Luna: New Moon

On her return to Meridian Marina Calzaghe buys a window seat, top deck. Mountains and craters, great and dusty, short of magnificence, as she thought. She watches a telenovella on the entertainment channel. It makes no sense, it makes all sense. Love, betrayal and rivalry among the elite. This elite are rare-earth miners. It’s stupid and repetitive and badly acted. She watches it because she can. She sends a message home. Mom, Kessie: news news news. I GOT A JOB! A proper job. With Corta Hélio. The fusion people. Five Dragons. I can get that money to you. Hetty out-boxes it, then Marina goes into the train shopping menu to find a new skin for her familiar. Cute robot monkeys are cute but so very obvious. God with swords. Steam witch. Cyborg orca. Yes. She blinks buy and Hetty’s default form reformats into lithe liquid metal and black. Marina lets out a little ecstatic squeak. Money makes you free. She looks out the window again at the soft grey mountains and rilles, patterned with tyre and foot tracks, tries to imagine her feet out there with Carlinhos Corta and his dusters. The Cortas scoop up great buckets of dust, sift, sort it, extract the helium-3 and throw the rest away. Dirt work.

Talk to Carlinhos, Lucas Corta had said. Marina ran. Post-crisis promises are forgotten if not redeemed instantly. Carlinhos brought her tea and sat her down under the dome of one of Boa Vista’s many pavilions to explain herself to him and Wagner.

‘So what’s your business?’

‘My postgrad degree was computational evolutionary biology in process control architecture.’

There was a thing Carlinhos Corta did when he didn’t understand a thing. His lower lip sagged, just a millimetre, and the tiniest vertical line formed between his eyebrows. She thought it was cute. But when Wagner made that same frown, it meant he had dug deep beneath her words.

‘That’s making manufacturing more like biology,’ Wagner said.

‘Put very simply. I was studying how a solar-rich energy environment like the moon is analogous to a terrestrial photosynthetic dry-land ecosystem like a tall-grass prairie, and how that might generate new manufacturing paradigms, and increase efficiency. Technology will always converge with biology.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Wagner said with tilt of his head, as if the weight of ideas had shifted him off balance. That’s your cute thing, Marina thought.

‘So have you any surface experience?’ Carlinhos interrupted.

‘I’ve been here eight weeks. I haven’t seen anything except the inside of Meridian.’

Both Corta brothers still wore their sasuits. The hi-visibility beading followed the lines of their musculature. Marina inhaled their perfume of gunpowder moon dust and recycled body-fluids. Sweat of the moon. The boys were relaxed and easy in their dirty pressure skins. They filled her with hurt and longing in that same way snowboard gear and goggles made her soul tighten. Her friends, they boarded; up at Snoqualmie and Mission Ridge. They were snow kids. They had offered once to take her and teach her but a paper was due. Not an impossible paper, but a troubling one. It needed time. So she stayed in the apartment while they loaded the car and cried with loneliness when it drove away. She completed the paper but she would always be the Girl Who Missed Snowboarding. The offer never came again. Every time she saw goggles and gloves and gear in the stores, when the weather reported first falls up in the ranges; she ached with want and loss. Someone out in a parallel universe, snowboarder Marina existed; fresh and joyful. The decal-plastered sasuits, the helmets; they called her like rumours of snow. The opportunity is back again. Do not be the Woman Who Missed the Moon.

‘I want to work on the surface. I want to be up there. I can learn it.’

‘You need to learn a whole set of physical skills,’ Wagner said.

‘I’ll teach you,’ Carlinhos said. ‘Report to the Corta Hélio Extractions Facility in João de Deus.’

‘I can do that.’ A subvocal whisper set Hetty on the task of finding accommodation.

‘Learn Portuguese,’ Carlinhos called as a farewell. Security was escorting huddles of guests and catering staff to the station. ‘And thank you.’