by Ian McDonald
‘Lucasinho, what’s happening?’
‘The power’s out again,’ Lucasinho says. He holds Luna to him, buffeted and beaten by bodies, trying not to feel the darkness as a solid, crushing thing. If the power has failed, what about the air supply? His chest tightens, he fights an involuntary gulp of panic. Reaches a decision, in the suffocating dark.
‘Come on…’ He seizes Luna’s hand and draws her behind him, against the flow of people down the pitch-dark tunnel. Voices call the names of missing children, children and parents call for each other. Lucasinho forces a path through the press of blind, confused bodies.
‘Where are we going?’ Luna asks. Her hand is so small and light in his. It could slip free so easily. He firms his grip. Luna yelps with pain.
‘You’re hurting me!’
‘Sorry. We’re going to João de Deus.’
‘But madrinha Elis said we were to get on the train to Lousika.’
‘Anjinho, no one’s getting on a train. No train’s going anywhere. We’re going to take the BALTRAN to João de Deus. The Sisters will look after us. Jinji, go to infrared.’
I’m sorry Lucasinho, but the network is currently unavailable.
Blind in a darkness deeper than dark Twé.
‘Jinji,’ Lucasinho whispers. ‘We need to get to the BALTRAN Station.’
I can navigate from my last location for you based on my internal maps and your average stride length, Jinji said. There will be a margin of error.
‘Help me.’
One hundred and twelve paces ahead. Then stop.
A hand tugs Lucasinho’s, hauls him to a halt mid-stride.
‘I can’t find Luna.’
In the dark and noise and fear, Lucasinho can’t understand what the young voice one pace behind him is saying. How can Luna not find Luna? Then Lucasinho remembers: Luna was also the name of her familiar. Grandmother Adriana always pursed her lips and tutted at the conceit, and that her granddaughter had chosen a blue Luna moth – an animal – to skin her familiar.
‘The network’s down, anjinho. Stay with me. Don’t let go of my hand. I’m going to get us somewhere bright and safe.’
One hundred and twelve paces, then stop. Lucasinho steps into the dark. One step two step three step four. The tunnel seems emptier now – the collisions fewer, the voices more widely spread – but every time Lucasinho brushes against another body he stops in place, silently repeating his last pace count. On the fifth halt, Luna interrupts.
‘Why do we keep stopping?’
The step count flees like carnival butterflies. Lucasinho battles the urge to scream his frustration at his cousin.
‘Luna? I’m counting steps and it’s really important you don’t interrupt me.’ But the numbers are gone. Lucasinho’s skin crawls in fear. Lost in the dark.
Eighty-five, Jinji says.
‘Luna, do you want to help?’ Lucasinho says. He feels Luna nod her head through the minute play of muscles in her arm. ‘We’re going to make this a game. Count with me. Eighty-six, eighty-seven…’
Lucasinho knows he has arrived at the intersection by the movement of air on his face. Sounds move in new paths. He smells mould, water, leaf-rot; the sweat of Twé. The air from deep inside the dark city chills. The heating is down. Lucasinho doesn’t want to think too long about that.
Turn right, ninety degrees, Jinji advises.
‘Don’t let go now,’ Lucasinho says and Luna’s hand tightens on his but there is peril here. Jinji can easily measure steps but turning is a more subtle action. Miss the angle and he could lose the calculated path. Lucasinho pivots his right foot and presses heel to instep. His feet feel at right angles to each other. He turns left foot parallel to right. Breathes deeply.
‘Okay Jinji.’
Two hundred and eight steps, take the second corridor.
Two corridors.
‘We’re going to move in to the wall,’ Lucasinho says and side-shuffles until his outstretched fingers touch smooth sinter. ‘You feel that? Reach out your little arm. Got it?’
A silence, then Luna says, ‘I nodded my head there, but uh huh.’
‘Count with me. One, two three…’
At one hundred and five Luna stops dead and shouts, ‘Lights!’
Lucasinho’s fingertips are so electric-raw he can hardly bear to hold them to the polished wall. They are as sensitive, as tuned, as nipples. He peers into the bottomless dark.
‘What can you see, Luna?’
‘Can’t see,’ Luna said. ‘I can smell lights.’
Now Lucasinho catches a hint of the grassy, mouldy smell of biolights and understands.
‘They’re dead, Luna.’
‘They might just need water.’
Lucasinho feels Luna’s hand tug and slip from his grasp. He follows into the uncounted dark. Take twelve steps to your left and resume your course, Jinji orders. Lucasinho hears a rustle of fabric, feels a downward tug on his hand and, knowing that Luna is squatting down, crouches beside her. He can see nothing. Not a photon.
‘I can make these work,’ Luna declares. ‘Don’t look.’
Lucasinho hears fabric rustle, a thick trickle, smells the warm perfume of piss. A warm green glow spreads from the revived biolights. The light is barely enough to discern shapes, but it grows by the second as the bacteria feed from Luna’s urine. A street shrine to Yemanja; a tiny 3-D printed icon ringed by a halo of biolights stuck to the floor and wall. The light is now strong enough for Lucasinho to see the two junctions Jinji described, and a body lying against the wall between them. He would have fallen over that, sprawling and lost in the dark.
‘Here.’ Luna peels off handfuls of biolights and presents them to Lucasinho. They are wet and warm in his hands. He almost drops them in disgust. Luna purses her lips in displeasure. ‘Like this.’ She sticks the little disc-shaped lights to her forehead, shoulders and wrists.
‘This is a Malihini shirt,’ Lucasinho protests.
‘Designer today, deprinter tomorrow,’ Luna declares.
‘Who taught you that?’
‘Madrinha Elis.’
Hand in hand, they take the long route around the body, then down the indicated corridor. The tunnel shakes to noises overhead, heavy things moving slowly, up on the surface. The trickster winds of Twé carry snatches of voices, clashing metal, cries, a deep rhythmic booming. Left here, up this ramp, around this curving peripheral road. A right turn takes them into the path of a mob of people milling in the dark corridor. Luna spins around.
‘They can see our lights!’ she hisses. Lucasinho turns, hides his glow.
‘They’re between us and the BALTRAN.’
‘Back to 25th, up the steps and there’s an old tunnel to the BALTRAN,’ Luna says. ‘You’re big but you should be able to fit all right.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I know all the sneaky ways,’ Luna says.
In daylight Lucasinho would have slipped around and between and under the jutting machinery and old raw rock of Luna’s sneaky way without a thought, but with his own body the only source of light, not knowing how far this tunnel goes or what surprise it might present to him, how much bigger or smaller it grew, panic grips him. The terror of being trapped in the dark, his biolights ebbing, flickering, dying: unable to see, unable to move. Megatons of rock above him, the distant heart of the moon beneath him.
He feels sinter press against his bent back, his shoulders, and freezes. He is wedged. Unable to go forward, unable to move backwards. Future generations might find him, something mummified and desiccated. In a Malihini shirt. He must get out, he must get free. But if he lunges, lurches, body-panics, he will only jam himself tighter. He must turn, slide one shoulder through like this, then the other, then his hips and legs.
‘Come on,’ Luna calls. Her biolights dance before him; soft green stars. Lucasinho dips his left shoulder. Fabric catches and tears. In João de Deus, he will treat himself to a new shirt. A hero’s shirt. Two steps and he’s through. Twent
y steps and he emerges from a crevice on 2nd Street he has never noticed before. Hand in hand, Luna and Lucasinho lope down the corridor to the BALTRAN. The BALTRAN station maintains a separate power supply. Twé, feeder of the moon, is well equipped with BALTRAN launchers. They step from the lock out on to a cargo bay wide enough to handle loading trucks.
‘Jinji,’ Lucasinho says. BALTRAN capsules hang before him in ranks and columns, a hundred metres high, far up into the heights of the launch silo.
The local network is available, Jinji says.
‘João de Deus BALTRAN station,’ Lucasinho says.
Jinji brings down a personnel capsule down and racks it in the access chamber. Now it asks for a destination.
I have a routing laid in, Jinji says. The BALTRAN network is in use so it’s not direct.
‘How many jumps?’ Lucasinho asks.
Eight, Jinji says. I’m sending you round the far side of the moon.
‘What’s happening?’ Luna asks as the BALTRAN capsule opens before them. She looks at the padded interior, the straps and crash webbing, the oxygen masks, with apprehension.
‘It’s going to take us eight jumps to get to João de Deus,’ Lucasinho says. ‘But it’ll be all right. It’ll just take a little longer, that’s all. We have to go now. Come on.’
Luna hangs back. Lucasinho reaches out a hand. Luna takes it. He steps into the capsule.
‘You’ve still got your lights on,’ Luna says. Lucasinho peels them from him. The adhesive pads leave grubby, sticky rings on his Malihini shirt. He leaves the little glowing discs on the floor of the capsule. They were good and faithful and he is superstitiously loyal to things. Jinji shows him how to strap Luna in. He seals his own straps and feels the memory foam soften, learn and reform to his body.
‘Good to go, Jinji.’
Pre launch sequence, the familiar says. Once we have launched I will be in offline mode until we arrive at João de Deus.
The door closes. Lucasinho feels pressure locks seal. The air con hums. The capsule is lit soft gold, a comforting, warm, peaceful hue. It looks like sickness to Lucasinho Corta.
‘Hold my hand,’ Lucasinho says, wiggling his fingers free from the webbing. Luna easily slips her hand free and into his. The capsule lurches and drops.
‘Whoa!’ says Lucasinho Corta.
The capsule is in the launch tunnel, Jinji says.
‘Are you getting this?’ Lucasinho shouts over the humming and rattling that now fills the capsule.
Luna nods. ‘It’s fun!’
It is not fun. Lucasinho closes his eyes and fights down the fear as the capsule shuttles out along maglev rails to the launcher. Jolts as Lucasinho and Luna are loaded into the launch chamber.
Prepare for high acceleration, the pod AI warn.
‘Like a ride!’ Lucasinho says without conviction and then the launcher grabs the capsule, accelerates it and every drop of blood and bile and cum in him rushes to his feet and groin. His eyes ache, pushed deep in their sockets, his balls are spheres of lead. He can feel every bone in his body pushing through his skin. The suspension harness is a web of titanium wires, cutting him into quivering chunks and he can’t even scream.
And it stops.
And he has no weight and no direction, no up or down. His stomach heaves. Were there anything in it more than morning tea it would be all floating free in a constellation of bile. His face feels swollen and puffy, his hands unwieldy and bulbous; fat wiggling fingers gripped around Luna’s hand. He can hear the blood rushing around his brain. Some of Abena’s friends rode the BALTRAN for free-fall sex. He can’t imagine anyone having sex in this. He can’t see any kind of fun in this. And he has to do it seven more times.
‘Luna, you okay?’
‘I think so. Are you?’
She looks like Luna always looks; small, self-contained yet insatiably curious about whatever world she is encountering, cosmological, personal. Lucasinho wonders if she realises she is packed into a padded, pressurised can, flying high above the moon, aimed at the distant mitt of a receiving station, unable to change course, trusting absolutely in the accuracy of machines and the precision of ballistics.
Stand by for deceleration, the pod says. So soon? Hardly time to get to pre-foreplay, let alone the free-fall cum all the boys described with such detail and enthusiasm.
‘We’re going in,’ Lucasinho says.
Without warning, something grabs Lucasinho’s head and feet and tries to make him ten centimetres shorter. Deceleration is harsher but briefer than acceleration: red dots dance in Lucasinho’s eyes, then he is hanging upside down in his crash web, gasping. Gasp turns into bark, into laugh. He cannot stop laughing. Heaving, wrenching laughter that tears at every strained muscle and drawn sinew. He could laugh up a lung. Luna catches his laugh. Upside down, they whoop and giggle as the BALTRAN launcher draws them in and turns them upright for the next jump. They arrived. They survived.
‘Ready to do that again?’ Lucasinho asks.
Luna nods.
* * *
The pod door opens. The pod door should not open. Lucasinho and Luna should remain sealed in for the entire sequence of jumps.
Please exit the capsule, Jinji says.
Cold air, heavy with dust, flows into the capsule.
Please exit the capsule, Jinji says again. Lucasinho unclips the crash webbing and steps on to metal mesh. He feels the chill of the mesh through the soles of his loafers. He feels this place was brought to life moments ago. Air-conditioning fans roar but the lights are dim.
‘Where are we?’ Luna asks a split second before Lucasinho.
Lubbock BALTRAN relay, their familiars whisper. Jinji shows Lucasinho a map location. They are on the western shore of the Sea of Fecundity, four hundred kilometres from João de Deus.
‘Jinji, lay in a course for João de Deus,’ Lucasinho commands.
I’m sorry, I am unable to comply, Lucasinho, his familiar replies.
‘Why?’ Lucasinho asks.
I am unable to launch capsules due to energy constraints. The power plant at Gutenberg is offline.
The lurch and drop of acceleration to free fall, free fall to electromagnetic braking, is nothing to the sick vacuum that opens in Lucasinho’s belly.
They’re trapped deep in the badlands.
‘How long before power is restored?’
I am unable to answer that, Lucasinho. Access to the network has been compromised. I’m running on the local architecture.
‘Is something wrong?’ Luna says.
‘The system is updating itself,’ Lucasinho lies, numb and not knowing what to do. Luna is scared, and any answers he gets from Jinji will only scare her more. ‘We might be here for a little while, so why don’t you go see if you can find us anything to eat or drink?’
Luna looks around her, hugs herself tight against the cold. Lubbock is not Twé with its multiple launchers and loading docks. This is a remote relay, an uncrewed node. It houses a service crew twice a lunar year for a day or two. Lucasinho can view most of it from the platform and sees nowhere to store food or water.
‘This place is scary,’ Luna declares.
‘It’s all right anjinho, we’re the only people here.’
‘I’m not scared of people,’ Luna says but she trots away to explore her small new world.
‘How long have we got?’ Lucasinho whispers.
The relay is operating on reserve power. If main power is not restored within three days you will experience significant environmental degradation.
‘Significant?’
Heating and atmosphere failure, chiefly.
‘Get a call out.’
I have been broadcasting a distress call on the emergency channel since our arrival. I have not yet received an acknowledgement. Communications seems to be down all across Nearside.
‘How can that be?’
We are under attack.
Luna returns with a can of water.
‘No food,’ she says. ‘Sorry. Can yo
u make it warmer? I’m really really cold.’
‘I don’t know how to, anjinho.’
He lies. Jinji could do it in a breath. Lucasinho has finally acknowledged that he will never be an intellectual, but even he can run the numbers: a degree in temperature is an hour less breathing. He takes off his Malihini and slides Luna’s arms into the sleeves. It hangs from her like a cape, like dressing-up day.
‘What else did you find?’
‘There’s a suit. A shell-suit, like the old one at Boa Vista.’
Lucasinho’s joy is a chemical rush. A suit. Simple. Just walk out of here.
‘Show me.’
Luna takes him to the outlock. It’s small, designed for one person at a time. In the lock, a hard-shell survival suit, adjustable to a wide range of body shapes, bright orange. Like the one in which he had walked from Boa Vista to João de Deus. Just a short walk across the surface. One suit. Luna had said: a suit. He hadn’t listened. He needs to listen. He needs every sense and nerve to be sharp, he needs not to rush to assumptions, or wishful thinking. Could-be’s would kill them out here.
The will-be is that in three days the air will run out, and you have one moon suit.
‘Luna, we may need to sleep here. Could you go and see if you can find anything we can cover ourselves with?’
She nods. Lucasinho does not know how convinced Luna is by his diversions but he prefers her gone when he asks Jinji the hard questions.
‘Jinji, where is the nearest settlement?’
The nearest settlement is Messier, one hundred and fifty kilometres east.
‘Shit.’ Well beyond the range of a shell-suit. Walking to find help is dead at his feet.
‘Are there any other surface-capable devices in this station?’ He had heard Carlinhos use that phrase once. Surface-capable. It sounds strong and in-charge. Mão de Ferro.
The emergency shell-suit is the only surface-capable device, Jinji says.
‘Fuck!’ Lucasinho slams his fist into the wall. The explosion of pain almost drops him. He sucks on his bleeding knuckles.
‘Are you all right?’ Luna has returned with a thermal foil blanket. ‘I’m sorry it was all I could find.’
‘We’re in trouble, Luna.’
