Luna: New Moon (19 page)

‘Abena!’ Lucasinho calls but she’s gone and now Ya Afuom is gone too. ‘Abena! Ya! What’s going on?’ Some game of abusua-sisters. Now the air is chill and the semi is gone and the hangover of the multiple hallucinogen hits makes him shivery and paranoid and the party has soured. He finds his clothes, begs a favour to get a ticket back to Meridian and finds the apartment very full of Kojo and his new toe. Lucasinho can stay the night but only the night. Homeless fuckless Abena-less.

Wagner is late into Meridian. Theophilus is a small town, a thousand lives on the northern edge of the great desolation of Sinus Asperitatis where only machines move. The rail link to the mainline went in three years ago, three hundred kilometres of single track; four railcars a day to the interchange at Hypatia. A micrometeorite strike took out the signalling gear at Torricelli, trapping Wagner – pacing, scratching his itchy skin, drinking glass after glass of ice tea, howling in his heart – for six hours until the maintenance bots slotted in a new module. The railcar was crowded, standing room only for the hour-long ride.

Am I changing before your eyes?
Wagner thought.
Do I smell different, other than human?
He has always imagined he does.

The Torricelli strike has thrown out travel plans over much of the western hemisphere. By the time Wagner gets into Hypatia Station – little more than the junction of four branch lines from the southern seas and central Tranquillity with Equatorial One – the platforms are thronged with commuters and shift workers, grandparents on pilgrimage around their extended families. Tribes of children; running, shrieking; sometimes complaining at the long wait. Their voices grate on Wagner’s heightened senses. His familiar has managed to book him on to Regional 37; three hours’ wait. He finds a dark and quiet place away from the families and the discarded noodle cartons and drinks cups, sits down with his back against a pillar, pulls his knees up and puts his head down and redesigns his familiar. Adeus, Sombra: olá Dr Luz. The pillars shake, the long halls ring to the impact of fast-passing trains, up there. Zabbaleen robots sniff around him, seeking recyclables. Calls, messages, pictures from Meridian.
Where are you we want you it’s kicking off.
Train trouble.
Miss you, Little Wolf.
None from Analiese. She knows the rules. There is the light half of life, and there is the dark half.

Dr Luz couldn’t book Wagner his usual window seat so he can’t spend the journey gazing up at the Earth. That’s good: there’s work to be done. He has to devise a strategy. He can’t arrange a meeting. One whisper of Corta and Elisa Stracchi will run. He’ll lure her with a commission, but he’ll have to make it convincing and exciting. She will do due diligence. Companies within companies, nested structures, a labyrinth of holding bodies; a typical lunar corporate set-up. Not too complicated; that too will spark suspicion. He will need a new familiar, a counterfeit social media trail, an online history. Corta Hélio AIs can fabricate these but it takes time even for them. It’s hard to be thorough when he can feel the Earth up there, tearing at him, quickening and changing him with every fast kilometre. It’s like the first days of love, like being sick with excitement, like the moment of euphoria at the edge of being drunk, like dance hall drugs, like vertigo, but these are weak analogs; none of the moon’s languages has a word for what it’s like to change when the Earth is round.

He almost runs from the station. It’s small morning hours when he falls into the Packhouse. Amal is waiting.

‘Wagner.’ Amal has embraced the culture of the two selves more fully than Wagner and has taken the Alter pronoun. Why should pronouns only be about gender? né says. Né pulls Wagner to ner, bites his lower lip, tugs with enough force to cause pain and assert ner authority. Né is pack leader. Then the true kiss. ‘You hungry, you want anything?’ Wagner’s demeanour says exhaustion more eloquently than words. Change days burn human resources. ‘Go on, kid. Jose and Eiji have still to arrive.’

In the dressing room Wagner peels off his clothes. Showers. Pads soft-footed to the bedroom. The sleeping pit is already full. He lowers himself in; the soft upholstery, the fake-fur lining caress him. Bodies grunt and turn and mutter in their sleep. Wagner slides in among them, cupping and curling like a child. Skin presses close to him. His breathing falls into rhythm. Familiars stand over the entwined bodies; angels of the innocent. The union of the pack.

The rover is lunar utility at its purest: a roll-frame open to vacuum, two rows of three seats facing each other, air plant, power, suspension and AI, four huge wheels between which the passenger frame hangs. Shit fast. Clamped in with her Surface Activity Squad, Marina jolts against the locking bars as the vehicle bounces up rilles, leaps crater rims. Marina tries to calculate her speed but the close horizon and her unfamiliarity with the scale of lunar landmarks gives her mathematics no anchorhold. Fast. And boring. Degrees of boredom: the high blue eye of Earth, the low grey hills of Luna, the blank faceplate of the sasuit opposite her – Paulo Ribeiro, says the familiar tag. Hetty flicks up in-suit entertainment. Marina plays twelve games of Marble Mayhem, watches
Hearts and Skulls
(a holding episode, as the writers maneouvre the series arc and characters towards the finale) and a new video from home. Mom waves from her wheelchair on the porch. Her arms are thin and blotched, her hair a grey straggle, but she smiles. Kessie and her nieces, and Canaan the dog. And there, oh there is Skyler her brother, back from Indonesia, and his wife Nisrina and Marina’s other nephews and niece. Against a background of grey rain, grey rain cascading from the overwhelmed porch gutter, a waterfall, rain so loud everyone on the porch shouts to be heard.

Behind the blank mask of her faceplate, Marina cries. The helmet sucks up her tears.

A tap on her shoulder. Marina unblanks her faceplate: Carlinhos leans across the narrow aisle of the rover. He points over Marina’s shoulder. The seat restraints allow just enough freedom to turn and take her first sight of the mining plant. Spidery gantries of the extractors reach up from beneath the close horizon. The squad mission is a scheduled inspection of Corta Hélio’s Tranquillity East extraction facility. Moments later the rover brakes in a spray of dust and the harnesses unclamp.

‘Stay with me,’ Carlinhos says on Marina’s private channel. She drops to the tyre-streaked regolith. She is among the helium harvesters. They are moon-ugly, gaunt and utilitarian. Chaotic, hard to comprehend in a glance. Girders house complex screws and separator grids and transport belts. Mirror arms track the sun, focusing energy on solar stills that fraction out helium-3 from the regolith. Collection spheres, each marked with its harvest. Helium-3 is the export crop but the Corta process also distils hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, the fuels of life. High-speed Archimedes screws accelerate waste material into jets that arc a kilometre high before falling in plumes of dust like inverted fountains. Earthlight refracts from the fine dust and glass particles, casting moonbows. Marina walks up to the samba-line. Ten extractors work a five-kilometre front, advancing at a crawl on wheels three times Marina’s height. The near horizon partly hides the extractors at each end of the samba-line. Bucket wheels dig tons of regolith at a scoop, moving in perfect synchronisation: nodding heads. Marina imagines tortoise-kaiju with medieval fortresses on their backs. Godzilla should be fighting these things. Marina feels the vibration of industry through her sasuit boots, but she hears nothing. All is silence. Marina looks up at the mirror arrays and waste jets high above her head, back at the parallel lines of tracks, ahead at the ridge of Roma Messier. This is her workplace. This is her world.

‘Marina.’

Her name. Someone said her name. Carlinhos’s gloved hand grasps her forearm, pushes her hand gently away from her helmet latches. The latches: she had been about to open them. She had been about to remove her sasuit helmet in the middle of the Sea of Tranquillity.

‘Oh my God,’ Marina says, awed by the absent-minded ease with which she had almost killed herself. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I just …’

‘Forgot where you were?’ Carlinhos Corta says.

‘I’m okay.’ But she isn’t. She has committed the unforgivable sin. She has forgotten where she is. Her first time out in the field and every word of training has fallen from her. She’s panting, snatching for breath. Don’t panic. Panic will kill you.

‘Do you need to go back to the rover?’ Carlinhos asks.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ll be fine.’

But the visor is so close to her face she can feel it. She is trapped inside a bell jar. She must be rid of it out of it. Free, breathe free.

‘The only reason I’m not sending you back to the rover is because you said,
I’ll
,’ Carlinhos says. ‘Take your time.’

He’s reading her biosigns on his hud; pulse rate, blood sugar, gases and respiratory function.

‘I want to work,’ Marina says. ‘Give me something to do, take my mind off it.’

Carlinhos’s blank helmet visor is motionless for a long moment. Then he says. ‘Get to work.’

The moon is almost as violent with robots as it is with human meat. Unfiltered radiation eats AI chips. Light degrades construction plastic. The monthly magnetotail, the event of the moon passing through the streaming coma of Earth’s magnetic field, can short weakened electrical circuits and whip up brief but destructive dust devils. Dust. Chief devil of the Tranquillity East samba-line. Everywhere dust. Always dust. It coats struts and spars and spokes and surfaces like fur. Marina moves a finger gingerly over a structural truss. The fuzz of dust moves like hairs to the dance of the electrostatic charge of her sasuit. Over lunes dust grinds, wears, abrades, destroys. Marina’s job is regaussing. It’s simple enough for a Jo Moonbeam and fun to watch. A timer sets the magnetic and electrical reversal and she runs in great bounding moon-strides to the safe distance. The field reverses and repels the charged dust particles in a sudden cloud of silver powder. It is pretty and dramatic and very more-ish. Marina sees in terrestrial, biological similes: an ocean-wet dog shaking its coats; a forest fungus exploding a puffball of spores. The module team is at work even as the dust settles on their sasuits, swapping chipsets and actuators: work robots find hard. Marina’s fingers trace graffiti hidden like heiroglyphs under the dust: the names of lovers, handball teams, imprecations and curses in all the Moon’s languages and scripts.

Boof. Marina gausses off another soft explosion of dust. It should make a noise. The silence is improper.
Boof,
she whispers inside her helmet. She hears laughter on a private channel.

‘Everyone does that,’ Carlinhos says.

Under the dust are hieroglyphs. Generations of dusters have left their names, their curses, their gods and their lovers on the bare metal in a dozen colours of vacuum pens. Pyotr H. Fuck this shit. Moços HC.

She
boofs
with every extractor. There are tricks to moon-work. Maintain concentration. The sameness of the terrain, the closeness of the horizon, the uniformity of the extractors, the mesmerising weave on their scoop-heads; all conspired to sedate, to hypnotise. Marina finds her thoughts drifting to Carlinhos running, tassles and weaves and body oil. She shakes him out of her head. The second trick is also a seduction. Not all pressure suits are equal. A sasuit is not a diving suit. There is no water resistance, no air resistance on the surface. Things move fast. Oleg’s head was crushed in training because he made that very mistake. Mass, speed, momentum. Concentrate. Focus. Check your suit reports. Water temperature air radiation. Pressure, coms, network. Channels, weather reports. The Moon has weather, none of it good. Magnetotail, solar activity. A dozen things to check every minute, and still do her work. Some squadmates are listening to music. How do they do that? By the fifth extractor Marina’s muscles are aching. Focus. Concentrate.

So deep is her concentration, so sharp her focus, that Marina doesn’t notice when alerts go off across the public channel as the name above Paulo Ribeiro’s helmet goes red, and then white.

Rafa runs his hands over the burnished aluminium of the landing strut.

‘She’s beautiful Nik.’

The VTO transporter
Orel
stands bathed in kilowatt brilliance from twenty floodlights. The lifter’s own search-spots highlight hull, thruster pods, the clustered spheres of the fuel tanks, the manipulator arms, the recessed pilot windows, the VTO eagle on the nose.

‘Fuck off, Rafa Corta,’ Nikolai Vorontsov says. ‘She is not beautiful. Nothing on the moon is beautiful. You are such a shitter.’ He laughs like a landslide.

Nikolai is everyone’s idea of a Vorontsov, a wall of a man, as broad as he is tall. Bearded, long hair braided. Earth-blue eyes and a deep booming voice. He amplifies the accent. No follower of the current taste for retro fashion, Nik Vorontsov. Shorts with many pockets, workboots, T-shirt straining over heavy muscles slumping into slack flab. Like all his family, his familiar is the double-headed eagle, with his own personal heraldic device emblazoned on the shield. He is professionally Vorontsov.

‘It’s not how she looks,’ Rafa says, ‘It’s what she is.’

‘Now really fuck off,’ Nik Vorontsov says.

Orel
is a moonship. A point-to-point surface transporter. The most expensive and spendthrift means of travel on the moon. The hydrogen and oxygen in the spherical tanks are precious; the fuel for life, not rocket thrusters. It’s the same insanity as burning oil for electricity, up on old Earth. On the moon, energy is cheap, resources rare. People and goods travel by train, rover, surface bus, decreasingly the BALTRAN, the orbital tethers, their own muscle power on foot and wheel and wing. They don’t fly in the cargo pods of moonships.

VTO maintains a fleet of ten transporters stationed at widely dispersed locations around the moon. They are the emergency service, the ambulance, the rescue team, the lifeboat. Nowhere is more than thirty minutes flying time from a transporter hub. Nik Vorontsov commands the fleet and is occasional pilot, engineer and lover of his ugly moonships. They are dearer to him than any of his children.