by Ian McDonald
‘Then by the contract entered into by the combatant parties, I dismiss Amanda Sun’s claim to custody of Lucas Corta Junior,’ Judge Rieko says. A stuttering moan of consternation goes up from the spectators, echoed and redoubled moments later by the crowds outside; pulsing through Meridian’s quadras, taken up in turn in hotshops and bars and offices and homes, in trains and rovers and on private suit-helmet feeds from Rozhdestvenskiy to Queen of the South, St Olga to João de Deus.
The Suns have lost.
Medics converge on Jiang Ying Yue, standing bloody and shaking, arms crippled, on the fighting floor. Patches take away the pain, staples staunch the blood loss, tubes and lines counteract the shock. Taiyang medics escort the bot-gurney into the undercroft of the Court of Clavius.
‘Can we agree a thirty-minute recess to clear up this mess?’ Judge Rieko says with clear distaste. Ariel is on her feet.
‘If parties concur, I would like to move to final resolution immediately.’
Now comes the gasp. Abena opens a private channel: Tumi to Beija-flor.
What are you doing?
Follow me, Ariel says. No questions, no hesitations. Can you do this?
I can do this.
‘Senhor Corta?’
Lucas gets to his feet. The babbling gossip ceases.
‘If Mariano is fit to fight?’
‘I am,’ the zashitnik declares.
The judges are still for a moment, conferring on their private channels.
‘If both parties agree, we would not disagree,’ Judge Kumah says. ‘Senhor Corta, I take it you will keep the same representative?’
‘I will.’
Judge Arce turns to Ariel’s team.
‘Who represents you?’
A long pause, then Rosario stands.
‘I am Rosario Salgado O’Hanlon de Tsiolkovski, contracted zashitnik of this party.’
‘Step forward please.’
‘Not so fast.’
Ariel steps to the edge of the ring.
‘Who represents is one thing. Who fights is another. Luna.’
The girl has been cued. She skips down the steps to Ariel’s side.
‘If you please.’
Luna unwraps the ritual blade. Ariel snatches it up, there is an audible hiss as the edge cuts the air.
‘By the legends of my family, this knife may only be borne by a Corta who is bold, great-hearted, without avarice or cowardice, who will fight for the family and defend it bravely. I am that Corta, and I will fight you, Mariano Gabriel Demaria.’
Court Five explodes.
Alexia suspects her mouth is open. She feels her eyes are wide and her heart is hammering and there is a high-pitched noise in her ears. Like everyone else in Court Five.
You clever, clever woman. If Lucas refuses the fight, he surrenders the case. If he fights, he sets the moon’s greatest blade against a disabled woman who barely knows which side cuts. His own sister. With the whole of the moon looking on.
‘Senhor Corta?’
‘Mão de Ferro,’ Lucas says. He holds out his hand. ‘The blade.’
Alexia sets the knife reverently in Lucas’s palm. No questions, no hesitation, no explanations. He orders, she obeys. Leaning on his cane, Lucas gets to his feet.
‘Bold, great-hearted, without avarice or cowardice,’ Lucas says. ‘A Corta who will fight for the family and defend it bravely. Stand down Senhor Demaria. It is time for me to take the blade.’
He levels the blade at the judges.
‘Are we agreed?’
‘The bench has no objection,’ Judge Rieko says.
‘Sister?’
Ariel is smiling. Has she planned this? Did she know the only way out of the trap was for Lucas to take up the blade? A long exhale: Alexia realises she has been unconsciously holding her breath. Her and all of Court Five. This has stepped from insanity into mythology.
‘I will fight you, Lucas,’ Ariel says.
‘Best get to it then,’ Lucas says. ‘Second.’
And Alexia is again on the killing floor with Lucas handing her his jacket, his suspenders, his tie and his shirt. He undresses neatly, folds his clothes before passing them to Alexia. Across the ring, Ariel has seconded the ghazi. She takes off her Adele List hat, kicks off her Ferragamo shoes, shucks her Charles James jacket, lets the skirt fall. Beneath the fashion suit is the timeless uniform of the fighter: short trunks, a crop top. A hiss passes over the court: the spinal link; the smooth plastic, the puckered livid scar tissue. Lucas tests the fighting surface, then slips off his own Oxfords. He is an unwieldy wedge of old muscle softening into mass. Bulk in the wrong places: massive thighs and calf muscles to kick against terrestrial gravity; muscles banded around his spine to hold him upright. This is what Earth does to a moon-born body and what the moon does with that when that body returns to its proper environment. The build of a superhero, walking with a cane to protect his eroded knee joints.
‘Please.’ Lucas passes the cane to Alexia. He studies the knife. ‘Have you any idea what to do with this?’ he asks his sister.
‘You try to kill me with me it,’ Ariel says.
The judges hurry through the formalities. Lucas and Ariel raise their blades in salute, step back, circle each other.
‘We are ridiculous,’ Lucas says. ‘Human wreckage playing with knives.’
‘Someone has to make the first move,’ Ariel says.
‘Yes,’ Lucas says. ‘They do.’ He drops to a crouch and with all his strength drives the Corta blade into the fighting floor. Polished olivine cracks and chips; meteoric steel shatters halfway to the hilt. A flying shard lays Lucas’s cheek open. Ariel dips her head to him in salute; reverses her grip on her blade and stabs it into adamant stone. The tip snaps, flies; the stone stars. And Court Five is on its feet.
‘Let’s talk,’ Ariel shouts through the babel of voices; ecstatic, abusive, enraged, thrilled, non-comprehending.
‘No,’ Lucas shouts back. ‘Let’s deal.’
The bots and drones have been less than scrupulous cleaning the zashitnik stables underneath the court. The rooms are small and dusty, the air stale. Lucas Corta perches on the edge of a stone dressing-shelf. Ariel has the sole chair. Alexia has thrown Lucas his shirt and he buttons it with the care and respect of a man who understands clothes. He is still barefoot. The court above is still in uproar, the noise a sonic ceiling to the tiny room.
‘A telenovela could not have played it more melodramatically,’ Lucas Corta says.
‘Thank you.’
‘You took the mother of risks.’
‘There was never any risk. Family first …’
‘Family always. What’s your deal?’
Ariel is still dressed in her fighting garb. As one who spent lunes remapping his body in the gymnasium of the Saints Peter and Paul, Lucas appreciates the definition of her arms and upper body. The last time he saw her she was in a wheelchair. Before that, in the dark time, she had only that Jo Moonbeam to help her – what was her name? He can’t remember. She had a closet up in Bairro Alto, strung with lines so she could swing herself from room to room.
That’s discipline.
That is the politics of the body.
‘You’re staring.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Lucas had not been aware that his eyes had strayed to her spinal link and remained there. ‘I can’t get used to it.’
‘Would you have preferred the old prosthetics?’
Lucas sees again the hideous, clicking things; servos and actuators picking and tapping. He sees again his sister in the bed in the João de Deus med centre, pushing herself upright in her trauma bed to berate him for attempting to negotiate his son’s nikah.
‘Is this …’
‘Permanent? Unless I can find six spare lunes for the university to regenerate the nerve tissue.’
‘I would have aimed for it,’ Lucas says. ‘If it had come to blades.’
‘It’s the logical target.’
‘Your deal?’
‘Let’s not fool ourselves here. Lucasinho can walk and smile and charm every heart in Meridian but he is a long way from legal independence,’ Ariel says. ‘I have something you want. You have something you don’t want.’
‘The Eyrie?’
‘The Eyrie.’
‘You don’t want the Eyrie.’
‘No. I don’t. I know what you’ve been forced to do by the LMA to get to Bryce Mackenzie. You’ve kicked it down the road but it will always be there. I can’t say that I won’t make a worse job of it than you. But I’ll be able to try. You never could, not with Lucasinho. You would always have been afraid for him. I have no children, no lovers, no ties. I’m made of iron.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Act for the people of the moon. We’re not an industrial outpost, we’re not an Earth colony.’
‘Ariel Corta, independence fighter.’
‘If I had my vaper, I’d blow smoke rings at you, brother. Here’s the deal. You take Lucasinho and whoever else you want home to Boa Vista. You build whatever kind of empire you want out there in the Mare Fecunditatis. I take the title, honours and responsibilities of the Eagle of the Moon. Straight swap.’
‘Is this legal?’
‘There’s no law against it,’ Ariel says. ‘This is the moon.’
‘Everything is negotiable,’ Lucas says. ‘One rider.’
‘Try me.’
‘Take Alexia.’
‘Your Mão de Ferro?’
‘You’ll need help. She knows the business. Deal?’
‘Deal.’
In the cramped, dusty pen under the killing floor of Court Five, Lucas Corta and Ariel Corta shake hands. They embrace briefly. Ariel moistens a wipe under the faucet and dabs clean the cut on Lucas’s cheek where the blade fragment grazed him. Blood has run down his neck, his chest, trickling to the waistband of his pants.
‘There ought to be a first aid kit down here,’ Ariel grumbles.
‘The kind of wounds you get here are not amenable to first aid,’ Lucas says. They look at each other. Faces crease. Choked mirth bubbles into giggles, into aching, breathless laughter. Malandragem. The flyest of fly moves. The Cortas are back. Lucas wipes his eyes.
‘Shall we keep them waiting a little longer?’
‘Oh, I think so,’ says the Eagle of the Moon.
TWENTY-SEVEN
These are the images from Corta versus Corta that will endure as long as the moon hangs in the sky.
Broken knives on cracked polished stone.
Judges on their feet, trying to shout over a courtroom in uproar.
A hovering sphere, half black, half silver, unfolding wings, drinking colour out of the air, becoming green Luna moth.
A nine-year-old girl wiping skull-paint from her face.
A father hugging his son to him, oblivious to everything else.
‘I recall saying that the next time you tried to pull a trick like that in my court, I would order the zashitniks to gut you.’ The counsel chamber is one of the hive of ancillary rooms and corridors beneath Court Five and as small, dusty and cramped as the fighters’ stable. Judge Rieko Nagai perches on the edge of the basin as Ariel Corta strips off her sweat-stained fighting garb and drops it into the de-printer. Ariel slips into the shower for thirty seconds of pre-programmed hot water.
‘I’d’ve taken them,’ Ariel shouts through the gush.
‘You broke your knife,’ Rieko says.
‘The ghazi would have taken them.’
‘She probably would.’
The drier buffets Ariel; she throws back her head, letting her dark hair fall out, runs her fingers through it, flounces it, fluffs it up to the hot air. Then into the robe extruding from the printer.
‘I also remember last time I gave you one of these.’
Judge Rieko takes a small bottle of ten-botanical gin from her purse.
‘Thank you, but I don’t any more,’ Ariel says. ‘You brought that to court, didn’t you?’
‘I knew you would pull some piece of gratuitous malandragem.’
‘And if I hadn’t?’
‘I’d’ve toasted your memory.’ Judge Rieko’s tone darkens. ‘The terrestrials are in panic. They’ve filed over five hundred writs already. Court of Clavius AIs are winnowing them out but you might want to keep that ghazi on a retainer.’
‘They can’t stop me. And they can’t count on the Vorontsovs’ space-artillery.’
‘They have fifteen thousand combat bots deployable in seconds.’
‘Do they?’ Ariel says with a sly smile.
One last thing, Lucas said as they prepared to go up on to the fighting floor and shake the moon in its orbit. You’ll need this.
Beija Flor logged a file transfer.
What is this?
The word for the terrestrials’ bots. I did a deal with Amanda Sun.
What does it do?
Whatever you want fifteen thousand combat bots to do.
Ariel said, as the roof slid open, throwing a lengthening box of light into the zashitnik pen, Your own private Ironfall.
‘You have those courtroom eyes again,’ Judge Rieko says. ‘You scare me when you look like that.’
‘We need to grow up,’ Ariel says. ‘All of us. Rule of law, not rule of the blade.’ The printer is at work again.
‘That’s your first decree?’
‘My second.’ Ariel holds up the print-wet Pierre Balmain dress. ‘The fifties are back.’
The elevator seizes the moto and lifts it high above Gargarin Prospekt. Ariel takes her vaper from her purse and snaps it out to its full decadent length.
‘Do you mind?’
‘Yes,’ Lucas Corta says.
Ariel vapes up and cracks open the roof.
‘There.’
She leans back and exhales a ribbon of pale fumes.
‘That doesn’t help.’
The crowds outside the court show no signs of dispersing; numbers have doubled and redoubled in size and noise. Gargarin Prospekt is solid with bodies, wall to wall. Half of Meridian waits with questions, demands, concerns, fears, opinions for the new order that emerges from Court Five.
The Cortas and their retainers depart from the service entrance in a flotilla of chartered motos, and immediately take to the heights. Each vehicle follows a different route. Not to the Eyrie. The Eyrie is the first place the terrestrials will send their bots. Not even to the station: the gupshup channels’ bots are already swarming there. The transports will rendezvous at the VTO moonship dock, where Nik Vorontsov has Orel fuelled, crewed and ready to lift for Boa Vista.
The moto bearing the former and current Eagles of the Moon runs the high streets, ascending and descending, crossing and recrossing as soon as it senses gossip-drones closing in. Bossa nova and vaper fumes fill the bauble of titanium and carbon fibre. A sudden stop and turn and the moto drives on to the cargo deck of a cable car and swings out into two kilometres of sheer airspace.
LMA bots closing in, Beija Flor and Toquinho announce.
‘It’s time to give you this,’ Lucas Corta says as the moto reels through the glittering void.
Beija Flor lights up with a massive data transfer. Information, codes, privileges and accesses, every thing the Eagle of the Moon requires to administer, coming so fast Beija Flor sags under the torrent.
‘You’ve made me God,’ Ariel says. Vapour leaks from the corners of her mouth as she takes in the enormity of the powers she has been granted. ‘All that time I was in the White Hare, advising Jonathon Kayode, and he could do all this …’
‘The thing about God is that there can only be one,’ Lucas says.
‘It’s a failing of monotheism. Take this.’
A final transfer.
‘What does it do?’
‘Shuts anyone but you out of the executive powers.’
Ariel grimaces.
‘What’s keeping you?’ Lucas asks. He closes his eyes, breathes deep. Aguas do Marco.
‘It feels very final.’
‘It’s supposed to. Do it.’
Toquinho chimes a guitar chord and says, Executive authorisations erasing. Lucas calls up a visualisation and watches his powers dissolve in slow detonating puffballs of dying code. Elis Regina sings a plangent, melancholy soundtrack. Saudade.
‘How do you feel?’ Ariel asks.
‘Do you mean, am I like some kind of superhero who loses his powers? No. Not that. Not that at all.’ He does not tell his sister his feelings: he is filled with light and lightness like a New Year balloon. He could weep tears of release rich as pearls. He understands what it is to be blessed.
The cradle docks, the moto turns towards the Sixty-Third West upramp.
‘I regret that Jonathon Kayode died,’ Lucas says. ‘Adrian Mackenzie fought like the very devil. I think my abiding sin may be underestimating my enemies.’
The moto takes the freight elevator to the moonship dock. Orel stands gleaming under spotlights, a fantastic beast of fuel tanks, thruster nodes, struts and spars and comms dishes, solar and radiator panels nearly folded. An environment pod stands open, ramp lowered. Everyone is there: the ghazi, Ariel’s Bairro Alto zashitnik, Abena Maanu Asamoah. Madrinha Elis. The wolf. Luna. The Iron Hand. Lucasinho.
‘Get in get in!’ Nik Vorontsov, still rebelling against taste and fashion in his aggressively blue-collar shorts and T-shirt and dock boots comes down the ramp to escort Ariel and Lucas. ‘Standing around like a wedding photograph. We have a launch window!’
The inlock gate stirs. Orel’s dock is a massive airlock, the outlock overhead, opening to the surface; the inlock opening to the city. And the inlock is grinding open.
‘Bots!’ Nik Vorontsov yells. Dozens of them, swarming behind the slowly opening gate, blades unfolding and closing with a terrifying snicker-click.
