by Ian McDonald
Laine really needs to tell me things.
So: it’s fourteen days to Operation First Footprint, and we have practicalities and planning.
Kobe appoints himself Department of Transport. He produces heavily-detailed presentations of train times, passenger and commercial; and the models, features, and spec of rovers. Everything except how to get one.
Sidibe puts herself in charge of surface activity on the principle of what I call Peril Suits. Wings are perilous, so are sasuits. If she’s good at one, she must be good at the other. I suspect her logic, but I’m happy to let her do it as long as she doesn’t assume that Peril Suits include things like navigating or giving orders. Suits, air, water, power, food: those are hers. The adventure stuff is mine.
I put Jair in charge of security. He’s good with things that think. He’s anonymized our locations, set up some code to disguise our search history, and has us meet in a different hotshop from the ones we eat in every day. And that’s his contribution to Operation First Footprint security. Even Kobe can see that Jair isn’t really in. Here is danger. If one person drops out—if one person isn’t staunch—the whole adventure falls apart.
We work hard and fast. Wedding-minus-eighteen now. Two days gone deciding who does what and, more important, who doesn’t do what. Triangle of Production. Three corners: Good, Fast, Cheap. You can have any two but not the third. Another one of Andros’s teachings. We can do fast and cheap. I tell everyone good will follow, sure as dark Earth follows light. I’m hoping Laine or Gebre are too busy planning for the wedding to ask us exactly what we’re doing. Cariad Corcoran’s Corollary to the Triangle of Production. You can have it good, fast, or quiet. If you can’t get quiet, then get a wedding. The best place to hide any secret is inside a wedding.
* * *
I know. There’s no other side, there’s no near and far. It’s not literally a ring. It’s a network of contracted marriages and nurturing relationships, a special form of polyamory where each member is married to two spouses, an iz and a derecho, who in turn are married to an iz or a derecho, and so on, to the left, to the right, until the ring comes full circle. I live in one, right? You’re a psychiatric bot. Of course you know how it works, but you don’t know how it feels. You wanted to know how it makes me feel.
It feels like a ring that goes right around the world. Wherever I go, Hadley or Twé or even Farside, there will be an Oruka there. I’m in it and inside it at the same time. Can you understand that? It’s one thing, a whole thing. It’s like surface tension in a bubble—I learned about that. It wants to pull inwards, pull together and be whole. When Andros divorced and moved across the ring, Laine was itchy and twitchy for a long time. I’m pretty sure Reuben, his derecho, felt the same too, though I don’t know him or his kids all that well.
Oh, they were talking to you?
What did they say about me?
Fuck your professional etiquette. You don’t even know what that means.
It’s not easy being in a ring. It’s complicated. People are always complicated. It’s got one great feature: it’s good for kids—it evolved to provide kids with a super-stable support system. SSSS. Ssss. It may be the greatest support network for kids ever invented. The moon is hard on kids. It’s harder on love. In fact, I’d say that when it comes to love, rings are the craziest of all possible families, apart from all the others.
* * *
And now it’s two days to Operation First Footprint.
How did that happen?
I mean, those days: where did they go?
Sidibe calls a suit inspection.
We gather after hours in the common room in the colloquium house. It’s never completely empty: there is a pack of table-gamers down the hall, but they are (a) noisy and (b) intent, so we could be building a second sun in our room and they would never notice.
Suit up.
Now, I rock the surface activity suit look. The tight weave works well on curvy girls with good muscle definition. I’ve given mine a sneaky custom job, highlighted the muscle lines with red. I’m hot, but commanding. Sidibe of course is a vision in gold, but she looks like someone cosplaying a character in one of those kid telenovelas that are all about the relationships because the budget won’t run to surface shooting. She looks like Awusi Sarfo in Glass Hearts. I look like a jackaroo.
My eyes! Kobe waddles in wearing white and high-visibility orange. Good, fast, quiet just got run into the dust by good, fast, gaudy. He is visible from orbit. This, he tells me, is his plan: he and his little friend Chao have been working on a special adventure-proof suit. They’ve added emergency devices and backups and trackers and comms until he stands before us in the safest sasuit ever to step out of Shoemaker Main Lock. If anything does happen, he’ll be noticed and found in less than a minute.
‘Kobe Kobe Kobe,’ I say. ‘Understand this. The thing—the entire thing—is not to be noticed.’
This time Sidibe sides with me.
‘Plus, Kobe? Your friend Chao?’
‘Oh,’ says Kobe.
Oh, indeed.
Sasuits: the thing. You’re out there in what looks like sports gear, because the whole idea is that the tight weave allows you to move free as a dancer. You’re kind of wearing your own skin. Like your own skin, it’s your responsibility. There is your danger. I can’t trust Kobe not to get over-interested in some surface detail and forget where he is and what is—or isn’t—around him. I wanted him in an old-school armoured suit. It does everything for you.
‘Kobe: think about this,’ I say. ‘I’d like you in a shell-suit. You can still have all your alarms and surprises; sure. But we need one person we can rely on. Can you be that person?’
See, Sidibe? I asked sweet. I didn’t bully. I persuaded. While being commanding.
Jair arrives in black and drapery.
‘This is a suit inspection,’ Sidibe says. Jair crouches on a chair and this time the cute-neko does not work with Sidibe or with me. ‘That is not a suit. That is scarves. Where is your suit?’ I have not seen Sidibe angry before. She is impressive. But she doesn’t know him like I do and so she can’t see that at any moment he might say fuck it and there will be no Adventure.
‘Sidibe, we’re good,’ I say.
‘We’re good when I say we’re good. I said a suit inspection . . .’
She’s not hearing me. She needs to hear me.
‘Sidibe,’ I say, ‘we’re good.’
She flounces her hair and stomps off in shiny gold. Then Jair slips off his chair and wraps his scarves around his face until only his eyes show. Through all this Kobe has been looking more and more unhappy until he too walks out and it’s just Cariad Corcoran presenting for suit inspection. Two days to Adventure and my team is in bits. These people need to understand discipline. These people need to understand the chain of command.
* * *
Understand this: I’ve researched you. I know how you neo-Freudians operate. Kill popa, fuck moma. Fuck popa, kill moma. That’s your theory? Of how human heads work? I mean, it’s not just that it’s icky; it’s that your idea of family and parents are so ancient. So binary. Bio-parent is family-parent. That’s all you need to know everything about people.
Well, machine, I’m here to open up your head. Or casing, or whatever. Pop your cloud.
In rings, you have bio-parents and you have ceegees. Caregivers. They can be the same, but they don’t have to be. You can only be married to the people on either side of you, but anyone in the ring can be a ceegee. To anyone. Doesn’t matter how young or old you are.
That’s how come Kobe lives with us. He’s not related to me gene-wise, but Laine is his ceegee. It all happened eight years go. Someone three links to the derecho was going away to work on the Meridian build and couldn’t find anyone to care for her boy. Laine was the only one not running off somewhere to extract something or engineer somewhere so she took him in. Then the someone died. The link closed. Doesn’t always happen that way and it’s cute when it does, but the ne
w iz and derecha couldn’t agree about who would care for Kobe and anyway he was settled here and Laine liked him and I was kind of used to him and his neuro-atypicalities. So he stayed.
What I’m saying is, rings care.
What I’m really saying is, Freud was a dick.
* * *
Right, so: Cariad Corcoran needs to talk her team down.
Kobe is back at the apartment in his den. He is still in his glo-suit, in a corner, the quilt off his bed wrapped around him like a cloak. I will overlook the security breach of him taking the elevator up from colloq in That Suit. The mission itself is in peril. I crouch down and play-punch him on the shoulder. That is a thing that really grounds him.
‘Thanks for agreeing to the shell-suit, Kobe. I know you really love this gear, but I need you to be security and rescue. If anything happens, we’ll need you, Kobe.’
He opens his quilt like Sidibe opening her wings. I slip inside, beside.
‘Is Jair going to go?’
‘We all go, or no one goes.’
‘But if Jair doesn’t want to go, then we can’t go.’
‘Jair will go.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘I have the word for Jair.’
‘No offence, Cariad, but what if he doesn’t want to hear your word?’
‘Deep down, Jair wants to go.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because it would make him look bad to Sidibe.’
‘Why is it important that he looks good to Sidibe?’
‘Let’s just say he needs it.’
‘Is this an iz-derecha thing?’
‘I think it is, Kobe.’
Kobe leans against me. I know his language, his ways, I lean back.
‘I think you can do this, Cariad.’
‘Thank you, Kobe. I do need to go talk to Jair now. Are you all right here?’
‘I’m all right here, Cariad.’
‘That’s good. I’ll not be long. One thing? Put something else on. If Laine finds you in that suit, there is no First Footprint.’
* * *
Chidozie in our hotshop does these great yam-cakes.
Oh yes, I forgot. You only know what that’s like, not what it is.
So let me tell you, she shreds them real fine, and soaks out most—but not all—of the starch. That’s the important part because it’s the starch that gives them stick so they don’t fall apart, and it’s the starch that goes crispy around the edge, because there is nothing better than crispy.
You’ll have to believe me on that.
To be honest with you, there’s not that much to a yam-cake. It’s the dipping sauces that make it interesting. Those and the crispy edge.
Why am I telling you this?
Because there is this thing you do, like a little blink, or a breath, or a pause, when you hit something that tickles your theory-routine. You don’t have to do it; they could have coded you without that so I can only think that it’s there for a reason. The most obvious reason would be to get me to say more, but that’s the obvious reason and Cariad Corcoran has always been the one who lifts the corner of the obvious to see what’s underneath. You did it when I was telling you about Jair and Sidibe. Like a little click. Tic.
Understand, I’m thinking you’re trying to push your theory onto my family. And it doesn’t fit. Like a sasuit that’s too small. The rules are clear. You can be with anyone you like in the ring, except your iz-sib and your derecho-sib.
Yes, I know Jair and Sidibe aren’t directly related. Yes, I know links split and reform. Isn’t that what this is about? But it’s like Chidozie’s yam-cakes. It’s the crunchy bits around the edges that are interesting.
And yes, when I said that thing about you being coded: yes; I intended to deny you agency.
* * *
And so Jair.
Have I told how much he annoys me? Everything he says, he does, he is, is infuriating. He thinks he can get away with it because he’s cute but, Jair? Even your cute is infuriating. Because it’s cute.
He’s in what I call Number Three Neko Nest. That’s the one on the balcony. He had his legs through the railing. A kilometre below his claw-booties are the treetops of city floor. He knows it fazes me—that’s why he’s there. I can imagine sliding through the rails (How? Magic, horror, something impossible?) and falling. Did I tell you how infuriating Jair is?
I look at his ears. Eye contact spooks Jair.
‘Understand this: she will go without you.’
‘She wouldn’t do that.’
‘She really wants to go. Believe.’
‘I thought the rules were we all go or no one goes.’
‘All right, then. If we don’t go because you’re scared to, how do you think she’ll feel? How do you think she’ll see you?’
‘I’m not scared.’
‘She’ll think you are.’
‘It doesn’t matter to me what she thinks.’ He hunches his shoulders and swings his feet over the drop. My stomach gives a little twitch but I glow inside. There, right there, Cariad Corcoran wins.
‘You have got a suit, haven’t you, Jair?’
‘Of course I’ve got a suit. Everyone’s got a suit.’
And he’ll look cute in that too, I doubt not. And I don’t care, as long as he turns up in it.
* * *
And now, Cariad Corcoran’s finishing move. I go over to the Carbuncle shouting names and trying to be cool about the wedding checklists stuck to the wall, but Gebre is out and golden Sidibe is not in her eyrie. I find her in the Alcalde Hotshop on Divine Harmony Plaza having tea like any sane person. The Alcalde is the flyers’ hotshop. She’s drifted into the flying circle—most of them are older than her, which I don’t like—but it’s good she’s making her own friends. You can tell flyers from a way off. They have this profile, this silhouette. Pecs, abs, bis, and tris: they have amazing upper body development. I have curves, but I still go right into their little conclave. You may have the arm definition but I have the stance. Sidibe sees me, finishes up, and we go out onto the plaza.
‘That was rude, Emer.’
‘Are you staunch?’
‘What?
‘Are you staunch?’ I like that word. It’s a jackaroo word; I got it from Marisa Mackenzie across the ring. She’s an engineer on that crazy train thing they’re building with the Vorontsovs. It’s the great Mackenzie virtue: staunch. It sounds righteous and solid, like God’s guts.
‘Why are you asking me?’
‘Are you staunch?’
‘Has someone been saying stuff about me?’
‘Are you staunch?’
Third time is the charm or the betrayal.
‘I’m staunch, Emer.’
I hold it a moment.
‘That’s all I need.’
I walk away. My walkaway is almost as good as my stance. I never doubted Sidibe was staunch. Of all of them, Sidibe is the most true. But I have to make her prove it to herself. For a moment I’m tempted to look back to see the puzzlement on the faces of her flying friends, but looking back is always a weak move.
* * *
And now it’s no more days to Operation First Footprint.
* * *
Sidibe is solid gold but I am a boss in white and red. Sidibe suggested we stow the suits at the Alcalde. So we step out from the back room like two track queens, fingers of the left hand hooked through the webbing handles of the suitpack, helmet cradled under the right arm, proper duster style. Every flyer turns to stare at us as we cruise past. We pretend to notice them out of the corners of our eyes. What we’re really looking at is each other.
Jesus and Mary, we’re hot.
A moto circles in across the plaza to stop in front of us. My heart is in my throat and my belly in my moonboots. They’ve found us. They knew all along. They were letting us run out to the end of our tether. Now they’re pulling us in. The moto unfolds its panels. Jair stands up among the open shells. He’s long and skinny in pink and purple ti
ger stripes. The toes of his moonboots and tips of his glove fingers are little fast-print claws. His helmet has ears. Furry ears. Those are going to gather a lot of dust out there.
Don’t care. I want to jump up and down. I want to kiss him. He is gorgeous and he is cute and he is here here here.
‘Get in,’ he says. We bounce in beside him. Sidibe’s squadron are on their feet, mouths open as the moto closes up around us. We look like some kind of gods. Truth? There’s not a lot of space in a Queen of the South moto with three First Footprint adventurers. I’ve got suitpacks and helmets on my knee, Sidibe is curled into the space behind the seats.
‘How did you get this?’ I ask as Jair gives the instruction and we rake off across Divine Harmony Plaza.
‘Cloned Dolores’s log-ins and privileges,’ he says. ‘I told her, I told her, I told her: biometric. Always biometric. But she’s so stupid-lazy.’
‘So you’ve access to . . . ?’ I ask.
‘Everything,’ Jair says. As a structural engineer, Dolores’s everything means whatever rolls or walks or crawls or flies upon the moon.
So we go: in and out of the traffic, across the big boulevards and plazas. We drive away from the handful of towers of city core, out to where the city shrinks and the roof of the lava bubble and the floor come together. See: if we went to Queen Station, in this gear, there would be private security waiting for us at Meridian Station to turn us right round and put us on the next train back to Laine and Gebre. Of course there would. Any responsible ceegee would do that.
But we aren’t going to Queen Station. Oh no.
My Department of Transport can be a real schemer when you explain the stakes to him.
The further from the centre of Queen, the more the city becomes a construction site. Bots, graders, sinterers. Cranes swinging beams, manipulators. Everywhere the spiky blue light of welding. Humans shouldn’t be here, humans are in the way. Humans could get hurt. Our little moto steers between the machines and the swinging aluminium and glass. The dust thickens until it’s hard to see. The moto is a little bubble inside grey, greyer, and grey-most. Shapes and things materialise, loom, and dissolve. Moondust is dark and treacherous stuff. My five-derecho died from silicosis. Thirty-five. Laine says that’s no age at all. I went to the memorial. Everyone whispered that the zabbaleen wouldn’t recycle her lungs. Moondust had turned them to stone. And this same dust is wisping in through the air vents.