by Ian McDonald
The words burn Lousika Asamoah’s throat. Madrinhas, host mothers. Hired wombs, who become nannies, who become unofficial aunts, become family. For small corporations like the Cortas with a business to build and no time for pregnancy, birth, early infancy, Lousika could understand the arrangement. Not for the next generation, not that the coven of demure, ever-present madrinhas should become tradition. She resented tall, Brazilian-cheek-boned Madrinha Elis carrying her child, birthing her baby. She had been shocked when Rafa had presented the surrogacy as a done thing: the Corta way. Put it in me, plant it in me, let me grow it and carry it and press it into the world. I don’t need Madonnas of Conception to mix your sperm with my egg and pronounce, let there be life. I don’t need to watch your gyno-bots slide the embryo up into sleek, smiling Elis and watch her every day grow bigger and fuller. I don’t need to see the reports, the scans of her uterus, the daily posts of how her pregnancy is progressing. And I did not need to lock myself away in my room howling and smashing things as Elis went under the knife. It should have been me, Luna. It should have been me they brought you to. My smiling, exhausted, teary face the first thing you saw. An Asamoah. Life flows and spurts and gushes in all our fluids and juices. I am fit, fertile, everything works naturally, brilliantly, fecundly. But it’s not the Corta way.
I love you Luna, but I cannot love the Corta way.
Lousika wraps Luna up in her arms, rocks as much for her own comfort as for Luna’s. One assassin-fly has cracked her world. This is not a garden of gods, a palace of waters. It’s a tunnel in the rock. Every one of her family’s light-filled agraria, every city and factory and settlement, is a scrape, a fragile bivouac of rocks against the vacuum sky and the killing sun. Everyone is in danger, all the time. Nowhere can you escape, or even hide.
‘Your papa and the contract and everyone may say you’re a Corta, but you are an Asamoah. You’re an Asamoah because I am an Asamoah because my mother is an Asamoah. That’s our way.’
Lucas Corta sweeps his hand across the board table and scatters the virtual documents.
‘I haven’t time for this. Where did it come from? Who made it?’
Heitor Pereira dips his head. He is a head shorter and a decade greyer than everyone at the board table except Adriana Corta and her Finance Director, Helen de Braga, the dark will of Corta Hélio.
‘We’re still analysing—’
‘We have the best R&D unit on the moon and you can’t tell me who made this?’
‘They’ve gone to remarkable lengths to hide anything that might identify the drone. The chips are generic, we’ve nothing on the printer pattern.’
‘So you don’t know.’
‘We don’t know yet.’ Everyone around the table hears the tremble in Heitor Pereira’s voice.
‘You don’t know who made it, you don’t know who sent it, you don’t know how it got through security. You don’t know if, right now, another one of those things is coming for my brother, or me, or, God save us, my mother. You’re head of security, and you don’t know this?’
Lucas holds the stare. Heitor Pereira’s face twitches.
‘We are in a total security situation. We’re monitoring everything over the size of a skin-flake.’
‘What if they’re here already? That drone could have been planted months ago. Have you thought of that? There could be a dozen more waking up right now. A hundred more. They only need to get lucky once. I know what modern poisons do. They make you wait. They make you wait in hours of pain, knowing each breath is shorter than the one before, knowing there’s no antidote, knowing you’re going to die. You spend a long time looking at death. Only then do they let you die. And I know that someone tried to use one of those poisons on my brother. That’s what I know. Now, tell me, what do you know?’
‘Lucas, enough.’ Adriana Corta occupies the head of the board table. For months her seat has been empty, her only presence the large, clumsy portrait of her in a sasuit, Our Lady of Helium, looking down the length of the table. An immediate and lethal threat her children has brought her to the board room in all her authority. Rafa is seated at her right hand, Ariel to her left. Lucas sits to the right of his brother.
‘Mamãe, if your head of security can’t keep us safe, who can?’
‘Heitor has been a faithful agent of our family for longer than you have been alive.’ No one can mistake the sting of authority.
‘Yes, Mãe.’ Lucas dips his head to his mother.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Rafa fills the stinging silence.
‘Is it obvious?’ Ariel says.
‘Who else has it ever been?’ Rafa leans low over the table. His anger smokes. ‘Bob Mackenzie has never forgiven Mamãe. He’s slow poison. Not today, not tomorrow; not this year or even this decade, but some year, some day. The Mackenzies pay back three times. They’re striking at the succession. They want you to see everything you’ve built come apart, Mamãe.’
‘Rafa …’ Ariel begins.
‘Kyra Mackenzie,’ Rafa interrupts. ‘She was at the party. Did anyone search her, or did we just wave her through, because she was one of Lucasinho’s friends?’
‘Rafa, do you think the Mackenzies would risk all-out war?’ Ariel says. She draws long on her vaper. ‘Really?’
‘If they thought they could break our monopoly, they might.’ Lucas says.
‘It’s starting again, can’t you see that?’ Rafa says.
Eight years before, Corta Hélio and Mackenzie Metals fought a brief territory war. Extractors fallen in tangles of metal, trains boarded and shipments hijacked, bots and AIs crashed under bombardments of dark code. Dusters fought hand to hand, knife to knife in the tunnels of Maskelyne and Jansen and out on the stone seas of Tranquillity and Serenity. One hundred and twenty deaths, damage in the millions of bitsies. In the end, Cortas and Mackenzies agreed to arbitration. The Court of Clavius ruled for Corta Hélio. Two months later Adrian Mackenzie married Jonathon Kayode, Eagle of the Moon, CEO of the Lunar Development Corporation, the owners of the moon.
‘Rafa, enough,’ Adriana Corta says. Her voice is thin, her authority is incontestable. ‘We fight the Mackenzies through business, we beat them through business. We make money.’ Adriana rises from the table, stiff and worn in face and limb. Her children and retainers bow and follow her from the board room.
Carlinhos stands, purses the fingers of his right hand and bows to his mother. He has not spoken a word at this board meeting. He never does. His place is out in the field, with the extractors and refiners and the dusters. He’s the duster, the fighter. Rafa can outshine him with his charm, Lucas bludgeon him with his arguments, Ariel tie him up with her eloquence but none of them can walk the dirt the way he does.
Lucas detains Heitor Pereira a moment.
‘You made a mistake,’ Lucas whispers. ‘You’re too old. You’re past it, and you’re gone.’
In the lobby outside the board room Wagner Corta waits. Adriana and her retainers pass without looking at him, then Lucas and Ariel. Ariel nods, a tight smile. Carlinhos claps his brother on the back.
‘Hey brother.’
Wagner is the conspicuous absence at the board table.
‘I want a word with Rafa,’ Wagner says.
‘Sure. You want to bike back to João?’
‘I’ve something else planned.’
‘Catch you later, Lobinho.’
‘A word about what?’ Rafa says. He perches on the inside lip of Oxala’s right eye. Behind him water tumbles slowly.
‘The fly. I want to take a look at it.’
Rafa has made sure that Wagner received Heitor Pereira’s schematics. Rafa makes sure Wagner receives all data from every board meeting.
‘You’ve got everything.’
‘Respect to Heitor and even your R&D, but there’re things I’d see he wouldn’t.’
Rafa knows that Wagner’s life is complicated and lived in the shadows on the edge of the family and that his contribution to Corta Hélio is solid but hard to quantify, but
he is an outstanding engineer of the small and intricate. Sometime Rafa envies his two natures; the dark precision, the light creativity.
‘Like what?’
‘I’ll know it when I see it. But I will need to see it.’
‘I’ll let Heitor know.’ Socrates, Rafa’s familiar, has already sent the notification. ‘I’ve told him not to let Adriana know.’
‘Thank you.’
Wagner has been the shadow in the family so long his siblings have evolved an alternative social gravity, informing him, including him while keeping him invisible, like a black hole.
‘When will we see you around, miudo?’ Rafa says. Adriana is looking back, waiting for him.
‘When I have something to say,’ Wagner says. ‘You know me. Keep breathing, Rafa.’
‘Keep breathing, Little Wolf.’
‘Ariel.’ Lucas calls to his sister down the length of the Oxala steps. Ariel turns. ‘Going back already?’
‘I have business in Meridian.’
‘Yes, the reception for the Chinese trade delegation. I couldn’t ask you to miss that.’
‘I told you clearly at the party.’
‘It’s family.’
‘Oh come on, Lucas.’
Lucas frowns in puzzlement and Ariel sees that he cannot understand what she is saying. He believes absolutely that his every act is for the family, only the family.
‘If the positions were reversed, I would do it. Without a thought.’
‘Things are simpler for you, Lucas. People are taking an interest in my career. My skin has to be airtight. I have to be clean.’
‘No one’s clean on the moon. They tried to kill Rafa.’
‘No. Don’t you ever do that.’
‘Maybe not the Mackenzies. But someone did. We’re Corta Hélio: we’re good, but we’re good at only one thing. We extract helium. We keep the lights burning down there. That’s our strength but it’s also our vulnerability. AKA, Taiyang; they’re everywhere, doing everything. They’ve got more than one place to go. Even Mackenzie Metals is diversifying – into our core business. We lose the business, we have nowhere to go. We lose everything. The moon does not suffer losers. And mamãe. She’s not what she was.’
Ariel had been glancing away from Lucas, breaking his powerful eye contact. Even as a child, he won every staring-game. Now he says five words and she can’t look away.
‘Even you must have noticed,’ Lucas says. Ariel takes the barb. It is months since she was at a Corta Hélio board meeting.
‘I know Rafa’s been managing her public engagements.’
‘Rafa Corta. The Golden Boy. He’ll run this business into the dust. Help me, Ariel. Help me, help mamãe.’
‘You’re a bastard, Lucas.’
‘I’m not. I’m the only true son in this entire place. I need something on those Chinese, Ariel. Not much. Just a tiny edge. They’ll have something. A little loose skin I can tear.’
‘Leave it with me.’
Lucas bows. As he turns away from his sister, a smile breaks on to his face.
One light for doors locked, two for undocking. Three for departure. A small tremor in the rock as the induction motors levitate the car. And the tram is gone. It is only five kilometres from Boa Vista to João de Deus station. From Rafa’s hugs, farewells, and, yes tears, it might be worlds.
Lucas observes his brother’s bare emotion with discomfort. The corner of his mouth twitches. Everything is big with Rafa. It always was. The biggest bully, the loudest laugher, the charismatic boy, the golden light; as profligate with his anger as his pleasure. Lucas has grown up as his shadow: restrained and precise; honed and holstered like a taser. Lucas feels as profoundly and intensely as his older brother. Emotion is not emotionalism. One is script, the other performance. Lucas Corta has room for emotion but it is a private room, windowless, white and airy. White rooms, without shadows.
Rafa hugs his brother. This is undignified and embarrassing. Lucas huffs in pain.
‘She’ll come back to you.’ It’s the kind of platitude that is expected in situations like this.
‘She doesn’t trust me.’
Lucas cannot understand his brother’s emotional incontinence. This is what marriage contracts are for. Trust and love are no architecture for a dynasty.
‘While Luna is here, she will come back to you,’ Lucas says. ‘She understands. I’m keeping Lucasinho here until the security situation improves. He’ll hate it. It’ll be good for him. Give him something to work against. He has it all too easy.’ Lucas claps Rafa on the back. Make light of it. Get over it. Let go of me.
‘I’m going to get Robson back.’
Lucas suppresses the sigh of exasperation. This, again. When Rafa is frustrated, in business or sport or society or sex, he falls back on the enduring injustice of his son and first born. It has been three years since Rachel Mackenzie took Robson back to her family. Contracts were broken, flagrantly and deliberately. Lawyers are still arguing what is effectively an act of hostage-taking. Ariel has negotiated a steel-bound access agreement but every time the tram takes Robson back to Queen of the South or Crucible, Rafa’s scabs tear and bleed. In such moods, not even Lucas can talk his brother down.
‘You do what you have to.’ Lucas respects his mother in all things, except in her blind adoration of Rafa. Golden Rafa, the heir apparent. He’s too emotional, too open, too soft to run the company. Hearts can’t decide the fate of dynasties that keep Earth’s lights burning. Lucas hugs Rafa again. His mission is clear. He will have to take control of Corta Hélio.
Two jumps from Queen of the South to João de Deus. Rafa and his escoltas wait in the private arrivals area of the BALTRAN station. Until now Rafa’s guards have been electronic. Today they are close and biological: two men, one woman, armed and alert.
The capsule is in the elevator tube, Socrates informs him.
Green lights. Doors open. A boy charges out; brown-skinned, mane of dreadlocks; all legs and arms. He crashes into Rafa. Rafa scoops him up, swirls the boy around, laughing.
‘Oh you you you you!’
Behind the boy comes the woman: tall, red-haired, white-skinned. Green-eyed like her boy. With infinite poise she stalks up to Rafa and slaps him hard across the face. Bodyguards’ hands flash to the hilts of knives concealed in well-cut suits.
‘We have trains, you know.’
Rafa cracks into great golden laughter.
‘You look stunning,’ Rafa says to his wife. And she does look fantastic, for a woman who has been bucketed across the moon in a converted cargo can like a load of ore. Make-up immaculate; every hair, every pleat and fold: immaculate. And she is right. The BALTRAN is outmoded since the high-speed rail network has been linked up: it’s crude, but it is quick. The BALTRAN is a ballistic transport system. On an airless moon, ballistic trajectories can be calculated with precision. A magnetic mass-driver accelerates a capsule. Throws it up. Gravity brings it down. A receiving end of the target mass-driver catches the capsule and decelerates it to rest. In between, twenty minutes of free fall. Repeat as necessary. The capsules can contain cargo, or people. It’s tough but endurable; fast and only hair-raising if you think about it too much. Rafa used to enjoy it for the freefall sex.
‘I want him to catch the game. He’d miss it if he came by train.’ Then to the boy: ‘You want to see the game? Moços versus Tigers. Jaden Sun thinks he’s got us beat but I say we kick Tiger ass all over the stadium. What do you say?’
Robson Corta is eleven years old and the sight of him, the presence of him, his magnificent hair, his face, his great green eyes, the way his lips part in excitement, fill Rafa’s heart with a joy so great it is pain, and at the same time a loss so deep it is a nausea. He crouches to kid level. ‘Game day. What do you think, eh?’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Raf.’ Rachel Mackenzie knows, Rafa knows; their respective sets of bodyguards, even Robson knows that this is not about a handball match. The terms allow Rafa access to his son at any time. Even if that mean
s lobbing him like a handball across the moon. Throw and catch. Throw and catch.
‘We can have this in front of him if you want,’ Rafa says.
‘Robbo, honey, could you go back to the capsule? It’ll only be a couple of minutes.’ A nod from Rachel sends one her blades with the boy. He glances back once at his father. Killing green eyes. He will break hearts. He is breaking one now.
‘Robbo,’ Rafa says with contempt.
‘I had nothing to do with what happened at the party.’
‘ “What happened at the party.” What happened at the party was someone tried to stick me with a neurotoxin-armed fly. I’d’ve been spasming and pissing and shitting myself for hours before I suffocated.’
‘Classy, but it’s not our style. Mackenzies like you to see our faces before they kill you. You should look to your friends the Asamoahs. Poisons, assassin bugs; that’s more their game.’
‘I want him back.’
‘The terms of the settlement …’
‘Fuck the settlement.’
‘Leave this to the lawyers, Raf. You really don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘He’s not safe with you. I’m invoking the security clause. Please send Robson to me.’
‘Not safe with me?’ Rachel Mackenzie’s laugh is like mining tools on stone. ‘Are you insane? Raf, I don’t care how they kill you, or even if they kill you but I know the moon and they won’t stop at you. Root and branch, Rafa. Let you take Robson? No fucking way. Rob stays with me. Mackenzies look after their own.’ She turns to her guard. ‘Lay in a new BALTRAN jump. We’re going to Crucible.’
Rafa roars in inarticulate rage. Knives whip out from magnetic sheaths: escoltas and blades.
‘You know, your brother’s right,’ Rachel Mackenzie says. ‘You are shit-stupid. You want to start a war with us? Stand down lads.’ The Mackenzie blades open the capsule. Rachel Mackenzie says as the lock closes, ‘I tell you something; your sister scares me more than you do. And she’s got more balls.’
The capsule is in the elevator, Socrates says. The mass-driver is powering up.
