Luna: New Moon (33 page)

Rafa rolls on to his back and blinks up into the mirror-dazzle. Lousika slides on top of him.

‘So what else have you been practising?’

Carlinhos holds the blade flat at arm’s length. The Mackenzie saboteur throws hands up in defence. Carlinhos Corta knows how to take care of blades and such a blade, so honed and loved, with such momentum has taken the right arm clean through just beneath the elbow. It’s not survivable.

Carlinhos puts a boot down and doughnuts the dustbike, lining up on his next target. São Jorge sprays vital signs all over his hud; breathing, blood pressure, adrenaline, heart rate, neural activity, visual acuity, salts and sugars and blood oh-two. Carlinhos doesn’t need São Jorge’s visuals. He’s blazing.

His dustbike cavalry has completed its first charge. Five Mackenzies down, the rest fleeing. The rovers are coming up at speed to evacuate. The raiding party has been routed. Carlinhos circles his knife hand in the air:
round and at them again.

‘Leave them!’ Gilmar shouts on the common channel. ‘They’re running.’

The rovers unfold, Mackenzie raiders dump sabotage equipment as they pile into the seats and harness on. The dustbikes can easily match them. São Jorge superimposes an icon of the Vorontsov ship lifting off from over the horizon, swooping in for rescue. Let it come. A moonship is a battle worth fighting.

Two rovers accelerate away in arcs of dust; one of the raiders kneels by the side of the third rover, aiming a long metal device. The kneeler jerks: recoil. And Fabiola Mangabeira’s head explodes. Her body flies from the dustbike; the machine careers on, the dead woman spins in a spray of glass and fibre, bone and flash-frozen blood. Her name turns white on Carlinhos’s hud.

‘They’ve got a fucking gun!’ Gilmar cries. The shooter tracks another target. Silent recoil. Carlinhos’s hud tracks an ejected red-hot thermal clip. The shot takes Thiago Endres through the shoulder. Not a clean shot, not a head-shot; but a killing shot all the same. Sasuits can heal, but not this much damage, not this fast. Thiago spasms on the regolith, thrashing as blood sprays into vacuum and freezes in a thick glossy ice. Another name goes white.

The gun swings on to Carlinhos. He throws the bike over into a skid, slides across the dust. Then he sees Gilmar pile full speed into the shooter. Gilmar strikes true and hard. The shooter goes down under the wheels, arms and legs flailing; the bike bucks high, Gilmar holds it down. The massive tread of the drive wheel rips open sasuit, skin, flesh, ribs. The gun spins away.

Carlinhos sprints to his still-running bike.

‘After them, get after them!’

The third rover clamshells up and accelerates away. Carlinhos stands in the soft-settling dust, a knife in each hand, bellowing.

‘Let them fucking go!’ Gilmar yells.

Carlinhos walks to the corpse of the shooter. Fabric, bone, bowel. Carlinhos contemplates it for long heartbeats; the fragility of this goop and gore, the totality of the destruction. The moon makes any injury fatal. A woman, he guesses. They are often the best shooters. Then he raises his boot to stamp down through the helmet and crush the skull. Gilmar seizes his arm and whirls him away. Carlinhos leaps back, blades ready.

‘Carlo, Carlo, it’s over. Put the knives away.’

He can’t see. Who is this? His signs are off the scale. Red all over his visor. What are they saying? Something about knives.

‘I’m okay,’ Carlinhos says. The dust has settled. The rest of his team wait on him, standing at a distance between respectful and fearful. Someone has recovered his dustbike. The ground shakes; from over the horizon a moonship rises on diamonds of rocket-fire, lights flashing, three rovers clutched to its belly. Carlinhos stabs his knives at it; roars in two-bladed futility at the lights in the sky. It turns, it’s gone. ‘I’m okay.’ Carlinhos puts the knives away, one at a time.

Carlinhos learned to love the knife young. His guards were playing a game; stabbing the point of the blade between outspread fingers. Carlinhos aged eight could see the stakes and the appeal at once. He understood the small lethality, the simple precision, how there was nothing complicated or unnecessary about knives.

Like his brothers and sister, Carlinhos Corta had been taught Brazilian jiu jitsu.
He won’t apply himself,
Heitor Pereira reported to Adriana.
He jokes and play-acts and won’t take it seriously
. Carlinhos didn’t take it seriously because it could not be serious to him. It was too close up and undignified and he loathed the master-pupil discipline. He wanted a weapon fast and dangerous. He wanted elegance and violence; an adjunct to his body, an extension of his personality.

After Madrinha Flavia found him printing out fighting daggers, Heitor Pereira sent Carlinhos to Mariano Gabriel Demaria’s School of Seven Bells in Queen of the South. All dark skills were taught here; thieving, stealth and assassination, confidence tricks and poisons, torture and excruciation, the way of the two knives. Carlinhos fell in among the freelance security and bodyguards like true family. He learned the way of one hand and two, of attack and defence and how to trick and blind; how to win and kill. He grew fast and lean, muscular and poised as a dancer.
Corta means cut in Spanish,
Mariano Gabriel Demaria said.
Now it’s time to try the Bell Walk.

The heart of the School of Seven Bells was a labyrinth of old service tunnels, kept in darkness and hung with the seven bells that gave Mariano Gabriel Demaria’s academy its name. Walk the maze without sounding a single bell and you graduated. Carlinhos failed on the third bell. He raged for three days, then Mariano Gabriel Demaria took him and sat him and told him,
You will never be great. You’re the kid brother. You’ll never command companies or budgets. You’re full of anger, boy, swollen like a boil with it. An idiot would tell you to use that anger but idiots die in the School of Seven Bells. You’re not the strongest, you’re not the smartest but you are the one who will kill for his family. Accept it. No one else can do it.

Four times more Carlinhos Corta took the Bell Walk. The fifth time he walked clear in silence. Mariano Gabriel Demaria gave him a pair of matched handcrafted lunar steel blades; balanced and beautiful and honed to an edge that would part a dream.

It has taken Carlinhos five years to understand Mariano Gabriel Demaria’s truth. The anger will never go away. He will never find a way through it. That’s therapy-talk. Accept it. Just accept it.

In the repaired base, Carlinhos plays with his knives, over and over, rolling them around his fingers, spinning them, tossing and catching them while outside vacuum-sealed corpses hang in racks, their carbon and water the property of the Lunar Development Company now. And he is angry, still so angry.

The Sisters have disappointed Lucas Corta. Toquinho has led him to an industrial unit on East 83rd of Hadley’s Armstrong Quadra. Glass and sinter, full-height windows, standard-fit partitions, functional utilities, quick-print catalogue furnishings, generic reception AI. Soft white, discreet full-spectrum lighting. The air is scented with cypress and grapefruit. It could be a budget beautician or a hire-by-the-hour developer farm. Hadley always was a cheap place, a budget boon dock. But Toquinho insists that this is the Motherhouse of the Sisters of the Lords of Now; their terreiro.

And they keep him waiting.

‘I am Mãe-de-Santo Odunlade Abosede Adekola.’ The woman is a short, rotund Yoruba, all in Sisterhood whites, her neck hung with dozens of bead necklaces and silver charms. Her fingers are busy with rings; she extends a hand to Lucas. He does not kiss it. ‘Sisters Maria Padilha and Maria Navalha.’ The two woman flanking the Mãe-de-Santo curtsy. They are younger and taller than the Reverend Mother; one Brazilian, the other West African. Their head scarves are red. Filhos-de-Santo of the Street Exus and Pomba Gira, Lucas recalls from Madrinha Amalia’s teachings.

‘We are a familiar-free community,’ Sister Maria Navalha says.

‘Of course.’ Lucas banishes Toquinho.

‘We are honoured, Senhor Corta,’ Mother Odunlade says. ‘Your mother is a great supporter of our work. I presume that’s why you’ve come to us.’

‘You’re direct,’ Lucas says.

‘Modesty is for the children of Abraham. I deplore your callous treatment of our Sister Flavia. To leave that dear woman in fear of her breath …’

‘The matter is out of my hands now.’

‘So I understand. Please.’

Sisters Maria Padilha and Maria Navalha invite Lucas to an adjoining room. Sofas, more budget-print furniture, soft-focus white. Lucas is defiantly bi-chromatic in his dark grey suit. He doesn’t doubt that there is a sanctum hidden deep behind these bland walls, and that no non-believer, and precious few believers, will ever see it.

A metal cup of herbal brew.

‘Maté?’

Lucas sniffs, sets it aside. Mother Odunlade sips decorously through a silver straw.

‘It’s a mild stimulant and concentration aid,’ she says. ‘We develop and export spiritual tisanes and matés to Earth – printer files. Everything from mild euphoric to full-on hallucinogens that make ayahuasca look like lemonade. They’re pirated the very moment they hit the network, but we feel it’s our duty to give the world new religious experiences.’

‘My mother has donated eighteen million bitsies to your organisation in the past five years,’ Lucas says.

‘For which we are very grateful, Senhor Corta. Religious orders face unique opportunities and challenges on the moon. Faith must breathe. Our funders include Ya Dede Asamoah, the Eagle of the Moon and, on Earth, União do Vegetal, the Ifa Pentecostal Church of Lagos and the Long Now Foundation.’

‘I know.’

‘She says you’re diligent.’

‘Do not patronise me.’

The attendant Sisters sit up, affronted.

‘Forgive me, Senhor Corta.’

‘Would there be any point in asking that this conversation continue in private?’

‘None, Senhor.’

‘But I am diligent. I’m the son who won’t let his mother waste her money on hustlers and conmen.’

‘It’s her own money.’

‘What do you do, Mother Odunlade?’

‘The Sisterhood of the Lords of Now is a syncretistic Lunar-Afro-Brazilian religious order dedicated to the veneration of the orixas, the relief of poverty, the practice of spiritual disciplines, alms-giving and meditation. We also engage in genealogical research and social experiment. It’s the latter that interests your mother.’

‘Tell me.’

‘The Sisterhood is engaged in an experiment to produce a social structure that will last for ten thousand years. It involves genealogies, social engineering and the manipulation of bloodlines. Europeans see a man in the moon; the Aztecs a rabbit. The Chinese see a hare. You see business and profit, the academics of Farside see a window on the universe, we see a social container. The moon is a perfect social laboratory; small, self-contained, constrained. For us it’s the perfect place to experiment with types of society.’

‘Ten thousand years?’

‘How long it will take humanity to become independent from this solar system and evolve into a truly interstellar species.’

‘That’s a long-term project.’

‘Religions deal in eternities. We’re working with other groups – some religious, some philosophical, some political – but we all have the same aim; a human society so robust and yet so flexible it will take us to the stars. We’re evolving five major social experiments.’

‘Five.’

‘That’s correct, Senhor Corta.’

‘My family are not your lab rats.’

‘With respect, you are, Senhor Corta—’

‘My mother would never degrade her children—’

‘Your mother was fundamental to the experiment.’

‘We are not an experiment.’

‘We all are, Lucas. Every human is an experiment. Your mother is not just a great engineer and industrialist, she is a social visionary as well. She saw the damage nation states, imperial ambition and the tribalism of identity groups has done to Earth. The moon was a chance to try something new. Humans have never lived in a more demanding or dangerous environment. Yet here we are, a million and a half of us in our cities and habitats. We’ve survived; we’ve thrived. The very constraints of our environment forced adaptation and change on us. The Earth is specially privileged. The rest of the universe will be like us. You are an experiment, the Asamoahs are an experiment, the Suns are an experiment, the Mackenzies are an experiment. The Vorontsovs are an extreme experiment: what happens to human bodies and societies after decades in zero-gee? You experiment, you compete with each other. It’s a kind of Darwinism, I suppose.’

Lucas bridles at the presumption. He is the manipulator, not the manipulated. But he can’t deny that the Five Dragons have reached very different solutions to surviving and thriving on the moon. His colleagues among the Vorontsovs have never confirmed nor denied the legend that Valery Mikhailovitch Vorontsov, the old rocketeer of Baikonur, has, over decades of free-fall aboard his cycler
Saints Peter and Paul
, become something strange and inhuman.

‘Why is one of your Sisters visiting my mother?’

‘At your mother’s request.’

‘Why?’

‘You spy on your brother but not your mother?’

‘I respect my mamãe.’

The Sisters look at each other.

‘Your mother is making her confession,’ Mother Odunlade says.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Your mother is dying.’

The moto closes around Ariel Corta. She lifts a hand: the cab opens a crack for Ariel to be heard.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I almost lost a finger there!’ The moto had closed fast and hard in Marina’s face.

‘We’d compensate you. Darling, we’ve been through this. You can’t come with me.’

‘I have to come with you,’ Marina says. This morning the printer delivered a male flamenco-style suit into the hopper. Marina very much likes the pants though she can’t stop tugging the jacket down to cover hips and ass. She’s been hacking the shoes for some time now. Not the silly heels. They are unhackworthy. The real shoes; adding a line of code here for comfort, there for custom fit, rewriting the soles for grip and acceleration. Action pumps.