by Ian McDonald
And that is how Rosario Salgado O’Hanlon de Tsiolkovski wins.
‘Dakota, catch me!’
She launches herself towards the ghazi. Flying free. Flying untethered. If she misjudges, if Dakota mistimes her move, if the bot recovers too quickly from its disorientation, she flies into her own partial orbit. She won’t have to worry about the life-support limits of her ruined SE suit. Impacting East Tranquillity at two point seven-five kilometres per second will decide everything. She’ll be a crater. They might even name it after her.
And Dakota Kaur Mackenzie has her forearm tucked through Rosario’s belt. She’s worked it out. She hits the tether reel and flings the guttering flare at the bot as the winch snatches them away from a dismembering slash.
‘Xenia,’ Rosario shouts. ‘Spin the ship!’
‘We’re not at turnaround,’ Captain Xenia begins. Dakota shouts over her.
‘Do what she says! Three-sixty her!’
A pause. The bot scrambles towards them, blades held aloft like some many-armed deity of knives. Rosario hauls herself towards the lock, the latch, the carabiner at the other end of the tether.
‘Hold tight,’ Captain Xenia says. And the world wheels. Acceleration tears Rosario’s fingers from their grip. Dakota has her. Dakota has her. Moon stars sun spin around her. Don’t look. Don’t look, you’ll throw up in your helmet. She has to look. One glance over her shoulder is enough: the bot has lost its grip and is snapped by centripetal acceleration to the full extent of the tether. In a moment it will haul itself in. Orel tumbles across the lunar sky, a carnival of sputtering blue attitude jets. Rosario climbs up Dakota’s body to the edge of the airlock. She unsnaps the carabiner. It whips from her fingers. The bot flies free, following its own, helpless ballistic trajectory. They’ll name no craters after you, thing.
It’s all physics. It’s all momentum tether engineering.
‘Fuck off you old-school Type 3 bot,’ Rosario whispers. On comms she says, ‘Hostiles eliminated, Captain.’
‘Good work. Thank you,’ Captain Xenia says. ‘Now get in here.’
‘Good one, ghazi,’ Dakota Mackenzie says as the two women squeeze themselves into the lock. At that moment, in that place, those are the greatest words Rosario has ever heard. She knows the horror stories about vomiting inside a helmet in free fall. Are there any such legends about tears?
Gravity kicks, kicks again, attitude jets turning Orel into descent mode. Foetus-curled, bawling from strain and relief, smeared with a starburst of her own blood, Rosario Salgado O’Hanlon de Tsiolkovski falls towards the Sea of Fecundity.
* * *
Ariel sniffs at the administrative suites. She raises an eyebrow at the stale, windowless offices and looks askance at the refurbished boardroom. When she comes to Lucas’s eyeball-sanctum she can hide her disdain no longer.
‘Now I remember why I left this shit-hole.’
She whisks on, leaving a vaper trail to disperse slowly in the sluggish air conditioning.
‘Stone stone stone stone stone,’ Ariel complains as she descends the grand staircase to ground level.
‘Exit through the mouth,’ Alexia hints. Ariel rolls her eyes. On Oxala’s lip, Ariel stops, touches Alexia on the arm.
‘What is that?’
It takes Alexia a few peering moments to make out the object of Ariel’s interest. The accelerated-growth trees are in full leaf now, and the cupola half-glimpsed through the slow-stirring leaves is like an image from a dream. Old, perilous gods live here.
‘Take me there.’
Beija Flor could rez up a map of Boa Vista but Ariel enjoys setting small tasks, tests and traps in Alexia’s path. Iron Hand? Maybe to my brother, but Ariel Corta is not so easily swayed. As Alexia finds a path of stone flags winding through the bamboo, Ariel takes a long draw on her vaper. Marina killed an assassin with this vaper’s predecessor, stabbed him up through the jaw, drove the point out through the top of his skull. Jo Moonbeam strength. Strength enough to kill for love, strength enough to keep her through the dark time but not enough to stay. Since taking the Eyrie, Ariel’s thoughts have more and more gone to Marina. How do you find Earth? How does Earth find you? Does the light in the night sky fill you with longing, like a wolf? Do you look up and think of me?
What is your strength, Alexia who calls herself Mão de Ferro, and what in this world will break it? For something will.
The turning path ends at a pavilion; plinth, pillars, a dome. Water runs around the base of the plinth. Ariel climbs the steps. The air is fresh, made sweet by running water, the sunline is blue and the artificial wind rustles the bamboo. The canes screen the pavilion from the gaze of the orixas; it is an encircled, private place. Ariel walks the circle, stroking her fingers across the columns. Warm stone.
‘This is the place,’ Ariel declares. ‘I’ll need a desk, three chairs, one comfortable, the others not so. Beverages on demand. Can you arrange that?’
‘I have people on it now. Lucas has requested a private meeting.’
Ariel savours the moment.
‘Of course. Let him know where he can find me.’
Ariel hears his stick on the stones before she sees him emerge from the bamboo maze.
Human wreckage, meeting in the circle.
‘Our mother’s favourite place,’ Lucas says. ‘In the latter days she would come here to talk with Mãe de Santo Odunlade. Her confessor, Mamãe called her.’
‘Is there anything left of the Sisterhood?’ Ariel asks.
‘The madrinhas. The shrine in João. Legends,’ Lucas says. He leans into his cane. ‘Is that enough? I don’t know. I’m not a person of faith. This will be your office?’
‘Until I can move back to Meridian.’
‘There’s a thing I need to do first. Lucas, I can’t let you get away with it.’
Lucas smiles wryly, sags on his stick,
‘I thought this would come. I used to have dreams: burning, gasping for air. Drowning in molten metal. Horrific dreams.’
‘You did a horrific thing.’
‘I did it for Rafa, Carlinhos, our mother. You.’
‘Our debts are settled.’
‘They are now.’
‘You’ll retire gracefully,’ Ariel says. ‘Cultivate your garden. Become the two worlds’ greatest expert on bossa nova. Get into sports – you have your own handball team now. Learn politics, comment with insight and pungency. Raise your son.’
Ariel sees old pain tighten Lucas’s face.
‘It seems a light sentence.’
‘Is it?’ Ariel says. ‘Why did you want to see me, irmão?’
‘Why did you do it? Cortas don’t do politics. And here we are, a convocation of Eagles.’
‘Vidhya Rao showed me the future.’
For a moment Lucas can’t place the name.
‘The economist. Whitacre Goddard. Did er computers prophesy for you? What is it e calls them?’
‘The Three August Sages. No, e told me about a conversation e had with Wang Yongqing, Anselmo Reyes and Monique Bertin. E proposed er Lunar Bourse idea.’
‘I saw er present it.’
‘Were you there at the meeting where the terrestrials proposed funding it, on the basis that it needed no human input?’
‘What do you mean?’ Lucas shifts uncomfortably on his stick.
‘Vidhya Rao asked her computers to construct likely futures. They all foresaw a moon depopulated by disease. Plagues, Lucas. The terrestrials’ plan for us. A dark machine, grinding out value. I was the only one in a position to act. I had a clear path to the power to stop them.’
‘Use the codes.’
A command – and Beija Flor has laid them all out in plain vision, the options and powers of the Eagle of the Moon – and she could put every terrestrial to the blade.
‘We have to be better than them, Lucas.’
She will not commit another Ironfall.
‘They wouldn’t hesitate.’
She surveys the virtual array of commands
, edicts and executive functions. There. The work of a thought.
‘I won’t do that, Lucas.’
‘So be it.’ He purses thumb and fingers in the Corta salutation. ‘I will retire, but not gracefully. I intend to be as irritating and vexatious as I can be. Someone needs to hold you to account, sister.’
‘Lucas.’
He turns on the top step.
‘That thing I told you about. The one I needed to do first. I just did it.’
* * *
At Leeuwenhoek a VTO track-queen plugs her suit into the diagnostic port of the broken-down freight hauler.
Out on the glass-fields south of Abul Wafa a glasser sends his maintenance bots scurrying out in search of cracks.
In the helium-fields of Mare Anguis a duster uncaps a vac-pen and scrawls Corta Hélio across the Mackenzie Helium logo.
In Meridian in the Seven Funk hotshop on Tereshkova Prospekt the star noodle-maker twirls and stretches and pulls the fine dough while the customers gossip about the shocks and surprises of Corta versus Corta.
In Twé a horticulturist checks grow-tower availability and crossindexes it with AKA seed banks. She has heard there is to be a society wedding; Mackenzie-Vorontsova-Asamoah. Someone will have to supply the flowers.
In the eighty-seventh level of Queen of the South’s Perth Tower, a schoolkid glances away from her networked classmates to look out of the apartment window: what was that flicker in her bottom right corner of her eye? A flyer? She loves flyers.
In the bottom right corner of each of those eyes, of every eye, for all life and memory, there have been four tiny icons. Air, water, data, carbon: the Four Fundamentals.
And all at once, everywhere, those little lights go out.
First the panic. In half a century, those lights that spell life and health and wealth have never failed.
Then the whole moon holds its breath. Holds it, not knowing if there will be another one. Holds it until the eye bulge, the brain seethes red, the heart screams. Until it cannot be held any longer.
The moon exhales.
And inhales. No charge. No tick of bitsies in the little golden icon, no price notifications. Priceless. The second breath, and the third, and the one after that and the one after that. Breathing free.
Ariel Corta has abolished the Four Fundamentals.
* * *
The young man is very good-looking in that lunar way; tall, brown skin, soft brown eyes, dark hair, close-shaved to quantum levels. Tall of course and pleasingly put together. When she first came to the moon she had found the moon people unsightly; their proportions disproportionate, top heavy, limbs too long, joints subtly out of place. She has learned to see them by their own aesthetics, and by those, this man is most easy on the eye. And outside are five equally handsome compatriots, ready to storm the apartment should she conjure some opposition to him. A middle-aged functionary of the Lunar Mandate Authority, against a fit young Brasilian.
She wonders where he keeps the knife in that suit.
The fashion has changed again. She could never understand the lunar fascination with historical styles and retro fads. She knows they think her dowdy in her modest, political suit. She thinks them effete and reactionary.
‘Senhora Wang? My name is Nelson Medeiros. I have been sent by the Eagle of the Moon. If you please?’
He indicates the door.
The bots would have cut that sharp suit from around this cocksure puppy, then taken him to pieces. When the bots went into sleep and could not be made to obey, she knew this visit was inevitable.
‘So which is it to be?’ Wang Yongqing asks. ‘Out the airlock, or a blade through the cervical vertebrae?’
‘Senhora,’ Nelson Medeiros says. ‘You hurt my pride. That may be how you do things down there, but up here we are civilised people.’
The escoltas she imagined are waiting outside, with Monique and Anselmo, and a flock of motos waits.
‘We’re going to the station?’ Wang Yongqing asks. Anselmo and Monique never learned Meridian’s three-dimensional cartography, but she grew up in the sky-scraper towers of Guizhou and can read the levels and ramps and elevators like the corridors and crosswalks and overpasses of her childhood.
‘A railcar is waiting for you,’ Nelson Medeiros says. ‘You will be taken to a secure site, when you will remain in safety and comfort during the political transition.’
‘Hostages,’ Wang Yongqing says.
‘Hostages is an old-fashioned word,’ the Primo Escolta says. ‘This is a different moon. You are our guests.’
‘Guests who can’t check out.’
‘That depends on how eager your governments are to negotiate. But it will be six-star luxury.’
‘Where are you taking us?’
The young man’s smile is like a sky full of stars.
‘Boa Vista.’
* * *
‘So do I pass?’
‘You’re the Eagle of the Moon,’ Alexia Corta says.
Ariel Corta tuts in exasperation.
‘What did my brother ever see in you? Pass.’ She sweeps a theatrical hand down the front of her attire.
Dress; Cristobal Balenciaga 1953, Maninho says. Alexia knows nothing and cares less than nothing about 1950s couture. Black unlined wool trimmed with finely ribbed silk satin. Hat by Aage Thaarup, shoes by Roger Vivier, bag and gloves by Cabrelli.
Alexia adjusts the set of the Thaarup cartwheel hat.
‘Perfect.’
‘You’re a shit liar, Mão de Ferro. And are you going to introduce me in that?’
How many times has Alexia attended here, in the antechamber to the Pavilion of the New Moon, fussing over the lie of his cufflinks, the set of his tie, the drape of his jacket, with Lucas? Habits and superstitions that quickly became rituals.
‘I like this look,’ Alexia says. She has only just learned how to wear 1940s style. She likes the forties. She can rock the forties.
‘You like to look like a refugee,’ Ariel says.
‘How did anyone ever work with you?’Alexia says.
Ariel beams at the defiance.
‘Because they adored me, darling. Well, that’ll have to wait. Impatient Dragons are irritable Dragons. Now, I want you to go in and give me the kind of introduction a god would envy.’
‘Lucas had a … thing.’
‘Thing?’
‘From the old days. The first days. “Sers: the Eagle has Landed”.’
Ariel hisses in distaste.
‘That’s ridiculous, darling. My name, my title, and a bit of swish time.’
‘Okay, senhora.’
Ariel’s smile is genuine now.
‘I’m fucking terrified, you know,’ she confides.
‘You faced down Lucas in the Court of Clavius,’ Alexia says.
‘That was my territory. My domain. Here I have no idea what I’m doing.’
‘If it’s any help, Lucas didn’t either,’ Alexia says.
‘I sat on the other side of the floor when Jonathon Kayode abolished the LDC,’ Ariel says. ‘He didn’t know either. No one does.’
‘You’re a hero. You abolished the Four Fundamentals, you arrested the terrestrials…’
‘Gave them to Lucas to look after,’ Ariel says brightly. ‘You make me laugh, Mão. Right. Show time.’
As Alexia opens the door to the council chamber floor she catches Ariel de-correcting her correction to the tilt of the Thaarup hat. Alexia steps into the light. The familiar council murmur falls silent. Through the glare she can see the tiers reserved for the Dragons and great families filled, the sector kept for the terrestrials empty. Arrayed along the gallery at the rear are academics, heads of faculties, deans from the University of Farside.
‘Sers,’ she says. ‘Ariel Corta, the Eagle of the Moon.’
Ariel takes Alexia’s place under the spotlights. Her face is hidden beneath the wide brim of her hat. The silence is total. She looks up, smiles, throws wide her arms. And the Pavilion of the Full Moon thunders with
voices.
* * *
‘You call me the moment you get in, you hear?’
Robson rolls his eyes and tries to drift away across the station’s thronged concourse to the escalators down to the platforms but the Earth is bright and Wagner Corta has the eyes and reactions of a wolf and he moves effortlessly to follow the boy.
‘Okay okay, the moment I get in.’
Wagner knows he is being overprotective. He signed the coparenting agreement with Max and Arjun; Robson will live with Haider when the Earth is round and Wagner goes back to the pack. They are honest, they are kind, they are loving and they are trustworthy to the extent that they have changed jobs and moved to Hypatia to break the link with Theophilus. Robson will be safe and happy and cared for. But who can blame Wagner for being overprotective, after the horrors of Theophilus and the assassination of Bryce Mackenzie at João de Deus?
Assassination. A thirteen-year-old kid drove five poison needles into Bryce Mackenzie’s eyeballs. One would have killed him sure as stone. Five was to advertise to the whole moon that this was the slow justice of the Cortas. Poison needles procured by that kid’s uncle, brought to him by his best friend. Poison needles he hid in his hair, because Bryce wanted him naked and vulnerable.
Wagner can’t think of that. In the bright of the Earth, emotions burn hotter and more fiercely and Wagner cannot look too long at the failure and weakness and inadequacy he feels when he thinks of Robson a hostage. A toy.
Lucas had done what he could not. Lucas had wrought the revenge. Not out of any senze of loyalty to his own brother – to his nephew – but for the name of Corta. Family first. Family always.
It was for family that Analiese had betrayed Robson. He loathes her but he can’t blame her. The Five Deaths of the Asamoahs were not enough for Bryce Mackenzie.
The train is in, the crowd move towards the stairs. Wagner and Robson ride down, side by side. Gods. The kid is getting big. It seems only hours since they escaped this city under the protection of a Mackenzie debt, and Robson had been a cute kid sleeping on his shoulder as the train ran east towards the Sea of Tranquillity.