by Ian McDonald
Oh my God, is it you?
It’s me, Lucasinho says. He’s become a celebrity. He buys her mejadra from one of the stands at the top of the run not because she is hungry but because she wants to see cash at work.
You have to do all those sums in your head?
It’s not so hard.
Together they watch the streaks of light race through the alleys and over the roofs and down the walkways, dipping in and out of sight as they duck under build-overs or round corners. Far below, on Budarin Prospekt, tiny luminous spirals wind around each other: bikes at the finish line. The times don’t matter. The winner doesn’t matter. The race doesn’t even matter. What matters is the spectacle, the daring, the sense of transgression, that something wonderful has fallen out of the sky into safe, conventional lunar life.
There are a lot more suit-liners tonight. Two of the guys are decorating each other with the luminous paint the downhillers use on their bikes. Lucasinho’s presence has somehow graced the downhill. Two girls come to Lucasinho through the crowd. They are dressed as nineteenth-century European males: tail coats, wing-collars, top hats and monocles. Kiss-curls and kill-you-deadly make-up. They carry canes in their gloved hands. Their familiars are little dragons, one green, one red. One of them whispers a time and a place in Lucasinho’s ear. He feels her teeth tug on the metal spike in his earlobe. Pleasurable little pain. Abena Asamoah licked his blood at his moon-run party.
The girl who rescued him and shared his mejadra is Pilar. She is of no family but she goes back to Kojo’s apartment with Lucas and falls straight asleep in the guest hammock. It’s still light. Lucasinho sleeps to local morning and makes her fresh-baked muffins as a parting gift.
The rest of the batch he brings to this new party. It’s in Antares Quadra, the morning side of the city, across seven rooms in a colloquium block. The two girls from the previous night receive him. They are still dressed as nineteenth-century aristo boys.
Oh baked goods, says one.
But this is old already, says the other, running a finger up Lucasinho’s suit-liner and holding it a moment under his chin. Her lips are very full and red. We will have to do something about you.
The rest of the night is spent making Lucasinho Corta over. Lucasinho giggles as the girls strip him but he’s vain enough to enjoy the exposure.
You see, it’s not about who you do.
You’re so bi, so spectrum, so normal.
It’s about who you are.
What you are.
They paint him, cosmetic him, change his hair, spray him with temporary tattoos, play with his piercings, dress him up and down. Clothes from all retros and none; inventions by fashion students; of all genders and none.
This is you.
A 1980s gold lamé dress, cinched waist, leg-of-mutton sleeves, power shoulders. Panty hose and red heels.
Absolutely you.
The crowd nod and yes and coo. At first Lucasinho thought he had come to a fancy-dress party: mini-bustles and tutus, hair woven with mirrors and bird-cages; hats and heels; ripped hosiery and leather; hi-cut leotards and kneepads. Everyone made-up in a hundred different regimes, all immaculate. Then he realised that this was a subculture where everyone was a subculture.
One of the boys has a mirror in his bag as a period accessory and Lucasinho studies himself in the glass. He looks stunning. He is not a girl, he is not trans-dressing. He is a moço in a dress. His quiff has been backcombed and gelled into a reef. The lightest touch of make-up turns his cheekbones into edged weapons and his eyes into dark murderers. He moves like a ninja in heels. Not a girl, not entirely a boy.
I think he likes it, says Top-Hat and Monocle.
I think he knows who he is, says Wing-Collar and Cane.
One of the girls catches him: Hey, you’re Lucasinho Corta, great dress, show me the cash. Says, Do you want to come to a party?
Where?
She gives him a location and it’s only when he’s back in Kojo’s on his own that Lucasinho realises that it’s in Twé, the capital of the Asamoahs and that Abena Asamoah might be there. And that what he wants, what he really really wants, has only ever been the girl who put the spike through his ear.
‘This is a strange room,’ the musician says.
Lucas sits on a sofa. The room’s only other piece of furniture is a chair, directly facing the sofa.
‘It is acoustically perfect. It’s designed for me but it will still be the best acoustic you have ever heard.’
‘Where should I …’
Lucas indicates the chair in the centre of the room.
‘Your voice,’ the musician says.
‘Yes,’ Lucas says, quietly and without emphasis and his words fill the room. He doubts there is a sound room in the two worlds to match his. He had acoustic engineers flown up from Sweden to supervise its construction. Lucas loves its discretion. There are sonic marvels hidden in its micro-grooved walls, beneath its absorbent black floor and re-shapable ceiling. The sound-room is his only vice, Lucas believes. He controls his excitement as the musician opens his guitar case. This is an experiment. He has never tried the room with live music before.
‘If you don’t mind.’ Lucas nods at the open case on the floor. ‘It will interfere with the wave forms.’
The case removed, the musician bends over his guitar and picks a soft harmonic. The notes come as soft and clear to Lucas as if they were breathing.
‘It is very good.’
‘You should come over here and try it,’ Lucas says. ‘Except then who would play the guitar?’
Tuning, then the musician rests his hands on the wooden body of his instrument.
‘What would you like to hear?’
‘I asked you play a song at the party. My mama’s favourite.’
‘Aguas de Marco.’
‘Play that for me.’
Fingers float across the board, a chord for every word. The boy’s voice is not the strongest or the most refined Lucas has ever heard – an intimate whisper, as if singing only for himself. But it caresses the song, turns its dialogue into pillow-talk between singer and guitar. Voice and strings syncopate around the beat; between them it vanishes, leaving only the conversation: chords and lyrics. Lucas’s breathing is shallow. Every sense is tuned as precisely as the strings of the guitar, harmonically alive and resonating, focused on the player and the song. Here is the soul of saudade. Here are holy mysteries. This room is his church, his tereiro. It is everything Lucas hoped.
Jorge the musician ends the song. Lucas composes himself.
‘Eu Vim da Bahia?’ he asks. An old João Gilberto song with difficult descending chord progressions and a heartbreaking turn. Jorge nods. Lua de São Jorge. Nada Sera Como Antes. Cravo e Canela. All the old songs his mother brought from green Brazil to the moon. The songs of his childhood, the songs of bays and hills and sunsets he has never seen and can never see. They were seeds of beauty, strong and sad, in the grey hell of the moon. Lucas Corta realised young that he lives in hell. The only way to transform hell, to even survive it, is to rule it.
Lucas feels a tear run down his face.
Por Toda a Minha Vida ends. Lucas sits silent and unmoving, letting his emotions settle.
‘Thank you,’ Lucas says. ‘You play beautifully.’ A thought sends the fee to Jorge’s familiar.
‘This is more than we agreed.’
‘A musician argues about being overpaid?’
Jorge fetches the case and stores his guitar. Lucas watches the care and love with which he handles the instrument, wiping sweat from the strings, blowing dust from under the end of the fingerboard. Like laying a child in a cradle.
‘This room is too good for me,’ Jorge says.
‘This room was made for you,’ Lucas says. ‘Come again. Next week. Please.’
‘For that money, I’ll come when you whistle.’
‘Don’t tempt me.’
And there it is, in the flicker of smile, the flash of exchanged looks.
‘I
t’s good to find someone who appreciates the classics,’ Jorge says.
‘It’s good to find someone who understands them,’ Lucas says. Jorge hefts the guitar case. Toquinho opens the door of the sound room. Even the muffled footfalls, the creak of the guitar case, sound perfect.
Shafts of light fall around the fighting figures. The Hall of Knives is a tunnel of bright, dusty pillars of sunlight. The two males, one tall, one short, lunge and dance, feint and follow, barefoot across the absorbent floor, now lit, now shaded. It is as beautiful as ballet. Rachel Mackenzie watches from a small spectators’ gallery by the door. Robson is quick and brave but he is eleven years old and Hadley Mackenzie is a man.
There is no law on the moon, only consensus, and the consensus outlaws projectile weapons. Bullets are incompatible with pressurised environments and complex machinery. Knives, bludgeons, garrottes, subtle machines and slow poisons, the Asamoah’s fancy of small, biological assassins: these are the tools of violence. Wars are small and eyeball close. Rachel hates to see Robson in the Hall of Knives. She hates more his love for and skill in the techniques Hadley teaches him. She hates most that it’s necessary. The Five Dragons rest uneasy on their treasures. Hadley is the family’s duellist. Rumours pass up and down Crucible that Robert Mackenzie has ordained it to keep Jade Sun’s ambitions in check, and to preserve the inheritance line with pure Mackenzies. There is no one better to teach Robson the way of the knife, but Rachel wishes there were another, better bond between him and Hadley. Sport – like his father’s handball obsession – would be healthy and wholesome and command Robson’s energies.
Look at him, slight but sharp as the blade in his right hand. The fighting pants hang off his slender hips. His shallow chest heaves but his eyes take in everything in the long room. A cry. Robson kicks forward to break a kneecap, follows with a slashing cut, high left to low right. Aiming at the eyes, the throat. Hadley dodges the kick, steps inside the blade and twists the arm. Robson cries out. The knife falls. Hadley catches it before it reaches the floor. Another twist and a trip land Robson flat on his back. A knife in each hand, Hadley brings the blades hammering down towards Robson’s throat.
‘No!’
The blades stop a millimetre from Robson’s brown skin. A drop of sweat falls from Hadley’s brow into Robson’s eyes. Hadley is grinning. He hadn’t even heard Rachel’s cry. She didn’t stay his hand. It’s just the two of them. Nothing else exists. The intimacy of violence.
‘What’s the rule, Robbo? If you take a knife …’
‘You must kill with it.’
‘This time – this time only – I’m letting you live. So what’s the lesson?’
‘Never lose the knife.’
‘Never let go. Use their weapons against them,’ says a voice from the door.
Rachel hadn’t heard Duncan enter. Her father is in his early sixties but has the energy and bearing of a man twenty years younger. His suit is simple grey, conservative, single-breasted, immaculately cut but unflashy. His familiar Esperance is a plain silver sphere, its only ornament, liquid ripples that flow across its surface. Nothing in Duncan Mackenzie’s practised minimalism and modesty advertises that he is CEO of Mackenzie Metals. Everything about Duncan Mackenzie declares it.
‘Is he good?’ Duncan Mackenzie asks.
‘He could cut you up,’ Hadley says.
Duncan Mackenzie gives a sour, twisted smile.
‘Bring him along, Rachel,’ he says. ‘There’s someone I want him to meet.’
‘He’ll be five minutes in the shower,’ Rachel says.
‘Bring him along, Rachel,’ Duncan Mackenzie repeats. Robson looks to his mother. She nods. Hadley raises his knife: a fighter’s salute.
*
Rachel Mackenzie has always been repelled by her Uncle Bryce. Robert is a horror, but Bryce Mackenzie, Director of Finance, is a monster. He is huge. Tall even for a second-gen, lunar gravity has allowed him to pile weight upon weight. He is a gross man-mountain balanced on strangely tiny feet. Not fat, vast. He moves with the lightness and delicacy that big men often possess.
Bryce Mackenzie looks Robson up and down, like a sculpture, like an account. ‘Such a pretty boy.’
A young adoptee brings mint tea. The formality is that Bryce Mackenzie finds his boys at puberty and adopts them, afterwards finding them employment in the company. Many have married in or out, some have become fathers. Bryce is close to his former lovers, and supports them generously. There is never any scandal. Bryce is too dutiful for that. The teaboy is one of three amors currently serving Bryce. Fingers meet over the tea-glass. A look, a smile. Rachel imagines him on top of Bryce, man-mountain Bryce. Riding, riding. Ass pounding.
‘Robson, meet your new husband,’ Duncan says. Rachel’s eyes open. ‘This is Hoang Lam Hung.’ A grown man, well built: twenty-nine, thirty years old.
‘One of your boys,’ Rachel says. Bryce’s soft, full lips purse in offence.
‘Rachel,’ Duncan says. Hung shrugs away the insult, but there is a crack of hurt in the crease of his mouth.
‘This is the nikah.’ Bryce slides the print contract across the desk at the same instant it arrives on Cameny. A legal sub-AI kicks in and summarises the contract to bullet points.
‘You’re joking,’ Rachel Mackenzie says.
‘It’s standard form. No alarms, no surprises,’ Bryce says.
‘Have you asked Robson about his preferences?’ Rachel professes.
‘Dad wants this,’ Duncan Mackenzie says.
‘What do you say?’ Rachel asks her father. She wishes she hadn’t formed that image of the teaboy riding Bryce’s naked bulk. It leads her to imaginings so hideous she covers her mouth with her hands.
‘Like Bryce says, it’s standard.’
‘I need a day or two.’
‘What can there possibly be to think about?’ Bryce says. Rachel is powerless. The will of Robert Mackenzie rules Crucible and she is at the heart of his power. There is no one to whom she can appeal. Jade Sun will always stand with her husband. Whether Hung is kind or cruel, the marriage makes Robson a hostage of the Mackenzies.
Duncan uncaps the pen. Cameny presents the digital signature panel on the virtual contract.
‘I will never forgive you, Bryce.’
‘So noted, Rachel.’
Two quick, decisive stabs of the pen and she would put Bryce’s eyes out. But she signs, and Cameny imprints her digital yin. And it is done.
‘Robson, son: go to your new husband,’ Duncan says.
Hung stands with his arms welcoming. Rachel kneels and hugs Robson to her.
‘I love you, Robbo. I will always love you, and I will never ever let you be hurt. Believe me.’
She leads the boy by the hand across the room. Three steps and the world changes: son to husband. Rachel stands close to Hung and whispers loud for all to hear.
‘If you hurt him, if you even touch him; I will kill you and everyone you have ever loved in your life. Understand.’ Rachel says it to Hung, but her eyes are on Bryce. Again, Bryce’s wet, full mouth works with displeasure.
‘I’ll take care of him, Ms Mackenzie.’
‘I’ll make sure you do.’
Hung rests a hand on Robson’s shoulder. Rachel wants to break every finger, one at a time. She slaps it away from her son.
‘I warned you.’
A touch on her arm: her father.
‘Come along, Rachel.’
The office door opens and two of Duncan’s security enter.
‘What do you think I’m going to do, Father?’
‘Come along, Rachel.’
Rachel Mackenzie kisses her son, then turns away from him, fast so no one will see the look on her face. Never, ever again will she let her uncle, her father, her grandfather, see the marks of the nails they have driven through her heart.
‘Mum, what’s happening?’ The door seals behind her but she can still hear the cries of her son. ‘What’s happening? I’m scared! I’m scared!’
&nb
sp; Never let go, her father had said. Use their weapons against them.
The lock is vast, built for rovers and buses, but Marina feels a heart-clench of claustrophobia as the inlock closes behind her. While the lock chamber depressurises, Marina observes. Minute observation is her way of dealing with her fear of confining spaces. Lose herself in the sensory. The crunch of dust under her boots. The dwindling hiss as air is abstracted. The tightening of the sasuit’s grip on her body as the smart weave adjusts to vacuum. Weird, the familiars hovering over the shoulders of her squad. They should be wearing virtual sasuits.
José, Saadia, Thandeka, Patience. Oleg is dead. Physics killed him. He mistook weight for mass, speed for momentum. A Joe Moonbeam error. He thought he could stop the moving freight pallet with one hand. Momentum had driven the bones of his outstretched arm through his chest and burst his heart.
Oleg, Blake up in Bairro Alto. As many people have died in Marina’s short life on the moon as in all her years on Earth. Oleg’s death has widened the rift between her and her squad-mates. José no longer speaks to her. Marina knows the squad blames her. She is a jinx, a storm-crow, a karma magnet. She’s started to hear a new lunar word; apatoo: spirit of dissension. The moon is the mother of magics and superstitions.
Marina can’t get the Long Run out of her head. She can’t understand how hours and kilometres disappeared. She can’t understand how she could lose herself in something so irrational. It was nothing more than endorphins and adrenaline, but in her bed she feels the rhythm of the feet, hears the heartbeat of drums. She can’t wait to go back. Body paint next time.
