by Ian McDonald
‘Mão de Ferro.’ A short, bone-thin VTO staffer of indeterminate gender – neutro Alexia guesses, fishing for the appropriate pronoun – bows. Pav Nester, Maninho informs her. A young man with cheekbones to die for presents a tray bearing a small bun of bread and a dish of salt. ‘Welcome to St Olga.’ Alexia breaks off a piece of the loaf, dips it in salt.
‘Bread and salt,’ Alexia says. Maninho briefed her on Vorontsov etiquette in the executive suite in Meridian Station. ‘The Eagle sends his apologies.’
A young woman, the female counterpart of the Vorontsov boy, presents a tray bearing wristbands.
‘We’ve always had radiation issues in St Olga,’ Pav Nester says. ‘It monitors exposure.’
It also monitors you, Maninho says.
Can you fix it? Alexia asks as she slips on the band.
I’m in there, Maninho says. There. You can turn it on and off as you wish.
St Olga claims to be the oldest city on the moon – the original launch point for rare earths refined by Mackenzie Metals’ extraction robots – and her age shows. Dome over a small crater – no more than two kilometres in diameter – and berm it all up under a six-metre-thick blanket of regolith. Over the decades St Olga has sprawled into a hinterland of construction yards, moonloop and BALTRAN facilities, rail shunting yards, comms towers, solar generators, engineering and robotics yards, but its heart is the grey, featureless hemisphere of the Vorontsovs, polluted, leaking, riddled with radiation.
Inside the dome is chaotic magnificence. The city of the Vorontsovs is a cylinder of apartments, businesses, hotshops and nurseries, kindergartens and colloquiums, workshops and shrines, standing a kilometre high at the centre of the dome. Galleries, staircases, walkways thread the sheer face of this walled city; escalators and moveways disappear into its interior. Nothing is level, nothing is true and straight. St Olga has grown like a shell over its seven decades, extensions built on to annexes, storeys piled on storeys, levels upon levels, whole new districts dumped on top of old, a city accreted like a stalagmite around a hidden ancient heart, all bound up in a web of pipes and catenaries, comms lines and cable cars.
Alexia knows she will feel right at home here.
Evening dress is expected.
‘It’s a formal reception,’ Pav Nester says. ‘We have standards.’
Alexia’s diplomatic apartment lies in the core of old St Olga overlooking a court filled with dusty succulents and drooping ferns. Falling water tinkles somewhere below. If she goes on to her balcony and looks up past the tiers of higher balconies, through the mesh of cables, she can see a square of sky-blue that flickers to no-signal grey to black screen-death. In St Olga even the sky is in poor repair. VTO builds the infrastructure on which the moon relies but cannot maintain its own capital. Pav Nester led her up staircases, along clattering catwalks between sheer walls, through dripping tunnels to these old-fashioned, musty rooms at the very heart of the city. Distance from radiation, the key social gradation on the moon, is no less important under the dome, it just moves along a different axis; inward, not downward, closer to the core, further from the dome.
‘Too ugly, too frumpy, makes me look eighty years old, trip hazard, too flouncy,’ Alexia says of the first five designs Pav Nester shows her.
‘Flouncy?’
‘Frills,’ Alexia says with disgust. ‘Pleats.’
Pav Nester flashes another design on to Alexia’s lens. Pure white, floor length, padded here-I-come shoulder, sash waist: sculptural in its elegance. It is heart-melting, classy and deadly.
‘Sleeves,’ Alexia says. Pav Nester slumps. ‘What? Where I come from, party dresses don’t have sleeves. Or much of anything.’
Her aide flicks another gown on to her lens.
‘This one,’ Alexia declares. ‘Absolutely.’
She showers while the print-shop prepares the dress. Even the water in St Olga feels used. Freshly pissed. The dress is at the door by the time she has attended to her skin and face.
‘Help me with this,’ she asks Pav.
Maninho shows her herself. She could kill everything within twenty metres by glam alone. She plumps up her hair, pouts, poses hands on hips.
Your transport has arrived.
Alexia shouts with surprised laughter as she opens the door on to the narrow, steep street. A sedan chair, borne by two muscly Moonbeams, a Jo and a Joe.
‘You’re joking.’
‘Eminently practical, given our geography and your couture,’ Pav says. E hands Alexia her forgotten clutch bag and closes the door. ‘Do please hold on to the handles.’ The lurch as the sedan chair starts to move almost throws her to the floor. Alexia white-knuckle grips the leather straps. It’s like a theme park ride, jolting, rolling, tipping back up sheer staircases, down steep pitches, round and round spiralling ramps, beneath hologram saints and neon shrines, street angels and district superheroes until she is set down with a thump outside a set of double doors sculpted with a complex pattern of arcs and arches. Security is arrayed three deep. Alexia tucks her clutch bag under her arm and contrives to step out with as much smoky lustre as possible. Maninho tosses the bearers a handful of bitsies. Pav is there already, come by different, stealthier routes. There is not a mark, not a crease on er smoke-grey brocaded shalwar kameez.
The lobby is filled with arrivals and welcomers. Alexia walks past them. Maninho flashes up a map of the apartment but Alexia lets surer senses lead her. Go where the party is loudest. Heads turn in the lobby, in the antechamber, in the receiving room as she strides through in her six-centimetre heels.
The last time she wore heels was when she disguised herself as a maid at the Copa Palace Hotel. The heels, the skirt, the top, the sagging pantyhose, had been too small. Everything she wears tonight is a perfect fit.
The maître d’ announces her to the salon. Everyone was looking long before the woman declaims her name in silken Russian. Of course they’re looking. The dress is a sheath of gleaming satin, so tight that Alexia can barely breathe. She is bare from the top of the breasts to the tip of her coiffure. The hope of the Saints seems to be all that holds the dress up. Opera gloves to the shoulder. It is impossible not to vamp in this dress. The couture, the height of the heels dictate it.
‘The Iron Hand!’ cries the maître d’ to rapturous applause. Already Alexia has read the party; the ones who will be aimed at her, the ones who will screen the ones she needs to talk to, the ones who will try to seduce her. She scoops a martini from a tray and heads to battle.
It is a full half-hour before the Vorontsovs make their first move.
He is tall, but they are all tall. He is blue-eyed, precision-fit, breathtakingly handsome. They all are. Alexia recognises him from the LMA sessions, one of the young, confident generation that occupy the highest tier of the chamber with the assurance of power. He wears a formal shirt, stiff white tie, the tail coat. He is exactly Alexia’s type. The Vorontsovs have done their research thoroughly.
‘Alexia Corta.’ He bows. It is very fetching.
‘Dmitri Mikhailovich.’
‘You look stunning. Not everyone can work the 1940s look, but you are classic Hollywood. A true screen goddess.’
Alexia has never trusted blue eyes. You see too far into them and what lies at the bottom is cold and hard. Dmitri Vorontsov’s blue eyes hold a sparkle. Ice or fire? Alexia whispers to Maninho. Before she can return the compliment he continues.
‘That’s an … assertive new skin on your familiar.’
‘Does it not suit me?’
‘Of course, yet it seems uncharacteristically metal for a Corta.’
‘It is what I am.’
‘The Iron Hand. I apologise, I’ve never been able to work the Portuguese nasal tones.’
‘Mão de Ferro.’ Dmitri has steered Alexia away from the salon to a vaulted cloister. At the centre is a fountain. Dmitri guides Alexia around th
e pillared arcades. By St Olga’s logic this palace must lie at the very heart of the city, yet the rooms are spacious and Alexia has no sense of claustrophobia. The air, for St Olga, is fresh, if heavy with cologne and cuir de russe. Dmitri Vorontsov smells as sweet as he looks. No one has come to rescue her.
‘I’ve always been impressed by that title. It’s like something we would make up.’
‘It’s not a title and I didn’t make it up,’ Alexia says. ‘Mão de Ferro is my apelido, my nickname. In Brasil, everyone has an apelido. But you can’t give it to yourself, it has to be given to you. Mão de Ferro is an old miner’s apelido from Minas Gerais. It means the miner’s miner. The A-number-one. The man.’
‘Or the woman.’ Dmitri Vorontsov directs Alexia around the turn of the cloister with a soft touch. Manicured nails, Alexia observes.
‘My great-grandfather Diogo was the first Mão de Ferro. It became a family name. There’s hasn’t been a Mão de Ferro in my branch of the family for generations. Not since my great-aunt.’
‘Adriana Corta.’ Dmitri Vorontsov says. ‘Now you. So tell me, Iron Hand, who gave you this name?’
‘Lucas, the Eagle of the Moon.’
‘I see your glass is empty.’ His fingers rest on hers a moment too long as he takes her glass. ‘Would you like another? Or shall we stay here away from all the noise? I do find parties tiring.’
Oh you sweet liar.
‘I would love another,’ Alexia says.
‘Then let me refresh your glass.’ Dmitri’s manners are as immaculate as his suit but he has failed. His small talk turns to handball as he guides Alexia across the cloister to the party.
‘I understand it’s the thing here.’
‘Oh I am crazy about it,’ Dmitri says. ‘We all are in St Olga. I used to play, then I moved into ownership. The Saints? You’ve heard of them. I must take you to a game. You won’t understand the moon until you understand handball.’
‘I’d like that,’ Alexia says. ‘Some time. I used to play volleyball. It was the thing in Rio. Beach volleyball. In a stupidly small, stupidly tight bikini. With my name on my ass.’
She’s never played beach volleyball in her life.
She slips away from Dmitri Vorontsov without a backward glance and lifts her own martini from a tray. The party opens to accept her. Greetings, compliments, politenesses. They failed with a boy, they’ll try a girl next. Alexia has already glimpsed her, a look from across the room, stolen away when Alexia catches her eye. Big brown eyes, brown skin, a glorious wedge of hair. Cream silk and pearls. She works the right side of the party, Alexia the left and they meet by the vodka fountain.
‘You caught me,’ she says in a thrilling, liquid baritone. ‘I’m not as good at this game as Dmitri.’ A gloved hand. ‘Irina Efua Vorontsova-Asamoah.’
Irina of the seducing voice is seventeen, St Olga-born. Father Van Ivanovitch, a nephew of Yevgeny Grigorivitch. Mother Patience Quarshie Asamoah, cousin of Lousika Asamoah. Maninho shows Alexia how she is related to Irina. The complexity dazes her.
‘I thought Vorontsovs and Asamoahs were historical enemies,’ Alexia says.
‘They are.’ Irina Asamoah could recite machine code and be enchanting. ‘People like me are the peace.’ She moves in a whisper of cream to a balcony high above a deep courtyard glimmering with biolights. Irina moves close to Alexia, on the edge of intimate space.
‘So which are you?’ Alexia asks.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Vorontsov or Asamoah?’
Irina frowns, two lines of bafflement between her eyes.
‘Both, of course. Neither. Me.’
As soon as Alexia holds a part of lunar life, it wriggles free in a spray of feathers, bright as a parakeet. Family is everything, except when family forces you to pick a side, an identity. Alexia remembers the ghazi she met at Twé Station, Dakota Kaur Mackenzie. She had doubted that a Mackenzie could find another, greater loyalty. Mackenzie first Mackenzie always. In the ghazi, in the silken Irina Efua Vorontsova-Asamoah, Alexia understands that identity is negotiable. Family is what works for you.
‘I brought you out here to give you fair warning, Alexia Corta. My task is to seduce you. Which I shall, and you will adore it.’ She steps away from the light-well and glances over her shoulder as she dances back into the party. Alexia cannot but follow. Irina introduces her to more Vorontsovs. Handsome, tall Vorontsovs from the moon, the layers of track and the spinners of cable, the train-lords and the rover-queens. Squat, waddling Vorontsovs from Earth, relearning gravity. Drawn, frail Vorontsovs from space, battling gravity. Maninho remembers the faces, the names, the patro- and matronymics. Alexia tries not to remember Valery Vorontsov with his solar system of colostomy bags and coiling catheters.
Names, faces, wisps of biography. Stunning frocks and stiff tail-suits. Alexia glances up from the introductions to see Irina exchange glances with Pav Nester across the ballroom. Irina catches Alexia catching her and smiles, unashamed and unashameable. You are beautiful, you are golden. You’ve never known anything but this. You will always be adored, your days will always be charmed. No one will ever judge you by your accent, by your birth, by your money, by the colour of your skin.
‘Met enough saggy old men and hideous dowagers?’ Irina asks.
‘Who else do I need to meet?’ Alexia says.
‘The rest will just either try to jump you or bore you. This party is done. Next question, can you run in that dress?’
‘I might take off and fly a bit. Why?’
‘Just as long as you’re faster than your bodyguards,’ Irina says, hitches her party frock and takes off, a bolt of cream and brown. In a heartbeat Alexia switches off her tracker-band and follows Irina. The first step almost sends her headlong as the skirt trips her. Alexia stoops to take a seam and tear it up to her thigh. Now she can run. One step sends her soaring to the chandelier, the next into a wall as Irina veers into a corridor. Alexia fights to run low, run true. They arrive gasping and laughing in a stark backroom, raw rock and aluminium, far from the ponderous glamour of the public suites. Circular hatches a metre in diameter ring the room at waist-height. Irina locks eyes with Alexia and kicks off her shoes.
‘I promised I would seduce you, Alexia Corta,’ Irina Efua Asamoah says . Above each of the circular hatches is a pair of handles, warning-striped. Irina grabs them, swings herself feet first into the hatch and vanishes. Alexia hears a distant, echoing shriek of pleasure.
‘Fuck it.’ Alexia steps out of her shoes and in a breath is in a sloping tube, picking up speed as she slides on her back, feet first into the unknown. She giggles, then the tube steepens into a near vertical and gravity grabs her. She is plunging through complete darkness, swung one way then the other as the tube turns, dress billowing up around her. She can’t resist a scream of excitement and fear, then her stomach is in her mouth as the incline softens and she is thrown into a long spiral, coil after coil, downward downward. She whoops, she yells, she hollers as she rattles round the pipe, human detritus in a drain. She might piss herself with excitement. A dot of light expands into a circle and she is shot from the mouth of the tube into the air to land with a gasp in a mitt of soft crash mats. She rolls to her feet. She is as groggy, as glassy-eyed, brain-glazed as after great sex. And laughing laughing laughing.
Irina lounges on the crash mat, big dark eyes wide and alluring.
‘What was that?’ Alexia says.
‘Emergency escape protocol Two,’ Irina says. Now Alexia sees that there are as many exit hatches as there were entry hatches in the other room – how far away was it? She had seemed to slide for a very long time but time on a slide is time sliding. ‘We’re five hundred metres under St Olga,’ Irina says, as if reading Alexia’s thoughts. ‘This is a radiation shelter. When there’s a sudden solar flare, we jump in the nearest tube and get our asses down here.’
‘I went ro
und a corkscrew,’ Alexia says.
‘A what?’
‘A spiral. A helix. Why would you put a corkscrew in an emergency escape slide?’
‘Why wouldn’t you?’ Irina says. Her frown is heartbreaking. ‘Some have switchbacks. I’ve ridden most of them.’
A secret fun park under the capital of VTO. A rollercoaster emergency escape system. Everything is big with the Vorontsovs, Alexia recalls. Big love, big rage, big loyalty. Big fun. From inside an escape tube comes a high-pitched cry, growing louder until with a gleeful yell a boy flies from a hatch and goes head over heels across the crash pit. He comes up in a blur of blond hair and big grin. He looks about twelve. He dashes, laughing, from the shelter.
‘This dress is wrecked,’ Alexia says. ‘I can’t be seen in this.’
‘There’s a printer next level up.’ Irina coyly twists her foot. ‘However …’
‘However?’
‘You want to maybe change outfit? I was going to go on to another party,’ Irina says. ‘A proper party. For people like us.’
Alexia is hard tempted. Time out from the duties and responsibilities of the Mão de Ferro. Time to be Alexia Corta, carioca and Queen of Pipes, with people of her own age and outlook. People free from the burden of power.
You almost had me, Irina Asamoah.
‘I have work to do,’ Alexia says. ‘I have meetings in the morning. With all those people not like us.’
Irina bites her lower lip in disappointment, then dips her head.
‘All right. But when you’re done with them, call me.’ She goes up on her tiptoes to kiss Alexia sharp and sweet on the lips, then skips away, barefoot and glorious.
My task is to seduce you, Irina had said. Which I shall, and you will adore it.
