Luna

by Ian McDonald

  Lyoto had been dead two years by then. We had been lovers for over a year. I wasn’t there when he was shot down in the Praça da Sé. I was working on a term paper when the word came. I never was the political one. I was an engineer, he was a literature student. An activist. I was just a natural capitalist who had never taken a position because I had never really thought about politics, he told me. I had pragmatism. He had theory. I could never debate with him because he had everything thought out; argument after argument like a colonial army. When one line fell, the next would advance, firing. The world order was rotten. Diseased with social injustice, racism, sexism, inequality and bad gender politics. I thought that was just the natural state of Brazil. But even I could see the number of helicopters that flew over USP campus increasing every day: the limousines of the hyper-rich, the people who lived up there among the tower-tops and never touched the ground. The changes fell like micro-meteors, like hundreds of tiny impacts. The bus and metro fares going up again. My friends tagging their bicycles, because theft was going up, because fares were going up. Shops buying full shutters because more people were sleeping in shop porches. More cameras on the streets, because of the street sleepers. Surveillance drones. In São Paulo! Maybe in some European state, or the Gulf, but it is not the Brazilian way. Where there are drones, there will always be police. Where there are police, there will always be violence. And every day the price of bread went up, up, up. If there is one thing that will bring people on to the streets, it’s the price of bread.

  Lyoto was committed. He went down to Praça da Sé and painted placards and occupied spaces. He thought I was uncaring. I was caring, but not about people I didn’t know. Not about Chinese companies buying up whole provinces and driving people off the land. Not about refugees from the country, who even favelados looked down on. I could only care about what I knew. My family, my friends, the family I would have some day. Family first, family always.

  I was scared for him. I watched Youtube. I could see how the protests were escalating. Shouting to stones to petrol bombs. Each step the police responded: riot shields to tear gas to guns. I told him I didn’t like him going down there. I told him he could get arrested, or go to jail and get his CPF pulled and he could never get credit or a proper job. I told him that he cared more about strangers than he did about people who cared for him. About me. We split up for a while. We still had sex. No one ever really splits up.

  At first I didn’t know what had happened. All at once a dozen messages came up. OMG. Police shooting. People shot. Shots fired. Lyoto wounded, Lyoto okay, Lyoto shot. Messages coming in, one on top of the other. There was jerky camera feed: a body dragged into a shop door. Then sirens, ambulances arriving. All jerky, all shaking. Nothing in focus. In the distance, gunshots. Have you ever heard gunshots? I suppose not. No guns on the moon. They sound small and mean. All this information bombarding me, but I couldn’t pick the truth out of it. I tried calling him. No signal. Then the rumours started to coalesce. Lyoto had been shot. He had been taken to hospital. Which hospital? Can you imagine how helpless I felt? I called round everyone I knew who knew Lyoto, who knew any of his activist friends. Hospital Sírio-Libanês. I stole a bicycle. It took me seconds to hack the tracking chip. I rode like a madwoman through São Paulo traffic. They wouldn’t let me see him. I waited in the emergency room – there were police everywhere, and news cameras. I said nothing and sat at the back. The police would have asked me questions, then the news people. I listened and listened but I couldn’t hear anything about how he was. Then his family came. I had never met them, I didn’t even know he had a family but I could see at once who they were. I waited and waited, trying to overhear. Then the word came that he had died in the emergency room. The family were devastated. The hospital staff kept the police away. The news people got all the right shots. There was nothing to be done. Nothing to be taken back. Death keeps everything. I crept away on my stolen bike.

  Lyoto died, and five others. He wasn’t the first to be shot, so no one remembered his name. No one sprayed it on walls and buses: remember Lyoto Matsushita. No one remembers the second man on the moon. I remember I was shocked; numb; terrified, but my chief emotion was anger. I was angry that he thought so little of me to put himself in danger of death. I was angry that he died in such a stupid way. I remember the anger, but I can’t feel the sickness, the set of the muscles, the pressure behind the eyes, the feeling of dying inside over and over again. I’m old. I’m a long way from that engineering student at USP. Does anger have a half-life?

  I wonder, if he had lived, what Lyoto would have thought of me? I’m rich and I’m powerful. With a word I can switch off every light on Earth and plunge the planet into darkness and winter. I’m not even the one per cent; I’m the one per cent of the one per cent; the ones who left Earth.

  Within a week we had forgotten about Lyoto Matsushita, the second martyr. There were new riots, new deaths. The government made promises and broke them all. Then came the first of a series of crashes, each one bringing the country and economy lower until it hit the ground and broke beyond any repair.

  I didn’t know then that Lyoto was one of the first casualties in the class war. The great class war; final class war: the hollowing out of the middle class. The financialised economy didn’t need workers and mechanisation was driving the middle classes into a race to the bottom. If a robot could do it acceptably and cheaper, the robot got your job. The machines made you bid against them. The machines even supplied the apps you used to bid against them and against each other. If you were cheaper than a machine, you ate. Just. We always thought the robot apocalypse would be fleets of killer drones and war mecha the size of apartment blocks and terminators with red eyes. Not a row of mechanised checkouts in the local Extra and the alco station; online banking; self-driving taxis; an automated triage system in the hospital. One by one, the bots came and replaced us.

  And here we are, in the most machine-dependent society humanity has ever produced. I’ve grown rich, I’ve built a dynasty on those very robots that beggared Earth.

  My father didn’t remember the North Americans landing on the moon, but he told me old Mão de Ferro did. He was drinking in a bar in Belo Horizonte. The television was switched to the football and Mão de Ferro almost started a fight insisting the bar owner switch over to the moon landing. This is history, he said. We won’t see a greater thing on our time. Faked, the others in the bar shouted. Shot on a Hollywood sound stage. But he stood in front of the television, staring up at the black and images, daring anyone to turn it back to the football. And I remember when the Mackenzies put robots on the moon. I too was in a bar, with my study group. I had gone back to the homeland, to Minas Gerais, and DEMIN, the mining institute, for post-grad. I was even more of an oddity in Ouro Preto. No: I was unique. I was the only woman. The men were over-polite and clubbish. I would not let them leave me out, so I was drinking beer with them in that bar. The bar owner was flicking between sports channels when he dropped for a moment on to the news. I saw the moon, I saw machines, I saw wheel tracks. I shouted at the bar man – hey hey hey, leave it. I was the only person in that bar watching the screen, watching history happening. The Australian Mackenzie Mining Corporation had sent robots to the moon to prospect for rare earth metals for the IT industry. Why aren’t you watching this? I wanted to to shout to my group. Why can’t you see what I see? Call yourself engineers? Watching that screen I felt a flash of understanding, a brilliance in my head. I felt as if my breath were catching, as if my heart were skipping every third, fourth beat. It was feeling of the impossible becoming not just possible, but achievable. By me. Then the news item moved on – it was far down the news, no one was interested in space and science. News was what telenovella stars and models did. I went out of the bar into the beer garden and sat on the wall under the dusty trees and looked up into the night. I saw the moon. I said to myself, there are things up there, making money.

  My father came to see me. He came on the bus. I knew ins
tantly the news was bad. Ouro Preto was a long way but my father would have made an adventure out of the drive. He had lost the dealership. No one was buying high-end Mercedes any more, not even in Barra. He’d been careful: bought out the apartment and my education was safe. As long I delivered in the next two years and did not fill the fridge with beer on a weekly basis. But the business was over and at his age there was no hope of him re-skilling for the machine-code economy, let alone finding another job. He was sorry yet proud – he had done everything he could the best he could. The markets had failed him.

  Then Our Lady of Tuberculosis came and knocked his plans off the table. Caio, boy-baby; kid brother. Caizinho: the runt of the litter we called him. He had never moved out, perpetually thirteen years old it seemed. As jobs collapsed and marriages failed and families imploded, the rest of Mamãe Corta’s seven babies moved back in. All but me. The learner, the keeper. Then Caio breathed in bacillus of TDR-tuberculosis – a bus, a classroom, mass. There were three types of tuberculosis then. MDR, XDR, TDR. Multiply Drug Resistant, Extensively Drug Resistant, Totally Drug Resistant. MDR resists the first-line antibiotics. XDR resists even the second-line drugs, which are basically toxic chemotherapy treatments. TDR: you can guess that. The White Lady we called it, and she wafted into Caio’s lungs and grew there.

  Mamãe turned a room into a sanatorium; sealed it up with plastic. Papa engineered an air-conditioning unit. They couldn’t afford the hospital, they couldn’t afford the drugs. They bought experimental treatments on the black market – experimental Russian phages; chemo-hecked generic pharmaceuticals. I came home. I saw Caio through plastic. It wasn’t safe to go into the room. Mãe slid his meals in on trays my siblings stole from McDonalds, in through two layers of heavy plastic. Caio double-bagged the refuse. I saw him, I saw Pai tired to the marrow, I saw Mãe talking to her saints and orixas. I saw my brothers and sisters and their children scraping a réal where they could: scrap dealing here, buying and selling there, running an animal lottery there. Caio would die but I couldn’t begrudge my family saving every centavo in hope. They could not afford my completing my post-grad. There was a way I could finish. The advertisements had been appearing in the professional journals and sites, within weeks of the Mackenzie landing.

  I applied to work on the moon.

  My adviser of studies helped me with the loan application. My paper on solar distillation of rare earth elements from lunar regolith marked me as a valuable asset in lunar development. I got a contract with Mackenzie Metals. My application was approved, I got the loan.

  I went home that weekend. I could afford to fly. I went down to Barra and I saw the grass sprouting through the Niemeyer cobbles. Shrubs had taken root on apartment rooftops and empty windows. Avenida Sernambetida was lined with stalls and shelters and every apartment block was webbed in water pipes and electricity cables like strangling figs. Every traffic circle held a cluster of water tanks and solar panels. The football stadium, the Olympic park, the uprooted seating, roofs half missing since the last storm. The city was failing. The planet was failing.

  The apartment was crammed full of people but I was given my own room. Caio was still in his plastic cave. He was on oxygen now. Caio and I, in our chambers: the dying prince and the homecoming princess. Television day and night, people coming and going day and night, husbands and wives and partners and their relatives, family members who were not family members. And my mamãe, so big she could only waddle, ruling them all with her shout. I went out on to the balcony that night and I saw the moon. Yemanja, my goddess: only she was not forming out of the sea; she was far beyond the world, and the world was turning to her. The world was turning and bringing me under her gaze, and all the water in the ocean was drawn to her. And me with it. Oh, me with it.

  I loved training for the moon. I ran, I swam, I did weights and cross. I was lean and purposeful and so so fit. I adored my muscles. I think I was very much in love with myself. I was not just the Iron Hand, I was the Iron Woman.

  The South American training centre was in Guiana, near the ESA launch facility. Out running, I would hear the roar of the Orbital Transfer Vehicle engines powering up. They shook me until I couldn’t hear. They shook Earth and Heaven. Then I saw the vapour trail, curving upwards and the tiny dark needle of the spaceplane at its tip, powering up. Up, away from the world. It made me cry. Every time.

  The thing about training for the moon: you aren’t training for the moon. You’re training for launch. The moon had no need for my fantastic body. The moon would eat it, slowly. The moon would change me to itself.

  I wasn’t the only woman, but almost. The Korou facility was DEMIN, on steroids. The moon would be like a giant college football team, in space. I realised that the moon was not a safe place. It knew a thousand ways to kill you if you were stupid, if you were careless, if you were lazy, but the real danger was the people around you. The moon was not a world, it was a submarine. Outside was death. I would be sealed in with these people. There was no law, no justice: there was only management. The moon was the frontier, but it was the frontier to nothing. There was nowhere to run.

  It took three months to make me ready for the moon. Centrifuge training, freefall training – up in an ancient A319 over the South Atlantic and me throwing up every single time we went into the dive. And the suit training – the suits were huge clunking things compared to the sasuits we have now: try threading screws in those gauntlets! I was good at it. Good fine motor skills. Low pressure training, zero-pressure training. Low-gee manufacturing, vacuum manufacturing, robotics and 3D-print coding. Three months! Three years wouldn’t have been enough. Three lifetimes.

  And then it was three weeks to launch day. I went back home. Papa threw a party on the roof. He always leaped at any chance to hold a churrasceria. Everyone told me how hot I looked. It was a great party, joy shot through with saudade. It was a wake for the dead. Everyone knew I would never come back.

  Caio died three days before launch. And my thought wasn’t loss or grief. My thought was, why couldn’t you have waited? A week, even five days? Why did you have to give me something to feel, when all my feeling is taken up by that big moon up there, and that star in the morning sky that grows a little brighter every day – the cycler, approaching Earth – and most immediately, that black bird waiting to roll out from Hangar 6 on to the strip.

  So anger, then guilt. I asked for compassionate leave. I was refused. I couldn’t risk infection so close to launch day. Any bug would rip through the confined spaces of the cycler and the facility. The moon was an enormous clean room. We were checked daily for viral infections, parasites, insects. No vermin on the moon.

  So they burned Caio to kill the White Lady as I was driven out in the pressurised bus to the spaceplane. We had practised embarkation a dozen times in the hangar, but we still pressed to the darkened windows for our first glimpse of the OTV, black and glinting naked under the sun. The sense of power, of human ability, was so strong. Many of the men cried. Men are so easily moved.

  We strapped in, suited and helmeted, no windows, the screens off. We had done it twenty times before but I still fumbled with the straps, the safety checklist. I wasn’t ready. No one could be, for a thing like this. I couldn’t stop thinking about the hydrogen tanks before and behind me, the oxygen tank under my feet. I was rigid with fear. Then I found there was a place beyond that fear – not calm, not beautiful, nor resigned or helpless, but firm and resolute.

  Then the OTV rolled out and it went cunk cunk cunk over the strip where its tyres had developed flat spots from the standing. Fifty years and I remember it all so clearly. I felt us turn on to the strip, I felt the spaceplane pause, then the engines fire. Oh my! The power! You won’t have felt anything like it, not even if you’ve gone by the BALTRAN. It’s like every part of you, yelling. And I found out what was beyond the resolution beyond the fear. Excitement. Pure excitement. This was the sexiest thing I had ever done.

  The engines cut out. A slight shock: the payload po
d had unlatched. We were in free fall. I felt my stomach begin to unravel, the acid bile burning up my throat. Vomiting in your helmet is not just vile. It can drown you. Then I felt centrifugal force tug at the base of my stomach and I knew the tether had us and was swinging us up into a transfer orbit to the cycler. The gees peaked, the blood rushed to my toes. Freefall again. The next touch of weight I would feel would be in the centrifuge arms of the cycler.

  A judder. A lurch, loud clunks and clangs and servo whine. We had docked with the cycler. Our belts released. I pushed myself free towards the open lock. It looked far too small even for small me. But I was through, we were all through, all twenty-four of us.

  I stayed a time in the lock, clinging to a stanchion, fighting nausea, looking through a tiny window at the spaceplane hanging against the huge blue Earth. It was too big, too close to reveal the movement of the cycler, rushing away from it. But I felt it. I was out on the moon path, me: Adriana Maria do Céu Mão de Ferro Arena de Corta.

  FOUR

  Two kisses for Adriana Corta, one for each cheek. A small gift, wrapped in Japanese print paper, soft as fabric.

  ‘What is it?’

  Lucas loves to bring his mother gifts when he visits. He is assiduous: at least once a week he takes the tram to Boa Vista and meets his mother in the Santa Barbra pavilion.

  ‘Open it,’ Lucas Corta says.

  He sees delight dawn across his mother’s face as she carefully unwraps the paper and catches the tell-tale perfume of the gift. He loves the management of emotion.