by Ian McDonald
This morning she ordered Maninho to show her herself. In the skin. Hair down. She winced, looked away, looked again. Alexia understood too well the irony of feeling physically self-conscious in as exhibitionist a society as Brasil, but the enduring family narrative was that Cortas were workers not lookers. She had always worried that her hips were too wide, her ass too heavy, her boobs too small. The gatinhas from school bounced down to the beach after class in three triangles of lycra; she went for coffee, and took a table with her back to the ocean. Wanting so much to be the one in the sun. The moon taught her different. The moon gave her a movie-star dress and she had wooed and wowed St Olga. The bodies at the banya – young, old, large and small – taught her that no one was looking.
She looked at herself in her lens. And it was okay. It was good. It was her. Fuck it.
She booked a National Classic trim for her boceta, hung her bra and pants in her locker, slid her feet into the Havaianas, slung her towel over her shoulder, shook out her hair and marched to the steam room.
The call comes in the spa. Irina.
‘Ola.’
She is distraught. In bits. Teary. Where is she? She’s in Meridian. She needs her.
‘I’m in the Sanduny banya. I’ll book a private suite.’
Warm water, juniper-scented air, ambient light and guaranteed privacy are safe, centring, healing.
Irina Efua Vorontsova-Asamoah does not even wait for the water, the warmth, the seclusion to start to work.
‘They’re marrying me!’ she bawls.
There is no ready answer to that when you are naked and up to your neck in gently bubbling water.
‘Kimmie-Leigh Mackenzie!’
By the time it has all unravelled they have progressed from the warm pool to the cold pool to the sauna to the steam room to the cold pool to the warm pool again. Alexia’s skin feels three sizes too big for her and she understands Irina’s woe.
It’s the deal. The Mackenzie deal. The contract calls for a series of dynastic marriages to seal the agreement. Irina has been betrothed to Kimmie-Leigh Mackenzie, granddaughter of Katarina Mackenzie, granddaughter of Robert. The engagement will be proclaimed as part of the announcement of the Mackenzie Metals/VTO pact. The ceremonies will take place ten days later in Hadley.
‘Hang on hang on hang on. Married? Against your will?’
‘It’s part of the deal.’
‘But did you consent to this?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It matters if it makes it rape.’
‘I signed the pre-nikah.’
‘But you didn’t want to,’ Alexia protests. She learns one thing about the lunar way of life, accepts it, then she runs hard into something alien, brutal and harsh.
‘I didn’t want to but I had to. How could I say no? This is family. You don’t know what it’s like in the families.’
‘I certainly do not,’ Alexia says. ‘And what about her? Kimmie-what?’
‘Kimmie-Leigh. K-L. She doesn’t want it either but she’s a Mackenzie, I’m a Vorontsova-Asamoah…’
‘Do you know her? Have you even met her?’
‘She’s sixteen, in the Three Heavens Colloquium here in Meridian. Seems a nice kid. But my oko? My oko? For five years. Five years!’
Alexia almost laughs aloud.
‘Only five years!’
Irina is aghast.
‘I’ll be … twenty-two by the time the contract reverts!’
‘In five years a lot can happen. She could be dead. You could be dead. The deal might fall through, the contract might be annulled. You could cheat and be a renegade from both houses. Or you could fall in love. What I’m saying is, five years is nothing.’
Irina sulks, then splashes water in Alexia’s face. Alexia bristles, then drenches Irina with a torrent of splashing. Irina shrieks, then the two women yell and laugh and throw water at each other until they cannot breathe.
‘Your hair,’ Alexia gasps, ‘looks like. Shit. And I’m puckered up like an old nun. What I’m saying is, is, get a fucking marriage lawyer. Let’s get a drink.’
Irina is still there three bars later. She is still there at the Ethiopian restaurant and she is still there in the morning folded around the bottom of Alexia’s bed, like a small sister or a visiting cousin. And she is still there, blinking big eyes and hung-over, when Lucas calls with the invitation to the eclipse party at the Palace of Eternal Light.
* * *
If she puts her right arm out and rolls on to her side, and bends this way, Luna reckons she can slide around this corner to the really good spy-hole in the roof of the med centre common room. She wiggles her arm up and around, for a moment her elbow jams against the roof of the access tunnel, then Luna grits her teeth, shifts her body weight on to her left side and the arm goes into the crawlspace. Then it is roll, flex, kick and she is through into the duct beyond.
Luna never thinks that she might get stuck, that familiar-Luna might have to call for help, that bots and engineers might have to dismantle half of Coriolis to get her out; that Luna might call and no one would come, ever.
In a few metres the crawlspace will open out and she can manoeuvre her arm down by her side and peer through the mesh into the common room. Tea machine, food machine, water machine, seats and spaces. People sitting around with that faraway look grown-ups get when they are with their familiars rather than the friends around them. Moving air strokes her hair, rustles her dress. Who’s in the common room today? Dr Gebreselassie, just leaving. Dr Donoghue and Dr Ray, just entering, talking together at the tea machine. A group of researchers: they’re not interesting. There is Amalia Sun, who came with Tia Amanda when she visited Lucasinho. She seems a bland, dull woman, sitting on her own with tea, involved with her familiar.
Who to follow? Luna invented her little game in the crawlspaces and conduits of Boa Vista, but it is so much better here. There are so many people here she can track without them knowing, instead of just some boring relative or security person. It makes her giggle, thinking she is up here, watching and they will never know.
Luna tracked every step her Tia Amanda took and not even her security knew she was there.
So, who to hunt today? Amalia Sun is the newest thing Luna has seen but she just sits and sits, busy with her familiar. The researchers finish their tea. Luna picks the least uninteresting and follows her into the main ring, down two levels to the neuronics laboratory – a drop down a service shaft, her ballooning dress slowing her fall – to the laboratory offices, another tight turn, but not as narrow as the passage from the scanner room to the common room. Luna’s dress snags on the misaligned edge of a panel and tears. She hisses in annoyance.
‘Now look what you made me do!’ she scolds the researcher.
* * *
Madrinha Elis holds up the dress. The tear runs from armpit to waist.
‘Scrambling.’
‘Exploring,’ Luna says.
‘And you’re covered in dust and dirt,’ Madrinha Elis says. Luna stands defiant in shorts and T-shirt. ‘Take a shower. You are a smelly girl. And…’
‘Wash that thing off my face?’ Luna grins. ‘I always do, madrinha.’
‘And put it right back on again.’
Luna skips to the shower. ‘I need that reprinted for when I go to see Lucasinho.’
Madrinha Elis rolls her eyes and tosses the torn dress into the deprinter.
* * *
‘Ola, Luca.’
Lucasinho is in his chair today. His smile is a thing of joy and light. Luna likes to talk to him in Portuguese, it seems to link memories in new ways, give him fresh words for speaking about himself.
‘Bom dia, Luna!’
‘Walk again today?’ Luna says in Portuguese. Lucasinho nods. He can walk without a stick now, and likes to test his body’s limits. The faculty has a small park and Luna and Lucasinho walk laps of its circular path. There is tall bamboo and sheltering leaves and overhanging branches and you can almost believe that you aren’t in a c
hamber under a low roof.
‘Look at the fish!’ Lucasinho says. Luna takes his arm as they walk down to the elevator.
‘Feed the fish!’ Luna says and takes a glass vial of protein flakes from the pocket of her grey dress. Lucasinho claps his hands in delight.
Medics and academics and researchers greet them as Luna and Lucasinho stroll hand in hand along the sintered stone path.
‘Seven trees?’ Luna says. An ornamental Japanese maple is their lap marker. Lucasinho looks doubtful. He tires easily. Mental work is the hardest. ‘Seven trees and we can feed the fish.’
‘Okay.’
As he does every day, Lucasinho stops in a spot where light falls through gently moving leaves. He looks up into the dapple, lets it warm his face. His eyes are closed.
‘You look like an orixa,’ Luna says.
‘Which one?’
‘Oxossi,’ Luna says.
‘The hunter,’ Lucasinho says. ‘The Lord of Knowledge.’ His face tightens in concentration. ‘I’m trying to remember. Facing each other, from the tram station to the main lock. Oya and Xango. Oxum and Ogun. Oxala and Nana. Then Oxossi and Yemanja. Last of all, Omolu and Ibeji. It’s easy to remember Boa Vista here. Is that why you bring me?’
‘And I like the fish,’ Luna says. They walk on, smiling and greeting the well-wishers in Globo.
‘I’m starting to remember the Palace of Eternal Light as well,’ Lucasinho says. Fourth tree. ‘It’s all light and dark, big shadows and light so bright it’s like – real? Solid. Huge empty spaces. Echoes. Really really small people, but it’s the stone that makes them look small. Trams everywhere. I remember looking out of the window of a tram. What’s the name of that other city, the old city?’
‘Queen of the South?’ Luna says.
‘That city. I was on the tram, with my mãe.’
‘Amanda Sun,’ Luna says.
‘Mãe,’ Lucasinho says firmly. ‘I was on the tram, from the Queen, and we were going around inside this big crater, and it was all shadows and light. Like a cut.’ He slashes his hand through the air. ‘Sharp like that. Light, shadow. Mãe said, those shadows, they never end. I remember I was scared, but she put her arm around me and said look and there were all these lights in the shadow, and Mãe said, that’s our city. Light in the shadows.’
Six trees. Lucasinho has a lightness in his step, a certainty in his voice. Luna must trot to keep up with him.
‘I remember! Another time. There’s a room, all covered in beautiful cloth, and tiny windows, and the light comes in through the tiny windows and makes the cloth all pale. There was an old lady, and she was smiling and she took my two hands and my mãe said, “Luca, this is your great-grandmother.”’
‘That old woman is Lady Sun,’ Luna says. ‘When was that? I don’t remember you meeting Lady Sun.’
‘I don’t know, I think just before I lived there. Seventh tree! Can we feed the fishes now?’
‘Luca,’ Luna says. ‘You never lived in the Palace of Eternal Light.’
* * *
‘Now this will not do,’ Lucas Corta says.
‘I rocked St Olga in it,’ says Alexia in the ballgown that had so seduced the Vorontsovs, so fresh it still smells of evaporating printer fluid.
‘What rocks St Olga will get the stone face in the palace,’ Lucas says. He wears a suit in a soft, vaguely iridescent grey which, on close inspection, reveals itself to be brocade micro-print. His tie is primrose silk, as is the band of his hat. ‘The Suns have standards.’
‘What is this anyway?’ Alexia calls as she goes back to pull off the dress, deprint it and print out the one that is very much her second choice.
‘The Suns host eclipse parties in the Pavilion of Eternal Light. It’s the only time darkness ever falls so they think it’s worthy of celebration. There’s an eclipse every month so people are always being invited to the Palace of Eternal Light. LMA, trade delegations, social influencers, society debutantes, academics. Tourists. Everyone is going to be there, so there is clearly something Taiyang wishes to announce.’
‘Everyone?’ Alexia wriggles into the new dress.
‘Heads of all five … four Dragons,’ Lucas says. ‘And the Eagle of the Moon and his Iron Hand.’
‘To do with the Sun-ring powering up?’ Alexia says. Right shoe, then left. There is magic and ritual to dressing.
‘Absolutely certainly.’
Alexia descends the two steps from the dressing room. The long drape of crepe, the mutton-chop sleeves, the tightly cinched waist.
‘You could land a moonship on these shoulders.’
Lucas smiles.
‘Discreet but powerful. The Suns will appreciate that.’
* * *
‘I’ve never been to the Palace of Eternal Light,’ Alexia says as the railcar runs the Transpolar mainline south over the viaducts and through the cuttings of the La Caille craterlands.
‘You’ll be impressed. It’s built to impress. It’s very composed, very quiet, very austere and everyone there is afraid all the time.’
‘How was he?’ Alexia asks.
‘I thought of turning around and walking away.’
‘Lucas, that’s not what I asked.’
He looks out at the silver-black desolation.
‘I saw a wonder, then I saw a horror. Then I saw a thing I thought I knew and didn’t know at all. I thought, they’re putting him back together, memory by memory, but they’re not his memories. They’re the memories of others, his social media self, the parts of his memory he gave over to machines. Is that all we are? What others remember of us? He’s still pretty, Lê.’
‘You showed me a picture of him, that time I came back to the Copa Palace.’
‘And I offered you the moon. He looks the same, Lê, but he’s not the same. Will he ever be the same or will the doubt always be there, that they built something that is not my Lucas Corta Jnr?’
‘When I go back to Earth, I won’t be the same, Lucas. Every part of the me who almost got killed in that suite in the Copa will be left here on the moon, and I’ll take the moon back inside me. Every hair and bone and cell.’
‘You’re going back?’
‘If I go back, I mean. If. Lucas. One more question. Who is Jorge Mauro?’
That suspicious smile again. Alexia sees the fifteen-year-old, the ten-year-old, the five-year-old boy, who knows he must always be smart, be sharp, be secretive.
‘You spy on me?’
‘I look after you. You stayed behind after the reception.’
‘Jorge Mauro is my song, my sanity, my soul. I tell him what I will never tell you, Iron Hand. I would have spent the rest of my life with him but he was wise and would not have me.’
Bossa guitar fills the cabin, whispered, invoking lyrics.
‘“Samba de Una Nota”,’ Lucas says. ‘Jorge’s group.’ He prepares martinis, viciously dry and cold. Alexia still cannot bring herself to love gin or bossa nova but she sips and the craterlands of the south speed past and she understands something of Lucas Corta’s towering, terrible loneliness.
At Queen of the South they transfer to the Shackleton tramway. Alexia notes railcars at the private platforms: VTO red and white, the monochrome patterns of AKA, the green and silver of Mackenzie Metals. The tram silently carries her and Lucas under Queen’s great lava bubble, beneath the Aitken Basin to emerge on to a track cut into the inner wall of Shackleton crater. Lights blaze in a profound darkness that changes on a boundary sharp as a blade to blinding light. White and black. Ice and fire. Sun has never touched the deep recesses of Shackleton; primordial ice has lain there since the birth of the solar system, ice that fuelled the Suns’ and Mackenzies’ first steps on this world. The history of the moon is only eighty years deep, but it is passionate, bloody and magnificent.
Alexia’s lenses polarise as she squints up to try and catch sight of the Pavilion of Eternal Light in the sun glare. It took her some time to comprehend the principle of a Peak of Eternal Light. The moon has
virtually no axial tilt, so no seasons and no months-long days and nights at the pole. A sufficiently high mountain peak at the pole would never be out of sunlight. Water and constant solar power: humans of vision and spirit could build a world out of those. Malapert Mountain fails the Peak of Eternal Light test by a few hundred metres, but build a tower on top of it … And Alexia sees it, and her mental resistances fail. She is awed. A shaft of searing light rises into the black, tipped with a blazing diamond. A spear, challenging the universe. Earth and sun are invisible beneath the far rim of the crater: Alexia tries to imagine darkness obliterating the spearpoint, spreading down the shaft.
The tram car enters another tunnel and moments later draws into a glass chamber. Locks seal; the Eagle’s escoltas form an escort.
‘Your ex-wife is here,’ Alexia whispers. She adjusts the fall of her gown, the set of her shoulder pads. This is stupidly complicated clothing.
Amanda Sun greets Lucas with precision kisses. She is fierce in a fitted New Look suit.
‘Lucasinho looked well, I thought,’ Amanda Sun says, escorting Lucas across the soul-shrinking space of the Great Hall of Taiyang. Alexia’s heels sound like gunshots on the polished rock. She imagines she leaves a trail of sparks.
‘I thought he looked ragged,’ Lucas says. ‘Drained. Only natural. But then I know him better than you.’
Shafts of light fall across the floor of the Great Hall, so bright they seem to hiss.
‘Senhor Corta.’ Sun Zhiyuan greets his guests. ‘Senhora Corta. You are most welcome.’
Alexia recalls her last meeting with the Suns. They had come to dip the head to the new Eagle and scry what favour and denial they could expect. She had tried to bar Lady Sun because the Dowager of Shackleton had not been on her list. Mistake. She had been inexperienced. The Suns will not have forgotten nor forgiven. There she is, the old bruxa. She has always worn this 1940s style. The world has come round to her. The effete-looking kid at her side in the sharp suit must be Darius Sun-Mackenzie. Alexia tests her memory on the rest of the Great Hall. Lousika Asamoah with her animal entourage and AKA executives in the same beautiful kente that had impressed her beneath the Great Tree of Twé. Robert Mackenzie a dark star among his bright retainers. A posse of flamboyant Vorontsovs hail Alexia like a lost sister.