by Ian McDonald
‘You’re gaping, Aston.’
Client two. The Wong divorce. The only way he can get custody is by having his daughter file a separate petition effectively divorcing her co-father – failure to thrive or to provide an optimal domestic environment are the obvious paths, though the easiest for Lily to argue would be personal disgust at remaining with Marco in a parental role. Ariel recommends going deep and dirty – there will be something, everyone has something. Even if she succeeded, it would be the girl’s decision to contract parenting to Brett. And it would effectively destroy Marco’s name and reputation – for which he could seek legal redress. So what Brett has to ask himself is: Is the price worth paying?
The Red Lion amory. By now the image of gin is as precious as the rare rains that sweep the dust from the air of Orion Quadra. No no no no no, darling. Ariel will always advise against partnering into an amory with too heavy a contract.
‘Amory’s are light, open, flitting and fleeting things, darling. You don’t crush them beneath heavy nikahs. Send me the contract, I’ll take it apart and put…’
And gone.
We’re out of data, Beijaflor says.
‘Fuck!’ Ariel Corta swears. She smashes a fist edge-on against the white wall. ‘I fucking hate this. How can I get any fucking work done? I can’t even talk to my clients. Marina! Marina! Get me some connectivity. I’ve ascended into the fucking proles.’
She hears movement outside the street door.
‘Marina?’
Marina has warned Ariel time and again not to leave the door open. She’s not safe. Anyone could walk in. That’s the idea, darling. Law is always open. To which Marina answers: Who carried you up here on her shoulders? You may never be safe.
Movement in the lobby space.
‘Marina?
Ariel pushes herself up from the Justice Seat and hooks her fingers into the netting that lines the ceiling of the tiny apartment. She swings herself out into the main room.
A figure turns.
* * *
She first feels a fist, and then a kick.
She’s up in a cross-tube, one of the forgotten access tunnels that run through the bare rock connecting one quadra to another. They’re old, dusty, scary with radiation. Behind her is midnight in Antares Quadra, before her is morning in Orion. She’s got a belt of old dirty printed money from clients, some curry noodle and moon-cakes for the festival and she’s on her way home to Ariel.
The cross-tubes are long and shadow-filled. The moon abandons its obsolete infrastructure. Kids, rebels and up-and-outs all find their own uses for it.
They were waiting. They were practised, they knew her routines and what she was carrying. She never saw them. Of course she never saw them. If she had seen them, they would never have hit her. The first took her in the middle of her back. A fist, from the dark, into a kidney that knocked breath and thought from her and sent her crashing to the mesh.
Then the kick. She sees it through the red pain and scrambles away. The shoulder, not the head.
‘Hetty,’ she gasps. But she is alone. She has shut down her familiar to donate her data to Ariel for her consultations.
The boot again raised over the side of her head. She reaches for it, tries to push it back before it crushes her skull against the titanium mesh. The boot comes down on her hand. Marina screams.
‘Got it got it,’ a voice yells. A knife nicks her money belt.
‘I want to kill her.’
‘Leave her.’
Marina gasps, bleeding. Boot heels on the walkway. She can’t make out if they are women or men. She can’t stop them. She can’t touch them. They take her money, her curry noodle and her moon-cakes.
She couldn’t touch them. That makes her scared beneath the blood, the beating, agonised kidney, the cracked ribs, the black fingers. Once she threw Mackenzie Metal dusters around the lock of Beikou habitat like toys. Two muggers up in a cross-tube at midnight, and she couldn’t touch them.
* * *
‘I’d offer you gin but we’re out of gin. I’d make you tea but I don’t do making and I’m in the only chair,’ Ariel Corta says. ‘Sorry. There are hammocks, or you can perch.’
‘I’ll perch,’ says Vidhya Rao. E positions erself on the edge of Ariel’s desk. E has put on weight since Ariel saw er last, in the faded decor of the Lunarian Society. E is a bulb of a human; waddling and ungainly, swathed in layers of fabric. E has jowls, bags under the eyes.
‘I’m sorry to find you in reduced circumstances,’ Vidhya Rao says.
‘I’m happy simply to find myself breathing,’ Ariel says. ‘You still work for Whitacre Goddard?’
‘Consulting,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘I have a portfolio of clients. And I still dip my fingers in the markets, see what I can stir up. I’ve been following your recent cases. I can understand why you practise matrimonial law. There is no end to the entertainment.’
‘That entertainment is people’s hopes and hearts and happinesses,’ Ariel says. Gin. She wants a bloody gin. Where is her gin, where is Marina? Ariel twists a capsule into her vaper and flicks a fingernail against the tip. The element glows, she inhales a cloud of customised tranquillity. Calm floods her lungs. Almost gin.
‘Your reputation still precedes you,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘I have state of the art pattern recognition software but in all honesty, I didn’t need it to find you. For a woman in hiding, you show a distinctive flair. Most theatrical.’
‘I never met a lawyer who wasn’t a frustrated actor,’ Ariel says. ‘Courts and stages: it’s all performance. I remember you saying, when I was a member of your little political glee club, that your software had identified me as a mover and shaker.’ She gestures with her vaper, a curl of smoke taking in the whole three and a half rooms of her empire. ‘The moon remains unshaken. Sorry to disappoint your August Ones.’
‘And yet it shook,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘We live among the aftershocks.’
‘You can hardly connect me with what happened at Crucible.’
‘But there are patterns,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘The hardest ones to spot are the ones so large they seem like a landscape.’
‘I can’t say I was overly upset when Bob Mackenzie took the thousand degree shower,’ Ariel says with a flourish of vapour. ‘Living under a million tons of molten metal is tempting, if not Providence, certainly something with a sense of irony. Oh, don’t look at me like that.’
‘Your nephew was there,’ Vidhya Rao says.
‘Well he’s obviously all right, otherwise you wouldn’t have said that. Patterns. Which nephew?’
‘Robson.’
‘Robson. Gods.’ She hasn’t thought about her nephew since the word distilled through old legal contacts that the boy had been made a ward of the Mackenzies. Lucasinho, Luna, any of the kids, the survivors. She hasn’t thought about Wagner the wolf, or Lucas, whether he is alive or dead. She hasn’t thought about anything but herself, her life, her survival. Ariel inhales sharply to mask the tic of loss and guilt. ‘Do the Mackenzies still hold the parenting contract?’
‘He is a ward of Bryce Mackenzie.’
‘I should get him out of it.’ Ariel taps her fingers together. You could always tell a Mackenzie contract. Sloppy work.
‘More important, since Ironfall, the terrestrial commodity markets are in turmoil,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘Helium-3 and rare-earth prices hit an all-time record yesterday and will set a new one today. The G10 and G27 groups are calling for action to stabilise prices and production.’
‘In vacuum no one can hear you shout,’ Ariel says.
‘Moon and Earth are bound by more than gravity,’ Vidhya Rao says. Ariel exhales a long plume of vapour.
‘Why have you come here, Vidhya?’
‘To bring you an invitation.’
‘If it’s the festival, I’d sooner stick needles in my eyes. If it’s politics; Cortas don’t do politics.’
‘It’s an invitation to cocktails. The Crystaline, Mohalu, thirteen hundred Orion Quadra Time.’
‘The Crystaline. I’ll need a dress,’ Ariel says. ‘A proper cocktail dress. And accessories.’
‘Of course.’
Beijaflor whispers, Credit transfer. It’s enough for the dress and the accessories, for a new wheelchair, a moto. Gin. Beautiful beautiful gin. Before any of those: data. Beijaflor reconnects to the network. The sensation of world, the inrush of information, message, chat, gossip, news at the same time as her curiosity rushes out like a child into morning light, is powerfully sensual.
‘Beijaflor, get me Marina,’ Ariel commands. Already Beijaflor is opening catalogues and pattern books. ‘I need her to pick an order up from the printers.’
‘You can afford to get them delivered,’ Vidhya Rao says from the door. ‘Aren’t you curious about whom you’re meeting?’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll stroll it.’
‘The Eagle of the Moon.’
* * *
Marina stumbles through a kilometre of cross-tube to Orion Quadra. She hits the call button for the service elevator and cries aloud at the blaze of pain through her bruised, blackened fingers. As she rides the elevator cage down from the top of the city she remembers all the people she saw die on the moon, how sudden and arbitrary their deaths. Head caved in by an aluminium beam in the training bay. The edge of a knife pulled out through a throat. Impaled through the skull by the silver spear of a vaper. She never stops seeing that death. She never stops seeing that man’s eyes change from living to dead. She never stops seeing the moment he realises that this fraction of a second is all he has remaining of life. Edouard Barosso. He crippled Ariel, would have killed her if Marina had not seized the only weapon to hand and stabbed it up through the softness of his jaw, out through the top of his soft, moon-born skull.
How easily she could have joined that roster of the dead, up there in the cross-tunnel. They hurt her. They wanted to kill her. They should not have been able to hurt her. Two third-gen punks should not have been able even to touch her.
She swears as she wrenches open the gate with her black, rigid fingers, slumps against the safety grilles. Every breath is a slow, deep knife. She reels out on to West 17th, staggers across traffic to seize the balustrade. The chasms of Orion Quadra open before her. She hauls herself along the edge of the drop, stanchion by stanchion. The clinic is a kilometre north on the vast cylinder where the five wings of Orion Quadra meet. Stanchion by stanchion she hauls herself to help. It takes her ten minutes to make a hundred metres.
Almost, she whispers the command to reboot Hetty. Call for help. Call Ariel. Ariel can help. That’s what everyone up in the Bairro Alto says. She can’t. She failed. She let them take Ariel’s money. How can she claim to protect Ariel when she can’t even protect her money? Since that day Corta Hélio fell in fire and blood and she climbed up to the roof of the world, hand over hand, rung over rung, Ariel Corta on her shoulders, she has kept her safe against enemies many, harsh and patient.
Hand over hand, Marina hauls herself along the railing.
Call her. Don’t compound idiocy with pride.
Hetty boots up. There are three messages. Two about gin, one to inform that their data credit limit has been exceeded. Marina Calzaghe smashes her wounded fist on the handrail. The pain is intense, justified and purifying.
It isn’t that they beat her that scares her. It’s how they were able to beat her.
The moto swings in and unfolds.
‘You work with Ariel, don’t you?’ The fare is a middle-aged man, hair and skin greyed by years of slow radiation.
Marina manages a nod.
‘Get in. Gods you look like shit.’
He helps her to the clinic door.
‘I used to work for Corta Hélio,’ the man says. ‘I was a duster, then.’ Then he adds in Portuguese, ‘Piss on Bryce Mackenzie’s contracts.’
* * *
‘Of course Ariel’s credit is good.’ Dr Macaraeg’s clinic on Orion Hub 17th is glossy and well-equipped. Gleaming bots, shiny clients. Real flowers on the reception desk, where Marina leaves blood smears on the white plastic. Dr Macaraeg is the former medic of Boa Vista, personal physician of Adriana Corta. She tended Ariel in João de Deus med centre, after Edouard Barosso severed her spinal column with a knife grown from his own bones. She huddled with the family in the over-crowded, fetid refuge when Boa Vista was destroyed; she tended to the survivors, the last thing she could do for the Cortas. She came to Meridian and set up her high-end practice on Orion Hub, close to the centres of society and power. Dr Macaraeg remembers honour and loyalty, family and duty. ‘Just not good enough for a patch up and a scan.’
Dr Macaraeg is not a charity.
‘I’ll take the scan,’ Marina says.
‘I would advise…’ Dr Macaraeg begins but Marina cuts in.
‘The scan.’
The scanner is cheap and perfunctory; two sensors that snap-fit to universal arms, but sufficient for the task. Marina stands on the footprints and the bot moves its arms over her, intimately mapping every centimetre of her body. She doesn’t even need to take her clothes off.
‘How long?’
‘One, maybe one and a half lunes.’
Hand over hand, rung over rung, Marina had borne up Ariel Corta into the roof of the world, to Bairro Alto where the up-and-outs go; the poor, the out-of-contract, the refugees, the sick and the ones whose lungs are turning to stone after thousands of dust-filled breaths. The hunted. Up the ladders and the staircases, to the cubicles and cells and caves pushed into the gaps between the old environment plants and power units, lighting grids and water tanks. Marina knew this world. Six weeks on the moon, scarcely able to walk straight, a cancelled contract had sent her up to Bairro Alto. Selling piss. Breathing short so some air-buyer, down there, could breathe long. She never thought she would return. But she knew it and knew how to survive it. And she knew that Ariel Corta did not know it, and that her ignorance would kill her quicker than any Mackenzie blade. She found the cubby, scavenged hammocks and the ceiling netting, and, as she gathered in the bitsies, the paraphernalia of a life with some comfort. Reliable data. A reliable print shop with an idea of fashion. Cosmetics. A refrigerator and gin to put in it. As Marina wove a life for Ariel, she forgot her own. She forgot her own body. She forgot what the moon was doing to it; leaching the calcium from her bones, the strength from her muscles, sucking away the Jo Moonbeam strength that allowed her to throw those Mackenzie dusters around the lock at Beikou like rags, until a couple of skinny punks could smash her to the ground, rob her, beat her to nothing.
Marina pulls the scanner display panel to her.
‘It’s not going to contradict me,’ Dr Macaraeg says. It doesn’t, but Marina has to see the numbers that tell her Moonday is coming, and soon. The day when she will have to decide whether to go back to Earth, or remain on the moon permanently. One, maybe one and a half lunes. Thirty, forty-five days. Days.
‘Don’t tell Ariel.’
‘I won’t.’
This she must tell Ariel face to face. Tell her that Moonday is rising. Tell her that she hates the moon, has always hated the moon, hates what it makes people, hates the fear and the danger and the smell of dust that gets into everything, every blink and breath, the smell of death. That she aches for open skies, horizons, free air in her lungs, free rain on her cheeks. Tell Ariel that the only reason she stays, serves Ariel, protects Ariel, cares for Ariel, is because Marina can’t abandon her.
Then tell her nothing.
‘Thank you doctor.’
Dr Macaraeg presses fingers into her bruised ribs, forcing her by pain down on to the examination trolley.
‘Sit there and keep still. Let’s get you fixed up.’
* * *
It is the night of Zhongqiu in Meridian. Aquarius Quadra is decked in red and gold; fork-tailed banners, prayer flags and cascades of lamps tumble from levels and galleries and bridges, and every staircase and ramp twinkles with lights. Enormous festival lanterns waddle up toward the darkened
sunline. Flocks of helium-filled Jade Rabbits skip through the middle air, dodging flotillas of red balloons that have escaped from children’s hands. There is a flying drone-dragon, undulating between the bridges and cable ways. Here biolights gleam through the trees and glimmer from the cafés and tea booths and Mooncake kiosks that line Tereshkova Prospekt. Look: cocktail stalls! Listen: a dozen musics competing with jugglers and street magicians and bubble blowers! On the moon, bubbles reach titanic dimensions. Parents tell their children that bubbles can trap naughty kids and carry them up to Bairro Alto: a venerable lie. There is face painting. There is always face painting. I’m going to turn you into a tiger, the face painter says lifting her brush. What’s a tiger? the children ask.
Everyone in Aquarius Quadra has turned out in fresh printed party clothes. Streets, levels, walkways are thronged. Kids run from stall to stall, unable to choose between the wonders on offer. Teenagers and young adults move in groups, disdainful of the populism of it all. They all secretly love Mooncake festival. Some have worked it in each of Meridian’s three quadras. Zhongqiu is the festival to hook up with the someone you’ve been lusting for all year but never had the nerve to approach. There! Did you see that? Those girls, those guys – Were they guys? Were they girls? – running and laughing through the crowds in nothing but body paint. Ten Lady Lunas, one half alive and black, the other bone and white. Zhongqiu is a time for skin and sass.
Zhongqiu rightly belongs to Chang’e, Goddess of the Moon but Lady Luna – usurper, pretender, thief – stole it. On this night Our Lady of Love and Death permits other, lesser saints and orixas, gods and heroes, to share her honours. A hundred perfumes and incenses spiral up to her. Yemanja and Ogun accept flowers cakes and gin. Street shrines to Our Lady of Kazan glow with a hundred luminescent votives. A trillion in paper money will go into the shredders tonight.
And Mooncake! Mooncake. Round and fluted, stamped with mottoes or adinkra, shaped like rabbits and hares and unicorns and little ponies, cows and rockets. Everybody buys it. No one eats it. It’s so rich. Too dense. Too sweet. I just look at it and my teeth ache.