Luna: New Moon

Lucasinho has never flown in a moonship. He anticipated excitement: rushing over the surface faster than he ever travelled before, rocket-powered, riding to the rescue. His experience was a seat in a windowless pod, a series of unpredictable jolts and thumps and accelerations that threw him against his restraint harness and much time to imagine what he would find down there.

The VTO rescue squad strike through the debris field to the lock. They rig winch tripods and lights. Lousika, with Abena and Lucasinho and her guards, descend the ramp to the surface. The moonship’s searchlights cast long, slow-moving shadows of warped garden furniture, twisted construction beams, shards of reinforced glass stabbed into the regolith, smashed machinery. Lucasinho and Abena pick a path through the wreckage.

‘Nana.’

Lousika’s guards have found something. Their helmet lights play across tweed, the curve of a shoulder, a hank of hair.

‘Stay there, Lucasinho,’ Lousika orders.

‘I want to see him,’ Lucasinho says.

‘Stay there!’

Two guards seize him, turn him away. Lucasinho tries to wrench free but these are fresh workers six months up from Accra and they outmuscle any third gen moon-boy. Abena stands in front of him.

‘Look at me.’

‘I want to see him!’

‘Look at me!’

Lucasinho turns his head. He glimpses Lousika on her knees on the regolith. Her hands are pressed to her faceplate, she rocks back and forth. He glimpses something smashed and distorted, burst open and freeze-dried to leather. Then Abena claps her hands on either side of his helmet and turns his head to her. Lucasinho returns the gesture. He pulls Abena’s helmet to touch his, a duster kiss.

‘I will never ever forgive the people who did this,’ Lucasinho swears on a private channel. ‘Robert Mackenzie, Duncan Mackenzie, Bryce MacKenzie, I name you and claim you. I put down a marker. You’re mine.’

‘Lucasinho, don’t say this.’

‘You don’t tell me that, Abena. This is mine, you don’t have a say in it.’

‘Lucasinho …’

‘This is mine.’

‘Ms Asamoah-Corta.’

Lousika starts at the call on the common channel from the VTO rescue squad.

‘We’re ready.’

She rests a hand on Lucasinho’s shoulder. Sasuit haptics communicate the nap of the terrain, the touch of a hand.

‘Luca, it will kill you.’

He only caught a glimpse; he was not allowed to see what Lousika saw; his uncle, her oko; but what he did see he will never stop seeing.

‘Nana, they’re waiting for us,’ says one of the guards. She carefully steers Lucasinho to keep his back turned to the dead thing. The moon kills ugly.

The Vorontsov team hook first Lousika, then Lucasinho, last Abena to the winches. Lucasinho swings out over the black gullet of the lock shaft. He glances down, his helmet beams splash around the wall of the pit. The enormous blast of Boa Vista’s depressurisation has scoured the shaft clean of anything that might snag and tear a sasuit. Still, it is a descent into dread and darkness. The refuge has been beaconing constantly but it could have shifted, become jammed, failed, ruptured.

‘Lowering.’

It must have been likewise when Adriana first descended into the lava tube she would sculpt into her palace. Light on rock, the vibration of the winch through the drop line. You came up this when you stormed out on your pai, Lucasinho thinks and feels a brief burn of embarrassment. How differently you make the return trip.

Then Lucasinho’s proximity sensors beep and his feet touch down. Crunch and texture of wreckage under his boots. He unsnaps the harness and steps out into Boa Vista. The Vorontsov team has rigged working lights; they hint at more than they reveal: dark shadows in the eye sockets of Xango. Pavilions fallen and strewn like unsuccessful card tricks. Leafless trees, frozen to their hearts, eerily underlit. The full, sensual lips of Iansa. Hints and glints of ice: the frozen tears of the orixas; Lucasinho’s helmet beams playing across dead lawns rigid with frost, lenses of black ice in the dry pools and watercourses. What water wasn’t blown away in the DP has flash frozen in a frosted glaze.

Lucasinho blunders into a lost object and sends it skidding across the tiled pavement. His helmet beams locate it: the wreckage of the old Corta Hélio board table; cracked, missing a leg. He sets it upright. It keels over immediately. Through broken door frames and smashed chairs, under trees draped in shredded bedding. His boots crunch vacuum-frozen twigs and crumbs of glass. Not a pavilion stands. He plays his helmet lights across the faces of the orixas. Oxala, Lord of Light. Yemanja the Creator. Xango the Just. Oxum the Lover. Ogun the Warrior. Oxossi the Hunter. Ibeji the Twins. Omolu, Lord of Disease. Iansa, Queen of Change. Nana the Source.

He never believed in any of them.

‘I will bring this back,’ he whispers in Portuguese. ‘This is mine.’