by Ian McDonald
She takes her audience to another world, to a city open to the sky, to meet her family in its tower by the ocean. She introduces her family, back to three generations. She gives their saint names, their nicknames. She is still wary of the name Corta. She tells of how her grandfather Luis took her up on to the roof of Ocean Tower to show her the dark of the moon. Squint your eyes, child, he said. Peer. Look deep, what do you see?
Lights!
She tells of how she found a leak in the window corner of her bedroom and followed the drips down the wall to catch them in a beaker, then a can, then a basin, then decided that this was no answer in the long run and built a little pipeline of drink straws to carry the water away to the plughole in the bathroom. She tells of how she found that she could make water go uphill a short way if the source was higher than the mouth, and sitting watching the drip swell and drop into the funnel and following the pulse of water down the candy-striped maze.
Why don’t we have good water? she asked her mother.
People like us don’t get good water.
A year before he died Grandfather Luis took her up again on to the roof and said, If you can tell me why you should have it, I will give you your inheritance now.
I want to be a water engineer, Alexia said.
Grandfather Luis gave her not just her share but part of her siblings. Marisa’s and even little Caio’s. Make it work.
By night she studied water and waste engineering at CEFET. By day she apprenticed to Naimer Fonseca, a plumber working out of an all-women repair shop in Barra. The day after she graduated she stole two hundred metres of piping from the site of the gated enclave at Marapendi and replumbed not just her family’s apartment but the entire top half of Ocean Tower.
‘Everyone had their own supply,’ she says. ‘Everyone was just out for themselves. I made a system that worked for everyone. I made it better.’
Wisdom and bold moves – a water supply is only good if it is clean; stealing water from the FIAM without their knowledge; hawking her brand around Barra under the noses of rivals who would have carved her face off. By the time they share her pride at overhearing someone call her Queen of Pipes, she is sitting on the step beneath the Jack.
‘Nice little empire,’ the Jack says. ‘But it’s a long way from there to here.’
‘Another operation wanted to send me a message. They beat up Caio. They left him with deep damage, maybe permanent.’
‘What did you do?’ a thin, dust-grey woman wheezes.
‘I repaid them,’ Alexia says. ‘Three times.’
A murmur. Alexia reads it as approval.
‘Caio needs constant care and rehab. Barra doesn’t have that kind of money. I did what the Cortas did. I came to the moon.’
Another murmur, this time menacing, the edge of a growl.
‘That’s a name with a lot of history up here,’ the Jack says.
‘I know,’ Alexia says. ‘But everyone in Rio – everyone in Brasil – knows it, and what they did.’ Nods in the audience. Alexia plays a careful game here: lead with a lesser card, invoking the Cortas, in the hope that it convinces her audience that she holds no higher card: her true name. Queen of Pipes for Ace of Cortas. But she isn’t safe yet. There is one more card to play. ‘So, I may not know anything about air or data, but I could build you a water system.’
This murmur is of distrust.
‘Of course you’d come back.’ A teen boy with a tower of black hair says what everyone thinks.
Because of the choking man in the elevator, because of what Lucas asked me to do out on the cycler, because of Caio and the price of revenge. Because of the terrible terrible things I have done. All Alexia can say is, ‘My word?’
‘You give your word?’ the Jack of Blades says.
‘I give my word.’
‘Mates,’ the Australian shouts. ‘We have a contract!’
* * *
On the first day, the Queen of Pipes assigns teams. Kids go into Team Scavenger. They are quick and lithe and can climb and hide. She gives them steal-lists and sends them out.
‘I need four construction teams,’ Alexia declares. She sits her squad down on the only large open space in Bairro Alto, the gently curving cap of a gas exchanger the size of an office block. ‘Team Dew, Team Tank, Team Pipe, Team Ultraviolet.’
‘What about me?’ the Jack says. He sits cross-legged on the ground, pants rolled to mid-calf, wide-collared shirt unbuttoned to the waist. He has torn off the sleeves at the shoulders. Alexia likes the Australian’s way with clothes.
‘Team Security,’ Alexia says. The Jack smiles. The skin of his chest, his upper arms, is scarred, scar over scar over scar. ‘Now gather round.’ She pulls a vac pen from the pocket of her zabbaleen shorts and draws on the white tank insulation. No familiars, no network, no smart presentations and engineering diagrams in Bairro Alto. No paper. Across a hundred square metres she sketches out her masterplan for a water supply for the High Hub. It is simple but intricate, robust yet easy to service, fully backed-up yet completely modular.
‘The zabbaleen will take it apart day one,’ a Team Tank man says.
‘Then we defend it,’ the Jack says. ‘Team Security is everyone.’
The kids come home from hunting. Yaya, the tall-haired boy who questioned Alexia’s word, has ten five-metre plastic pipes tucked under his arm and his eyes shining.
‘There was a bot,’ he says, panting. Everyone pants, everyone is short of words, everyone pauses for breath up in Bairro Alto.
‘You okay?’ Alexia asks. The kid grins and holds up a fistful of hydraulic piping and actuators: his trophy from the fight.
‘Careful with those things,’ the Jack says. ‘You’re not trained to fight them.’
On the second day the teams go out to prepare the site. The few fixed cameras and spy-bots that have survived are taken out by kids with catapults and ball bearings. Alexia guides her teams – no, that pipe run can’t go there; that header tank needs to be higher; you’ll need protection for the UV sterilisers. If you tap that water main here, you will blow half of Bairro Alto off the wall. Tap it here. Filtration meshes here, in this tank. What do you mean you don’t have any filtration meshes? Team Scavenger!
‘You’re kind of hot when you give orders,’ the Jack says.
‘And you can do some work too,’ Alexia says, throwing him a bonding gun stolen from a careless maintenance crew member at a Level Fifty tea stall.
On the third day, the waters move.
‘Hang your fog traps here,’ Alexia orders. ‘You won’t catch as much, but there’s a constant cold air flow from the heat exchanger which means you’ll harvest eighty per cent of what you do trap.’ Mirrors heliograph across the roof of Meridian Hub; on cue Team Dew open the valves beneath twenty collecting tanks. And the waters flow. Children run with the water, tracing the pipe-run over ducts, down stairwells, around roaring heat engines, through mazes of electrical conduits. Pipe to pipe, junction to junction. Check for leaks, was the Queen of Pipes’ instruction. Don’t overtighten, you’ll strip the threads.
At three receiving cisterns spaced equidistantly around the hub, the up-and-out gather. A tremor, a distant rumble, a gurgle, a spit and a spurt, then the water flows.
The Jack dips his cupped hands in the swirling water, lifts it to his lips. A taste, then he offers it to Alexia. She drinks from the Australian’s cupped hands.
‘It’s good,’ she says. Her but it could be better is drowned out by the cheering.
She can’t take her eyes off his.
She remembers, lifts a hand.
‘Shut it off, we haven’t got enough to waste.’
That night she thinks of booking satellite time, putting a call through to Caio on Earth, to her mother, to the apartment. She dithers – she doesn’t know the Earth time, she would be calling out of the blue, she would alarm everyone. Her thoughts wander from Barra to Norton, pretty, jealous, big, sweet Norton. Norton who shaved his heavy cock and balls baby-smooth for her. H
e’ll have found someone else. He’s too cute not to. Except he won’t. He’ll wait, to be true, to be honourable, to make a point about faith and faithlessness.
And she is faithless, because it’s not really Norton she’s thinking about.
It’s been too fucking long.
On the fourth day she is restless in her work as Iron Hand, so much so that Lucas notices and comments. There is a big presentation to the full Pavilion. Terrestrials and Dragons will be there. It must be immaculate. She lies about her period and as soon as the day is done she is on the elevator to the top of the city. There is the Jack. Her heart soars out into the void like one of the winged fliers who turn and flash in the airspace of Meridian Hub. He’s not smiling. No one is smiling.
‘What’s happened?’ Alexia scans the faces. Someone missing. A hole. She remembers. ‘Where’s Yaya?’
Team Tank found him by the Antares Quadra switchgear, blood dripping through the mesh. Three levels of decking. He sat upright against a bulkhead. His intestines were in his lap. He was split open from groin to sternum.
Only a machine kills with such disregard for the dignity of the human body.
Team Tank retreated as the high city resounded to the bootfalls of the zabbaleen.
‘Got fucking cocky,’ the Jack says. Alexia lays a hand on his shoulder and he covers it with his own. ‘Come on!’ he shouts. ‘We got gutters to install! And be careful out there, mates.’
All must be ready, screwed tight and tested, for on the fifth day the rains will come.
* * *
Alexia wills the elevator up, up; faster faster. But the speed of elevators is fixed, and this one seems to stop at every level. Alexia fidgets in frustration. The rain has been scheduled for 13.00 Orion time and she must be up there before the first drop falls.
She arrives at the Level Seventy-Five terminus and sprints up the staircase. Beneath her boots, Meridian is hushed, suspended. The hub is empty of fliers, the bridges and crosswalks deserted. The air is grainy with old dust. Alexia can taste it on her tongue, feel it clogging her nostrils. The city waits to be washed clean.
The high folk wait, posed with the artifice and elegance of a dance troupe on landings and platforms, draped over railings, squatting on steel steps.
‘Oh queen my queen!’ Alexia squints up into the ceiling lights to see the Jack perform his signature vault and dashing drop four levels to the platform. He offers an arm. ‘Shall we?’
‘Jack of Blades.’ Alexia takes his arm and together they process up the steps through level after level of cheering and whistling. The noise echoes from Bairro Alto’s cavernous architecture, doubling it, changing it into a machine roar. As she climbs, Alexia sees kids slip mirrors from rag-tag pockets and flash messages across the hub. Answers flicker back. Ready. All ready.
‘You know, you’ve never called me that to my face,’ the Jack says as they arrive at the southern reservoir. The plastic sheeting cracks in the unpredictable gusts of high city. The teams have fallen in behind Queen and Jack and form a ring around the reservoir. Kids hang ready to run and repair: Alexia has calculated for the volume of a Meridian monsoon but the engineer’s curse is that theory seldom survives reality.
Alexia is tight with nervous energy. All day at the office she hid her excitement, now she realises that it was a mask for the anxiety. What if it all comes apart at the first drop? What if Yaya died for nothing but a tangle of pipes and shreds of plastic sheeting?
The silence up on the gantry is as complete as that before creation.
Alexia hears a ringing splat, looks down, sees a dark patch on the mesh. Another, then another, another. She sights her first raindrop: the size of the end of her thumb, falling so slowly she can track it. It splashes on her right forearm, a distinct, solid tap. The drops fall regularly now, scattered but steady. The gantry, the staircases, the metal monoliths of the high city machinery ring. The plastic tanks and sheets pop and crack.
‘Come with me,’ the Jack says. She takes his hand and he pulls her to the rail. ‘Look.’
At the first touch of the rain, Meridian has blossomed. Crowds jam the empty bridges and crossways; every balcony is filled with people. Hundreds of thousands of faces upturned to the rain.
‘Oh my,’ Alexia says. Her eyes fill with tears.
‘You seen nothing yet.’
The rain steepens into a downpour. Alexia is soaked to the bone in an instant. Rain pummels her, drives the wind from her. She tries to catch breath through the torrent of drops. The noise is deafening. She is inside some percussion instrument, a city-sized tambourine. She had known fat tropical rain in Rio, but this is beyond all imagining. This is a biblical deluge. The Jack grips her hand. Stay, he yells.
The vault of the hub fills with rainbows, one above another above another. A triple rainbow; brilliant and bright. This is a cloudburst without clouds. The sunline blazes noontime. Rainbows march up the canyons of Orion, and Aquarius Quadras, spans and arches wall to wall, is morning and evening rainbows. Antares Quadra is dark, then the sky brightens to full day and a carnival of rainbows. Of course you would turn on the sky for such a wonder.
‘Oh,’ Alexia Corta says. ‘Oh!’ Then she feels it. Moving water, rushing water, hungry water. ‘The run has started.’ She drags the Jack away from the balustrade, across the ringing, slippery decking to the tank. She lays hands to a pipe: the vibration is almost sexual. Surging water. She combs back streaming hair from her face and shouts up to a kid from Team Scavenger.
‘Is it standing up?’
The kid gives two thumbs up and a huge grin.
The pipes are quaking now, rattling in their mounts. Alexia imagines rain gushing down from gutter to trough, trough to feeder, feeder to conduit, conduit to main, cascading down and around through level upon level of Bairro Alto, water racing, water tumbling. Rivers, torrents of wild water. And the faucets above the reservoirs explode. Waterfalls burst from the pipes and crash into the plastic reservoirs. The support cradle shifts and creaks, people back away. Alexia Corta has designed strong, the Bairristas have built true. The sheeting bulges, the water level rises. Winks of dazzling mirror-light shine diamond-hard through the downpour: north-east and north-west reservoirs are functioning and filling.
‘Fuck!’ the Jack shouts over the roar of waters. His hair is plastered to his head, his clothes cling to him in sodden creases and folds. ‘You little beauty!’ And in an instant his face freezes. Changes. ‘Get out of here!’ he yells. The high folk scatter, up staircases, stanchions, climbing pipes, hand over hand up ladders. Alexia casts around in bafflement. Only she and the Jack remain on the platform.
‘Lê, get the fuck out of here,’ the Jack shouts. Old Earth-muscles take Alexia to the next platform in one leap. She’s seen the shadows in the corners of the world.
Four fighters in body armour, rain shedding from the edges of their helmets. Holstered knives and tasers. Behind them, hanging back, the zabbaleen and their picking, clawing machines.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ the Jack says. He strips off his shirt. Alexia reads the scars across his back, his shoulders, some still purple, marked with recent sutures. His hands hover over the knife hilts at his hips. ‘This again?’
‘Just let us do our job,’ a zabbaleen calls from the dripping darkness. ‘It’s magnificent but we can’t let it stand.’
‘Yet stand it will,’ the Jack says. Alexia sees the fighters’ muscles tighten, their sinews contract beneath their armoured shells. ‘Have you cunts learned nothing?’ The Jack has read it too. ‘What’s my name?’ he says. ‘What’s my name?’
‘De…’ the zabbaleen begins but the Jack cuts her off with a roar.
‘I’m the Jack of fucking Blades!’
Click, hum, tap. Two bots step from shadows through curtains of teeming rain. Drops run down their glossy shells. They are fit, elegant, beautiful. Alexis remembers their beauty striking her when she went as Lucas’s representative to inspect them in the Guangzhou construction plant before shipping to
low Earth orbit. Beautiful horror. She could vomit.
‘Ah,’ the Jack says. He turns. He turns away.
He turns to gain momentum. He spins, moves with lightning grace and in that flash there is a knife in a fighter’s armpit and his taser in the Jack’s hand. Aim, shot, one thought – less than thought. One action. The taser catches the bot in the air as it leaps, blades unfolding. It goes down in a thrash of short-circuited limbs. The fighter kicks in a circle, blood beating from the arterial wound. Blood sprays far in lunar gravity. The punishing rain washes it all down through the holes in the mesh.
The Jack crouches like a jaguar, a blood-hungry grin on his face. The second bot is in motion; the Jack flips away, the bot lashes out a blade-tipped leg. Machine speed, machine accuracy. It would have cut him spine-deep across the side had not something come spinning down from the upper levels. A bola: the lines tangle around the bot’s legs, weights spinning up with angular momentum enough to snap joints. The bot is down and kids are dropping, whooping and whistling, from the high levels to mob the downed bots, crack them open with hammers and wrenches and rip out their precious, twitching guts.
The fighters charge. The Jack is between them and the kids. A fighter moves to outflank, the Jack’s hand flashes and there is a knife hilt-deep in the man’s throat. A blade swings for the Jack, he is already underneath it, his other blade arcing to drive deep into the back of the woman’s knee. She goes down shriek-swearing. The Jack drops, slides across the wet decking and drives a foot into the kneecap of the other outflanking fighter, smashing the armoured kneeguard back with the full weight of his body. Ariel can hear the crack of shattering kneecap over the punishment of the rain.
‘Kids!’
How does he sense the fighter bearing down on him? By air movement, by the momentary absence of rain, by smell, by subtler fighter’s senses? He snaps the kneecapped fighter’s thumb back – another snap of bone – seizes the knife and ducks around the descending blade to slam it into the unprotected back of the attacker’s forearm. The attacker drops the blade, the Jack catches it before it clangs from the decking and drives it into the side of the fighter’s instep. And he’s on his feet. Empty hands.