by Ian McDonald
‘You vile, withered sack of bile,’ Amanda Sun says.
‘What mother would not sacrifice for her child?’
‘I am a board member, I have a right to be consulted.’
‘Motherhood is not a thing of rights. It is a thing of responsibilities,’ Lady Sun says. ‘A private railcar is waiting.’
Lady Sun folds her hands. Amanda Sun composes herself, turns, strides from the apartment.
‘She lied to me,’ Lady Sun says to Darius. ‘She told me that she had killed Lucas Corta, when Corta Hélio fell. Understand, Darius: people will say business is business, nothing personal. A great lie. Everything is personal.’
THREE
Twé seduces Alexia’s every sense. Here are colours, shapes, shadows and movements she never sees in Meridian. A dozen musics, a hundred voices – children! Birds! – a housand dins and hubbubs and commotions: the thunder and slosh of water pipes, the call and chorus of warm, humid winds through the ventilation ducts, the petulant shriek of electric engines – what’s that? Two kids on a powerboard? Twé smears Alexia’s skin with fifty musks and pheromones; it’s sour and sweet, savoury and salty on her tongue; it’s a sense of warmth in every cell her body, of a higher air pressure, of humidity and is the gravity ever so slightly out of kilter? Meridian is a magnificent panorama of meshing canyons; cliffs higher than imagination, immense perspectives dwindling to distant, luminous vanishing points, but it is stone, dead stone. Twé is the life-root, twining, digging, questing deep into the cold heart of the moon for the vital stuffs to make more of itself.
Motos slide through the mill of people crowding from the station. Lucas, Alexia and Nelson Medeiros, the Eagle’s Head of Security at the centre of a knot of escoltas. Alexia grabs a handle as sudden acceleration sends her reeling. She emits a small cry as the moto plunges into an unlit tunnel. Twists, turns, inclines pull her balance this way, that way. At one point the bottom drops out of her belly. Then she is in pink light so intense it feels like sunburn and something snatches the moto up so fast it knocks the speech from her. She is on an elevator platform, riding up the side of a vast shaft between tier after tier of growing things. Every balcony and rooftop in Barra had been an urban farm – she had designed drip irrigation systems for crops from salad to bespoke coca -but the sheer scale of this hydroponic tube makes her breath tremble. Here are potatoes, there yams. Can those be beans; pods the length of Alexia’s arm? The moto ascends through a forest of corn; slender leaves like spears, stalks like tree trunks. Plants grow tall in lunar gravity and the warm, bright, nutrient rich ecology of Twé.
‘This is like a theme-park ride!’ Alexia shouts over the play of air and the shush of foliage and the voices of unseen birds.
‘Cortas and Asamoahs have always understood each other,’ Lucas says. ‘Mackenzies, Suns, Vorontsovs, they brought their wealth from Earth. Cortas and Asamoahs, we came with nothing. We used what we found. So: let’s go over this again. The Omahene…’
‘Is the CEO of AKA. The position rotate every two years.’
‘Currently?’
‘Lousika Asamoah.’
‘Who is?’
‘Luna Corta’s mother. She was the second wife to Rafa Corta.’
‘Not second wife. That implies serial monogamy. And the word oko is not gendered. Keji-oko. Parallel spouse. Her connection with Lucasinho?’
‘He saved some … kid?’
‘Kojo Asamoah. On the Moonrun.’
‘I researched that bit. That’s insane.’
‘As entertainment I recommend it only to the most jaded. Continue.’
‘Kojo Asamoah being Lousika Asamoah’s … nephew? Anyway, he earned the protection of the Asamoahs, which he claimed when he ran out on Denny Mackenzie at the altar. Have to say, your marriage customs fry my head.’ Alexia is aware that Nelson Medeiros is trying not to laugh.
‘Amories, rings, polygamies of any number, monogamies of any shape and duration, group marriages, line marriages, walking marriages, ghost marriages, self-marriages … My sister could explain them all to you,’ Lucas says. ‘But the principle is the same. Love is negotiation. Every moment of every day. Love is like a child. It must be guided, nurtured, grown. Our system of agreements and contracts and nikahs seems unromantic. I say good. Romance is a foolishness, a sickness. Love is a living thing. Love is what survives. Our system has no time for romance but gives whole worlds for love to grow in. My nikah with Amanda Sun was well designed. We were both glad there was no requirement for sex or intimacy. Love was never in the contract. It allowed us to look outward for love.’
‘Amanda Sun, who tried to asphyxiate you at the Fecunditatis BALTRAN terminal,’ Alexia says. ‘Who’s romanticising now?’
‘At which she singularly failed,’ Lucas says. ‘And we were taught that the Suns were thorough.’
‘Their board seemed pretty thorough to me,’ Alexia says. Taiyang had been the first of the dragons to pay respects to the new Eagle in Meridian’s Eyrie. She had socially cut Lady Sun, a mistake for which Alexia knew there would be payment. ‘I think the old lady has already planned a dozen ways to get me dead.’
‘Lady Sun is a worthy adversary,’ Lucas says. ‘Pray you outlive her. Even then, watch your back. The Suns play the long game.’
Alexia settles into her seat imagining knives, needles, insect assassins all around.
‘What’s it like, open vacuum?’ The obverse of Alexia’s claustrophobia nightmares, of being wedged into a stone tube so narrow she can’t move her arms, her fingers; are the dreams of waking suddenly naked on the surface, the air evacuating her lungs in a silent shriek, nothing between her skin and the edge of the observable universe.
‘Terrible. Sublime. The life shouts out into nothing. Every cell is tested to its limit. Lucasinho is a moonrunner. I didn’t understand why anyone should want this insanity. I understand now. You live completely in those moments. Have you been to the surface? You should. Every ten, eleven year-old is taught to use a suit, walk on the surface and look at the earth. That’s a wise custom.’
The car draws up outside an interior lock. Lucas waits for Nelson Medeiros to assemble the escort. ‘The full theatre show,’ Lucas says as the outer lock opens. ‘The Golden Stool intends to impress. So must we.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Alexia says.
The inner lock opens.
Alexia can’t contain the gasp of wonder.
The dome is a kilometre-wide hemisphere hacked from a lava bubble blown four billion years in the eruptions that flooded the Sea of Tranquillity, but it is the tree that takes Alexia’s breath away. It fills the dome, raft upon raft of boughs and branches, twigs and leaves. The main trunk, half a kilometre distant, is wider and taller than Ocean Tower. Alexia looks up into the branches. Each would be the trunk of any other tree, each twig is a branch. Each leaf the size of size of her torso. Mirror-shards of sunlight dazzle through the leaf canopy; the dome is lined with AKA mirror-magic; panels turning and seeking, bouncing light from mirror to mirror to mirror to feed the leaves of the Great Tree of Twé. The leaves are in constant, gentle motion, moving against each other to fill the dome with a vast murmuring. A leaf sifts down through the branches, touching, catching, turning, tumbling slowly like a swimmer in water. A bot scurries from shadows. Stepping delicately over the web of irrigation channels cut into the polished stone floor, it catches the leaf before it touches the surface. The floor of the dome is pell-mell with darting scavenger bots. The channels must be kept clear; the carbon must be recycled.
Alexia tries to calculate the mass of carbon and water in this ecosystem. A city-worth, thousands of lives incarnate in wood and leaf. The tonnage of invested life-stuff testifies to the power of the Asamoahs. They hold life at the heart of a dead moon.
The Kotoko waits in the deep leaf-gloaming, arrayed on each side of a set of low, wide steps. Men, woman draped in bright kente, one arm clothed, the other bare. Over each clad shoulder hovers a familiar, each bare hand clasps a staff topped with
a representation of their abusua: crows, leopards, dogs, vultures, all eight of the soul-creatures of the maternities. Maninho gives Alexia names and positions. AKA’s social and political structures baffle her. She suspects they baffle anyone who is not an Asamoah.
Where the two wings meet sits Lousika Asamoah, Omahene of AKA. The Golden Stool is a simple pi of pale wood carved from the Great Tree itself; more precious than any gold. The Omahene’s hair is a sculpture – an architecture – of rods and quills and lacquered sticks, all hung with glossy black baubles like miniature paper lanterns. Animals emerge from the shadow beneath the Golden Stool: a bright-plumaged parrot, a dwarfed raccoon, a slow-stepping spider the size of Alexia’s hand. A dark cloud materialises for a moment behind Lousika Asamoah’s head, disperses like smoke. A swarm. Alexia remembers the touch of an Asamoah-designed assassin insect; poison crawling across her skin, hardly daring to breathe. She had thought she was smart, sharp, irresistible when she conned her way into Lucas Corta’s hotel suite on the Copacabana.
She knew nothing then.
Every one of those animals will possess some subtle surveillance sense, and some fast and lethal means of killing.
The raccoon licks its asshole.
‘Yaa Doku Nana,’ Lucas Corta says. The formal address of the Omahene.
‘Bem-vindo ao Twé, Lucas Corta,’ Lousika Asamoah says.
Alexia’s breath catches at the Portuguese.
‘Lucasinho,’ Lucas says.
‘Is safe. Stabilised. We’ll talk, Lucas. Councillors.’ The Kotoko dip their heads and lift their staffs. Leaf-light dapples their patterned robes. Nelson Madeiros leads the escoltas from the chamber. As arranged, Alexia remains.
Lousika Asamoah turns a cold stare on Alexia.
‘My Iron Hand stays with me,’ Lucas Corta says.
‘Lucasinho is secure and stable,’ Lousika Asamoah says. ‘But he was anoxic for ten minutes. There has been brain damage.’
Lucas’s hand tighten on the knurl of his cane.
‘Tell me, Lousika.’
‘Terrible damage Lucas.’
Lucas Corta folds visibly; joints, muscles weak in shock. Alexia moves to take his arm. He does not push her away.
‘Take me to him. Please.’
‘Of course.’
Lousika lays a hand on Lucas’s arm, a blessing. The animal entourage flows after her. The spider rides on the ornate hair arrangement. There are doors to this chamber Alexia neither noticed nor suspected. Waiting in the corridor are AKA employee to lift and store the Omahene’s head-piece. The spider jumps to Lousika Asamoah’s shoulder. Alexia flinches.
The corridors have been cleared.
‘The Sisterhood did their best but they’re not a medical centre,’ Lousika says. ‘The life support pod was damaged in the escape from João de Deus.’
Alexia hears the rebuke in Lousika’s voice: you left your son helpless in your enemy’s stronghold. But you did the same with your own daughter, Alexia thinks. You left her among enemies. She remembers the call when school security found Caio in the river. She had threatened drivers, terrified pedestrians, smashed every rule the road, bribed, extorted, paid and slept on the floor of the emergency room until she knew her brother was safe. She would have torn the moon in two to get to him.
Eagle, Omahene, Dragons: what is power if you don’t use it for your own?
‘I’ll give you some time with him,’ Lousika Asamoah says at the entrance to the med centre. ‘Luna will be here soon.’
Alexia hesitates at the door but Lucas’s touch asks her to be with him. He can’t be alone with Lucasinho. He dare not; he is afraid that alone, the disciplines and necessities that bind him together might unravel and he would collapse into a thousand shards. Then she sees the boy on the bed, in the cocoon of medical light, surrounded by a halo of machine arms.
Alexia sees thick black hair, full lips, high and angled cheekbones, the fold of the closed eyes, the Brazilian width to the nose and colour of the skin. He is a prince from a fairytale, trapped in an enchantment. Her segundo primo.
Lucas Corta stands at the bedside, looking down in to the still, holy face. He strokes Lucasinho cheek. Alexia’s heart turns over. The touch is so gentle, so ruined. Then Alexia has another vision of Lucasinho Corta, a childhood memory of religious terror. Against sense, opinion and budget, Tio Rubens and Tia Sabrina had insisted on marrying in the old Jesuit mission, a long, narrow, haunted vault of horrors. Chief of horrors had been the mummified body of a five-hundred-year-dead Father Provincial preserved in a glass case beneath the altar. Rubens and Sabrina kneeled, prayed, vowed but nine-year-old Alexia had been unable to look away from the tent of leather-wrapped bone.
Lucasinho Corta is the terror in the glass tank.
* * *
‘What are you doing, anjinho?’
Madrinha Elis chose the room with care. She draped it with Luna’s favourite fabric prints; flowers and animals. She laid out five copies of Luna’s beloved red dress, in which she ran free and feral through the gardens of Boa Vista. She arranged its furniture to create crannies and crevices and crawlspaces, like the ones she had grown up exploring in Boa Vista. Everything is designed to delight, but Luna sits cross-legged in the middle of the floor, her back to the door, dressed in the same pink suit-liner she wore on the flight from Boa Vista.
‘I’m working on my face, Madrinha.’
Over her head hovers a sphere the size of a clenched fist, one half black, one half silver. Luna’s familiar was always the creature that shares her name, the life-green Luna moth.
On the floor before her is a tray of face-paints.
‘Luna?’
She turns. Madrinha Elis cannot contain the cry, the flight of the hand to the mouth. One half of Luna’s face is a white, leering skull.
‘Get that stuff off your face before your mother sees it.’
‘Mamãe is here?’
Luna leaps to her feet.
‘She arrived ten minutes ago.’
‘Why hasn’t she come to see me?’
‘She has people to meet, then she will see you.’
‘People like Lucasinho,’ Luna says.
‘Your Tio Lucas is here to take him to Meridian.’
‘I want to go to Mamãe,’ Luna declares. The half-death’s-head unnerves Madrinha Elis.
‘I will take you,’ Madrinha Elis says. Never lie, never talk down. ‘After you clean that off your face and put on your lovely red dress.’
‘I will not.’ Luna takes a step forward; against all her experience and duty, Madrinha Elis takes an involuntary step backwards. She has known Luna petulant, defiant, sulky, racked with tantrums. She has never see a cold determination like this, a titanium light in the dark eye of her skull-face. A thing she does not know was conjured from the reflecting black mirrors of the sun-belt, heated and forged in the meltdown of the Pustelga.
‘Anjinho.’
‘Take me to Mamãe!’
‘I will if you clean up and dress nice.’
‘Then I’ll go on my own,’ Luna declares and is in the corridor before Madrinha Elis can turn old bones to stop her.
Gods but the girl is fast. Elis catches up with her at the elevator. The platform drops through the surging foliage of Aidoo agrarium, the mass of leaves black in the pink shine of the grow-lights. AKA tech teams are still debugging the hacked moondozers from the siege and slowly pushing back the berms of regolith from the caps of the tube-farms. It will take lunes for Twé’s abused ecosystems to return to full burgeoning health. Under that same light Luna’s suit-liner almost fluoresces. The girl has already summoned a moto: it closes around the two women like a flower and opens again outside the medcentre.
Lousika Asamoah’s bestiary precedes her: the swarm, the bright-plumed bird, the cunning spider as big as Luna’s hand. Luna claps her hands in delight. She has not seen her mother’s guardians before. A creature Luna does not know, rotund but agile, banded tail, clever paws, sits up to regard Luna with masked eyes. Luna c
rouches to return the gaze.
‘Oh what are you?’
‘A raccoon. But what are you?’Lousika Asamoah asks. ‘Lady Luna now?’
The animals remain obediently at the door to the intensive care unit.
Luna sees the arms first. Arms in half-light. The slender, many-jointed arms of medical bots, their long fingers driven into Lucasinho’s own arms and throat. Sensor arms outstretched around his head, as if blessing. Her uncle’s arm, dark against the medical lights, then his hand resting lightly on Lucasinho’s chest, lifting and falling gently in time to the breathing.
‘Get her out of here,’ Lucas says without looking up.
‘Lucas…’ Lousika says.
He turns to Luna.
‘He gave his last breath to you,’ Lucas says. ‘For you.’
Behind her fierce mask, Luna feels tears. Not here, not in front of him. Never for him.
‘You do not speak to my daughter like that!’ Lousika Asamoah explodes, then Luna feels Madrinha Elis’s hand on her shoulder turn her and guide her into the corridor. The door closes on voices shouting; like she used to hear when she hid in the service tunnels of Boa Vista, that only she knew, when her mãe and pãe used to fight when they thought that only machines could hear them.
‘It’s all right, coraçao,’ Madrinha Elis says. She hugs Luna to her, strokes her hair.
‘It’s not all right,’ Luna hisses into her madrinha’s belly. Every muscle in her jaw, her throat is tight. Her face burns with the humiliation. Her ears are filled with a high-pitched singing that is the noise of not-crying. The raccoon waddles over to investigate. Luna turns her moon-face to it, bares her teeth. It leaps away in distress.
‘I’m not taking it off,’ Luna says to the masked raccoon. ‘Not until everything is right. It’s my face now.’
She squats and reaches a hand towards the suspicious raccoon. It cocks its head to one side. Luna clicks a finger, beckons, tsish-tsishes, which Elis told her is the sound for ferrets. It sidles towards her, lingers at the limit of her reach.