Authors: Ian McDonald
Heitor Pereira looks closer. The fly batters itself against the glass but in its moments of stillness a pattern of gold tracery is clearly visible on its wings and carapace.
‘Let her go.’ Adriana Corta’s voice is quiet but the tone of command makes every security man and woman flinch. Heitor Pereira nods. The knives are sheathed. Lousika scoops up the howling Luna.
‘And her,’ Adriana Corta orders. Marina gasps as the knife is removed from her throat and realises she has not inhaled since security grabbed her. The shaking starts.
Lucas is shouting, ‘Lucasinho? Where is Lucasinho?’
‘I’ll take that now.’ Heitor Pereira places his hand on top of the glass. He takes a pulse-gun from a small holster. The device is the size of his thumb, a silly, camp weapon in his huge hand. ‘Shut down your familiars.’ Up and down Boa Vista familiars wink out of existence. Marina blinks off her own Hetty. That camp little gun possesses enough power to take down the whole of Boa Vista’s network. There is nothing to see or hear, but the little wired fly goes from moving to still and dead.
Lucas Corta leans close to his Head of Security and whispers to him.
‘They tried to kill my brother. They got into Boa Vista; into our home, and they tried to kill my brother.’
‘The situation is under control, Senhor Corta.’
‘The situation is that an assassin came within the thickness of a cocktail glass of killing Rafa. In front of guests from every one of the Five Dragons. In front of our mother. That doesn’t strike me as a situation under control, does it?’
‘We’ll analyse the weapon. We’ll find out who’s behind it.’
‘‘Well that’s not enough. There could be another attack any moment. I want this place secured. This party is over.’
‘Senhors, senhoras, there has been a security incident,’ Heitor Pereira announces. ‘We must secure Boa Vista. I have to ask you to leave. If you could make your way to the tram station. It’s now safe to relog your familiars.’
‘Find my son!’ Lucas orders Heitor Pereira. Lucasinho’s friends mill, lost and overshadowed. Their moon-run, Lucasinho’s saving of Kojo Asamoah, are eclipsed. Boa Vista security shepherd guests out of the gardens towards the station. A guard escorts Corta grandees indoors. Lucas Corta considers Marina Calzaghe with ice and iron. She is shivering with shock.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Marina Calzaghe.’
‘You work for the caterers?’
‘I work at what I can get. I am – I was – a Process Control Engineer.’
‘You work for Corta Hélio now.’
Lucas offers a hand. Marina takes it.
‘Talk to my brother Carlinhos. The Cortas owe you.’
And gone. Still numb with shock, Marina tries to work out what happened. The Cortas try to slit her throat, now she works for them. But: the Cortas. Blake, it will be all right. I can get you meds. We’ll never be thirsty again. We can breathe easy.
Luna Corta: small spy. Boa Vista is rich in hiding places for a bored girl. Luna discovered the service tunnel following a cleaning bot one long Boa Vista morning. Like all moon kids Luna is drawn to tunnels and crawlspaces. No adult could fit it and that is good because hiding holes and dens must be secret. The shaft has grown tight since Luna first crawled in and realised she could look down into her mother’s private room and, if she held her breath, hear. Tucked up behind the eyes of Oxossi, Luna squirms, a constriction in a sinus in the head of the hunter and protector.
‘They put a knife to my throat.’
Her father says something she can’t make out. Luna twists closer to the ventilation grille. Dusty light-rays strike up around her face.
‘They put a knife to my throat, Rafa!’
Luna sees her mother brush fingers against her neck, touching the remembered edge of the knife.
‘It was just security.’
‘Would they have killed me?’
Luna moves again to fit both of her parents into her narrow slot of sight. Her father sits on the bed. He looks small, diminished, as if the air and light has gone out of him.
‘They were protecting us. Anyone who wasn’t a Corta was suspect.’
‘Amanda Sun isn’t a Corta. I didn’t see a knife at her throat.’
‘The fly. Everyone knows you people use biological weapons.’
‘You people.’
‘The Asamoahs.’
‘There were other Asamoahs at the party. Abena Maanu for one. I didn’t see a knife at her throat. My people, or just some of my people?’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Because your people, Rafa, put a knife to my throat. And I don’t hear anything from you that says they wouldn’t have cut me.’
‘I would never let them do that.’
‘If your mother gave the order, would you have stopped them?’
‘I’m bu-hwaejang of Corta Hélio.’
‘Don’t insult me, Rafa.’
‘I’m angry our security put a knife to your throat. I’m angry that you were a suspect. I’m raging, but you know how we live here.’
‘Yes. Well maybe I don’t want to live here.’
Luna sees Rafa look up.
‘I know how we live in Twé. It’s a good place, Twé. It’s a safe place. With
my people
, Rafa. I want to take Luna there.’
Luna gasps. The shaft is so tight she can’t press hands to mouth, to try and call back the noise. They might have heard. But then she thinks, Boa Vista is full of sighs and whispers.
Rafa is on his feet. When he is angry, he gets close, breath-close. Spit-in-my face close. Lousika doesn’t flinch.
‘You’re not taking Luna.’
‘She’s not safe here.’
‘My children stay with me.’
‘Your children?’
‘Didn’t you read the nikah? Or were you too eager to jump into bed with the heir apparent of Corta Hélio.’
‘Rafa. No. Don’t say this. This is beneath you. This is not you.’
Rafa’s anger is stoked now. Anger is his sin. It is the other side of his affability: easy to laugh, to play, to make love. Easy to rage.
‘You know? Maybe your people planned …’
‘Rafa. Stop.’ Lousika presses her fingers to Rafa lips. She knows his anger is as quick to ebb as to flow. ‘I would never, ever plot against you – not me, not
my people
– to get hold of Luna.’
‘Luna stays with me.’
‘Yes. But I won’t.’
‘I don’t want you to go. This is your home. With me. With Luna.’
‘I’m not safe here. Luna’s not safe. But the nikah won’t let me take her. If you’d once said you were sorry that your escoltas put a knife to my throat, it might be different. You were angry. You weren’t sorry.’
Now her father speaks but Luna can’t hear his words. She can’t hear anything but a rushing noise inside her head that is the sound of the worst things in the world arriving. Her mamãe is going away. Her chest is tight. Her head rings with the horrible hissing, like air and life leaking away. Luna wriggles free, pushes herself down the shaft away from the hidey-hole where she overheard too much. She has scuffed her shoes and torn her Pierre Cardin dress on the raw stone.
The rain has swept the dead butterflies into floes and flotsam. Their wings form an azure scum around the lips of pools. Luna Corta sits among the corpses.
‘Hey hey hey, what is it?’ Lousika Asamoah crouches beside her daughter.
‘The butterflies died.’
‘They don’t live very long. Just a day.’
‘I liked them. They were pretty. It’s not fair.’
‘That’s how we make them.’
Lousika kicks off her shoes and sits down on the stone beside Luna. She swishes her feet in the water. Blue wings cling to her dark legs.
‘You could make them live longer than a day,’ Luna says.
‘We could, but what would they eat? Where would they go? They’re decorations, like flags for Yam Festival.’
‘But they’re not,’ Luna says. ‘They’re alive.’
‘Luna, what happened to your shoes?’ Lousika says. ‘And your dress.’
Luna looks at the floes of butterflies slowly drifting downstream.
‘You’re going away.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘I heard you say it.’
None of the questions Lousika could ask have any meaning here.
‘Yes. I am going back to Twé, back to my family. But only for a while. Not for always.’
‘How long?’
‘I don’t know, love. No longer than I have to.’
‘But I’m not going with you.’
‘No. I would love to, more than anything – more than myself – but I can’t.’
‘Am I safe, Mama?’
Lousika hugs Luna to her, kisses the top of her head.
‘You’re safe. Papa will keep you safe. He’ll tear the head off anyone who tries to hurt you. But I have to go until things are clear. I don’t want to, and I will miss you so much. Papa will look after you, and Madrinha Elis. Elis will not let anything hurt you.’
The words burn Lousika Asamoah’s throat. Madrinhas, host mothers. Hired wombs, who become nannies, who become unofficial aunts, become family. For small corporations like the Cortas with a business to build and no time for pregnancy, birth, early infancy, Lousika could understand the arrangement. Not for the next generation, not that the coven of demure, ever-present madrinhas should become tradition. She resented tall, Brazilian-cheek-boned Madrinha Elis carrying her child, birthing her baby. She had been shocked when Rafa had presented the surrogacy as a done thing: the Corta way. Put it in me, plant it in me, let me grow it and carry it and press it into the world. I don’t need Madonnas of Conception to mix your sperm with my egg and pronounce,
let there be life
. I don’t need to watch your gyno-bots slide the embryo up into sleek, smiling Elis and watch her every day grow bigger and fuller. I don’t need to see the reports, the scans of her uterus, the daily posts of how her pregnancy is progressing. And I did not need to lock myself away in my room howling and smashing things as Elis went under the knife. It should have been me, Luna. It should have been me they brought you to. My smiling, exhausted, teary face the first thing you saw. An Asamoah. Life flows and spurts and gushes in all our fluids and juices. I am fit, fertile, everything works naturally, brilliantly, fecundly. But it’s not the Corta way.
I love you Luna, but I cannot love the Corta way.
Lousika wraps Luna up in her arms, rocks as much for her own comfort as for Luna’s. One assassin-fly has cracked her world. This is not a garden of gods, a palace of waters. It’s a tunnel in the rock. Every one of her family’s light-filled agraria, every city and factory and settlement, is a scrape, a fragile bivouac of rocks against the vacuum sky and the killing sun. Everyone is in danger, all the time. Nowhere can you escape, or even hide.
‘Your papa and the contract and everyone may say you’re a Corta, but you are an Asamoah. You’re an Asamoah because I am an Asamoah because my mother is an Asamoah. That’s our way.’
Lucas Corta sweeps his hand across the board table and scatters the virtual documents.
‘I haven’t time for this. Where did it come from? Who made it?’
Heitor Pereira dips his head. He is a head shorter and a decade greyer than everyone at the board table except Adriana Corta and her Finance Director, Helen de Braga, the dark will of Corta Hélio.
‘We’re still analysing—’
‘We have the best R&D unit on the moon and you can’t tell me who made this?’
‘They’ve gone to remarkable lengths to hide anything that might identify the drone. The chips are generic, we’ve nothing on the printer pattern.’
‘So you don’t know.’
‘We don’t know yet.’ Everyone around the table hears the tremble in Heitor Pereira’s voice.
‘You don’t know who made it, you don’t know who sent it, you don’t know how it got through security. You don’t know if, right now, another one of those things is coming for my brother, or me, or, God save us, my mother. You’re head of security, and you don’t know this?’
Lucas holds the stare. Heitor Pereira’s face twitches.
‘We are in a total security situation. We’re monitoring everything over the size of a skin-flake.’
‘What if they’re here already? That drone could have been planted months ago. Have you thought of that? There could be a dozen more waking up right now. A hundred more. They only need to get lucky once. I know what modern poisons do. They make you wait. They make you wait in hours of pain, knowing each breath is shorter than the one before, knowing there’s no antidote, knowing you’re going to die. You spend a long time looking at death. Only then do they let you die. And I know that someone tried to use one of those poisons on my brother. That’s what I know. Now, tell me, what do you know?’
‘Lucas, enough.’ Adriana Corta occupies the head of the board table. For months her seat has been empty, her only presence the large, clumsy portrait of her in a sasuit, Our Lady of Helium, looking down the length of the table. An immediate and lethal threat her children has brought her to the board room in all her authority. Rafa is seated at her right hand, Ariel to her left. Lucas sits to the right of his brother.
‘Mamãe, if your head of security can’t keep us safe, who can?’
‘Heitor has been a faithful agent of our family for longer than you have been alive.’ No one can mistake the sting of authority.
‘Yes, Mãe.’ Lucas dips his head to his mother.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Rafa fills the stinging silence.
‘Is it obvious?’ Ariel says.
‘Who else has it ever been?’ Rafa leans low over the table. His anger smokes. ‘Bob Mackenzie has never forgiven Mamãe. He’s slow poison. Not today, not tomorrow; not this year or even this decade, but some year, some day. The Mackenzies pay back three times. They’re striking at the succession. They want you to see everything you’ve built come apart, Mamãe.’
‘Rafa …’ Ariel begins.
‘Kyra Mackenzie,’ Rafa interrupts. ‘She was at the party. Did anyone search her, or did we just wave her through, because she was one of Lucasinho’s friends?’
‘Rafa, do you think the Mackenzies would risk all-out war?’ Ariel says. She draws long on her vaper. ‘Really?’
‘If they thought they could break our monopoly, they might.’ Lucas says.
‘It’s starting again, can’t you see that?’ Rafa says.
Eight years before, Corta Hélio and Mackenzie Metals fought a brief territory war. Extractors fallen in tangles of metal, trains boarded and shipments hijacked, bots and AIs crashed under bombardments of dark code. Dusters fought hand to hand, knife to knife in the tunnels of Maskelyne and Jansen and out on the stone seas of Tranquillity and Serenity. One hundred and twenty deaths, damage in the millions of bitsies. In the end, Cortas and Mackenzies agreed to arbitration. The Court of Clavius ruled for Corta Hélio. Two months later Adrian Mackenzie married Jonathon Kayode, Eagle of the Moon, CEO of the Lunar Development Corporation, the owners of the moon.
‘Rafa, enough,’ Adriana Corta says. Her voice is thin, her authority is incontestable. ‘We fight the Mackenzies through business, we beat them through business. We make money.’ Adriana rises from the table, stiff and worn in face and limb. Her children and retainers bow and follow her from the board room.
Carlinhos stands, purses the fingers of his right hand and bows to his mother. He has not spoken a word at this board meeting. He never does. His place is out in the field, with the extractors and refiners and the dusters. He’s the duster, the fighter. Rafa can outshine him with his charm, Lucas bludgeon him with his arguments, Ariel tie him up with her eloquence but none of them can walk the dirt the way he does.
Lucas detains Heitor Pereira a moment.
‘You made a mistake,’ Lucas whispers. ‘You’re too old. You’re past it, and you’re gone.’
In the lobby outside the board room Wagner Corta waits. Adriana and her retainers pass without looking at him, then Lucas and Ariel. Ariel nods, a tight smile. Carlinhos claps his brother on the back.
‘Hey brother.’
Wagner is the conspicuous absence at the board table.
‘I want a word with Rafa,’ Wagner says.
‘Sure. You want to bike back to João?’
‘I’ve something else planned.’
‘Catch you later, Lobinho.’
‘A word about what?’ Rafa says. He perches on the inside lip of Oxala’s right eye. Behind him water tumbles slowly.
‘The fly. I want to take a look at it.’
Rafa has made sure that Wagner received Heitor Pereira’s schematics. Rafa makes sure Wagner receives all data from every board meeting.
‘You’ve got everything.’
‘Respect to Heitor and even your R&D, but there’re things I’d see he wouldn’t.’
Rafa knows that Wagner’s life is complicated and lived in the shadows on the edge of the family and that his contribution to Corta Hélio is solid but hard to quantify, but he is an outstanding engineer of the small and intricate. Sometime Rafa envies his two natures; the dark precision, the light creativity.
‘Like what?’
‘I’ll know it when I see it. But I will need to see it.’
‘I’ll let Heitor know.’ Socrates, Rafa’s familiar, has already sent the notification. ‘I’ve told him not to let Adriana know.’