Luna: Moon Rising

by Ian McDonald

  ‘The company is under threat,’ Lady Sun says. ‘I have been consulting recently with the Three August Ones.’

  ‘Voodoo,’ Sun Liqiu says.

  ‘Who should I meet there but Vidhya Rao?’

  ‘Economist, consultant to Whitacre Goddard bank and member of the Lunarian Society and the Pavilion of the White Hare,’ Sun Zhiyuan explains to Darius.

  ‘And proponent of the Lunar Bourse concept,’ Lady Sun says. ‘Which the terrestrials are funding aggressively. What interests Vidhya Rao interests me.’

  ‘Vidhya Rao escaped from Meridian on the moonloop,’ Jaden Sun says. ‘It was quite a show. Drones, moto chases and everything. A flying assassin.’

  ‘I know,’ Lady Sun says. ‘I helped er.’

  Bafflement in the owners’ box of the Coronado.

  ‘What did e discover?’ Tamsin Sun says.

  ‘I don’t know. I do know that e had been spending a lot of time with the Three August Ones,’ Lady Sun says.

  ‘What did they tell er that the terrestrials tried to assassinate er on the streets of Meridian?’ Sun Gian-yin asks.

  ‘Impossible to discover without exposing our own interrogations of the Three August Ones to Whitacre Goddard and therefore the terrestrials. I did ask the Three August Ones about potential threats to Taiyang from the Lunar Bourse. They want the Sun-ring. The Three August Ones predict an eighty-seven per cent probability of Earth taking control of the Sun-ring within eighteen lunes to power their financial market.’

  Consternation in the owners’ box at the Coronado.

  ‘If we start power transmission before the terrestrials have their bourse running…’ Sun Zhiyuan says.

  ‘We could capture the market,’ Tamsin Sun says. ‘A dependent market.’

  ‘We could effectively give it away free for a year,’ Zhiyuan says.

  ‘The heroin dealer’s strategy,’ Tamsin Sun says.

  ‘Problem,’ Jaden Sun says. He points up, through Coronado’s dome, through the roof of Queen of the South. ‘We need the relay satellite.’

  ‘I shall talk with Yevgeny Vorontsov,’ Zhiyuan says. ‘I also move an immediate power-up on the Sun-ring. Show Earth that we are open for business.’

  ‘This is a board decision,’ Lady Sun says.

  ‘We don’t have enough for quorum in this room,’ Tamsin Sun says.

  ‘Seniority has its benefits,’ Lady Sun says. ‘In cases of financial, political or social crisis, when the survival of Taiyang is threatened, the senior board member has the authority to draft board members. I nominate Darius Sun-Mackenzie to the board of Taiyang.’

  Glances, slow nods. Outside the box, the arena MCs are whipping up the audience with quick-fire call-and-response. Music blares. A cheer goes up.

  ‘I witness,’ Jaden Wen Sun says.

  The crowd outside sends a rolling cheer around and around the seating tiers.

  ‘I second,’ Zhiyuan says.

  ‘I witness,’ Tamsin says.

  ‘Then we have a quorum in this box,’ Lady Sun says. ‘I propose we immediately power up the Sun-ring and open negotiations with VTO and the terrestrial energy suppliers. Hands?’

  Hands. Murmured ayes.

  ‘So passed,’ Zhiyuan says. ‘It is resolved that Taiyang powers up the Sun-ring and negotiates supply contracts with Earth.’

  ‘Well, if that’s all settled,’ Jaden Sun says, ‘now we can play handball. Darius, as newest board member, you can take the throw-in.’

  The match MCs have spiralled the crowd, home and away, into a crescendo of excitement. Spectators are ready, commentators are ready, scoreboards and screens and close-in drones are ready. Players are ready. Jaden hands Darius the ball. It is smaller than he thought, heavier; fit to his hand and heft.

  ‘Throw it in like a Sun,’ Lady Sun says.

  ‘Watch me.’ Darius steps down into the pulpit. The Coronado’s tiers drown him in voices as he raises his hand. Reach out with sense and sinew. Where does the body end? The hand that holds the ball, the tips of the fingers, the skin of the ball itself, the skin of every one of the three thousand handball fans jammed around the tight oval of the stadium. Darius throws, the ball flies straight, high, true. The players leap, sculptures in slow gravity: the crowd rises in a thunder of voices.

  * * *

  The two boys stand so sober and serious on Theophilus’s small platform that it is all Analiese Mackenzie can do to keep herself from erupting with laughter.

  ‘Got everything?’ Robson asks.

  She holds up the long case that holds the setar.

  ‘Let us know when you get there,’ Robson says.

  ‘Better,’ interrupts Haider. ‘Let us know when you get the connection at Hypatia. Hypatia is tricky.’

  ‘I change trains at Hypatia every time the band meets,’ Analiese says. The station at Theophilus is little more than a large airlock serving the rail shuttle to the mainline.

  ‘This is different,’ Robson says gravely. ‘This is tour.’

  He’s right. This is tour and it is different. Ten nights, eight dates from Meridian to Hadley, Rozhdestvenskiy to Queen of the South. It’s not Robson she fears leaving home alone. He’ll move Haider in and they’ll be proper little home-makers together. She fears for Wagner. He came back in from his latest inspection tour, picked at some food and rolled up to bed. Exhaustion. Tough out there in southern Tranquillity. Analiese was not fooled. He had been out there under the burning sky on his meds and now the old familiar dark was coming.

  She rose early, cleaned and packed her setar as carefully as a religious relic. He was still asleep, muttering in a language neither she nor her familiar could identify. The tongue of wolves. He was so pretty, so worn out, so vulnerable. He rolled over at her touch.

  ‘I’m going now, coraçao.’ He liked it when she used Portuguese. ‘You sleep on. You need it. I’ll call you when I get to Meridian.’

  He muttered, opened his eyes, saw her, smiled. She kissed him.

  He had a particular scent when the change was on him. Sweet and musky.

  The boys will take care of him for the ten days of tour.

  A thrum through the smooth stone, the click of mechanisms meshing, the whir of pressure equalising. The shuttle has arrived. The lock opens.

  ‘You can listen if you want,’ Analiese says. ‘We’re streaming the Meridian concert.’

  Robson and Haider look aghast. For a moment she might hug Robson but that would compound a venal sin with a mortal one.

  The outlock opens. Wagner. Shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, sandshoes. His hair is a mess, his eyes are bleary, he looks like a coma, walking. He is dark and he is light and he is all beauty.

  ‘You’re going,’ he stammers. ‘I forgot. Sorry.’

  She sets down the setar and throws herself on him.

  ‘You smell good.’

  She bites his ear. He growls. This is the Wagner Corta she remembers. Half a man is better than the wan ghost of Wagner Corta trying to live without the meds.

  Analiese Mackenzie picks up her instrument.

  ‘Look after him.’

  ‘I will,’ Wagner says.

  ‘I wasn’t talking to you.’

  * * *

  He has never been so afraid.

  In moments he will be at the door. Beyond it will be his son. His hand quivers on the head of his cane.

  ‘He’s awake and excited to see you, Senhor Corta,’ Dr Gebreselassie says.

  Who is awake, who is excited? Is it Lucas Corta Junior, Lucasinho? Lucas’s memory has a long track to run to recall where he saw his son last. Twenty lunes, the lobby of the Home Inn hotel the night before the wedding of the century. Parting words: don’t get drunk, don’t get high, don’t fuck it up. A straighten of the lapels of Lucasinho’s jacket to cover the catch in his throat. He never wanted Lucasinho to marry Denny Mackenzie. Jonathon Kayode had been so proud of his dynastic marriage that would put an end to half a century of vendetta: the Shining Boys! Jonathon was always the toy of Mack
enzie Metals. The Eagle of the Moon died screaming and shitting into two kilometres of airspace, but Adrian was found with a bloody knife in each hand. No one ever called a Mackenzie coward.

  So here they were, the Shining Boys; one a daredevil rebel swinging through the roof of the world; the other a vacuum-dried husk being rebuilt memory by injected memory.

  All these thoughts in the time it takes his hand to hesitate over a door handle. What is the speed of memory?

  ‘What are you staring at?’ he says to Luna, frowning balefully at his side. Her white fright-mask is not half so intimidating as her own face. Lucasinho did this for you. You are not forgiven. Forgiveness is for Christians and I am no Christian. ‘You stay here.’

  ‘Don’t tire him out,’ Luna orders.

  Lucas steps into the room.

  He had a smart line about this being the second time he’s found him in hospital after drinking vacuum. It’s gone. Lucas Corta is in rapture, Lucas Corta is appalled. The boy is so small on that bed: so thin. But the bones are good. The bones always were good. Has he seen him? Can he see at all? Lucas with half a mouth, half an eye, half a face.

  ‘Sorry,’ Lucasinho says.

  Lucas Corta barely makes it to the chair. He takes his son’s hand and collapses. His chest heaves, his breath beats and quails, he dare not speak because the weight of one word will crack everything and the years of biting back, of deep discipline, of containing and controlling will shatter him.

  Rafa the golden one, Lucas the shadow. The lover, the schemer, the talker, the fighter. And the wolf.

  ‘Please…’

  Lucas’s grip has tightened on his son’s hand to the point of pain.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  We are rebuilding him from the memories of others, Dr Gebreselassie said. Network, family, friends, lovers.

  ‘You know who I am?’ Lucas says.

  ‘You are Lucas Corta. You are my father. My mother is Amanda Sun, my madrinha is Flavia,’ Lucasinho says. The words are slow, the effort total. ‘Amanda came to see me. Is that why you’re here?’

  Lucas moves the subject away from his ex-wife and the deal she made with him. The software has been coded, all that is left is the infection, and the contagion, bot to bot to bot. It should take no more than thirty seconds to spread between all fifteen thousand bots.

  Be here. You never were here for him. Five hours by rail around the waist of the moon and you are reviewing your deal and schemes, who you can trust, who you cannot.

  ‘Do you remember where you used to live?’ Lucas says.

  ‘The place with the big faces, wet with water. Green and warm. Boa Vista.’

  ‘Do you remember, I wasn’t at Boa Vista very much. I lived at João de Deus. That was another place we had.’

  ‘João de Deus.’ Lucas can see his son fighting to attach name to detail. Lucasinho’s face brightens. ‘Smelly!’ Lucas laughs aloud.

  ‘Yes. Smelly! But I’m going to go back to Boa Vista. I’m doing work there. I’m going to fill it with living things. You can live there too, when you’re ready.’

  Lucas knows the eyes watching, the ears listening. Lucasinho’s medical team, the faculty, the university with its secretive agenda, a vigilance of ghazis. His sister, at some remove. Help him remember, Lucas was told. Take him back. Don’t take him forwards, don’t promise him.

  Now Lucas can see the process he understands what is being done, and with that understanding come doubts. Who controls the memories, who decides what is brought forward and what is pushed back, what is injected into Lucasinho’s brain at all? Lucasinho does not remember João de Deus beyond bad atmosphere. Lucas was an absent, distant father. The memories that built his childhood are those of his madrinha. The Corta way. Lucas thinks of Alexia growing up in her tangle and tatter of lives, wrapped up in others. Now he thinks of his own son, solitary among the stone faces. No wonder he wanted to taste everything the world and people had to offer. No wonder he ran off to the bright lights the first chance he got.

  The boy tires quickly. His attention dips, his motor control slackens. Words slur into each other, his eyes cannot focus. Time to go.

  ‘Son.’

  He embraces a kite of skin and rib. As Lucas opens the door the healing hands of the machines reach from floor walls and ceiling to embrace Lucasinho, touching, ministering. Rewriting his life.

  * * *

  Planet Earth is blue and it throws its gentle light across the Ocean of Storms. Lunar night: the cities glitter with ten thousand lights, sparks wheel through the high black – moonloop capsules, BALTRAN pods, rare and precious ships. A swift spear of light is a passenger express travelling to the far side of the world. On either side of the wide rail tracks is a wider belt of pure glossy black: lunar regolith sintered and salted and seeded by Taiyang engineers. The Sun-ring girds eighty per cent of the moon’s equator. Machines and glasser teams work lunar day and night to drive the band of black across Farside’s unrelenting mountains and craters. Taiyang legal teams negotiate access agreements with the university which does not want its pristine research moonscape despoiled by industry and profit.

  Now that Crucible is slag on the surface of Oceanus Procellarum, the Sun-ring is the largest constructed object in the two worlds, a ribbon of solar cells one hundred kilometres wide, nine thousand long. At night it is a marvel, a black abyss full of stars: reflections of the sky above it. Stars and far blue Earth. So huge is the Sun-ring that even wan Earth-shine will generate one hundred megawatts of electricity. Under the light of the sun, the ring comes to life. It is easily visible from Earth, a black band dividing the moon like the hemispheres of the brain. It’s slept for two lunar years. Now the command goes from the Palace of Eternal Light. Buried processor chips warm and run through boot cycles. Arrays of solar cells switch on; segment by segment the moon-sized energy grid wakes. Taiyang substations measure and balance feed. Seventy exajoules of power course into Taiyang’s network. The Sun-ring is alive.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘You’re late,’ Krimsyn says to Finn Warne. ‘He’s pissed off.’

  These are the most words Krimsyn has ever said to Mackenzie Helium’s First Blade.

  Bryce Mackenzie stands before the window, dressed only in a thong, bathed in laser light. Flickering red beams map the flows of flesh, fold upon fold, as if he has erupted fat from his pores like lava; the sacks of adipose tissue that press his thighs together, the heavy, pendulous breasts.

  ‘You’re late,’ Bryce Mackenzie says.

  ‘I know what they’re doing,’ Finn Warne says. Glances around the room to the rest of the board: Jaime Hernandez-Mackenzie to Rowan Solveig-Mackenzie to Alfonso Pereztrejo. The moon has been a pestilence of political rumour since Taiyang powered up the Sun-ring. The Suns would only rush a project launch if their hands had been forced. ‘I have some people in the Palace of Eternal Light.’

  ‘Who?’ Bryce asks with a liquid shrug. The thong is unnecessary, his genitalia quite hidden by flaps of skin. The lasers wink out, the bots wheel to storage.

  ‘It would endanger them to give you the name,’ Finn Warne says. ‘They’re close to the board. They told me that Taiyang’s sales agents on Earth have been setting up meetings with terrestrial energy companies. Particularly in those nation states that don’t have representation in the LMA.’

  Bryce’s eyes widen. He understands.

  ‘Clever fuckers. Clever clever fuckers.’

  ‘They can’t go solar, they don’t have the transmission satellite,’ says Jaime Hernandez-Mackenzie, Head of Operations. Ever the old jackaroo – groomed, proud, trustworthy.

  ‘Sun Zhiyuan is on his way to St Olga with the full travelling circus,’ Finn Warne says. ‘I had some of the engineers run simulations; Taiyang could have a solar power satellite ready to beam power to a terrestrial microwave array in six lunes.’

  ‘They’re taking pre-orders,’ Rowan Solveig-Mackenzie says, Mackenzie Helium’s analyst.

  ‘They’ll give it away free,’ Bryce Mack
enzie says. ‘The first one is always free. And we’re selling gas for kids’ balloons.’

  ‘Why now?’ Alfonso Pereztrejo says. ‘They’re nowhere near ready. They’re still negotiating glassing rights with the university. And as you say, they have no means of getting the power to Earth.’

  ‘They have those computers that can predict the future,’ Finn Warne says. ‘What if they looked forward and saw something that scared them? Really scared them.’

  ‘Scared the Suns?’ Jaime says.

  Attendants arrive, print-fresh clothing draped over their arms. They fuss around Bryce, trying fits, draping him, dressing him.

  ‘There’s more,’ Finn Warne says. ‘I’ve been talking to other sources. There was a high-level meeting between Yevgeny Vorontsov and his puppet-masters and Duncan. They agreed a joint development venture. Asteroid mining. Mackenzie Metals is moving off-moon.’

  ‘Is the deal done?’ Bryce asks. The dressers adjust the sit of his pants, the fall of his jacket. They slip shoes on to his petite feet.

  ‘The legals are drawing up contracts,’ Finn Warne says. ‘Signed and sealed by the end of the lune.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Jaime asks.

  ‘We do what any good business does,’ Bryce says. Swathed and suited, he addresses his board. ‘We diversify. Aggressively.’

  * * *

  Today she goes clothes-free.

  It’s a leap forward on Alexia Corta’s quest to become lunar. She shied from the banyas: the idea of public hygiene is alien to her. Washing, cleaning, ablution, are private, rationed, a few moments in the metered shower under her own pumped water. Then she discovered there were wonders in those raw rock caverns carved deep into the face of the city. Hidden pools, steam chambers, bubbling baths and warm polished moonstone slabs where she could loll and sweat. Spa tubs of increasing heat, linked like ganglia by low-ceilinged tunnels where she could lie back in the scented water, bathed in ambient lighting and amniotic surround-sound allegedly streamed from a flying probe two hundred kilometres down in Jupiter’s storm system. She made the banya a daily habit but she still baulked at public nudity. It was not mandatory – nothing was mandatory on this world – but it was customary and she suffered agonies of guilt between private and social discomfort.