by Ian McDonald
Jade Sun’s every breath burns. Air temperature inside Crucible is four hundred and sixty Kelvin, Shi Ke says.
The hammering on the lock door has stopped.
‘I’m not. Trying. To disconnect,’ Robert Mackenzie says. Claw fingers twitch at his collar. A blur of motion: Jade Sun reels back in her padded impact seat as a tiny buzzing object darts at her. She lifts a hand to the sudden needle of pain in her neck, drops it. Her face slackens, her eyes, her mouth open. AKA neurotoxins are swift and certain. Jade Sun slumps in her seat, held upright by the safety straps. The assassin fly hums on her neck.
‘Shouldn’t have waited to close the lock, cunt,’ Robert Mackenzie hisses. ‘Never trust the fucking Sun.’ Then his croaking defiance becomes a terrible scream as the mirrors turn their full focus on him and flash the old man, every person and everything in Fern Gully into flame. Titanium, steel, aluminium, construction plastics sag, melt, drip in the intense heat, then blast upwards and outward in a spray of molten metal as Crucible explosively depressurises.
* * *
When he fell from the top of Queen of the South, Robson Mackenzie had been afraid. More afraid than he had ever been in his life. He could imagine no greater fear. There is a greater fear. He is strapped into it while Crucible melts above him. In the big fall, life and death were his choice and skill. Here he is helpless. Nothing he can do here can save him.
Robson slams forward against his seat restraints. His stomach lurches. A moment of free fall, then the pod grounds hard. It is moving, trying to get to a safe distance, but to where, how fast, how soon Robson doesn’t know. Something snaps him left, then right. Rattles, lurches. Creaks and cracks and whines. Robson has no idea where he is, what is happening. Noises, impacts. He wants to see. He needs to see. All Robson can see are the faces around him, glancing at each other but never letting those glances be caught, because then you would puke with fear.
The pod stops. There is a long low grinding noise. The pod starts again, very slowly.
Robson is in Boa Vista again, at the end, when the power went down and the light went out and there was nothing to see but the faces looking at each other in the green glow of the refuge’s emergency biolights. Noises. Robson remembers the cracks of the explosives and how everyone closed their eyes at each blast, fearing that the next would smash the refuge like a dropped tea-glass. One great explosion, and then a terrible rushing noise, like the world tearing down the middle, the refuge shaking and shifting on its shock-springs, everyone too terrified to scream, the rushing mighty noise dying into silence and that was how Robson knew that Boa Vista was open to vacuum. That was how Robson knew his father was dead.
We’re safe. Madrinha Elis had wrapped Luna tight in her arms, told her that over and over. You’re safe. Refuges can’t blow. They’ve blown Boa Vista, Robson thought but he didn’t speak it, because he knew that one spark would send fear-fire tearing through the crowded refuge, burning all the oxygen in a flash.
Refuges can’t blow. Drop pods can survive anything.
When the flashlight beams came waving through the dark, he didn’t know if they were saviours or killers.
Robson slaps the release button over his chest. He pulls himself to the observation window.
He can’t die in a steel bubble. He has to see. He has to see.
Crucible dies in slow eruptions; a line of molten light. The far end of the train is beneath the horizon but Robson can see glowing tears of molten metal, each the size of a drop pod, arcing kilometres high, spinning, tumbling and splitting. He shields his eyes against the light. The mirrors are still tracking, still moving, drawing their two-thousand Kelvin blades down the support piers and bogies. Undermined, the retorts fail. Trusses buckle, the converters twist and spill. Ironfall. Rare earths spill and run. Glowing floes of lanthanum, floods of cerium and fermium, long laps of glowing rubidium. Air pockets detonate; complex, beautiful machines explode. Molten metal rains on the Ocean of Storms.
Now the mirrors themselves are failing, their supports fatally undermined. One by one they twist and collapse, swinging their swords of light across the sky, across the mare, fusing arcs of glass out of the Procellarum dust. Robson sees a pod die, cut open by the deadly, inescapable focus of a furnace mirror, and another. One by one, the twelve thousand mirrors of Crucible fall. Mirror by mirror, darkness descends. The only light now is the glow of molten metal and the emergency beacons of the fleeing pods.
Robson finds he is crying. Full, helpless tears. His chest heaves, his breath quivers. This is grief. He hated Crucible, hated its scheming and secrecy and scuttling fear, its politics and the sense that everyone he met there had a plan that involved him as prey. But it was a home. Not in the way that Boa Vista was a home; nothing can ever be Boa Vista again; he can never go back. It was a home, and now it’s gone, dead, like Boa Vista is gone. Dead. Killed. He’s had two homes and both of them have been killed. What is the common factor? Robson João Baptista Boa Vista Corta. There must be something wrong with him. The boy who can’t have a home. It gets taken away from him. Like paizinho, like his Mãe, like Hoang. His pai sent him to Queen, to Crucible where Hadley tried to make him a zashitnik. When he came back to Boa Vista, paizinho pelted handballs at him, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to bruise, to make him hate. Everything. Always. Is taken away.
The steel rain has ended. The drop pod races across the metal-spattered mare, co-ordinating rescue centres and mining bases and habitats all across greater Procellarum. The mirrors stare burning eyes in their final falling places. The destruction of Crucible is bright enough to be visible from Earth. The sky is brilliant with moving constellations, flickers of light that Robson knows are manoeuvring thrusters. VTO has turned out every search and rescue ship on the moon. No need to search, nothing to rescue. You either live or the moon kills you.
Robson finds an object in his hand. Squared edges, rounded corners, a thickness and heft. He glances down. His cards, the deck Hoang gave him when they were okos, that he has kept with him ever since. He cuts the cards, slowly, deliberately. Here is comfort and certainty in the manipulations his fingers work on them. This he can master. Cards he can control.
2: VIRGO – LIBRA 2105
Bodies in every room and tunnel, every corridor and lock. Bodies sitting, squatting, lying, cross-legged, heads bowed. Bodies leaning against each other. Bodies in party clothes: Chanel, D&G, Fiorucci, Westwood. Bodies saying little, moving less, waiting. Bodies saving breath. The rooms, tunnels, corridors, locks of Lansberg hum with the synchronised, shallow breaths of survivors. Every few minutes a lock opens and more evacuees step out in their party clothes, take one deep breath of the moist, reeking, re-breathed air; then their chibs click into emergency response and close down the breathing reflex to a susurrus. Wheezing, trying to gasp, they find places among the huddles and knots of survivors to sit and wait.
Lansberg is VTO’s Equatorial One Central Procellarum mainline maintenance depot; a redoubt scooped under Lansberg crater for bots and service vehicles and track teams on two-lune rotations. Its environment unit is designed for fifty in an emergency. Twenty times that many are crammed into its dank chambers. Eight hours after Ironfall drop pods are still crawling into the lock on reserve power to disgorge anoxic, dehydrated, terrified survivors. Lansberg engineers are printing up CO2 scrubbers but now the water recycling system is failing. The toilets gave in hours ago. There is nothing to eat.
Darius Mackenzie hisses in frustration and sends the cards showering across the corridor. I can’t get it, he says through Adelaide, his familiar. Robson gathers up the cards. He squares the pack and slowly shows Darius the move again. The flick with the thumb, the slide into the Tenkai palm. He shows his hand, spreads his fingers. See? The precision of the trick is the relative angle of hand and card so that none of the card is visible. It’s one of the more difficult sleights of hand. He practised in front of a camera hour after hour. Body memory is dull and slow to learn; only repeated rehearsal will drive the move, the flow
, the timing into the fibres of the muscle. Sleight of hand is the most rehearsed performance art. A conjurer will practise a move ten thousand times before braving an audience.
Bryce had briefly checked on Robson’s well-being before commandeering a VTO moonship to take him to Queen of the South. Crucible had fallen, Mackenzie Metals must endure. That was five hours ago. For the first hour Robson and Darius held each other, numbed by the enormity of the destruction. Then Robson dared the network. Horrors flooded in. Numbers, names. Names he knew, names who had smiled and talked to him and poked innocently at his bruises and drawn their names in lipgloss on his ribs, names with big hair and party clothes. Eighty dead; hundreds missing. He sat, weighing every breath in his shallow chest, unable to comprehend what he was hearing. Three hours he listened to the news reports. Then he took out his cards.
I want to teach you how to palm a card, he whispered. Palming is like the heart of conjuring. It’s there, but it’s hidden, right in front of everyone, and any time I want, I can call it back.
He showed Darius the classic, the Hungard and the Tenkai palms, while new refugees picked paths over their outstretched legs and VTO water and medic teams worked their ways up and down the corridors.
You try it again.
Darius takes the deck, lifts the top card between his first and second fingers, makes the fake toss and folds his fingers down to lodge it between the tip and ball of his thumb. Something catches his eye: the trick is never completed. The cards fall from his hand. Robson squints into the damp, dusty haze. Lady Sun and her entourage, stepping carefully over the prone refugees. She breathes free and deep from a mask, one of her guards carries her oxygen tank. She takes the mask from her mouth.
‘Darius. Up up.’
She waves her fingers: rise. Darius wobbles to his feet. A bodyguard steps in on either side to steady him. They seem untroubled by the reduced breathing. Lady Sun embraces him. Robson’s jaw tightens at her famine-thin arms, her long, bone fingers around his friend.
‘Oh my dear boy. My dear dear boy. I am so sorry.’
‘Mum…’ Darius says. Lady Sun presses a long forefinger to his lips.
‘Don’t talk.’ She presses the breath-mask to her face, then to Darius’s. ‘There’s a railcar waiting. You’ll be safe in the Palace of Eternal Light.’
The handsome girls and boys form a guard around Darius. He glances back at Robson and for the first time Lady Sun notices him.
‘Senhor Corta, I’m glad to see you safe and well.’
Robson purses his fingers, dips his head in his family’s gesture of respect. Lady Sun smiles. A fast, conjurer’s sleight and Robson offers half his deck to Darius. Darius slips the cards inside his jacket. The guards are already propelling him down the corridor, clearing a path through pushing, jostling Mackenzies who overheard the word railcar. Darius gives one final look back, then Lady Sun’s entourage bustle him through the lock into the station approach.
I’ll never see you again, will I? Robson whispers.
* * *
Body by body Lansberg empties. Robson’s lungs expand, breath by breath. Train announcements, people getting up and leaving. VTO staff ask, Are you going? Not going. Waiting. Who are you waiting for?
Now Robson is the only one in the corridor. But he stays there because it’s the way from and to the station. He has to come this way. And in the end, he sleeps because waiting is a dull sick ache, like a tinnitus of the soul.
A kick to the sole of his shoe. Another one.
‘Hey.’
Hoang, crouching in front of him. Real true Hoang.
‘Oh man oh you oh…’ Robson throws himself on Hoang. They sprawl back across the empty corridor. ‘Where have you been? Where have you been?’
‘There was a train, I got taken to Meridian. It took so long to get a train out to Lansberg. So long.’ Hoang hugs Robson tight, joint-dislocating love. New bruises over old.
‘I was so scared,’ Robson whispers in Hoang’s ear. ‘Everyone…’ Words are not enough.
‘Come on,’ Hoang says. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up. When did you last eat? I brought food.’
When words are not enough, stuff suffices.
* * *
Old women should sit in the sun. Each seat around the table is illuminated from above by a beam of sunlight. Dust floats in the light. The game is venerable yet worth playing; tracing the spot back to mirror through mirror to mirror, to the hundred sun-bright dots of mirror in the perpetual shadow of Shackleton basin, to the high, blazing beacon of the Pavilion of Eternal Light. Eternal darkness to eternal light. Flummery with mirrors, for the amusement of those who know how the trick is done, but she still feels a prickle of old awe when the mirrors move through the dark, catch the light and burn.
When the mirrors move, the Board of Taiyang is in session.
‘Lady Sun?’
Twelve faces, each lit by its own personal sun, turn to her.
‘We tear them apart.’
You thought I wasn’t listening, you thought I was a silly old lady, only allowed to sit in the light out of respect for my age, a senile old woman with the warmth of the sun on her face.
‘I beg your pardon, Great-Aunt?’ Sun Liqiu says.
‘The brothers have always detested each other. All that held them together was the company, and their father. Robert is dead and Crucible is a pool of molten metal on the Ocean of Storms. We have a perfect opportunity to steal business for the solar belt.’
‘Bryce has opened negotiations over Mackenzie Fusibles’ L5 stockpile,’ says Sun Gian-yin, Yingyun of Taiyang. The strong down light casts every face with deep, hard shadows.
‘Oh, we can’t have that,’ Lady Sun says. ‘We need some leverage over Bryce.’
‘A man in debt is a well-behaved man,’ Tamsin Sun says. She is Taiyang’s Head of Legal Services. Lady Sun very much admires and very much mistrusts her honed, ambitious intellect.
‘Any arrangement would be secure,’ Sun Liwei says. ‘Nothing could be linked to us.’
‘Everyone will guess,’ Amanda Sun says. The down light is more severe on her than the other board members. The shadows in her eyes, beneath her cheekbones say killer. You work it well, Lady Sun thinks. I don’t believe you. You haven’t the talent or the quality to kill Lucas Corta. No no, little killer, the one you really want, have always wanted dead, is me. You have never forgiven me for that cruel nikah that shackled you to Lucas Corta.
‘Let them,’ says Lady Sun.
Now the heads turn to Sun Zhiyuan, Shouxi of Taiyang.
‘I agree with my grandmother. We divide and conquer. Like we did with the Mackenzies and the Cortas.’
The Cortas had flair. Lady Sun often regrets destroying them for something as inelegant as profit.
* * *
Abena Maanu Asamoah won’t take his voice calls. Won’t message, won’t interact in any of the social forums. Won’t recognise Lucasinho Corta as existing in the same universe. He contacts friends and friends of friends. He asks family. He sends hand-written letters on scented artisan paper to her apt. He pays his niece to write them. Lucasinho Corta can’t hand-write. He posts apologies. He posts cutenesses and kawaii and emojis. He sends flowers and scented butterflies. He gets maudlin, he gets pathetic, he combs his hair down over his eyes and slightly purses his full lips in the way he knows is irresistible, he gets angry.
Finally he goes round to her apartment.
Of all the cities of the moon, Twé is the most bewildering; the least structured, the most organic, the most chaotic. Its roots were a cluster of agriculture tubes sunk into Maskelyne that, over years and decades, sent tunnels and power lines and pipes reaching out through the rock, linking, connecting, blowing habitat bubbles and driving new shafts and cylinders up towards the sun. It is a city of claustrophobic corridors that open into soaring silos, brilliant with mirrors turning the sun on to tier upon tier, level upon level of crops. The mirrors send stray shafts of light far through Twé’s labyrinth, on to walls, int
o apartments, stairwells at certain moments of the day. In the long lunar night the magenta light of the LED arrays leaks from the tube farms into the labyrinth of tunnels and crosswalks. Lucasinho loves that dirty, sexy pink. It turns every tunnel, every shaft into an erogenous zone.
Public spaces are few and jammed with kiosks, food stalls, print shops and bars. Too narrow for motos, Twé’s tunnels and streets are perilous with powerboards and scooters. Everyone sounds their buzzer, rings their bells, yells. Twé is a cacophony, a rainbow, a banquet. Graffiti, mottoes, adinkra, Bible verses adorn every surface. Lucasinho loves Twé’s din, its purposefulness, the way that a deliberate wrong turn can bring him to new places and faces. Most of all he loves the smell. Damp, mould, growth and rot, sewage and deep water. Fish, plastic. The unique tang of air that has had much strong light shone through it. Perfume and fruit.
In the eighteen months since Lucasinho Corta came to Twé he has been a prince in exile, enjoying the protection and favour of the Asamoahs. Lucasinho loves Twé. Today, Twé does not love Lucasinho Corta. Friends look away; refuse to make eye contact; dissolve their groupings as he approaches; disappear into the crowd; flip up their powerboards, switch direction and surf away.
So everyone knows about Adelaja Oladele.
Abena’s colloquium apt is on the twentieth level of Sekondi habitat; a half-kilometre deep cylinder of housing encircling a vertical orchard of apricots, pomegranates and figs. A mirror array beneath the glass roof sends long shards of light down through the leaves. Abena moved here when she joined the Kwame Nkrumah Colloquium. It’s Twé’s leading political science colloquium but Lucasinho liked her old apt better. It was private. Fewer people, and those that he did bump into weren’t constantly judging him for some defect of ideology, privilege or politics.
He had a lot more sex in the old place.
The door won’t answer me, his familiar Jinji says. Lucasinho checks his image in his lens, runs a comb through his hair, adjusts the knot of his white tie against his black shirt. He has all his piercings in their proper holes. She likes them. He raps a knuckle against the door.