Luna: Moon Rising

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Family first. That’s the rule. But let’s look at this family. An absent father and a status-hungry aunt. We Suns understand family. We are old, we are strong and we are together. We know the truth, that, in the beginning and the end, there is only families and individuals. Family first, of course. The Cortas are not a family. We are.’

  Amanda Sun dips her head to the bench and returns to her pew.

  ‘Counsel for Luna Corta?’

  Abena gulps. Her stomach tightens. The moment is here and her statements, her arguments, her persuasions have flown from her head.

  Call Ariel.

  The order to Tumi is on the tip of her tongue. She swallows it. She doesn’t need Ariel Corta.

  Strike, axe of Xango, give me strength for the battle.

  She steps down on to the shining stone.

  ‘I represent counsel for Luna Corta, who claims a continuance on a pre-existing informal contract of care…’

  Viego Quiroga and Amanda Sun are on their feet.

  ‘Your Honours, really…’

  ‘Madam Asamoah is not qualified to plead in this court.’

  Abena hisses a thank you to Xango. Her enemies have fallen into her trap.

  Judge Rieko looks at her.

  ‘Madam Asamoah?’

  ‘Ariel Corta is Luna Corta’s counsel. I am her agent here on Nearside. For personal security reasons, Ariel chooses to remain on Farside.’

  ‘Senhora Corta could make her representation through a network link,’ Kweko Kumah says.

  ‘As you know, Ariel Corta has always preferred the physical over the virtual.’

  Rieko Nagai suppresses a smile at the effrontery.

  ‘You are a lawyer?’ Valentina Arce asks.

  ‘I am a political science student at Cabochon Colloquium,’ Abena says.

  ‘No legal qualifications,’ Judge Kumah says.

  ‘None, madam. I believe I don’t require any.’

  Intakes of breath from all five tiers of Number Two Court. Once again Rieko Nagai smiles.

  ‘Our law stands on three legs,’ Abena says. ‘In the Court of Clavius everything, including the Court of Clavius, is on trial. Everything, including the law, is negotiable, and furthermore – and my argument – is that more law is bad law. To insist on a legal qualification to plead in this court is establishing a right of audience. That right has not been negotiated; it makes more law, not less, and it hasn’t been tried. Until now.’

  Rieko Nagai conceals an outright laugh with a sip of water.

  ‘This court will take a short adjournment, after which we will rule on Madam Asamoah’s position,’ Judge Arce says.

  Number Two Court erupts with voices. Abena slips down beside Rosario in the zashitnik pit.

  ‘You all right?’ Rosario asks. Abena is shaking. She cannot speak. She nods. ‘You’re making some enemies,’ Rosario continues. ‘Contracts have gone out. Just to say. Don’t worry, we’ll buy them out. Think of it as a professional compliment.’

  Camera drones hover in her face. Tumi notifies her of a dozen interview requests, twenty invitations to society events that would never have admitted her, even as the niece of the Golden Stool.

  The chatter is silenced as if cut off with a blade. The judges have returned.

  ‘Madam Asamoah.’ Valentina Arce beckons her. Abena reads the body language, the hold of the limbs, the set of the faces. She’s got this.

  ‘The bench will hear you,’ Judge Rieko says. The court murmurs and mutters.

  ‘Malandragem,’ Kweko Kumah says. ‘Now, we’ve wasted quite enough time on this. I’d like to get this all wrapped up before lunch.’

  ‘That’s not a problem,’ Abena says. ‘I have only one submission to present.’

  Tumi opens the link to Farside and the Court of Clavius network patches it into every familiar in Number Two Court. Murmurs turn to gasps. There in every lens, every eye, is Lucasinho Corta. He sits on the edge of a medical bed, haloed by the outstretched hands of med robots. His chest, his face are sunken, his eyes are distant and lost. His cheekbones are as beautiful as they ever were to Abena Asamoah. He waves.

  ‘Hi,’ he says.

  A noise between a sigh and a cry runs around the galleries of Number Two Court.

  ‘Hi everyone.’ His words are painful, slurred. ‘Dad, hi. Love you. Can’t come now. Need to get better. Remember better. Work to do. I can walk. Look!’ He rises unsteadily from the bed and takes an uncertain step towards the camera. ‘Long way to walk. Still. Just to say: Luna saved me once. She’s saving me again.’

  Abena cuts the link.

  ‘Family is family, but the only consideration is Lucasinho’s welfare,’ she says. ‘Look at what has been achieved. But as Lucasinho said to you, long way to walk. Even if both the Suns and Lucas Corta agreed to keep him on Farside, there is no guarantee that they would continue to do so. Lucasinho has to be beyond politics. For his own well-being, I submit that this court recognises, extends and codifies the existing contract of care that Luna Corta established when she rescued Lucasinho Corta and brought him to Boa Vista.’

  She bows to the bench and returns to the seat. The judges look at each other.

  ‘We have a judgement.’

  The three advocates stand.

  ‘This court unanimously finds for Luna Corta, represented by Ariel Corta,’ Judge Rieko says. ‘Madam Asamoah, in chamber?’ The bench rises. The judges file from the dais.

  Abena has heard that Clavius’s behind-court rooms are notoriously poky, but she is surprised at the cubby in which Judge Rieko is deprinting her robes and changing into civilian dress.

  ‘Ariel instructed you well. The personal appearance, that was hers?’

  ‘It was, but I worked the three pillars argument myself,’ Abena says. She is electric with excitement. Nothing, not even delivering her paper at the Lunarian Society, not even sex with Lucasinho, makes her glow, makes her breathless, makes her burn like this. She understands it now. She is going to so party tonight. Some boy will get so lucky.

  ‘Well played, but in future, stick to politics.’

  And it dies on the floor.

  ‘One Ariel Corta is quite enough.’

  * * *

  Vidhya Rao hates their jokes, their sarcasms, their cruel whimsies. E hates the word games they make er play – exchanges in strict poetic forms, only responding to sentences without the letter ‘a’ – the roles they make er assume – a 2040s Shanghai refuse collector, an 18th-century porcelain carrier – the worlds they build and force er to inhabit – a blue-and-white Western willow-pattern universe, a virtual reality based on a late 20th-century iteration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. E hates that they change personalities, memories, whole identities. They are never the same creatures twice. E hates their pettiness, their condescension, their arrogance and other personality traits which have no direct translation in the human emotional lexicon.

  Vidhya Rao hates the Three August Sages.

  Had e more time and more patience, e could have explored at intellectual leisure the concept of quantum intelligence, how it would differ profoundly from human intelligence, how it might not even be recognisable as intelligence, how that essential quantum nature might manifest as surreal humour. But time on the quantum computer has been policed since Vidhya Rao moved from Whitacre Goddard staff to consultancy. E is beginning to suspect that e is permitted any access at all because e is the only human with which the Three August Sages will communicate.

  E is beginning to suspect that Whitacre Goddard has chosen a political faction opposite to ers. But er concern at Wang Yongqing’s plans for the Lunar Bourse compels er to quiet favours, debts softly recalled, whispered blackmails.

  E enters the codes, sets up the protocols and lets the alien architecture of the quantum operating system interface with er familiar. E sighs. Today the Three August Sages will entertain her as gods in a rendering of a 1950s San Francisco tiki bar. Ukulele music plays, plastic parrots fly and thunder rumbles. The August Ones
await.

  A twitch, a twinge, a disharmomy, an echo.

  There’s someone else in the simulation.

  * * *

  Robson Corta glows. Every square centimetre of his skin radiates energy. He can smell himself: sweet, salty, slightly singed. Your vitamin D levels are low, Joker said and booked him the light bath at the banya. Robson believes in vitamins the same way he believes in mathematics, something unseen, abstract but useful. What he does know is that after thirty minutes standing naked in the solar chamber, he feels electric. Glowing.

  A jump to the top of the door frame, an immediate flip back and turn to grab the truss, swing and he is in the superstructure of Theophilus. He runs fast and low, rolling under construction beams, sliding beneath live power conduits, hurdling gaps and entire intersections, flying above the heads of the Theophilians. He could do this forever.

  This must be how Wagner feels when he charges up on the light of the full Earth and turns into the wolf. Anything and everything is bright to his senses, everything and anything falls within his grasp. Body and mind united, beyond consciousness and will. Everything is flow. It’s thrilling and terrifying.

  Am I turning into a wolf?

  I have insufficient information to reach a diagnosis, Joker says. Robson didn’t know the thought had strayed into the subvocal range. However, we should have another talk about puberty.

  ‘Joker!’ Robson hisses. Familiars have no shame.

  He wishes Wagner were back. He worries about him out there in the dust. Swift home, Lobinho. He has promised, those times when he touches the network, that he will be back before Analiese leaves on her concert tour. But the moon is the moon and she knows a thousand ways to trip you. Robson is wary still of Analiese – she sublets a room in another apartment to practise the setar, she says: to get away from him, Robson suspects. She might have agreed to the tour to get away from him. But he is uncomfortable being in the apartment all alone. He was alone before, when Wagner was working the glass. When he fled to a city higher than Bairro Alto, where only the machines and the wind went. He had been afraid every second: afraid, alone, cold, hungry but more afraid to go down to the living streets.

  Wagner had come to bring him home. Wagner, afraid of heights. He came across half of Nearside, through invasion and space-strike, bot-war and siege. He’ll come.

  From his high hiding placement Robson watches his colloquium mates gather on the ring and argue about which hotshop to visit today. No chance any of them will suggest El Gato but he waits until they make up their mind and leave. Robson remembers spying unseen on Wagner, at the wolf-meet in Meridian. He hadn’t understood the unspoken language between Wagner and the wolf from the Meridian pack. He does now.

  Maybe Joker is right. He has been waking up early morning soaked in sweat with his dick hard. And his balls are turning dark and one of them is hanging lower.

  Robson shivers, chilled with self-consciousness.

  Within a minute he is at El Gato and drops out of the infrastructure to land in front of the door.

  Behind the cook-counter, Jianyu bows and applauds.

  ‘What?’ Robson Corta says.

  Applause also from the diners and drinkers arrayed along the curve of the bar.

  ‘I told ya, I told ya I knew the face,’ shouts a young man, a new regular, in a short-sleeved leisure shirt, homburg pushed back on his head.

  ‘Did it hurt?’ asks Rigger Jayne, a regular, from her fixed place at the corner of the bar, and suddenly a dozen questions are flying at Robson.

  ‘What what what what what?’ Robson asks but he is beginning to form an idea.

  ‘You were the kid who fell from the top of Queen of the South,’ Jianyu says.

  ‘I knew the face!’ Homburg shouts again. ‘I remember it from the social media. You’re that Corta, aren’t you?’

  Silence in El Gato Encantado. Then Robson sees Haider, in the booth, feet still not touching the ground but not kicking this time, nothing about him moving. His face is the colour of sacred ash. Robson strides over to him.

  ‘What have you done? What did you say?’

  ‘It was the story, I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘Not here.’ Robson storms to the washroom, rounds on Haider.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. The man in the hat said he’d heard the kid who fell from the sky lived here and Jianyu said he didn’t know and I couldn’t help it. I told them the whole story. It’s a great story, Robson. You don’t know how to tell it right. I was good. You couldn’t hear a breath.’

  ‘I so wish you hadn’t done that.’

  ‘It’ll be all right, won’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Robson says. ‘Man in the hat? Who is he? Is he safe? What if he tells someone else? What if word gets back? What if we have to go?’

  ‘Could that happen?’ Haider asks.

  ‘I don’t know. Where could we go? Where’s safe?’

  Robson’s anger is fading, damping down to embers. Haider is guilty, ashamed, terrified that his moment of shine, an audience enchanted by his words, has put Robson in danger and burned a friendship.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Haider said.

  ‘It’s said now,’ Robson says. ‘I’ll have to tell Analiese. And Wagner.’ And look around him, behind him, into every corner, and never feel comfortable in Theophilus’s corridors again. It always was a lie, that comfort. An illusion, an effect. No Corta is ever safe. The only shelter on the moon is behind the bodies of people you love.

  Haider’s face twitches.

  ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘What if I am?’

  ‘That’s all right.’ Robson punches Haider softly on the shoulder. ‘You’re all right.’

  ‘I was good. They listened to me. It’s what I’ve got; words.’

  ‘It’s the words that do the damage,’ Robson Corta says.

  FOURTEEN

  Somewhere in the grey gloaming is Lucas Corta. Alexia pushes cautiously into the fog. She cannot see her outstretched hand. If she peers into the fog she could trip over an invisible obstacle. If she looks at her feet she could walk straight into a wall or a piece of construction machinery or the river. She could have turned right around and be walking back to the main lock. Noises loom and boom, close, then far, then echoing close again only to veer and reappear behind her. She hears trickling water and freezes. Air currents stir the murk, weaving subtle shifting bands of grey-scale. A face looms over her, dark on the grey. Perspective clicks in: it is huge and distant. Condensation runs down its stone cheeks like tears. She’s lost.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she declares. Maninho throws up infra-red images and tags. Lucas is less than ten metres from her. He is in bright humour.

  ‘Isn’t it magnificent? We’ve been slowly raising the temperature for a lune now and suddenly, look! Five kilometres of fog. I might keep it like this all the time. No, it’s a stage, a moment. Its wonder is that it’s ephemeral. Like music.’ Lucas and his environmental engineers are draped in transparent rain-capes. Alexia is saturated and shivering in her St Olga suit. ‘You’re soaked. Here, Adde.’ The cape only amplifies the discomfort, wet and clinging into heavy and chafing. ‘Walk with me.’

  Lucas delights in pointing out features as they resolve out of the grey: the stone bridge over the river – step carefully – the suddenly seen pillars of a pavilion, the stately glide of a construction bot, the unexpected uprights of a handball net – don’t trip. Alexia lets Lucas guide her. It’s an uncomfortable blind man’s buff. A stone step, slick with condensation, leading to another, to a staircase curving up between rising walls of dewed stone. The steps turn and Alexia arrives in a saucer of stone, billowing fog before her. She is high on the face of one of the orixas: Iansa’s stern features soar dark and wet behind her.

  ‘My mother had this mirador constructed when she built Boa Vista,’ Lucas says. ‘It was supposed to be her secret; the place she could see and not be seen. How many pretty bodies did the Voronts
ovs throw at you?’

  ‘Three.’

  Lucas smiles.

  ‘I was never a frequent guest at St Olga. Rafa adored it; me, I like solid rock over my head. They like you to think of them as amiable, expansive buffoons.’

  ‘They are not.’

  ‘Which one worked?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘You think. It’s quite all right if one did. They are good at this.’

  ‘I’m meeting Irina. As a friend.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I met Duncan Mackenzie, out at Crucible.’

  ‘What was he doing there?’

  ‘Irina wouldn’t tell me but I found out he’d also been meeting the Vorontsovs.’

  ‘Interesting.’ Lucas rests both hands on the handle of his stick. ‘Yevgeny Vorontsov wants my support for the Moonport programme. Mackenzie Metals cancels its order for a new smelter train and instead meets with VTO. Representations and negotiations. Alignments and alliances.’

  The fog swirls, the droplets congeal into heavy drops.

  ‘Duncan Mackenzie said that we have a bigger enemy,’ Alexia says.

  It is raining now; fat heavy drops clattering on the plastic capes. The fog thins into streamers, into wisps, then clears. Alexia stands on Iansa’s lower lip looking out over the dripping, sparkling expanse of Boa Vista. The temperature has risen another couple of degrees; she is sweating in her plastic cape.

  ‘So the Vorontsovs are in open rebellion,’ Lucas says. ‘VTO needs to anchor its space elevators with an asteroid at the L1 point. The terrestrials will never allow that in their sky. I am being forced to choose sides. I don’t like that. Not at all.’

  * * *