by Ian McDonald
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everyone’s got a big idea, Mão. What’s yours?’
‘I don’t know. Do I have to have one?’
‘We bring life. The Vorontsovs hold the keys to the system. Ask any Sun and they’ll tell all about their post-scarcity communism. The Mackenzies have something they’re not talking about. But they have something. And it will be big. So what do the Cortas believe in?’
Alexia sees Lucas, cane in hand, on the floor of the council chamber. Terrestrials to his right, Vorontsovs to his left. She knows his cane conceals a blade. What is power, that a weapon is his constant companion? Come to the moon with me, he had said in the car on the drive back from the beach at Tijuca. Help me take back what the Mackenzies and Suns stole from me. Lucas stole power, but that power is powerless. Every use of that power takes empire and family further away. The grind of politics is wearing him dull. The hidden sword no longer cuts. What does the last Corta want, what does he believe in?
At the centre of a maze of vehicle tracks, a shattered escape pod lies capsized on smashed axles, half the roof gone. Alexia cannot but see a smashed skull. The edges of the fracture are fringed with long tear-drops of molten metal, the interior is a mess of fused hydrocarbons, glass fibres and titanium-splash. The regolith is spattered with metal spangles where the steel rain from the detonating smelters impacted and solidified. Irina stops the rover to pick and present one to Alexia; a tiny crown, for the coronation of a thumb. The closer the rover draws to the heart of the disaster, the larger the star-splashes. They merge with the debris field, ever-larger fragments, shards, chunks of Ironfall. Shattered incomprehensible machinery for the most part, occasionally a piece with a recognisable human purpose.
The rover picks its way into the great devastation. VTO track queens cleared Equatorial One as quickly as possible, lifting and laying the wreckage on both sides of the line. Gantries canted at crazy angles. Upended bogies the height of the rover; the belly of a retort, mouth open, congealed metals lapping in a frozen tongue. A half mirror propped up against a melted habitation unit, focusing sunlight on a slagged patch of regolith.
Irina pauses the rover at an arc of black glass sweeping across the regolith. A hastily dumped traction motor has smashed one end to obsidian splinters. Alexia sees herself reflected in the black mirror; herself as she is, an armoured hulk, not the pleasing illusion of her familiar.
‘When the mirrors fell, they fused these glass paths into the regolith,’ Irina says. ‘We call them the Dead Roads. Walk on them and you can see your hopes, your true future and your death.’
Catastrophes breed jokes first, then myths. Later come the conspiracies.
Irina drives deeper into the labyrinth. Entire smelter cars have been moved and dumped here, piled on end, propped against each other.
You did this, Alexia Corta. You spoke one word, and the molten sky fell.
The rover stops.
‘We’re not alone,’ Irina says. Figures appear on Alexia’s HUD, visible through the tumbled wreckage.
‘I can’t see any tags,’ Alexia says.
‘They’re not wearing tags,’ Irina says. ‘We may need to leave. Scavengers come out here to loot the precious metal spills. The zabbaleen take money to turn a blind eye, the Vorontsovs disapprove, but to the Mackenzies they’re grave robbers. So they tend to be well armed.’
‘Happy to go. I’ve seen enough.’
A chatter of machine talk on Alexia’s display, flickers of data.
‘We’re being security scanned,’ Irina says. ‘High level.’
Names resolve over the images as physical figures appear from behind the steel behemoths. Alexia recognises the colour of the suits before the names: the green and silver of Mackenzie Metals. Three sasuits, two shell-suits: one name she cannot mistake: Duncan Mackenzie.
You’re being hailed, Maninho says.
‘I am Vassos Palaeologos,’ says the other shell-suit. ‘You are not welcome here, Mão de Ferro.’
‘I needed to see,’ Alexia begins.
‘And what do you see, Iron Hand?’ Duncan Mackenzie breaks in on the channel. Alexia orders the rover to set her down. She drops softly to the regolith. The surface is a litter of micro-debris, parts and pieces ground ever finer by salvage machines. ‘I’ll tell you what I see, Alexia Corta. I see my home, the place I grew up. There was nothing like it; the greatest feat of engineering in the two worlds. We were the children of eternal sunlight. I see my family. When the mirrors turned on us, they touched a thousand degrees. I like to think it was quick, a flash of heat, nothing. One hundred and eighty-eight deaths.’
‘I’m—’
‘What can you say to me? You’re from Earth.’
‘I’m—’
‘My enemy in name? It’s not our way to blame the innocent. You are safe here. You won’t be harmed. Do you know what they say about the Mackenzies?’
‘You pay back three times.’
‘At some point, all debts have to be cancelled. Written off. Reduce it all to zeros. We cannot go on, tit for tat, feud for feud, blood for blood. What are we going to do: rip the moon in half to get at each other? We have a bigger enemy. Tell that to Lucas Corta when you get back to Meridian. Tell him he needs to decide. Who he stands with. Tell him that. And remember what you’ve seen. Fucking Iron Hand.’
The Mackenzie party turns as one and disappears into the ruins of Crucible.
Duncan Mackenzie turns.
‘You never come back here. Any of you.’
Alexia stands shaking in her shell-suit, unable to move, unable to issue a command to move. She is going to vomit. She must vomit. She must spew out all the horror and guilt and cowardice: that she could not tell Duncan Mackenzie the truth that she was the hand behind Ironfall.
Your biosigns are all over the charts, Maninho says. Administering anti-nauseas and tranquillisers.
No, Alexia shouts silently. Warm benevolence spreads through her brain. The storms subside. She should rage at the medical violation but under it she cannot summon the strength even for outrage. Now she is in her seat, now the safety bars are descending. Now the rover is threading back through the steel labyrinth, leaving dusty tyre tracks on the obsidian tracks, the roads of the dead.
TWELVE
A shadow across her window where no shadow has ever fallen wakes Ocean Paz Calzaghe. Shadow, and engine, men’s voices. She squints out. A delivery truck. Delivering. She pulls on clothes and is out on the steps to see Kessie directing two laden dray bots and an engineer around the veranda to its south-west corner.
‘Bremerton Spa Pools,’ she read from the side. ‘Are we getting a Jacuzzi?’
‘Marina is getting a Jacuzzi,’ Kessie says.
By noon even Skyler has been roused from jet lag by the sound of power-tool assembly.
‘What does she need with a spa pool?’ he asks.
‘The therapists say water’s good for her. Gives support.’
‘Can I have a go when you’re not using it?’ Ocean asks.
‘Everyone’s welcome,’ Marina says.
‘Wait wait wait, house rules,’ Kessie says. ‘Swimwear in the spa. No exceptions.’
The engineer runs a pipe to the outside faucet. The spa takes two hours to fill, two more hours to come up to blood temperature. Then he corrals his bots into the van and drives them back to Bremerton. The wooden tub sits on the wooden veranda, smelling of chlorine and fresh cedar. Ocean watches Marina jog and splash up and down in the warm water. Ocean hangs over the edge of the pool while Marina works her upper body with weights.
‘You’ll get wrinkly in there.’
‘I get wrinkly on this planet. Gravity is shit for skin tone. I had a complexion like yours.’
‘So, good for boobs too?’
‘Less sag, but the laws of angular momentum apply. You try running, you even turn
too fast, and you remember the difference between mass and weight pretty quick. A girl needs all the support she can get.’
That evening, Ocean joins Marina in the pool. She climbs in, body-conscious, body-awkward in her swimsuit. They bask among the bubbles. Memory shakes Marina: a pool deep beneath crater Macrobius, just big enough for two and the dragon on the roof, the old dragon of the East Sea. Death-tired after the Sea of Serpents adventure, water warm as blood swaddling her. Carlinhos sliding in beside her.
‘You all right, Marina?’
She must be more circumspect with her emotions. More lunar. The girl will wheedle, so she’ll have to talk about Carlinhos.
‘Just remembering someone. A man.’
‘Oh!’ says Ocean, anticipating sex and secrets.
‘It doesn’t have a happy ending. He was a beautiful, beautiful man. There was violence in every bone of his body. He was Corta Hélio’s zashitnik.’
‘That’s like kind of a gladiator?’
‘What he couldn’t deal with was that he loved it. It was the opposite of everything he wanted to be, and he could never get away from it.’
Marina sees him, magnificent, blazing, in the arena of the Court of Clavius, barefoot on the stained boards, kicking a spray of his enemy’s blood in Jade Mackenzie’s face.
‘He died, sweetie. He strapped on his battle armour and took a knife in each hand and walked out alone to face his enemies. I think he knew he wouldn’t come out of it. He couldn’t live with what he saw that day in the court.’
‘Marina, did you, ever …’
‘Kill anyone? No. I don’t think so. I hurt people. A lot. I was strong, you see. Like a superhero. Until I wasn’t, and that was when I knew I had to come back. I was scared every second I was there, and I have never felt more alive. People – Earth people – they’re asleep all the time. Just going through things. Up there you’re always aware that a thousand things keep you alive. You take nothing for granted. Can you understand that?’
‘I’m trying to. Marina …’
‘Shh.’ Marina’s touches Ocean’s arm but the girl already sees them. Elk move in steps and stops, stares and stands, past the veranda: two, three, then two more.
‘It’s been a good year for them,’ Ocean says, when they can speak again. ‘A weird year.’
Light on the water: while Marina’s attention was held by the elk, the moon trapped her. It stands two-thirds full over the Hurricane Hill.
‘Ole Kū Kahi. Maybe Ole Kū Lua.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Days on the moon. We use the Hawaiian calendar. A name for each day of the month. Or lune, as we call it. A lune is not the same as the Earth month; our year is ten days shorter than the terrestrial year.’
‘Marina,’ Ocean says. ‘You say, we, our.’
‘I did, didn’t I?’ Marina says. ‘Can you take the wrinkles? If you can, I’ll show you my moon. Blades and dragons and wolves, oh my.’
THIRTEEN
The neural link grafted by the surgeons of Rozhdestvenskiy is small and clever but it is still a prosthesis. A subtle trap to which Ariel is alert: never forget that you have a disability. Never forget that your spinal column is severed and that you are paraplegic. But it is extraordinary technology. She can dance with this new graft. Ariel allows herself a pirouette in front of the window screen, with its dramatic view out over the jewelled bowl of Coriolis. It’s still a hostage cage, but a classy one.
Abena Maanu Asamoah, Beija Flor announces. Ariel orders tea and sips it while she watches the cable car spin up from the station. Abena is smart and assured as ever, fashionable in tank-fur stole and pillbox hat with short veil but even she can’t conceal the depredations of train travel from one side of the moon to the other.
‘I don’t see why we couldn’t have done this all over the network,’ Abena says as she copies her progress report to Ariel. The girl is good. Too good to waste her talents in politics.
‘So I know who to send Dakota after if there’s a breach in discretion,’ Ariel says.
‘You look weird walking,’ Abena says.
‘It feels like someone else’s legs. Now, the preliminary hearing. I want you to conduct it.’
And the girl has admirable control. Her eyes widen a fraction.
‘You’re the lawyer, you conduct the plea.’
‘Nearside, I have issues. I’m not the niece of the Omahene.’
‘And I’m not the lawyer.’
‘Not a problem, sweetie. Well, it will be a problem but you’ll find a way around it.’
‘Use one of the other consultants.’
‘No. They’re not invested.’
‘You mean, they haven’t fucked him.’
Talent, control and a bracing self-awareness.
‘And just you.’
‘What?’
‘Just you. No one else.’
‘That’s …’
‘Theatrical. Of course. One woman, one voice, before the Court of Clavius, ringed around by a thousand powerful enemies? Our dominant metaphor of the court is gladiatorial. The arena. No no, coraçao. The court is theatre. It’s a stage. Law is not combat. Law is persuasion. Always has been. It’s better than any telenovela. The network ratings will be through the sunline.’ Ariel sees Abena work through a silent sequence of I can’t, completely unreasonable, you’re joking/insane/impossible. ‘Something you wanted to say?’
‘Yes. Fuck you, Ariel Corta.’
‘Yes yes. You will not be alone. You will always have full AI support, the team is behind you and you’ll have me in your ear. You think I’d let you go into the Court of Clavius bare-tit naked? Now, you will need a zashitnik.’
‘Settling disputes by combat is barbaric, outmoded and demeaning to the law.’
‘Of course it is, but if I were Lucas, I’d throw out a challenge just to watch you strip down to bra and pants and stick a knife into your hair. You okay with that?’
‘It demeans everyone and everything. We are not savages.’
‘My brother was Corta Hélio’s zashitnik. Carlinhos was the sweetest, gentlest, most handsome and caring man I ever knew and I watched him tear out Hadley Mackenzie’s throat in the Court of Clavius. It could as easily have been him lying on the boards in his own blood. Our law has a price and it’s that it can cut anyone who touches it. Law that has no price has no justice. Carlinhos understood that. Hire a zashitnik. I used to use Ishola Oluwafemi. Then we’ll work on your court-face. And while you’re here, go and talk to Lucasinho. He can talk now. Tell him stories. He likes stories. Tell him about you and him.’
Abena pauses at the door.
‘Getting maternal, Ariel?’
‘Go and meet your client.’
‘I make this?’
Luna nods yes yes and slides another piece of cake on to the spoon.
‘I can … feed. Myself,’ Lucasinho Corta says. He takes the spoon and guides it to his lips. Luna watches anxiously. At the last moment he loses visual tracking, his hand wobbles; Luna darts to the rescue and catches the falling cake on a paper towel. ‘Sorry.’
Every day she comes to see him when Dr Gebreselassie has locked in whatever she puts into Lucasinho’s head and every day his reactions are sharper, his face brighter, his speech clearer but she soon discovers the holes in his mind; moments, days, entire narratives that are bright and clear to her and don’t exist for him.
Don’t push him to remember, Dr Gebreselassie instructs her. You can’t make him remember what isn’t there. Do talk to him about what he does remember. Social reminiscence is important.
Today she had perched herself on the end of his bed and talked about cake. At first he barely understood what she was talking about, then the memories returned and the protein chips made connections between the disjointed memories and they came alive in his head. She told him how it had st
arted when he declared he wasn’t going to have any more mooncake at Zhongqiu because no one liked it; he was going to make cupcakes instead. It took him three days, and they were oversweet and overflavoured but they weren’t mooncakes. Everyone applauded, so, encouraged, he went on to bake for saint-days and festivals and birthdays and any colloquium occasion and in time he got good at it. As Luna told him the cake story his eyes brightened. He remembered this, and then Luna took him back to the Sea of Tranquillity, when they were escaping on the appropriated rover and he tried to pass the time by lecturing her about cake. How it was the perfect gift, how difficult it was to make, what the rules of cake were. On and on over rille and crater, until they ran into the Mackenezie Metals party. Here his face darkened. He shook his head. A hole in his mind between cake and waking in the Coriolis med centre.
It took time even for the moon’s foremost facility in printing organic materials to synthesise a lemon drizzle cake. Lucasinho looked nervous as Luna took a spoonful and moved mother-close to feed it to him. Then ecstasy flooded his face.
‘More please.’
This time he lets Luna lay her hand on his hand as he navigates the spoon.
‘I made this!’
‘You used to have a special way of doing it.’
Lucasinho frowns, puzzled. His memory is a moonscape of craters and chasms.
‘You’ll remember when you’re ready,’ Luna says.
Their familiars announce the visitor simultaneously. Lucasinho’s eyes widen.
‘Abena!’
Luna scowls behind her Lady Luna mask. This is her time. Her space. Her primo. She positions herself at the foot of Lucasinho’s bed, a strong defensive site. Faces up her best glare. Abena Asamoah doesn’t even blink.
