by Ian McDonald
Then he was in free fall again. The tether had released the capsule and now Lucas was falling towards rendezvous with the SSTO. Toquinho showed him the orbiter; an improbable beauty of wings and streamlines like a living thing, quite alien to Lucas’s aesthetic of machines designed to operate solely in vacuum. The spaceplane opened its cargo hatches. Pulses from the attitude thrusters nudged the capsule. Lucas watched the manipulator arm unfold from the orbiter and latch with the docking ring. Lucas felt a tiny acceleration, as gentle as a domestic elevator, as the arm pulled him in. Space travel was tactile; clicks and thumps, soft jerks and brief jolts. Vibrations through his arm rests.
Lucas counted the numbers in his head. One hundred and fifty. The height of the SSTO orbit in kilometres. Thirty-seven. The number of minutes until de-orbit burn. Twenty-three. The number of minutes the ship would be in transit through the atmosphere. Fifteen hundred. The degrees Celsius which the ceramic hull of the orbiter would reach on re-entry. Three hundred and fifty. The speed in kilometres per hour at touch-down. Zero. The number of crew who could take the controls if anything went wrong.
The cabin shook, shook again, shook for a long time. The de-orbit burn. A fist of gravity seized Lucas’s head and tried to pull him into the ceiling. The deceleration was savage. The ship jolted. Lucas Corta’s fingers hooked the armrests but there was nothing to hold, nothing true and immovable. His heart wanted to die. He couldn’t take this. He had been wrong all along. He had been a vainglorious fool. A moon-man could not go to Earth. The killing Earth. Cries of deepest fear fluttered in his throat, unable to break the crushing gravity.
The shaking intensified; bounds and skips that threw Lucas into momentary free fall and then slammed him against his restraints hard enough to leave bruises, then a high-frequency vibration as if the ship and souls were being grated into powder.
He found a hand and seized it so tight he felt bones shift in his grasp. He held that hand, held it as the only sure and solid thing in a shaking, roaring world.
Then the shaking stopped and he felt gravity, true gravity under him.
We are in atmospheric flight, Toquinho said.
‘Show me,’ Lucas croaked and the seat backs and warning signs of the grey capsule were overlain by a window. He was high enough to see the curve of the planet. It went on forever, subtle and vast as a life. The sky above him deepened to indigo. Beneath lay veil upon veil of cloud, merging into a dull yellow haze. He glimpsed dusty blue. That is an ocean, he thought. It was so much bigger, so much more grand and aloof than he had imagined. The SSTO arrowed down through the highest cloud layer. Lucas’s breath caught. Land. A line of brown half-seen through cloud.
Lucas knew from his research that he was coming in across the coast of Peru, two thousand three hundred kilometres from touchdown. Beyond the brown of the coastal desert would appear the sudden dark of mountains; the spinal chain that ran the length of the continent. The Andes. Sun flashed from snow and Lucas Corta’s heart surged. Beyond the mountains lay the remnants of the great forest; patches of deep green among the lighter greens and golds of crops and the swatches of buffs and duns where the soil had died. Those plumes, strangely low and truncated to his eyes, would be smoke, not dust. Towering clouds boiled up from the baking land. Below lay the final cloud layer. Lucas held his breath as the orbiter dropped toward, then through them. Grey, blind. The ship jolted. Holes in the air. Then out, and Lucas Corta’s breath caught. Sun silver, then gold: the great river, yellow with silt. The SSTO followed the line of the river east, along a trellis of tributaries, tributaries of tributaries. Enchanted, Lucas tried to discern a pattern to the loops and meanders of the lesser waters. An alert from Toquinho, what had it said? He had not been paying attention. How many minutes to landing?
Another great river, black meeting gold, and at their junction, a blur of human activity. Thousands of sun-flashes as the shuttle passed over: a city, Lucas realised. His breath caught. A city, between the twin rivers, lidless, open to the universe, spilling across the earth. Huge beyond his imagining. Those webs of light when the clouds did not cover the Earth gave no hint as to the sprawl and appalling magnificence of the planet’s cities.
The spaceplane banked. Lucas gritted his teeth as gee forces played with him. The SSTO was circling, dumping speed for landing. He could hear the air out there, like hands on the hull. He glimpsed the long strip where this ship would touch down, the city, banked at an alarming angle, the meeting of the rivers. Black and gold waters side by side without mingling for many kilometres. Lucas found the effect charming. He did not understand enough terrestrial hydrodynamics to know if the effect was commonplace or spectacular. What were those moving objects on the waters?
Ten minutes to landing, Toquinho said.
‘Lucas,’ Dr Volikova said.
‘What?’
‘You can let go of my hand now.’
Over the city and the rivers once more, lower now. The spaceplane levelled out. They were committed. The landing strip was straight and true before him. Luca felt the wheels go down and lock. The spaceplane lifted its nose and dropped solidly on to its rear wheels, a lesser shock as the nose came down.
Earth. He was on Earth.
Dr Volikova stayed Lucas’s hand as he went to open his seat harness.
‘We’re not there yet.’
For what felt an aeon to Lucas Corta the SSTO rumbled over taxiways. He felt it stop. He could hear movements through the hull, feel inexplicable thumps and vibrations.
‘How do you feel?’ Dr Volikova asked.
‘Alive,’ Lucas Corta said.
‘I’ve arranged for a medical team and a wheelchair.’
‘I’m walking off this ship.’
Dr Volikova smiled and then Lucas felt the unmistakable lurch that meant a crane had lifted the capsule free from the orbiter.
‘I’m still walking,’ he said.
Lugs locked, locks spun. The hatch opened. Lucas blinked in the light of Earth. He took a deep breath of the air of earth. It smelled of cleaning products, plastics, human bodies, ingrained dirt, electricity.
‘Can I help you?’ Dr Volikova called from the hatch. The other passengers had left, as casually as shift workers sauntering off the Peary-Aitken express.
‘I’ll let you know.’
‘The clock is ticking, Lucas.’
When he was alone Lucas placed his hands square on the armrests. He took a breath of the breathed, cleaned air. He took his weight on his forearms, leaned forwards, pushed up. Thigh muscles took over: a crazy move. On the moon, it would have sent him soaring, crashing into an overhead bin. On the Earth, he stood. First the right hand, then the left. Lucas Corta let go of the arm rests and stood free. Only for a moment – the space was confined and he needed his hands to negotiate his way into the aisle. The weight was terrible, irresistible, relentless, waiting for him to lose balance and smash him down to earth. Falls will kill you, Dr Volikova had said.
And he did almost fall on that first step down the aisle. Gravity was not the spin-gee of Saints Peter and Paul. He had learned to walk in earth gravity under the Coriolis force of spinning habitat rings. The spin threw everything a fraction off. Lucas put his weight onto his foot and it was not where it needed to be. He staggered, grabbed the armrest, steadied himself.
He made it to the lock. The light blinded him. Beyond was a boarding tube. At the end of the tube, Dr Volikova, medics, a wheelchair.
He would not be wheeled into his new world. He inhaled a mighty draught of earth air. He could breathe. Breathe freely.
‘Lucas?’ Dr Volikova called.
Lucas Corta walked on, one slow wavering step at a time, up the boarding tube.
‘Cane,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘Print me a walking cane. Silver tipped.’
‘We don’t have your level of printing sophistication,’ a solemn young man in a bad suit said. Lucas squinted to make out his name from the badge clipped to his pocket. It ruined the line of the jacket, but it was a poor and cheap suit. Abi
Oliviera-Uemura. VTO Manaus. ‘We might be able to find one by tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
Lucas stopped in front of a window. Heat buzzed from the grooved concrete of the apron and runway. The SSTO was a black dart, beautiful and lethal, a weapon, not a spacecraft. At the far edge of the field, further than any horizon on the moon, was a line of irregular darkness above a line of liquid. Toquinho would have magnified them for Lucas but Toquinho was a dead lens in his eye, dead air in his ear. Trees, Lucas surmised, rising out of heat haze. How hot was it out there? The light was painful. And the sky. Going up forever, so much sky, high over all. That blue. The sky was terrifying, dizzying. Lucas would be a long time reckoning with the agoraphobic sky of Earth.
He squared himself up.
‘So,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘Brasil.’
* * *
From the quarantine suite’s one window, Brasil was water tanks, comms dishes, solar panels and a slot of dun concrete, a hyphen of trees and a shaft of sky. Sometimes clouds broke the abstraction of blue, green, buff. This was the Amazon, the rain forest. It looked drier than the Ocean of Storms.
VTO refused to let Toquinho link with its network so Lucas was dependent on old fashioned, remote access to information. His contacts were messaging him daily; calls, conferences, physical meetings. I am safe, I am well, Lucas replied. I will be in touch very soon.
The daily fitness sessions were as dull and dispiriting as ever. He had been assigned a personal trainer, Felipe. His conversation was limited to moves, muscles, reps. The surgical mask he wore may have restricted his chat. The mask was at Dr Volikova’s insistence. Lucas’s immune system fizzed with a dozen inoculations and phages but he was still vulnerable to a hundred infections and pandemics. The sessions took place in the centre’s pool. Water is your friend, Felipe said. It will support body weight. It gives a good workout to all major muscle groups.
Lucas slept oppressed by the smell of chlorine. The gravity was tough, the gravity was relentless but he knew this enemy. The minor afflictions fought with attrition. The deep, phlegm cough that brought up dark, dust-laden catarrh. The diarrhoea from the change in water and diet. The rhinitis and itchy red eyes from one allergy after another. The way he had to get up slowly to keep the blood from rushing from his head. The way his feet swelled inside his shoes. The wheelchair. The agony of having to bend down. How he couldn’t understand a word anyone said. It was not the Portuguese he understood, inflected with Spanish, loaned a hundred words and phrases from thirty languages. The accent was odd and when he tried to speak Globo, eyebrows raised and heads shook.
The meat in his meals, that gave him terrible cramps.
The sugar in the sauces, the drinks, the bread.
Bread. His stomach rebelled at it.
The certainty that his trainer, his valet, his young and charming VTO personal assistants were spying on him.
‘I need to work,’ he complained to Dr Volikova.
‘Patience.’
The next morning the valet told him to shower and shave and helped him dress in a decent suit. The valet arranged him comfortably in the wheelchair. At the door Lucas snatched up his silver-handled cane he had demanded. Once he swallowed his pride and accepted the wheelchair when he needed it, the cane assumed a theatrical character. The valet wheeled him along windowless corridors and down a boarding tunnel to a cylinder full of seats.
‘What is this?’ Lucas Corta asked.
‘An aircraft,’ the valet said. ‘You’re going to Rio.’
* * *
The clouds stunned him. They lay along the ocean edge of the world; stripes and layers that broke into bars, stipplings, hatchings, all moving on the very limit of his perception of change. He glanced away, to the lights coming on block by block, street by street, and when he looked back the clouds had changed shape. Skeins of lilac edged with purple; purple deepening to the colour of a bruise as the light bled from the sky, to indigo and blues for which he had no name and no experience. Why would anyone do anything else than watch clouds?
In the evening the heat will be tolerable, the hotel staff told him. The suite was comfortable and well appointed. Toquinho interfaced smoothly with the local network, though Lucas had no doubt that a dozen surveillance systems reported his words and actions to a hundred watchers. He worked solidly and productively, setting up conference calls and face-to-face meetings, but his attention strayed to the window, to the street and the heat haze that turned it and the vehicles speeding along it to quicksilver, to the ocean and the islands and the march of waves on the beach. He had never felt claustrophobic on the moon. This corner suite in the legendary Copacabana Palace hotel was gilded oppression.
Evenings, when the heat was less, he spent in the spa pool. Seek water, Felipe had told him. Lucas felt gravity slide from his shoulders as he shucked clothes that had never been weighty before and slipped into the balcony pool. He was out, in the air, in the world. The view was magnificent. If he shifted position to his right, he could see the favelas rising up behind him on the hills. In the waning dusk their lights, from windows and streets and staircases, were a straggling web of colours; a chaotic contrast to the strict pattern of the Copa, prim and tight between Tabajaras and the ocean. The web of lights was broken by patches of darkness where the slope defeated even the ingenuity of the builders of the informal shanty town. Or the power had outed. A million people lived in a handful of square kilometres. Their close presence comforted Lucas. The favelas, pressing closer every day by a house, an apartment, an extension, reminded him of the tiered quadras of João de Deus; the vast canyons, kilometres deep, of Meridian.
The waiter brought him a Martini. He took a sip. It did what a Martini should do obediently, obviously. It was the hotel’s rarest gin but it was still standard, mass-produced; a small-batch Martini but still a commercial vermouth. Mass drinks for mass markets. He could not enjoy it in the knowledge that nowhere else in the two worlds was anyone drinking what he was drinking.
The light was almost gone in deepening indigo. Lucas’s glass froze at his lips. Light on the eastern edge of the world, spreading from beneath the horizon. A silver lip kissed the ocean. Lucas watched the moon rise out of the sea. Every myth, every superstition and goddess: he believed them. Here was true divinity. A line of light reached across the ocean from moon to moon-man. The moon rose clear of the sea. She was in her waxing crescent: Ole Ku Kahi. The days of the lune were imprinted on Lucas as they were on every moon-born, but he had never understood them as he did now; as they were named, from the Earth, looking at the moon in her changing phases.
‘You are so small,’ Lucas whispered as the moon rose clear from the distraction of the horizon and stood alone in the sky. With his thumb he could blot out his crescent world, everyone he had ever known or loved. Lucasinho; gone. The seas, the mountains, the great craters; the cities and railways; gone. The billion footprints of humanity’s seventy years on the moon. Gone.
Lucas saw Lady Luna as his mother had seen her, almost a century ago: Yemanja, her personal orixa, throwing down a silver path across the sea and space. And this was all Adriana had ever seen, this one face of Dona Luna, ever changing but never turning away. His understanding flipped upside down. Earth was relentless, crushing hell. The moon was hope. A small, dim hope, blotted out with an upraised thumb, but the only hope.
A thread of cloud moved across the crescent moon, fringed silver. The sky expanded around Lucas Corta. The moon was not a bauble on the edge of the world. She was distant and untouchable. Cloud across the moon was beautiful and desolating.
Full dark now and the moon stood high and Lucas’s dark-adapted eye could make out the features of the reclining crescent. The mitt and thumb of Fecunditatis and Nectaris, the palm of Tranquilitatis, part of the wrist of Serenitatis. The suit glove, in lunar lore. The dark pupil of Mare Crisium, and how bright the south-eastern highlands. He could make out a bright ray from the crater at Tycho. These places, these names he looked at dispassionately, from an
astronomical distance. Now he saw that tiny lights sprinkled the dark part of the moon. Sparks clustered along the equator; the settlements and habitats that followed the line of Equatorial One. That tangle of lights was Meridian at the centre of Nearside, the closest point to Earth. His eye moved south: a handful of sparkles in the darkness of the pole. Queen of the South. Scattered lights along the pole to pole line. With magnification he could discern individual trains. There, on the edge of the sun zone; those sharp lights in the dark would be the mirror farms of Twé. Crucible, the brightest feature on the surface of the moon, would not be visible in this phase, under the full sun around the shoulder of the moon.
Neck deep in sustaining water, Lucas Corta drank his inferior Martini under the lights of the cities of the moon.
4: LIBRA 2105
In this black pyramid squatting on the Marsh of Decay he was born, fifty-three years ago. Duncan Mackenzie draws his finger through the dust that lies thick on the desk. Here are his skin flakes; with every dust-filled breath he inhales his childhood. Adrian wears a dust mask; Corbyn Vorontsov-Mackenzie sneezes theatrically; but there was no other place Duncan could assemble his board than Hadley. The first forge of the Mackenzies.
Duncan Mackenzie lays his right hand flat on the surface of the desk. Esperance sends the silent order running out through the nervous system of the old city. Duncan smiles at the vibration beneath his feet; systems waking, checking, powering up. Lights switching on, corridor by airless corridor. Pressure seals closing, atmosphere rushing into the vacuum. Buried elements and headlamps raising the temperature from lunar cold. Chamber by chamber, system by system, Duncan Mackenzie builds his capital. When the family is safe, when the company is secure and rooted, then he will let the full weight of Crucible’s fate rest on him. Until then, someone must bear the roof beams on his back. Someone must share air until everyone has escaped from the rover.