Luna--Wolf Moon--A Novel

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Leave it!’ Adrian shouts. ‘Use the garden service ladder. They don’t have anything coming up from below.’ Now he relays long-rehearsed words to Calliope. Panels slide out of the walls. Racked inside, bathed in brilliant white light, body armour. Jonathon Kayode boggles.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t know everything about this place.’ The chest and back plates are tight. He’s grown fat. Fat and slack. No time for the greaves, the vambraces. He places the helmet on his head. ‘Calliope has called a moto to the Level Fifty service door. It will take you to Mackenzie Metals’ Meridian office. Jackaroos will meet you and protect you. Go!’

  Last of all, Adrian Mackenzie draws the crossed knives from their magnetic field. Adrian lets the light catch their tungsten inlay, the intricate damasking of the blades. They are sublime. He snaps them into the sheaths at his waist.

  ‘Go!’

  Calliope shows Adrian three groups of armed and armoured men converging on the bedroom. They’ve hacked the Eyrie’s security.

  ‘I’ll buy you as much time as I can.’

  ‘Adrian…’

  ‘No Mackenzie ever ran from a fight, Jon.’

  A kiss, brief as a rain shower. Adrian Mackenzie flicks down his helmet visor.

  At the wedding, in the midst of the celebrations, his father had taken him apart on to a high balcony overlooking Antares Hub. For you. Adrian opened the box. Inside, resting on pillows of titanium wool, were matched knives. Adrian grew up among blades, he knew knives, and these were unlike any he had ever seen before. Unlike any ever made in the history of Mackenzie Metals. Try one, Duncan Mackenzie said. The blade sat in Adrian’s hand like a thing extruded from his bones. So well balanced, so secure. He cut and feinted, slashed. The dancing blade made a keening hum. That’s air bleeding, Duncan said. I couldn’t be happier for you, son, but the day will come when you need a knife. Keep these for that day.

  Feet. Voices. The door blasts in.

  Adrian Mackenzie’s blades sing from their sheaths.

  * * *

  The Eagle of the Moon is a big man, an out-of-condition man, a man whose Jo Moonbeam muscle has slackened to flab. The blades catch him, wheezing, at the top rung of the ladder down to Level Fifty, in shorts and bedroom slippers. They haul him up, squealing and shrieking. Hands seize him, hands lift him. A slipper is kicked off, then the other. Hands transport him. Hands tear at him. Now he is naked, gibbering in fear. Hands, more hands. The blades carry him down between the precisely pruned bergamots. The Eagle of the Moon sees where he is being taken and thrashes, screaming. The hands hold him sure and steady. They carry him to the little pavilion that overlooks Antares Hub. The five prospekts of Antares Quadra are vaults of lights.

  In perfect synchrony, the blades raise Jonathon Kayode and throw him far out into the twinkling air.

  Atmospheric pressure in a lunar habitat is 1060 kilopascals.

  He tumbles as he falls. This Eagle cannot fly and doesn’t know how to fall.

  Acceleration under gravity on the surface of moon is 1.625 metres per second squared.

  He screams as he falls, arms and legs flailing as if he could climb empty air like a rope, until he hits the rail of the Thirty-third level bridge. An arm shatters, flaps at an unnatural angle. No more screaming.

  Terminal velocity for a falling object in atmosphere is sixty kilometres per hour.

  It will take the Eagle of the Moon a minute to fall from his Eyrie to the park at the centre of Antares Hub.

  There is a physical property called kinetic energy. Its formula is ½mv2. Call it impact. Impactability. A large thing, moving slowly, can have low impact, low kinetic energy. A small thing, at high velocity, has high kinetic energy. Like an ice slug fired from a space-based mass-driver that can punch a hole through the rock cap of a lunar habitat.

  And the other way around.

  A thirteen-year-old boy, for instance, wire thin, falling from a kilometre, has a low kinetic energy.

  A fifty-year-old man, big, overweight and out of condition, has a higher kinetic energy.

  A minute is time enough to calculate that a thirteen-year-old boy, wire thin, might survive impacting Antares Hub at sixty kilometres per hour. And that a fifty-year-old man, big, overweight and out of condition, will not.

  * * *

  Hetty wakes her.

  Marina, it’s leaving day.

  She set an alarm. As if she could forget to wake. As if she could sleep on the night she leaves the moon.

  Of her few possessions, Marina hesitates over the Long Run tassels; the green bands and cords of São Jorge. They are a few grams, she has a mass allowance of a handful of kilograms. She sets them on the bed. They haunt the corner of her eye as she dresses, quickly, quietly, for this is a crowded house. They are small accusations: all leavings should be clean.

  Clean, but not sterile.

  Marina has dithered for days over what note she should leave. There must be a note: no question. It must be immediate and personal and there must be no possibility of Ariel stopping her.

  A note, written by hand, left where no one can overlook it. Direct, personalised: a parting gift.

  Abena grunts and opens her eyes as Marina takes the sheet of paper from the printer. She has been a permanent resident since the occupation.

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Long Run,’ Marina lies. It’s the only story that will infallibly excuse her leaving the apartment at four in the morning. Now she will have to dress for her alibi. Marina will depart the moon in running shoes, bra top and stupidly short shorts.

  ‘Have fun,’ Abena grunts and rolls over in her hammock. Ariel snores in her room. Marina crouches on her bed, knees pulled up, trying to write. The letters are painful and ill-formed. The words are excruciating. She goes to the refrigerator in hope of a steadying gin. Idiot. There hasn’t been any gin, any vodka, any spirit since the fall of the moon. But she leaves the note sticking out of the door.

  Last of all Marina ties the green bands around her wrists, her biceps, her knees and thighs. The decision about the tassels has been made for her. Abena wakes again as Marina opens the apartment door.

  ‘Are you not cold in that?’

  There are goose bumps on Marina’s pale skin but not from the cold.

  ‘Get some sleep. You’ve got a world to save in the morning.’

  Stealthy dressing, hushed note-leaving, the silent sneaking and muffled closing of the door.

  Marina, you have two hours to departure.

  Marina stifles a choke as she walks to the 25th Street ladeira. The street is almost empty, the few faces who nod in greeting – she nods back – share the communal pleasurable guilt of those about their business before the light. A woman practises yoga in front of her apartment; two men lean on the rail, talking quietly; a gaggle of kids reel home from a club or party: in the exchanged nod do they sense a special purpose, a particular emotional charge to her? A dim indigo light at the end of the quadra touches the walls and balconies. The sunline powers up for another day.

  A bot and two VTO guards in heavy-metal armour wait at the top of the ladeira. Marina’s heart clutches tight: afraid that if she makes eye contact they will recognise her, afraid that if she doesn’t they will pull her in for suspicious behaviour. You’re Marina Calzaghe, you work for Ariel Corta. We need to ask you some questions. You’re Marina Calzaghe, you abandoned Ariel Corta. Where do you think you’re going?

  She turns a glance, a flick of the head. The VTO guards aren’t even looking and one of the teens, out of his head, studies the bot with a kid’s intensity, daring himself to get as close as possible to the barely sheathed blades.

  A war was fought, a war was won and lost and nothing has changed. Kids get stoned and make out. Guys chat, women practise yoga. Long Runners head to their meet-points. A woman walks a ferret on a harness. The chib in Marina’s right eye records the prices of the Four Elementals and the state of her account. A change of management, that’s all. But that makes the death
s meaningless. The fighters who went down beneath the blades that the kid now touches weren’t fighting for shareholder value. They weren’t fighting out of personal loyalty to rich, remote Dragons. No one could fight for such things. They fought for their world, their life, their culture, their right not to be told what to do by aliens.

  Marina rides the ladeira down. There are guards on every level. She makes a little recreational mental calculation: number of levels times number of ladeira on each side of the prospekt times number of quadras. That’s a lot of bots and even more Vorontsovs.

  On the 3rd Street ladeira a woman glances over from the up escalator. A young woman, in running gear, small and revealing: yellow braids banding her biceps, yellow bangles at her wrists; a green cord around her left knee, brilliant against her dark skin. A Long Runner. She nods to Marina: Sisters of the Run. Doubt fells Marina. She turns, almost runs back up the down escalator to follow her. Her heart will burst, surely burst. She wants to go with this runner. She wants to go back, to the apartment, to Ariel. She wants it more than anything.

  The escalators carry them away from each other and tear the moment apart.

  Down in Orion Hub she finds a bench under the canopy of the tall trees. Shadows deepen. She draws them round her. Only lovers and her in the park this morning. The indigo lightens to deep blue, turning the grove to a palisade of tree-trunks. Marina sits until the wrenching sobs in her breast ebb into something bearable, something that will pass, something that will allow her to look at a face without breaking down.

  It was not Ariel but her brother, Rafa, who said that the only beautiful thing on the moon was the people. Beautiful and terrible. Like passionate, volatile, weak Rafa. Like vain, committed, lonely Ariel. Like beautiful, doomed, raging Carlinhos. Like dark, intense, loyal Lucas. You work for us now, he said. If she hadn’t accepted the offer, if he hadn’t offered it. If she had been an instant slower in intercepting the drone-fly. If she hadn’t taken the wait-staff job at Lucasinho Corta’s Moonrun party.

  She would still be under this tree, taking this walk, riding the Moonloop elevator home.

  This is a terrible world.

  High in Meridian Hub, where the main boulevards of the three quadras meet in a vault three kilometres high, early fliers swoop and turn, wrapping helices of air around each other. Their wings flash as they catch the ten thousand lights of dawn. They spread nano-carbon feathers and catch the rising air, spiralling up until they are flecks of dazzle lost in deep blue.

  She never got to fly. At the party before she went to flight training, she stood on the bar and promised everyone that was the one thing she would do. They fly there. She never got to fly on the moon; she never got to snowboard that semester when her friends went up to Snoqualmie while she finished the paper. The Girl Who Missed the Snow. The Girl Who Never Flew.

  The Moonloop station is in the south-west buttress of Meridian Hub. It is discreet and unflashy but it is the pillar around which Meridian stands. The elevator was here, at the moon’s closest point to the Earth, long before the first shafts were sunk far beneath the Sinus Medii. Marina passed through these doors only two years ago and nothing about them is familiar. A new world, new gravity, new ways of moving feeling breathing, the new chib in her eye charging her for every breath she takes.

  The station never closes. The Moonloop never stops turning, wheeling around the world. The staff have been expecting her. There is a final medical test, some paperwork. Not very much. In a small white room, on a tall white chair, Marina is asked to stare at a black spot on the wall. A flash, a moment of blindness, blinking purple afterimages that seem to buzz on her retina and when she can see again the little numbers in the bottom right corner of her eye are gone.

  Marina is off-chib.

  She breathes non-regulated air.

  She takes a deep lungful and almost falls off the stool, overdosed on oxygen. The woman in white who takes her from the small white room smiles.

  ‘Everyone does that.’

  After the shock, the doubt. What if she’s wrong? What if something hasn’t been explained? What if she has no right to the oxygen in her bloodstream? Marina begins to shallow breathe, sipping air, holding it like a precious child.

  ‘Everyone does that too,’ the woman says as she shows her into the departure lounge. ‘Breathe easy.’ The old lunar blessing. ‘Your ticket covers everything from now until you step out of the OTV.’

  That’s the part she hasn’t thought through. She’s worked through the departure, over and over, in every detail and permutation, every motion and timing. She cannot imagine the arrival. It will be raining. That’s all. She can’t see past the curtains of warm grey rain to the planet beyond.

  Five passengers wait in the lounge. There is tea, there is alcohol, but no one drinks anything but water. The sushi stands unconsidered on the cool plate, gathering bacteria.

  As she expected, Amado, Hatem and Aurelia from the repatriation class are there. No words now, nothing more than a nod. No one casts a second glance at her running gear. No one dares eye contact. Everyone sits as far apart as possible. And everyone does that, Marina supposes the staffer would say. Marina has Hetty flick through her music but everything is either too trivial for the occasion or something she doesn’t want tainted by attachment to an event as final as this.

  ‘One more to come,’ the staffer advises before closing the lounge door.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Marina asks. ‘Have I time?’ She nods to the bathroom. She could be worlds away before she gets to piss in comfort again.

  Like a yawn, her piss-need communicates wordlessly and infallibly. Behind her the line is out the door.

  Now comes the last ascender. It’s not who Marina was expecting. Oksana had been the last in the current group in Marina’s cohort. She is a short, narrow-eyed, frowning Ukrainian. This is a tall Nigerian man. Oksana must have changed her mind. Made her peace after the last group meeting. Re-opened her door and gone back into her house. Looped around the Vorontsov guards at the bottom of a ladeira section and headed back up. Turned her heel at the Moonloop station door. Chosen the moon. And Marina is swallowed in hideous doubt. Even now she could do it. Get up from this white couch, walk out of the door and go back.

  To Ariel.

  She can’t move. Between leave and remain, she is paralysed.

  Then a door opens at the other end of the lounge, another receptionist says, ‘We’re ready to board,’ and Marina finds herself standing with the others and walking with the others out of the door through the pressure lock into the Moonloop capsule. She takes one of the seats that circle the central core. The restraints fold down around her and take away all doubt. The hatch seals. The countdown is perfunctory. Capsules like these arrive and depart hundreds of times each day. Yet she is afraid, in her sports top and running shorts and ribbons. Departs as she arrived: afraid.

  The first stage of the ascent is a thrill-ride straight up the interior of Meridian Hub. In seconds she is half a kilometre high. The Moonloop capsule is a pressure body, built without windows, but external cameras feed images to Hetty. Marina sees Meridian Hub as a huge empty shaft, filled with the lights of ten thousand windows, lilac now in the dawn. Now she is above even the ascending fliers – there they are, sliding off the top of the thermal and circling down through the dusty gloaming.

  She is leaving the moon in the morning, in the swelling light.

  She glimpses the vents and fans, the power conduits and heat exchangers of the high city, then the camera cuts off as the capsule enters the airlock. The capsule jolts, she feels machinery move, locks seal, hears the shriek of depressurisation dwindle to a whisper to silence. Above her is the ascent tower. The Moonloop wheels around the moon, reaching down to snatch her from the top of the tower into space.

  It will hurt, Preeda at the returnee group said. It will hurt more than anything.

  * * *

  ‘Ariel.’

  All motos are strictly speed limited but when you are in the only one on th
e prospekt, in the lilac gloaming of Orion Quadra waking, speeding through the tall dark trees of Gargarin Park, you feel like you are travelling at the speed of love.

  ‘Ariel, there’s no point.’

  Abena stirred again in her shallow hammock-sleep to the click of the closing door and the whir of the deprinter. Put them together. She saw the note trapped in the refrigerator door. Knew what had just happened. She read the note. Before she had finished it she was in Ariel’s room.

  ‘Marina’s gone back to Earth.’

  The moto was at the door by the time she had helped Ariel into the shift dress. Do something with my face, Ariel said in a voice of ice while Beijaflor tried to locate and call Hetty. Abena knelt on the seat and carefully applied two-tone eye shadow. The moto whirred unchallenged through each of the occupation force checkpoints.

  I can’t reach her, was all Ariel said. I can’t reach her.

  ‘I still can’t reach her,’ Ariel says.

  ‘Ariel, listen to me.’

  She left the note on the kitchen floor. Abena can still see every word, as if written by a white-hot needle on her retina.

  I have to leave the moon. I have to go.

  ‘Ariel, her capsule left fifteen minutes ago.’

  The moto arrives in Meridian Hub and unfolds.

  ‘Ariel, she’s gone.’

  Ariel snaps her head and Abena quails under the pale heat of her gaze. ‘I know. I know. But I need to see it.’

  The return capsule descends the wall of Meridian Hub, coming in from space. One dropped as one is picked up. Up and down, the endless carousel.

  ‘I want you to go,’ Ariel says.

  ‘Ariel, I can help…’

  ‘Shut up!’ Ariel screams. ‘Shut up you stupid, silly little bitch; shut up with all your fucking well-intentioned, cheerful, senseless, insensitive, ignorant, glib little homilies. I don’t want your help, I don’t want your charm, I don’t want your therapy. I want you to go. Just go. Go.’

  Sobbing, Abena reels from the cab. She runs to a stone bench by a wall of hibiscus. The lilac morning ebbs to gold, there are fliers tumbling through the shining air and it is hideous to Abena. Hateful woman. Vile woman. Ungrateful woman. But she can’t help looking up through her hair, through the shivering sobs, to the helpless woman in the moto. The doors lie open around her like petals. Now her head is bowed forward. Now her head is thrown back. Abena tries to understand what she is seeing. She recalls how she felt when Lucasinho played around with other girls and boys. Anger, betrayal, a need to hurt as indiscriminately as she had been hurt. A desire to strike at the person who hurt her, and to see him struck. This is something else. This is a life tearing down the middle. This is total, eviscerating loss.