Luna--Wolf Moon--A Novel

by Ian McDonald

  Movement within. They’ll know who’s out there on the gallery.

  He raps again. Again.

  ‘Abena!’

  Again.

  ‘Abena, I know you’re there.’

  ‘Abena…’

  ‘Abena, talk to me.’

  ‘Abena, I only want to talk. That’s all. Just talk.’

  By now he is leaning against the door, cheek pressed to the wood, tapping lightly with the knuckle of the middle finger of his right hand.

  ‘Abena…’

  The door opens wide enough to show eyes. They’re not Abena’s.

  ‘Lucas, she doesn’t want to talk to you.’ Afi is the colloquium-mate least sneering at Lucasinho. This is progress, Lucasinho thinks.

  ‘I’m sorry. Really. I just want everything to be right.’

  ‘Well maybe you should have thought that before you fucked Adelaja Oladele.’

  ‘I didn’t fuck Adelaja Oladele.’

  ‘Oh? You came five times in three hours. What’s that then?’

  ‘It was edging. You should know that he is insanely, insanely good at edging.’

  ‘So edging isn’t fucking.’

  Why does he have the idea that Abena is feeding Afi lines?

  ‘Edging isn’t fucking. Edging’s edging. Hand stuff. It’s not intimate, like fucking.’

  ‘Having Ade’s hand on your dick for three hours isn’t intimate?’

  Adelaja Oladele has the hands of an angel, Lucasinho must admit. Three hours. Five orgasms.

  ‘It’s … just playing. Guy stuff.’

  ‘Guy stuff. Fine.’

  Lucasinho can’t win here. Get out with as little damage as possible.

  ‘It’s not like I—’

  ‘Like you what?’

  ‘Love him, or anything like that.’

  ‘And you love me. Her. Her.’

  ‘I don’t love Adelaja Oladele.’

  From inside the apt comes a sob. Afi glances around.

  ‘Lucas, just go away.’

  ‘I’ll just go away.’

  I could have coached you, Jinji says as Lucasinho stares at the closed door.

  ‘You’re an AI,’ Lucasinho says. ‘What do you know about girls?’

  More than you, obviously, the familiar says.

  But Lucasinho has a plan. A brilliant flawless romantic plan. By the time he hits the Level 12 access tunnel he is running full pelt. The flaps of his Armani jacket fly. Jinji puts a hire in and the powerboard meets him at the junction of 8th and Down. Lucasinho crouches low, arms outspread for balance, trouser pleats flapping in his own slipstream. The board dances through the streams of pedestrians and machines. He pulls up outside Tia Lousika’s apt, arms folded, nonchalance in Armani.

  He’s naked by the time the kitchen space has unfolded.

  ‘Luna, let’s go get sherbet,’ Madrinha Elis says. Tia Lousika objects to Lucasinho’s enthusiastic nudity but Tia Lousika is hardly ever at home now: her commitments as the new Omahene of the Golden Stool keep her in Meridian. Luna has grown up comfortable with her cousin in his skin. What drives her and her madrinha out is Lucasinho in a kitchen. He is a diva.

  Lucasinho pads naked to the worktop. He has the recipe, he has the ingredients, he has the talent. Lucasinho takes a deep breath, rubs his hands over his firm abdominals, the concavities of his incredible tight ass, the taut muscles around his lower spine. This will slay you, Abena Maanu Asamoah. He flexes his biceps and cracks his knuckles. Lifts the flour in its plastic sifter and lets it snow slow down into the work bowl. Miraculous stuff. Lucasinho knows its cost and its rarity. This is a work of love, an art beyond artisanal. Lucasinho plunges his hands into the bowl and delights in the silky flow of the flour; almost liquid, eddying around his fingers. He scoops it up and watches it descend, drips and drops falling out of the cloud where the powder has clumped.

  Lucasinho dips a forefinger into the still-settling flour and draws a line along each cheekbone. A line down the centre of his forehead. A dab of flour on each nipple. A last white circle on the brown skin of his svadhishthana chakra. Creativity, sex, passion, desire. Interaction, relationships, sexual memory. He’s ready.

  ‘Let’s bake.’

  * * *

  With cream he adorns her. A dab on the throat, one on each nipple, the belly, the navel. She stops his cream-laden finger midway between the wreckage of the cake and her vulva.

  ‘Are you creaming my chakras?’ says Abena Maanu Asamoah. Lucasinho leans in and places the blob of cream on the hood of her clitoris.

  Abena gasps at the cold and the bold. She takes Lucasinho’s hand and sucks the remaining smears of cream from his fingers.

  ‘Now what am I going to eat?’ Lucasinho says and Abena giggles deep and dirty and wiggles to offer her breasts to him. She growls a little in her throat as he licks her nipples.

  ‘Anahita, manipura, svadhishthana,’ Abena says. She puts her hand gently, firmly on the back of Lucasinho’s head and directs him between her opening thighs. ‘Muladhara. Leave room for seconds.’

  He had waited, silvered with drizzle from the vertical orchard’s hydration system, for fifteen minutes outside the door. Water condensed and dripped from the cake box he held in his hands. Water dewed and depressed his high-combed quiff. Water moistened his Issy Miyake suit and worked its way into the creases. Water ran from every silvery pierce he had put through his skin. When the door opened Abena was behind it.

  ‘You’d better come in before you catch something.’

  Was she hiding a smile?

  She tried to ignore the cake on the lounger beside him.

  He tried not to notice that all her colloquium-mates were gone.

  ‘I made you cake.’

  ‘You think that’s the answer to everything? You just go off and make a cake and that makes everything all right?’

  ‘Most things.’

  ‘Why did you fuck Adelaja Oladele?’

  ‘I didn’t fuck him.’

  ‘It was a hand job…’

  ‘Edging…’

  ‘Yes, he’s fantastic at edging. Everyone says.’

  ‘Legend. It’s not a thing to be missed, so I’m told. And it’s like you’re…’

  ‘I’m what?’

  ‘Well, you’re always busy…’

  ‘Do not. Make this. About me. Do not. Try and say. That you only had sex with Adelaja Oladele because I was working.’

  ‘Okay. But we agreed. You agreed. This isn’t exclusive. We can see other people.’

  ‘Because you insisted.’

  ‘That’s me. You knew that before we got together.’

  ‘You could have asked,’ Abena said. ‘If it was all right to session with Ade. I might have wanted to watch. Boy on boy, you know.’

  Lucasinho never stopped being surprised how Abena could surprise him. The Moonrun party, just before the assassination attempt on Rafa, when she had placed the special pierce in his earlobe and relished the taste of his blood. The wedding, when he exercised the power hidden in that pierce and claimed the protection of the Asamoahs rather than face marriage to Denny Mackenzie: Abena was waiting behind the pressure glass at Twé station. When Boa Vista fell, she suited up without hesitation, walked with him out to the waiting VTO ship, held his hand the whole flight. Went down into the lightless, empty hell that had been his home.

  She was a hero, a goddess, a star. He was a cake-baking fool.

  ‘Can I get out of these wet things?’

  ‘Not yet. Not for a long time yet, Senhor. I know you. One flash of the abs and you think you’re forgiven. But I might take a bit of cake.’

  Lucasinho opened the box.

  ‘It’s a berry whipped cream cake.’

  ‘What kind of berry?’

  ‘I only know the word in Portuguese.’

  ‘Say it.’

  He did. Abena closed her eyes in pleasure. She loved the music of Corta Portuguese.

  ‘Strawberry. I do like strawberries. I would definitely like a piece
of your strawberry cake.’

  ‘And cream.’

  ‘Don’t push it, Lucasinho.’

  In the food space – so much larger than even Tia Lousika’s, so much less well equipped – he cut precise slices – small portions, he’s hopeful – and made mint tea.

  ‘Are you shivering?’

  Lucasinho nods. The precipitation has chilled him bone deep.

  ‘Let’s get you out of those wet things.’

  It was then he had the great idea about the whipped cream.

  * * *

  After the cake and the play and the making-up sex Abena spooned close to Lucasinho, warming the last chill out of his marrow. Her cold absence wakes him.

  She’s taken the cake with her.

  Lucasinho finds Abena sitting cross-legged on the common room floor, back hunched in concentration. She has pulled on a baggy T and tiny shorts and pulled her hair back in a green woven band. Lucasinho observes her pure and intense focus. If he allowed Jinji to link to her familiar he would see the room full of ghosts and politicians; her forum. She’s explained it; a group of engaged people exploring new futures for everyone. Lucasinho can’t think about futures. From where he lies, his looks the same in every direction, bleak as the Sea of Tranquillity. Abena’s every hour outside colloquium seems spent talking in the back of her jaw with her political friends. Stuff going on, she tells him; down there. Earth.

  Cortas don’t do politics. They tried once. It killed them.

  He places a hand between Abena’s shoulder-blades, the other in the small of her back and corrects her spine. Abena gives a cry of surprise.

  ‘You have the worst posture.’

  ‘Luca…’

  He loves it when she calls him that most intimate family name.

  ‘Come back to bed.’

  ‘It’s still unfolding.’

  ‘Crucible.’

  ‘The death toll is up to one hundred and eighty-eight. Robert Mackenzie and Jade Sun are missing.’

  ‘They burned. I’m glad.’

  ‘The forums are insane. The markets are going crazy. I’m tracking panic buying on the helium markets.’ Then Abena realises what Lucasinho has said. ‘You’re glad? People died, Luca.’

  ‘They DPed Rafa. They hung Carlinhos by his heels. They broke Ariel’s spine. Wagner’s in hiding and my father, no one knows if he’s alive or dead. They sent blades after me. Do you remember that? They burned. I can’t be sorry about that. You saw Boa Vista. You saw Rafa, out there.’

  ‘He’s safe.’

  Lucasinho shakes his head at the discontinuity, tripping over an emotional crack in the world.

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘Your cousin. Robson.’

  ‘Robson is in Queen of the South.’

  ‘Robson was at Robert Mackenzie’s party. He’s safe, Luca. But you didn’t know that.’

  Lucasinho collapses back on to the lounger. Abena dismisses her forum.

  ‘Luca, he’s your family.’

  This is an old conversation, its tracks deeply rutted, its emotional turns well-marked.

  ‘Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I wanted to stop Bryce Mackenzie taking him? I couldn’t do that. I’m nineteen years old. I’m the heir. The last Corta. I couldn’t even keep Robson with me. I couldn’t keep him safe.’

  ‘Luca, you’re not a lawyer.’

  ‘Abi, shut up. You’re always right. All you Asamoahs, you’re always right and wise and have the answer: bim bam. Shut up and listen to me. I’m scared. When the Mackenzies start looking round for someone to blame, where will they look first? Cortas. I’m scared all the time, Abi. That session with Adelaja, it wasn’t about the sex. It was about three hours not being scared. Do you know what it feels like, being scared all the time?’

  Abena understands that she inhabits a world she can touch and shape, where her words and thoughts have power and agency. Lucasinho lives in a world for which he is responsible and yet powerless to change, where he carries blame for things he did not do. The distance will widen and split them apart in the end. Abena sees that clearly. She sees also a maimed, vulnerable boy who has experienced things beyond her imagining. A boy she can’t help, and so understands him, because in this she’s responsible and powerless too.

  Abena puts her arms around Lucasinho.

  So Afi finds them when she weaves in post-cocktail in search of cleansing tea. Better than tea: cake. She cuts herself a slice. The boy will have made it. They’re cute together on the lounger, sleeping against each other. He’s very pretty in that self-conscious Brazilian way but she could never invest in something so heavily damaged.

  His cake, however, is outstanding.

  * * *

  Mackenzie Metals’ house mixologist has created a memorial cocktail. Old-school industrial vodka, hibiscus syrup, lime, sprigs of wattle and a ball of cinnamon-myrtle-flavoured gel, slowly releasing orange tendrils into the pink. It commemorates the epochal life of Robert Mackenzie in a glass. Waiters with trays of the things lurk by the doors, pressing them into hands.

  ‘And this is?’

  ‘Red Dog, Ma’am.’

  Lady Sun takes the glass, sniffs, sips, passes it to one of her entourage. Tasteless, from the glass to the mix to the name. So Mackenzie. One of her guards pours her a thimble glass of her own private gin. Fortified, she sweeps into the salon to join the wake.

  The mausoleum surprised her. No Mackenzie has ever shown any religious impulse, but the heart of Kingscourt, the old palace at Queen of the South, enfolds a small shrine: a pure white room, a perfect cube, three metres on a side. Duncan entered alone, then invited family and guests to pay their personal respects. Curiosity sent Lady Sun in. The chamber was small, large enough for three people at the most, pure white. The white walls were dotted with coloured discs, ten centimetres in diameter. Lady Sun stood in a polka dot chamber. Each disc was the familiar of a dead Mackenzie, frozen in ceramic circuitry. The body was recycled, the electronic soul endured. Here was Robert Mackenzie, a crimson disc at the centre of the far wall. Red Dog was his familiar, Lady Sun recalled. She touched Red Dog, half expecting a thrill of data, an echo of the old burning anger and ambition. It was a disc of doped glass, napped like velvet to the touch, nothing more.

  After the obsequies the important event: the reception. Lady Sun drew up her conversation card on the tram ride from the Palace of Eternal Light. Pecking order is important.

  First on the tour is Evgeny Vorontsov, his daughters around him. Good boned but inbred and stupid. Too much radiation woven into their DNA.

  ‘Evgeny Grigorivitch.’

  The CEO of VTO Luna is a great hulk of a man, long-haired, heavily bearded, immaculately dressed and groomed. Lady Sun particularly admires the damask of his shirt. There is a glass of neat vodka in his hand. The hand shakes. Lady Sun’s informants whisper that his drinking problem is chronic, and that the command of VTO has passed to a younger, harder generation. Passed, been taken.

  ‘Lady Sun. I’m sorry for your loss.’

  ‘Thank you. It seems every house has been touched by this tragedy.’

  ‘We’ve borne our own losses, Lady Sun.’

  Jade Sun had been a work of a lifetime, decades of careful manoeuvring and manipulation undone in a drop of blazing sun. Jade was the honed weapon: Amanda had never the edge, the subtlety, the patience of her older sister. Lucas Corta out-thought Amanda Sun in every way. She should have married Amanda to Rafa, even as a third oko, but the Three August Ones insisted that that Lucas Corta would one day rule Corta Hélio.

  ‘Sour times, Evgeny.’

  Evgeny Grigorivitch Vorontsov knows a dismissal when he hears one.

  To Lousika Asamoah now, elegant and lethal in Claude Montana. AKA politics are inscrutable to Lady Sun, but she understands Lousika is currently Omahene of the Kotoko, which is some kind of board, and that the position rotates around the Kotoko and that members come and go constantly. It seems fearfully elaborate and inefficient to Lady Sun. The Asamoahs
keep everyone’s secrets. That is all Lady Sun needs to know.

  ‘Ya Doku Nana.’ Her familiar informs her that this is the expected form of address to the Omahene.

  ‘Lady Sun.’

  They talk of families, of children and grandchildren and how the moon turns each generation stranger than the last.

  ‘Your daughter is at Twé,’ Lady Sun says.

  ‘Luna, yes. With her madrinha.’

  ‘I’ve never understood that Corta tradition, let alone why you’d import it wholesale into Twé. Forgive me, I’m an old woman and therefore forthright.’

  ‘It’s what she’s used to.’

  ‘I suppose. I can see how the child-care duties are very useful when you’re away from Twé as much as you are since taking the Golden Stool. Tell me, how does it make you feel? You conceive the child, another woman bears it, births it, nurses it.’

  Lady Sun spies a prick of irritation on Lousika Asamoah’s perfectly composed, perfectly made-up face and takes pleasure at the little drop of blood she has drawn. Asamoahs keep secrets, I find them out. Some day, when the need comes – and it may never come – she will work an edge into this tiny wound and use it to splinter Lousika Asamoah apart.

  Lady Sun has manoeuvred Lousika Asamoah to the edge of Bryce Mackenzie’s space and effortlessly transfers social orbit. Lady Sun has not been in Bryce Mackenzie’s physical presence for years now and she can barely contain her disgust. He is a horror. An obscenity. She can only tolerate his proximity by believing that his size is some form of perverse body art. Only two of his catamites today. Well-groomed boys. The taller one must be too old by now.

  ‘Bryce.’ She lays her hands on his. She is glad she is wearing gloves. ‘There are no words. No words at all. A terrible, terrible loss.’

  ‘And for you.’

  ‘Thank you. I still can’t quite believe that I was there – we were both there. A tragedy – an atrocity. Someone caused this. There are no accidents.’

  ‘Our engineers are investigating. Physical evidence is hard to obtain and VTO wants to reopen Equatorial One as soon as possible.’

  ‘But Mackenzie Metals goes on. It always did. We were the first, your father and I. You have the helium business at least. Far be it from me to tell a man how to run his affairs, but sometimes a quick, authoritative statement calms a nervous market. Until your father’s will is made clear.’