by Ian McDonald
We drew up the contract and her legal systems looked over it and Mãe Odunlade advised her and we agreed. We had already started a number of embryos; we picked one and then asked Ivete how she wanted to do this. Did she just want to go to the med centre for implantation or did she want to have sex with me, or Carlos, or both of us? To make it personal, with affection, and connection.
We spent two nights in a hotel in Queen of the South and then we had the embryo implanted. It took right away. Mãe Odunlade had selected her madrinhas well. Ivete came to João de Deus with us and we gave her her own apartment and full-time medical support. Nine months later, Rafa was born. The gossip networks were full of pictures and excitement – picture rights were part of Ivete’s remuneration package – but the cheers were not warm. I could smell the disapproval. Surrogate mothers; rent-a-womb. They all had a weekend of wild sex together in a hotel in Queen. A threesome, you know.
Rafa was hardly off the teat before I was already planning the next in the succession. Carlos and I started looking for a new madrinha. At the same time I had my first visions of this place. João de Deus was no place to bring up a family. There are children there now, but back then it was a frontier town, it was a mining town, it was raw and rough and red-blooded. I remembered Achi’s parting gift to me. I found the bamboo document tube easily – ten years since she had left. So fast! Waterfalls and stone faces; a garden carved into the heart of the moon. It was as if she had seen the future, or the insides of my heart. I commissioned selenologists; found this place, hidden away in the rock like a geode for billions of years. A palace, a child, another one coming together in the Meridian Medical Facility. A business and a name. Finally I was the Iron Hand.
Then Carlos was killed.
Did you hear what I said? Carlos didn’t die. He was killed. There was intent in it. There was purpose and ill will. Nothing was ever proved, but I know he was killed. He was murdered. And I know who did it.
I’m sorry. I get over-emotional. It’s been so long – half my life without him, but I see him so clearly. He comes and stands so close to me: I can see the texture of his skin – he had terrible skin; I can smell him – he had a very distinct, very personal smell; sweet like sugar. Sweet-smelling sugar-man. His children have it too: the sweet sweat. I can hear him, I can hear the little whistle he made when he breathed through his nose. His chipped tooth. I see it all in such detail and yet it doesn’t seem real. It’s as unreal to me as Rio. Did I ever live there? Did I waggle my toes in the ocean? We were together so short a time. I have lived three lives: before the moon; Carlos; after Carlos. Three lives so different they don’t feel like me.
I still find it hard to talk about. I haven’t forgiven. I don’t even understand the concept; why should I stop feeling what I honestly feel, why should I pardon the injustice? Why should I take all the hurt that’s been done to him and say, None of that matters Carlos? I have forgiven. Pious nonsense. Forgiveness is for Christians, and I am no Christian.
He was out on a five-day inspection run across the new Mare Imbrium fields. His rover underwent an uncontrolled depressurisation in the Montes Caucasus. Uncontrolled depressurisation – you understand what that means? An explosion. It was forty years ago and our engineering was not as good as it is now, but even then, rovers were sturdy; rovers were tough. They did not undergo uncontrolled depressurisations. It was sabotaged. A small device, internal pressurisation would do the rest. I went out on a Vorontsov lifeboat. The rover was scattered over five kilometres. There wasn’t even enough to recycle for carbon. Do you hear my voice? Do you hear how I keep it flat and focused, how I choose my words like tools, precise and practical? This is still the only way I can talk about Carlos. I put a marker there; a pillar of laser-cut titanium. It will never rust, never discolour, never grow old and dusty. It will stand there for aeons. That’s right, I think. That’s long enough.
You killed Carlos Matheus de Madeiras Castro, Robert Mackenzie. I name you. You waited, you took your time and you worked out how to hurt me most. You destroyed the thing I loved dearest. You paid me back three times.
Three months later Lucas was born. I never loved him as I loved Rafa. I couldn’t. My Carlos was taken, Lucas was given back. It didn’t seem a fair trade. And that’s not right, that’s not just, but human hearts are seldom just. But it was Rafa who heard the name of his father’s killer whispered over his bed; he was the one grew up in that shadow, with hate in his heart. Cortas cut. We begin and end with our names.
Rafael, Lucas, Ariel, Carlinhos: little Carlos. Wagner. I couldn’t be kind to that boy. We get notions into our heads and then we look around and a lifetime has gone past and they become dogmas. And Ariel … Why didn’t I … No point. Once an engineer, always an engineer. It has taken me a lifetime to realise that lives are not problems to be solved. My children are the achievements that make me most proud. Money – what can we spend money on here? A faster printer, a bigger cave? Empire? It’s dust out there. Success? It has the shortest half-life of any known substance. But my children: do you think I’ve built strong enough to stand ten thousand years?
Yemanja laid a silver path out across the ocean and I walked up it until I came to the moon. What I like about the orixas – their particular wisdom: they don’t offer much. No holiness, no heaven, just one opportunity, once given. Miss it and it will never come again. Take it and you can walk all the way to the stars. I like that. My mamãe understood this.
My story is finished now. Everything else is just history. But do you know? I wasn’t average. I wasn’t Jane-outside. I was extraordinary.
Sister, excuse me. Yemanja has an emergency call.
TEN
You pass the first line of security twenty kilometres out from João de Deus. You may be on the train, a bus or rover, perhaps you fall towards the Fecunditatis 27 catcher in a BALTRAN capsule, but your vehicle, your passenger manifest and you will have been interrogated by Corta security AI. The first trip-line is so subtle you won’t even know you’ve crossed it. Unless you trip it.
The second line of security is not a line but a level, a field that covers every prospekt and level, every crosswalk and elevator, every duct and pipe and shaft of João de Deus. Bots, crawling and climbing and flying, from massive tunnel diggers and sinterers to insect-sized inspection drones. Eyes and ears and senses only bots possess turned outward, alert and engaged.
The third circle is the security personnel, women and men in sharp suits with sharper blades and other, longer-range weapons that can take down an assassin, biological or machine, before it closes to killing distance. Poisons, air-drones, tasers, targeted insects. Heitor Pereira has spent freely and widely. His arsenal is the finest on the moon.
At the centre of these rings of security lies Ariel Corta in an induced coma in the intensive care unit of the Nossa Senhora Aparecida Medical Facility.
The Cortas have come from the four quarters of the moon. The doctors are firm in their refusal to allow the family access to the ICU. There’s nothing to see. A handsome woman in a life-support cot, tubed and wired, bot sensors and scanners weaving over her body like mudras from a Hindu dance. Beijaflor hovers above her head. Adriana has moved her court to João de Deus. Corta Hélio has requisitioned a suite of rooms on the level above the ICU. Occupants have been well-compensated; where necessary, they have been booked in other medical facilities, transported at Corta expense with the best available care, upgraded. Boa Vista staff print out furniture and fabrics and broadcast catering tenders. Press and gossip sites camp outside the med centre. Heitor Pereira has caught thirty spy drones already.
Their familiars have told them the details of the attack and the damage but the Cortas find comfort and reassurance in repeating, rehearsing, renewing them to each other. An assassin’s litany.
‘A bone knife,’ Adriana Corta says.
‘He carried it straight past the scanners at the party,’ Rafa says. He’s arrived directly from Twé; three jumps by BALTRAN. He’s unruffled; groomed, clothe
s, shoes, hair immaculate despite the indignities of ballistic transport. ‘They never saw it.’
‘The pattern is widely available on the network,’ Carlinhos says. He’s come twelves hours by rover from the small war on the Sea of Crises, itchy in an unfamiliar shirt and suit. He tries to loosen the confining collar. ‘Half my crew carried them. They were fashionable a couple of years back. You’d use your own DNA as the template.’
‘A litigant with a grudge,’ Adriana says.
‘Not so short a commodity,’ Lucas says.
‘Ridiculous,’ Adriana hisses. ‘If you’re on the sharp end of the bad divorce, you don’t take it out on the lawyer, you take it out on the ex.’
‘The story is credible,’ Lucas says. ‘Barosso vs Rohani. The Court of Clavius has the case file. He backed out of negotiations and went for a court settlement. Ariel took him to pieces.’
‘Yet he was a guest at this party,’ Adriana says. Ridiculous. Ridiculous.’
No one has yet named the obvious, nor will they until Ariel is out of danger. The rest of the moon can work up rumours and frenzies and network indignation. It feeds the Corta well, but not so well as their dignity in distress.
‘And where is Wagner?’ Adriana asks.
‘Queen,’ Carlinhos says. ‘He’s found something.’
‘If he wants to be one of us, he needs to be here.’
‘I’ll try him again, Mamãe.’
But Lucas’s eyebrow is raised and he flicks a look at his brother that says we’ll talk about this.
Dr Macaraeg is here, everyone’s familiar announces.
Ariel’s physician hesitates in the open door, intimidated by the phalanx of Cortas facing her. She sits at one end of the conference table. The family congregate around the other end.
‘It’s not good,’ Dr Macaraeg says. ‘We’ve stabilised her though she’s lost a lot of blood. A lot of blood. There has been nerve damage. The knife has severed part of the spinal cord. There has been a loss of function.’
‘Loss of function?’ Rafa blusters. ‘What’s that? You’re not talking about a bot here. My mother needs to know what’s happened to Ariel.’
Dr Macaraeg rubs her eyes. She’s exhausted and needs nothing less than Rafael Corta’s futile temper.
‘The knife caused a category B lesion in the region of the L5 section of the spinal cord. With a category B lesion motor function is lost. Sensory function remains. The L5 region is associated with motor control in the feet, legs and pelvic region. That’s been lost. There’s also a loss of bowel and bladder control.’
‘What do you mean, bowel and bladder control?’ Rafa says.
‘Incontinence. We’ve fitted a colostomy system.’
‘She can’t walk,’ Carlinhos says.
‘It’s a paraplegia. Your sister is effectively paralysed from the hips down. We’re also concerned about potential brain damage from the heavy blood loss.’
Carlinhos murmurs an umbanda invocation.
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Adriana Corta says.
‘What can you do?’ Rafa asks.
‘We’ll begin stem cell therapy as soon as Ariel is stabilised. It has a good success rate.’
‘I don’t understand: good success rate? Kojo Asamoah had a new toe in two months,’ Lucas says.
‘There’s a big difference between growing a new toe and repairing spinal nerves. It’s a delicate process.’
‘How long?’ Adriana asks.
‘It can take up to a year.’
‘A year!’ Rafa says.
‘Maybe eight months, if the grafts take first time. Then there’s the recuperation process, learning to use the motor systems all over again, imprinting the neural pathways. We cannot rush this. It’s precision work. Any mistakes can’t be rectified.’
‘A year, in total,’ Lucas says.
‘Anything you need, we’ll get it for you,’ Adriana says. ‘Equipment, new techniques from Earth, anything. Ariel will have it.’
‘Thank you, but our medical technology is in advance of anything on Earth. We’ll do everything we can, Senhora Corta. Everything.’
‘Of course. Thank you, Doctor.’ The second thank you is the dismissal. Adriana turns to her sons. ‘Rafa, Carlinhos, if you please? I need a word with Lucas.’
‘I’d be a fool and a liar if I said this didn’t work for me,’ Lucas says when the suite is empty.
‘You expect me to admire that?’
‘No. It’s reprehensible but it is good business. But it’s not the issue uppermost in my mind. The wedding, Mamãe. Without Ariel negotiating the nikah, the MacKenzies will eat Lucasinho alive.’
Lucas sees his mother try to take in this new perspective, like a piece of extraction plant that requires whole landscapes to make a turn, a train that must begin to brake before it’s over the horizon. She would have spun like a dancer once. Quick of wit and apprehension. This dynastic marriage will not be the long trap he shared with Amanda Sun. Ariel will broker a deal. The best marriage contract of her career. Lucas still hasn’t told Lucasinho. He had not intended to until the contract was prepared. Now the boy is on his way up from Meridian and Lucas dreads the coming conversation.
‘What can we do?’ Adriana asks and Lucas hears exhaustion and indecision in his mother’s voice.
‘Play for time.’
‘The MacKenzies will never allow that.’
‘I’ll see who I can find. Beijaflor manages Ariel’s contacts.’
‘Yes,’ Adriana says but Lucas can see that her thoughts are turned to the room below. ‘We’ll do our best for Lucasinho.’
‘Mamãe, I feel for Ariel, I truly do, but the company …’
‘Tend to the company, Lucas. I’ll tend to Ariel.’
‘Hey.’
‘Hey.’
He’s reeling up and down corridors trying to find food, tea, something to pass the waiting time with which medical facilities are so generous. She’s stumbling out of a room where she has been debriefed by Heitor Pereira; question after question, questions, three hours of questions. Details. Memories. Tell me again, again, again. Any glimpse or peripheral detail that might be an insight into the attack. She is tired and sick.
The attacker was dead dead dead by the time the rest of the bodyguards arrived. Someone prised her fists off the vaper. Someone pulled her away from the pooling blood. Bots arrived first; scuttling across the ceiling, floating on fans. They assayed Ariel Corta, already blue from blood loss, ran lines and tubes into her arms, compressed and stapled the gaping flaps of flesh, printed up artificial blood, put her into recovery position and called human medics. A freelance security team, crash-contracted by Beijaflor, cleared the party. Now Corta Hélio brought its resources to bear. A Vorontsov moonship was arriving at Aquarius Quadra’s surface lock. Ariel was to be taken to João de Deus. No questions. The security mercenaries escorted gurney and med team up into the hold of the moonship. Marina drifted in their orbit, a bloodstained satellite. She had never been in a moonship before. It was noisy. Everything shook. She felt much less safe than she ever had on Carlinhos’s dustbikes. She was nauseous the entire twenty-minute flight, then understood as she threw up quietly in the corner of the elevator down into Nossa Senhora da Gloria Hub that it was from the stench of blood from her dress.
Heitor Pereira seized her at the gate and hurried her away from the emergency team. She glimpsed mother and brothers over shoulders, between milling bodies.
Tell me everything.
The cameras were swarming.
We need to know. Everything.
I saved her fucking life.
‘Your, ah, dress.’
Marina’s still wearing the Jacques Fath. It’s rigid with dried blood, reeking of iron and death.
‘They wouldn’t let me …’ Now she has stopped moving and the momentum of events and voices and faces threatens to topple her. Marina is dizzy with fatigue, shocky and vertiginous.
‘Come on, we’ll get you something.’
The big prin
ters are tied up with medical parts or Corta Hélio furnishings but there is a small public unit behind the med centre teahouse. Customers stare, at the blood, at the Corta.
‘Stop staring at me!’ Marina shouts. ‘Stop fucking staring at me!’
The deprinter refuses to accept Marina’s dress. Contaminated material, Hetty informs her. Please recycle by contracting Zabbaleen.
‘Here.’ Carlinhos offers tea as Marina waits for the printer. Casual, classic: hoody and leggings. Pumps.
‘Do you mind?’ Marina peels the straps from her shoulders.
‘I’ve seen you before,’ Carlinhos jokes.
‘Could you just give me a moment?’ There are no possible jokes, no levities here.
The dress has stuck to her skin. Marina dabs the fabric with cooling tea to loosen the scabbed blood. Her underwear is soaked through. She peels it all off, there in the kiosk behind the teahouse; all of it, off her. She can smell herself. Marina gags. If she throws up now she’ll never stop. Print-fresh, the leggings, the hoody feel religiously clean against her skin.
‘Come on.’
Carlinhos takes her arm and she lets him guide up to a quiet room on the ninth floor. Sofas, fake fur throws, space to lounge and curl.
‘Drink?’
Carlinhos holds a Blue Moon in either hand.
‘How can you …’ Marina cries. ‘Sorry. Sorry.’
Carlinhos sits down beside her, sprawls. Marina huddles, arms around knees.
‘You did good.’
‘I just did. That’s all. I didn’t think about it. There was nothing to think about. Just do it.’
‘Something takes over. It’s not body, not spirit, something else. Instinct, maybe, but we’re not born with it. I don’t think we have a word for it. Something instant and pure. Pure action.’
‘It’s not pure,’ Marina says. ‘Don’t call it pure. I can see him, Carlinhos. He looked so surprised. Like this was the last thing he expected. Then, annoyed. Frustrated, that he was going to die and wouldn’t see if his plan had worked. I can still see him.’
