Luna: New Moon (18 page)

‘What did those Mackenzies teach you, eh?’

Corta security rushed Robson straight from the BALTRAN capsule to the Boa Vista medical centre. His escape from Crucible had left no physical damage but the psych AIs noted a reluctance to speak and a compulsion to show a card-trick to any human who showed an interest in him. Psych recommended a prolonged course of trauma counselling. Rafa Corta’s therapy is more robust.

‘Didn’t they teach you this?’

Rafa throws the ball hard and flat. It strikes Robson on the shoulder. He cries out.

‘Didn’t they teach you to dodge and weave?’

Robson throws the ball back at his father. There is venom in it but no skill. Rafa neatly picks it out of the air and curves it back at Robson. Robson tries to move but it strikes him on the thigh with a clear slap.

‘Stop doing that!’ Robson says.

‘So what did they teach you?’

Robson turns his back and drops the ball. Rafa scoops it up and throws it at point blank range with all his strength. Handball game-suits are tight and thin and the smack of ball against ass is loud as a bone breaking. Robson turns. His face is tight with fury. Rafa catches the ball on the rebound. Robson lunges to slap the ball from his father’s hand but it’s not there: Rafa has dribbled it, turned and scooped it up again. He slams it hard. The court echoes with the boom of ball on flooring. Robson recoils from the ball bouncing up in his face.

‘Afraid of a ball?’ Rafa says and it’s back in his hand again. Again Robson lunges. Again Rafa skips around him, a circle of bounces around his son. Robson turns, turns but he can’t follow the ball. His head turns this way, that way. Boom! He turns into the bounce and it takes him in the belly.

‘Once afraid of a ball, always afraid of a ball,’ Rafa taunts.

‘Stop it!’ Robson yells. And Rafa stops.

‘Angry. Good.’

And the ball is back, bouncing, hand to hand. Badam badam badam. Shoot. Robson yelps at the slap of weighty handball. He yells and throws himself at his father. Rafa is big but fast and light of movement. He dances effortlessly away from his son. The mocking ease with which Rafa outclasses Robson stokes the boy’s anger higher.

‘Anger is good, Robbo.’

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘Why not, Robbo?’ Dribble, shoot, sting. Catch and bounce, always a blink ahead of Robson’s fingers.

‘That’s what they called me.’

‘I know. Robbo.’

‘Shut up shut up shut up shut up!’

‘Make me, Robbo. Get the ball and I’ll shut up.’

Robson doubles over at a point-blank impact to the stomach.

‘Your mama is dead Robson. They killed her. What does that make you want to do?’

‘Go away. Leave me alone.’

‘I can’t, Robson. You’re a Corta. Your mamãe. My oko.’

‘You hated her.’

‘She was your mother.’

‘Shut up!’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I want you to stop!’

‘I will, Robson. I promise. But you have to tell me what you want to do.’

Robson stands stone still in the centre of the court. His hands are held low, outstretched a few fingers’ breadth from his body.

‘You want me to say I want them dead.’

The ball smashes him in the back. Robson rocks but does not move.

‘You want me to say I will get back at them for Mamãe, however long it takes.’

To the belly. Robson wavers but does not fall.

‘You want me to swear like vengeance and vendetta on them.’

Belly, thigh, shoulder.

‘And I do that and they do it back and I do more and they do more and it never ends.’

Belly. Belly. Face. Face. Face.

‘It never ends, Pai!’ Robson punches out. He hits the small, dense handball a glancing blow, enough to deflect it. In an instant it’s back in Rafa’s hand.

‘What they taught me in Crucible,’ Robson says. ‘What I learned from Hadley.’ Rafa can’t clearly see what Robson does, but in a sly fast heartbeat he steps inside his father’s reach and the ball is in the boy’s hand. ‘They taught me to take a man’s weapon and use it against him.’ He flings the ball the length of court and walks off to the sound of its slow, dying bounces.

Badam. Badam. Badam.

From its claw-hold on the inside of the Oxala’s right eye, the spy-fly observes the board table of Corta Hélio.

The Serpent Sea floats in Lucas Corta’s augmented vision. Socrates and Yemanja display identical maps to Rafa and Adriana Corta.

‘A prospecting site at Mare Anguis.’ Toquinho zooms in, rings the named areas. ‘Twenty thousand square kilometres of mare-regolith.’

Lucas lifts a finger and taps the illusory map. Data from selenological surveys overlay the grey and dust. Rafa flicks over the information but Lucas sees his mother’s eyes narrow with concentration.

‘I’ve taken the liberty of running a cost-benefit analysis. Corta Hélio starts turning a profit in the third quarter after the claim is licensed. We can reposition extraction plant from Condorcet. Condorcet is eighty per cent mined out; we have materiel mothballed. Within two years we will be extracting half a billion dollars of helium-3 annually. We estimate the life of Mare Anguis at ten years.’

‘This is thorough,’ Rafa says. Sourness on his tongue and lips. Through his little fly Lucas knows of the private, furniture-smashing tantrums. The constant bodyguard, even among the waters of Boa Vista. The hesitation in Luna before her father scoops her up and throws her up into the air. Golden, affable Rafa is turning dark, ugly with sudden anger at parties and receptions. Berating his useless handball manager, his useless coaching team, his useless players. Lucas appreciates irony: the man who had no good word for his wife in life rages at her death. The news channels reported Rachel Mackenzie’s death as a catastrophic depressurisation event. A delicate lie. The press won’t press. Journalists who vex the Five Dragons suffer their own catastrophic depressurisation events. Report the smiles and the frocks, the affairs and the beautiful children, the marriages and the adulteries. Don’t tug the Dragon’s tail.

‘How soon?’ Adriana asks.

‘Twelve ZMT on Muku.’

‘Not long,’ Rafa says.

‘Long enough,’ Lucas says.

‘This is sound information?’ Adriana asks. Lucas sees her eyes darting over her own virtual lunar terrain. She has the highest surface hours of any living Corta, even Carlinhos. She may not have locked a helmet for ten years but once a duster, always a duster. She will be analysing the terrain, the dust cover, the logistics, the electrical effect of the moon’s transit of Earth’s magnetotail, the likelihood of a solar storm.

‘It comes from Ariel. A tip-off from someone in the Pavilion of the White Hare.’

‘Hell of a tip-off,’ Rafa says. Lucas hears an energy in his voice, an interest in his eyes. His muscles tighten, he draws himself up from his uncharacteristic stoop. The old gold light glows under his skin. It’s game night. The teams are in the tunnel and the crowd is in full cry. But he is still suspicious. ‘We have to act now.’

‘Delicacy,’ Adriana says. She presses the tips of her fingers together, vaults of a bone cathedral. Lucas knows this gesture well. She is calculating. ‘Too fast, we expose Ariel and I spend the rest of my years fighting my way through the Court of Clavius for alleged claim-jumping. Too slow …’

The law on extraction rights is primitive: the steel law of placer stakes and gold rushes that shaped the North American West. Whoever stakes out the four corners of the newly released territory has forty-eight hours to lodge a legal claim and the licence fee with the LDC. It’s a straight race. Lucas has seen Rafa screaming, incoherent, transcendent at Moço games. This is the same thrill. This is what he loves: movement. Energy. Action.

‘What assets have we?’

Lucas commands Toquinho to highlight extraction units around the target quadrangle. Orange icons lie at varying distance from north-west, north-east and south-east corners. The south-west vertex is dark.

‘I have the north-east Crisium units in motion. It will be hard to disguise it as a routine redeployment or a scheduled maintenance.’

Lucas is jonmu: movement orders are not his to issue. Anger flickers; Rafa contains it. He passed the test.

‘My concern are the vertices.’ Toquinho zooms in the scale.

‘We have nothing we can get there in less than thirty hours,’ Rafa says, reading the deployment tags.

‘Nothing on the surface,’ Lucas hints. Rafa picks the ball up.

‘I’ll go talk to Nik Vorontsov,’ Rafa says. He dips his head to his mother and is in motion: decisions to be made, actions to be taken.

‘A simple call will save hours,’ Lucas says.

‘This is why I’m hwaejang, brother. Business is all about relationships.’

Lucas dips his head. Now is the time for a small acquiescence. Let his mother see that her boys are united.

‘Bring this home, Rafa,’ Adriana says. Her face is bright, her eyes clear. Years have rolled from her. Lucas sees the Adriana Corta of his childhood, the empire builder, the dynasty-maker; the figure in the doorway of the berçário. Madrinha Amalia’s whisper: Say goodnight to your mother, Lucas. The smell of her perfume as she leaned over the bed. She wears it still. People are loyal to perfume in a way they are not to any other personal adornment.

‘I will, mãezinha.’ The most intimate term of endearment.

Unseen, the spying fly disengages from its cranny and floats after Rafa.

The bolt of electric blue hits Lucasinho square on the abs. Blue splat to join the red, the purple, the green, the yellow. Almost none of his bare body is unstained. He is a harlequin of colours, as bright as a reveller on Holi.

‘Whoa,’ Lucasinho says as the hallucinogen kicks in. He spins, gets a shot off from his splatgun and then the world unfolds into millions of butterflies. He turns, grinning like a fool, at the centre of a tornado of illusory wings.

The game is Hunting, played up and down and through the Madina agrarium, with bare skins and guns that fire random bolts of coloured hallucinogens.

The butterflies open their wings and link and lock together. Reality returns. Lucasinho ducks under the fronds of a towering plantain. Rotting fronds mash to slime beneath his bare feet. He advances, gun at the ready, still wide-eyed and trippy after the blue. He has been shattered into diamond tiles, flown up the side of an endless skyscraper, watched the colours drip from the world into purple, been his left big toe for what seemed an eternity, chasing and being chased through towering cylinders of dappled light, sniped at from positions high among yams and dhal bushes.

Fronds rustle: movement. Splatgun muzzle next to his cheek, Lucasinho ducks under foliage into a small, damp clearing, heady with growth and rot, a hidden nest.

Something touches the nape of his neck.

‘Splat,’ says a female voice. Lucasinho awaits the sting of the ink-hit, the trip into somewhere else. He came to the party because it was at Twé and he might meet Abena Asamoah. Guerrilla games were not Abena Asamoah’s fun. But it is exciting to chase and be chased, to be lost and a little bit scared at times, to beat people to the draw and shoot them, to snipe them so that they never knew what had hit them, and be hit in return. The gun against his neck is sexy. He’s at the mercy of this girl. Arousing helplessness.

He hears the trigger click. Nothing.

‘Shit,’ the girl says. ‘Out.’

Lucasinho rolls and comes up, splatgun levelled.

‘No no no no!’ the girl cries, hands held up in surrender. Ya Afuom Asamoah, an abusua-sister of Abena and Kojo. Leopard abusua. AKA kinship makes his head hurt. Her skin bears five colour-blots, right hip, left knee, left breast, left thigh, the right side of her head. Lucasinho pulls the trigger. Nothing.

‘Out,’ he says. The same call rings out across the tubefarm, down from the high terraces and the sniping positions in the solar array. Out. Out. Faintly, down the tunnels that connect the agrarium tubes. Out. Out.

‘You’re lucky,’ Lucasinho says.

‘What do you mean?’ Ya Afuom says. ‘I had you on your knees.’ She looks him up and down. ‘You’re covered, man. You need a bath. Come on. This is the best. You’re not scared of fish, are you?’

‘Why?’

‘You get them in the ponds. Frogs and ducks too. Some people freak at the idea of being touched by a living thing that isn’t human.’

‘I think this game is broken,’ Lucasinho says. ‘The more you get hit, the easier it is to get hit.’

‘It’s only broken if you’re playing to win,’ Ya Afuom says.

The bar is set up on the decking. Drinks and vapers in plenty but Lucasinho has had so many chemicals through his brain that he doesn’t welcome any more. The pools are already full. Voices and water-splash ring up the shaft of the tubefarm. Lucasinho lowers himself carefully into the water. Do fish bite, do they suck, can they swim up your dick-hole? Mildly hallucinogenic skin-paint dissolves into the water; halos of red and yellow and green and blue. What does that do to the fish? What does that do to the people who eat the fish? He can’t imagine eating anything that’s shared water with him. He can’t imagine eating anything with eyes.

‘Hey ha!’ Ya Afuom splashes in beside him. Hips, butts touch. Legs entwine. Bellies rub, fingers walk.

‘Was that a fish?’

Ya Afuom giggles and Lucasinho finds he has a breast in his hand and her fingers cradling his ass. His own hands dive deeper through the blood-warm water, seeking folds and secrets. ‘Oh you!’ She has the best ass since Grigori Vorontsov. Then he’s hard and they’re touching foreheads and looking on each other’s eyes and she’s laughing at him, because naked men are ridiculous.

‘I always heard the Asamoah girls were polite and shy,’ teases Lucasinho.

‘Who told you that?’ Ya Afuom says and pulls him in.

Abena. Glimpsed through tomato leaves. Moving from the bar towards the service tunnel.

‘Hey! Hey! Abena! Wait!’

He surges up out of the pool. Abena turns, frowns.

‘Abena!’ He strides dripping towards her. His semi swings painfully. Abena raises an eyebrow.

‘Hi Luca.’

‘Hey Abena.’

Ya Afuom slips in beside him, puts her arm around him.

‘Since when?’ Abena says and Ya Afuom smiles and presses closer. ‘Have fun, Luca.’ She drifts away.