Luna: New Moon

‘Please don’t. I have to go to Queen. Please let me go, let me have a life there. Don’t look for me. I know you can do whatever you want, but let me go.’

‘Did you ever …’

‘What?’

These words too are barbed but the hooks catch in Lucas’s throat.

‘Love me?’

‘Love you? The first day when I came to your sound room, I couldn’t even tune the guitar, my hands were shaking so much. I don’t know how I got the words out. When you asked me to stay, that night on the balcony, I thought my heart would burst. I kept thinking, what if he wants to fuck me? I want to fuck him. At home when I was jerking off, I got Gilberto to rez up an image of you, synth your voice. Is that creepy? Love you? You were my oxygen. I burned on you.’

‘Thank you. That’s not right. Thank you is too small and weak. Words can’t say it right.’

‘I can’t marry you, Lucas.’

‘I know.’ Lucas stands, smooths out his clothes. ‘I’m sorry about the audience. I sent them away. I’m far too used to getting my own way. If you go to Queen of the South, I promise I won’t follow you.’

‘Lucas.’

Jorge pulls Lucas to him. They kiss.

‘I’ll listen out for you,’ Lucas says. ‘You’ve brought me such joy.’ Outside the club, he dismisses his guards and walks alone to São Sebastião Quadra. Long Runners cross Ellen Ochoa Prospekt on a tenth-level bridge. Drums and finger cymbals, chanting voices. Lucas customarily sneers at Carlinhos for his devotion to the Long Run but tonight the colour, the rhythm, the fine bodies strike a shard from his heart. To be able to lose yourself for a time and a space, to be somewhere that is not yourself, this casque of bone locked in this prison of stone. He’s heard that some of the Long Runners now believe that they power the moon on its cycle around the Earth. A cosmic treadmill. Faith must be so comforting.

The apartment welcomes him and prepares a martini from Lucas’s personal gin. He goes to the sound room. Those notes, those words and breaths, those pauses and harmonics, trapped in the walls and the floor. No ghosts on the moon, but if there were, those are the kind they would be: trapped words, whispers, stone memories. The only kind Lucas can believe.

Wordless with loss, Lucas hurls the glass to the wall. The room reflects the sounds of shattering glass, perfectly.

The codes are still valid. The elevator responds to his command. It waits in a little-used lobby by the main entry port to Boa Vista. He leaves footprints in the years-deep dust on the floor; he imagines the mechanisms give a groan as they return to work after long idleness. The dome is opaqued, a hemisphere of dust-grey but he knows he is on the surface. Systems come to life, touched by his familiar. He runs fingers over the tank-leather couches leaving trails in the dust; the chairs, awakened, swing towards him. He smells the human taint of old dust, the prickle of electricity, the slight scalded smell of surfaces blasted by years of light.

Slowly and with great formality, Wagner removes all his clothes. He stands naked under the apex of the dome, balanced lightly on the balls of his feet, a fighter’s stance. His body is a mess, purple, scabbed, bruised. Wolf love is fierce love. He breathes deeply and steadily.

‘Clear the glass.’

The dome turns transparent. Wagner stands naked on the surface of the Sea of Fecundity; the dust at his feet extends into the dusty regolith, marked with eternal footprints and tyre-tracks. Boulders that have stood in place from before life began. The distant rim of Messier A.

None of this is why Wagner has come. He throws his arms and wide and looks up. The full Earth shines down on him.

He has always known when the Earth was round. As a seven-, eight-, nine-year-old nestled deep in the walls of Boa Vista, he had lain in bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep because the Earth light was shining inside his head. Ten, eleven, twelve, hyperactive and fractious and prone to dazzling flights of fantasy at full Earth. Doctors had prescribed ADHD medication. Madrinha Flavia had thrown it back into the de-printer. That child is Earth-touched, that’s all. No medicine’s going to put out the big light in the sky. Thirteen. The full Earth had called him from his bed, through sleeping Boa Vista to this elevator, to this observation dome. He had closed the door, taken off his clothes. Thirteen was the age when everything changed, his body deepening and lengthening and filling. He was becoming a stranger in his skin. He stood naked in the Earthshine, felt it tugging him, tearing him, ripping him into two Wagner Cortas. He threw back his head and howled. The lock opened. Wagner had triggered a dozen security systems. Heitor Pereira found him, naked, curled on the floor, shaking and yelping.

Heitor never said a word about what he found in the observation dome.

Wagner basks in the light of the blue planet. He feels it cauterising his wounds, easing his bruises, healing him.