by Ian McDonald
Luna is grey with fear.
‘Ariel, is this going-to-happen or might-happen?’
‘The terrestrials are scared,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘The Vorontsovs want to build a network of space elevators and turn the moon into the hub of the solar system. The Mackenzies want to mine asteroids and build space habitats. Both sides need Lucas Corta to endorse them but they don’t know where he stands. Then I propose my Lunar Bourse scheme. They like it. They like it very much. They like most of all that it is unimaginable wealth with no human input. They have everything they want. And I gave it to them.’
Ariel takes Luna’s hand.
‘Luna, anjinho, don’t be scared,’ Ariel says.
The girl shakes her head.
‘I’m not scared. I just want to know what I can do.’
‘Lucas has power, authority, the Cortas restored,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘Everything but one thing.’
‘Lucasinho.’
‘You have what he wants. He has what you want.’
‘I remember saying to you that Cortas don’t do politics.’
‘What you said to me was, Cortas don’t do democracy.’ Vidhya Rao taps a finger to the folds of er right eye. ‘My external memory is flawless.’
‘Then it’ll remember that line came just after you told me I was some kind of Chosen One,’ Ariel says.
‘Our first meeting. Your first session of the Pavilion of the White Hare.’
‘And you’ve kept turning up ever since to pronounce doom and remind me of my special status. You clambered all the way to Bairro Alto to invite me to cocktails with the Eagle of the Moon and feed me that same old Special One nonsense. Is this why you’re here? Third time’s the charm? Fairy stories, Vidhya. Whether it’s Canopus in Aries or your Three August Ones, it’s Fairy Stories. The universe doesn’t have heroes.’
‘Nevertheless…’ Vidhya Rao says.
‘You’ve always got an answer,’ Ariel says. ‘It’s all scripted whether I want it or not. What part of the telenovela is this?’
‘“Refusing the Call”,’ Vidhya Rao says.
‘Consider it refused,’ Ariel says. ‘The moon stands, the moon falls: it will do it without me.’
Ariel sweeps from the room in a flurry of polka-dot jersey. Luna remains for a sustained glare, to let Vidhya Rao know the depth of her disapproval, before marching after her tia.
‘But you will,’ Vidhya Rao says softly to the empty room. Dust sparkles in the light from the window. ‘You can’t help it.’
* * *
Luna thinks she has been into every tunnel and shaft and duct in Coriolis, but Amalia Sun leads her into pipes and conduits strange to her.
‘Where are you going?’ Luna whispers as she peers out from a vent eight levels down in the emergency stairwell. It had been a tough climb down the zig-zagging shaft; no opportunity to drop and land; familiar-Luna showing her the position of power lines that could flash her to nothing. Amalia Sun goes through a green-painted service door and Luna has to haul herself up in a tricky ninety-degree horizontal turn into the airspace between the wall-panelling and the gas-sealed stone. She hopes the airspace runs the length of this level: she has had to double back from dead-ends or deep drops or live power relays too many times since Amalia Sun got up from her seat – always the same seat – in the common room and Luna stirred from her long watching and followed. Familiar-Luna shows her an air-vent fifty metres down the airspace. Luna scampers, hands and feet, and arrives to see Amalia waiting at the door of a freight elevator.
Where to? Luna asks Luna-familiar. Amalia Sun has switched her familiar off, but Luna’s familiar can access the elevator’s rudimentary AI.
Park level, Familiar-Luna says.
‘Back up again.’ The freight elevator is slow and arrives a long way from the park door and Luna knows a cunning short-cut.
‘What are you doing?’ Luna mutters to herself as she takes the service ladder three levels to Level 12. She slips out of a cleaning-bot hatch, sprints down the corridor and takes the direct elevator, the one she uses with Lucasinho on their expeditions, which will deliver her outside the park entrance even as Amalia Sun is stepping out from the sliding doors. No one on the business of good takes such a long route through nothing and nowhere. It is as if the woman is trying to avoid being seen, trying to throw as much dust over her tracks as possible.
Luna is a daily sight at the park so she can stand in the entrance and watch Amalia Sun walk towards her, nod a greeting, and walk on along the corridor towards the yellow door with the biohazard markings.
‘Shitzer!’ Luna swears. She doesn’t have the clearance to go through that door. But there is a red door on the first cross-walk which will take her into the air-ducts, and they follow the layout of the clean room. There are only two ways out of the park-level biohazard zone, and Luna knows her prey well enough to make a good guess which Amalia Sun will take. She runs lightly along the trunking, ducks down a right into a lesser conduit and is peeping down through a vent to see Amalia Sun exit the door on to the stairwell.
‘Got you!’ Luna says. ‘I know where you’re going.’
She follows anyway, to be sure. Amalia Sun takes the staircase two levels up to the bio-fabricator level. Luna drops out of the roof to see Amalia Sun push open the door to the protein-chip printshop.
* * *
Dr Gebreselassie catches sight of Luna hovering in the door to her office, half in, half out. The door frame bisects her face.
‘Can I come in?’ says the human side of Luna’s face.
‘What’s wrong?’ Dr Gebreselassie asks.
‘Why do you think something’s wrong?’
‘Because you never asked if you could come in before.’
Dr Gebreselassie pulls a chair out with her foot and Luna drops on to it and swings her feet.
‘So tell me.’
‘Okay,’ Luna says. ‘But first I have to ask you a technical question.’
Dr Gebreselassie has learned not to be surprised at anything Luna Corta says or does.
‘Ask.’
‘Technically, is it possible for someone to add memories of things that didn’t happen to Lucasinho’s protein chips?’
‘Technically, it is,’ Dr Gebreselassie says. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Okay,’ Luna says and tells Dr Gebreselassie about Lucasinho talking about his mother – which he never did – and when he lived in the Palace of Eternal Light – where he never lived – and all the good times he had with his Sun aunts and uncle and cousins – who he never knew. Dr Gebreselassie’s face grows grave. Then Luna tells her that she is an explorer and that she knows all Coriolis’s secret tunnels and corridors and walkways and how she used to them to spy on Amalia Sun and follow her strange long route through the campus all the way to the protein chip factory.
There Dr Gebreselassie holds up a hand.
‘Luna, hold it there a moment.’
The door opens. Dakota Kaur Mackenzie comes into the office.
‘So, Luna,’ Dr Gebreselassie says. ‘I’d like you to tell Dakota everything you told me.’
* * *
Lady Sun turns the little metal cylinder over in her hands. It is the size of her thumb, heavy, cold and slightly greasy to the touch. Her fingers sense minute markings etched into the metal.
‘What is this?’ she asks. She has been disturbed, in her apartment, in her solitude and contemplation. Her temper is short and not sweet.
‘A note of credit from the University of Farside. Delivered by BALTRAN, to me, personally,’ says Amanda Sun.
Lady Sun holds the cylinder up before her eyes, strains to make out the engraving.
‘Such tiny writing,’ she tuts. ‘Credit for what?’
‘From the University of Farside, Faculty of Biocybernetics, School of Neurotechnology to the account of Taiyang: Carbon; fifty-one thousand two hundred point eight eight grams, oxygen; sixteen thousand one and twelve point six five grams…’ Amanda Sun says.
‘The chemical con
stituents of a human body,’ Lady Sun says and the chill of the metal invades her. She touches her hand to her chest. Her own trick of power, turned against her.
‘Yes,’ Amanda Sun says. ‘Amalia Sun.’
* * *
Analiese Mackenzie can remember the moment she realised that music is a demon. She had completed her twelfth repetition of the twenty-third gusheh of the seventh rastgah, the Rastgah-e Mahur, and saw blood on the strings of her setar. The taut steel strings had abraded the tips of her fingers down to raw flesh. She had not noticed.
She was fourteen when the setar took blood.
She had just turned thirteen when it made her love it. Just turned thirteen and riding Equatorial One back with her mums from the new surveyings at Rimae Kopf to Crucible. Looking out of the window. Flicking the channels on her entertainment. When a spray of notes like molten silver in her ear made her sit up. Strings, notes of metallic precision, talking to her, to her alone, to no one else on this round round moon, clear and precise. She understood everything they said, every emotion they summoned – elation, peace, control, awe, fear, mystery. Everything was limned in light; everything was clear.
‘Listen!’ she shouted, jumping down from her seat to wake her dozing mums. ‘Listen!’ She flicked the music on to their familiars. ‘It’s like … it’s like out there, in here.’
They listened. They didn’t hear.
That silver voice was that of the setar, an instrument of classical Persia. One could be made. Anything could be made on the moon. She learned the tuning, the fingering, the gushehs that built through sayr into the dastgahs into the magnificences of the ratifs: the symmetries, the asymmetries, the free-forms: all these on a carbon setar strung with lunar steel. Later, when the setar had possessed her, she paid a stunning sum of bitsies to have one made, from wood, by hand, fretted with true silk, flown up from Earth.
She found other musicians who had been touched by this music. Not many, and they didn’t see what she had seen in the music: the harsh, beautiful, austere, brilliant nature of her world. But they had been possessed by the demon, and as she met musicians in other disciplines she saw that they too were demon-ridden: devotees, ascetics, perfectionists, explorers, obsessives. Her measure of wood and wire had possessed her, harried and driven her to perfect her relationship with it, to make it the centre of her life and need. Demon.
She loves the wolf, but she is married to the demon.
It is an abusive relationship.
Analiese completes the final dastgah and lets the note fade over the closing beat of the daf. She takes a moment in the silence after sound. Nothing and everything is here but she can no more stay here than in the womb. A breath and the applause breaks over her.
It always surprises Analiese that there is an audience for her music. A sizeable audience: second and third gen Iranians and Central Asians; Moonbeams and visitors from the Islamic Republic; music lovers, musicologists, musicians of other disciplines: the demon’s other lovers. On this tour, her first in over a year, she has noticed a number of terrestrials. LMA officials. Iran and the Stans have a piece of the lunar cake.
They are the most appreciative of audiences. Every concert at least one has come backstage to ask her about her instrument, her music, why a lunar Australian should be so enraptured with an alien music.
Her familiar informs her that tonight is no exception. Two men in the dressing-room corridor of the Queen’s Xian Xinghai music centre. A woman and a man. Not Iranians. White Australians.
‘Analiese Mackenzie?’ the woman asks.
‘I am.’
‘A moment in your dressing room, please?’
‘Were you at the concert?’ Analiese asks. ‘I don’t remember you. Who are you?’
‘Oh dear,’ the woman says. The man inclines his head and Analiese feels a brief, sharp needling pain in the back of her head. She lifts a hand.
‘Don’t do that,’ the woman says. ‘No, really. There’s a combat insect attached to the back of your neck. Now, can we chat?’
Analiese opens the door, conscious of the thing on the back of her neck, conscious of the man and woman following her into the room as if attached to the thing and her spine by electric nerves.
‘Can I at least put the setar away?’
‘Of course,’ the woman says. ‘It’s a valuable musical instrument.’
She lays it in its case, folds the fabric over the strings, hasps shut the lid. All the time, the thing, the thing, that black thing on her neck.
‘Who are you?’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ the woman says. The dressing room is small, the woman perches on the edge of the shelf, the man on the toilet. ‘There is someone would very much like to meet you. He’s on his way. He’ll be here very soon. We’re just here to make sure you don’t miss him.’
‘The rest of the group…’ Analiese says.
‘You’ve told them you’ll meet them later in the bar,’ the woman says. ‘And I don’t think you’ve noticed, but we’ve screened off this room.’
The man pulls back his jacket to display a black box at his waist. He looks pleased with himself.
‘It’s quite a sophisticated piece of technology, actually,’ the woman says. ‘It’s surprisingly difficult to isolate a person from the network. There are ten thousand eyes on us all the time.’
Movement outside the door.
‘He’s here. Nice meeting you. Don’t touch the spider.’
The man and woman leave. Bryce Mackenzie enters. His bulk dominates the tiny dressing room. Analiese gets up from her chair.
‘Sit sit,’ Bryce says. ‘I won’t be long. And I doubt it would hold me anyway. Analiese Mackenzie. Partner of Wagner Corta. Care giver to Robson Corta. My adopted son. That’s not very loyal of you.’
‘It’s not disloyal to live my own life,’ Analiese says. ‘It’s not disloyal not to take sides.’
‘But you have taken sides. I’ll be brief. I have suffered a number of business setbacks recently. This is public knowledge. I’m in the process of reversing those. My strategy requires bargaining assets. Hostages, if you like.’
‘I’m just a musician,’ Analiese says. She would give anything, anything to be able to tear this black, prickling thing from her neck.
‘Not you,’ Bryce says. He laughs. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are? No. I want Robson Corta. You have him. I want him. Give him to me.’
‘Wagner…’ Analiese stammers. ‘I can’t…’
‘I wouldn’t trust you to fix a martini, let alone bring me this kid. And he’s a slippy little bastard. He got away from me once in Meridian. Cost me a First Blade. Then again, he did have Denny Mackenzie fighting for him. I have people for this kind of thing. What I need from you is to clear space for them. Do you understand?’
‘You want me to get Wagner out of the way.’
‘Yes I do. Problem is: that word trust. Frankly, you are very far from staunch. You have betrayed the family before and I find it hard to put my trust in you. So what I need isn’t your loyalty, it’s your obedience.’
‘This…’ Analiese hooks a thumb towards the slowly-spasming thing hooked into her skin,
‘That? That’s just to get your attention. I’m going to send you something.’
Her familiar whispers, Message from Bryce Mackenzie. Windows open in Analiese’s vision: wide-angle, high viewpoint drone shots of streets, prospekts, tunnels. Each drone follows a figure: a middle-aged woman with striking long grey hair moving along a crowded prospekt, a young man taking tea with friends at a hotshop bar, a middle-aged, close-cropped woman leaning on the rail of a high balcony on one of Queen’s towers, surveying her marvellous city; a young woman running, a fair pony-tail swinging.
Mom, Ryan, Mom, Rowan.
‘You fuck.’
‘It’s agreed then?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘Of course you have a choice.’ A secure contact appears on Analiese’s lens. ‘Arrange it, then let us know. We’ll take care o
f the rest.’ Bryce Mackenzie smiles, a thin tear in shining, straining skin. ‘My business is concluded. So there’s no more need for this.’ He holds out a hand and the thing leaps from Analiese’s neck on to his hand. He lets it run across his skin like a pet, turning his hand one way, then another to keep the vile thing in motion. It is glossy, hard and brittle and yet liquid at the same time; scurrying and intent, all legs and fangs. Analiese knows she will wake many nights, feeling the prickle of the little needle claws in her neck.
‘You wouldn’t have dared kill me with that thing,’ Analiese says. Defiance. Defiance is something.
‘I dare what I like. But correct: I wouldn’t have killed you. The spider’s armed with a non-lethal neurotoxin that would have fucked your nervous system so long and deep and hard you wouldn’t have been able to pick up that instrument of yours, let alone get a note out of it. Goodbye. I’m glad you agreed. Your friends are expecting you in the bar. You deserve a drink.’
For a big man he moves deftly, softly. Analiese is shaking. She can’t stop. She may never stop.
Demons.
* * *
As she departed, she returns, instrument in hand, the sole alightee at Theophilus’s small station. And there are her men; big man, little man. Big man tight, controlled, loud with dark emotions he thinks no one but he can see. Little man sombre and serious and failing to conceal how happy he is.
She almost gets back on the train. That would be the best thing, take herself away, far away from anyone and everyone who has ever known her. Change her name, edit her identity, erase her records, smash the setar.
They would still come.
Blow the lock, blow herself and her lovely men out into vacuum, all die in each other’s arms, brains burning red as each neuron guttered and was extinguished.
They would still come; by wing and wind and foot and knife-tip: Bryce Mackenzie’s assassins.