by Ian McDonald
‘You’ll side with whichever faction wins,’ Ariel says.
‘Yes. We must. VTO, the two Mackenzies, Taiyang to a lesser extent, all depend on a relationship with Earth. We don’t. The moon is all we have. But, as we say, everyone eats, everyone sleeps.’
‘Shall I tell that to the Eagle?’
‘That is the answer of the Golden Stool.’
Movement in the trees; a sudden thrill of wings. Birds rise, butterflies skirl past Ariel’s face and small fast low things dash and dart along the borders of the paths. The guardians are leaving, the cordon is lifted. Ariel understands that she is to remain while the Omahene takes leave. She listens to dead leaves tumble across the gravel on the unpredictable winds of Aquarius Quadra’s microclimate. Crunch of footfalls and tyres: runners and sweet-eat sellers’ carts.
* * *
Lady Sun pulls the sleeves of Darius’s suit down to cover his wrists. Darius pulls them up again.
‘It’s the fashion,’ he says.
Lady Sun concedes but snatches the vaper from his fingers.
‘This I will not tolerate.’
Darius’s shoes click on the polished stone. The Great Hall of Taiyang is an open, empty cuboid sculpted to millimetre perfection from the raw rock of Shackleton crater rim. Its proportions and acoustics are engineered to induce physiological awe. The Suns favour it to receive guests and clients.
‘That’s Ariel Corta,’ Darius says. In a red Emanuel Ungaro dress, Ariel Corta is the bright sun of an orbit of Taiyang dignitaries. Even chair-bound she commands every eye. Ariel Corta is not one to be cowed by architectural trickery.
‘Who are those people with her?’ Darius asks.
‘The younger woman is Abena Maanu Asamoah.’
‘A niece of the Omahene,’ Darius says. The perspectives in the Great Hall deceive. He feels he has walked for kilometres without drawing a footstep closer.
‘You’ve paid attention,’ Lady Sun says. ‘Good. Significance?’
‘The Asamoahs and the Cortas are traditional allies.’
‘Half of their bloodline lives under Asamoah protection.’
‘As I live under the protection of the Suns,’ Darius says.
‘Keep that sneer out of your voice or I will poison you myself, young man,’ Lady Sun says. ‘The third woman is her personal guard. She need not concern us.’
‘She killed a man with a vaper,’ Darius says.
‘Did you research that, or have your familiar look it up?’ Lady Sun says.
‘I recalled it,’ Darius says. ‘That is what you want me to do?’
The huddle of executives opens. Heads dip to Lady Sun.
‘Grandmother: Ariel Corta, representing the Eagle of the Moon,’ Sun Zhiyuan says.
Lady Sun extends a hand. Ariel shakes it. You’re not supposed to do that, Darius thinks. You kiss the hand of Lady Sun.
‘Madam Sun.’
Darius studies Ariel Corta as introductions are made. From her chair she commands everyone in the room. Her attention is a favour she rations and even the executives of Taiyang crave it. Why does she not walk yet? She can easily afford the surgery. Is there power in the chair? Does it give her advantage? Everyone, even Lady Sun, must lower themselves to speak to her. Darius tries to understand the will that chooses disability and authority over ability and anonymity. There is a lesson here.
‘And my ward, Darius.’
Darius dips his head to Ariel Corta.
‘Charmed, Senhora Corta.’
The flare in the back of her eyes as they meet his sends a shock of fear through Darius. Was his tone too cute? Has she seen into him?
‘A pleasure, Darius.’
She’s suspicious of him.
‘I wanted him to meet you, Ariel,’ Lady Sun says. ‘The young need to learn the value of perseverance. No great thing was wrought without it. A fall, a time away from the world, the rise to prominence and power: perseverance. Come Darius.’
Business resumes. Zhiyuan and Ariel are discussing the civil service, the operatives that keep the moon spinning around the Earth; from the recyclers of the dead to the administrators who bond the chib to every new eyeball. The human staff will work for whoever keeps them breathing. Who will Taiyang’s administrative AIs serve: Eagle or Board?
‘You were flippant,’ Lady Sun chides as she guides Darius away from the conference.
‘You were rude,’ Darius says. ‘To her face.’
‘I am the Dowager of Shackleton,’ Lady Sun says. ‘Dowagers are rude. You’ve heard of the Three August Ones.’
‘I’ve heard stories.’
‘They are very much more than stories. They are quantum computers we constructed for Whitacre Goddard bank to make highly accurate guesses at future events. Prophecies, if you like. Of course we built a back door into them and they have been dealing us a measure of future insight ever since. They are wretched things; they obfuscate and they never totally agree. They have only ever been unanimous on one thing: that Ariel Corta will be a major figure in the story of the moon.’
‘This is why she is our enemy.’
‘She isn’t, yet. She may be. I may well be dead and gone to the Zabbaleen by then, but you will be ready.’
‘I will be, great-grandmother.’
Darius’s feet tippy-tap on the polished rock. Coming or going, he heard not a sound from Lady Sun’s footsteps.
* * *
Abena can’t stop shivering. The air is warm, scented with a spicy tang of dust pleasing to anyone who grew up in Twé’s ever-expanding maze of tunnels and agriculture tubes. The rock, the rock, the relentless rock, oppresses her. Hadley is rock and metal unrelieved by any fleck of life or colour. Dead metal, stifling and cold. Abena feels she has been trudging this corridor for years. It must have turned or branched but still Abena marches on, hand brushing the right armrest of Ariel’s chair for reassurance, shivering with claustrophobia.
‘They could have escorted us from the station,’ Abena says.
‘I will not be marched into the presence of Duncan Mackenzie by the blades who killed my brothers,’ Ariel says.
‘And who tried to kill you,’ Marina says, at the left side of the silently rolling chair.
‘I don’t understand how you can even come here,’ Abena says.
‘That’s because you don’t understand the counsel/client relationship,’ Marina says. ‘Ariel represents the Eagle of the Moon. She’s here as his counsel and representative. What she feels, her history with the Mackenzies, have no place here. Here she’s not Ariel Corta. Duncan will respect that.’
‘It still seems that she’s erasing her personal integrity,’ Abena says.
Marina stops dead.
‘You have nothing to tell Ariel about integrity.’
‘Both of you shut up,’ Ariel snaps. ‘I’m not fucking dead, you know.’ Abena hears apprehension beneath the irritation.
And then there is a door. Behind the door, an elevator. Beyond the elevator, a golden-haired smiling Mackenzie Metals woman who could not say unarmed and harmless more clearly were she unclothed and hairless. Beyond her, a low-ceilinged room, rock and metal; windows like squints. Shafts of light stab down from slots in the low ceiling.
‘Still the mirrors,’ Ariel whispers.
Five figures stand arranged for effect in the strong down lights. Abena recognises them from her briefing: the board of the new Mackenzie Metals. All men, of course. Duncan Mackenzie is larger than Abena imagined. Signature grey, his familiar an oily ball of grey light. She finds herself awed by this man where the psychoarchitecture of the Palace of Eternal Light was stage magic. He has presence and gravity.
‘Duncan.’
‘Ariel.’
How can she shake his hand? How can she speak to him, how can she say his name? Abena is sure she could never debase herself so lowly. Professional objectivity is a career lesson she knows she must learn but there are principles which may not be compromised without losing all credibility and self belief. She admires
Ariel’s professional detachment; she is not certain she respects it.
‘Thank you for coming to Hadley,’ Duncan Mackenzie says.
‘Testing me, Duncan?’
‘Partly. And I no longer feel safe in Meridian.’
The Mackenzie Metals woman brings a tray of drinks. Ariel passes it without hesitation, without even a lingering look. It does not pass near Abena and Marina.
‘What do you want from me, Ariel?’
‘The Eagle of the Moon needs to know if he will continue to enjoy the support of Mackenzie Metals.’
‘And where do my brother’s loyalties lie?’
‘You wouldn’t let as petty a thing as that colour your judgement?’
‘Three hundred and fifty deaths and two hundred and fifty million bitsies in materiel damage and lost revenue is hardly petty.’
‘Your brother has yet to request a meeting with the Eagle’s counsel. I thought you would have known that, or has your back channel to the Eagle gone quiet?’
‘Adrian remains resolutely unaligned,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. He invites Ariel to a ring of seats. Abena notices there is no space for her or Marina. There is a lot of standing around in the job of intern to the Eagle of the Moon’s counsel. She is glad of Ariel’s advice on comfortable shoes. ‘We need stability, Ariel. The Eagle’s coup on top of my family’s ongoing issues has not reassured the markets. Capital hates uncertainty and we’re men of business. Mackenzie Metals will support whichever party offers us the most stable and secure environment to guarantee profits.’ Duncan Mackenzie sits back in his chair. His board unconsciously echoes him. ‘That’s the position of Mackenzie Metals. The position of the head of the Mackenzie family is this.
‘My father came to the moon to build a world. His own world, outside the controls and restrictions of governments, consortia, empires. Boards and investment funds. He sank every cent of his fortune into sending five robot prospectors to the moon, then a construction hub, then a production and shipping facility, then an inhabited base. Always reinvesting his own profits. He never took anyone else’s money, he never let any outsider invest or buy a stake in Mackenzie Metals. He fought to keep terrestrial nation states from turning us into a colony. He fought to uphold the Outer Space Treaty – and strengthen it. He opposed the establishment of the Lunar Development Corporation, and when it was forced on him, made sure its power was so fractured and diluted that the politics of terrestrial states could never be imposed on free lunar workers. To his dying day my father stood for our freedom and independence. So, please tell Jonathon Kayode that Duncan Mackenzie supports him.’
Abena sees Ariel Corta ready her answer. Duncan Mackenzie raises a hand.
‘If he supports me against Bryce.’
* * *
Ariel watches the drop of dew run down the under slope of the Martini glass. It hesitates at the junction of bowl and stem, gathers, fills, shivers under its weight and glides to the foot.
‘Beautiful,’ Ariel Corta says. ‘The most beautiful thing in this Quartersphere.’
The train hits eight hundred kilometres per hour across Palus Putridinis. The Aitken-Peary Polar line was the first railroad to be built on the moon, serving the ice and hydrocarbon reserves at both poles, but its primacy has been usurped by Equatorial One. Ariel, Marina and Abena are the only passengers in the observation car of the Polar Express. Abena is uncomfortable in the glass blister. She feels exposed, too close to vacuum. Her skin itches from imagined radiation. The vista is of a landscape exhausted by the extractors of Mackenzie Metals. Every crater graded flat, every rille filled with spoil, and that waste scabbed by rover tracks, abandoned machinery, slat panels, abandoned caches and refuges.
It’s more interesting than the usual gentle uplifts and soft grey moundings.
Ariel pushes the glass across the table to the waiter.
‘Now take it away please.’
With a dip of her head, the waiter whisks the glass away. Not a ripple, not a bead of dew disturbed.
‘If you ever do that again,’ Ariel says to Marina, ‘I shall put the glass through your face.’
‘It worked, then.’
‘The same applies if you congratulate me or try any of that motivational garbage, sweetie.’
Marina hides a tight laugh. Abena cannot understand the constant low-key aggression between the two women, or the laughter behind every cut and jibe. Ariel disrespects, belittles or outright insults Marina, yet back in Hadley when Abena questioned Ariel’s personal integrity Marina had turned on her like a knife-fighter.
‘Will he keep to it?’ Marina asks.
‘Duncan has some sense of honour,’ Ariel says, catching the conversational shift like a handball ace. ‘Unlike his shit of a brother.’
‘I still don’t see how it couldn’t have been done through the network,’ Abena says. ‘We’ve been to Hadley, the Palace of Eternal Light – we would have gone to Twé if Sewaa Lousika hadn’t been in Meridian.’
‘Law is personal,’ Ariel says. ‘Personal contracts, personal agreements, personally negotiated. When you deal with Dragons, you must offer them a treasure. Maybe they will take it, maybe they will let you keep it. No greater treasure than your own life.’
‘Do you know where we haven’t been?’ Marina says. Abena frowns. Ariel nods.
Realisation. ‘The Vorontsovs!’
‘I’ve had no request for a meeting,’ Ariel says.
‘Does VTO support the LDC board members?’ Abena asks.
‘Ariel would know,’ Marina says.
‘Ariel would,’ Ariel says. ‘And Ariel doesn’t know where the Vorontsovs stand. Ariel doesn’t like that. So Ariel’s going to talk to someone who might be able to guess.’
* * *
The print really is very small, no larger than her two thumbs put together. Ariel must lean close to make out the minute figures standing on the upper limb of the curved world and the smaller third figure on the first rung of the ladder that rests on the limb of the crescent moon.
‘I want! I want!’ Ariel reads. There is an inscription beneath the print’s minuscule title but it is in cursive and she cannot parse that form of writing.
‘William Blake,’ Vidhya Rao. ‘Eighteenth-, nineteenth-Christian-century English artist and poet. Visionary, prophet and mystic. Uniquely, he excelled at all of them.’
Ariel has never heard of William Blake but she knows Vidhya well enough to commit no trespasses of false erudition. The lunch has been excellent, given the location. The Lunarian Society dining rooms are private and discreet – a suite that can be sealed off from the network – but in Ariel’s experience members’ clubs seldom have good kitchens. The ramen is as tolerable as noodles can ever be, the sashimi so fresh Ariel suspects it is cut from living fish.
‘And our cocktail creator is as good as any in the two worlds,’ Vidhya Rao said when e met Ariel in the Lunarian Society Lobby and took the handles of her wheelchair.
‘Far too busy for cocktail hour,’ Ariel said. Knowing now cocktail hour might never come.
At the small table in the discreet dining room, Ariel’s attention is drawn back to the print. The style is simple, almost simplistic, the message a clear parable but there is a vigour, a power to the etching that draws the eye and captures the imagination.
‘Crying for the moon,’ Ariel says. Vidhya Rao’s mouth twitches. Ariel has disappointed er.
‘I do so adore Blake,’ e says. ‘There is always more to him.’
‘The surface the figures stand on looks more like the moon than the moon does,’ Ariel offers. She has noticed that every table has a small print on the wall, just above the lamp. Beijaflor enhances: they are all in the same style, by the same artist. Decorations, conversation starters.
‘That’s an interesting observation,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘So in fact, from our point of view, it could be Earth, from the moon.’
‘That would be beyond nineteenth-century imagining,’ Ariel says.
‘Not Blake,’ Vidhya Rao says.
E takes a wallet from er bag and places it on the table. Ariel looks inside.
‘Paper,’ Ariel says.
‘I find it more secure.’
‘What dark secrets are you sharing with me?’
‘You wanted to know why VTO has not requested a meeting with you.’
Ariel has never been a strong reader. She concentrates to stop her lips moving as she works through the digest at the head of the document. That effort grows more extreme the deeper Ariel goes into the paper. Her mouth opens. She sets the paper on the table.
‘They will cut us apart.’
‘Yes. We aren’t soldiers. We have no soldiers, we don’t even have a police force. We are an industrial colony. We have private security and militias at best.’
‘Your Three August Ones told you this.’
‘With an eighty-nine per cent outcome probability.’
‘Who else knows about this?’
‘Who would we tell? We have no defences. Whitacre Goddard has started diversifying and strengthening its portfolio as a hedge.’
‘Fuck you bankers.’
Vidhya Rao smiles.
‘That is the very heart of the matter. We have no solidarity. We are individuals, families and corporations, all acting in our own self-interest.’
‘You said the Suns have a back door into the Three August Ones. Do they know this?’
‘I look at patterns. I try to draw inferences. From Taiyang’s recent investments and disinvestments, I would infer not.’
‘How could they avoid seeing something like this?’
‘Quite simple. They haven’t asked the right questions.’
Ariel spreads sheets across the small table.
‘This requires massive space-lift capability.’
‘The terrestrial nation states don’t have the capacity.’
‘My question about VTO is answered. What I don’t understand is why.’
‘VTO is unique among the Dragons in having an Earth-based arm. That makes it vulnerable to political pressure.’
‘Gods.’
‘Yes. All of them, of whatever name and nature. I’m sorry, Ariel. Tea?’