by Ian McDonald
Carlinhos’s blank helmet visor is motionless for a long moment. Then he says. ‘Get to work.’
The moon is almost as violent with robots as it is with human meat. Unfiltered radiation eats AI chips. Light degrades construction plastic. The monthly magnetotail, the event of the moon passing through the streaming coma of Earth’s magnetic field, can short weakened electrical circuits and whip up brief but destructive dust devils. Dust. Chief devil of the Tranquillity East samba-line. Everywhere dust. Always dust. It coats struts and spars and spokes and surfaces like fur. Marina moves a finger gingerly over a structural truss. The fuzz of dust moves like hairs to the dance of the electrostatic charge of her sasuit. Over lunes dust grinds, wears, abrades, destroys. Marina’s job is regaussing. It’s simple enough for a Jo Moonbeam and fun to watch. A timer sets the magnetic and electrical reversal and she runs in great bounding moon-strides to the safe distance. The field reverses and repels the charged dust particles in a sudden cloud of silver powder. It is pretty and dramatic and very more-ish. Marina sees in terrestrial, biological similes: an ocean-wet dog shaking its coats; a forest fungus exploding a puffball of spores. The module team is at work even as the dust settles on their sasuits, swapping chipsets and actuators: work robots find hard. Marina’s fingers trace graffiti hidden like heiroglyphs under the dust: the names of lovers, handball teams, imprecations and curses in all the Moon’s languages and scripts.
Boof. Marina gausses off another soft explosion of dust. It should make a noise. The silence is improper. Boof, she whispers inside her helmet. She hears laughter on a private channel.
‘Everyone does that,’ Carlinhos says.
Under the dust are hieroglyphs. Generations of dusters have left their names, their curses, their gods and their lovers on the bare metal in a dozen colours of vacuum pens. Pyotr H. Fuck this shit. Moços HC.
She boofs with every extractor. There are tricks to moon-work. Maintain concentration. The sameness of the terrain, the closeness of the horizon, the uniformity of the extractors, the mesmerising weave on their scoop-heads; all conspired to sedate, to hypnotise. Marina finds her thoughts drifting to Carlinhos running, tassles and weaves and body oil. She shakes him out of her head. The second trick is also a seduction. Not all pressure suits are equal. A sasuit is not a diving suit. There is no water resistance, no air resistance on the surface. Things move fast. Oleg’s head was crushed in training because he made that very mistake. Mass, speed, momentum. Concentrate. Focus. Check your suit reports. Water temperature air radiation. Pressure, coms, network. Channels, weather reports. The Moon has weather, none of it good. Magnetotail, solar activity. A dozen things to check every minute, and still do her work. Some squadmates are listening to music. How do they do that? By the fifth extractor Marina’s muscles are aching. Focus. Concentrate.
So deep is her concentration, so sharp her focus, that Marina doesn’t notice when alerts go off across the public channel as the name above Paulo Ribeiro’s helmet goes red, and then white.
Rafa runs his hands over the burnished aluminium of the landing strut.
‘She’s beautiful Nik.’
The VTO transporter Orel stands bathed in kilowatt brilliance from twenty floodlights. The lifter’s own search-spots highlight hull, thruster pods, the clustered spheres of the fuel tanks, the manipulator arms, the recessed pilot windows, the VTO eagle on the nose.
‘Fuck off, Rafa Corta,’ Nikolai Vorontsov says. ‘She is not beautiful. Nothing on the moon is beautiful. You are such a shitter.’ He laughs like a landslide.
Nikolai is everyone’s idea of a Vorontsov, a wall of a man, as broad as he is tall. Bearded, long hair braided. Earth-blue eyes and a deep booming voice. He amplifies the accent. No follower of the current taste for retro fashion, Nik Vorontsov. Shorts with many pockets, workboots, T-shirt straining over heavy muscles slumping into slack flab. Like all his family, his familiar is the double-headed eagle, with his own personal heraldic device emblazoned on the shield. He is professionally Vorontsov.
‘It’s not how she looks,’ Rafa says, ‘It’s what she is.’
‘Now really fuck off,’ Nik Vorontsov says.
Orel is a moonship. A point-to-point surface transporter. The most expensive and spendthrift means of travel on the moon. The hydrogen and oxygen in the spherical tanks are precious; the fuel for life, not rocket thrusters. It’s the same insanity as burning oil for electricity, up on old Earth. On the moon, energy is cheap, resources rare. People and goods travel by train, rover, surface bus, decreasingly the BALTRAN, the orbital tethers, their own muscle power on foot and wheel and wing. They don’t fly in the cargo pods of moonships.
VTO maintains a fleet of ten transporters stationed at widely dispersed locations around the moon. They are the emergency service, the ambulance, the rescue team, the lifeboat. Nowhere is more than thirty minutes flying time from a transporter hub. Nik Vorontsov commands the fleet and is occasional pilot, engineer and lover of his ugly moonships. They are dearer to him than any of his children.
‘So, you come all the way from John of God to lick my ugly babies and tell me they are beautiful?’ Nik Vorotnsov asks. He says the name of the city in Globo because he has always made a play about how impossible it is to pronounce Portuguese. He and Rafa are old university friends. They studied together, they gymmed together: weights and body culture. Nik went further up Muscle Road than Rafa, but Rafa has made it business to keep on top of the sport to be able to discuss supplements and training regimes with his former gym buddy when they meet at the Nevsky Bar in Meridian over vodka.
‘I came all the way from João de Deus to hire one of your babies,’ Rafa says.
‘Any baby in particular?’
‘Sokol at Luna 18.’ Knowing the locations of the VTO lifeboats is core surface-work knowledge, as is an up-to-date rescue insurance.
‘So sorry. That baby is rotated out for maintenance,’ Nik Vorontsov says.
‘What about Pustelga at Joliot?’
‘Ah. Pustelga. Still waiting spaceworthiness certification. The LDC is so slow.’
‘That’s the entire Tranquillity-Serenity-Crisium sector without any cover.’
‘I know. It’s deplorable. Civil servants – hah. What can I do about it? Be careful out there.’
Rafa slaps Orel’s landing leg.
‘This one.’
‘When do you need her?’
‘A forty-eight-hour wet lease, from now.’
Nik Vorontsov sucks in the air through his teeth and Rafa knows that Orel will not be available for that time, that no Vorontsov transporter will be available. Rafa’s jaw and belly muscles tighten. Anger blisters hot across his face, his hands. The personal touch, he had assured Lucas. Business is all about relationships. Now he has come all this way in his stylish clothes and groomed hair and manicured hands to be made to look like a fool by this Vorontsov blockhouse.
‘How much do you need?’
‘Rafa, this is undignified.’
‘Who got to you?’
‘Rafa, this is not good talk.’
‘The Mackenzies. Was it Duncan, or did the old man crank himself up to doing it personally? Family to family. Robert, it’ll have been Robert. Tying up the transporter fleet, that’s his sense of style. Duncan never had any style. Did he ask you personally, or did it ping up to old Valery and he told you to jump?’
‘Rafa, I think you should leave now.’
Rage bursts inside Rafa, a surge of boiling blood. He is shouting in Nik Vorontsov’s face, speckling him with spittle.
‘You want to make an enemy of me? You want to make an enemy of my family? This is the Cortas. We can fuck you so many ways you will never get out from it. Who the fuck are you? Bus drivers and cabbies.’
Nik Vorontsov wipes the back of his hand across his face.
‘Rafa—’
‘Fuck you, we don’t need you. We will get this claim, and then the Cortas will fucking deal with you.’ Rafa petulantly kicks the transporter’s landing leg.
Nik Vorontsov roars in Russian and Corta security has Rafa’s arms pinioned. They came out of nowhere, silent, well-dressed, strong.
‘Senhor, let’s go.’
‘Let me fucking go!’ Rafa shouts to his bodyguards.
‘I’m afraid not, Senhor,’ says the first escolta, wrestling Rafa away from Nik Vorontsov.
‘I’m ordering you,’ Rafa says.
‘We’re not on your orders,’ says First Escolta.
‘Lucas Corta’s apologies for any slight to your family, Senhor Vorontsov,’ says Second Escolta, a tall woman in a well-cut suit.
‘Get your boss the fuck off my base!’ Nikolai Vorontsov roars.
‘At once senhor,’ says Second Security. Rafa spits as he is manhandled towards the door. The gob flies far and elegantly in the lunar gravity. Nik Vorontsov dodges it easily but it isn’t aimed at him. It’s aimed at his ship, his baby, his precious Orel.
The Professional Handball Owners Club is small, comfortable, intensely private. It displays a flagrant discretion: leave your escoltas at the door. The clubs heavily-muscular security tap left forefingers to their pineal glands as you pass: no familiars. The staff will politely remind you until you comply. The club is sporty not luxurious; its ambiance recalls university colloquiums. It has two dozen members, all of them men.
Two dozen men, two dozen friends, and Rafa doesn’t want to speak to any of them. Jaden Wen Sun calls from the depths of a club chair across the salon; Rafa waves an answer and strides for his room. He is charred with anger. He slams the door, lifts a chair and slings it effortlessly across the room. Table, lamps smash and fall. He kicks the shards high and hard. He rips the old-fashioned screen from the wall, how the owners watch their team in the so-discreet PHO Club, smashes it across the edge of the dressing table, smashes and smashes and smashes until it breaks in two. He wedges the broken screen halves into the output hopper of the printer, levers them until he has warped the printer into uselessness.
A tap at the door.
‘Mr Corta.’
‘Nothing.’
The rage has burned to embers. He breaks everything. This room, the deal with Nik Vorontsov – all the same rage. He spat on Nik Vorontsov’s ship. He might have spat on his daughter. When he called João de Deus, Lucas’s pauses and long silences were more eloquent condemnations that any outburst of anger. He has failed the family. He always fails the family. Everything he touches falls to ruin.
Rafa has been careful in his room-smashing red rage. The bar is intact. He sits on the bed, eyes the bottles like lovers across a crowded room. The club keeps Rafa’s room stocked with his personalised gins and rums. It would be a fine night with them, drinking together. Drinking himself to maudlin regret; drunk-calling Lousika in the small hours.
Have some fucking dignity, man.
‘Hey,’ Jaden Sun calls again.
‘I’m going out,’ Rafa says.
The club staff will have the room rebuilt by his return.
Madrinha Flavia is as surprised to see Lucasinho at her door as he was to see her at the foot of his hospital bed.
Lucasinho opens the cardboard box he has carried so carefully from Kojo’s apartment. Green fondant-frosted letters spell the word Pax.
‘They’re Italian,’ he says. ‘I had to look up where Italy is. They’re really light. They’ve got almond in them. Are you okay with almond? It says Pax. It’s kind of like the Catholic word for paz.’ A boy naturally speaks Portuguese to his madrinha.
‘Paz na terra boa vontade a todos os homens,’ Flavia says. ‘Come in, oh come in.’
The apartment is cramped and dim. The only light comes from dozens of small biolights, arranged in every crevice and cranny and along every shelf and ledge. Lucasinho frowns in the green glow.
‘Wow, it’s kind of small in here.’ Lucas ducks under the door lintel and tries to find a place to sit amid the paraphernalia.
‘There’s always space for you,’ Flavia says, taking Lucasinho’s face between her hands. ‘Coração.’
When you need a roof, a bed, hot food, water and clean, your madrinha will always be there.
‘I like your place.’
‘Wagner pays for it. And my per diems.’
‘Wagner?’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘Um, my Dad doesn’t …’
‘Talk about me. Your mother neither. I’m used to that.’
‘Thank you for coming to see me. In hospital.’
‘How could I not? I carried you.’
Lucasinho squirms. No seventeen-year-old male can bear being told that he was once inside an older woman. He settles on the indicated spot on the sofa and surveys the apartment while Flavia flicks on the boiler and brings plates and a knife from her kitchen cubby. She shifts icons and biolamps to clear a space on the low table in front of the sofa.
‘You’ve a lot of … Stuff.’
Icons, statues, rosaries and charms, offering bowls, stars and tinsel. Lucasinho’s nose wrinkles at the collision of incense vapers, herbal mixes and stale air.
‘The Sisterhood is big on religious clutter.’
‘The …’ Lucasinho catches himself before the conversation descends into asking parrot-questions to his madrinha’s every statement.
‘The Sisterhood of the Lords of Now.’
‘My vovo has something to do with that.’
‘Your grandmother gives us money to support our work. Irmã Loa has been visiting her as a spiritual adviser.’
‘What does vo Adriana need with a spiritual adviser?’
The boiler sings. Madrinha Flavia crushes mint leaves and infuses.
‘No one’s told you.’ Flavia pushes more statues and votives to the end of the low table and settles on the floor.
‘Hey, I should …’
Flavia waves away Lucasinho’s offer to take her place.
‘Now, this cake you’ve brought me.’ She lifts the knife before her eyes and whispers a prayer. ‘You must always bless the knife.’ She cuts a tiny fingernail of cake and sets it on a dish in front of a statue of Saints Cosmos and Damiano. ‘Unseen guests,’ she murmurs then takes her own slice of Pax cake between fingers as thin and precise as porcelain chopsticks.
‘This really is very good, Luca.’
Lucasinho blushes.
‘It’s good to be good at something, Madrinha.’
Madrinha Flavia brushes crumbs from her fingers.
‘So tell me what brings you to your madrinha’s door?’
Lucasinho lolls back on the patchouli-smelly upholstery and rolls his eyes.
On the train back from Twé he had thought his heart might explode. Heart, lungs, head, mind. Abena had walked away from him. He found his fingers straying to the metal spike in his ear. Abena had licked his blood at his party. At the Asamoah party she looked at him and stalked away. Five times he almost pulled the plug from his ear, to send back it back to Twé the moment the train arrived in Meridian. Five times no. When you have no other hope, Abena had said. When you’re alone and naked and exposed, like my brother; send the pierce. He wasn’t any of those things. To misuse the gift would make her hate him more.
‘I need someplace to stay.’
‘Obviously.’
‘And I have this question I can’t figure.’
‘There’s no guarantee I can figure it either. But go on.’
‘Okay. Madrinha, why do girls do things?’
‘He’s making that wrong.’
The bartender freezes. The bottle of blue Curacao waits over the cocktail glass. The woman turns with granite slowness to stare from the other end of the bar.
‘The lemon twist goes in first.’
Rafa Corta slides to the end of the bar beside the woman. Her clothes are immaculate, her Fendi bag on the stool beside her a classic. Her familiar is a rotating galaxy of golden stars. But she is a tourist. A dozen physical misco-ordinations and stiltednesses, mistimings and maladaptations declare her terrestrial origins.
‘Excuse me.’<
br />
Rafa lifts the glass and sniffs.
‘At least that’s correct. The Vorontsovs insist on vodka, but a true Blue Moon must be made with gin. Seven botanicals minimum.’ He lifts the orb of curled lemon peel with tongs and drops it into the glass. He nods at the Curacao bottle. ‘Give me that.’ A click of the fingers. ‘Teaspoon.’ He inverts the teaspoon and holds it twenty centimetres above the glass. The bottle he holds another twenty centimetres above the spoon. ‘It’s about sculpting with gravity.’ He pours. A thin thread of blue liqueur falls slow as honey from the lip on to the back of the spoon. ‘And two steady hands.’ The Curacao coats the back of the spoon and drips from the rim in chaotic runnels and drops. Azure spirals like smoke into clear gin. The yellow marble of lemon peel is wreathed in ribbons of diffuse blue. ‘Fluid dynamics does the stirring. It’s the application of chaotic systems to cocktail theory.’
He slides the cocktail to the woman. She takes a sip.
‘It’s good.’
‘Only good?’
‘Very good. You make a sweet Blue Moon.’
‘I should. I invented it.’
A group of four middle-aged customers toast some family business success in a corner booth. Corta security haunt a table a discreet distance from the bar. Rafa and the Earth woman are the only other clients. Rafa has stumbled into this bar because it was the closest to the club but he likes it. Old-fashioned up-light turning each drink into a jewel, tightening chins, sharpening cheekbones, shading eyes with mystery. Rare wood and square club couches in tank-leather. Mirrors along the back bar, muttered music, a terrace high on the central hub of Aquarius Quadra. Galaxies of city lights in every direction. He was two caipis down when the tourist woman entered the bar. His mind is made up. No more drinking alone. Blue Moon all the way.
Her name is Sohni Sharma. She is a New York-Mumbai postgraduate researcher finishing a six-month placement with the Farside Planetary Observation Array. Tomorrow the moonloop snatches her up to the cycler and back to Earth. Tonight she drinks the moon out of her mind and blood. She either doesn’t recognise his name or her Mumbai hauteur is supreme. Rafa moves into the vacant social space.
