by Ian McDonald
‘Okay. Now ask Lucasinho.’
‘Luca, we need you to do something for us.’
Luna lets the nickname go but her suspicions are roused.
‘Do what?’
‘Something fun,’ Abena Asamoah says. Lucasinho beams with delight but Luna scowls.
‘Do what?’ she asks again.
‘Just do a network video link with me,’ Abena says.
‘Is it safe?’ Luna asks.
‘It’s safe,’ Abena says. ‘It’s the safest thing in all the world.’
‘Luca, I think you should do this,’ Luna declares.
Abena breathes deep with relief.
‘Thank you. Is that lemon cake?’
Lucasinho nods.
‘Could I have a piece?’
‘Yes,’ Lucasinho says to Luna’s furious face. ‘Of. Course.’
* * *
Meridian has a bar for everyone. The glassers have the Peace Jazz Bar; the VTO track-queens have Red Dynamo while their VTO Space counterparts sip their vodka martinis in the Vostok Lounge. Mackenzie Helium workers shake the moondust from their feet in the Coogee while Mackenzie Metal jackaroos bang glasses in the Hammer in the next quadra. Premier League handball stars sport in the D, Liga de Luna in the Saint Mary, and the owners brag and talk deals on the terraces of the Professional Club. Coders and software engineers rave at Index, medics at Slaughter. There are bars for BALTRAN dispatchers, rail supervisors, actors, comedians, singers, musicians and two hundred kinds of student. The politicos drink and argue in a suite of bespoke clubs along 32nd Street, a bar for each political complexion; the lawyers carp and bitch in the Clube de Argumentos. Directly across the Quadra – same street, same number – the judges of the Court of Clavius squander their fees on the bench’s terrible gin. The Flashing Blade is the zashitniks’ bar.
In Abena Asamoah’s imagination the Flashing Blade is rambunctious, piratical, low stone eaves and a tag carved on every lintel, a place of feuds and vendettas, quick tempers and long-held grudges ended on the edge of a knife. Thudding hip-hop metal, Valhalla lyrics to the beat of glasses on table. Songs to honoured blades.
The Flashing Blade disappoints sorely. Abena stands before a suite of standard accommodation units dug into the raw stone of Level Fifty-Three East. Glass and titanium. She had hoped to turn heads as she walked in. No one gives her a second glance in her wasp-waist suit, faux-fox stole and fantastic hat.
The clientele is a further disappointment. She had expected big men and lean, mean women; studs and tattoos, piercings and shaved heads shining in the soft light. Mohicans. Scars and missing digits. Ripped T-shirts, sleeveless hoodies, mish-mashes from all of the moon’s many fashion fads. Real leather. Killer footwear. Big men and lean mean women there are, and the Jo Moonbeams are easy to spot – hired for their terrestrial muscle – but the zashitniks of the Court of Clavius are as diverse in shape, age, gender and style as the regulars of any Meridian club. The music is well-curated M-pop, inoffensive but toe-tapping. The drink is martini, in elegant, dewed glasses. The talk in the alcoves, at the tables, along the bar, is not of battles and blood, honour won and enemies crushed in the arena, but of cases current, historical, remarkable; legal precedents, arguments and clever plays, the characters and foibles of judges, lawyers, plaintiffs and defendants: courtroom gossip and scandal. These zashitniks have seen more court-time than many of the counsels who retain them; more even than the judges. Abena cannot see a single knife, not even the unmistakable contour of a sheath beneath a blouse. Most of the customers of the Flashing Blade have never drawn a blade for the law.
Tumi, her familiar, has already identified the man she seeks, but Abena goes to the bar to take the longer, appraising look. Ishola Oluwafemi: Ariel’s long-time zashitnik. A broad, bullet-headed Yoruba man, smiling, happy among his colleagues. He laughs like running water. A kind man, devoted father, ferocious fighter, Ariel says. Abena doesn’t see that. It is two years since Ishola Oluwafemi last unsheathed a blade in court.
He’s a big man, Abena says to Tumi.
But he’s in bad shape, Tumi says.
Ishola Oluwafemi has gone soft in lunar gravity, laughing with his friends on too many nights in the Flashing Blade. Abena goes to his table.
‘I wish to contract a zashitnik.’
‘Go through my agent,’ Ishola says.
‘I represent Ariel Corta,’ Abena says.
‘I know Ariel Corta,’ Ishola says. ‘If Ariel Corta wants me, she comes to me; not the practice intern.’
Abena reaches across the table, empties Ishola’s half-empty glass and turns it upside down. Ishola is on his feet. The Flashing Blade is as silent and still as the cold heart of the moon. Everyone knows the message of the upturned glass. Everybody fights.
‘I wish to hire a zashitnik for Ariel Corta,’ Abena says. ‘Whoever beats him gets the job.’
And the Flashing Blade explodes. Figures lunge at Ishola Oluwafemi, the table goes over as Abena darts away. A chair flies past her, she ducks under a fist. The bar room is a scrum of heaving, yelling bodies. Abena keeps low and heads for cover. Tables tumble, drinks avalanche, furniture crashes to pieces and each piece is picked up and wielded as a weapon. A chair leg skims her nose, a flying knife clips a centimetre of feather from her pillbox hat. A boot comes for her face, at the last moment the attacker sees that she is not a player and pirouettes the kick away into the ear of a woman lunging with a blade in each hand. Bodies go down on to a floor of smashed martini glass. Abena makes it to the bar and crouches under the lip, hands over head. The entire population of the moon seems to lie between her and the exit, and they are fists and feet and fighting.
A hand on her shoulder. Abena whirls, handbag raised as a weapon to strike. She looks into the face of a skinny Hispanic woman in Rosie the Riveter blue and a red polka-dot headscarf. Her familiar wears the white and blue circles of the university.
‘Come with,’ she yells in a strong Farside accent. ‘I’ll get you safe.’
Abena takes the offered hand. The woman’s grip is strong and she leads sure, drawing Abena through the rhythm of the battle in the bar, slipping through the gaps that open between combatants, pausing while a man cartwheels through the air, giving a sharp, shoulder-wrenching tug to pull Abena out of the path of a swinging chair. The woman glances back at Abena, grinning. Unsighted, a fighter roundhouses a chunk of table at her head. Before Abena’s warning can leave her lips the woman in blue turns, blocks the move and turns it into a throw that sends the attacker ass over tit into the wall. Only two brawlers remain between the two women and the street but they both see what Riveter Rosie is doing. Knives out, one high, one low. The woman drops Abena’s hand, rolls over the low blade, takes the high blade with a swinging boot. The two men reel off-balance, the woman shoves Abena through the gap. Abena stumbles on treacherous heels, fetches up hard against the Fifty-Three East safety rail. Aquarius Quadra yawns before her. The light-spangled void. Again, a hand seizes hers.
‘Can you run in those?’ The woman nods at Abena’s heels. Abena slips them off and throws them into the melee in the Flashing Blade. Add to the chaos.
‘I can run now.’
‘Run now.’
They stop in the elevator. They slump against the wall, breathing hard.
‘Enjoy that?’ the woman asks. The car drops down towards Tereshkova Prospekt. For a moment Abena is taken aback, affronted, then admits the truth she felt the moment she brought the upturned glass down on the table and the whole bar rose.
‘I loved it.’ Every dangerous, bloody, terrifying, stupid second of it.
‘I know you did,’ the woman says. ‘Rosario Salgado O’Hanlon de Tsiolkovski. Unrepresented.’
‘I said, whoever beats him gets the job.’
‘I beat him,’ the woman says. ‘Fighting’s not the only way to win.’ Tumi checks Rosario’s familiar. Abena scans the profile. She was right about Farside. Post doctoral in Lunar telenovelas. Trainee ghazi. That explains the moves.
‘I had a crisis of intellect,’ Rosario says.
‘Soap opera,’ Abena says with audible contempt.
‘You watch telenovelas?’
‘No.’
‘Then you can’t talk,’ Rosario says with contained ferocity. ‘This is my fall from faith. You don’t get to explain it to me. I walked into a meeting with my mentor and I saw comets. Clouds of comets, distant and cold and dead, out there in nothing. Theory after theory after theory, all of them as fictive as telenovelas. Metafictions, derivatives. Of the profusion of theories there is no end. I thanked him and walked out.’
‘And went for hire as a zashitnik.’ Again, Tumi probes Rosario’s résumé. ‘No fights, I see.’
‘No lost cases either. Contract to my familiar, please.’
Abena observes her new hiring as the elevator descends. This Rosario is knots and hawsers, sinewy and swift. Her talk is sharp but in a true fight, one she could not slide away from, how deep could she cut? What would Ariel Corta think? She would admire the braggadocio, the confidence, the shadow of failure and exile. What does Abena Maanu Asamoah think? She thinks the same. She thinks more. She loves the risk, the danger, the sense of worlds balanced on a knife blade, embodied in this small woman. Among her colloquium mates in Cabochon, she had railed against the barbarism of lunar law. Any social contract must have a civil and criminal code. In private thoughts she admired its intimacy. Justice should touch, justice should cost; justice, like a knife, should cut all who misuse it. Once – another Abena, she sometimes thinks – she had given Lucasinho Corta the gift of the sanctuary of the Asamoahs, and when he drew blood pushing the stud through his ear, she had licked and tasted it. This Abena had started the fight in the bar to prove a point to Ishola Oluwafemi, yes; to show that she was a player, yes; but most of all because she could. Because it was exciting. As the fists struck, the blades glittered, as the bodies went down and the glasses smashed, she was more aroused than she had ever been before. There are not two Abena Maanu Asamoahs. There is one, and she cannot wait to step out into the arena of the Court of Clavius.
Don’t let her seduce you, her friends from the Cabochon colloquium said when she took the placement as Ariel’s amanuensis in the LDC. She is charming and she is clever and she will turn you into something you don’t even recognise.
It’s much worse than that, Abena would say to them. She’s turning me into her.
* * *
The moto unfolds. Abena Maanu Asamoah takes a deep breath and steps out into Court Plaza. And the cameras swoop. The reporters surge. Voices clamour. Abena Maanu Asamoah throws her fur around her shoulders and strides towards the doors of the Court of Clavius. Her heels ring on the polished sinter. Little shots.
The trial begins the moment you uncross your legs in the moto, Ariel had said. At five a.m. her colloquium mates began the dressing. At six a.m. the hair team arrived with their scaffolding and machinery. At seven a.m. the cosmetics took over and started work on her court-face. At nine she ate some fruit – small berries, nothing bloating or staining to her perfect teeth. Nine fifteen she made her final conference call with Ariel on Farside.
I’ve seen worse benches, Ariel said. Valentina Arce makes her mind up in the first ten minutes, so get your hits in early. Kweko Kumah will want the whole thing over by lunch. He’s an outrageous handball fanatic. Spends every afternoon arguing on fan sites. Mano de Dios is his fan name. Rieko Nagai I know of old. She inducted me into the Pavilion of the White Hare. She’s still a member. Advises my brother. Bias isn’t a legal problem if its compensated for: prejudice is. She’ll hear you straight. Rieko and Valentina never agree on anything. Kweko knows that so don’t stick your tongue up his ass. Not publicly. And have fun.
At ten her zashitnik arrives. Rosario is trim and professional in her uniform of riveter’s coveralls and headscarf. She follows close on Abena’s shoulder as they mount the steps. Reporters and gossip curators shout questions.
‘Madam Asamoah…’
‘High profile case…’
‘Youth and inexperience…’
‘I’ve just caught and neutralised five drones targeting you in the camera swarm,’ Rosario whispers. ‘Might be nothing, might be assassins. Better safe. Thought you should know.’
Abena touches fingers to the back of her neck, the traditional Twé charm: brushing away the killing spider. Anansi’s dark sisters. She can’t breathe. She can’t make the next step. Rosario touches her elbow and strength flows.
‘Keep walking, keep smiling,’ Rosario says. ‘And don’t worry. If they beat my electronic defences, I’ve antidotes to the top fifty assassination toxins.’
Abena thinks this may be zashitnik humour. But it lifts her.
‘Suns and Cortas…’
‘Inexperience…’
‘Youth.’
‘Inexperience.’
Number Two Court is one of the oldest – Abena expected no less of the Suns. Intimate and intimidating, it is a hemi-cylinder of sleekly polished rock, the stone bench facing tiers of galleries rising five levels. Boxes and arcades, pillars and pews. This is court as opera. On this stage, law is as close as a kiss. Abena takes her place in the assigned box, Rosario beneath her in the zashitnik’s pit. Lucas’s team is in position, three tiers of lawyers. Lucas’s Head of Legal Services, Viego Quiroga, nods over to her. Abena has done due diligence on him, as he has on her. Their zashitnik is a mountain of Russian, Konstantin Pavlyuchenko. He could punch through solid rock.
I can take him, Rosario says. Big men are full of doubt.
The Sun delegation has not arrived yet. They will make their entrance at the last minute. Amanda Sun is conducting her own case. She will put on quite a show. Amanda will have singing attorneys and dancing advocates, counsellors pulling pretty flowers out of their asses: the whole telenovela, Ariel said. You’re one woman, alone, speaking the truth. That’s more than enough.
Messages: friends, family, colloquium-mates have found seats in the tiers above her. Where are you? We can’t see you.
You’ll see me.
Ariel, Maninho announces.
‘Final pre-flight checks, darling. Do you need to go to the washroom? Don’t. Rhetoric works better with a full bladder. Gives it a sense of urgency. Now, I know you haven’t taken anything, but if you’ve brought some little upper or focuser or concentrator or soother or relaxer, don’t take it. In fact, get rid of it. Kweko despises pharmacological enhancement. Which is ironic for a handball fan. He stuffs his courtroom with sniffers so don’t chem. Couple of final dos. If it gets away from you, do move for an adjournment. Do go off-script. Malandragem, the fly move, is the heart of the Court of Clavius. But you must use it well. Bad malandragem is no malandragem. Do keep me on. Better safe than sorry.’
The Suns arrive. They are elegant and aristocratic and immaculate. Abena has memorised the names and the faces. Amanda Sun takes the counsel box. She catches Abena’s stare and returns it with frozen disdain. House Sun has always looked down on House Asamoah. The company from the Palace of Eternal Light fills the galleries. There is Lady Sun, leaning on a stick. Who is that young man helping her into the box behind Amanda and her advisers?
Darius Mackenzie-Sun, Tumi says. His mother was Jade Sun. He is the last child of Robert Mackenzie. After Ironfall he was taken back to the Palace of Eternal Light where he has become the protégé of the Dowager of Shackleton. He is studying at the School of Seven Bells under the personal tutelage of Mariano Gabriel Demaria.
Adopting the inheritor, Abena muses as Tumi prepares a full briefing on Darius Sun. A mistake to work the same trick twice.
She watches Lady Sun take a tiny sip from an exquisite porcelain flask. The finest, hardest porcelain is made with bone ash. On the moon, those bones are human.
The usher calls, the courtroom rises. The bench zashitniks enter first, for everything is on trial in the Court of Clavius, including the judges. They take their places in
the fighting pit. Now come the judges, their white gowns brilliant in the harsh light of the courtarena. Valentina Arce calls the court to order, Kweko Kumah lists the actors, their biases and the agreed legal framework, Rieko Nagai reads out the case. And the hearing is on.
Viego Quiroga buries Number Two Court in medical detail and appeals to fatherhood, to family, to healing and unity. Lucas Corta appears in a pre-recorded statement that all he wants is his son, with him, where he could be, being cared for by his loving father. Abena notes, the judges note, all of the public and the reporters and gossip-mongers note, that Lucas Corta is not present before the Court of Clavius to make this profession of paternal love.
Now Amanda Sun steps down on to the D of polished moonstone. Murmurs scurry around the galleries. She gives each judge a long look.
The bench zashitniks stir, down in their trench.
‘Our law is good law because it forbids prejudices while recognising biases. I am biased. How can I not be biased? I am a mother. I want my son with me. That’s all.’
She goes on to paint Lucas as a bad father; an absent father; a reckless father and worst, a dangerous father. What kind of place is the Eagle’s Eyrie for a child, with blades concealed in every hand, assassin drones in every half-glimpsed, darting movement?
A father you tried to kill, Abena thinks. A glance to the bench tells her the judges are keenly aware of that, and to the rumour that the Suns engineered the war between Cortas and Mackenzies.
‘The Palace of Eternal Light is strong and stable, a safe place for my son to heal in the security of his family. Family matters. The university is many things but it is not family. Ariel Corta – who this court knows well – claims to represent Luna Corta’s assumed contract of care for Lucasinho Corta. I ask you; when did Ariel Corta ever show any interest in her neice, much less her nephew, until a time when their safety might ensure her own? Who was it turned her back on her family to pursue her own glittering career as a celebrity lawyer? Ariel Corta. When Lucasinho was under the protection of the Asamoahs, where was Ariel Corta? The interests she has only ever truly represented are her own. Look at the public interest in this hearing – a preliminary hearing. Ariel Corta thinks she’s clever to remove herself from scrutiny by making her niece Luna Corta the guardian but surely the court is not deceived by such transparent scheming. Ariel Corta intends to use her own nephew as a ladder to climb her way back to the top of the social hierarchy.
