by Ian McDonald
Now all that is necessary for the wedding of the year is the groom and groom.
A man should undress from the bottom, Lucasinho has heard, so to dress he should reverse the order. The shirt, fresh from the printer. Silver cuff links. Gold is trashy. The necktie is dove grey with a Seikai-ha pattern, tied in an elaborate five-strand Eldredge knot Jinji showed Lucasinho and which he has practised every day for an hour. Underwear: spider silk. Why are all clothes not made from this? Because no one would ever do anything else than adore the feel. Socks also, mid-calf. No visible ankle: a terrible sin. Now the pants. Lucasinho dithered for days before deciding on Boy de la Boy. He turned down five designs. The fabric is grey, a shade darker than the tie, with a ghost of a floral damask pattern. Pants: no turn-ups, sharply creased, two pleats. Two pleats is on trend for now. Two of everything is on trend: for the jacket, two buttons at the front, two buttons at the cuff, cut away at the front. Four centimetre lapels starting high. Buttonhole for a buttonhole. A pocket square; folded into two triangular peaks. The square in-line fold has been old for a lune. Matching stingy-brim fedora, two-centimetre silk band and bow, which Lucasinho will carry, not wear. He doesn’t want it to interfere with his hair.
‘Show me.’
Jinji shows Lucas himself through the hotel room cameras. He turns, preens, pouts.
‘I am so freakin’ hot.’
Before the hair, the make-up. Lucasinho tucks a towel into his collar, sits at a table and lets Jinji close in on his face. The cosmetic pack is also a bespoke commission from Coterie. Lucasinho enjoys the rhythm of the ritual; the layers of application, the refining and blending, the fine touch and nuance. He blinks his kohled eyes.
‘Oh yeah.’
Next, at the same table, his hair. Lucasinho carefully builds up the quiff, reinforcing it with back combing and strategic applications of spray, mousse, gel, hair-concrete. He shakes his head. His hair moves like a living thing.
‘I’d marry me.’
Last thing. One by one he inserts his pierces. Jinji gives him one last look at himself, then Lucasinho Corta takes a deep breath and leaves the Antares Home Inn.
The waiting moto opens to accept Lucasinho Corta. A command from Jinji sends it whirring away into the traffic on Hang Yin Plaza. The hotel is centrally located, an elevator ride from the Eagle’s Eyrie. Nothing left to chance. The people on the plaza glance, double-take, recognise. Some nod or wave. Lucasinho straightens his tie and looks up. The hub is a waterfall of coloured banners; manhua-balloons wallow and nudge each other. The bridges are fuzzy with humanity, he can hear their voices echoing down the great well of Antares Hub.
Up there is the wedding of the year. Across the plaza from the front door of the Home Inn is an AKA commissary, an up-market affair for recreational cooks. Lucasinho steps out into the street and walks towards it. The traffic detours around him, ripples of self-organisation running from the plaza out along the five prospekts. Trays of bright vegetables in the window, a prominent meat locker with hanging lacquered ducks and poultry sausage; fish and frogs on ice; at the back of the store, freezers and bins of beans and lentils, bouquets of salad under a freshening mist. Two middle-aged women sit at the counter, rolling and lolling together with a secret shared laughter. They wear adinkra familiars in the Asamoah manner: the goose of Sankara, the asterisk of Ananse Ntontan.
Their laughter stops when Lucasinho enters the shop.
‘I’m Lucas Corta Junior,’ he announces. They know who he is. The society channels have been filled with nothing but his face for a week. They look afraid. He sets his fedora on the counter. Lucas takes the metal spike from his left ear and sets it beside the hat. ‘Please show this to Abena Maanu Asamoah. She’ll know what it means. I claim the protection of the Golden Stool.’
We’re Earth and moon, Lucas Corta thinks. Bryce Mackenzie a gravid planet, I a small svelte satellite. Lucas takes pleasure in the analogy. Another pleasure; this is the same hotel from which Lucasinho absconded. Two small smiles. That will be the extent of the pleasure in this meeting.
Bryce Mackenzie stamps his way to the sofa, stick, foot, other stick, foot, like some antiquated quadruped mining machine. Lucas can hardly watch. How can the man bear himself? How can his many amors and adoptees bear him?
‘Drink?’
Bryce Mackenzie grunts as he lowers himself to the sofa.
‘I’ll take that as a no. Do you mind if I do? The staff from the Holiday Inn are on hourly contracts and, well, you know me. I like to extract the maximum value from any situation. And these Blushing Boys really are rather good.’
‘Your levity is not appropriate,’ Bryce Mackenzie says. ‘Where is the boy?’
‘Lucasinho should be arriving in Twé even as we speak.’
The guests, the families; then the celebrant. The role was nothing more than witnessing the signatures on the nikahs, but Jonathon Kayode had brought the full magnificence of the Eagle of the Moon to the role. When Ariel has suggested he celebrate, he had feigned surprise, even coyness. No no, I couldn’t possibly, well, oh all right then.
Jonathon Kayode had arrayed himself in formal agbada, adorned with golden regalia he had commissioned for the occasion. ‘Is he wearing built-up shoes?’ Rafa whispered to Lucas. Once noticed, it shaded everything. Without the elevator shoes, the Eagle would have been a head shorter than the couple he was marrying. Rafa caught his own joke. He squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his mouth, but Rafa quaked with suppressed laughter.
‘Stop that,’ Lucas hissed. ‘I have to get up there and hand him over.’ The infection was irresistible. Lucas swallowed a tight giggle and discreetly wiped tears from his eyes. The orchestra stuck up The Blooming of Rainy Night Flowers. Bryce Mackenzie rose and took his position by the Orange Pavilion. Every head turned. Denny Mackenzie walked the rose petal path. His walk was clumsy, self-conscious, half-hearted. He had no idea what to do with his hands. Bryce Mackenzie beamed. Jonathon Kayode opened his arms like a summoning priest.
‘Show time,’ Rafa whispered to his brother. Then every Corta familiar whispered simultaneously call from Lucasinho.
Within thirty seconds Gupshup had sent the news around the moon. Lucasinho Corta: runaway groom.
‘You’ve been in touch with your son?’ Bryce Mackenzie asks.
‘I haven’t heard from him.’
‘Pleased to hear that. I was under the impression that this was something you had knocked up between you.’
‘You’re being ridiculous.’
Bryce Mackenzie shakes his head, a tic of annoyance.
‘The question now is how do we repair the damage?’
‘There’s damage?’
Another tic: a flare of the nostrils, an audible breath.
‘Damage to the image of my family, the reputation of Mackenzie Metals; our compensation for the suit Gupshup will bring against us.’
‘The drinks bill must be pretty high too,’ Lucas says. He has met Bryce Mackenzie twice, both times social occasions, never in business, but Lucas has worked out the man’s trick, his malandragem. Physical intimidation, not by muscle, but by mass. Bryce Mackenzie dominates a room as if by gravity; a trip, a fall will break you. I know how the trick is done, Lucas thinks. But you are the Earth and I am the moon. He feels lightheaded with potential. Everything is clear, clear as never before.
‘Flippant,’ Bryce Mackenzie says. He is sweating, big sweaty man.
‘Neither your family nor mine are intimidated by threats of litigation. What’s your proposal?’
‘The wedding is re-staged. We’ll split the costs. Can you give me a guarantee that your son will actually be there?’
‘I offer no guarantee,’ Lucas says. ‘I can’t speak for my son.’
‘Are you his father or not?’
‘As I said, I can’t speak for Lucasinho. But I stand by his decision with all my heart,’ Lucas says. ‘For me, I say, fuck you, Bryce Mackenzie.’
A third tic: a chewing in of the top lip. Those others had been irrit
ation. This is fury.
‘Fine.’ Bryce’s blades enter from the lobby and help the man from the sofa, steady him on his stick and surprisingly neat feet. He stalks past Lucas, click by click. There is a third pleasure, Lucas realises, a small, mean but very sweet one, in discommoding Bryce Mackenzie.
At the door, Bryce turns, one finger raised, his stick dangling from its wrist-loop. ‘Oh yes. One final thing.’ Bryce takes a step forward and slaps Lucas across the face. There is little weight in the blow; Lucas reels from the shock, the daring, the implication. ‘Name your seconds and your zashitnik if you are to be represented. Time and location to be decided by the court. The Mackenzies will have blood for this.’
*
One by one the familiars of the Kotoko appear around Abena Maanu Asamoah. Her breath catches. She is more awestruck than she thought. The adinkras glow in her lens, every second a new one appears. She is ringed by shining aphorisms. Abena prepared her room respectfully. The board’s members may be the people you meet in the tunnels, in the tubefarms, on the streets and in the compounds, but the Kotoko is more than its individuals. It’s continuity and change, lineage and diversity, abusua and corporation. Anyone may consult the Kotoko; the implied question is, why do you need to? Abena has tidied away her few things, folded up the furniture, set biolights, black, red and white in a triangle on the floor and put herself at the centre of them. She’s showered.
Last to appear is the Sunsum, the familiar of the Omahene. Abena shivers. She has summoned powerful forces.
‘Abena,’ says Adofo Mensa Asamoah. The familiars speak with the voices of their clients. ‘How are you? Greetings from the Golden Stool.’
‘Yaa Doku Nana,’ Abena says.
‘Oh you’ve tidied, lovely,’ says Akosua Dedei from Farside.
‘Nice touch with the lights,’ says Kofi Anto from Twé.
‘So, what do you need to ask us?’ says Kwamina Manu from Mampong. The hidden question.
‘I made a promise,’ Abena says, her fingers unconsciously twisting the chain of her Gye Nyame necklace. ‘And now I’ve had to honour it, but I don’t know if I had the right to promise anything.’
‘This is about Lucasinho Corta,’ says the familiar that Abena knows is Lousika Asamoah.
‘Yes. I know we owe the Cortas for Kojo on the moon-run, but what if the Mackenzies turn on us like they turned on the Cortas?’
‘He asked for sanctuary,’ Abla Kande from Cyrillus agrarium says.
‘But was it mine to offer?’
‘What would the moon think of us if we failed to honour our promises?’ Adofo Mensa says. Voices whisper in chorus around the ring of familiars: Fawodhodie ene obre na enam. Independence comes with responsibilities.
‘But the MacKenzies, I mean, we’re not the biggest family, or the richest or the most powerful …’
‘Let me tell you a little history,’ says Omahene Adofo. ‘That’s true. AKA is not the richest or the oldest of the Five Dragons. We’re not exporters; we don’t keep the lights burning up there like the Cortas, or Earth’s tech industries fed like the Mackenzies. We’re not industrialists or IT giants. When we came to the moon we didn’t have political backing like the Suns or wealth like the Mackenzies or access to launch facilities like the Vorontsovs. We weren’t Asians or Westerns; we were Ghanaians. Ghanaians going to the moon! Such presumption! That’s for the white people and Chinese. But Efua Mensah had an idea, and saw an opportunity and worked and fought and argued her way all the way up to the moon. Do you know what she saw?’
‘You may become rich by shovelling the dirt, but you will become rich by selling the shovel,’ Abena says. Every child learns the proverb as soon as they’re socketed, lensed and linked for a familiar. She’s always thought it dull and worthy, old people’s wisdom. Storekeepers and greengrocers; not glamorous like the Cortas and the Mackenzies with their handsome dusters or the Vorontsovs with their exquisite toys.
‘We bought our independence dear,’ Adofo Mensa says. Her familiar is made from the Siamese Crocodiles and Ese Ne Tekrema, the adinkras of unity and interdependence ‘We don’t surrender it. We will not be bullied by the Mackenzies.’
‘By anyone,’ Kwamina Manu adds.
‘Are you answered?’ Omahene Adofu asks.
Abena dips her head and purses her fingers in the accepted lunar way. One by one the familiars of the Kotoko wink out. Last to shine is Lousika Kande Asamoah-Corta.
‘You’re not, are you?’
‘What?’
‘Answered.’
‘I am, I’m just not …’
‘Reassured?’
‘I think I put the family in danger.’
‘How many people are there on the moon?’
‘What? About a million and a half.’
‘One point seven million. That seems a lot but it’s not big enough that we don’t have to worry about the gene pool.’
‘Inbreeding, accumulating mutations, genetic drift. Background radiation. I did this in school.’
‘And each of us has a differed mechanism for dealing with it. We refined the abusua system and all those regulations about who can’t have sex with you. You’re a, what?’
‘Bretuo. Aseni, Oyoko, and of course my own abusua.’
‘The Suns intermarry everyone and anyone, half the moon is a Sun; the Cortas have their weird madrinha system, but they’re all ways to keep the gene pool open and clean. The Mackenzies, they’re different. They keep the family close and tight, they have a fear of polluting the gene line, about diluting their identity. They intermarry among themselves and backcross: where do think all those freckles come from? But it’s risky – very risky, so they have to make sure they breed true. They hire us to engineer the gene line. We’ve been doing it for thirty years. It’s our secret, but it’s the reason we’re safe from the Mackenzies. The fear of the two-headed baby.’
Abena whispers a prayer to Jesus.
‘The Asamoahs keep everyone’s secrets. But look out for Lucasinho, Abena. The Mackenzies won’t daren’t touch us, but they hold long grudges and long knives.’
Zabbaleen carefully pick up and take away the dead doves that litter the gardens of Jonathon Kayode. The release had been timed; the cages sprang open, the birds beat upwards in an applause of wings and whisked out over the heads of the departing guests. Ariel picks her careful, purring path through the rotting rose petals. She doesn’t trust her bot legs on the slippery slime. She shares her mother’s distaste for living matter. Organic turns so nasty so fast.
Jonathon Kayode receives her in his apartment, overlooking the garden. Ribbons and silvered fruit still adorn the citrus trees, food scraps litter the lawns. The bots are diligent but four hundred guests shed a load of party.
‘Well, this is a mess,’ Jonathon Kayode says, greeting Ariel.
‘We hire people to clear up our messes,’ Ariel says.
‘I didn’t get the opportunity to mention it at the “event”, but it’s wonderful to see you so mobile. That lower hemline suits you. I’ve been around a few places. The wedding of the year flops but the groom’s aunt sets a fashion trend. How is the boy?’
‘The Asamoahs have given him sanctuary.’
‘You always were close, Cortas and Asamoahs.’
‘I want you to stop this Jonathon.’
Jonathon Kayode shakes his head, touches a finger to his forehead.
‘Ariel, you know as well as I …’
‘If the LDC wants a thing to happen or not happen, the LDC finds a way.’
They sit on either side of a low table. A bot brings two Blushing Boys.
‘You know, I really got a taste for these,’ the Eagle says. Ariel does not have the taste this afternoon. The Eagle takes a sip. He is a noisy drinker.
‘It’s two years since the Court of Clavius settled by combat,’ Ariel says.
‘Not quite.’ Jonathon Kayode sets his glass down. ‘Alayoum versus Filmus.’
‘It would never have gone to blades. I knew that. Malandra
gem. It’s how I win. And the two cases are different. That was a divorce case. This is an old-fashioned calling-out, a trial of honour.’
‘Bryce Mackenzie did rather get the drop on your brother.’
‘You can call it off Jonathon,’ Ariel says.
‘Are you sure you don’t want anything to drink?’ The Eagle of the Moon says, lifting his glass. Over its rim his eyes catch Ariel’s. His glance darts to the rear of the apartment; once, twice, three times. Ariel’s eyes widen.
‘It’s still a little too early for me, Jonathon.’ It had been a standard joke among the court and legal circles that Adrian MacKenzie had the Eagle of the Moon trussed up like a piece of exhibition shibari. No joke.
They want blood, he mouths. ‘Who’s representing Lucas?’
‘Carlinhos.’
Jonathon Kayode’s mouth opens in shock. Your oko didn’t tell you that the blood they want is the heart blood.
‘They nominated Hadley Mackenzie as zashitnik. We had to match status.’
She won’t let the Eagle of the Moon look away. You can stop all this, save two young men.
‘Jonathon?’
‘I can’t help you, Ariel. I am not the law.’
‘I seem to be making a habit of this, but fuck you.’ Ariel wills her legs to stand her upright. She lifts her clutch bag. She raises her courtroom voice to hit the back wall of the drawing room. ‘And fuck you too, Adrian. I hope my brother cuts yours to pieces.’
He’s gone back to Boa Vista for the fight. I couldn’t do that, Ariel thinks. Even in the deep dark, when she felt opened and reached into and violated, when she feared her fine legs would never carry her again, when she saw the knife every time she closed her eyes, she refused to let her mother carry her back to Boa Vista. You see the knife too, Carlinhos. Every time. It’s behind me, it’s ahead of you. I would be paralysed with fear.
He lies on his belly on a table in the Nossa Senhora da Rocha Pavilion. Spray from the Oxum waterfall gathers and drips from the lip of the dome. A masseur works his body, fingers deep in the muscle fibres. Carlinhos moans, little cries that sound like sex. It repulses Ariel: another touching your body so intimately. Another has touched her body, more intimately than massage, or sex.
