by Ian McDonald
They are gone. He remains, kneeling drunk among the votives. He is disgusting. He loathes himself. The icons reproach him.
‘Not you.’ Lucasinho tries to rip the picture of his father from the wall but it has been glued in place. He scrabbles to find an edge he can tug. A hand on his arm, a voice.
‘Leave it.’
He turns, fist balled to drive it deep into a face, a snarl on his face.
The old woman steps back, hands raised, not defensively, not in fear, but in wonder. She is knife-thin, dark, swathed in white robes, a white turban on her head. She wears a green and blue stole, many rings, more necklaces. Lucasinho knows her but cannot remember where. She recognises him.
‘Oh you, little mestre.’
She darts her hands forward, fast as a knife-fighter’s stab, and folds Lucasinho’s hands in her own.
‘I’m not…’ He can’t pull away. Her eyes are dark and deep and paralyse him with fear. He recognises those eyes. He has seen them twice; once at Boa Vista with his Vo Adriana, again at his grandmother’s eightieth birthday feast. ‘You’re a sister…’
‘Irmã Loa, of the Sisterhood of the Lords of Now.’ She kneels before Lucasinho. ‘I was your mother’s confessor. She was generous to my order.’ She rearranges votives where Lucasinho’s feet have scattered them. ‘I chase the bots away – they know no respect, but the Zabbaleen remember the Cortas. I always knew someone would come. I hoped it would be you.’ Lucasinho snatches his hands from her dry, hot grasp. He stands up, and that is worse. This old woman kneeling in front of him horrifies him. She looks up into his eyes and it is like supplication. ‘You have friends here. This is your city. The Mackenzies don’t own it, they never could. There are people here still regard the name of Corta.’
‘Go away, leave me alone!’ Lucasinho yells, backing away from the sister.
‘Welcome home, Lucasinho Corta.’
‘My home? I’ve seen my home. I went there. You’ve seen nothing. You feed lights and chase bots and dust the pictures. I was there. I went down and I saw the plants dead and the water frozen and the rooms open to vacuum. I got the people out of the refuges. I got my cousin out. You weren’t there. You saw nothing.’
But he swore he would come back. His sasuit boots crunching the flash-frozen debris of a great house, he vowed he would bring it back. This was his.
He can’t. He doesn’t have it in him. He is weak and vain and luxurious and stupid. He turns and runs, sobered by shock and adrenaline.
‘You are the true heir,’ Irmã Loa calls after him. ‘This is your city.’
* * *
By the second, Lucasinho knows that Blue Moons are terrible cocktails. He finishes it and orders the third and the bartender knows the right way and does the trick with the inverted tea spoon, the tendrils of blue Curacao dispersing into the gin like guilt. Lucasinho picks it up and tries to catch the bar lights in its blue cone. He is back drunk again, where he wanted. His Tio Rafa created the Blue Moon but he knew nothing about good cocktails.
The bar is small, smelly, dim, booming with loud chart music and louder conversation and the bartender recognises Lucasinho but keeps professional discretion. The girl does not. They came in halfway through his first; two girls, two boys, one neutro. They’ve been glancing over from their booth carved from raw rock, glancing away when he catches their eyes. Heads down, furtive. She waits until the fourth Blue Moon to make her approach.
‘Ola. You’re, ah…’
Pointless to deny. He would only spark rumours, and rumours are legends that have only just learned to crawl.
‘I am.’
Her name is Geni. She introduces Mo, Jamal, Thor, Calyx. They smile and nod from their booth, waiting for a sign to join him.
‘Do you mind if I?’ Geni gestures to the stool, the empty bar space.
‘Yes actually.’
She either doesn’t hear or doesn’t care.
‘We’re, Urbanistes?’
Lucasinho’s heard of this. Some extreme sport; suiting up and exploring old abandoned habitats and industrial plants. Abseiling down agriculture shifts. Crawling along tunnels with your O2 gauge running down in the corner of your eye. No interest. History, sport and pointless danger. He hates all of those. Too much like effort. Lucasinho slides back on his stool until he rests his chin on his hands, studying the half-drunk fifth Blue Moon. The bartender catches his eye; the flicker of silent communication says give the nod and I will get rid of her.
‘We’ve been out there. Three times.’
‘Boa Vista.’
‘We can take you.’
‘You went to Boa Vista?’
She looks less certain now; she glances over at her friends. The gulf beyond booth and bar is stellar.
‘You went to Boa Vista?’ Lucasinho says. ‘You went to my home? What did you do, go along the tram line? Or did you go down the surface shaft? Did you feel really proud when you touched down; like you’d really done something? Did you all do high-fives?’
‘I’m sorry, I just thought…’
‘My home, my fucking home.’ Lucasinho turns his fury on the young woman and it is hot and pure, fuelled by shame and self-loathing and Blue Moon. ‘You went to my home and you walked all over it and took your pictures and your movies. Look, here’s me in the São Sebastião Pavilion. Here’s me in front of Oxala. Did your friends love them and say that’s so amazing, you’re so daring and brave? That’s my home. My fucking home. Who said you could go to my home? Did you ask? Did you think maybe you had to ask? That’s there a Corta left to ask?’
‘I’m sorry,’ the young woman says. ‘I’m sorry.’ She is scared now and Lucasinho is so mean with alcohol and shame he adds her fear to his combustion. He smashes his Martini glass down on the bar, shattering the stem, spilling blue liquor over the glowing counter. He staggers to his feet.
‘It’s not yours!’
The barman has caught the woman’s eye but her friends are already leaving.
‘I didn’t mean…’ the young woman calls from the door. She is in tears.
‘You weren’t there!’ Lucasinho shouts after her. ‘You weren’t there.’
The bartender has mopped up the breakage and set a glass of tea on the counter.
‘She wasn’t there,’ Lucasinho says to the bartender. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’
‘So there he is.’ Lucasinho had given no more than a glance to the duster on the far side of the bar but now she looks up from her caipiroshka and speaks. The bar throws strong shadows up from her features. Her dark face is spotted white with radiation-induced vitiligo. ‘Mão de Ferro.’
‘What?’ Lucasinho snaps.
‘The Iron Hand. The Corta name. I gave your family twenty-five years of my life. I’m owed.’
Owed? is on Lucasinho’s tongue but before the word can be spoken the tiny bar is full of big women and men in fashionable suits and bulges in their jackets that hint at bladed weapons. Three surround Lucasinho, two cover the bar, one on each shoulder of the duster. Adinkra familiars. AKA security.
The squad leader sets a titanium ear-spike on the glowing white bar.
‘You forgot that,’ he says. The duster looks at Lucasinho, shrugs. ‘Come with us please, Senhor Corta.’
‘I’m staying…’ Lucasinho says but the guards haul him to his feet. A firm hand on his right forearm, another in the small of his back.
‘Sorry,’ the duster says as the Asamoah guards hurry Lucasinho out on to Kondakova Prospekt. ‘I mistook you for the Iron Hand.’
* * *
‘I thought you’d like the room with the window.’
Ariel wheels from the living space into the bedroom and around the bed. A bed, not a hammock. A free-standing bed. A bed wide enough to spread out every limb. A bed with space all around it. Space enough to move properly, freely. Compared with the moss-damp wooden home, rain dripping from its shingles, in which Marina grew up, the apartment on Orion Hub is a clutch of cubbyholes, intimate as a wasp’s nest. By Meridian standards,
it is the pinnacle of desirability; low enough to be fashionable, high enough to escape the grosser smells and sounds of the prospekt. By the standards of the holes up in Bairro Alto, it is paradise.
‘Give me the traffic noise, right,’ Marina says. She sees Ariel crest-fallen and regrets the jibe. The apartment is magnificent.
‘Show me more,’ Marina says with what she hopes sounds like enthusiasm. Ariel’s court-room senses have been dulled by the excitement of the new apartment. On any other day she would have heard the insincerity like a temple bell.
There are two bedrooms, a living space and an auxiliary social space which can be closed off. An office, Ariel declares. There is a small separate room for whatever purposes require a small separate room.
‘That could be your new sex room,’ Marina declares, putting her head around the door to check the dimensions. ‘Soft flooring, new wall covering.’
Sex had been problematic up in Bairro Alto. Her disability and reduced station in life had not touched Ariel’s autosexuality. Times and spaces were negotiated. Marina donated her pittance of a carbon allowance to print up Ariel’s sex toys. Sex became a household joke, a third character in the family, with its own nicknames and vocabulary and code: Senhora Siririca and Ribbed and Exciting. Sister Rabbit – Marina had to explain what a rabbit was – was the household trickster deity and Senhor Girth kept up an ongoing rivalry with Senhor Depth. The conversation became easy but it never once crossed to Marina’s side of the tiny apartment. Who she was doing it with; who might she do it with; was she doing it all? Marina had in time accepted celibacy as the pledge of her watch over Ariel Corta. Most of the time she was too tired to even remember sex, much less engineer a fantasy. Now, as she closes the door on the small room in the vast new apartment, the possibility opens. She can think about herself.
A private banja. A separate spa, in which the water keeps running until you shut it off. Marina still can’t believe that the Four Elamentals graphics on her chib are gold and remain gold. There is a house printer. There is a food space and a chiller. The chiller is stocked with designer gins and vodkas, the food space with twists and mixers and botanicals, and the work surfaces with appropriate glassware.
‘Marina coracão, I’d adore a Martini.’
‘It’s just gone ten.’
‘Where’s your sense of celebration?’
Bairro Alto had been lean in pleasure. Anything that tasted of victory – a case, a deal, a new thing around the house – Ariel celebrated. Marina had recognised the point at which celebration slumped into dangerous drinking. It would have to be faced, some day, some place. Not in Bairro Alto. This is the place, but Marina cannot make this the day. This is a worthy celebration. She mixes two breathtakingly dry Martinis from a twenty-two botanical from Cyrillus. Ariel levers herself out of the wheelchair and drops into the yielding expanse of the lounger. The wheelchair scurries to a corner and folds itself down to a flat box.
‘What do we think?’ Ariel lifts her legs on to the couch, one at a time, sprawls out, Martini glass in hand.
‘I’m thinking, who lived here before?’ Marina says.
‘You nortes are such Puritans.’ She raises her glass. ‘Saude!’
Marina tips glass against glass. It has the ring of good crystal. ‘Tim tim.’
‘Since you ask, it belonged to Yulia Shcherban. She was a special economic adviser to Rostam Baranghani.’
‘The LDC Board Member?’
‘The same. She was recalled. There’s been a spate of recalls among the LDC ancillary staff.’
‘You’d think…’
‘I have mentioned it to the Eagle.’
‘And?’
‘He thanked me for my due diligence.’
‘Well, I do know it’s a seller’s market in personal security,’ Marina says. ‘Above and beyond the Mackenzies. If you’ve got any kind of history with the Dragons, you can name your price.’
Ariel sits up.
‘Where did you hear this?’
‘While you’re listening, we’re talking.’
‘Why didn’t I hear that?’
‘Because you’re sitting on Jonathon Kayode’s shoulder trying to work out if his lawyers will stab each other before they stab him.’
‘I should be on that,’ Ariel insists. ‘I’d have been on that. Anyone as much as belched in Meridian, I used to know it.’
‘You’ve been out…’
Ariel cuts in.
‘He’s fucked. His board is against him. His legals are trying to save their own asses. I’m the only one he trusts.’ Ariel takes a long draw at her Martini. ‘It’s all so polite and formal and discreet, but I read the faces. The LDC was constituted so that no terrestrial government could gain overall control. They’re unified now. Something has changed. The board will act to remove him soon.’
‘If he jumps before he’s pushed?’
‘The board will still put their stooge in.’
‘Fucked if he does, fucked if he doesn’t. What did he do to piss off his board so mightily?’
‘The Eagle of the Moon is a great big stupid romantic. He believes that the office of the Eagle of the Moon should be more than just rubber-stamping the edicts of the LDC and mincing around cocktail receptions. He believes in this world.’
‘When you say, he believes in this world…’
‘Self-government. Turn us into a state, not an industrial colony. He’s become political, the dear thing.’
‘That would piss them off,’ Marina says.
‘Yes,’ Ariel says. ‘I whisper in his ear and I take his money and his apartment and there’s not a thing I can do.’ Ariel throws herself back down on the lounger and stretches her arms wide. Marina scoops up the Martini glass as Ariel’s fingers lose their grip on the stem. ‘Which is a pity, because I rather like the big idiot. Enough politics. I want the vodka this time.’
‘Ariel, do you think…’
‘Get me a fucking vodka Martini, Marina.’
The glass, the ice, the chill-thick liquid. The homoeopathic drip of vermouth. Ariel’s casual arrogance never fails to wound. Never a pause, never a thought for what Marina might want. Never the consideration that Marina wouldn’t want the bedroom with the window. Never the notion Marina might not want to move into the apartment. Never the question about Marina’s life. Marina’s hand shakes with tight rage as she stirs the Martini. She does not spill a drop. Never a drop.
‘Sorry,’ Ariel says. ‘That was inelegant.’ She sips the Martini. ‘This is a thing of beauty. But tell me, what do you really think?’
‘I think that if the Eagle falls, try not to be underneath him.’
‘No, not the Eagle, enough of the fucking Eagle,’ Ariel snaps. ‘And the fucking LDC and lawyers and advisers and every little gimcrack political club and debating society and activism group. Now, tonight, I need you. There’s a Lunarian Society meeting I want to go to.’
‘You want to go to the Lunarian Society?’
‘Yes. The Cabochon political science colloquium is delivering papers on models for lunar democracy.’
‘Well, I’ve got your excuse. I’ve a ticket to go and hear a band.’
‘You’ve what? You never told me.’
Marina bridles. ‘I need permission to go and hear a band?’
‘What do you need to go and hear a band for? Do we even have bands any more?’
‘We do and I like them and I want to see one.’
‘Is this that rock stuff?’
‘I need to justify my taste in bands?’ Marina had learned quickly that Ariel, unlike her brother, had no appreciation of music and camouflaged her ignorance as disdain.
‘Here’s what you do. Drop me off, go and get yourself a cup of tea and have Hetty stream this … band. It’ll be just like being there. Better. You won’t have all those ghastly sweaty rock people in your face.’
‘Ghastly sweaty people in your face is what makes it rock,’ Marina says but Ariel’s incomprehension is so total, so manifest,
any further defence of guitar-led music will only confuse. ‘You do owe me.’
‘I owe you so much that there is no possible hope of me ever repaying it. But I need to go to the Lunarian Society. I’ve no interest at all in ghastly zealous student idealism. No, I want to go because Abena Maanu Asamoah is delivering a paper and the last thing I heard she was fucking my nephew Lucasinho. And I’m concerned about the little fucker. So, will you?’
Marina nods. Family wins.
‘Thank you, sweetie. Now, third time of asking: What do you think?’ Ariel gestures expensively to the wide white room and sends vodka slopping on to the lounger.
‘I’m thinking how do I rig it?’
‘Ropes and nets? Handles on everything?’
‘I think of them more as mobility aids.’
‘I plan not to need them.’
There is only one scenario under which Ariel will not need Marina’s rigging of nets and lines to move around the apartment.
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I should tell you every detail of my deal with the Eagle?’
‘Walking is a bit more important than wanting to go and see a rock band.’
‘Do you think I would have agreed if walking wasn’t part of the deal?’ Ariel says.
‘I remember Dr Macaraeg said it could take months,’ Marina says. ‘That spinal nerves were a slow and painstaking job.’
‘It takes as long as it takes. But I’ll be mobile, Marina. I won’t need that.’ Ariel slops vodka toward the recharging wheelchair. ‘I won’t need you. No, yes, I will. You know what I mean. I will always need you.’
* * *
The hands over his eyes disgust him. Hot, dry, skin papery, rustling. He holds his eyelids tightly shut. The idea of those palms, that skin touching a naked eyeball brings a retch to his throat.
Motion ceases, doors open. The hands impel him a few steps forward, then fly from his face.