by Ian McDonald
In Twé a horticulturist checks grow-tower availability and cross-indexes it with AKA seed banks. She has heard there is to be a society wedding; Mackenzie-Vorontsova-Asamoah. Someone will have to supply the flowers.
In the eighty-seventh level of Queen of the South’s Perth Tower, a schoolkid glances away from her networked classmates to look out of the apartment window: what was that flicker in her bottom right corner of her eye? A flyer? She loves flyers.
In the bottom right corner of each of those eyes, of every eye, for all life and memory, there have been four tiny icons. Air, water, data, carbon: the Four Fundamentals.
And all at once, everywhere, those little lights go out.
First the panic. In half a century, those lights that spell life and health and wealth have never failed.
Then the whole moon holds its breath. Holds it, not knowing if there will be another one. Holds it until the eye bulge, the brain seethes red, the heart screams. Until it cannot be held any longer.
The moon exhales.
And inhales. No charge. No tick of bitsies in the little golden icon, no price notifications. Priceless. The second breath, and the third, and the one after that and the one after that. Breathing free.
Ariel Corta has abolished the Four Fundamentals.
The young man is very good-looking in that lunar way; tall, brown skin, soft brown eyes, dark hair, close-shaved to quantum levels. Tall of course and pleasingly put together. When she first came to the moon she had found the moon people unsightly; their proportions disproportionate, top heavy, limbs too long, joints subtly out of place. She has learned to see them by their own aesthetics, and by those, this man is most easy on the eye. And outside are five equally handsome compatriots, ready to storm the apartment should she conjure some opposition to him. A middle-aged functionary of the Lunar Mandate Authority, against a fit young Brasilian.
She wonders where he keeps the knife in that suit.
The fashion has changed again. She could never understand the lunar fascination with historical styles and retro fads. She knows they think her dowdy in her modest, political suit. She thinks them effete and reactionary.
‘Senhora Wang? My name is Nelson Medeiros. I have been sent by the Eagle of the Moon. If you please?’
He indicates the door.
The bots would have cut that sharp suit from around this cocksure puppy, then taken him to pieces. When the bots went into sleep and could not be made to obey, she knew this visit was inevitable.
‘So which is it to be?’ Wang Yongqing asks. ‘Out the airlock, or a blade through the cervical vertebrae?’
‘Senhora,’ Nelson Medeiros says. ‘You hurt my pride. That may be how you do things down there, but up here we are civilised people.’
The escoltas she imagined are waiting outside, with Monique and Anselmo, and a flock of motos waits.
‘We’re going to the station?’ Wang Yongqing asks. Anselmo and Monique never learned Meridian’s three-dimensional cartography, but she grew up in the sky-scraper towers of Guizhou and can read the levels and ramps and elevators like the corridors and crosswalks and overpasses of her childhood.
‘A railcar is waiting for you,’ Nelson Medeiros says. ‘You will be taken to a secure site, when you will remain in safety and comfort during the political transition.’
‘Hostages,’ Wang Yongqing says.
‘Hostages is an old-fashioned word,’ the Primo Escolta says. ‘This is a different moon. You are our guests.’
‘Guests who can’t check out.’
‘That depends on how eager your governments are to negotiate. But it will be six-star luxury.’
‘Where are you taking us?’
The young man’s smile is like a sky full of stars.
‘Boa Vista.’
‘So do I pass?’
‘You’re the Eagle of the Moon,’ Alexia Corta says.
Ariel Corta tuts in exasperation.
‘What did my brother ever see in you? Pass.’ She sweeps a theatrical hand down the front of her attire.
Dress; Cristobal Balenciaga 1953, Maninho says. Alexia knows nothing and cares less than nothing about 1950s couture. Black unlined wool trimmed with finely ribbed silk satin. Hat by Aage Thaarup, shoes by Roger Vivier, bag and gloves by Cabrelli.
Alexia adjusts the set of the Thaarup cartwheel hat.
‘Perfect.’
‘You’re a shit liar, Mão de Ferro. And are you going to introduce me in that?’
How many times has Alexia attended here, in the antechamber to the Pavilion of the New Moon, fussing over the lie of his cufflinks, the set of his tie, the drape of his jacket, with Lucas? Habits and superstitions that quickly became rituals.
‘I like this look,’ Alexia says. She has only just learned how to wear 1940s style. She likes the forties. She can rock the forties.
‘You like to look like a refugee,’ Ariel says.
‘How did anyone ever work with you?’ Alexia says.
Ariel beams at the defiance.
‘Because they adored me, darling. Well, that’ll have to wait. Impatient Dragons are irritable Dragons. Now, I want you to go in and give me the kind of introduction a god would envy.’
‘Lucas had a … thing.’
‘Thing?’
‘From the old days. The first days. “Sers: the Eagle has Landed”.’
Ariel hisses in distaste.
‘That’s ridiculous, darling. My name, my title, and a bit of swish time.’
‘Okay, senhora.’
Ariel’s smile is genuine now.
‘I’m fucking terrified, you know,’ she confides.
‘You faced down Lucas in the Court of Clavius,’ Alexia says.
‘That was my territory. My domain. Here I have no idea what I’m doing.’
‘If it’s any help, Lucas didn’t either,’ Alexia says.
‘I sat on the other side of the floor when Jonathon Kayode abolished the LDC,’ Ariel says. ‘He didn’t know either. No one does.’
‘You’re a hero. You abolished the Four Fundamentals, you arrested the terrestrials …’
‘Gave them to Lucas to look after,’ Ariel says brightly. ‘You make me laugh, Mão. Right. Show time.’
As Alexia opens the door to the council chamber floor she catches Ariel de-correcting her correction to the tilt of the Thaarup hat. Alexia steps into the light. The familiar council murmur falls silent. Through the glare she can see the tiers reserved for the Dragons and great families filled, the sector kept for the terrestrials empty. Arrayed along the gallery at the rear are academics, heads of faculties, deans from the University of Farside.
‘Sers,’ she says. ‘Ariel Corta, the Eagle of the Moon.’
Ariel takes Alexia’s place under the spotlights. Her face is hidden beneath the wide brim of her hat. The silence is total. She looks up, smiles, throws wide her arms. And the Pavilion of the Full Moon thunders with voices.
‘You call me the moment you get in, you hear?’
Robson rolls his eyes and tries to drift away across the station’s thronged concourse to the escalators down to the platforms but the Earth is bright and Wagner Corta has the eyes and reactions of a wolf and he moves effortlessly to follow the boy.
‘Okay okay, the moment I get in.’
Wagner knows he is being overprotective. He signed the co-parenting agreement with Max and Arjun; Robson will live with Haider when the Earth is round and Wagner goes back to the pack. They are honest, they are kind, they are loving and they are trustworthy to the extent that they have changed jobs and moved to Hypatia to break the link with Theophilus. Robson will be safe and happy and cared for. But who can blame Wagner for being overprotective, after the horrors of Theophilus and the assassination of Bryce Mackenzie at João de Deus?
Assassination. A thirteen-year-old kid drove five poison needles in
to Bryce Mackenzie’s eyeballs. One would have killed him sure as stone. Five was to advertise to the whole moon that this was the slow justice of the Cortas. Poison needles procured by that kid’s uncle, brought to him by his best friend. Poison needles he hid in his hair, because Bryce wanted him naked and vulnerable.
Wagner can’t think of that. In the bright of the Earth, emotions burn hotter and more fiercely and Wagner cannot look too long at the failure and weakness and inadequacy he feels when he thinks of Robson a hostage. A toy.
Lucas had done what he could not. Lucas had wrought the revenge. Not out of any senze of loyalty to his own brother – to his nephew – but for the name of Corta. Family first. Family always.
It was for family that Analiese had betrayed Robson. He loathes her but he can’t blame her. The Five Deaths of the Asamoahs were not enough for Bryce Mackenzie.
The train is in, the crowd move towards the stairs. Wagner and Robson ride down, side by side. Gods. The kid is getting big. It seems only hours since they escaped this city under the protection of a Mackenzie debt, and Robson had been a cute kid sleeping on his shoulder as the train ran east towards the Sea of Tranquillity.
‘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 and 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.
