Luna: New Moon (39 page)

External communications have been restricted on medical grounds,
Beijaflor says on the common channel. Ariel shrieks in exasperation. The nurse returns and is driven from the room in a fluster by Ariel’s bellow. Marina turns away to hide her delight.

‘Marina, coração, can you get Lucas for me?’

‘Already done, Senhora Corta.’

‘I keep telling you: Ariel.’

The cry wakes Marina. She’s in the corridor, running while Hetty is still informing her of the alarm in Ariel Corta’s room. Ariel has been moved from the ICU to a private room up on the former Corta floor. The level is airy and quiet and secure. Machines walk or flit by, sniff Ariel’s vital signs, drift on. Marina’s momentum carries her into the room and hard into the wall beside the bed. Medical bots reach out from their hatches in the walls to examine her. Superficial bruising, no lasting trauma.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I heard – Hetty alerted me.’

‘Nothing!’

The bed again brings Ariel Corta into a sitting position. Hetty displays diagnostics but Marina can see the fear in Ariel’s wide eyes, the tightness of her breathing, the resentment in the set of her mouth that she should be found like this: unseemly.

‘I’m not going.’

‘Nothing. No. I saw him.’

‘Barosso …’ Marina begins. Ariel holds up a hand.

‘Don’t say it.’ She gives an exasperated sigh, fists clenched. ‘I see him all the time. Every time anything moves; the bots, someone in the corridor, you; it’s him.’

‘It takes time. You’ve had a trauma – a serious trauma, you need to heal the memories …’

‘Do not give me that therapy-speak, healing shit.’

Marina bites back her words. She grew up in the vocabulary of well-being, of balancing and aligning and rebirth. Crystals turned, chakras glowed. Hurts crippled, traumas wounded, offences maimed. She realises she has never examined its principles and beliefs. It is all analogies. But healing, practical healing, might be a thing of the body only, not the emotions. A different process might apply to the emotions – if what is wounded are emotions at all, if
wound
isn’t just another analogy for a realm that has no names or words beyond the experience of the emotion itself. Or perhaps no process at all, except time and the decay of memory.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Self-help shit,’ Ariel growls. ‘What I need: I need to be able to walk, I need to be able to take a piss or a dump without feeling something warm in a bag next to my hip. I need out of this bed. I need a bloody martini.’

You’re angry,
Marina makes to say. No. ‘My brother-in-law, Skyler, was in the military.’

‘Really?’ Ariel props herself up on her elbows. The bed catches up with her. A human story. People doing things; those interest her.

‘He was working down in the Sahel. That was when they brought the army in on any kind of emergency; some multiple-resistance outbreak or refugees or famine or drought.’

‘What you people get up to down there, I don’t understand any of it.’

A spike of fury stabs through Marina. Who is this lofty rich bitch lawyer? A rich bitch lawyer on the moon. Stabbed and paralysed. Let the emotion go. Calm. Heal.

‘He was in information support. Every crisis needs information support. But he still saw things. Kids. They were the worst. That was all he’d say. He wouldn’t talk about it. They never do talk about it. He was diagnosed as a PTSD victim. No, he said. I’m not a victim. Don’t make me a victim. That’s all people will see. That will become everything about me.’

‘I am not a victim,’ Ariel says. ‘But I want to stop seeing him.’

‘So do I,’ Marina says.

‘What do you mean, you don’t do other people?’

Two o’clock and Marina and Ariel are insomniac again in a med centre room. They’ve talked people and politics, law and ambition; unspooled their stories and histories and they’ve come round to sex.

‘I’m not sexually attracted to other people,’ Ariel says. She lies propped up in bed vaping. Dr Macaraeg has given up her admonitions and warnings.
Who pays for your breathing, darling?
The vaper is new, longer and more deadly than the one with which Marina stabbed Edouard Barosso. Its flowing tip mesmerises Marina. ‘I can’t be bothered with them. All that neediness and attention seeking and having to think about them when they’re not thinking about you. All that having to negotiate sex, and the falling in and out of sex, and then there’s love. Spare us that. It’s so much better to have sex with someone who’s always available, knows what you want and who loves you more deeply than anyone else ever can. Yourself.’

‘That’s, um, wow,’ Marina says. When she arrived as a print-fresh Jo Moonbeam, Marina explored the moon’s sexual diversity but there are niches in the ecosystem – a sexual rainforest – she has never imagined.

‘You’re so terrestrial,’ Ariel says with a flick of the vaper. ‘Sex with other people is always compromise. Always barging and shoving and trying to get it all to fit and who comes first and who likes what and you don’t like what they like and they don’t like what you like. Always something held back; that secret thing you love or want to try or that makes you lose everything and scream yourself sick that you can’t say because you’re scared they’ll look at you and say,
you want to do what?
and see not their lover but a monster. Nowhere is as dirty as the inside of your head. When you’re with yourself, when you’re jilling off, flicking the bean, fishing for pearls, playing women’s handball, cutting a siririca; there’s no one else to worry about, nothing to hold back from. No one’s judging you, no one’s comparing you, no one’s got someone else in their head they’re not telling you about. Me-sex is the only honest sex.’

‘Me-sex?’ Marina says.

‘Self-sex sounds grubby, auto-sex is bots fucking and anything with the word “erotica” in it is by definition un-erotic.’

‘But what do you—’

‘Do? Everything darling.’

‘That room you wouldn’t let me into, in your apartment …’

‘That’s where I go fuck myself. The things I have in there. The fun I’ve had.’

‘Is this an appropriate employer/employee conversation?’

‘As you keep reminding me, I’m not your employer.’

‘Goodness,’ Marina says; an old grandma expression, but the only one she can think of that adequately expresses her sense of wonder and shock. It is as if she opened that locked door in the small, bare apartment and found an endless wonderland of meadows and rainbows, oiled skin and soft flesh and orgasmic choirs.

‘Who are you thinking about?’ Ariel asks.

‘I’m not—’

Ariel cuts her short.

‘Yes you are. When you tell anyone you’re A, they immediately start comparing the best they’ve done solo with the best they’re doing with their current other. Every time. Who is it?’

It’s the dark, it’s the smallness of the hour, it’s the click and whirr of lunar machinery, always present but in this room on this level loud and present; it’s the feeling that there is only her and Ariel in this whole world that gives Marina the courage to say, ‘Your brother.’

A grin of delight spreads across Ariel’s face.

‘Oh you ambitious girl. One of the family. That’s why I do like you so very much. Carlinhos? Of course it’s Carlinhos. He’s gorgeous. Really looks after himself. Doesn’t talk too much either. If I were the kind of girl who fucked other people, I’d want to fuck him.’ Ariel’s vaper freezes on its way to her lips. Her eyes widen. She sits forward and grasps Marina’s hands in her own. The gesture is startling, the skin still hot and dry from medications.

‘Oh mi coração,’ Ariel says. ‘You have, haven’t you? Please don’t tell me you love him. Oh you silly woman. Did my mother not tell you this about my family? Don’t get close to us, don’t care for us; above all, don’t love us.’

With a huff of effort, a bite of the lower lip in pain, Ariel Corta swings herself on to the edge of the bed. Marina watches in agony.

‘Can I?’

‘No you fucking cannot,’ Ariel says. She pushes herself to the very edge of the bed, legs dangling, pulls the petticoats and skirts of the full-length dress up around her thighs. ‘Come legs.’

In the corner of the room legs whirr and stir. Corta Hélio roboticists designed and built them in under a day: all other projects suspended to the imperative of making Ariel Corta walk. The legs stride across the floor to the bed. Their gait is natural, easy, human and quite quite horrifying to Marina. They’re like bones a body has stepped out of. They’ll be stalking through her nightmares for lunes. They nuzzle against Ariel’s hanging legs, open like traps and lock from foot to thigh. ‘I need your help now,’ Ariel says. Marina gets an arm around Ariel’s waist, a shoulder under her arm and holds Ariel up as the neural links spider up her spine seeking the socket the surgeons have set into her back. The woman is as light as thought; bone and air, but Marina feels her tight-wired strength. The spiders scuttle over skin beneath bunched fabric and sink connectors into the socket. Ariel hisses in discomfort. Two drips of blood.

‘Let’s try this.’

Marina steps away. Ariel drops down to the floor. The machine legs buckle, for an instant she might topple, then the gyros and servos mesh with her intentions and she stands firm.

‘Hold the dress up.’

Ariel takes a step forward. There is no hesitation or faltering in it. She takes a tour of the room, Ariel holding up the train of her dress like a courtier.

‘How does it feel?’

‘Like I’m seven years old and wearing Mamãe’s shoes,’ Ariel says. ‘All right. Make me presentable.’

Marina lets fall the dress and straightens out the folds and layers. It gives no flash of the prosthetics beneath. Ariel examines herself through Beijaflor.

‘It’ll do for now.’ The grafts have already restored some control to bladder and bowel but the voluminous dress conceals discreet colostomy equipment. ‘I’m not wearing floor-length frocks for the rest of my life. Unless I set a new trend. Please keep behind me. I want to make an entrance.’

Lucas is first to applaud as Ariel waltzes through the door into the reception room but Marina marks the momentary flicker of sour across his face. Kisses. Then Adriana embraces her daughter, stands back to admire what Corta engineers have wrought.

‘Oh my love.’

‘It’s temporary,’ Ariel chides. ‘Purely cosmetic.’

The third member of the family to have come to the med centre is Wagner. He is the most intriguing Corta to Marina. Since the party in Boa Vista, Marina has seen him only once, at the birthday celebration. Like Carlinhos he serves the family outside the board room but Marina senses this is through politics not temperament. He is dark-eyed and -skinned, long-lashed and high cheekboned, his familiar is a sphere of oily black rubber spikes and he is here when Rafa and Carlinhos are not.

Ariel sits, crosses her legs, flicks out her vaper. Marina stands behind her, enjoying the show.

‘Lucas. A proper nikah.’ Familiars flicker with data transfer. ‘That’ll keep the boy safe and happy. Don’t read it, just sign it and don’t mess around with things you don’t understand again.’

‘Have the Mackenzies agreed?’

‘They will or they’ll be years renegotiating every clause and Jonathon Kayode is very impatient for a glam wedding.’

Lucas dips his head but again Marina reads resentment.

‘Wagner has something to report to us,’ Adriana says.

‘Ariel, your bodyguard,’ Lucas says.

‘Marina stays,’ Ariel says. ‘I trust her with my life.’

Lucas looks to his mother.

‘She has saved the lives of two of my children,’ Adriana says.

‘I know I don’t have a position at the centre of this family,’ Wagner says. ‘I made an arrangement with Rafa, after the attack at the moon-run party. I’d make some investigations. My special … situation … means I can see things the rest of you can’t.’

Ariel catches Marina’s puzzled frown.

He’s a wolf,
Beijaflor whispers on Marina’s private channel.

What?
Hetty whispers back. Marina remembers when he had quizzed her at Boa Vista. Carlinhos had asked her whether she had any surface experience. Wagner had asked her about her engineering specialism. She sees the dark intelligence here, and the sense of something lonely, feral, vulnerable.
Wolf
.

‘I caught a scent of something I recognised in one of the protein processors and tracked down the designer. She led me to the people who commissioned her. It was a one-shot disposable shell company but one of the owners was Jake Tenglong Sun. I went to talk to Jake Sun in Queen of the South. He knew I was coming. He tried to kill me. The Magdalena pack saved me.’

Magdalena pack?
Hetty whispers to Beijaflor but Ariel has a question.

‘He knew you were coming?’

‘His words were “You’re far too predictable, Little Wolf. The August Ones saw you coming a week back.”’

‘Gods,’ Ariel says.

‘Ariel,’ Adriana says.

‘I’m a member of the Pavilion of the White Hare. I’m also a member of the Lunarian Society.’

‘Why was I not informed of this?’ Lucas says.

‘Because you’re not my keeper, Lucas,’ Ariel snaps. She vapes deep and long. ‘Vidhya Rao is also a member.’

‘From Whitacre Goddard,’ Lucas says.

‘E told me about an AI analytics system Taiyang designed for Whitacre Goddard. Three quantum mainframes, designed to make highly accurate predictions from detailed real-world modelling. E called it prophecy. Fu Xi, Shennong and the Yellow Emperor: the Three August Ones.’

‘The Suns are our allies,’ Adriana says.

‘With respect Mamãe,’ Lucas says, ‘the Suns are their own allies.’

‘Why would the Suns commission a device to try to kill my son?’ Adriana says.

‘To bring us to exactly where we are, Mamãe,’ Lucas says. ‘The edge of war with the Mackenzies.’

Lucas is awake the instant before Toquinho calls him. The present is an illusion. He had read that as a child. Human consciousness lags half a second behind every decision and experience. The finger moves unconsciously, the mind approves the action and imagines it initiates.