Luna: New Moon

Jo Moonbeam muscles. Marina launches from the chair. The dive carries her a quarter the length of the room. She piles into the attacker as he drives the knife at Ariel Corta’s heart, knocks him so the strike goes awry. The knife goes through layers of Givenchy lace and bodice into Ariel’s back. Blood. Blood sprays high and slow on the moon. Ariel is down. The attacker reels and comes up for another strike. He’s moon-born, tall, light, fast; faster than Marina. He shifts his grip on the knife. Marina’s weapons are locked inside her stupid clothing. She looks for a killing thing to hand, finds it. The attacker comes up, knife-ready. With all her strength, Marina drives the vaper up under his chin. The full length. Her fists jerk against his chin-stubble. Crunch of bone. The tip punches through the top of his skull. The assailant spasms. Marina holds the vaper, holds it firm, holds him impaled on it, holds his gaze until she knows there is no life in it. She lets go of her spear. The body slumps on to its side. Blood has run down the titanium spike of the vaper over her hands. Blood from Ariel’s wound has sprayed across her face and dress. Ariel lies in dark blood, panting, twitching. The entourage stands in its eternal circle, looking down. We are aghast. We are concerned. We don’t know what to do.

‘Medics!’ Marina screams. She kneels beside Ariel. Where to press, where to hold, how to staunch the flow? So much blood. Flaps of skin and flesh. ‘Medics!’

NINE

He’s been here all along, sitting waiting for me to call him in, listening to all my stories and digressions and smiling because I’m the engineer, I’m the one who’s supposed to be no nonsense, get-to-the-point. He always was patient to a fault. Carlos, you’ll have to wait a little longer. But not much longer.

Achi left and I never saw her or talked to her again. I worked. I had things to do. No time to miss people. Look at my productivity! I didn’t miss her at all. It was a good thing she had gone; love would only have been a distraction. I had a business to build.

I was so busy, I missed my Moonday.

That’s a lie. It’s a lie too that I didn’t miss Achi. I missed her so hard the loss was an ache in me; a vacuum. I missed her sweet seriousness; her tiny kindnesses like tea by my bed every morning or laying out my surface suit neat and right; her tidiness where I was a slob, her attention to detail, the way she would straighten things if we were in the apartment or a hotel or a pod; set things square to the walls of the room. Her inability to get my jokes or pronounce Portuguese. So many things! I pushed them all down in my memory, did not think of them because thinking of her made me think of all the things I would lose forever on the moon. Breathing free. Sunlight on my naked face. Looking up into an open sky. The far horizon; the moon at the edge of the world laying a silver path out across the ocean. Oceans of water not dust. The wind: listen!

I worked like the devil; modelling and designing and planning. It would work. It was simple. But you can only work so much before it eats your stomach and soul. I took a break. An Adriana Corta break. My old mining school mates from DEMIN would have been proud. I worked the twelve bars of Orion Quadra. I fell in through the door of the ninth. By the tenth I was taking bets on how high a tower of shot glasses I could build on the bar – fifteen. By the eleventh I was in an alcove touching foreheads with this sweet big-eyed Santos boy and burbling all my plans and ambitions with his big eyes wide and pretending he was interested. I never made it to bar twelve. I was in bed with the Santos Big-eyes. I was a lousy lover. I cried all night. He was sweet enough to cry along.

I didn’t call my family for a long time after Moonday. I was afraid I would realise I had made a terrible decision, one that I could not reverse. Then I thought, for most of human history, migration has been a one-way trip. Old Portuguese families would hold funerals for children going off to a new life in Brazil. Agency is a comforting fairy story. Life is a series of doors that only open one way. We can never return. This is the world and we must live in it the best we can. But I did listen to a lot of music from the old world, the music my mother loved and sang around the house, and it was as if it floated up from that blue planet down there and settled itself over a new landscape, not the grey hills and scarps and rilles and all that ugliness, but the people. The only beautiful thing on the moon is the people.