Luna: New Moon

The legend is that the chair keeps Robert Mackenzie alive but one look tells the truth: it is the will that burns in the back of his eyes. Will to power, will to own, will to hold and let nothing be taken, not even his husk of a life. Robert Mackenzie stares down death. The life-support system towers over his head like a crown, a halo. Tubes pulse, pumps hiss and spin, motors hum. The backs of his hands are blotched with slow-healing haemotomas where needles and cannulas pierce the flesh. No one can bear to look more than an instant at the tube in his throat. The perfume of fern, the smell of fresh water, can’t hide the smell. Rachel Mackenzie’s stomach lifts at the taint of colostomy.

‘My darling.’

Rachel bends to kiss the sunken cheeks. Robert Mackenzie would notice any hesitation or revulsion.

‘Robson.’ He opens his arms to embrace. Robson steps forward and lets the arms enfold him. A kiss from the hideous old mummy, on both cheeks. Robert Mackenzie was forty-eight years old when he chose Mare Insularum over Western Australia and committed family and future to the moon. Too old to go to the moon. He would never survive the lift to orbit, let alone the slow gnaw of low gravity on his bones and blood vessels and lungs, the steady sleet of radiation. Leave it to the kids and the robots. Robert Mackenzie came and sunk the foundations of the moon’s million-strong society. This thing in the life-support chair can rightly claim to be the Man in the Moon. One hundred and three years old, a dozen medical AIs monitor and maintain his body, but its fuel is the same will in his pale blue eyes.

‘You’re a good kid, Robson,’ Robert Mackenzie breathes in the boy’s ear. ‘A good kid. It’s good to have you back where you belong, away from those Corta thieves.’ The papery claw hands shake the boy. ‘Welcome home.’ Robson tears himself free from the frail claws. ‘They won’t steal you back.’

‘My husband has been thinking,’ says Jade Sun. She stands behind him, one hand on the old man’s shoulder. The hand is slim, refined, nails lacquered, but Robert Mackenzie seems to sag under its tiny weight. ‘Is there any reason why Robson shouldn’t be married?’

Hi Mom, hi Kessie. Kids, if you see this, hi. I’ve been kind of quiet for a while. I have an excuse. So: as I said in my really rushed mail, I am working for the Dragons. Corta Hélio. The helium-3 miners.

I’m working for Corta Hélio. I just thought I’d say that again so you can appreciate it. What it means right up front is, no more worrying about oxygen or water or carbon or network, which is why I can send you this. I don’t think I can make you understand how it feels not to have to worry about the Four Elementals again. It’s like winning a lotteria, where you get to keep breathing rather than winning ten million dollars.

I can’t tell you too much about how I got the job – it’s a security thing: the Five Dragons are like the Mafia, always at each other’s throats. But I can say that I am under the personal watch of Carlinhos Corta. Kessie, sister. You should emigrate. This rock is full of hot bodies.

I’m in a surface activity induction squad. Moon-walking. There’s a lot to learn. The moon knows a thousand ways to kill you. That’s rule one and it rules everything. There are ways of moving, reading signs and signals, being in or out of communications, analysing data from your suit and you need to know them or the one tiny thing you’ve overlooked will cook you or freeze you or asphyxiate you or shoot you full of radiation. We spent three whole days on dust. There are fifteen kinds of dust and you need to know the physical properties of each one from abrasion to electrostatic properties to adhesion. Like Sherlock Holmes learning his fifty types of cigar ash? There’s battery recharge times, lunar navigation – Jo Moonbeams misjudge the horizon and think everything is much further away than it is. And they haven’t even taken us up on the surface yet. And the sasuits. I know they’re meant to be tight, but are they sure they’ve got the size right? Took me ten minutes to get into the thing. Wouldn’t want to do that in a depressurisation. Put it on wrong and you get bruising where the seams pinch. Mind, if the environment deepees, bruising is the least of your worries.

I’m probably scaring you to death. But you get used to it. No one could live with that level of constant dread. But if you ever once get sloppy, it will have no mercy. Carlinhos tells me we usually have at least one death each induction squad. I’m being extra careful that it’s not me.