Luna: New Moon

For an instant Ariel might explode, eyes bulging as if in a sudden pressure-out. Then she collapses into helpless laughter.

‘Be a dear and run off to the public printer and get me a pair,’ Ariel commands. ‘Beijaflor has transfered the print file.’

‘What wrong with …’ Marina begins. Don’t finish. Hetty guides her to the nearest printer, a level down. Ariel assiduously examines the stockings, then peels on and replaces them.

‘Shouldn’t you find somewhere a little less public?’ Marina offers. She has views no employee ever should.

‘Oh for gods’ sake don’t be so Earthy.’ Ariel straightens her dress, peering with the long look of a woman being shown herself through public cameras. ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’

Vidhya Rao waits for Ariel in the lobby. Ariel looks over the Lunarian Society with distaste. There is carpet. She despises carpet. This one is sickness-green, stained and mottled with decades of tread and insufficient care. Patched too the tank-skin leather sofas, of a design so outmoded it has served its time as knowing and retro and drooped into terminal obsolescence. Low lights. Collegiate, conformist, like an old colloquium house in a musty subject. There were pockets of air here Ariel suspected had circled like djinn for years.

‘Please.’ Vidhya Rao indicates a cluster of sofas around a low table. ‘Something to drink?’

‘Bloody Mary,’ Ariel says and snaps out her vaper. A bot brings her drink, water for the banker. ‘Will there be others?’

‘Just me, I’m afraid,’ Vidhya Rao says. E rests er hands on er knees, fingers arched, a lively pose. Ariel sips her Bloody Mary.

‘A successful parley, then.’ Vidhya Rao lifts er glass. Ariel returns the toast. ‘Quite a feat. Your mother is well?’

‘It’s hard to tell anything about my mother. There’s a new corporate structure.’

‘I know.’

‘Your Three August Ones predicted that?’

‘I am an avid fan of the gossip channels.’

‘Why am I here, Ser Rao?’

‘You remember when we last met I said we wanted to buy you?’

‘Name your price.’

‘The Lunarian Society is producing a paper. We do this on a regular basis; outlining various cases for lunar independence; economic, political, social, cultural, ecological. We like endorsements.’

‘What would I be signing up to?’

‘It’s a politics paper, drafted by me, Maya Yeap, Roberto Gutierrez and Yuri Antonenko. We posit three alternative structures for the abolition of the LDC and the establishment of lunar home rule. They run from full participatory democracy to micro-capitalist anarchism.’

Ariel finishes her Bloody Mary. No breakfast like it.

‘Last time we met I believe I said I’m a Corta, we don’t do democracy.’

‘Those very words. It is only a paper. We’re not asking you to sign a declaration of independence in your own blood.’

‘Well as long as I don’t have to read anything,’ Ariel says and hands her empty glass to the waiting server bot.

Lucas’s tram has arrived, Yemanja announces.

‘Leave me,’ Adriana says to Heitor Pereira and Helen de Braga. Helen rests a parting hand on Adriana’s.

‘It’s all right,’ Adriana says. Lucas won’t rage like Rafa; there will be no shouting, no tantrums, no sulks. But he will be furious. Adriana waits in the Nossa Senhora da Rocha Pavilion, under the face of Oxum.

The two kisses, dutiful as ever.

‘Why didn’t you trust me?’ Direct, of course. Open with the personal betrayal. A strong card. The dutiful son, lied to.

‘I would have had to tell the others. I couldn’t have borne it from Rafa.’

‘I have always been discreet.’

‘Yes, you have, Lucas. No one’s been more discreet, or trustworthy.’

‘Or done more for the company.’ Adriana knows the high card he holds, but this is too early to play the Jack of Guilt. ‘When were you going to tell us? Another family celebration? Luna’s birthday?’

‘Lucas, enough of this.’

‘So when, Mamãe?’

‘Get it over with Lucas. I can’t bear this from you.’

Lucas bites back his anger, dips his head.

‘How long, until?’

‘Weeks.’

‘Weeks!’

‘I would have told you, before …’

‘Just enough time for goodbyes. Thank you. What did you think we would do when we found out?’

‘It would have changed everything. I see how you look at me now and you’ve known for what? Five hours? I’m not your mother, I’m not Adriana Corta. I’m death walking.’

Worse then the look of death was the look of pity. Adriana could not abide pity, its whinnying solicitudes, its patient smile over seething resentment. You will not pity me. This death was hers alone. She would have no cares or hurts encroaching on it. Her children would take her death away from her, shape it and manage it and control it until she was pruned back, an old woman dying in a chair.

‘I haven’t told the others.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I had to hear it from the Sisters of the Lords of Now.’