by Ian McDonald
‘I know that,’ Luna said. ‘I meant, see him. You’ve blocked my familiar.’
‘There’s nothing to see, Luna. Just a young man in a medical coma, and a lot of machines.’
‘Have you taken the top off his head?’ Luna said. Dr Gebreselassie started, taken aback by the girl’s directness.
‘Would you like to see the protein chips?’ the doctor said, leaning forward in her seat. She hadn’t crouched down to Luna’s height. That would have been insulting.
‘Show me,’ Luna said and her lens filled with wonders; like Meridian if the walls and sunline were like the prospekts, and those great canyons branched off into tens more, and those into tens more.
She blinks away the graphic.
‘Cities with people in them,’ Luna declares.
‘People and voices,’ Dr Gebreselassie says. ‘And memories. That’s where we need you. We can give him basic things like walking and language but the things that make him Lucasinho – his memories, they’ve been damaged. Very badly damaged. But the network is full of memories. We can give him those memories on the protein chips and in time, as we rebuild the connectome, those memories will become his own memories.’
‘I know this,’ Luna says. ‘You want me to give my memories to him.’
Dr Gebreselassie has a head-rolling gesture she makes when something is not quite correct in her world.
‘We can’t go in there,’ she says. She reaches a finger towards Luna’s painted forehead. A glare from the death-eye of Lady Luna stops her cold. ‘The network has his memories and your memories. We need your permission to use them.’ She sees the disappointment on Luna’s face. ‘If you want, you can review some of them as we download them to the chips.’
‘I’d like that,’ Luna says. ‘It would be like being with him. Where do I go?’
‘You don’t need to go anywhere,’ Dr Gebreselassie says. ‘We can access them anywhere.’ Again, she has overspoken and Luna is crestfallen. ‘But we can find a room for you. A special room.’ Still the frown. ‘And a special bed.’
‘And granita?’ Luna asks.
‘What’s your favourite?’
‘I don’t have favourites,’ Luna says. ‘I am an explorer. Strawberry, mint and cardamom.’
‘Deal.’ Dr Gebreselassie extends a hand.
‘You don’t deal with me. I’m the Corta of Corta Hélio. I deal with you.’ Luna solemnly reaches out a hand. Dr Gebreselassie solemnly shakes it.
Strawberry and mint: good. Strawberry and cardamom: okay. Cardamom and mint: weird. Strawberry, mint and cardamom: another failed experiment in granita. Luna sucks the glass dry because she doesn’t want to look like an explorer who only went halfway to Platinum Mountain and gave up. She lies back on the bed. It’s comfortable and more importantly it looks right. Otherwise this med centre is everything she hates about all the other med centres she’s been in: over-bright, over-warm, smells like it has something to hide and no one ever has time for a nine-year-old girl.
‘Tell Dr Gebreselassie I’m ready,’ she orders Luna-familiar.
Okay, Luna, make yourself comfortable and we’ll begin, Dr Gebreselassie’s voice and face say on the lens. Luna closes her eyes. In the darkness behind her eyelids, the memory show begins.
She cries out. She is in Boa Vista again, Boa Vista full of green and life, light and water and warmth. The serene, full-lipped faces of the orixas watch over her as she explores the river, wading barefoot through pools, scrambling up the small cascades and falls, her dress soaked through. A drone floats over her head, her madrinha’s watching presence. The detail goes far beyond her own memory; she hears every leaf stir, sees every shadow and ripple, imagines she feels the cool cool water between her toes, smells the warm verdure of old Boa Vista. Noises from a stand of tall, swaying bamboo distract her from her mission: there are paths cut through the canes, irresistible to young explorers. The tracks wind in: she glimpses movement through the screen of wands. The path delivers her to a clearing in the centre of the grove. There is Lucasinho, on the growing edge of kidhood, wearing a long-skirted, flowing sky-blue dress and make-up.
‘Lady Luna, Queen of the Moon!’ he cries and curtsies deep to Luna. ‘Yemenja Queen of the Waters welcomes you to her grand ball!’ He bends down to take her hands and half-squatting, half-bounding they dance around the clearing, laughing and laughing and laughing.
‘How old was I?’ she asks Luna-familiar.
Three, says the grey-silver ball hovering over her chest. Lucasinho was thirteen.
Now he is fifteen and she is five and they are in his apartment in Xango’s eye. He has tasked some long-armed, high-precision bots and they are passing a long evening playing with faces. Each programs their bot to spray-paint them a new face: the winner is the one who gets the biggest reaction. She remembers this. She doesn’t want to see it again, in detail that time has dimmed. The animal faces, the theatre masks, the high-fashion make-ups and the fight-faces of the martial artists. Demons and angels, skulls and bones. Then Lucasinho turns away from her and the bot arm is busier than she has ever seen it, weaving and dancing and dodging in and out, drawing circles, making sudden runs across Lucasinho’s hidden face.
He turns back to her.
His face is eyes. Nothing but eyes. A hundred eyes.
She screamed then. She screams now. She fled then, but she stays now. She can look at the face of a hundred eyes. She has seen worse.
Now she is six and she goes by her secret path to her special pool that is fed by Iansa’s tears but Lucasinho has found the secret path to her special pool and he’s in it, with a friend, and they’re both naked and looking at each other and when she says, This is my pool, they turn round and go Oh, hey and step away from each other. Now Luna can understand what they were doing but then all she said was, Well, I’m going to join you and they fled like she had poured poison into the water.
The boy’s name was Daystar Olawepu, Luna-familiar tells her. He was in Lucasinho’s colloquium in João de Deus. Luna realises now that the reason they ran was not because she had caught them playing with each other’s penises, but because Lucasinho had smuggled the boy through the security grid. And she thinks, But he didn’t get past the security grid, because the security grid checked everyone. Daystar was let through. And she thinks, Daystar is a pretty name.
Now she is seven and Boa Vista is full of movement and music and lights and people in wonderful clothes and she is chasing ornamental butterflies between the guests. She is in a white dress with bold red peonies and wherever she goes she is told how pretty she looks. There is Lucasinho with his Moonrun friends and she tells the Mackenzie girl she likes her freckles but Lucasinho chases her away because she was just a kid. But it was all right because there was Tia Ariel, and Lucas and Carlinhos and Wagner and Grandmother Adriana. She tries to cling to the memory of Lucasinho’s Moonrun party because it was the last time she remembers Boa Vista as a happy place. But the torrent of remembering is relentless: millions of moments recorded, tagged, stored. Before Luna can remember, her familiar was remembering. The idea makes her head swim.
Luna knows what would clear it.
A new combination: cardamom, vanilla, cashew. That’s sure to be a success.
‘On my own?’
‘All on your own,’ Dr Gebreselassie says. Luna had been exploring the more accessible of the med centre’s tunnels and ducts when Luna-familiar got the message. Coriolis is old, much older than Boa Vista; its roots go deep into the crater rim. She followed corridors thick with dust, peeked through lock portholes into labyrinths of passages depressurised and sealed; peered into shafts that dived deep into the city’s past and returned a satisfying echo when she shouted her name. Then Luna-familiar told her that Lucasinho was awake and she could see him and she came running.
‘You did put the top back on his head?’ Luna says.
Dr Gebreselassie does her
head-roll movement.
‘We don’t do that. Go on. Go see him.’
He is sitting up. His eyes are closed, his breathing is shallow. He is terribly thin and pale. Luna can see the skull in his face. His arms, lying loose on the sheet, are like chopsticks. His chest is like a tent stretched over spars. Jinji his familiar hovers over his head, folded up into a orrery of spinning wheels within wheels. Luna has never seen a familiar do that before.
Jinji is in minimal interface mode, Luna-familiar says. It’s editing and processing petabytes of archived biographical information.
Luna tiptoes towards the bed. She can feel the room’s suspension yield beneath her footsteps. She senses machines in the walls, the floor, the low ceiling. She cannot lose the feeling that they scurried out of sight the moment she touched the door handle, and that the moment she touches it again, they will snake out of their secret places through his skin, into Lucasinho.
‘Lucasinho?’
His eyes open. He sees her. Recognises her.
‘Luna.’
The regulars in the elevator see it, and smile. It’s a bright thing on a working morning. The Eyrie security see it and nod. The Eagle’s back-office coders see it and whisper. Lucas’s domestics and service see it and wink. Alexia rolls past, moonwalking, beaming.
The Iron Hand has had sex.
Lucas is in the Orange Pavilion: a canopy, two seats, a stone table at the end of the tree terraces, a bead on the lip of Meridian Hub.
‘You’re late.’
‘Sorry.’ She can’t keep herself from grinning. Professional. ‘How is the case?’
‘We’re agreeing judges and legal system. Between Meridian, Queen and Farside, we’ve disbarred twenty-two in the last twenty-four hours.’ Lucas sips mint tea from a tulip glass. He makes no offer of one to Alexia. He knows she loathes it. Lucas sets down the fragile bulb of tea. ‘I want him here, Alexia. I want him with me. I forget you’ve never met him. You’ve heard the talk; that he’s a wastrel, a playboy. But he is kind and he is brave. Much braver and kinder than me. He took the Moonrun. I never did that. He saved Kojo Asamoah’s life. He went back, in vacuum, to save him. Everyone forgets that about him. The Asamoahs didn’t. Lê.’
Alexia stiffens. Lucas has never used the apelido with her before.
‘I need you to go to St Olga. You will meet with representatives of VTO Moon, Space and Earth.’
The inner smile, the just-fucked glow, the jaunty catwalk of sexual superiority: frozen solid. She may have spoken the word no aloud.
Lucas continues. ‘Yevgeny Vorontsov came to see me. He has a proposition – an offer. I am inclined to hear his offer. I can’t go – I need to look spotless and sinless to the LMA.’
‘When?’ Alexia asks.
‘Tomorrow,’ Lucas says.
‘Tomorrow?’
Lucas Corta lifts an eyebrow.
‘There is a problem?’
‘No problem.’
She will have to move fast and hard. Compress all her plans down into diamond. If there is one night, then it will be a night that will shake Meridian to its roots.
‘Good,’ Lucas Corta says. ‘And what is making you grin?’
It’s not the greatest hotel. It’s unfashionably high, there is nowhere to eat, the room smells of overworked air and underworked sanitation and the cleaning bots don’t get into the corners.
Let me book the Meridiana, Alexia pleads. It’s nice. My treat. I can afford it. The Meridiana is Meridian’s second best hotel – the best, the six-star Han Ying, is permanently booked for LMA and visiting terrestrials – but he insists. The Lodge of Celestial Peace or nothing. The Jack of Blades is a hunted man.
‘I’m a traitor,’ he says. ‘My own family threw me out. My own father disowned me. I’m a pariah.’
What? Alexia says but he opens the door to the smelly, too small room and sees the bed. ‘Oh fuck me gods,’ he says and collapses on to it like a crashing satellite. He is asleep, snoring, smiling like a baby by the time Alexia gets back from the bathroom.
She finds a way to wake him up. They fuck, they fight, they work out their sexual fantasies on each other’s bodies, they leave deep marks on each other’s flesh and hearts, they laugh and scream and cry and shout the filthiest of blasphemies. They sleep, exhausted by each other’s bodies.
They go to it again. They fuck again and again, again and again. They blow each other. He rolls her up into the piledriver position and though the blood pounds in her brain to the rhythm of his cock she is willing to give him the control and the humiliation. As long as he gives her gamahuche immediately after.
They sleep again.
Alexia is woken by the empty space at her side. She rolls over, sees him perched like a bird on the sole chair. He looks out of the small porthole. Antares Quadra is in night-shift; silver-blue light beams through the glass. In its light every scar on his body is livid, a terrain of rilles and ridges. He looks up into the light and Alexia sees a kid, not much older than the ones he fights for up in Bairro Alto.
His beauty stops her heart.
‘I’ve done terrible things,’ he says. ‘Hideous things. Blood; years of it. You never get the smell out of your head. It’s the light. I feel the knife in my hand and the light comes. It’s terrible and it’s brilliant and it fills everything. Everything is beautiful in that light. I see things no one else can. I can see to the edge of the universe. That light; it’s the only way I can see clear. I love the light. I hate what I do but there’s no other way to see it. And I have to have it.’
He looks across the room at her. His skin is steel blue in the Antares night.
‘They made me for killing, Lê. First Blade. When I wouldn’t do what they wanted, they threw me out.’
‘Coraçao.’
‘Still freaks me, Portuguese.’
Alexia pulls back the sheet, pours a glass from the bottle of vodka in the ice bucket on the bedside table. He shakes his head to the vodka but slips in beside her, curled up against her warmth. Alexia runs her hand the length of his flank. She can feel every scar. He is trembling.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Hey.’
‘I never told anyone that.’
She kisses his cheek; old-fashioned, chaste. She lies beside him until he falls into sleep. He twitches, gives small cries. She lies a time longer, until the nightmares end, and longer still, until she is sure she can move. She extricates her arm from under his shoulder. He mutters something.
First Blade.
Alexia summons Maninho. She fixes the sleeping man in her lens.
Who is he? she asks silently.
The answer comes back immediately.
Denny Mackenzie.
She dresses quickly, silently. Closes the door, slips on shoes in the corridor: go fast go sure. Never look back. A glance would turn her to salt. Don’t stop. You can’t stop. If you heard him say your name behind you, you would turn. You would tell him everything.
I destroyed your family. I killed your grandfather. I smelted your city to slag.
She hits the elevator call. Where to? Maninho asks on behalf of the elevator.
‘Down,’ she whispers. Her chest heaves. ‘All the way. Get me a moto. Book me a railcar to St Olga.’
The car is empty and she sits back to the wall, knees pulled up to her chest. Sobbing bottomless, shuddering cries of destitution, she drops down through Antares Quadra’s jewel-bright night.
You killed Carlinhos. The light kindled inside you and you drove him to his knees and slit his throat, stripped him and hung him from a crosswalk. And you were beautiful and I loved you. And I am the coward who ran rather than face you with the truth of who I am.
Get up. You’re Mão de Ferro.
She forces herself to her feet. She can breathe now.
Budarin Prospekt, Maninho says. The moto waits. Alexia slips into t
he form-fitting seat. Meridian Station, the moto says as it closes around her and accelerates. Estimated arrival in two minutes eight seconds.
‘Inform the office of the Eagle that I am en route as ordered,’ Alexia says. ‘Notify St Olga and request an official VTO delegation to meet me off the train. Take me to the executive lounge, I’ll need a shower and some new clothes. Triangulate modish, professional and rebellious.’
Done, Maninho says as the moto dives down the steep ramp to the concourse. At all hours there are travellers, workers, students, families crowding the platforms of Meridian Station. The moto opens in the foyer of the business suite and Alexia uncurls. An Equatorial One staffer waits with a printer-fresh clothing box in his hands; his colleague holds the towel and complimentary toilet bag.
‘Welcome, Senhora Mão,’ says suit-man. ‘If you follow my colleague?’
The air is spa fresh and scented with synthetic pine but Alexia smells dust, tastes dust. Creeping back into the air after the purifying rains. Dust never dies.
He is up there, in the roof of the world.
A chime from her familiar: a file from the office of the Eagle of the Moon. Accept and open. A new skin for Maninho. Something befitting your role as my representative, Lucas says in the attached message. It’s the work of a moment to reskin. Familiars are augmented reality objects that exist in the eye of the beholder, as difficult for the wearer to see as the back of their own head. Maninho flashes a rendering of its new form: a metal gauntlet holding a miner’s pick. Mão de Ferro. The Iron Hand.
TEN
The journey from Meridian is too short, the chartered railcar too small, and her bodyguard too close to allow Alexia to reflect on the open wound of Denny Mackenzie. The edges are raw. Accusations, recriminations roar. Blame incinerates her, guilt freezes her. Denny Mackenzie. Denny Mackenzie.
She steps out of the lock into the fumes and reek of St Olga, capital and workshop of the Vorontsovs. If Meridian is electricity, sintered stone, vehicle tyres, hot food, incense, vomit and sewage; and Queen of the South is the soft musk of computers, plastics, construction adhesives, gin and the bracing tang of deep buried cold; then St Olga is the spice of bots and machines, dust, air trapped long in deep corners, the prickle of radiation, dead cologne.
