by Ian McDonald
Alexia ground again. Norton groaned.
‘Up there is my family. You’re sure he’s Lucas Corta?’
‘Lucas Corta from the moon.’
‘How is he … never mind.’
‘He’s pretty sick. A wreck. Doctors all over him.’
‘Lucas Corta on Earth.’ Alexia lifted herself off Norton’s cock and showed him her full magnificence. ‘Norton Adilio Daronch de Barra de Freitas, if you ever want in here again, you will get me in to talk to Lucas Corta.’
* * *
The maids’ uniform was a size too small. Buttons gaped on the shirt. The skirt was too tight, too short. She constantly pulled it down. The gusset on her panty hose rode low. She constantly pulled it up. Ridiculous that staff were expected to work in such stupid shoes. She had bribed the hotel manager heavily: at least she could have supplied a uniform that fitted.
Half of Barra worked in service but Alexia had never seen the interior of a five-star hotel. The paying parts were marble and chrome, over-polished and tired of standing to attention. The kitchen and service were concrete and stainless steel. She suspected this was universal. The corridors smelled of much-breathed air and tired carpets.
The Jobim suite.
The fear hit her at the doorbell.
What if there was security beyond the security Norton had fixed?
She would think of something. She rang the bell. The door buzzed open.
‘Turn-down service.’
‘Come in.’
His voice surprised her. When he spoke, Alexia realised she had no idea how a man from the moon should sound, but it was not this. Lucas Corta spoke with the voice of a sick, sick man. Tired, weighed down, struggling for breath. His Portuguese was strangely accented. He sat in a wheelchair by the panoramic window. Against the brightness of beach, ocean and sky he was a silhouette: Alexia could not tell if he was facing her or turned away.
She went to the bed. She had never seen one so wide, smelled one so fresh. Five different medical bots attended it, a dozen medications stood on the bedside table. She touched the sheets: the bed undulated. A water bed. Of course.
Something twitched on the side of her neck. Alexia raised her hand.
‘Touch that insect, you die,’ Lucas Corta said in his old sick man voice. ‘Who sent you?’
‘Nobody, I’m…’
‘Unpersuasive.’
Alexia flinched to the touch of insect feet, tip-tapping as they crawled around to the soft spot behind her left ear. The urge to flick it away was overpowering. She did not doubt Lucas Corta. She had read about cyborg insect toxin delivery systems. On the moon they were the preferred weapon of the Asamoahs. And she was thinking this, appreciating this, with neurotoxic death in a pool of her own piss and vomit a millimetre from her skin.
‘I’ll try that again. Who sent you?’
‘Nobody…’
She whimpered as she felt the tiniest prick of needle snag skin.
‘I am the Iron Hand!’ she shouted.
And the insect was gone.
‘That’s a name to live up to,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘What’s the rest of it?’
Alexia dry retched, hands trying to find support and certainty in the seascape of the waterbed, shivering with frayed fear.
‘Alexia Maria do Céu Arena de Corta,’ she gasped. ‘Mão de Ferro.’
‘The last Mão de Ferro was my mother.’
‘Adriana. Luis Corta was my grandfather. He was named after his grandfather Luis. Adriana was named after her great-aunt. She had an electric organ in her apartment.’
A hand lifted against the searing blues of ocean and sky.
‘Come into the light, Iron Hand.’
She saw now that he had not once looked at her. He had sat throughout with his back to her. The light collapsed his shadowy bulk, withered him, made him translucent and sick, a spider caught in the light. His hands were gnarls of sinew and swollen joints. The skin of his throat, his cheeks, under his eyes, his lips, sagged. He looked something crueller than old, more terrible than death.
Lucas Corta looked up into the sun, his eyes black with polarising lenses.
‘How do you live with this?’ he asked. ‘How does it not continually dazzle and distract? You can see it move. You actually believe it moves … and that’s the trap, isn’t it? It blinds you to reality. You can only understand if you look away.’
He glanced at Alexia and she felt the black lenses peel the skin from her face, the flesh from her cheekbones, flense every nerve to the fibre. She did not flinch. The heat radiating from the triple-layered glass was palpable.
‘You have the look.’
Lucas Corta spun away and wheeled away from the window to the dim cool of the interior.
‘What is it you want, Senhora Corta? Is it money?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why should I give you my money, Senhora Corta?’
‘My brother…’ Alexia began but Lucas Corta cut her off.
‘I’m not a charity, Senhora Corta. But I reward merit. See me tomorrow. Same time. Find a new way in. This way is closed to you. Show me you’re the Iron Hand.’
Alexia picked up her hotel bag of turn-down goodies. Her mind still reeled, vertiginous. She could have died on that bed. She had come within a needle’s-point, a fractional instant of everything ending.
He hadn’t said yes, he hadn’t said no. He said, Show me.
‘Senhor Corta, how did you know?’
‘The uniform is two sizes too small. And you smell wrong. Room service has a particular aroma. Chemicals get into the skin. It seems we on the moon are more olfactorily sensitive than terrestrials. On your way out, please send up the real turn-down service. I am sleeping stupid hours.’
* * *
Alexia stripped off the maid’s uniform the moment the service door swung behind her: too tight blouse, too short skirt. Stupid stupid shoes. In underwear and sag-crotch hose, Alexia Corta pushed past Norton and into his car in the Copa Palace’s underground garage.
‘It’s on my skin, my fucking skin,’ she shrieked at Norton as he drove her back to his apartment. ‘I can feel it.’
She plunged straight into his shower.
‘I should kill him,’ Norton said, watching the silhouette behind the water-beaded fabric.
‘Don’t touch him.’
‘He tried to kill you.’
‘He didn’t try. He defended himself. But I feel dirty. It was on me. An insect, Nortinho. I’m never going to feel clean again.’
‘I can help with that,’ Norton said and slipped through the curtain. Clothes dropped to wet tiles. He stepped out of pants, shook off shorts. ‘So what was he like? You were so freaked by that insect bot you never told me.’
‘He creeped the fuck out of me, Norton,’ Alexia said. Her back was turned to him; water ran down her skin, down the glass. ‘It was like something pretending to be a person. It looks okay from a distance but when you get up close everything is just that little bit off. Uncanny valley. Nothing was the right shape. Everything was too long or too big or top heavy. An alien. I heard people born there grow up different; I never thought…’
‘You don’t get to pick your family,’ Norton said and stepped into the shower. He pressed against Alexia’s warm, wet flank and she gasped. ‘So where is this dirty bit?’
She scooped her hair away and tilted her head to show him the soft places on her neck and beneath her ear where the assassin insect had nuzzled. He kissed them.
‘Cleaner now?’
‘No.’
‘Now?’
‘A little.’
He moved his hands to cradle the perfection of her ass. She pressed muscle-close, curled a leg around his thighs, hooked him in to her soft dark skin.
‘So are you going to see him tomorrow?’
‘Of course.’
* * *
‘Handsome boy.’
‘Here he is on the futsal team.’ Alexia flicks him the picture of Caio grinning in singlet and shorts
and long socks into Lucas Corta’s eyes. He lolls in the pool, cool water roiling gently. He has invited Alexia several times to join in. The idea repels her. She sits on a pool chair in the shade of the canopy. The sun is brutal today. The sea looks like it is dying.
‘Is he good?’
‘Not really. Not at all. They only pick him because of me.’
‘My brother had a handball team. They weren’t as good as he thought they were.’
Alexia flicks him another picture of Caio, trying to look big on the beach; stripes of blue sun block on his nose, cheekbones, nipples.
‘How is … Caio?’
‘He’s walking. He knocks things over a lot and he needs a stick. Futsal is over for him.’
‘If he wasn’t very good, maybe it’s a blessing. I was terrible at any kind of sport. I couldn’t see the point. One of my uncles was called Caio.’
‘Caio is named after him.’
‘He died of tuberculosis shortly before my mother left Earth. My mother taught me the names of all my aunts and uncles, the ones who never came. Byron, Emerson, Elis, Luis, Eden, Caio. Luis was your grandfather.’
‘Luis was my grandfather, Luis Junior was my father.’
‘Was.’
‘He walked out when I was twelve. He left three of us. My mother just threw her hands up.’
‘On the moon we have contracts for that sort of thing.’
Now. Ask him for the money. Claim kinship. He let you get in to the hotel. She had tracked down Dr Volikova, asked her to pass Alexia off as Lucas’s locum masseuse. Alexia had dressed the part. She sat by his pool in sports leggings and a crop top. Ask him. An image appeared on Alexia’s lens. The moment was lost.
‘This is Lucasinho, my son.’
He was a very pretty boy. Tall in that weird moon way but well proportioned. Thick glossy hair that she knew would smell clean and fresh. An Asian turn to the eyes that made him look withdrawn and beautifully vulnerable, cheekbones to fall in love with, lips you could kiss forever. Not her type – she preferred her men muscled and with no overt signs of intelligence – but so so cute. He was instant heartbreak.
‘How old is he?’
‘Nineteen now.’
‘And how is … Lucasinho?’
‘Safe. As far as I know. The Asamoahs are protecting him.’
‘They’re at Twé.’ As Lucas researched Alexia, she researched him and his world. ‘They run agriculture and environment.’
‘They have traditionally been our allies. The legend is that every Dragon has two allies…’
‘And two enemies. The Asamoahs’ enemies are the Vorontsovs and the Mackenzies, the Suns’ enemies are the Cortas and the Vorontsovs, the Mackenzies’ are the Cortas and the Asamoahs, the Vorontsovs’ are the Asamoahs and the Sun, the Cortas’ are…’
‘The Mackenzies and the Suns. Simplistic, but like all clichés, with an element of truth,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘I fear for him all the time. It’s an elegant fear, of many parts. The fear that I haven’t done enough. The fear of not knowing what is happening. The fear that there’s nothing I can do. The fear that, even if I could, whatever I did would be wrong. I heard what you did to the men who hurt your brother.’
‘I had to make sure they would never go near Caio, or any of us, ever again.’
‘My mother would have done that.’ Lucas took a sip of tea from the glass balanced on the edge of the pool. ‘She always wondered why none of you ever came. I think it was the great disappointment of her life. She built a world for her family and no one wanted it.’
‘I grew up believing that she turned her back on us. Took back her wealth and power and left us to fall.’
‘You still live in the same apartment, I believe.’
‘It’s falling apart, the elevators haven’t worked since before I was born and the electricity is more off than on. The plumbing is good.’
‘When we were twelve years old my mother took each of us up on to the surface at Earth-dark. She showed us continents all lined in lights and the webs of lights across them, and the knots of lights that were the great cities and she told us, We light those lights.’
‘They make more money trading that power than using it,’ Alexia said. ‘But Corta Agua does supply reliable and clean water to twenty thousand people in the Barra da Tijuca area.’
Lucas Corta smiled. It was a heavy thing, costly for his body and the more valuable for that.
‘I would like to see that. I would like to see the place my mother grew up. I don’t want to meet your family … that wouldn’t be safe. But I wish to see Barra, and the beach where the moon fell across the sea like a road. Arrange that for me.’
* * *
The hire MPV was a glassy bubble, all doors and windows, and made Alexia instinctively uncomfortable. Like something the Pope rode, waving and blessing. Nowhere to duck and hide, only faith and toughened glass to save you. She itched on the seat facing Lucas Corta as the car cruised down Avenida Lucio Costa.
Dr Volikova had been adamant in her refusal to allow Lucas Corta out of the hotel until a short, sharply worded argument that startled Alexia with its passion and ferocity. Patient and doctor argued like lovers. Dr Volikova followed in a pick-up stacked with emergency treatment bots.
‘This is my home,’ Alexia said. In the lilac cool, with the eastern ocean indigo and the lights coming on street by street, level by level, Barra could strut its old glamour. If you overlooked the potholes, the sidewalk tiles missing like broken teeth and the trash in the gutter, the parasitic power cables and the cell masts, the white plastic water pipes scrambling up every vertical like strangling fig.
‘Show me,’ Lucas said. Norton ordered the MPV to pull in to the crumbling curb. Alexia had no intention of letting him drive, but relaying commands to the auto-drive gave him sufficient purpose and agency.
‘I’d like to get out,’ Lucas Corta said. Norton scanned the street theatrically. He could be so adorably bad ass. Alexia opened the door and unfolded the elevator. Lucas Corta travelled the few centimetres to touch down on planet Barra. ‘I’d like to walk.’
‘Are you sure?’ Alexia said. Dr Volikova was at hand even before the car had opened.
‘Of course I’m not,’ Lucas said. ‘But I want to.’
The two women helped him from his wheelchair and passed him his cane. Lucas Corta clicked along the sidewalk. At every moment Alexia was in fear of a loose tile, a stray can, a kid on a bike, blown treacherous sand, anything that might trip him and send him crashing to earth.
‘Which apartment?’
‘The one with the Auriverde windsock.’
Lucas Corta stood a long time on his cane, looking up at the lights of the apartment.
‘We’ve remodelled it since your mother’s time,’ Alexia said. ‘It used to be a rich neighbourhood, so I was told. That’s why we’re near the top. The richer you are, the higher you lived. Now it just means the more steps you have to climb. If you have any choice, you live as low as you can afford. I read the moon’s like that.’
‘Radiation,’ Lucas Corta said. ‘You want to be as far from the surface as you can afford. I was born in João de Deus and lived there until my mother built Boa Vista. It was a lava tube; two kilometres long. She sealed it and sculpted it and filled it with water and growing things. We lived in apartments carved out of the giant faces of the orixas. It was one of the wonders of the moon, Boa Vista. Our cities are great canyons filled with light and air and movement. And when it rains … It’s beautiful beyond your imagining. You say Rio is beautiful, the Marvellous City. It’s a favela compared to the great cities of the moon.’ He turned away from the tower. ‘I’d like to go to the beach.’
The light was gone now and the beach was the preserve of guy-gangs and teenagers making out or vaping drugs. Norton’s jaw twitched in displeasure but he helped Lucas down the steps on to the beach. Lucas’s cane sank into the sand. He recoiled in horror, tried to tug it free.
‘Careful, careful,’ Dr Volikova admonishe
d.
‘It’s in my shoes,’ Lucas said. ‘I can feel it filling up my shoes. This is horrible. Get me out of this.’
Alexia and Norton carried Lucas to the sidewalk.
‘Get it out of my shoes.’
Alexia and Norton steadied Lucas while Dr Volikova removed Lucas’s shoes and poured out streams of fine sand.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lucas said. ‘I hadn’t thought I would react that way. I felt it and thought dust. Dust is our enemy. I have no control over these things. It’s the first thing we learn.’
‘The moon is up,’ Norton whispered. A waning crescent stood over the eastern horizon. The lights of the cities of the moon twinkled like diamond dust. Oceans of dust, Alexia thought and it thrilled and horrified her at the same time. This man, this frail man, dying of gravity in every step and movement, came from there. A Corta: her blood, and utterly, implacably alien. Alexia shivered, tiny and mute under the far moon.
‘My mother told me that the whole family used to come down at New Year and set paper lanterns into the sea,’ Lucas said. ‘The ocean would somehow draw them out until no one could see them any more.’
‘We still do that,’ Alexia said. ‘The Reveillon. Everybody dresses in white and blue, Yemanja’s favourite colours.’
‘Yemanja was my mother’s orixa. She didn’t believe it, but she liked the idea of orixas.’
‘I find the idea of religions on the moon strange,’ Alexia said.
‘Why? We are an irrational species, and profligate at exporting our irrationality. My mother was a benefactor of the Sisterhood of the Lords of Now. They believe that the moon is a laboratory for social experiments. New political systems, new social systems, new family and kinship systems. Their ultimate goal is a human social system that will endure for ten thousand years – which they consider the time it will take us to become an interstellar species. I could believe in the orixas more easily.’
‘I think it’s optimistic,’ Alexia said. ‘It says, we won’t blow ourselves up or die in climate collapse. We will get to the stars.’
‘We may. The Sisterhood says nothing about you here on Earth.’ Lucas Corta looked out again at the now-dark ocean. The moon drew a shiver of light across the black waters. ‘We fight and we die up there; we build and we destroy, we love and we hate and live lives of passion beyond your comprehension and not one of you down here cares. I’d like to go now. The sea is making me anxious. I can bear it in the light, but in the dark it has no end. I don’t like it at all.’