The Menace from Farside

by Ian McDonald

  * * *

  That night Gebre insists we all go out to eat. Not a hotshop, no. A proper restaurant: recreational eating. Birthdays and death-days and exam-passing eating. Watch-my-daughter-fly eating. Food you eat with chopsticks, not fingers. Red lanterns and red ropes and red seats. Servers who don’t know you and are so polite you want to trip them up. There is meat on the menu. Real dead-animal meat.

  Ikh, Jair says, folding his hands in front of his face to show his disgust.

  ‘I thought cats were supposed to be carnivores,’ Gebre says. This is meant to be a joke, but Jair shoots him an under-fringe glare like a meteor strike. I could hug my little neko for that death-glare.

  ‘Have whatever you want,’ Gebre says, trying to recover. ‘My treat.’

  It is then that the sense of creeping wrong that has been crawling closer ever since the boss server or whatever they call them showed us to our plush family booth arrives and throws an arm around my throat. Gebre is smiling. Sidibe is smiling. Laine is smiling. All I can see are the smiles, and then the smiles join up teeth and lips into one horror-smile that opens into a black hole to absolute sucking nothing.

  This isn’t a celebration of the Amazing Flying Sidibe Sister.

  This is something much, much worse.

  I force the food down, mouthful by mouthful. Everything looks like jewels and tastes like dust. Each mouthful is harder than the last until I am almost gagging on the dread. I am sick inside, sick with anticipation, sick with the anxiety that it will come back up, sick waiting waiting waiting for the hammer to fall. I look at Jair and Kobe. Kobe is happy prodding meat into his mouth, enjoying the new taste and texture. He will pay for that later. But Jair smells something off. He looks over at me, cute-frowns, but I can give him nothing back, not a word, not a look, not even a twitch, because that Sidibe Sisay has me in her sights and will kill me with a chopstick through the eye if I as much as squeak what I know is going to happen.

  Gebre orders the vodka. A flask, the restaurant’s own distillation. So cold there is ice on the outside. Frozen glasses, too, one for each of us. Smoking under the red lanterns. Gebre pours and the vodka is thick and slow as oil.

  ‘Kobe doesn’t drink,’ I say and I am amazed I even get the words out.

  ‘Just taste it, Kobe,’ Laine says and suddenly everything is clear and calm and colder than the Red Carp’s frozen vodka. This is a toast.

  Laine’s looking at Gebre. Gebre’s looking at Laine all shy and coy. Sidibe is grinning like Qingzhao in colloq’s pet ferret, after it ate Sean’s ferret’s babies. Maybe even more predatory.

  ‘Okay, well, we have an announcement,’ Laine says. ‘Raise your glasses.’

  I watch my fingers lift the glass and leave two circles of meltwater in the frost.

  ‘Gebre and I,’ Laine says.

  ‘Me and Laine,’ Gebre says. ‘We’re going to . . .’

  ‘Get married,’ they say together.

  Laine and Gebre are smiling, though the smiles are melting as fast as the ice on the Red Carp’s vodka. Jair’s eyes are like holes in reality. Kobe looks about to break into the Storm, the thing he does when new things happen and he can’t process them. I take his hand, hold it firm and tight. The pressure reassures him. I have no idea what my face looks like, but I’m hoping it’s some acceptable version of happy. From Sidibe’s expression I think it’s anything but. Everything hangs for a hideous moment. Then Sidibe knocks back her vodka and throws her glass across the room.

  ‘To us!’

  Laine drinks, Gebre drinks; glasses fly. Jair summons the cat within, downs the glass in one, and flings the glass. Kobe lifts his glass, I take it from him and down it myself before he can drink it. I make sure to give the empty shot back to him. He throws it with great energy and no accuracy. Then I down mine, reel a bit from the double hit, and my glass joins the shards in the corner.

  ‘May the ring be unbroken!’ I shout.

  Now the entire restaurant is on its feet, everyone shouting, May the ring . . . and toasting and flinging whatever they can find—glasses, tea glasses, bowls—into the corner. Bots whisk out to sweep and scoop the pile of broken glass and it becomes a game of target-the-bot and the whole restaurant and its red lanterns and red ropes and red chairs is full of shouts and cheers and flying crockery and polite, polite staff losing their polite. Laine and Gebre smile and wave and drink down the applause and it makes them more dizzy and drunk than any restaurant vodka. Laine can’t see me looking at her. What I see is her more happy, more filled with laughing and joy and brightness, than I have seen her in years and the universe has ended and what lies beyond is nothing but sharp, grinding darkness but I can’t take that joy away from her.

  * * *

  I have twenty days to save my family.

  Twenty days: then the entire Oruka Ring will contract from the width of the whole moon to a tight band around Osman Tower. They’ll come by train and rover-bus and BALTRAN: from St Olga and Hypatia, from Twé and Hadley, from Nearside and Farside. They’ll come and they’ll print out best clothes and best scents and best hair-dos. Then we’ll all go together hand-in-hand to the Yuyuan Garden and in the Pavilion of Celestial Joy Laine and Gebre will sign wedding contracts.

  And Sidibe Sisay will be my derecha forever and ever.

  I have no words. None.

  The nearer links have already been over. Dolores has called in from wherever the fuck it is she goes when Jair gets too much trouble for her. Two visits. A record for Dolores. First visit to see who these new people in her derecha’s apartment are, second visit to find out if there’s any dirt she can get on them. Jair makes sure he’s visiting his iz Esteban if Dolores is even in the same quartersphere.

  I need to do something. What can I do?

  I’m not stupid enough to try and split Laine and Gebre up.

  Bullet point one: it won’t work.

  Bullet point two: it will get me fired right across the ring to the furthest possible person with a ceegee contract and I will be exiled there until I die of lousy frozen virginity.

  Twenty days to take back control of my crazy family.

  Wait. Take back control.

  * * *

  Dolores. I don’t like her. And?

  No one ever said ring marriages were perfect. What marriage is? What family is? You get all these telenovelas—Laine loves them, I watch them so I have something to sneer about in colloq—and they always say, dysfunctional St Olga family the Komarovs; dysfunctional Hadley family the Thomases . . . And I watch, because these telenovela folk: they’re clever, they construct them to draw you in even if you hate the characters. So I watch these dysfunctional families and I see people who love and can’t bear each other, who have to be close and can’t live with each other, who would do anything for these people they love and who can be so weak and shameful. I watch them and I don’t see anything more dysfunctional than the families of my colloq-folk. My own family. What do you expect? Perfection? This is people we’re talking about.

  Dolores: whatever she and Laine had, I can’t remember it. It’s gone, and if she were any kind of right human being, she’d be gone too, break the link, move across the ring. Or even just shoot right out of it. Laine has always liked Esteban; they could just get together and close up the ring.

  She treats Laine wrong: that’s why I don’t like her.

  And she treats Jair worse.

  What do you mean, lack of woman role models in my life?

  * * *

  ‘There’s a footprint out there in the Sea of Tranquility,’ I say.

  We’re in the sauna at the Prince Igor banya; Jair, Kobe, Sidibe, and me. I’ve booked a private suite at the baths as a kind of pre-wedding present to Sidibe. That’s what I want her to think. What I really want is to lull her with hot water and oils and steam and shit so she can’t say no to my pitch. Sidibe has never been to a real banya and there is nothing like Prince Igor on Farside. I know because I’ve researched this. Research stuff. That is how you know thing
s.

  ‘The first footprint on the moon,’ I say.

  The sauna is a little wooden box, just big enough for Sidibe to sprawl out on a bench. I love the smell of hot wood. Now that the Asamoahs can grow it, it’s not so rare, but it still makes me feel strange, not comfortable in my skin. The moon is rock and metal, glass and dust. This is not a moon of wood. Kobe sits by the door. He likes to know where the exits are. Jair is wrapped up in a sheet, perched on the upper bench, but he looks as pale and cool as ever, though the heat is ferocious. He has body issues, but he has managed to do something with his hair to make it look like neko-ears. I admire that. Sidibe is amazing. Even when sweating. I got a private sauna cabin because Kobe can’t be trusted not to say something inappropriate in public, and Jair won’t even wear a sheet when other people are watching, but mostly to keep people from paying attention to Sidibe.

  I have better muscle definition, though.

  ‘The first Apollo,’ I say.

  Kobe looks up and I see him take a breath to correct or explain something. I lift a finger. It has taken time, but he now understands the instruction. Too much detail, Kobe. He shifts on the bench, but he does not interrupt.

  ‘One hundred years ago the first humans landed on the moon,’ I say. ‘In the Sea of Tranquility. The first footprint belonged to a man called Neil Armstrong.’ Sidibe props herself up on her elbows. ‘He came down the ladder, and put his foot on the surface and said, “It’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for humanity.” That footprint—the first footprint on the moon—is still there. On the Sea of Tranquility.’

  I leap up and dash to the cold pool and jump in with a big yell. Sidibe is two steps beyond me. We slop water all around the tiny polished stone chamber.

  ‘How can it still be there?’ Sidibe asks.

  ‘Footprints last forever,’ I say. The cold is digging in now, little daggers. ‘That footprint can last ten million years.’

  Everyone knows about King Dong, the hundred-kilometre-high spunking cock and balls that bored Mackenzie jackaroos stomped into Oceanus Procellarum with boots and rover tracks. I’m related to one of the original makers. I’m proud of that.

  ‘But they blasted off again,’ Sidibe says. ‘That’s your footprint, whoof!’

  A huge splash that half empties the cold pool. Water backwashes from the walls onto us; waves of colder-than-cold. We yell. Kobe bobs up, hair streaming.

  ‘The Apollo lunar modules were built in two stages,’ he says. My teeth are chattering, but Kobe, he just doesn’t feel the cold. ‘The descent stage was abandoned for lunar liftoff and rendezvous with the command module. Therefore the blast went out.’ He demonstrates with his arms and sends a chilly rain across the cold room. ‘Boof!’

  ‘So.’ My teeth are chattering. ‘All the footprints are still there. Including . . .’

  ‘The original!’ Sidibe says.

  Got her.

  I haul myself out of the splash pool and rush blue-assed into the steam room. Jair is already there, like a duster who has dumped their clothes after a party. He didn’t join us in the plunge. Nekos don’t do cold.

  I arrange myself on the top tier. Sidibe lies on her back on the moonstone slab, one knee cocked, one arm folded behind her head as a pillow. Kobe pours water onto hot rock. He loves to hear the hiss and see the steam fill the room. The wave of heat almost takes my breath away. Almost.

  ‘I think,’ I say very slowly, so there can be no misunderstanding, ‘we should go there.’

  Sidibe sits up.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think we should go there. All of us.’ Jair looks up. Kobe’s hand stops halfway to the water scoop.

  ‘All of us?’ Jair says.

  ‘All of us,’ I say. ‘Me, you, Kobe. Sidibe.’

  ‘Why would I want to go to Kneel Strong-arm’s footprint?’ Sidibe asks.

  I let the obvious error go, because here is the genius. The bit that kept me up until four in the morning, trying to get the key that would lock it all together.

  ‘For a wedding present,’ I say.

  Oh, I am brim-full of clever. Research research research. First the Armstrong footprint, then, once I knew that the wedding card was the one to play, the whole wedding-present thing. I explain to my expedition—see, in my head we are adventuring, bound for the Sea of Tranquility—about giving gifts to people getting married. It’s not a thing we do—why give someone something when they can print out anything they want, and not take up any precious carbon allocation? But on Earth, folk get so many wedding presents they’re like showers.

  ‘It’d be something special just for Laine and Gebre,’ I say. ‘Something no one else can give them.’

  I have to be careful here. Sidibe is frowning. I don’t want to oversell this.

  ‘Couldn’t we just make a cake?’ Jair asks.

  I turn on him.

  ‘Can you get wheat flour? Can you get eggs, milk, all that? Do you know anyone has a bake-oven? Can you even bake?’

  He shrinks. Sorry, Jair; I had to do it.

  ‘We make it special so it’s just from us,’ I say. ‘We print a little marker with their names on it, or a flag, and leave it there and take a picture of all of us with it. We did this, for you.’

  Sidibe knows I have a scheme but she can’t see it. Now I have to nail her down.

  ‘It would be an expedition,’ I say. ‘A proper adventure.’

  ‘Adventure,’ Jair says. ‘Isn’t that really just another name for dangerous?’

  ‘I know where to go, and we’d plan it properly,’ I say. ‘But dangerous? Yes, enough to make it something really precious.’ There’s a new meme in colloq and in the hotshops; a woman’s head, left half black skin, right half white bone. Half living, half skeleton. You can wear her as a charm on a bracelet on an arm or an ankle, around the neck, in the ear or the brow, you can have her as a pin or a brooch, or a print on a shirt or a top or the ass of your leggings. They call her Lady Luna. Saint and goddess, demon, angel, friend and enemy. Life and death. Giver and taker. But she’s more than those things. Those are human things. She isn’t human: Lady Luna is the moon. I haven’t rushed to get my Lady Luna tee or shorts or nose-pin because that’s what everyone else is doing, but I understand her. She is the edge of danger in my plan that makes it exciting. ‘When were you last on the surface? Kobe? Jair? Sidibe?’ I don’t give them a chance to answer because it was what’s called a rhetorical question and anyway they can all give the same answer: Same as you, Cariad.

  For your tenth birthday you get given a sasuit and you hide your disappointment but put it on for the picture with your helmet under your arm. There’s Laine, grinning, there’s me, a bit furious. Brave little jackaroo. With the suit, you get suit training. You get sent to suitschool and they show you how to squeeze into it proper and hook it all up and bring it to life. Then they take you into one of the big locks. You put your hand on the shoulder of the suit in front of you and you shuffle into the chamber. You can’t tell when it deepees—the gate opens and you shuffle a bit more and you are out on the surface. Instead of a shoulder you’re holding a safety line. Maybe the Earth is bright and that is a thing to see. Otherwise you shuffle around your half-kay loop under the lights, back into the lock again, and like most people never go up to the surface again. You take off your suit and you put it away in a closet and forget about the Worst Birthday Ever. You can’t recycle it for carbon because you never know when you might need it for the Thing Terrible. Says Cariad Corcoran: any Thing Terrible enough to threaten Queen of the South isn’t going to wait while you say, Half a minute, I just need to go and find where I put my sasuit. Lady Luna knows a thousand ways to kill you: that’s the meme.

  ‘We all go on about how we’re the first generation to live on the moon. We don’t. We live in the moon. We’re born in holes and caves and we live in holes and caves and think that’s the moon but it isn’t even a tiny part of the moon. The moon is up there. That’s our world, and we should walk on it and claim it and
make it ours. Come out of our holes and caves and say, This is our world. Put our footprints next to the ones that came from Earth. Neil and me. Neil and Kobe, Neil and Jair, Neil and Sidibe.’

  Every pitch has three parts. Andros taught me all about this, before the split with Laine. He worked in media: everything is a pitch. The first part is the hook. You tell the pitchee something that makes them curious. Could be a question, could be a fact that not a lot of people know, could be a single brilliant image. But it makes them want to know more. The second part is the gleam. You answer your question, you unfold your fact, you shine up your image until it’s blinding. You draw your pitchee in, make them see what you see, feel what you feel. Understand, it’s not about a brilliant idea or a fantastic feature or even changing the world. It’s about feeling. Emotion emotion emotion: all the way up, all the way down. And I have the gleam. Oh, small gods and Mary, I have the gleam. Kobe would walk straight out of the banya and into an outlock. Jair is all huddled up in his sheet but I can see him swallowing a lump in his throat. And Sidibe . . . Sidibe. She is bolt upright now, leaning forward, eyes and nostrils wide. I have her. Yes, you can fly, but you fly in a cave. This is a whole world, if you’re brave enough.

  And now the third part of the pitch: the deal. You offer something—a new software suite, fruit, a news story, a telenovela storyline. The chance to go somewhere no kid ever went before. In return: the agreement. I will buy, I will eat, I will read your story, watch your show. I will go on your adventure.

  ‘So, are you coming with me?’

  And they all shout, Yes, we are!

  * * *

  The true leader never has doubts.

  The true leader considers practicalities, realities, deliverability. That was one of Andros’s favourite words. Deliverability. A pitch is only as good as what you can deliver. I was never sure why he left the ring. Laine never told me. One day I had a derecho-ceegee, then I was floating around the divorce party in a Kingo dress from the 2020s. He left a hole nearly a year wide.