Luna: Moon Rising

by Ian McDonald

  ‘You don’t have to come with me to the lock,’ Robson says as they step off the escalator. The train waits beyond the pressure glass, a big double-decker Equatorial Express. Meridian is still giddy and disbelieving, almost hung-over after Ariel’s abolition of the Four Elementals. A pillar of life, knocked away, and yet the roof of the world stands. The quadras glitter with excitement. What next? Abolish the Court of Clavius and have laws? An election? Politics? The contagion of enthusiasm has spread even to the crowds boarding the Equatorial Express: there are smiles, people give way to others, there is laughing and chat and a sense of leisure that comes when every breath is no longer an entry in a profit and loss account.

  Robson stands obdurately between Wagner and the lock, making it as clear as he can that this is the place of parting.

  ‘I’ll see you in João,’ Wagner says. He takes up the new position as soon as the Earth diminishes. Corta Hélio is back, but it will never be what it was. The Helium Age is over, a new age is beginning. The Suns empower, the Mackenzies mine, the Asamoahs grow and the Vorontsovs fly. What do the Cortas do now?

  The Cortas do politics.

  Wagner and Robson embrace long and close. There is still nothing to the boy; he is wire and bone.

  ‘See you in João,’ Robson says. He turns at the lock. ‘Pãe…’

  Wagner heart turns over.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Robson blushes, then looks up, fierce and determined.

  ‘Pãe!’

  ‘What, filho?’

  ‘Look after yourself.’

  Then he turns and passes through the lock into the great train and Wagner turns, his heart burning, his breath catching, his throat tight and rides the escalators up into the light of Meridian and the high, blue Earth and the place where the wolves are waiting.

  * * *

  In one, two, three steps Robson is twenty metres up in the roof-world. New city, new infrastructure to run. Hypatia is a much larger city than Theophilus and its secret traceur geography very much more exciting. Here are dark shafts so deep they return echoes, vaults so high they have their own weather. Piping runs from which he can spy, unsuspected, on whole districts. Gantries and ducts, ladders and handholds. Older too: Robson’s early explorings deep into the inner city found names and dates from the last century. Thick dust. These old, virgin places drew him. His church, his healing place.

  Robson understands why Max and Arjun had brought him and Haider straight from Meridian to this new city. Theophilus would always smell of blood and fear to Robson. But Haider had found Analiese.

  I see it, Haider said. I see her every day. In the corner of my eye, something moves and I look and she’s there.

  He came back every day to the Church of Dust until he found the footprint. A gripsole, small. Pace long. A traceur’s tread. The perfection was defiled so he added his own prints to the trail as he tracked the runner’s course through the dust and a tic-tac up between two pipes to a duct node.

  Another runner. He was not alone.

  At first he felt a knotted, resentful anger.

  Anger is good, his therapist said, anger is right. It’s where the anger takes you.

  Driving poison needles into Bryce Mackenzie’s eyes, that’s where, he wanted to say every session. Wanted to say, but never said. He saved that anger for the dust, where he could take it out and look at it and ask it to lead him across the pristine dust to somewhere new. Until someone else ran the dust before him. That is a different anger, one that half-lifed quickly into a different emotion: curiosity, excitement. Another runner.

  He loves Haider, Haider is half of his soul, but he is not and never can be a runner and the thing between runners can’t be explained to anyone who is not a runner.

  He’s not alone.

  ‘Ey-ho.’

  That is Haider. Robson vaults a thick water-pipe on to a narrow gantry and sits, legs dangling into the drop. There is Haider, looking up, the only dark on him the flop of hair over his eye.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, it makes me sick,’ he calls up.

  ‘Then come on up,’ Robson says.

  Haider makes an obscene gesture.

  ‘You cut your therapist again.’

  After Theophilus, after what Lucas Corta made them do in the name of family, after João de Deus, Robson and Haider have been prescribed therapy. It will be months of work, the doctors said. Maybe years.

  ‘Mine’s human,’ Robson says.

  Haider grimaces as if he had tasted sick.

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since I started being obstructive with the AI.’

  ‘“Being obstructive”?’

  ‘That’s what Damien calls it.’

  ‘Your therapist is called Damien?’

  ‘He’s called Damien and he smiles too much.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Haider says, ‘it’s easier if you just talked to the AI.’

  ‘I like it here.’

  ‘It will work.’

  ‘Everything works. Nothing works.’

  ‘Something for you.’ Haider holds up a hand. In his palm is a small package wrapped in exquisite fabric. It sits eaily, comfortably. Robson’s breath catches.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘It was delivered to Max and Arjun,’ Haider calls. ‘It’s from the Palace of Eternal Light. Do you think it’s…’

  Robson pushes himself off the crosswalk. Haider’s eyes go wide but twenty metres is nothing to someone who once fell three thousand metres. And got up and walked. A few steps. He puts out his arms to let his baggy shirt parachute and break the fall. Robson Corta lands coiled, elastic on his feet. He shakes out his high-piled hair.

  ‘… Safe?’ Haider concludes.

  ‘Safe now,’ Robson says and takes the small pack, and unwraps the beautiful fabric. Half a deck of cards. As he suspected. ‘Thank you, Darius,’ Robson whispers.

  ‘Darius?’ Haider asks. ‘Like, that Darius?’

  Robson takes his cards from the pocket of his parkour-shorts, lays the half-deck on top, riffles, shuffles. Together again. Whole.

  ‘That Darius. I’ll explain. Not now. Hey, I’ve found a new hotshop to try out.’

  ‘Might give that a go,’ Haider says. A kid’s hotshop is important. More important than therapy. It’s the heart of their social life. It’s where your friends are.

  ‘Okay,’ Robson says. ‘Let’s check out the horchata in this town.’

  * * *

  Wang Yongqing has requested another meeting; her fifth since arriving in Boa Vista.

  ‘What is it this time?’ Lucas Corta asks Toquinho.

  Access to printers, his familiar replies. Some of the financial delegates have had to wear the same clothes three days in a row.

  Lucas sighs. He turns in his chair to look out over the lush green leafscapes of his kingdom. He had dreamed of wildness. Instead he is warden of a gilded jail. It’s a poetic punishment.

  ‘My schedule?’ Toquinho shows him an array of slots. ‘Postpone Naomi Allain; standard apologies. Move Senhora Wang into her slot.’ There is little Lucas can do; resources are stretched and it is more politic for any new printers to be sent to João de Deus. Wang Yongqing will make her protest, standing as ever. He will issue more standard apologies and then he will invite her to sit and they will talk. She is a good conversationalist. Art, politics, the ways of two worlds. Jazz. She is an aficionado. She is too intelligent ever to make the mistake of assuming that they have an enemy in common. Family first. Family always.

  Still, they pass the time, these small exchanges.

  The conversation will be especially good today. In her inaugural address to the new Lunar Assembly, Ariel gave name to the thing that has haunted every imagination since the ecstasy at the ending of the Four Fundamentals wore off. Euphoria has a short half-life. Independence. Ariel can be relied on for a rhetorical flourish but Lucas, in his internal exile, routinely intercepts the communications between Earth and its representatives on the moon an
d the words are darkening, the tone hardening, the attitudes turning to stone.

  He could be here for a long time if Ariel decides to hold the terrestrials as guarantors of Earth not nuking Meridian and Queen of the South. He does not doubt that there would be one warhead with João de Deus vacuum-markered on the side. Wang Yongqing will have the most wonderful horror stories to chill him over their tea and modal jazz.

  It won’t happen. The terrestrials think they are tough and can cut a shrewd deal but they haven’t grown up negotiating every breath of air, every sip of water, every scrap of shelter scratched from the rock. They haven’t argued for their lives with Dona Luna. Ariel will always pull the malandragem move.

  It will be a hard-won independence. The moon-kind are small in number, their weapons few and their enemies great as the number of stars in the sky. But they hold the high place. That, Lucas Corta thinks, will be enough.

  Toquinho chimes. Your delivery from Queen of the South.

  He has not seen this escolta before. Wagner sends them over from João on rapid rotation. It would not do for security to become too familiar with the secured. The wolf is working well in João: the de-Mackenzie-isation is straightforward. Revenge attacks are few though there is still friction between Santinhos and former Mackenzie Helium dusters who have contracted to the resurgent Corta Hélio. Disrespects, cold shoulders, glances and looks. ‘This is a Brasilian city, speak Portuguese!’ Squarings-up, facings-off; flash-fire fights. As long as the helium flows. Wagner, who has worked on the glass, understands that the future of fusibles lies in space, not on Earth.

  The delivery is a long, shallow impact-case. Lucas trusts it has not been sent by BALTRAN. Where everything is printed, shipping hand-made goods is a vanishing skill. The delivery sits in his desk but Lucas hesitates to unseal it. To open it is to accept the challenge within; to let it test his courage and commitment. Yet he aches to snap the locks and hold the thing inside in his hands, press it against his body, explore its curves and contours.

  Robson is with Haider in Theophilus. The adoption will be straightforward and Wagner is the only one who can begin to heal the wounds driven deep into that boy. Lucas’s hand made some of those wounds. He almost believes that all he did was enable the kid’s rage but self-delusion has never been Lucas Corta’s sin. He wielded Robson like a blade of meteoric iron.

  Luna is with her mother in Twé. Eldritch child. Her painted face, half living, half skull, has become lunar legend; the symbol of hope, persistence and justice. Lucas cannot shake the notion that it will always be there, within her skin.

  Lucasinho is preparing for his first independent visit. He is going to Meridian to see Abena Asamoah. Lucas argued firmly against it – not that the journey might be too much for Lucasinho, but that Abena Asamoah would eat him alive. Dangerous, ambitious, hungry young woman. The spaces and sinuses of Oxala had rung to shouting voices. The strength of Lucasinho’s resistance was what had convinced Lucas to let him go. That zashitnik will be going with him. Lucas can’t remember her name, but she was handy on the flight of the Orel. He might offer her a permanent contract.

  What wreckage we are, each and every one of us.

  But the family is away and he has nothing but a day of meetings and a special delivery from Queen of the South.

  ‘Toquinho, cancel my ten thirty.’ He opens the locks, removes the lid. ‘And my eleven and eleven thirty.’

  He lifts out the guitar case and sets it on his desk. Every instinct is to open it at once but that would rush the experience. Everything has its pleasures and perfections. Lucas Corta runs his fingers over the true leather, the bright brass hasps and hinges. Then he snaps the catches and opens the case.

  What strikes him first is the perfume. Wood, priceless organic varnishes, natural resins and polishes; Lucas almost reels at the aroma. Then he sees the colours, sungolds and ambers, dark mahogany, mother-of-pearl lozenges hand-cut from Twé-farmed shellfish between the frets, the halo of marquetry around the sound-hole. He picks it up like a newborn. It is light and muscular and filled with life. He sits down carefully but the guitar tells him how to hold it, where to place it, how to meet its body with his.

  He wants it to speak, to welcome its first vowels, to hear its tone and voice, but his fingers hesitate over the strings.

  He knows nothing. Less than nothing.

  That is the beginning of any relationship: strangers drawn to each other.

  Can he do it? He has the time, the dedication, the discipline to learn hard things, but is there more? What if, after years of study and practice and learning, he realises he will never be able to make those strings whisper and laugh like João Gilberto?

  It will still have been a journey worth taking. Perhaps only João Gilberto could be João Gilberto, and all that is necessary is for Lucas Corta to be Lucas Corta. Still, some day, some year; it will be good to duet with Jorge Mauro.

  His fingers strike the strings. It is out of tune. Irrational to have expected concert pitch to survive the trip from Queen of the South.

  So, tuning then. The first thing that he will perform every day of his playing life.

  All good work is the work of a lifetime.

  * * *

  Flour, sugar, butter, eggs.

  The four fundamentals of cake.

  The connections between his reforged memories still surprise Lucasinho Corta. Think of Abena Maanu Asamoah and his memory says, Cake.

  ‘I made cake?’ he asked Jinji.

  You were famous for it, Jinji says and throws up a montage of images of parties, surprises, gifts, culminating in him anointing Abena Asamoah’s chakras with real cow-cream from his strawberry gateau.

  ‘I’m bringing cake,’ Lucasinho says.

  Jinji calls up recipes but none of them are worthy of Abena.

  ‘Is there a thing called coffee cake?’ Lucasinho asks.

  There is, Jinji says and shows him how to make it. The ingredients are rare – one unobtainable in the political climate, but printers can synthesise a coffee flavouring that will pass for anyone who has never tasted the true bean – and the equipment dauntingly technical.

  I can requisition a catering microwave oven, Jinji says.

  ‘Will it make a difference?’

  As much as the synthetic coffee.

  Flour. Lucasinho frowns at the white powder. He sticks a finger into it. Surprised by the silky liquidity, he pushes his hand into the bowl, feels it flow over his skin, through his fingers.

  Sugar. He sniffs the crystals, moistens a fingertip, dips, tastes. Images flood through him, a torrent of sense-memories so vivid and poignant he reels back against the cook-room wall.

  Butter. Congealed cow-fat. He takes the pat, squeezes it through his fingers, enjoys the greasy unctuousness. He rubs a smear along each cheekbone. It feels dirty and sexy.

  Eggs. He holds each one up before him, marvels at its perfect completeness. It is a universe in the palm of his hand. Yet it came out of a living creature. He shakes his head.

  From such unpromising materials, he must work magic.

  Coffee cake says, I would move the Earth in the sky to make you happy. He remembers he said that, somewhere, to someone. Luna. On the dark walk.

  The bowls, the bakeware, the implements, the flavourings and decorations are to hand. Something is missing. Something is not right. Lucasinho takes a deep breath. Then he kicks off his shoes, slips his shirt over his head. He draws in his belly muscles, unfastens his pants and lets them fall. He steps out of them, kicks them away.

  Naked, he stands ready for cake.

  He cracks his fingers, lifts the butter and begins. Above him, beyond the curved brow of Oxala, beyond the artificial sky of Boa Vista, the bare, airless, radiation-blasted surface of the Sea of Fecundity stretches beyond the edge of seeing.

  GLOSSARY

  Many languages are spoken on the moon and the vocabulary cheerfully borrows words from Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Yoruba, Spanish, Arabic, Akan.

  Pronunciatio
n guide: in Portuguese, nh is pronounced like a Spanish ñ. Lucasinho is approximately ‘Lucasinyo’. The diphthongs ãe and ão are nasal, almost an ‘n’ sound.

  A: common contraction for asexual.

  Abusua: group of people who share a common maternal ancestor. AKA maintains them and their marriage taboos to preserve genetic diversity.

  Adinkra: Akan visual symbols that represent concepts or aphorisms.

  Afilhada: goddaughter.

  Amor: lover/partner.

  Amory: polyamorys, one of the moon’s many forms of partnering and marriage.

  Anjinho: little angel. Corta term of endearment.

  Auriverde: the Brasilian flag.

  Banya: Russian sauna and steam bath.

  Beija Flor: Hummingbird.

  Blackstar: AKA surface worker (derived from the nickname of the Ghana national football team).

  Boceta: Brasilian slang for vagina.

  Bogan: Australian slang for a vulgar person of low status.

  Bruxa/Bruxaria: witch/craft.

  Chib: a small virtual pane in an interactive contact lens that shows the state of an individual’s accounts for the Four Elementals.

  Coracão: my heart. A term of endearment.

  Cunhada: sister-in-law.

  Escolta: bodyguard.

  Feijoada: a Rio de Janeiro bean and meat stew. An icon of the city.

  Four Elementals: air, water, carbon and data: the basic commodities of lunar existence, paid for daily by the chib system.

  Gatinha: kitten/young woman.

  Globo: a simplified form of English, the lingua franca of the moon, with a codified pronunciation comprehensible by machines.

  Ghazi: Arabic knight-of-the-faith. On the moon, a warrior-scholar of the University of Farside.

  Gupshup: the main gossip channel on the lunar social network.

  Humpy: Western Australian slang for a rough shack.

  Irmã/Irmão: sister/brother.

  Jackaroo: Mackenzie Metals slang for a surface worker, from an Australian word for a male apprentice sheep-station hand.