by Neil Clarke
“If you’re not coming up, I’m coming down. I can just catch that next truck If I hurry.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You might need a backup, someone older with some sense.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m sixty-six years old, Laura. They’ve already told me I’ll never ramrod another job, let alone one like this. I can go home to sit and rot. I’m not even sure I could get a consulting gig at some aerospace company. Like you said, there’s opportunity down there. Besides, if I don’t give it a shot my old man’s ghost will never stop bugging me.”
“Well, hell, come on down.
Garver spoke again. “How does the old song go? You’ll get pie in the sky when you die. Bullshit. I’m in the sky and I’m not dead yet. This could be a lot of fun.”
“You’re crazier than I am,” I said.
“Downright moonstruck. Need a shop steward?”
“No.” I said. “We need a union president. If this is going to work we need someone with more clout than me. Someone just like you.”
“What makes you think the crew would accept me?”
“Come on down and we’ll make your case,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll give it a go. But then what about you?”
I smiled to myself. “Every town needs a sheriff.”
In my mind’s eye I saw Garver nodding.
“I like that notion,” he said. “For now, Selene Station out.”
I slipped off the headset, thinking of how another old tune my mother used to sing got the message wrong. The best things in life aren’t always free, but if I had my way, the Moon would belong to everyone.
2014
Ian McDonald is an SFF writer living in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast. Always fascinated by the close, great light in the sky, he’s been writing about the moon for six years now, beginning with this story. “The Fifth Dragon” is part of the Luna sequence, which concludes with the novel Luna: Moon Rising (Tor and Gollancz), published in early 2019.
THE FIFTH DRAGON
Ian McDonald
The scan was routine. Every moon worker has one every four lunes. Achi was called, she went into the scanner. The machine passed magnetic fields through her body and when she came out the medic said, you have four weeks left.
We met on the Vorontsov Trans-Orbital cycler but didn’t have sex. We talked instead about names.
“Corta. That’s not a Brazilian name,” Achi said. I didn’t know her well enough then, eight hours out from transfer orbit, to be my truculent self and insist that any name can be a Brazilian name, that we are a true rainbow nation. So I told her that my name had rolled through many peoples and languages like a bottle in a breaker until it was cast up sand-scoured and clouded on the beaches of Barra. And now I was taking it on again, up to the moon.
Achi Debasso. Another name rolled by tide of history. London born, London raised, M.I.T. educated but she never forgot—had never been let forget—that she was Syrian. Syriac. That one letter was a universe of difference. Her family had fled the civil war, she had been born in exile. Now she was headed into a deeper exile.
I didn’t mean to be in the centrifuge pod with Achi. There was a guy; he’d looked and I looked back and nodded yes, I will, yes even as the OTV made its distancing burn from the cycler. I took it. I’m no prude. I’ve got the New Year Barra beach bangles. I’m up for a party and more, and everyone’s heard about (here they move in close and mouth the words) freefall sex. I wanted to try it with this guy. And I couldn’t stop throwing up. I was not up for zero gee. It turned everything inside me upside down. Puke poured out of me. That’s not sexy. So I retreated to gravity and the only other person in the centrifuge arm was this caramel-eyed girl, slender hands and long fingers, her face flickering every few moments into an unconscious micro-frown. Inward-gazing, self-loathing, scattering geek references like anti-personnel mines. Up in the hub our co-workers fucked. Down in the centrifuge pod we talked and the stars and the moon arced across the window beneath our feet.
A Brazilian miner and a London-Syriac ecologist. The centrifuge filled as freefall sex palled but we kept talking. The next day the guy I had puked over caught my eye again but I sought out Achi, on her own in the same spot, looking out at the moon. And the whirling moon was a little bigger in the observation port and we knew each other a little better and by the end of the week the moon filled the whole of the window and we had moved from conversationalists into friends.
Achi: left Damascus as a cluster of cells tumbling in her mother’s womb. And that informed her every breath and touch. She felt guilty for escaping. Father was a software engineer, mother was a physiotherapist. London welcomed them.
Adriana: seven of us: seven Cortas. Little cuts. I was in the middle, loved and adored but told solemnly I was plain and thick in the thighs and would have be thankful for whatever life granted me.
Achi: a water girl. Her family home was near the Olympic pool—her mother had dropped her into water days out of the hospital. She had sunk, then she swam. Swimmer and surfer: long British summer evenings on the western beaches. Cold British water. She was small and quiet but feared no wave.
Adriana: born with the sound of the sea in her room but never learned to swim. I splash, I paddle, I wade. I come from beach people, not ocean people.
Achi: the atoner. She could not change the place or order of her birth, but she could apologise for it by being useful. Useful Achi. Make things right!
Adriana: the plain. Mae and papai thought they were doing me a favour; allowing me no illusions or false hopes that could blight my life. Marry as well as you can; be happy: that will have to do. Not this Corta. I was the kid who shot her hand up at school. The girl who wouldn’t shut up when the boys were talking. Who never got picked for the futsal team—okay, I would find my own sport. I did Brasilian jujitsu. Sport for one. No one messed with plain Adriana.
Achi: grad at UCL, post-grad at M.I.T. Her need to be useful took her battling desertification, salinisation, eutrophication. She was an -ation warrior. In the end it took her to the moon. No way to be more useful than sheltering and feeding a whole world.
Adriana: university at Sao Paulo. And my salvation. Where I learned that plain didn’t matter as much as available, and I was sweet for sex with boys and girls. Fuckfriends. Sweet girls don’t have fuckfriends. And sweet girls don’t study mining engineering. Like jujitsu, like hooking up, that was a thing for me, me alone. Then the economy gave one final, apocalyptic crash at the bottom of a series of drops and hit the ground and broke so badly no one could see how to fix it. And the seaside, be-happy Cortas were in ruins, jobless, investments in ashes. It was plain Adriana who said, I can save you. I’ll go to the Moon.
All this we knew by the seventh day of the orbit out. On the eight day, we rendezvoused with the transfer tether and spun down to the new world.
The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It’s more like mutual bondage.
I was sintering ten kilometres ahead of Crucible when Achi’s call came. I had requested the transfer from Mackenzie Metals to Vorontsov Rail. The forewoman had been puzzled when I reported to Railhead. You’re a dustbunny not a track-queen. Surface work is surface work, I said and that convinced her. The work was good, easy and physical and satisfying. And it was on the surface. At the end of every up-shift you saw six new lengths of gleaming rail among the boot and track prints, and on the edge of the horizon, the blinding spark of Crucible, brighter than any star, advancing over yesterday’s rails, and you said, I made that. The work had real measure: the inexorable advance of Mackenzie Metals across the Mare Insularum, brighter than the brightest star. Brighter than sunrise, so bright it could burn a hole through your helmet sunscreen if you held it in your eye line too long. Thousands of concave mirrors focusing sunlight on the smelting crucibles. Three years from now the rail lines would circle the globe and t
he Crucible would follow the sun, bathed in perpetual noon. Me, building a railroad around the moon.
Then ting ching and it all came apart. Achi’s voice blocking out my workmix music, Achi’s face superimposed on the dirty grey hills of Rimae Maestlin. Achi telling me her routine medical had given her four weeks.
I hitched a ride on the construction car back down the rails to Crucible. I waited two hours hunkered down in the hard-vacuum shadows, tons of molten metal and ten thousand Kelvin sunlight above my head, for an expensive ticket on a slow Mackenzie ore train to Meridian. Ten hours clinging onto a maintenance platform, not even room to turn around, let alone sit. Grey dust, black sky . . . I listened my way through my collection of historical bossanova, from the 1940s to the 1970s. I played Connecto on my helmet hud until every time I blinked I saw tumbling, spinning gold stars. I scanned my family’s social space entries and threw my thoughts and comments and good wishes at the big blue Earth. By the time I got to Meridian I was two degrees off hypothermic. My surface activity suit was rated for a shift and some scramble time, not twelve hours in the open. Should have claimed compensation. But I didn’t want my former employers paying too much attention to me. I couldn’t afford the time it would take to re-pressurise for the train, so I went dirty and fast, on the BALTRAN.
I knew I would vomit. I held it until the third and final jump. BALTRAN: Ballistic Transport system. The moon has no atmosphere—well, it does, a very thin one, which is getting thicker as human settlements leak air into it. Maybe in a few centuries this will become a problem for vacuum industries, but to all intents and purposes, it’s a vacuum. See what I did there? That’s the engineer in me. No atmosphere means ballistic trajectories can be calculated with great precision. Which means, throw something up and you know exactly where it will fall to moon again. Bring in positionable electromagnetic launchers and you have a mechanism for schlepping material quick and dirty around the moon. Launch it, catch it in a receiver, boost it on again. It’s like juggling. The BALTRAN is not always used for cargo. If you can take the gees it can as easily juggle people across the moon.
I held it until the final jump. You cannot imagine what it is like to throw up in your helmet. In free fall. People have died. The look on the BALTRAN attendant’s face when I came out of the capsule at Queen of the South was a thing to be seen. So I am told. I couldn’t see it. But if I could afford the capsule I could afford the shower to clean up. And there are people in Queen who will happily clean vomit out of a sasuit for the right number of bitsies. Say what you like about the Vorontsovs, they pay handsomely.
All this I did, the endless hours riding the train like a moon-hobo, the hypothermia and being sling-shotted in a can of my own barf, because I knew that if Achi had four weeks, I could not be far behind.
You don’t think about the bones. As a Jo Moonbeam, everything is so new and demanding, from working out how to stand and walk, to those four little digits in the bottom right corner of your field of vision that tell you how much you owe the Lunar Development Corporation for air, water, space and web. The first time you see those numbers change because demand or supply or market price has shifted, your breath catches in your throat. Nothing tells you that you are not on Earth any more than exhaling at one price and inhaling at another. Everything—everything—was new and hard.
Everything other than your bones. After two years on the moon human bone structure atrophies to a point where return to Earth gravity is almost certainly fatal. The medics drop it almost incidentally into your initial assessment. It can take days—weeks—for its ripples to touch your life. Then you feel your bones crumbling away, flake by flake, inside your body. And there’s not a thing you can do about it. What it means is that there is a calcium clock ticking inside your body, counting down to Moon Day. The day you decide: do I stay or do I go?
In those early days we were scared all the time, Achi and I. I looked after her—I don’t know how we fell into those roles, protector and defended, but I protected and she nurtured and we won respect. There were three moon men for every moon woman. It was a man’s world; a macho social meld of soldiers camped in enemy terrain and deep-diving submariners. The Jo Moonbeam barracks were exactly that; a grey, dusty warehouse of temporary accommodation cabins barely the safe legal minimum beneath the surface. We learned quickly the vertical hierarchy of moon society: the lower you live—the further from surface radiation and secondary cosmic rays—the higher your status. The air was chilly and stank of sewage, electricity, dust and unwashed bodies. The air still smells like that; I just got used to the funk in my lungs. Within hours the induction barracks self-sorted. The women gravitated together and affiliated with the astronomers on placement with the Farside observatory. Achi and I traded to get cabins beside each other. We visited, we decorated, we entertained, we opened our doors in solidarity and hospitality. We listened to the loud voices of the men, the real men, the worldbreakers, booming down the aisles of cabins, the over-loud laughter. We made cocktails from cheap industrial vodka.
Sexual violence, games of power were in the air we breathed, the water we drank, the narrow corridors through which we squeezed, pressing up against each other. The moon has never had criminal law, only contract law, and when Achi and I arrived the LDC was only beginning to set up the Court of Clavius to settle and enforce contracts. Queen of the South was a wild town. Fatalities among Jo Moonbeams ran at ten percent. In our first week, an extraction worker from Xinjiang was crushed in a pressure lock. The Moon knows a thousand ways to kill you. And I knew a thousand and one.
Cortas cut. That was our family legend. Hard sharp fast. I made the women’s Brazilian jujitsu team at university. It’s hard, sharp, fast: the perfect Corta fighting art. A couple of basic moves, together with lunar gravity, allowed me to put over the most intimidating of sex pests. But when Achi’s stalker wouldn’t take no, I reached for slower, subtler weapons. Stalkers don’t go away. That’s what makes them stalkers. I found which Surface Activity training squad he was on and made some adjustments to his suit thermostat. He didn’t die. He wasn’t meant to die. Death would have been easier than my revenge for Achi. He never suspected me; he never suspected anyone. I made it look like a perfect malfunction. I’m a good engineer. I count his frostbite thumb and three toes as my trophies. By the time he got out of the med centre, Achi and I were on our separate ways to our contracts.
That was another clock, ticking louder than the clock in our bones. I&A was four weeks. After that, we would go to work. Achi’s work in ecological habitats would take her to the underground agraria the Asamoah family were digging under Amundsen. My contract was with Mackenzie Metals; working out on the open seas. Working with dust. Dustbunny. We clung to the I&A barracks, we clung to our cabins, our friends. We clung to each other. We were scared. Truth: we were scared all the time, with every breath. Everyone on the moon is scared, all the time.
There was a party; moon mojitos. Vodka and mint are easy up here. But before the music and the drinking: a special gift for Achi. Her work with Aka would keep her underground; digging and scooping and sowing. She need never go on the surface. She could go her whole career—her whole life—in the caverns and lava tubes and agraria. She need never see the raw sky.
The suit hire was cosmologically expensive, even after negotiation. It was a GP surface activity shell; an armoured hulk to my lithe sasuit spiderwoman. Her face was nervous behind the faceplate; her breathing shallow. We held hands in the outlock as the pressure door slid up. Then her faceplate polarised in the sun and I could not see her any more. We walked up the ramp amongst a hundred thousand boot prints. We walked up the ramp and few metres out on to the surface, still holding hands. There, beyond the coms towers and the power relays and the charging points for the buses and rovers; beyond the grey line of the crater rim that curved on the close horizon and the shadows the sun had never touched; there perched above the edge of our tiny world we saw the full earth. Full and blue and white, mottled with greens and ochres. Full an
d impossible and beautiful beyond any words of mine. It was winter and the southern hemisphere was offered to us; the ocean half of the planet. I saw great Africa. I saw dear Brazil.
Then the air contract advisory warned me that we were nearing the expiry of our oxygen contract and we turned our backs on the blue earth and walked back down into the moon.
That night we drank to our jobs, our friends, our loves and our bones. In the morning we parted.
We met in a café on the twelfth level of the new Chandra Quadra. We hugged, we kissed, we cried a little. I smelled sweet by then. Below us excavators dug and sculpted, a new level every ten days. We held each other at arms’ length and looked at each other. Then we drank mint tea on the balcony.
I loathe mint tea.
Mint tea is a fistful of herbs jammed in a glass. Sloshed with boiling water. Served scalded yet still flavourless. Effete like herbal thés and tisanes. Held between thumb and forefinger: so. Mint leaves are coarse and hairy. Mint tea is medicinal. Add sugar and it becomes infantile. It is drinking for the sake of doing something with your fingers.
Coffee is a drink for grownups. No kid ever likes coffee. It’s psychoactive. Coffee is the drug of memory. I can remember the great cups of coffee of my life; the places, the faces, the words spoken. It never quite tastes the way it smells. If it did, we would—drink it until our heads exploded with memory, But coffee is not an efficient crop in our ecology. And imported coffee is more expensive than gold. Gold is easy. Gold I can sift from lunar regolith. Gold is so easy its only value is decorative. It isn’t even worth the cost of shipment to Earth. Mint is rampant. Under lunar gravity, it forms plants up to three metres tall. So we are a nation of mint tea drinkers.
We didn’t talk about the bones at once. It was eight lunes since we last saw each other: we talk on the network daily, we share our lives but it takes face to face contact to ground all that; make it real.