by Ian McDonald
‘I’ve found something,’ Wagner says.
‘Tell me.’
‘I recognised one of the protein processors. You wouldn’t be able to see it but, to me, it’s like putting your name up in neon.’
‘You’re talking kind of fast, Little Wolf.’
‘Sorry. Sorry. I met up with the designer – we went to university together. Same colloquium. She gave me an inbox address. Dead of course. But I got the pack to work on it.’
‘Slowly slowly. You did what?’
‘Got the pack to work on it.’
The Meridian pack are agriculturalists, dusters, roboticists, nail artists, bartenders, sports performers, musicians, masseurs, lawyers, club owners, track-engineers, families great and small; a diversity of skills and learning; yet, when they come together, when they focus on one task, something marvellous happens. The pack seems to share knowledge, to instinctively complement each other, to form a perfect team; a unity of purpose: almost a gestalt. Wagner has seen it rarely, participated in it once only but never called on it until now. The pack convened, minds and talents and wills blurred and merged and within five hours he had the identity of the engineering shop that built the assassin-fly. There’s nothing supernatural about it; Wagner doesn’t believe in the supernatural; it’s a rational miracle. It’s a new way of being human.
‘It was a one-shot engineering house called Smallest Birds,’ Wagner says. ‘Based in Queen of the South. Registered to Joachim Lisberger and Jake Tenglong Sun.’
‘Jake Tenglong Sun.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything. The company produced one item, delivered it and then dissolved.’
‘Do we know who they delivered it to?’
‘Trying to find that out. I’m more interested in who commissioned it.’
‘And do you have any leads on that?’
‘I may take this up with Jake Sun, personally,’ Wagner says.
‘Good work, Little Wolf,’ Rafa says. Another agonising slap on the back. Every bite mark shrieks. Rafa has steered Wagner to the edge of Adriana’s progress through the well-wishers.
‘Mamãe, happy birthday.’
Adriana Corta’s lips tighten. Then she leans towards him, an invitation to kiss. Two kisses.
‘You could have shaved,’ she says, to small laughter from her entourage, but as she wheels away into the party she whispers in his ear, ‘if you want to stay a while, your old apartment at Boa Vista is ready for you.’
Marina hates the dress. It catches and itches, it’s voluminous and uncomfortable. She feels naked in it; vulnerable, that one too-abrupt move and it will fall from her shoulders around her ankles. And the shoes are ridiculous. But it’s fashionable and it’s expected and while no one would whisper if she turned up in a pant-suit or men’s tailoring, Carlinhos makes it clear to Marina that Adriana would notice.
Marina is trapped in a dull conversation whorl dominated by a loud sociologist from Farside U and his theories about post-national identities in second and third generation lunarians.
All this and you can’t come up with a better name for moon-dwellers that Lunarians, Marina thinks. She runs phrases: Moonfolk, lunarites, loonie moonie moonish loonish. None good. Rescue me, she pleads to the orixa of parties.
She spies Carlinhos pushing through the press of bodies and festive familiars and cocktail glasses.
‘My mother wants to meet you.’
‘Me? What?’
‘She’s asked.’
He’s already leading her by the hand through the party.
‘Mãe, this is Marina Calzaghe.’
Marina’s first impression of Adriana Corta had been coloured by a knife blade at her throat, but she seems to have aged more than the intervening lunes – no, not aged: withered, collapsed, become more transparent.
‘Many happy returns, Senhora Corta.’
Marina’s proud of her Portuguese now, but Adriana Corta flows to Globo.
‘It seems once again my family is obliged to you.’
‘Like they say, I was just doing my job, ma’am.’
‘If I gave you another job, would you execute it as faithfully?’
‘I’d do my best.’
‘I do have another job. I need you to look after someone.’
‘Senhora Corta, I’ve never been been good with small children. I scare them …’
‘You won’t scare this child. Though she may scare you.’
Adriana’s nod directs Marina across the room, to Ariel Corta, a brilliant flame at the heart of a clutch of soberly dressed court officials and LDC technocrats. She laughs, she throws her head back, tosses her hair, weaves ideograms of smoke from her vaper.
‘I don’t understand, Senhora Corta.’
‘I need someone to mind my daughter. I fear for her.’
‘If you want a bodyguard, Senhora Corta, there are trained fighters …’
‘If I wanted a bodyguard she would have one already. I have dozens of bodyguards. I want an agent. I want you to be my eyes, my ears, my voice. I want you to be her friend and her chaperone. She’ll hate you, she’ll fight you, she’ll try to get rid of you, she’ll shun you and snub you and be vile to you. But you will stay with her. Can you do this?’
Marina has no words. This is impossible, to do, to refuse. In her scratchy dress she stands in front of Adriana Corta and all she can think is but Carlinhos won’t be there.
Carlinhos nudges her. Adriana Corta is waiting.
‘I can, Senhora Corta.’
‘Thank you.’ Her smile is true, and the kiss on Marina’s cheek warm but Marina shivers, chilled by the eternal waiting cold.
She leads him through the party, a dance in a red dress. She glances back to see if he is still looking, still following, moving on to keep her distance from him. Rafa catches her on the balcony. The balloon bestiary has flocked in around the restaurant, they wait, bobbing in the sky like prototype gods that never successfully auditioned for a pantheon.
Without a word, Rafa draws her to him. They kiss.
‘You are the most beautiful thing in this world,’ Rafa says. ‘In both worlds.’
Lousika Asamoah smiles.
‘Who’s looking after Luna?’ she asks.
‘Madrinha Elis. She misses you. She wants her mamãe back.’
‘Sssh.’ Lousika Asamoah touches a carmine nail to Rafa’s lips. ‘It’s always this.’ They kiss again.
‘Lousika, the contract.’
‘Our marriage expires in six lunes.’
‘I want to renew it.’
‘Even though I’m living in Twé and and you’re keeping my daughter and we only ever see each other at your family’s social events.’
‘Even so.’
‘Rafa, I’ve been invited on to the Kotoko.’
Rafa admires and is at the same time baffled by AKA politics. The Golden Stool is a council of eight family members representing the abusuas. The Chair, the Stool, the Omahene, rotates annually through those members, as the Golden Stool itself moves from AKA habitat to habitat. It seems unnecessarily complex and democratic to Rafa Corta. Continuity is preserved by the Sunsum, the familiar of the Omahene which contains all the records and wisdoms of its preceding Omahenes.
‘Does this mean you won’t come back to Boa Vista?’
‘It’ll be eight years before I get to sit on the Golden Stool again. Luna will be fourteen. A lot can happen. I can’t turn it down.’
Rafa steps back and holds his wife at arm’s length, as if examining her for signs of divinity or madness.
‘I want to renew the contract, Rafa. But I can’t come back to Boa Vista. Not just yet.’
Rafa chews back furious disappointment. He forces himself to take time, swallow the words he feels.
‘That’s enough,’ he says.
Lousika takes the lapels of his jacket and pulls him to her. Their familiars merge and mingle; inter-penetrating illusions.
‘Could we not just sneak away from this party?’
Lucas spir
als in from the edge of the party and cuts out Amanda Sun from among her laughing siblings and cousins. A touch on her elbow.
‘A word. In private.’
He takes her by the elbow to the dining room, set out for the birthday feast around a ceiling-scraping ice-sculpture of birds taking flight. Through the swing doors to the kitchen.
‘Lucas, what is this?’
Past the stoves and sinks and titanium work-surfaces, past the chillers and food-safes, the rise and fall of blades and choppers to a store room.
‘Lucas, what is wrong with you? Let go of me. You’re scaring me.’
‘I’m going to divorce you, Amanda.’
She laughs. The small, almost irritated laugh that finds what has just been said ridiculous. Unthinkable. Like the moon crashing into Hudson Bay. Then, ‘Oh my God, you are serious.’
‘Have I ever been anything else?’
‘No one could say that you weren’t serious, Lucas. And I can’t say that the idea doesn’t appeal to me. But we aren’t free in these things, are we? My father won’t tolerate an insult to his daughter.’
‘It wasn’t me insisted on the monogamy clause.’
‘You signed it. What is this really, Lucas?’ Amanda studies his face, as if divining sickness or insanity. ‘Oh my God. This is love, isn’t it? You actually love someone.’
‘Yes,’ Lucas Corta says. ‘Do you want me to break the contract, or will both parties agree to an annulment?’
‘You’re in love.’
‘I’d appreciate it if you moved everything out of Boa Vista before the end of the lune,’ Lucas calls back from the storeroom door. The restaurant staff work intently on placing and plating and glazing their sculpted amuse-bouches. ‘There will be no question over Lucasinho. He’s of majority.’ Lucas stalks through the kitchen. In the store-room, Amanda Sun laughs and laughs, laughs until she has to rest to hands on her knees in exhaustion, then laughs again.
‘Hey.’
‘So hey.’
‘So why were you bouncing my messages?’
Abena Asamoah twists the toe of a satin Rayne stiletto, looks away. She flicks the stud in Lucasinho’s ear.
‘You’ve still got it. That make-up really works on you.’
He has run her down here at the cocktail bar, edged her into a quiet corner. Part of him says, This is stalkery, Luca.
‘My grandmother thinks so too.’
Lucasinho grins and sees it touch Abena and draw the smallest of smiles from her.
‘So if I had a real emergency, I could go to you.’ Lucasinho taps the spike.
‘Of course. That’s what it means.’
‘It’s just …’
‘What?’
‘When I was at the pool party at Twé, you wouldn’t even look at me.’
‘When you were at that pool party you were all over Ya Afuom, and you were out of your skull on gods-know-what.’
‘Nothing happened with Ya Afuom.’
‘I know.’
‘And why would it matter to you if something had happened?’
Abena takes a deep breath, as if about to explain a hard truth, like vacuum, or the Four Elementals, to a child.
‘When you saved Kojo, I would have done anything for you. I respected you. I respected you so much much. You were brave and you were kind – you still are. But when you go to see Kojo in Med Centre, all you want is to get his apartment. You used him. Like you let Grigori Vorontsov use you like a sex toy. I’m not a prude, Luca, but that was gross. You needed stuff and you used anyone who could get it for you. You stopped respecting other people, you stopped respecting yourself and I stopped respecting you.’
Lucasinho’s face burns. He thinks of excuses, defences, justifications – I was angry at my father, my dad cut me off, I’d nowhere to go, I was off the network, it was all people I felt something for, I was exploring, it was a mad time, it was only for a little time, I didn’t hurt anyone – not badly. They sound like whining. They can’t abolish the truth. He didn’t fuck Ya Asamoah, but if he had it would have been for a few nights in her apartment; a soft bed and warm flesh and laughing. Like Grigori, like Kojo. Like his own aunt. He is guilty. His only hope for repairing hearts with Abena is to admit it.
‘You’re right.’
Abena stands, arms folded, magnificently magisterial.
‘You’re right.’
Still not a word.
‘It’s true. I was vile to people.’
‘People who cared about you.’
‘Yes. People who cared about me.’
‘Make me a cake,’ Abena says. ‘Isn’t that what you do to make amends? Bake them a cake?’
‘I’ll make you a cake.’
‘I want cupcakes. Thirty-two. I want a cup-cake party with my abusua-sisters.’
‘What kind of flavour?’
‘Every kind of flavour.’
‘Okay. Thirty-two cupcakes. And I’ll stream you the video of me making them, so you can see I’m making them right.’
Abena gives a little shriek of false outrage, slips off her right shoe and bangs Lucasinho none-too-gently on his chest.
‘You are an insolent boy.’
‘You tried to drink my blood.’
Security alert, Jinji says in Lucasinho’s ear. Remain calm, Corta Hélio security personnel are en route. Across the room hands fly to ears, faces ask questions: what where? A woman in a Tina Leser frock vaults over the bar, pushes Abena away and puts herself between Lucasinho and the danger. She has a knife in each hand.
‘What’s going on?’ Lucasinho says and then the movement of the guests away from the restaurant door shows him. With six corporate blades at his back, Duncan Mackenzie has crashed the party.
*
Heitor Pereira strides forward to confront Duncan Mackenzie. The CEO of Mackenzie Metals stops centimetres from the outstretched hand. He raises an eyebrow at the Corta man’s flamboyant uniform. Behind both men are their armed retainers, hands on blades.
Rafa pushes through the line of security personnel. Lucas is a step behind him, on either shoulder Carlinhos and Wagner. Lucas flicks a glance to his son; Lucasinho pushes past his bodyguard to fall in with the men.
‘What are you doing here?’ Rafa says. The room is motionless. Not a cocktail supped, not a glass of tea sipped.
‘I’m here to pay the compliments of the day to your mother,’ says Duncan Mackenzie.
‘We’ll throw you out like we threw you out at Beikou,’ a voice shouts from the line of security men. Rafa raises a hand: enough.
‘Boys, boys.’ Adriana touches Rafa on the hip and he drifts aside. ‘You’re welcome here, Duncan. But so many men?’
‘Trust is a short market right now.’
Adriana extends a hand. Duncan Mackenzie stoops to kiss it.
‘Happy birthday.’ Then, in a whisper of Portuguese, ‘We need words. Family to family.’
‘We do,’ Adriana replies in the same tongue, then, in command, ‘Have another place set at my table. Beside me. Drinks for Mr Mackenzie’s entourage.’
‘Mamãe?’ Lucas says. Adriana brushes by.
‘You’re not hwaejang yet. None of you.’
The food is exquisite, dish after dish, course after course of harmonious flavours and discordant textures, liquids and gels, geometries and temperatures but Adriana can only pick at it with her poison-sensing chopsticks. A scent, a taste to understand the theory and the skill. On her left hand Duncan Mackenzie eats with enthusiasm and many compliments; honouring the skill by not speaking until the last course is cleared.
‘Congratulations on the Mare Anguis,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. He lifts his glass of mint tea.
‘You don’t mean that,’ Adriana says.
‘Of course I don’t. But it was cutely done and I admire that. You have fucked up our helium-3 development plan. How did you hear about the licence?’
‘Ariel is in the Pavilion of the White Hare.’
Duncan Mackenzie chews over this aftertaste for a few
moments.
‘We should have known that.’
‘How did you learn about it?’
‘The Eagle of the Moon is a terrible pillow talker.’
‘If I can find an advantage for my own people, I’ll take it,’ Adriana says.
‘The Iron Law,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. ‘Served us well. I must have a word with Adrian. He needs some new tricks for the Eagle.’
‘Why are you here, Duncan?’
Duncan Mackenzie has Lucas’s place at Adriana’s left hand; Lucas is banished to a low table from which he repeatedly glances with clear loathing. Adriana catches his glance: This is not your business.
‘Birthdays are a time for looking forwards.’
‘Not at my age.’
‘Humour me. Five years, where will we be?’
‘In this room, celebrating.’
‘Or up in the Bairro Alto, selling our piss and clawing for food and water and fighting for every breath. The moon is changing. It’s not the world it was when you and my dad fought. If we fight now, we will both lose.’ Duncan Mackenzie speaks on a private channel, Esperance to Yemanja, subvocalising his words. Adriana responds in the same small voice.
‘I have no desire to go back to the corporate wars.’
‘But we are heading that way. The Beikou fight was only the start. There’s been trouble at St Ekaterina and Port Imbrium. Someone will be killed. We caught one of your surface workers at Torricelli trying to sabotage a Mackenzie Metals rover.’
‘What have you done with them?’
‘We’re holding her. There’ll be a fee, but it’s better than what Hadley wanted, which was to put her out the lock.’
‘My grandson Robson is surprisingly good with a knife. Do you know where he learned that? From Hadley. He’s over there. See him showing a card trick to Jaden Wen Sun? He’s been doing that ever since he escaped from Crucible. If anyone’s touched him—’
‘I assure you no one has. But you have your son. My daughter is dead.’
