Luna: New Moon

I went home that weekend. I could afford to fly. I went down to Barra and I saw the grass sprouting through the Niemeyer cobbles. Shrubs had taken root on apartment rooftops and empty windows. Avenida Sernambetida was lined with stalls and shelters and every apartment block was webbed in water pipes and electricity cables like strangling figs. Every traffic circle held a cluster of water tanks and solar panels. The football stadium, the Olympic park, the uprooted seating, roofs half missing since the last storm. The city was failing. The planet was failing.

The apartment was crammed full of people but I was given my own room. Caio was still in his plastic cave. He was on oxygen now. Caio and I, in our chambers: the dying prince and the homecoming princess. Television day and night, people coming and going day and night, husbands and wives and partners and their relatives, family members who were not family members. And my mamãe, so big she could only waddle, ruling them all with her shout. I went out on to the balcony that night and I saw the moon. Yemanja, my goddess: only she was not forming out of the sea; she was far beyond the world, and the world was turning to her. The world was turning and bringing me under her gaze, and all the water in the ocean was drawn to her. And me with it. Oh, me with it.

I loved training for the moon. I ran, I swam, I did weights and cross. I was lean and purposeful and so so fit. I adored my muscles. I think I was very much in love with myself. I was not just the Iron Hand, I was the Iron Woman.

The South American training centre was in Guiana, near the ESA launch facility. Out running, I would hear the roar of the Orbital Transfer Vehicle engines powering up. They shook me until I couldn’t hear. They shook Earth and Heaven. Then I saw the vapour trail, curving upwards and the tiny dark needle of the spaceplane at its tip, powering up. Up, away from the world. It made me cry. Every time.

The thing about training for the moon: you aren’t training for the moon. You’re training for launch. The moon had no need for my fantastic body. The moon would eat it, slowly. The moon would change me to itself.

I wasn’t the only woman, but almost. The Korou facility was DEMIN, on steroids. The moon would be like a giant college football team, in space. I realised that the moon was not a safe place. It knew a thousand ways to kill you if you were stupid, if you were careless, if you were lazy, but the real danger was the people around you. The moon was not a world, it was a submarine. Outside was death. I would be sealed in with these people. There was no law, no justice: there was only management. The moon was the frontier, but it was the frontier to nothing. There was nowhere to run.

It took three months to make me ready for the moon. Centrifuge training, freefall training – up in an ancient A319 over the South Atlantic and me throwing up every single time we went into the dive. And the suit training – the suits were huge clunking things compared to the sasuits we have now: try threading screws in those gauntlets! I was good at it. Good fine motor skills. Low pressure training, zero-pressure training. Low-gee manufacturing, vacuum manufacturing, robotics and 3D-print coding. Three months! Three years wouldn’t have been enough. Three lifetimes.

And then it was three weeks to launch day. I went back home. Papa threw a party on the roof. He always leaped at any chance to hold a churrasceria. Everyone told me how hot I looked. It was a great party, joy shot through with saudade. It was a wake for the dead. Everyone knew I would never come back.

Caio died three days before launch. And my thought wasn’t loss or grief. My thought was, why couldn’t you have waited? A week, even five days? Why did you have to give me something to feel, when all my feeling is taken up by that big moon up there, and that star in the morning sky that grows a little brighter every day – the cycler, approaching Earth – and most immediately, that black bird waiting to roll out from Hangar 6 on to the strip.

So anger, then guilt. I asked for compassionate leave. I was refused. I couldn’t risk infection so close to launch day. Any bug would rip through the confined spaces of the cycler and the facility. The moon was an enormous clean room. We were checked daily for viral infections, parasites, insects. No vermin on the moon.

So they burned Caio to kill the White Lady as I was driven out in the pressurised bus to the spaceplane. We had practised embarkation a dozen times in the hangar, but we still pressed to the darkened windows for our first glimpse of the OTV, black and glinting naked under the sun. The sense of power, of human ability, was so strong. Many of the men cried. Men are so easily moved.