Luna: New Moon

So, I was a woman of the moon now. I had committed myself to a new world and a new life. I had an idea and I had money – if you emigrate, the return part of your fare, minus any outstanding balance and the inevitable fees, is refunded to you. I bought convertible LDC bonds. Safe, solid, with a high return. I had a stable of legal and design AIs and a model I was itching to test out in the real world. What I didn’t have was a clue. More specifically, I had no idea how to turn all this into a business. I didn’t have a plan. It was engineering of a kind different from any I knew; how to plan a company and make it work.

Then I met Helen. I had cast a dark net for potential finance directors – none of my people was ever any good with money and I was no exception. It was all deliciously clandestine; encrypted messages – this was before we had familiars – and secretive meetings in teahouses that shifted location at the last minute. I could not risk Mackenzie Metals discovering my plan. You think we live in a wild world now; it’s nothing like the frontier days. But there she was, this woman from Porto and she knew all her stuff and she knew which questions to ask and which not to ask but, can I tell you? What really decided me to take her on was that she spoke Portuguese. I learned English and I was learning Globo – it was beginning to take over as the common language, especially because the machines understood the accent – but there are things you can only say with your own words. We could talk.

I have worked with her every day since. She is my oldest and dearest friend. She will never disappoint me, though I know I have disappointed her many many times. She said, you don’t talk money. Ever. You don’t pay anything unless I tell you to. Ever. And you need a Project Engineer. And I happen to know one, a Brazilian boy, a Paulistano, three months up.

And that was Carlos.

Oh but he was an arrogant bastard. Tall and good looking and funny and knew it. He had that Paulistano sense of superiority: better educated, better food, better music, better work ethic. Cariocas lived on the beach and sat around drinking all night. Never did a stroke of work. We met in a bar, we ate shirataki noodles. You wonder that I remember we ate shirataki noodles. I remember everything about that meeting. 1980s casual was the look then and he wore chinos and a Hawaiian shirt. He treated everything I said as if it was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. He was arrogant and annoying and sexist and he made me so mad. I was a little in hate with him.

I said, ‘Is it all women you have a problem listening to, or just this one?’

Then he spent the next hour laying out the business plan that would become the foundations of Corta Hélio.

Oh but it was fun, that year when we chased our ideas all over the moon. Gods know how we managed to keep breathing. A fare refund is significant money but it runs from you like dust, even when your Finance Director and Project Engineer are only taking for the Four Elementals and sleeping on friends’ floors. The meetings, the pitches, the prospectuses, the promises. The rejections, the realisation that a quick no is better than a long maybe. The thrill when we pinned down an actual, real investor and tasted her bitsies. I was clear: I didn’t want Earth-based investors and equity funds, I didn’t want to be like the Suns, constantly fighting their way out of control from Beijing. I wanted to be like the Mackenzies. There was a proper lunar corporation. Bob Mackenzie had sold his entire terrestrial operation, transferred the funds to the moon and said to the rest of his family: Mackenzies are moon people now. Move up or move out. I had committed to the moon: I could never go back to Earth, I didn’t want Earth coming to me. They would be customers, not owners. Corta Hélio would be my child. Helen de Braga is my dearest friend, she’s a board member but she has never been an owner.

Helen and I worked on the money while Carlos developed the prototype and the business. The moon was a much smaller place then, we couldn’t have built and trialed an extractor without word running round the Farside and back again before we’d even locked helmets. So we went to the Farside and hired a couple of units from the faculty. It wasn’t the university then, it wasn’t much more than an observatory and outpost for research into lethal pathogens. If anything went wrong, it was as far as you could get from Earth and you could dump, DP and irradiate the entire site. The tunnels were far too close to the surface; every night I imagined the radiation sleeting through my ovaries. We coughed all the time. It could have been the dust but we suspected it was some little souvenir from the pathogen lab.