by Ian McDonald
The council chamber of the Lunar Development Corporation is a series of tiered rings. The Eagle and Board members occupy the inmost, lowest circle. Advisers and legal representatives, experts and analysts occupy increasingly higher rings by their status and importance. Ariel directs Abena to the second tier. Importantly low. Abena’s name shines from the surface of the desk next to Ariel. Her seat is high backed and expensively comfortable. Ariel occupies her wheelchair. Abena frowns at the pad of paper and the short wooden rod on her desk. The Eagle’s other representatives file in on either side of Ariel and Abena, but the Eagle, in the seat immediately beneath the two women, turns to nod only to them. The council chamber fills rapidly. The room buzzes with soft conversation; lawyers confer with their clients, lean over desks or crane round in their seats to greet colleagues and rivals. It looks quaint and archaic to Abena. This could surely all be conducted through the network, like the Kotoko.
‘We’ll get going in a couple of minutes,’ Ariel explains. ‘Jonathon will open with the formalities, there will be the minutes of the last meeting and the current agenda. It’s quite tedious. Watch the advisers. That’s where you really see what’s going on.’
‘What’s the mood?’
‘A little too friendly.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I have no idea.’
Jonathon Kayode turns again in his seat.
‘Ready?’ he asks his advisers. Mumbles of assent.
‘Any last questions?’ Ariel says to Abena.
‘Yes.’ Abena holds up the paper pad and the stylus. ‘How do these work?’
* * *
In a Caron peplum suit, Marina sits at the end of the tea-bar where the bodyguards go and twirls her glass of mint tea. It’s the worst spot at the bar, but it’s at the bar. The tables are social death. The guards rate the LDC bar highly though Marina has no understanding of the points of lunar tea. She lifts the glass to study the twist of leaves within. Lunar economics and sociology in one glass. Unfeasible to grow tea or coffee economically in lunar tube farms. Mint runs rampant. You need chainsaws to keep it down. Impossible to make decent mint tea without true tea so AKA cut a few Camellia sinensis genes into the mint. Now AKA genetic science is sufficiently advanced to design a true tea that would grow luxuriantly in lunar conditions – even coffee – but the moon now has the taste for mint tea.
Marina always has loathed and always will loathe mint tea.
She sits among the bodyguards and dreams of coffee. Strong, sharp-roasted arabica, steaming hot, bitching with caffeine; good north-west coffee made slowly and with affection: the water poured from height to achieve perfect aeration, stirred – fork, not spoon – and left to sit and settle. It will tell you when it is ready. Lightly pressed. Two hands cupped around a craft-made mug, the steam of her breath mingling with the steam from the mug in a cold morning on the porch with the grey rain rattling in the gutters and sheeting down the galvanised chains the house uses for downpipes. The mountains hidden for days by deep cloud, the mist closing down perspectives and bringing the tree right to the edge of the house. The windsock limp and dripping, rain running from each end of the washing line to merge in the centre and drip. The shuffle and grunt of a dog. Music from three rooms away.
The creak of the boards under the wheels of Mom’s chair. Her asking questions questions questions at every television show: What’s happening, who’s that, why is she there, who’s that again? The atlas of car tyres: their unique sounds on the dirt out front; those they recognised and would open the door to, those they did not and hid from. The pentatonic voice of a solitary wind-chime placed to catch the east wind, the same wind that spun a flake of multiple resistant tuberculosis up over Puget Sound and into the lungs of Ellen-May Calzaghe. The east wind, the plague wind. Thick white coughing, endless, racking.
Marina’s attention snaps back to the LDC tea-bar. She drops the glass of mint tea. Every glass falls. Every bodyguard rises from their seats. Marina runs for the door.
Go to Ariel, Hetty shouts in her ear. Ariel needs you.
* * *
Armed mercenaries pour through the doors and down the steps on to the council floor. They swarm the LDC board, knives drawn, tasers aimed. A second wave bursts into the chamber and takes positions threatening the advisers, hands on hilts and taser holsters. A third squad of hired blades secure the doors. The council chamber is a roaring pit: board members, legal advisers, armed invaders.
‘What’s going on?’ Abena shouts.
‘I’m going to find the hell out.’ Ariel swings her chair away from her desk. A mercenary shoves the crackling blue tip of a shock stick at Ariel’s face. Ariel locks eyes with her, stares her down, defies her.
‘I can’t raise the network,’ Abena shouts. The invaders yell, the delegates yell, the LDC members struggle at the strong arms that restrain them. There is a centre, a still heart. Jonathon Kayode sits in his chair, hands in lap, eyes downcast. He turns to catch Ariel’s eye.
Sorry, he mouths. Then a detonation silences the council chamber like sudden vacuum. Chipped sinter falls from the ceiling, everyone ducks. A gun. Someone has fired a gun, a real gun. The gun-woman stands in the centre of the pit, weapon raised, aimed at the roof. It’s black and stubby and alien. No one in the council chamber has ever seen a real gun.
Now Jonathon Kayode rises heavily to his feet.
‘My fellow citizens. My dear friends. By the power vested in me as Chief Executive Officer of the LDC, I dissolve the board of the Lunar Development Corporation and place its members under house arrest as clear and present dangers to the stability, security and profitability of the moon.’
Voices from the pit and the tiers above bellow objections but the mercenaries have cuffed the board members and herd them towards the emergency exits. Faces are taut from screaming, tendons tight as torsion bars, mouths speckled with rage-spittle.
‘Can he do that?’ Abena whispers to Ariel.
‘He just has,’ Ariel says. She wheels into the centre of the pit. In an instant two mercenaries are on her, knife and taser. ‘I demand access to my client.’
The mercenaries are stone but the Eagle of the Moon halts two steps from the emergency exit. His face is grey.
‘Can I trust you, Ariel?’ Jonathon Kayode says.
‘Jonathon, what have you done?’
‘Can I trust you?’
‘I am your lawyer…’
‘Can I trust you?’
‘Jonathon!’
Four mercenaries cover Jonathon Kayode’s retreat through the emergency exit as the second tumult that has been building in the lobby breaks. Bodyguards, escoltas, blades and warriors overwhelm the mercenaries on the door and storm the council chamber. Shock sticks duel and parry, stab and shock. Bodies spasm and go down in gouts of body fluid. Guards and mercenaries slip and fall in vomit and blood and piss. It’s a dirty, chaotic fight where a dozen different contracts and interests clash and no one is certain which side is which. The delegates duck under desks, slide over chairs and huddle at the centre of the pit. Ariel seizes Abena’s hand.
‘Do not let go.’
Ariel glimpses Marina at the back of the fight. She carries a shock stick in each hand and sufficient sense to know when she is over-matched. Another gunshot, then a third. The room freezes.
‘This is not your fight,’ the woman with the gun shouts. ‘Disengage and we will release the bystanders.’
Abena’s grip tightens on Ariel’s hand.
‘They won’t hurt us,’ Ariel whispers. Mercenaries and bodyguards separate, the mercenaries retreat to the emergency exit. The woman with the gun is last to leave. The episode is over within one hundred seconds.
Marina powers down her shock sticks and conceals them in the clever holsters inside the jacket of her Caron suit.
‘What the hell happened?’
‘My client just staged a coup.’
6: GEMINI 2105
The bundle of plastic pipes was light but after forty flights
of steps it felt cast from pig iron. The pipes were contrary fucks to wrangle around the corners, booming and mooing like desolate musical instruments as they clattered against the steps. Add a tool belt and welding mask, top off with the bag of working lights slung across her back and by the time she kicked open the door and hauled her pipework out on to the top of Ocean Tower her thighs and forearms were burning. A moment in the swift lilac twilight to taste the sea in the gloaming, listen to the crump of waves on Barra beach beyond the rumble of traffic along Avenida Lucio Costa and the chug of air conditioners. A dozen musics and voices from a dozen apartment windows. The twilight heat was tolerable. She rigged her lights. Her sodium glare highlighted and shadowed things unnoticed in the day sun. Needles and patches, cigarette butts. Panties discarded behind the satellite dishes. The rustle of roosting fowl in their hutches. The skunk garden, lusciously night-fragrant.
Later. Repair woman’s perk.
She donned the welding mask, keyed open the hatch of the water steriliser and checked the UV array. Nothing wrong with it. Last forever, these modern UV guns. UVc was harsh. With every installation she would call the community together, explain how ultraviolet made the water safe, tell horror stories of UV-induced conjunctivitis ‘like having sand in your eye, forever’. Then she showed the photographs of eyes burned red and ulcerated by photokeratitis and everyone went whoa. No fingers strayed near her sterilisation plants.
She disconnected the UV array and took off the mask. Full dark now. She inspected the pipe run. Good thing she had turned off the supply; her finger went through the first u-bend, plastic falling into translucent crumbs. Ultra-violet ate polyethylene.
She would have to replace every pipe. She had brought plenty.
The pipes crumbled as she removed them. The steriliser was hours – perhaps minutes – from failure. Loud voices from below, complaining that the water was off. Not everyone had got the message that the Queen of Pipes was working on Ocean Tower’s supply. What do we pay her for?
For running taps into the Barra main and keeping up the payments to the FIAM officers so that they never find them. For laying and running pipe down the hill and up the sides of the towers and connecting them to the defunct plumbing in each and every apartment. For the pumps, and the solar panels that powered them, and the rooftop tanks and filtration units and this sterilisation unit so that the water you give your children is clean and bright and fresh. That’s what you pay me for. And if I spend what you pay me on a trustworthy secondhand Hawtai pick-up or football boots for the boy or a new hub for the apartment or an intensive manicure and nail rebuild for me, would you begrudge me? Because water engineering is hard on the nails.
She flicked up a playlist on her ear bud and set to her work. Night deepened, and on the third set of tubes Norton tried to booty call her.
‘Working.’
‘After you’re working?’
‘You’re working.’
As she tightened the connectors, she played with the idea, as she often did, that maybe she should have a better boyfriend. Norton was toned, honed and carried himself with a ripped nonchalance softened by a self-awareness that she found charming. He was proud to be a boyfriend of the Queen of Pipes, even if he could not understand why she did what she did. It annoyed him that she earned more than him. It annoyed him that she worked at all. She should let him keep her, support her, spoil her; like a man ought. Norton was security; security was the thing, security was important. You met celebs and rich people but security could get your ass killed.
She never said what everyone knew, that the best security, the most expensive security, was robotic. D-listers hired humans. But he had plans, aspirations for them both. A beach side apartment, and a proper car. Not that Hawtai pick-up; it made him look bad, her riding around in that. An Audi; that was a proper car. Can I get my gear in the back of an Audi? she asked and he would answer, When you’re with me you won’t need any gear.
She didn’t want Norton’s future. Time would come when she would have to get rid of him. But he was sweet and the sex, when their diaries connected, was good.
She hooked up the last pipe, turned on the water, checked the joints, drained any air locks. She listened to the gurgle and thrum of the water in the pipes. Then she flipped on her welding mask, reactivated the UV array and closed and locked the hatch.
There’s your clean water, Ocean Tower.
Her ear bud pinged again. Not Norton this time. An alert. She tapped up her lens and the app dropped a reticule over the arrival point. South-south-east, twenty kilometres out. She grabbed a fistful of buds from the skunk farm and sat on the edge of the parapet, legs dangling over the eighty-metre drop, kicking the backs of her heels against the concrete and looking out across the ocean. The power was out again, the streets were dark. Good for drop-watching. Not so good for community safety. Generators chugged from the roofs of the surrounding apartment blocks. The booths and shops glowed with harvested solar. Three hundred kilometres out, her reticule said. One hundred and fifty up. She let the digits guide her and gazed into soft, warm night. And the sky lit. Arcs of fire; three of them, looping down from the thermosphere in golds and crimsons. Her breath caught. Her breath had been catching for twenty years, since the night a seven-year-old went up with Tio German to see the moon.
See the moon? See those lights? Those are your cousins. Family. Cortas. Like you. Your Great-Aunt Adriana went there and became very rich and powerful. She is Queen of the Moon, up there. Then she saw stars fall, streaks of fire across the stars, and nothing else mattered. She knows now that they are freight packages; rare earths, pharma. Helium-3. Corta Hélio lights the lights. Fusion was supposed to end the brown-outs. Fusion was cheap and limitless, the ever-bright and humming saviour. All saviours fail. Fusion was never about the power that could be delivered, it was always about the wealth that could be extracted by buying and selling on the electricity markets. The three packages fall, cloaked with re-entry plasma, in slow, incredible beauty. She preferred the time of innocence and wonder, when her great-aunt threw stars down to her like candies.
Adriana Corta had sent money to the brothers and sisters she left behind on Earth. The Brasil Cortas had lived high and comfortably; then one day, the money stopped. Adriana Corta had closed the sky but her great-niece still watched the lines of fire drop down from the moon and felt her heart crack.
Dark now. The show was over. Out there on the dark ocean retrieval ships were picking up the capsules. Alexia Corta picked up her tool bag and welding mask. Someone else could clean up the old pipework. She had sensimilla in the pocket of her cut-offs. She would savour its giggly blurring of her cheap and tattered world. Every time she saw the packages fall in blazing stars, she suffered a stab of resentment, of opportunity blighted. She was Barra’s Queen of Pipes, but what more might she have been, in that world up there?
At the front door the security kid handed her an envelope of cash.
‘Thank you, Senhora Corta.’
She counted it in the pick-up. Another term of Marisa’s school fees. Pharma for grandma Pia, a night out with Norton. Nail art and money in the savings account. The Queen of Pipes steered out into the flow of tail-lights along Avenida Lucio Costa and the betraying moon was a blade thrown into the sky.
* * *
Like most apps, Alexia used the police siren twice: once when she bought it, once to show off to her friends, then forgot about it. Several times when cleaning out her ware she thought of deleting it but always its little smiling cop-cruiser icon jiggled and said, When you need me, you will need me.
This morning, on Avenida Armando Lombardi, auto-drive off and eleven-year-old Caio and fourteen-year-old Marisa and Sister Maria Aparaceida from Abrigo Cristo Redentor in the back, she needed it.
Her air horns blasted emergency. Her hazard lights flashed blue: another little car-hack, as was the police traffic network tag that made every car in Leblon think she was an emergency vehicle. Whatever got them out of her road. She shot through
the intersection of Avenida das Americas and Avenida Ayrton Senna.
Sister Maria Aparaceida in the back banged on the roof and leaned over the cab to bellow through the driver’s window.
‘Where are you going? Holy Mothers is left.’
‘I’m not going to Holy Mothers,’ Alexia yelled over the howl of sirens. ‘I’m taking him to Barra D’or Hospital.’
‘You can’t afford Barra D’or.’
‘I can,’ Alexia shouted. ‘Just not anything else.’ She bounced the heel of her hand off the horn and plunged through the intersection. Automated vehicles fled like gazelles.
She sent him off smart and fed. Every day, clean, clothes ironed, shoes bright. Smart and fed, and a proper lunch, with stuff he would eat and stuff he could trade. Money for the security guys, money for the savings scheme; Alexia on emergency dial, in case. He would never be A-grade, that was not the way his intelligence worked, but he was always presentable and a credit to the House of Corta.
School security called Alexia when Caio was half an hour late. She dropped her tools. The neighbourhood had already found him, in a shallow concrete culvert clogged with corn-starch water bottles and tied plastic bags of human excrement. A community sister from the Holy Mothers was with him. Alexia slid down the concrete slope. His head was a mess. A mess. His lovely head. Everything was wrong. She didn’t know what to do.
‘Get the pick-up down to the steps!’ Sister Maria Aparaceida yelled. Neighbours hauled Alexia up the rough cast culvert. She backed the pick-up to the low curve where street crossed culvert. Hands passed him into the back of Alexia’s truck, where Maria Aparaceida had set down some foam packing. Maria Aparaceida arranged Caio in the recovery position and snatched an offered bottle of water to wash the wound. So much blood.