by Ian McDonald
There exist shocks so profound that the body’s only response is paralysis. Not fear, though fear is right: this is the shock of the uncanny. The thing before her is so alien, so unsightly, so different from anything Marina has ever seen before that she cannot understand what she sees. The shock of the strange stuns her. Every part of it offends human sensibilities. She cannot move or think or act. But it moves, thinks, acts. Marina sees intelligence and intention in the eyes that scan her head to toe, then its attention snaps away. It dances on its three clicking stiletto feet. Now the fear comes. Marina sits shaking on the bottom step of the 24th Street ladeira. The God of Death looked at her and passed by. The new gossip wafts through the network: It’s all right, they won’t touch you.
Then what were they made for? Marina thinks.
The last wave is the suits.
Ariel and Abena, with most of the population of Orion Hub, are on their balconies or at the street handrail. Marina finds them. One detachment of suits comes up from the train station. They wear shell-suit armour decorated with Heavy Metal motifs: flaming skulls, fangs, demons, large-breasted women, big-cocked men, demons and angels and chains. Vorontsovs. Another detachment advances up Gargarin Prospekt from the outlock. They are dressed in black impact armour and carry small, black, projectile weapons. They advance in line and step. In the stunned silence of Orion Quadra their boots sound loud and intimidating.
‘They’re marching,’ Marina says.
‘They’re terrestrial,’ Ariel says.
‘Are those guns?’ Abena says.
‘They’re in for a big surprise when they try and shoot those things,’ Marina says.
‘Forgive me if recoil isn’t at the top of my list of concerns,’ Ariel says.
A third detachment emerges from offices and print-shops; not armoured, not armed and drilled, just people – moon folk – in everyday clothes and orange vests. They gather into groups of three and move up and out to every prospekt and street in Orion Quadra. Marina orders Hetty to zoom in on the vests: each carries a logo of the moon overflown by a bird carrying a twig in its beak. Marina is unfamiliar with the symbolism. Above are the words ‘Lunar Mandate Authority’.
‘Peace, Productivity, Prosperity,’ Marina says, reading the motto beneath the world and bird motif. ‘We’ve been invaded by middle management.’
* * *
Two boxes of guava juice and an empanada. They swing in Robson Corta’s waist bag as he climbs up through the high fifties to the West Antares power conduit. He lost the bot ten levels ago – they have restricted battery life and can’t climb. All they can do is try and follow him up by staircase and street and tag him for a writ. Good luck serving that, up above Bairro Alto. The danger is the human attention they attract, and the little machines are everywhere now, guarding every crumb and cup.
Robson’s thieved from hot-shops in every quadra – it’s always night somewhere in Meridian – but never Eleventh Gate. Thieving from your own hot-shop is shitting on your doorstep.
Two boxes of guava juice and an empanada – tilapia, he hates tilapia – is poor reward for a daring, dark-time descent of the West Antares conduit. Robson spent days navigating a safe path between the high voltage cables and the relays, marking it with luminous tape he filched from an off-shift duster’s pack at a busy tea-stand. His ascent follows a trail of shining arrows and dashes. An arrow: a gap jump in the direction of the arrow. A greater-than sign: wall pass. A less-than sign, precision jump to a narrow location. An equals sign: cat jump. A vertical equals: wall run. A cross: dash vault or lash vault, depending on the orientation of the long axis of the vault. Downward slash right: under bar. Downward slash left: reverse under bar. An X: Do not touch. An asterisk: Danger of death.
Robson drinks the first juice on the level seventy traverse. He tucks the empty carton into his pilfer bag. Trash can fall, trash can get into the machinery, trash can be a treachery waiting at the far end of a jump. He saves the empanada for the nest. Robson searched for days across the high places before he found a sleeping place that was warm, protected, had access to water without damp and condensation, was secure so he would not roll over in his sleep and fall to his death. He lined it with filched packing and went down to the bars where the surface workers drank to steal thermal sheeting.
Every magician is a thief. Time, attention, belief; thermal sheeting.
Robson burrows into his nest of impact foam and bubble wrap and eats his empanada. He will save the last juice for later. He has learned to ration his treats. It will be a thing to look forward to. Boredom is the dark enemy of the refugee. Wanking is an enemy in a different mask; the mask of a friend.
Robson likes to believe that his high nest gives him a philosophical eyrie over the world. High above every other human, he can look down and contemplate. If food is guarded, it must have a value beyond the everyday. On his thieving missions he hears tea-shop talk. The trains are out, the BALTRAN too. The Vorontsovs are in charge of those: why would they shut them down? Twé has been buried in regolith. That would cut back on the growing season. The crops would dwindle, they might fail. The Asamoahs could be weird – every one he’s ever known is – but they would never do that to their own capital. But if no one knows when there will be another harvest, that would explain bots guarding every empanada and bento box.
Then there are the most intriguing stories of all, the ones that make him linger a moment too long, his fingers a moment too slow on the object he means to steal. There are things out on the seas, in the highlands. Whole squads have been lost – killing things, with blades for fingers and swords for feet. Killer bots. Who would make a thing like that? The Suns could, but why would they? Why would anyone build a thing with no other purpose than to frighten, to intimidate, to threaten and control?
No one on this world, Robson decides. Huddled in his nest, warmed by the hum of a heat exchanger, his stolen blanket pulled around him, Robson concludes that, without any notice or declaration, without anyone actually knowing, the moon has been invaded. By Earth. By high blue Earth. But they couldn’t do that on their own; they would need someone to transport their machines, their people. The only ones with the capacity to do that are the Vorontsovs. The Vorontsovs are in league with Earth to take control of the moon.
‘Whoa,’ says Robson Corta.
And he hears a click. A tap, a click-click tap. A leg, elegant and precise as a surgical tool, appears around the corner of the heat exchanger. The steel hoof draws a click from the catwalk. Robson freezes. An arm like a blossom of blades comes around the corner of Robson’s nest, then a head. Robson thinks it’s a head. It has six eyes and is articulated like no limb he has ever seen but he’s sure it’s a head by the way it snaps from side to side to study him.
Click. Another step, another leg. Another arm.
He pushes slowly away from it.
The bot is interested now. Click click click. It steps after him. Robson is on his feet. The bot lunges forward. Gods it’s fast. Click click snap.
The bot freezes, looks down. One of its delicate hoofs is trapped in the wider mesh of Robson’s nest. Its head flicks side to side as it studies the trapped hoof. In a second it will work out what to do. That second is all Robson needs. Only a practitioner of sleight of hand has the speed and skill. Only a traceur, a city-runner who fell from the top of Queen of the South to the bottom has the daring.
Robson snatches up his thermal blanket and throws a loop under the body of the bot. As it turns he steps past it, ducking under the bladed arms. He throws the ends of the blanket over the rail, heaves. Unbalanced, the bot totters. Robson ducks low, puts shoulder where legs meet body and heaves. Levers do the rest. The bot topples as it works its foot free; legs and arms wave, unfold into an atrocity of blades. Its weight and speed carry it over the low rail. It falls, blades snapping at air, impacts a crosswalk five levels down and comes apart. Junk rains down on Tereshkova Prospekt far below.
Robson slams back into the security of his nest. The blanket i
s wrapped around him and the heat exchanger is blood warm but Robson shivers. He can’t believe what he did, what he dared. Would the bot have hurt him? It might have left him alone, but he couldn’t risk that. He did what he had to do. He got away with it. He might not have got away with it. He can’t think about that. He is shaking now. He feel sick. That empanada must have been bad. Tilapia: poisonous stuff. Liquid. He needs liquid. He’s crying. He shouldn’t be crying. Robson hugs his blanket more closely around him and sucks at the box of guava juice.
* * *
Luna arranges more tiny lights around the bed. Guardian lights at the cardinal points become a defending circle which she filled in with smaller circles. Circles of circles around the medical bed. She has a new idea about wiggling lines radiating from the big circle. Like sun rays or something. Luna likes symmetry, so she begins by laying out six sun-ray wiggles, each sixty degrees apart. She does not have enough to complete her pattern; she hisses in frustration. She will have to forage more lights. The Sisterhouse is generous with biolights.
Now it is time to water them. Squatting, Luna waddles around the ring of biolights with her little jug. A drop and a drop. The green glow brightens.
The noise is Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade entering the room. She thinks she’s as quiet and mysterious as a miracle but to Luna her heavy feet and heavy breath and the small mutters that she doesn’t know she makes are as noisy as a tunnel digger.
‘Luna, we do have to get in to tend him,’ says Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade Abosede Adekola. She is a round, old Yoruba woman in the whites of the Sisterhood of the Lords of Now. She clicks and rattles with beads and charms and saints. She smells a bit.
‘You can step over them,’ Luna says defiantly. The Mãe-de-Santo lifts the hem of her robes and steps into the circles of protecting light. She does not disturb a single lamp. Her feet are bare. Luna has never seen the Holy Mother’s feet before.
‘We’ve contacted your mother,’ Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade says.
‘Maame!’ Luna cries, standing up and knocking over her jug of water. She summons her familiar, though the Sisters don’t approve of them in the Sisterhouse. ‘Luna, get my Maame!’
‘Oh, not so fast not so fast,’ the Holy Mother says. ‘The network is still coming and going. We have our own channels. Your mother knows you’re here in João de Deus, and that you’re well, and she sends her love and says as soon as she can she will come and bring you home.’
Luna’s mouth is an ‘o’ of deflated excitement. Luna the familiar unravels in sprays of pixels.
‘What about Lucasinho?’ she asks.
‘It will take time,’ Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade says. ‘He is very badly hurt. A very sick young man.’
She leans over the body on the bed. So many tubes going in and out of it. Tubes to his wrists, his arms, his side. A big tube in his throat. Luna can only look at that one for the glance it takes to make sure he still breathes. A small thin tube coming out of his pee-hole. That makes her squirm. Wires and needles. Bags and sensor arms. He’s naked, uncovered, palms turned up like a Catholic saint. He’s in a place deeper than sleep. Medically induced coma, the Sisters say. He doesn’t move, he doesn’t dream, he doesn’t wake. He is a long way away, journeying through the borderlands of death.
If the Sisterhood hadn’t such good medical facilities. If the Urbanistes hadn’t been so curious. If she had been thirty seconds slower opening the lock to the Boa Vista refuge.
If if if-ity if.
Luna is still not sure that Mother Odunlade’s smell might not in fact be her smell. Suit-stink gets deep into the skin like a tattoo.
Different parts of Lucasinho’s body gently rise and fall as the bed inflates and deflates to prevent pressure sores. He breathes, but that’s the machine. Stubble is growing on his face, his stomach and his groin. He has a fine line of dark hair from his belly-button to his balls.
‘Will you shave him?’ Luna asks. He is fascinating and horrible.
‘We’ll care for him to the very best of our ability,’ Mother Odunlade says.
‘Do you think maame could come and we could all stay here with you?’
‘Your maame is a very important and busy woman, my love. She has a lot to do.’
‘I want him to wake up.’
‘We all want him to wake up.’
The Sisters have said that it could be days before Lucasinho wakes up, or it could be weeks. It could be years. That’s a thing from Madrinha Elis’s berçário stories. The cute prince cursed to sleep forever in a deep secret cave. A kiss usually wakes them. She tries that every day, when the Sisters are all gone. Some day it will work.
Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade’s lips move silently as she reads the screens around Lucasinho’s head. Sometimes a word slips out and Luna realises that they are not numbers but prayers.
‘Oh!I almost forgot,’ says Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade and rummages inside her white gowns, a thing Luna’s quite sure she should not see. She produces a wooden box, a big, flat wooden box, carved with flower patterns so fine and detailed they strain even Luna’s eyesight.
‘What is it?’ Luna is ever-open to the possibility of presents.
‘Open it.’
The box is lined with silky, shiny fabric. Luna loves the feel of it under her fingers. The Sisterhouse does not have a very good printer, but it is enough to print out lovely frocks. Goodbye! she shouted at the hated hated hated suit liner as she stuffed it into the deprinter. She never wants to wear anything clingy ever again.
Then she notices the knives. Two, nuzzled against each other like twins. Dark and hard and gleaming. Edges so sharp they cut the sight that beholds them. Luna touches fingertip to blade. It is as smooth and silky as the lining in which the knives rest.
‘They are made of lunar steel,’ Mother Odunlade says. ‘Forged from billion-year-old meteoric iron mined deep beneath Langrenus crater.’
‘They feel beautiful and scary at the same time,’ Luna says.
‘These are the battle knives of the Cortas. They belonged to your uncle Carlinhos. With these he killed Hadley Mackenzie in the Court of Clavius. With these Denny Mackenzie killed Carlinhos when João de Deus fell. They passed into our safekeeping. We aren’t comfortable having them in this special place – there is too much blood on them – but for the love and respect we bear for your grandmother, we have protected them. Until a Corta comes who is bold, great-hearted, without avarice or cowardice, who will fight for the family and defend it bravely. A Corta who is worthy of these blades.’
‘Lucasinho should have them,’ Luna declares.
‘No, my love,’ Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade says. ‘These are for you.’
11: SCORPIO 2105
The scrunched-up ball of panty-hose hits Marina on the cheek.
‘Field some fucking calls for me!’ Ariel shouts.
The apartment is a crisis suite. Ariel is in her room, Abena in the kitchen area, talking talking talking on their familiars. Marina sits in the living area, looking out through the open door at the sun running on Orion Quadra. Head full of nothing but the words tell her tell her tell her.
‘Abena’s doing that.’
‘Abena’s talking to her aunt. I’ve got Sun Zhiyuan on hold.’
‘What can I do?’
Tell her tell her tell her.
‘Tell him a joke. Enquire about his grandmother’s health. Ask him to explain quantum computing. That should fill half an hour.’
She couldn’t do it when the Eagle deposed the LDC. She couldn’t do it when the trains were shut down and the sky was closed. She couldn’t do it when Twé was buried in regolith and besieged in the dark. She couldn’t do it when an Asamoah-Mackenzie combat team was annihilated at Flammarion. She couldn’t do it when there was a big space gun aimed at Meridian. The time was too full of history. The time was never right.
‘Well, what are you doing?’
‘I am trying to talk to Jonathon Kayode.’
‘Haven’t you got a private channel with him?’
�
��And he is not answering it, genius. Just field this call for me, Marina. Gods, I wish I still drank.’
Hetty takes the call.
‘Zhiyuan géxià? Good evening. I am Marina Calzaghe, Ariel Corta’s personal assistant. I understand you’ve been unable to contact the Eagle of the Moon’s office for guidance on the current regime change. Ariel is trying to establish contact with the Eagle…’
And now regime has changed, the cities of the moon are occupied and the Soft War is over. The trains are running, the Moonloop is lifting cargo and passengers to orbit and VTO has confirmed her booking and scheduled her departure. Her ascent is scheduled and the time is still too full of history. The time is still not right to tell Ariel she is leaving her.
* * *
Adrian.
He’s been waiting five years for this voice in the night. Adrian Mackenzie is awake, out of bed.
They’re here.
Jonathon snores. He is a monster to waken. He must wake. Adrian shakes him ungently.
‘Jon.’
He gulps air, big mouth-breathing Earthman. He has to wake.
They have accessed the lobby. Eyrie security is sealing the doors. Adrian’s second shake is timed with an alarm from Jonathon’s own Eagle familiar. He wakes.
‘What time is it?’
‘We’re under attack. Get dressed.’
Calliope opens camera windows on Adrian’s lens. Three groups. One at the front, one coming through the vehicle exit, one descending from the upper terrace. They know where to go, what to hit and how to hit it. Shaped charges blow doors like paper in a depressurisation. The Eagle of the Moon freezes at the distant, flat cracks.
‘My security…’
‘They are your security.’ That’s how they know about the upper terrace exit. It had been Adrian’s planned escape route. He has a Plan B.
Jonathon Kayode is pulling on shoes, shorts, trying to find a way into a shirt.