by Ian McDonald
‘I have a problem,’ Lucas says. ‘All this beautiful justice is so much junk unless I can deliver it to its target.’
Lucas Corta stymied. For a moment Alexia is nonplussed, then a name comes to her. She sees it, whole and entire and beautiful. And cold and ruthless and exploitative, and the only thing that will work.
‘I’ve a suggestion,’ Alexia says.
* * *
The care givers are good simple academic folk – he a selenologist, he a professor of poetry, and despite Lucas’s best intentions they are terrified. They sit side by side on the lounger, upright in readiness for flight, nostrils wide, eyes wider, touching often and gentle.
Lucas sits almost knee to knee, leaning forward, keeping his head lower than theirs to signal intimacy. Many hand gestures, some touches. They flinch from each touch.
Alexia can’t blame them. Even operating minimal security there are still escoltas at every door for a hundred metres up and down the ring. Theophilus has been invaded. The kid, though; the kid is something different.
Haider sits opposite Alexia, hunched over in the chair, feet splayed, hands between his knees. Lanky and awkward. White hoodie and leggings. The whitest skin she has seen on the moon; black hair falling over one eye. Makes you look cute but you know that, Alexia observes. Boys can be cute and sweet and vulnerable. Then puberty makes them horrid.
She tries not to think of Caio, up there in high Brasil.
She flicks up her briefing. Lucas’s intelligence is thorough. Maninho knows things about Haider that his CGs don’t. That he is a kid of words, of stories. The stories he has written and given reluctantly to people. The stories he has written and does not give anyone. The stories he will never let anyone read: the ones about his BBFF Robson and Haider’s little boycrush.
‘What is it you want him to take, Senhor Corta?’ the selenologist, Arjun, asks.
‘I won’t lie to you,’ Lucas says. ‘Poison to kill Bryce Mackenzie.’
Arjun and Max, the poetry professor, make small cries of consternation.
‘Political assassination?’ Max asks. He is the taller of Haider’s two care givers, with a poetry professor’s salt-and-pepper beard.
‘Robson will not be safe until Bryce Mackenzie is dead,’ Lucas says. ‘And because I am here – because Wagner came to you – you will not be safe until Bryce Mackenzie is dead. You are part of it now, I am afraid.’
‘I never asked…’ Max begins, then stops speaking as he realises the futility of his argument.
‘I will protect you,’ Lucas says. ‘For as long as is necessary.’
‘And Haider? What about him? You are asking our son to carry deadly poisons into the very heart of Mackenzie Metals,’ Max says.
‘I’m asking him to visit his best friend,’ Lucas says. ‘There will be no issue, he will visit at the behest of the Lunar Mandate Authority. There will be no danger.’
Max snorts with pained contempt.
‘So you say, but what about your nephew? You were supposed to keep him safe. This places Robson in deadly danger,’ Arjun says.
‘Robson already is in deadly danger. You are aware of Bryce Mackenzie’s reputation. There are some things worse than death.’
‘I’ll do it.’ Haider’s voice fills the tiny room. He looks out fierce and resolved from behind his fringe. ‘I’ll go. For Robson.’
‘We forbid it!’ Max says.
‘Let him speak,’ Lucas says.
‘Nothing to say,’ Haider says. ‘Except I’ll do it. It has to be done. No one else can do it.’
‘We are your care givers,’ Max says. ‘Your parents.’
Arjun rests a hand on his oko’s.
‘We have no power here. He can do whatever he wants.’
‘I’m glad you see it my way,’ Lucas says. ‘Be assured that he won’t be alone. Haider will be accompanied – as far as possible – by an office bearer of the Lunar Mandate Authority. My own Mão de Ferro.’
* * *
‘Ancillary staff here, on hand.’ Lucas leads the LMA executives across the bridge of the nose to the north eyeball. His cane clicks loudly on the polished stone floor. ‘Your committee room. For those times when network conferencing will not suffice. Discreet. Secure.’ He points out through the pupil-window with the tip of his cane to the stone face across the chasm. ‘My own office. Eye to eye, so to speak.’
‘Oxala, Lord of Light and Beginning,’ Anselmo Reyes says. ‘And we are to be stationed in Omolu; orixa of Death and Disease.’
‘Also orixa of healing,’ Lucas says. ‘And keeper of the graveyards.’
Wang Yongqing purses her lips in displeasure.
‘It is inefficient to split and duplicate our efforts between Meridian and Boa Vista.’
‘I anticipate moving the entire LMA to Boa Vista. There is much to be said for separating the capital from the largest city. Much practised on Earth, though not in any of your nations. Boa Vista would be your own private city.’
‘Your own private city,’ Wang Yongqing says. ‘With the LMA as your hostages.’
‘That’s an unfriendly expression, Madam Wang.’
‘But one with much currency on the moon. Senhor Corta, the LMA is concerned.’
Birds call among the saplings. A blue morpho butterfly sweeps heavily past Omolu’s north eye. A thought to Toquinho and escoltas bring seats. Everything is prepared, everything is choreographed and Lucas will allow no deviations from his script.
‘We’ve approved and accredited your assistant,’ says Monique Bertin.
‘My Mão de Ferro,’ Lucas says. The terrestrials loathe the title. It sounds medieval, atavistic to their ears. Therefore Lucas delights in using it.
‘And the boy,’ Anselmo Reyes adds. ‘And provided a small escort.’
‘Thank you,’ Lucas says.
‘We have not asked your interest in this,’ Wang Yongqing says. Her hands are folded in her lap. Lucas’s staff erect a table, serve tea. ‘This is not a favour. Ours is a business enterprise with commercial goals.’
‘I am a man of business,’ Lucas says.
Wang Yongqing regards him for a cold moment.
‘I’m not sure you are, Senhor Corta. Not as we understand it. Of late you have been sending missions, holding meetings – doing deals – without our endorsement.’
‘I have to wheel and deal, Madam Wang.’
‘We are concerned,’ Anselmo Reyes says.
‘Earth is concerned,’ Monique Bertin says. ‘You recently sent your personal assistant to St Olga to set up a supply and confidence deal with the Vorontsovs.’
‘The Moonport space elevator system,’ Anselmo Reyes says. ‘I know that we have relied on VTO’s mass-driver as the bargaining position of last resort, but coupled with a monopoly over access to trans-lunar space – Earth cannot agree to that.’
‘The price of our favour is this,’ Wang Yongqing says. ‘VTO has asked for a vote in council. You will veto it. This is not a democracy. Are we clear on that?’
‘My position could not be clearer,’ Lucas Corta says.
TWENTY-ONE
The car has been behind her for some time now, matching her pace as she swings along the track on her crutches. Crisp crackle of gravel, the pop of stones under the tyres. Marina feels it like a gun barrel pressed against the back of her neck.
‘I know it’s you, Kess,’ Marina shouts. ‘Just go past me!’
She hears the car pull up alongside. Kessie rolls down the window to shout.
‘Are you all right?’
Marina sets her jaw and her determination. Rhythm and swing. Timing is everything. Break the rhythm and you go down. You are a quadruped, remember. Quadrupedal.
‘I’m all right. Go away.’
The pick-up rolls along beside her. Kessie still leans on the window. Marina still swings along the dirt road to the cattle-grid that marks the edge of the world.
‘What do you want, Kess?’ Marina shouts.
‘Thought you might like to see the
eagle nest down on the river trail.’
Crutch step, crutch step.
‘The North Campsite nest?’ That eyrie has lodged in the dying pine as long as Marina can remember, a rickety slum of river-washed branches stacked year upon year, clutch upon clutch.
‘There’s a second hatching.’
‘Goodie for them.’
‘They’re still feeding the hatchlings.’
Marina stops, leans into her crutches.
‘What is you want, Kess?’
Her sister opens the pick-up door. Marina slings her crutches into the back of the pick-up and slides into the seat. Kessie turns neatly in the track and drives back past the house, past the white-painted cabin, past the barely stirring dogs on to the river track.
‘Dr Nakamura told you to rest up. Your bones are weak.’
‘My bones are my bones.’
The river track is a series of zig-zags down the steep western bank. The tyres kick up heavy, fragrant dust. It settles quickly. Moondust falls slow and brilliant: glitter and moonbows. Marina remembers the trails of dust thrown up from the wheels of the moonbikes by her and Carlinhos on their mad, wonderful ride to claim Mare Anguis for Corta Hélio. Their tracks would have been visible from space. That telescope on the back porch would have picked them up, two tiny scars across the upper shoulder of a full moon.
Kessie bowls the pick-up along a suggestion of track; tyre-tread in a dried-out puddle, snapped twigs, flattened grass. Marina feels every rock and rut. Kessie parks the pick-up a respectful distance from the nest-tree. The eyrie is enormous, a second crown to the dying pine tree. Some of the really old eyries weigh up to a ton. The desiccated grass beneath is spattered with droppings. The river finds new words among the stones and gravel.
‘Really; what do you want?’ Marina asks.
‘Are you going back?’ Kessie says. ‘And before you deny it, Mom told me.’
Marina tries to find comfort in the battered seat. She is never comfortable now. She has no comfort on this world. This chuckle of water, this seasoning of road dust, this high clear sky and somewhere, turning in it, the eagle, seem thin and translucent. Overlit, colours too bright. Lies. The tree is flat, insubstantial, paint on film. Set hand to that mountain and her fingers would go through it. The moon is ugly and the moon is cruel and the moon is unforgiving but she is only alive there.
‘It’s changed me, Kess. Not just physically. The moon knows a thousand ways to kill you. I’ve seen terrible things. I’ve seen people die. Horrific, stupid, pointless deaths. The moon doesn’t forgive, but Kess: life there, it’s so intense, so precious. They know how to live. Kids here, you turn seventeen, eighteen, you get the car, get drunk, throw a party. Kids there, you run bare-ass naked across ten metres of hard vacuum. They live every second of those ten metres.’
‘If you go back—’
‘I can’t ever leave.’
A space for river-talk and the click and creak of the wind in the fabric of the eagles’ nest.
‘Can you go back?’ Kessie won’t look at her. The two women sit in adjacent seats, worlds apart. ‘When you went up on the shuttle you said you felt like you were going to turn to lead and die. To do it again—’
‘I don’t know,’ Marina says. ‘If Lucas Corta could do it—’ She chokes on the memory, sudden and sharp as a bone in the throat, of Lucas Corta: trim, dapper, his beard neat, his hair brilliantined, his nails polished and his suit sharp as a Corta blade. Lucas Corta as she first saw him in Boa Vista, at the Moonrun party when she got the hosting job that had saved her from the slow suffocation of being unable to pay her Four Elementals. Late-capitalist asphyxiation. Go back to that, to not knowing who was paying for your next breath. Yes, more than anything. A dark speck turns circles in the sky: dead cells in the humour of her eye or an eagle?
‘You told me it almost killed Lucas Corta,’ Kessie says.
‘It did kill Lucas Corta,’ Marina says. ‘He came back. Lucas Corta is unkillable.’
‘You’re not.’
‘No, but I’m Earth-born. I’ve got the physiology. Train myself up.’
‘Is that what you were doing when you got run into the ditch?’ Kessie asks. ‘Is that why you were out today? Training?’
It is a bird, spiralling, wing-tips wide-feathered, feeling a path down through the air.
‘I hadn’t decided then.’
The eagle turns up where the river bends and glides in down the valley.
‘You’ve decided?’
‘I decided the moment I touched down. It’s ugly and its cruel and I was scared all the time and I was more alive in those twenty-four lunes than all my life before. This is shadows and fog, Kess.’
The eagle ghosts in, pulls up into a stall, feathers unfurled and drops on to the lip of the nest, scales and gore clenched in her claws.
‘Look,’ Kessie whispers. Heads appear over the eyrie’s rim, the eagle tears pale bleeding chunks from the fish for the open maws.
* * *
The hiking sticks are surer and more subtle than the crutches but Marina still takes the companionway to the fore-deck one fumbling step at time. Kessie is already at the rail. It’s a family ritual, to catch first sight of the Space Needle as the ferry rounds Bainbridge. It is never warm on the sound; Marina pulls her light jacket tight round her. In her years away the bland towers have shouldered in around the landmark building like bodyguards, even spread across Elliot Bay to West Seattle. An automated container ship negotiates passage out towards the strait and the ocean beyond; a cliff-face of moving metal. The ferry bobs across its wake and Kessie raises the cry.
‘She’s out!’
House Calzaghe had taken the ferry to the city at most twice a year – sometimes whole years had passed with them coming to Seattle and, though the first glimpse of the towers had been beacon of arrival, the sight of Mount Rainier had been the welcome. The long trips had become more frequent when Mom had been in hospital; sighting the mountain had become an oracle. If she stood high and clear, her snow-cap higher than any imagining, then all would be well. If clouds covered her, if it was raining, then prepare for setbacks and disappointments. But always: she. Rainier was a drowsing goddess, sitting head bowed over her city and islands.
‘She’s clear,’ Marina says but even over two years she can see that snows have melted deeper, the glaciers retreated higher. She can’t bear the thought of a snowless Rainier: a crownless queen.
The ferry swings in to the terminal and the passengers stream towards vehicles and exits. Kessie clears a path for Marina through the swarm of foot passengers but Marina finds the close press of bodies in the narrow walkway reassuring. The moon was people, all people, only people, all the way down.
The moto whirls them up between the dark towers. Every other pedestrian or cyclist seems to be wearing a breath-mask now. Another new and lethal bacterial evolution. Every moon-dweller’s great fear was of a new terrestrial disease arriving in the moon’s sealed cities and passing lung to lung through Meridian’s quadras, up Queen of the South’s high towers before medical resources could be mobilised against it. Plague on the moon.
VTO’s office is a glass and aluminium trinket in a prime site on the shore of Lake Union. Float-planes land and take off beside full-wall animations of cyclers over earth-rises.
‘Give me a hand here.’
Kessie holds Marina’s sticks while she shrugs off the jacket. Proud in her Corta Hélio T-shirt she hikes past the aspirant Jo Moonbeams in the lobby. Eyes catch, heads turn.
‘I’ve an appointment at the med centre,’ Marina says to the receptionist.
‘Marina Calzaghe,’ the receptionist says. He’s the definition of a VTO boy; tall, glossy, killing cheekbones. He squirts a location to Marina’s data assistant. ‘Welcome back. We don’t get much repeat traffic.’ As she grips her sticks he adds, ‘Like the retro shirt.’
The waiting area is busy. There will always be people ready to seek their fortune on the moon. Young people of all colours and na
tions, nervous and excited. The tests are psychological as well as physiological. Not everyone can tolerate the moon’s tight, claustrophobic society. Hopes will be crushed as well as elevated behind those white doors.
‘Corta Hélio.’ The young woman in the row in front of Marina and Kessie turned to take in her potential launch-mates and read the shirt.
‘Used to work for them,’ Marina says.
‘Which office?’
Marina jerks a thumb at the ceiling panels.
‘Head office. I was a duster.’
‘You worked up there?’
‘Two years. The maximum.’
‘So, I have a question,’ the woman says.
‘Ask away,’ Marina says.
‘If you went there, why did you ever come back?’
A white door opens.
‘Marina Calzaghe?’
* * *
The arms curl their fingers and fold into the cracks in the white walls. The panels close and seal leaving pure, sheer surface. Marina swings from the scanner couch. She left her hiking sticks by the door. It looks a longer walk back to them than from them.
‘Am I good, Doctor?’
Dr Jaime Gutierrez blinks back the reader lens over his eye.
‘Eighty-eight per cent probability of surviving launch,’ he says. ‘Maximum gee to orbit is two gees, effectively twelve gees lunar. It’ll not be comfortable but you’ve got good muscle armouring. You’ve been working out.’
‘The Long Run,’ Marina says, knowing that the doctor won’t understand and is too incurious to ask.
The doctor blinks his lens away.
‘One question: why?’
‘Is this part of the psychiatric assessment?’
‘I’ve never seen anyone go back. I’ve seen tourists and executives and university researchers and LMA staff on six months up, three months down rotation. But someone who’s worked the full two years? No. Once they’re down, they stay down.’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have come down,’ Marina says.
‘There’s someone, isn’t there?’ Dr Gutierrez says.