by Ian McDonald
‘I know. The relay’s not updating itself.’
‘No. The power is out. I don’t know when it will come back on.’
Luna is quick to understand and asks no questions. Lucasinho has no answers. He has three days of air, one suit and the nearest haven is one hundred and fifty kilometres away. A rover could cover one hundred and fifty kilometres in an hour.
There could be a rover parked right outside and he would never see it.
‘Jinji, can you access the log?’
This is very simple.
‘I want every rover movement over the last…’ He makes up a reasonable number. ‘Three lunes.’
Jinji throws an overlay of maintenance visits, prospectors, glass crews up on Lucasinho’s lens. Lucasinho may not read or number well, but he is superlative at interpreting visual information. His skill at picking one person, one object, one narrative thread from a mob of people, a terrain of moving data, always amazed numerate, literate Abena.
An anomaly, a tangent to the orbits and loops of the service rovers.
‘Enhance this one please.’ Jinji isolates the track, a small rover, coming from the badlands, curving off north into the fastnesses of the Taruntius craterlands. ‘Show me this one please.’ Footage now: the rover skims the edge of the external camera’s range, tracking in from the Gutenberg, heading into the badlands. Destination nowhere. There is not a settlement that way for a thousand kilometres. Lucasinho estimates it’s moving at thirty, maybe forty kilometres per hour. ‘Specs please.’ Jinji complies. Once again Lucasinho’s visual sense picks the information he needs from the blur of technical data. Range at optimum speed is three hundred kilometres, plus en-route solar recharging. From the footage, Lucasinho estimates the rover was a touch under its top speed.
The nearest settlement it could have started from, based on its course, is Gutenberg. Lucasinho tries to calculate range. The numbers clang like metal. ‘Jinji, do the math.’ Lucasinho’s familiar has the answer on Lucasinho’s lens before the last syllable of the question is spoken. On Lucasinho’s lens is an arc of possible locations for the rover, based on its range, speed and direction. The minimum distance is ten kilometres. The maximum is twenty-five. ‘Enhance please.’ The little rover carries the linked-MH colophon of Bryce Mackenzie. A figure in a sasuit sits astride the rover. The sun is high, the time code reads ten days.
A rover. A sasuit. Lucasinho has one final question for Lubbock BALTRAN relay. One last chance for all to fall apart in his fingers.
‘How long have I got, Jinji?’
This time the numbers are not displays or clever graphics. They are numbers, cold, unrelenting and impersonal. There is no time for hoping, waiting, pondering decisions, weighing up possibilities. If they are to walk out of Lubbock BALTRAN relay, he must go now. Every second of prevarication is watts of power, sips of air and water. Wait and hope or act and hope.
It is no decision. The numbers make it no decision.
‘Jinji.’
Lucasinho.
‘Power up the suit.’
* * *
The inlock window perfectly frames Luna. She waves. Lucasinho raises a titanium hand. He is a monster, an abandoner. A thief. He has filled his suit with Luna’s air and water and power. What if he fails? What if he doesn’t come back? He imagines Luna shivering on the steel mesh, growing colder, thirstier, hoping he will come back, hoping the power will restore.
He can’t think that. He can’t think of anything except what he needs to do, clearly and precisely.
‘Okay Jinji, I’m ready to go out.’
Lucasinho touches the icon of Lady Luna by the outlock. Luck, and defiance. He beat Lady Luna once, in nothing but his skin. But everyone knows the Dona never forgives a slight. The rush of depressurisation dwindles to silence. The outlock opens. Lucasinho steps out on to the regolith. Jinji guides him to the tracks of the Mackenzie rover. From there he can easily follow the trail north. He won’t know for how far, how long, but he will know where he is going. Muscle memory never forgets and Lucasinho drops into the rhythm of walking in a shell-suit. It’s easy to over-move. The haptics are sensitive, even on this old, cheap VTO model. Let the suit do the work.
Soon all other tracks diverge and only the twin tyre tracks of the Mackenzie rover lead Lucasinho. The sun is high, the surface is bright, Earth is a wan sliver of blue. Lucasinho sings to himself to keep his mind from drifting. The suit is equipped with games, music, old telenovella seasons, but entertainment systems take power. His songs fall into the rhythm of his steps, rattle round and round in his head like hallucinations. He finds he is singing his own lyrics to the tunes.
Lucasinho, time to call in, Jinji says.
‘Ola Luna!’
The link is audio only, for power conservation reasons.
‘Ola Luca!’
Luna’s voice, divorced from her body, her presence, her image, sounds strange to Lucasinho. He is listening to a human being but something higher, rarer, wilder and wiser. Anjinho, he calls her, the old family endearment. Little angel. So she sounds to Lucasinho.
‘How are you? Have you had your water?’ Lucasinho left instructions for Luna to take a drink every twenty minutes. It diverts her from realising that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast in the apartment.
‘I’ve had my water. When are you coming back? I’m bored.’
‘As soon as I can, anjinho. I know you’re bored, but don’t touch anything.’
‘I’m not stupid,’ Luna says.
‘I know you’re not. I’ll call again in an hour.’
Lucasinho trudges on into the badlands of Taruntius. A single marching tune has lodged in his head and it is driving him crazy. He could ask Jinji how far he has walked, how long he might have to continue, but the answer could be dismal. The tracks lead ever onward. In his red and gold shell, Lucasinho tramps ever onward.
Something. The sole advantage of Lucasinho’s boring moonwalk is that he has become acute to the landscape of the Taruntius and any variation in its monotony.
‘Jinji, enhance.’
The visor shows him the aerial and masts of a rover reaching up above the close horizon. Over a handful of minutes the rover appears and suddenly Lucasinho is beside it. The sasuited figure he saw on the relay’s cameras is still upright in the saddle. For an instant he is seized by the fear that the figure will lunge at him and smash a rock through his faceplate. Impossible. No one can survive that long in a sasuit. Certainly not, as he sees as he walks around the rover, a sasuit with a twenty centimetre gash running from right nipple to hip. That’s a problem. Another problem. He will deal with that later.
‘Where’s the hard point?’ Lucasinho asks. Jinji highlights the port and Lucasinho unreels his network cable and plugs it in. As he thought, the rover is as dead as its passenger. He grits his teeth as he runs the power cable from his suit to the rover, feels the transfer of charge from his batteries to the rover’s like supernatural healing leaving him. He needs the rover’s AI awake, even if he cannot spare the power to drive it back to the relay. Data spills across his lens, and he dives deep for what he needs. The brakes are off. The steering is unlocked. There is the tow-cable release. Lucasinho unreels the tow cable, throws it around his shoulder and clips it into a harness.
‘Luna? I’m coming back.’ Lucasinho leans into the harness. The rover resists him for a moment, then the haptic rig feeds power to the motors and overcomes the inertia. Lucasinho tows the rover back along the line of its own tracks.
Tracks stay forever on the moon. The surface is a palimpsest of journeys.
It is never as long coming back as going out.
Lucasinho rolls the rover to a halt. Jinji shows him the relay’s charge point. Recharging the rover’s batteries will drain almost all of the relay’s power but he was committed to this course the moment he stepped out of the airlock on to the surface. The coupling connects, the rover wakes in a dozen tiny operating lights and beacons.
Next the sasuit. That’s the way to t
hink of it: a life-saving device that needs some work to make it operable. Don’t think of the dead human being inside. Lucasinho tries to work out the best way to unhook the corpse from the saddle. She has frozen solid. He unclips the suitpack from the dead woman and opens the outlock.
‘I’m sending something through to you,’ he says to Luna.
‘I can work a lock,’ Luna says. ‘And I’ve had my water.’
Lucasinho rocks the corpse gently on to her back and lifts her, legs bent at the knees, one arm at her side, the other resting on the control panel. He carries her to the lock. They must cycle through together. He can’t ask Luna to haul a frozen corpse out of the airlock. It would still be burn-cold, it would be too heavy. It’s a corpse. Lucasinho backs into the lock until the rear of his suit hits the inlock door. He drags the frozen body into the lock, hissing through his teeth in frustration as he tries to manoeuvre it around him, fitting his head and torso into the geometry of limbs and torso. Lucasinho is on his back, the body on top of him, its knees on his shoulders, his helmet between its knees, its head at the groin plates of his suit. Sixty-nining an ice-corpse. Lucasinho barks out a dark, fearful, private laugh at that. No one else will ever know that joke.
‘Luna, I’m coming in. Stay away from the airlock. Just do what I say.’
Jinji cycles the lock. Lucasinho listens to the rising scream of air and it is the sweetest sound he has ever heard. He pushes himself out of the lock on his back, arms wrapped around the corpse. Lucasinho drags the corpse to the vacant BALTRAN pod and shuts it in. He doesn’t want to think about the mess he will find after the body has thawed, but it’s out of Luna’s sight and there are other pods racked up, when the power – if the power – ever resumes.
He staggers out of the shell-suit. All strength has left him. He has never been so tired: mind, muscle, bones, heart. It’s not over yet. It’s not even completely begun. There is so much to do and only he can do it and all he wants is to lie against the wall and turn his back to all those things that must be done and beg a little sleep from them.
‘Luna, can I have some of your water?’
He does not know where she appears from but she gives him her flask and he tries not to gulp it all at once to wash the taste of the suit out of his mouth. Suit water always knows it was recently piss.
‘Luna, can I snuggle up with you?’
She nods and nuzzles up against him. She is wearing the rest of his clothes, a baggy 80s-style waif. Lucasinho folds his arms around her and tries to find comfort on the steel mesh. He fears he is too tired to sleep. He shivers. The cold has reached deep. You’ve so much to do, an insane amount to do and a thousand things could kill you yet but the start is made.
‘Jinji, don’t let me oversleep,’ he whispers. ‘Wake me when she’s defrosted.’
‘What?’ Luna murmurs. She is a small nugget of warmth, coiled against his belly.
‘Nothing,’ Lucasinho says. ‘Nothing at all.’
* * *
Lucasinho wakes, tries to move. Pain stabs through his ribs, his back, his shoulder and neck. The metal mesh is embossed on his cheek. His head is thick and stupid; his arm is dead and numb where Luna has fallen asleep on it. He slides the arm free without waking her. Luna sleeps like a stone. Lucasinho needs to piss. On the way to the head he has a wiser idea.
‘What are you doing?’ Luna is awake now, watching him empty the scanty contents of his bladder into the shell-suit.
‘The suit will recycle it. You’ll need the water.’ Lucasinho’s piss is dark and cloudy. Piss should not look like that.
‘Okay then,’ she says.
‘Is there anything to eat?’ Lucasinho asks.
‘Some bars.’
‘Eat all of it,’ Lucasinho orders.
‘What about you?’
‘I’m fine,’ Lucasinho lies in the face of the chasm in his belly. He has never known hunger before. So this is how poor people feel. Hungry and thirsty and short of breath. The short breath will come. ‘I’m going to get us another suit and then we drive right out of here.’
‘Is that the dead woman in the capsule?’
‘Yes. Did you look?’
‘I looked.’
He dreads this next part of his plan. Shards of panic at what he would have to do to get the sasuit woke him again and again from the drop into exhausted sleep. Do it fast, do it smart, give yourself no time to think. Lucasinho opens the BALTRAN capsule door, seizes the dead suited woman by the arm and drags her to the deck. She comes awkward, stiff-limbed. Lucasinho feels through the suit that she is not totally thawed. Lucasinho turns her face down. First he unlatches the helmet. He almost gags at the reek. Everyone stinks in a sasuit but this is something he has never experienced before. He fights down retch after retch. Stomach heaving, Lucasinho sets the helmet aside and peels back the webbing. Hands shaking, he opens the seal. Another gale of stench, which he realises is death. Lucasinho has seen death, but he has never smelled it. Zabbaleen take away the dead, in their soft-tyred jitneys, no mess, no dirt, no odour.
Lucasinho holds his breath as he peels the suit away from the flesh. Her skin is so white. He almost touches it, stops as he feels the cold deep within. Tricky now. He must pull an arm from a sleeve. The second should come more easily after he frees the first. The gloves suck at the fingers and the elbow fights him. Cursing, he sits on the deck, turns her face away from him and, one foot braced against the dead woman’s shoulder, tugs the obstinate sleeve free from the body. In fast to pull free the other arm. Now he must roll the body over to work the suit down the torso and release the legs one at a time.
He stands over the dead woman and hauls at the suit. The body jerks. He pulls the suit down over her breasts and belly, smearing blood from the terrible knife wound down over the small convexity of the woman’s stomach. Again, wiggling down over her buttocks. She has a flower tattooed on her left buttock. Lucasinho crumples into a sobbing, howling ball. The tattoo breaks him.
‘I’m sorry I’m so sorry,’ he whispers.
He takes a foot in two hands. The left, then the right leg pull free. The sasuit lies in his hands like a flayed skin. The blood-smeared woman lies on her back staring at the lights.
Now he must wear the suit. He peels off the shell-suit liner. In the deprinter it goes. Legs into legs, quick-smart, a wiggle and the sasuit is up to his chest. Don’t think about the wetness on your skin. One arm, both arms. Lucasinho reaches for the lanyard to pull up the seal. He tightens the tensioning straps. The suit is too short for him. That tension in his shoulders, toes, fingers will become an ache. The plumbing is female. He’ll endure that too. By the time he scoops up the helmet the printer has pinged out a new suit-liner, fresh, pink, Luna-sized. It’s heavy on scant resources, but Luna needs a liner to interact with the shell-suit.
‘Anjinho, I need a hand with this.’
Luna takes the roll of pressure tape from the airlock, seals the rent in the sasuit and walks around Lucasinho, wrapping him three layers deep.
‘Don’t use too much of that, we may need it,’ Lucasinho chides. ‘Now, you put on the liner and I’ll charge our suits.’
‘What’ll I do with the clothes?’
Lucasinho almost tells Luna just to leave them, then realises that he would be throwing away valuable material, organics that might be the difference between life and death out in Pyrenaeus.
‘Throw them in the deprinter and reprint them as pressure tape.’
‘Okay.’
Lucasinho does not think more than a second about that other stash of valuable organic material, lying face up in the capsule dock.
Luna returns in the pink suit liner with a small roll of pressure tape. She peers into the open shell-suit and grimaces. ‘It smells of piss.’ She steps in, the suit reads her smaller body and adjusts the internal haptic skeleton to support her. ‘Oh!’ she says as the suit seals around her.
‘Are you all right?’ Lucasinho asks. Luna has never been in a suit before.
‘It�
��s like the refuge they took me out of Boa Vista in, but smaller. But better because I can move.’
Luna clanks along the decking.
‘I take two steps and then it catches up with me.’
‘It’s really easy, the suit does all the work,’ Lucasinho says.
Power air and water at full charge, the familiars announce. Every breath, every sip, every step is budgeted now.
‘I’ll go through the lock first,’ Lucasinho says. ‘I’ll wait for you on the other side.’
It feels an age to Lucasinho, standing on the steps waiting for the lock to cycle, trusting and yet failing to trust in the pressure tape wrapped around the tear in his stolen sasuit, imagining the sudden evacuation of air as the tape gives way. It won’t give way. It’s been designed that way. Yet he can’t quite believe it, and already his fingers and toes are cramped from the too-small suit. Lights flash, the lock opens, Luna steps out.
Lucasinho uncoils a data cable from his pack and plugs it into the highlighted socket on Luna’s armour. ‘Can you hear me?’
Silence, then a giggle.
‘Sorry, I nodded.’
‘We use less power if we’re plugged together.’
Lucasinho is proud of the next bit. He thought it out as he was hauling the rover back to Lubbock. One rover, one seat. He positions Luna in her shell-suit on the saddle, then arranges himself in her lap. The shell-suit is slick and his seat is insecure. To come off at speed is to die. He hadn’t foreseen this problem. In the same instant, he has the solution. Lucasinho tears off lengths of pressure tape and binds himself to Luna, calves, thighs, torso. He hears her giggle on the comms link.
‘Good, anjinho?’
‘Good, Lucasinho.’
‘Then let’s drive.’
Jinji is already interfaced with the rover AI. A thought and Luna and Lucasinho, taped and wired together, race away from the upraised horns of the Lubbock relay across the stony regolith of Mare Fecunditatis.
* * *
It is ten years since Duncan Mackenzie last set foot on the surface but he refuses the shell-suit. Once a jackaroo, always a jackaroo. The sasuit is new, printed to the body profile of a middle-aged man with fitness issues, but the rituals of locking the seals, tightening the binding straps, are as familiar as faith. The pre-surface checks are little prayers.