by Ian McDonald
‘Dear gods.’
‘Yes. Here, Lucas.’
The briefest flicker of data between Yemanja and Toquinho.
‘Thank you, Mamãe.’
‘Don’t thank me. You’ll only use it when everything is lost and the family is destroyed.’
‘Then I’ll never use it.’
Adriana grasps Lucas’s hand with startling strength.
‘Oh, would you like some coffee? Esmeralda Geisha Special from Panama. That’s a country in Central America. I had it flown up. What else am I going it spend my money on?’
‘I never got the taste for it, Mamãe.’
‘That’s a pity. I’m not sure you could learn it now. Oh, can’t you see what I’m doing? Sit with me Lucas. Play me some music. You have such good taste. That boy you wanted to marry; it would have been good to have a musician in the family.’
‘The family was too much family for him.’
Adriana strokes the back of Lucas’s hand. ‘Still, you were right to divorce Amanda Sun. I never liked her sneaking around Boa Vista. I never liked her at all.’
‘You agreed to the nikah.’
Lucas feels Adriana’s hand start.
‘I did, didn’t I? I thought it was necessary for the family. The only thing that’s necessary for the family is the family.’
Lucas has no right words so he orders Toquinho to play.
‘Is that?’
‘Jorge. Yes.’
Tears soften Adriana’s eyes.
‘It’s all the little things, Lucas. Coffee and music. Luna’s favourite dress. Rafa telling me the results from his handball teams, whether they were good or bad. The sound of water outside my bedroom. The full Earth. Wagner’s right; you could lose yourself looking at it. It’s so dangerous: you daren’t look because it will snatch your eye and remind you of everything you’ve given up. This is an awful place, Lucas.’
Lucas hides the flinch of hurt from his mother. He grasps her hand again.
‘I’m afraid, Lucas. I’m afraid of death. It looks like an animal, like a dirty, sneaking animal that’s been hunting me all my life. That’s lovely music, Lucas.’
‘I’ll play his Aguas de Marco.’
‘Let it run, Lucas.’
Adriana opens her eyes. She had drifted off. That fills her with cold vertigo. It could have been the last sleep, with things unsaid. The cold shaking her heart is relentless now. Lucas sits with her. From his face Adriana guesses he is working; Toquinho a vortex of files and contacts and messages. The music has ended. It was very good. That boy can sing. She would ask Lucas to play it again but she doesn’t want to break this moment; aware without being noticed.
She turns her eyes to the Earth. Traitor. Yemanja showed her the shining path, drawn across the sea, out from that world to the moon. She followed it. It was a trap. There is no path back. No line of light across this dry sea.
‘Lucas.’
He looks up from his work. His smile is a delight. Small things.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘For what?’ Lucas says.
‘For bringing you here.’
‘You didn’t bring me here.’
‘Don’t be so literal. Why must you always take against things?’
‘That’s not my world up there. This is my world.’
‘World. Not home.’
‘You have nothing to be sorry for, Mamãe.’
Adriana reaches for the coffee on the table but the cup is cold.
‘I’ll have fresh made up,’ Lucas says.
‘Please.’
The terminator of the crescent Earth sweeps down across the Atlantic; the whorl of a tropical cyclone spinning north by northwest, the paisley-pattern cloud-avenues of the inter-tropical convergence zone disappearing silently into night. An edge of green, the tip of north-eastern Brazil, draws over the horizon. The night-side of the planet is edged in a lace-work of lights. Clusters and whorls; they mirror the patterns of meteorology. Those lives down there.
‘Do you know what happened to them?’
‘Who, Lucas?’
‘I know when you look at Earth like that, you’re thinking about them.’
‘They failed like everyone fails down there. What else could they do?’
‘It’s no easy world, this,’ Lucas says.
‘Neither is theirs. I’ve been thinking about my mãe, Lucas. In the apartment, singing; and Pai in the dealership, polishing his cars. They were so brilliant in the sun. I can see Caio. None of the others. Not even Achi clearly any more.’
‘You had courage,’ Lucas says. ‘There is only one Iron Hand.’
‘That stupid name!’ Adriana says. ‘It’s a curse, not a name. Play me that music again, Lucas.’
Adriana settles into the chair. Jorge’s whispering voice and agile guitar surround her. Lucas watches his mother drift down through the words and chords into shallow sleep. Still breathing. The coffee is here, Toquinho says. Lucas takes it from the maid and as he sets it on the table he sees that his mother is not breathing.
He takes her hand.
Toquinho shows him vital signs.
Gone.
Lucas feels his breath tremble in his chest, but it is not as terrible as he imagined; not so terrible at all. Yemanja slowly fades to white and folds in on itself. The crescent Earth stands eternally on the eastern horizon.
Luna, in a red dress, picking barefoot over the boulders and through the empty pools of Boa Vista. The streams have run dry, the water no longer falls from the eyes and lips of the ten orixas. Rafa can’t express why he shut down Boa Vista’s waters but no one except Luna objected. The only way he could articulate it was that Boa Vista needed to say something.
The memorial was ramshackle and disappointing. The guests could not outshine the Cortas in their eulogies, the Cortas had no valedictory tradition so their tributes were sincere but stumbling and poorly stage-managed and the Sisterhood, who understood religious theatre, had been barred from attending. The words were said, the handful of compost that was all the LDC would permit of Adriana Corta’s carbon for private ceremonials was scattered, the representatives of the great families made their way to the tram. Throughout the short ceremony, Luna wandered blithe as water, exploring her strange dry world.
‘Papai!’
‘Leave him, oheneba,’ Lousika Asamoah says. Like her daughter she wears a red dress; a funeral colour among the Asamoahs. ‘He has to get used to things.’
Rafa takes the stepping stones over the dry river, enters the bamboo. He looks up at the open-lipped, wide-eyed faces of the orixas. Small feet have drawn a path between the canes: Luna’s feet. She knows this place and all its secrets better than he. But it is his now, he is Senhor of Boa Vista. There is a universe of difference between living somewhere and owning it. Rafa runs the long, rough-edged bamboo leaves through his fingers. He had thought he would cry. He had thought he would be disconsolate, sobbing like a child. Rafa knows how easily his emotions are stirred, to anger or joy or exultation. Your mother has died. What he felt: shock, yes; the futile paralysis of needing to do something, a hundred things, knowing that none of them can change the truth of death. Anger – some; at the suddenness, at the revelation that Adriana had been sick for a long time, terminal since the moon-run party. Guilty that the whirlpool of events after the assassination attempt had drowned any signals Adriana might have given about her condition. Resentment that it was Lucas who had spent the final hours with her. Not disconsolate; not overwhelmed: no tears.
He stands a moment in São Sebastião Pavilion, its streams now dry; their sediments caking and cracking into hexagons. This had been her favourite of Boa Vista’s pavilions. There was a pavilion for drinking tea, a pavilion for meeting social guests and one for business guests, a pavilion for receiving relatives and one for reading, the morning pavilion and the evening pavilion but this one, at the eastern end of Boa Vista’s main chamber, was her working pavilion. Rafa has never liked the pavilions. He thinks them affected and silly.
Adriana built Boa Vista selfishly; the palace of her particular dreams. It’s Rafa’s now but it will never be his. Adriana is in the dry ponds and watercourses, the bamboo, the domes of the pavilions, the faces of the orixas. He can’t change a leaf or a pebble of it.
‘Water,’ Rafa whispers and feels Boa Vista tremble as waters stir in pipes and pumps; a gurgle here, a trickle there; pouring from freshets and faucets; runnels merging into streams, channels filling, water chuckling around rocks, drawing eddies and foam and dead leaves; water gathering in the eyes and mouths of the orixas; a slow swell into great teardrops quivering with surface tension then burst into slow waterfalls; showers and trickles first, then bounding cascades. Until he silenced them, Rafa had never realised how the splash and trickle of moving waters filled Boa Vista.
‘Papai!’ Luna exclaims, dress hitched up and calf-deep in running water. ‘It’s cold!’
Boa Vista is Rafa’s now but still Lousika won’t share it with him.
‘Do you think you’ll move back?’ Rafa asks.
Lucas shakes his head.
‘Too close. I like my distance. And the acoustics are terrible.’ A touch on the sleeve of Rafa’s Brioni jacket. ‘A word.’
Rafa wondered why Lucas had sought him out at the far end of the garden, risking wet trouser cuffs and stained shoes among the stepping stones and pools.
‘Go ahead.’
‘Mamãe and I talked a lot in the last hours.’
Rafa’s throat and jaw tighten with resentment. He is eldest, hwaejang, golden. He should have had these last words.
‘She had a plan for the company,’ Lucas says. The play of falling water masks his words. ‘Her will. She’s created a new position: Choego. She wanted Ariel to fill it.’
‘Ariel.’
‘I’ve been through this but she was quite obdurate. Ariel will be Choego. Foremost. Head of Corta Hélio. Above me and you, irmão. Don’t argue, don’t make suggestions. I have this already planned. There’s nothing we can do about the will. That’s set, locked in.’
‘We could fight …’
‘I said don’t argue, don’t make suggestions. It would be a waste of our time and money fighting through the courts. Ariel knows the courts, she would tie us up forever. No, we do this constitutionally. Our sister was badly wounded in a knife attack. She is effectively paraplegic. Her recovery will be slow, and by no means certain. The constitution of Corta Hélio contains a medical competency clause. The clause allows for a board member to be retired from office in the case of sickness or injury that would prevent them from fully discharging their duties.’
‘You’re suggesting—’
‘Yes I am. For the company, Rafa. Ariel is a supremely competent lawyer, but she knows nothing about helium mining. It wouldn’t be a board-room coup. Just placing her powers and responsibilities in temporary abeyance.’
‘Temporary until what?’
‘Until such time as we can restructure the company more in line with what it needs, rather than our mother’s whims. She was a very sick woman, Rafa.’
‘Shut the fuck up, Lucas.’
Lucas steps back, hands help up in appeal.
‘Of course. I apologise. But I tell you this; our mother would never have survived her own medical competency clause.’
‘No, fuck off, Lucas.’
Lucas backs off another step.
‘All we need are two medical reports, and I have those. One from the João de Deus medical centre, the other from our very own Dr Macaraeg, who is very pleased to have been retained as our family physician. Two reports, and a majority.’ Lucas calls back through the spray. ‘Let me know!’
Luna goes splashing down the stream, kicking slow-settling sprays of silver water into the air. They catch the light of the sunline and diffract it: a child crowned with rainbows.
The door of the tram closes, the door opens. Ariel looks out.
‘Well, are you coming?’
There is no one other than Marina on the platform that Ariel could intend, but she still frowns, mouths, Me?
‘Yes you, who else?’
‘I’m technically out of contract …’
‘Yes yes, you didn’t work for me, you worked for my mother. Well, you work for me now.’
Hetty chimes: incoming mail. A contract.
‘Come on. Let’s get out of the fucking mausoleum. We’ve got a wedding to arrange.’
ELEVEN
Meridian loves a wedding and there is no wedding bigger than the marriage of Lucasinho Corta and Denny Mackenzie. The Eagle of the Moon has donated his private gardens for the ceremony: the trees have been dressed with bows and biolights and twinkling stars. The bergamots and kumquats and dwarf oranges have been sprayed silver. Paper lanterns are strung between the branches. The path will be strewn with rose petals. AKA has donated a hundred white doves for a spectacular, wing-clapping release. They’ve been engineered to die within twenty-four hours. The vermin laws are strict.
The contracts will be signed in the Orange Pavilion. Behind the happy boy and boy a squadron of aerialists will perform a winged ballet high in Antares Hub, weaving ideograms in the air with streamers attached to their ankles. The Eagle of the Moon has made small grants available for the residents of Antares Hub to decorate their neighbourhoods. Banners hang from balconies, streamers festoon the crosswalks and the bridges drip strings of Diwali biolights. Balloons in the shape of manhua bats and butterflies and ducks navigate the hub’s airspace. Space rental on those balconies with the best views has hit six hundred bitsies. The finest vantages on the bridges and catwalks were tagged and bagged long before. Exclusive image rights have been signed to Gupshup after a ferocious auction: the access agreement is stern: media drones must keep a respectful distance and no direct interviews with either oko will be entertained.
The four hundred guests will be waited upon by twenty catering staff and eighty servers. Cultural and religious diets will be accommodated, and all manner of dietary intolerances. There will be meat. A joke is running around that Lucasinho made the wedding cake, in his signature style. Not true: the Ker Wa bakery has the longest established tradition of oko cakes and moon cakes. Kent Narasimha from the Full Moon bar of the Meridian Holiday Inn has created a celebratory cocktail: the Blushing Boy. It involves a designer one-shot gin, foams, cubes of jelly that dissolve and send spirals of colour and flavour up through the gin and flakes of gold foil. Virgin cocktails and herbal waters for non-alcohol drinkers.
The security screening started a week ago. LDC, Corta and Mackenzie security have liaised on an unprecedented level. The gardens of Jonathon Kayode are being scanned down to the level of dust-motes and dead skin-flakes.
Three days to the wedding of the the year! What will the boys wear? Here are spreads of Lucasinho Corta’s latest looks. The preppy colloquium boy. His moon-run party tweed and tan pants. His two weeks as a fashion icon, when everyone pulled on suit-liners and drew on them with marker pens. His grandmother’s eightieth party; his grandmother’s memorial, so sad, so soon. His return to the fashion flashlight: who does his make-up? So very defining of this season. Heads up, boys! You’re all going to be wearing this look. Denny Mackenzie: oh who cares? When was a Mackenzie ever fashionable? But who will design the wedding suits. We simply can’t leave it to the familiars. Design AIs we’re loving include Loyale, San Damiano, Boy de la Boy, Bruce and Bragg, Cenerentola. Who will get the contract? And the cosmetics …
Two days to the wedding of the year! What makes the Dragons so much better than any of us: class. The Cortas have shown sheer class throughout the matrimonial process. It’s less than a month since the terrible attack on Ariel Corta, but not only is she as mobile as ever on her bot legs, she arranged the nikah from her hospital bed! And only two weeks ago, the whole moon was rocked and saddened by the news of the death of Adriana Corta. But what better way for the Cortas to show their courage than chin up, dress up, glam up: the wedding of the year! Class tells.
One day to the wedding of the
year. The sure social signifier of the now is: are you on the guest list, or aren’t you? No one’s telling, but Gupshup has called in a few debts, dealt out a few threats, lavished kisses and micro-kittens and we can exclusively tell you who’s on the guest list! And who’s not! Prepare to be shocked …
The day of the wedding of the year. It starts with a small row; the celebrity spotters with berths booked on the best viewing stations versus the blimp bats and butterflies and beasts of good omen. At the prearranged time, the residents of Antares Hub all flick their banners over their balcony rails and let them slowly unroll into a tapestry of blessings and wedding charms. Security takes up positions as the guest elevators arrive. Invitations are scanned, guests directed to the reception and given their special Full Moon bar bespoke Blushing Boys. Jonathon Kayode and Adrian Mackenzie are delightful hosts. Drone cameras flit and jockey at the prescribed range, battling for celebrity close-ups. Half an hour before the signing, the guests are guided to the Orange Pavilion. Choreography is subtle and tight, the seating plan rigorously enforced. Wedding ushers sends fountains of rose petals into the air. Twenty minutes: the families arrive. Duncan Mackenzie and okos Anastasia and Apollinaire Vorontsov. His daughter, Tara, her okos; their rambunctious sons and daughters. Bryce Mackenzie, lumbering with determination on two sticks, accompanied by a dozen of his adoptees. Hadley Mackenzie, poised and very handsome. Robert Mackenzie is unable to leave Crucible and sends his apologies and congratulations to the happy couple, with all best hopes for a peaceful settlement between the great houses of Mackenzie and Corta. He is represented by Jade Sun-Mackenzie.
The Cortas: Rafa and Lousika, Robson and Luna. Lucas alone. Ariel and her new escolta, who takes a place among the family to flurries of murmurs through the guests. Carlinhos, filling his suit well. Wagner and oko Analiese Mackenzie, looking nervous, and his pack mates; thirty of them in dark colours, a wedding party in themselves, adding a spice of danger to the silver and ribbons of the wedding garden.
They take their seats, a small ensemble performs Blooming Flowers and Full Moon Night.
