by Ian McDonald
‘Chibs.’
‘Whatever. Everyone would be forced to have one and if you did anything the government would cut off your network, then your power, then your water. Then they’d stop you breathing.’
Skyler drains the carton and slaps it down on the table.
‘It’ll be foreigners in the end. It’s not just Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Australia. The Mackenzies are Aussies and they’re hanging Duncan Mackenzie print-outs from the Harbour Bridge and burning them.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘It’s a disease. It spreads. Even here.’
‘I’m … what? A secret super-spy from the moon?’
‘Who worked for one of the big players. Whose brother is now running the moon.’
‘It’s not like that…’
‘Doesn’t matter what it’s like. It’s what people think it’s like. Watch yourself.’
NINE
Alexia reckons her ass is too terrestrial for lunar furniture. She’s too short in the leg, too long in the back, too broad in the seat. The beds are no better: soft memory foams and lunar gravity means she wakes ten times a night from dreams of falling. Alexia wriggles in her chair and tries to find some comfort. This is the third LMA session in as many days.
Gossip runs around the tiers of the Pavilion of the New Moon in glances and whispers. Alexia can guess what they’re saying.
The Eagle’s own sister ran away rather than represent him.
She’s filed her own case against him.
Corta versus Corta?
Not the way you think. Ariel Corta is representing Luna Corta against Lucas Corta for medical wardenship of Lucasinho Corta.
But Luna Corta’s …
That weird kid? Yes, but she has no skin in this game.
So Ariel Corta can argue that Luna is best qualified to act in Lucasinho’s best medical interests.
And she is there, on Farside.
Clever, that Ariel Corta.
They can barely contain the derision as Lucas stands up to open the session and welcome the speaker. A wide, lumbering figure in a bronze gown painfully descends the steps to the pit. Vidhya Rao, Maninho tells Alexia. Economist and adviser to Whitacre Goddard, member of the Pavilion of the White Hare, Visiting Professor of the Faculty of Theoretical Economics … Alexia shuts off the biography and listens instead to the silenced whispers, closing of conversations that say, Here is a person of consequence. Alexia sees a dumpy, brown-skinned figure, short silver hair, robed and scarved in exquisite, fine-textured weaves that give nothing to fashion. Woman? Man? Alexia can’t tell. She doesn’t need to be able to tell; this is the moon. There seem to be as many genders and sexes and sexualities as there are citizens. And there are pronouns – or not, depending on personal taste – not just for those genders and sexes and sexualities, but also for non-human entities, and alternative human personalities. The Farsiders have a pronoun for speaking to and of machines. And then there are the Moon Wolves, and their darkside and lightside aspects.
‘Sers, I will be brief.’
The pernicious thing, Alexia realises as Maninho surrounds Vidhya Rao with panes and panels of information, is trying to decide if there is an original gender from which the current is deviation. Moon folk don’t think like that. Everything is negotiated.
‘A detailed proposal and full breakdown have been sent to your familiars under the name of “Lunar Bourse, towards an off-planet Value Nexus”. What I propose in this short pitch is nothing less than a complete restructuring of the economic foundation of lunar civilisation.’
Alexia understands economics chiefly by the lights of a proprietor of a hyperlocal, folding-cash, grey-market water engineering company. Personal and invested. This is not that kind of economics: this is financialisation, trades, derivatives; futures and forwards, swaps and options; puts and stays and defaults. Contracts and insurances and reinsurances. Instruments of inquisitorial sharpness and complexity. Minuscule profits extracted from price differentials that hover on the edge of the quantum scale, magnified into the immense by the sheer number of transactions.
In the opening quarter, a Lunar Bourse would trade upwards of fifty times the total GDP of both worlds in derivatives.
That line arrests her attention. As does: The future of all economies lies in financialisation. We arrived some years ago at the point where it is easier to extract value through an efficient market than through manufacturing or material commodities. Taiyang’s sun-belt has the capacity to power any forseen expansion of the Bourse for fifty years.
You want to turn us into a moon-sized stock market, Alexia realises.
‘Over a century the entire surface of the moon would be repurposed for energy generation, with the sub-regolithis converted to computing material,’ Vidhya Rao says.
A black moon, Alexia thinks. Every mountain laid low, every crater filled, every sea flooded with black glass. From Barra, you would look up on a summer night and see nothing. A hole in the sky. Inside that hole, money making money.
‘Such a system would of necessity be entirely automatic,’ Vidhya Rao continues. ‘Executive and oversight roles would also be automated – not even the famous Moon Wolves would be fast enough to interact with the trading cycle.’ E looks up, expecting a laugh. The terrestrials don’t understand; the Dragons are stone-faced.
This is the end of your world, Alexia thinks. This is everything you have built and fought for and struggled to keep alive, all drowned in black glass.
Vidhya Rao returns to er hymn to the market.
‘The Lunar Bourse will make this world the first truly post-scarcity society. With a guaranteed income for every citizen and limitless solar energy, work as we understand it will evaporate. We will be a post-labour society with the resources and opportunity for everyone to achieve personal self-actualisation. From the Bourse, according to its profitability, to each according to their desire.’
Financiers guarantee everyone’s personal fantasy when they might squeeze out another bitsie? And they call you a genius, Vidhya Rao? Take it from this Carioca entrepreneur, it’s profit every time. No work means no workers means redundant workers. Your Lunar Bourse will be built on human bones.
‘Sers, I present this proposal to the Lunar Mandate Authority, for your careful consideration. This is the future of our world.’
Vidhya Rao is done. E thanks er audience and leaves.
Alexia observes the reactions of the delegates. The terrestrials break up into groups, talking together as they leave the chamber. The Vorontsov kids have surrounded Yevgeny Grigorivitch. The big man nods and goes to Lucas.
‘A talk, if you might.’
‘Of course, Yevgeny Grigorivitch.’
‘Not here.’ He looks at Alexia. He smells of cologne in that way when the perfume masks a deeper, pervasive odour. Alexia reads the veins on his nose, the redness of his face, the bulge of his belly, the stiffness of his gait, as if he is slowly petrifying. Vodka is turning him to stone. She sees again Valery Vorontsov, floating at the free-fall axis of Saints Peter and Paul. Urine and shit had been the pervading perfumes; overfilled colostomy bag. He had been the opposite of this bear of a man; a tatter of skin and sinew, bones gnawed to spindles. A hank of hair, bulbous, watery eyes.
‘Just us,’ Yevgeny Vorontsov says.
The Asamoahs think we’re barbarians, Valery Vorontsov said. The Mackenzies think we’re drunken clowns. The Suns think we aren’t even human.
Yevgeny Vorontsov’s minders come down from their high seats to close in around their patriarch, insulate him, move him towards the exits. Alexia sees fear on his face.
‘Lucas?’
‘I won’t need you for a few hours, Alexia.’
As she climbs the stairs to the lobby she notices Vidhya Rao in close and intense conversation with Wang Yongqing, Anselmo Reyes and Monique Bertin.
* * *
The machine lies in the palm of Lucas Corta’s hand, tiny and precise as jewellery; micro-thin antennae, wings wisps of mole
cular film. Lucas snaps his hand shut and crushes the bot to powder. He wipes his hands clean on a tissue.
‘My security has caught eight more of their spy drones,’ Lucas says. The vodka has been freezing since the council meeting. Bottle and glass steam in the humid warmth of the Eagle’s Eyrie. Lucas pours the shot. He sees the naked hunger on Yevgeny Vorontsov’s face.
‘Those are the ones they wanted you to catch,’ Yevgeny Vorontsov says.
‘No doubt.’ Lucas hands him the ice-coated glass. It vanishes into the big man’s fist. So many rings, Lucas observes, cutting into his flesh. ‘Saúde.’
‘Aren’t you joining me?’
‘Vodka is not my drink.’
‘Gin is a little girl’s drink.’ Yevgeny raises his fist. ‘Budim.’ He sets the glass down on the broad arm of his seat, untouched. ‘Excellent, I’m sure. They like me to drink, Lucas. And they make it easy for me to drink. And I drink for them.’
‘A Dragon should not be spied on by his own grandchildren,’ Lucas says.
‘You spied on your brother,’ Yevgeny Vorontsov says.
‘My brother was charming, passionate, generous, handsome and quite incapable of leading Corta Hélio.’
‘They scare me, Lucas. We understood this world. We knew when to take, when to let go. We knew how to act, what was necessary, what was too much. It was a dance, Lucas. You, us, the Suns, the Mackenzies, the Asamoahs. Round and round. They have no restraint. They think no limits apply to them. They owe no duty, no loyalty. Can you understand that?’
‘I understand loyalty,’ Lucas says. ‘I thought we were allies, Yevgeny.’
Beyond the glass wall banners and kites flutter in the airspace of the hub. Someone is flying. There is always someone flying. The vodka has warmed, the ice coat has melted into a lens of water and still Yevgeny Vorontsov cannot take his eyes from the glass.
‘We are, Lucas. The oldest of allies.’
‘Yet Raul-Jesus Mackenzie knew about our mass-driver strike solution on Mare Cognitum.’
Yevgeny Vorontsov shifts in his chair.
‘We’re together in this, Yevgeny, or we are all dead.’
‘They wanted me to test you,’ Yevgeny Vorontsov mumbles. ‘The young ones. They wanted to push you.’
‘You made me look like a fool in front of the terrestrials.’
‘They wanted to see where you would fall.’
‘Did I fall right?’
* * *
Ten years old, Lucas Corta travels with his mother and brother on a state visit to St Olga, the capital of VTO. He coos at the building yards where cranes swing noiselessly through vacuum and the lunar night burns with the thousand actinic stars of welding arcs, where bots stitch and bind panels and meshes and struts into track builders and smelters and sinterers, moonloop capsules and moondozers. Madrinha Amalia leads Lucas by the hand into the old dome, which smells bad and tastes dusty, and he can feel the radiation leaking through the regolith roof where he is introduced, royalty to royalty, to Grigoriy Vorontsov, his sons and daughter, their children. Young Lucas understands that he is to be friendly, socialise, play with them, though they are all at least three years older than him and very much bigger.
Rafa throws himself in heart and soul and within moments he is running and chasing up and down the staircases, throwing balls, tagging. Lucas hangs back, close to his madrinha, as she is introduced to the Vorontsov heirs. These big women and men are the ones he should be talking to: the ones who will inherit Grigoriy Vorontsov’s business, the ones who he will one day try to deceive and defeat. Dragon to Dragon. He comes to Yevgeny Vorontsov. This big, bold young man sees something in the dark, grave, calculating kid at his mother’s side, noting names and filing faces. He crouches to offer a hand.
‘Who are you, sir?’
‘Lucas Arena de Luna Corta,’ Lucas says before Adriana can speak for him and takes the big hand. ‘I will be Corta Hélio.’
The others laugh but not Yevgeny Vorontsov.
‘I am Yevgeny Grigorivitch Vorontsov and I will be VTO Moon.’
* * *
Thirty-five years away, Lucas Corta watches the wreckage of Yevgeny Vorontsov glance again and again at the thimble of now-warm vodka. Everything in this room is balanced on that glass. Yevgeny Vorontsov fidgets.
‘That financier.’
‘Vidhya Rao?’
‘Are you thinking of implementing er plan?’
‘The Lunar Bourse? E is persuasive.’
Yevgeny Vorontsov leans forward.
‘Well I say fuck financialisation. The Vorontsovs do not trade. Our business is not to buy and sell. Our business is to build. We are great souls. Great souls look up. There are worlds out there, Lucas. Worlds. Worlds to take in our hands like jewels. This is the fucking future, Lucas. That Vidhya Rao: I’ll tell you what e wouldn’t. You don’t need people to run er Bourse. Two hundred robots working the market, the helium business and the solar strip and Earth is happy and secure.’
‘Your point, Yevgeny?’
‘Which way do you fall, Lucas Corta? Towards the Earth or towards the moon? Come to St Olga. You’ve gone to all those other bastards. You owe us.’
Lucas brushes the glittering dust of the crushed spy-bot across his desk. ‘Alas, the Eagle of the Moon is unable to accept.’
Yevgeny might roar from his chair, might seize the edge of Lucas’s desk in his huge hands and crush it. Then he reads the message of the crushed bot. We are surveilled.
‘However, for the old friendship between our families, might I send my Iron Hand? She is a Corta.’
‘All three divisions of VTO would be delighted to receive the Iron Hand of the Eagle of the Moon at St Olga,’ Yevgeny Vorontsov says.
Earth, Moon and Space, all together in one place, Lucas muses. The Vorontsovs have important news.
‘I will inform my Mão de Ferro,’ Lucas says.
‘Then drink a fucking toast with me, you piss-livered Brasilian!’ Yevgeny Vorontsov bellows. He snatches up the glass from the arm of chair. It has left a vodka-bleached ring on the printed leather. ‘Family.’
* * *
‘It looks like a city,’ Luna Corta says. She is flying over an endless urban landscape of tracks and blocks. She puts out a hand, and by the power of imagination she banks. ‘People and hotshops and printers. Roads and cablecars and trains.’ It’s illusion, a projection on her lens, but it’s fun to pretend. ‘You’re putting a city in his head.’
‘Cities,’ Dr Gebreselassie says. She is the doctor in charge of healing Lucasinho. She is much more than a doctor and the process is much more than healing. It is growing up again. This thing in her lens, that in one way looks like a city but in every other way looks like nothing she has ever seen before, is one of the keys to the healing. Luna is another.
‘Why won’t you let me see him?’ Luna asked as soon as Dakota Kaur Mackenzie had checked the medical centre reception room.
‘It’s delicate work,’ Dr Gebreselassie said, quickly escorting Luna to a private room. ‘So delicate the theatre is built on a vibration-suppressing cradle. We’re doing nano-surgery, putting protein chips so small you can’t see them into his brain and wiring them into his connectome.’
‘I know that,’ Luna said. ‘I meant, see him. You’ve blocked my familiar.’
‘There’s nothing to see, Luna. Just a young man in a medical coma, and a lot of machines.’
‘Have you taken the top off his head?’ Luna said. Dr Gebreselassie started, taken aback by the girl’s directness.
‘Would you like to see the protein chips?’ the doctor said, leaning forward in her seat. She hadn’t crouched down to Luna’s height. That would have been insulting.
‘Show me,’ Luna said and her lens filled with wonders; like Meridian if the walls and sunline were like the prospekts, and those great canyons branched off into tens more, and those into tens more.
She blinks away the graphic.
‘Cities with people in them,’ Luna declares.
/> ‘People and voices,’ Dr Gebreselassie says. ‘And memories. That’s where we need you. We can give him basic things like walking and language but the things that make him Lucasinho – his memories, they’ve been damaged. Very badly damaged. But the network is full of memories. We can give him those memories on the protein chips and in time, as we rebuild the connectome, those memories will become his own memories.’
‘I know this,’ Luna says. ‘You want me to give my memories to him.’
Dr Gebreselassie has a head-rolling gesture she makes when something is not quite correct in her world.
‘We can’t go in there,’ she says. She reaches a finger towards Luna’s painted forehead. A glare from the death-eye of Lady Luna stops her cold. ‘The network has his memories and your memories. We need your permission to use them.’ She sees the disappointment on Luna’s face. ‘If you want, you can review some of them as we download them to the chips.’
‘I’d like that,’ Luna says. ‘It would be like being with him. Where do I go?’
‘You don’t need to go anywhere,’ Dr Gebreselassie says. ‘We can access them anywhere.’ Again, she has overspoken and Luna is crestfallen. ‘But we can find a room for you. A special room.’ Still the frown. ‘And a special bed.’
‘And granita?’ Luna asks.
‘What’s your favourite?’
‘I don’t have favourites,’ Luna says. ‘I am an explorer. Strawberry, mint and cardamom.’
‘Deal.’ Dr Gebreselassie extends a hand.
‘You don’t deal with me. I’m the Corta of Corta Hélio. I deal with you.’ Luna solemnly reaches out a hand. Dr Gebreselassie solemnly shakes it.
* * *
Strawberry and mint: good. Strawberry and cardamom: okay. Cardamom and mint: weird. Strawberry, mint and cardamom: another failed experiment in granita. Luna sucks the glass dry because she doesn’t want to look like an explorer who only went halfway to Platinum Mountain and gave up. She lies back on the bed. It’s comfortable and more importantly it looks right. Otherwise this med centre is everything she hates about all the other med centres she’s been in: over-bright, over-warm, smells like it has something to hide and no one ever has time for a nine-year-old girl.
