Authors: Ian McDonald
‘Thank you.’
Wagner has been the shadow in the family so long his siblings have evolved an alternative social gravity, informing him, including him while keeping him invisible, like a black hole.
‘When will we see you around, miudo?’ Rafa says. Adriana is looking back, waiting for him.
‘When I have something to say,’ Wagner says. ‘You know me. Keep breathing, Rafa.’
‘Keep breathing, Little Wolf.’
‘Ariel.’ Lucas calls to his sister down the length of the Oxala steps. Ariel turns. ‘Going back already?’
‘I have business in Meridian.’
‘Yes, the reception for the Chinese trade delegation. I couldn’t ask you to miss that.’
‘I told you clearly at the party.’
‘It’s family.’
‘Oh come on, Lucas.’
Lucas frowns in puzzlement and Ariel sees that he cannot understand what she is saying. He believes absolutely that his every act is for the family, only the family.
‘If the positions were reversed, I would do it. Without a thought.’
‘Things are simpler for you, Lucas. People are taking an interest in my career. My skin has to be airtight. I have to be clean.’
‘No one’s clean on the moon. They tried to kill Rafa.’
‘No. Don’t you ever do that.’
‘Maybe not the Mackenzies. But someone did. We’re Corta Hélio: we’re good, but we’re good at only one thing. We extract helium. We keep the lights burning down there. That’s our strength but it’s also our vulnerability. AKA, Taiyang; they’re everywhere, doing everything. They’ve got more than one place to go. Even Mackenzie Metals is diversifying – into our core business. We lose the business, we have nowhere to go. We lose everything. The moon does not suffer losers. And mamãe. She’s not what she was.’
Ariel had been glancing away from Lucas, breaking his powerful eye contact. Even as a child, he won every staring-game. Now he says five words and she can’t look away.
‘Even you must have noticed,’ Lucas says. Ariel takes the barb. It is months since she was at a Corta Hélio board meeting.
‘I know Rafa’s been managing her public engagements.’
‘Rafa Corta. The Golden Boy. He’ll run this business into the dust. Help me, Ariel. Help me, help mamãe.’
‘You’re a bastard, Lucas.’
‘I’m not. I’m the only true son in this entire place. I need something on those Chinese, Ariel. Not much. Just a tiny edge. They’ll have something. A little loose skin I can tear.’
‘Leave it with me.’
Lucas bows. As he turns away from his sister, a smile breaks on to his face.
One light for doors locked, two for undocking. Three for departure. A small tremor in the rock as the induction motors levitate the car. And the tram is gone. It is only five kilometres from Boa Vista to João de Deus station. From Rafa’s hugs, farewells, and, yes tears, it might be worlds.
Lucas observes his brother’s bare emotion with discomfort. The corner of his mouth twitches. Everything is big with Rafa. It always was. The biggest bully, the loudest laugher, the charismatic boy, the golden light; as profligate with his anger as his pleasure. Lucas has grown up as his shadow: restrained and precise; honed and holstered like a taser. Lucas feels as profoundly and intensely as his older brother. Emotion is not emotionalism. One is script, the other performance. Lucas Corta has room for emotion but it is a private room, windowless, white and airy. White rooms, without shadows.
Rafa hugs his brother. This is undignified and embarrassing. Lucas huffs in pain.
‘She’ll come back to you.’ It’s the kind of platitude that is expected in situations like this.
‘She doesn’t trust me.’
Lucas cannot understand his brother’s emotional incontinence. This is what marriage contracts are for. Trust and love are no architecture for a dynasty.
‘While Luna is here, she will come back to you,’ Lucas says. ‘She understands. I’m keeping Lucasinho here until the security situation improves. He’ll hate it. It’ll be good for him. Give him something to work against. He has it all too easy.’ Lucas claps Rafa on the back. Make light of it. Get over it. Let go of me.
‘I’m going to get Robson back.’
Lucas suppresses the sigh of exasperation. This,
again.
When Rafa is frustrated, in business or sport or society or sex, he falls back on the enduring injustice of his son and first born. It has been three years since Rachel Mackenzie took Robson back to her family. Contracts were broken, flagrantly and deliberately. Lawyers are still arguing what is effectively an act of hostage-taking. Ariel has negotiated a steel-bound access agreement but every time the tram takes Robson back to Queen of the South or Crucible, Rafa’s scabs tear and bleed. In such moods, not even Lucas can talk his brother down.
‘You do what you have to.’ Lucas respects his mother in all things, except in her blind adoration of Rafa. Golden Rafa, the heir apparent. He’s too emotional, too open, too soft to run the company. Hearts can’t decide the fate of dynasties that keep Earth’s lights burning. Lucas hugs Rafa again. His mission is clear. He will have to take control of Corta Hélio.
Two jumps from Queen of the South to João de Deus. Rafa and his escoltas wait in the private arrivals area of the BALTRAN station. Until now Rafa’s guards have been electronic. Today they are close and biological: two men, one woman, armed and alert.
The capsule is in the elevator tube,
Socrates informs him.
Green lights. Doors open. A boy charges out; brown-skinned, mane of dreadlocks; all legs and arms. He crashes into Rafa. Rafa scoops him up, swirls the boy around, laughing.
‘Oh you you you you!’
Behind the boy comes the woman: tall, red-haired, white-skinned. Green-eyed like her boy. With infinite poise she stalks up to Rafa and slaps him hard across the face. Bodyguards’ hands flash to the hilts of knives concealed in well-cut suits.
‘We have trains, you know.’
Rafa cracks into great golden laughter.
‘You look stunning,’ Rafa says to his wife. And she does look fantastic, for a woman who has been bucketed across the moon in a converted cargo can like a load of ore. Make-up immaculate; every hair, every pleat and fold: immaculate. And she is right. The BALTRAN is outmoded since the high-speed rail network has been linked up: it’s crude, but it is quick. The BALTRAN is a ballistic transport system. On an airless moon, ballistic trajectories can be calculated with precision. A magnetic mass-driver accelerates a capsule. Throws it up. Gravity brings it down. A receiving end of the target mass-driver catches the capsule and decelerates it to rest. In between, twenty minutes of free fall. Repeat as necessary. The capsules can contain cargo, or people. It’s tough but endurable; fast and only hair-raising if you think about it too much. Rafa used to enjoy it for the freefall sex.
‘I want him to catch the game. He’d miss it if he came by train.’ Then to the boy: ‘You want to see the game? Moços versus Tigers. Jaden Sun thinks he’s got us beat but I say we kick Tiger ass all over the stadium. What do you say?’
Robson Corta is eleven years old and the sight of him, the presence of him, his magnificent hair, his face, his great green eyes, the way his lips part in excitement, fill Rafa’s heart with a joy so great it is pain, and at the same time a loss so deep it is a nausea. He crouches to kid level. ‘Game day. What do you think, eh?’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Raf.’ Rachel Mackenzie knows, Rafa knows; their respective sets of bodyguards, even Robson knows that this is not about a handball match. The terms allow Rafa access to his son at any time. Even if that means lobbing him like a handball across the moon. Throw and catch. Throw and catch.
‘We can have this in front of him if you want,’ Rafa says.
‘Robbo, honey, could you go back to the capsule? It’ll only be a couple of minutes.’ A nod from Rachel sends one her blades with the boy. He glances back once at his father. Killing green eyes. He will break hearts. He is breaking one now.
‘Robbo,’ Rafa says with contempt.
‘I had nothing to do with what happened at the party.’
‘“What happened at the party.” What happened at the party was someone tried to stick me with a neurotoxin-armed fly. I’d’ve been spasming and pissing and shitting myself for hours before I suffocated.’
‘Classy, but it’s not our style. Mackenzies like you to see our faces before they kill you. You should look to your friends the Asamoahs. Poisons, assassin bugs; that’s more their game.’
‘I want him back.’
‘The terms of the settlement …’
‘Fuck the settlement.’
‘Leave this to the lawyers, Raf. You really don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘He’s not safe with you. I’m invoking the security clause. Please send Robson to me.’
‘Not safe with me?’ Rachel Mackenzie’s laugh is like mining tools on stone. ‘Are you insane? Raf, I don’t care how they kill you, or even if they kill you but I know the moon and they won’t stop at you. Root and branch, Rafa. Let you take Robson? No fucking way. Rob stays with me. Mackenzies look after their own.’ She turns to her guard. ‘Lay in a new BALTRAN jump. We’re going to Crucible.’
Rafa roars in inarticulate rage. Knives whip out from magnetic sheaths: escoltas and blades.
‘You know, your brother’s right,’ Rachel Mackenzie says. ‘You are shit-stupid. You want to start a war with us? Stand down lads.’ The Mackenzie blades open the capsule. Rachel Mackenzie says as the lock closes, ‘I tell you something; your sister scares me more than you do. And she’s got more balls.’
The capsule is in the elevator,
Socrates says.
The mass-driver is powering up.
Rafa punches concrete, hard. Blood sprays from his knuckles.
‘I know it was you!’ he bellows. ‘I know it was you! You want to put him in the chair of Corta Hélio!’
On her return to Meridian Marina Calzaghe buys a window seat, top deck. Mountains and craters, great and dusty, short of magnificence, as she thought. She watches a telenovella on the entertainment channel. It makes no sense, it makes all sense. Love, betrayal and rivalry among the elite. This elite are rare-earth miners. It’s stupid and repetitive and badly acted. She watches it because she can. She sends a message home.
Mom, Kessie: news news news. I GOT A JOB! A proper job. With Corta Hélio. The fusion people. Five Dragons. I can get that money to you.
Hetty out-boxes it, then Marina goes into the train shopping menu to find a new skin for her familiar. Cute robot monkeys are cute but so very obvious. God with swords. Steam witch. Cyborg orca. Yes. She blinks buy and Hetty’s default form reformats into lithe liquid metal and black. Marina lets out a little ecstatic squeak. Money makes you free. She looks out the window again at the soft grey mountains and rilles, patterned with tyre and foot tracks, tries to imagine her feet out there with Carlinhos Corta and his dusters. The Cortas scoop up great buckets of dust, sift, sort it, extract the helium-3 and throw the rest away. Dirt work.
Talk to Carlinhos,
Lucas Corta had said. Marina ran. Post-crisis promises are forgotten if not redeemed instantly. Carlinhos brought her tea and sat her down under the dome of one of Boa Vista’s many pavilions to explain herself to him and Wagner.
‘So what’s your business?’
‘My postgrad degree was computational evolutionary biology in process control architecture.’
There was a thing Carlinhos Corta did when he didn’t understand a thing. His lower lip sagged, just a millimetre, and the tiniest vertical line formed between his eyebrows. She thought it was cute. But when Wagner made that same frown, it meant he had dug deep beneath her words.
‘That’s making manufacturing more like biology,’ Wagner said.
‘Put very simply. I was studying how a solar-rich energy environment like the moon is analogous to a terrestrial photosynthetic dry-land ecosystem like a tall-grass prairie, and how that might generate new manufacturing paradigms, and increase efficiency. Technology will always converge with biology.’
‘That’s interesting,’ Wagner said with tilt of his head, as if the weight of ideas had shifted him off balance.
That’s your cute thing,
Marina thought.
‘So have you any surface experience?’ Carlinhos interrupted.
‘I’ve been here eight weeks. I haven’t seen anything except the inside of Meridian.’
Both Corta brothers still wore their sasuits. The hi-visibility beading followed the lines of their musculature. Marina inhaled their perfume of gunpowder moon dust and recycled body-fluids. Sweat of the moon. The boys were relaxed and easy in their dirty pressure skins. They filled her with hurt and longing in that same way snowboard gear and goggles made her soul tighten. Her friends, they boarded; up at Snoqualmie and Mission Ridge. They were snow kids. They had offered once to take her and teach her but a paper was due. Not an impossible paper, but a troubling one. It needed time. So she stayed in the apartment while they loaded the car and cried with loneliness when it drove away. She completed the paper but she would always be the Girl Who Missed Snowboarding. The offer never came again. Every time she saw goggles and gloves and gear in the stores, when the weather reported first falls up in the ranges; she ached with want and loss. Someone out in a parallel universe, snowboarder Marina existed; fresh and joyful. The decal-plastered sasuits, the helmets; they called her like rumours of snow. The opportunity is back again. Do not be the Woman Who Missed the Moon.
‘I want to work on the surface. I want to be up there. I can learn it.’
‘You need to learn a whole set of physical skills,’ Wagner said.
‘I’ll teach you,’ Carlinhos said. ‘Report to the Corta Hélio Extractions Facility in João de Deus.’
‘I can do that.’ A subvocal whisper set Hetty on the task of finding accommodation.
‘Learn Portuguese,’ Carlinhos called as a farewell. Security was escorting huddles of guests and catering staff to the station. ‘And thank you.’
Marina leans back in her window seat. The job, the apartment, the complete transformation of her life, is reflected in one tiny, imperceptible movement: she flicks up her chib in the bottom right corner of her vision and sees the O2 gauge in gold. She’s breathing on the Corta account. Marina is nearing the bottom of her second mojitka as the train pulls into Meridian and the airlocks seal with the doors. The escalators bring her up into the roaring, chaotic cathedral of Orion Hub. Every tea and water stall, every shop and outlet, every street food stand and service kiosk is brilliant with things she can
buy
. Then she remembers Blake, up there in the roof of the city, coughing his lungs up gobbet by gobbet. Orca-Hetty puts out bids to farmacias, contracts a price for a course of phage therapy. Multiply-resistant tuberculosis is a recent invader from Earth despite the strict quarantine, and not long finding a lodging, clinging like white mould to the damp, stagnant high ribs of the quadras, up among the poor. The stall prints out twenty white tablets. Little white tablets.