Luna: New Moon

‘Your mother built the moon.’ Judge Reiko’s voice. Ariel had not seen her reenter the lobby. ‘But the political legacy of the LDC and the Five Dragons is essentially feudalism. Great Houses and the Monarchy, dispensing territories and favours, monopolising water, oxygen, carbon allowance. Vassals and serfs indentured to their sponsoring corporations. It’s like Shogun Japan or medieval France.’

Reiko sits beside Vidhya Rao. Ariel begins to feel targeted.

‘The Three August Ones agree that this model is unsustainable,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘The Five Dragons have reached the pinnacle of their power – last quarter profits from derivatives trading exceeded those of the Five Dragons for the third quarter in a row. Financial entities like Whitacre Goddard are in the ascendant.’

Ariel holds Vidhya Rao’s eyes until the banker looks away. Corta disdain.

‘The woman in Hamburg plugging her car into the charge point on the street, the girl in Accra who recharges her familiar chip from the school touch-pad, the boy in Ho Chi Minh City playing his DJ set, the man in Los Angeles boarding the HST to San Francisco; what they plug into is Corta helium.’

‘Eloquently put Senhora Corta.’

‘It’s more eloquent in Portuguese.’

‘I’m sure. The fact remains, the future is financial. We are a resource-poor, energy-rich economy. It’s obvious that our economic future lies with weightless, digital goods.’

‘Weightless goods turn strangely heavy when they fall on you. Or have you learned nothing from the Five Crashes?’

‘The Three August Ones …’

‘We are an independence movement,’ Nagai Reiko cuts in.

‘Of course you are,’ says Ariel Corta with a feline smile and a slow draw on her gleaming vaper.

‘We have our own pavilion. The Lunarian Society.’

‘More talking.’

‘Words are better than blades.’

‘And you want me.’

‘The Lunarian Society draws from all Five Dragons and levels of society.’

‘It is much more democratic than the White Hare,’ Vidhya Rao interjects.

‘I’m a Corta. We don’t do democracy.’

Vidhya Rao can’t disguise er scowl of distaste. Nagai Reiko smiles.

‘You want to invite me to join your society,’ Ariel says.

Vidhya Rao sits back, honest surprise on er face.

‘My dear Senhora Corta, we don’t propose to invite you. We want to buy you.’

With a bed under his back and money in his pouch, Lucasinho hits the party circuit. It’s never hard for a Corta boy to find a party. He follows a chain of acquaintances of acquaintances to Xiaoting Sun’s apartment up on Thirty Aquarius Hub. His reputation has preceded him. You skipped out on your father? I mean, no network, no carbon, no bitsies? Where are you sleeping?

Kojo Asamoah’s. While he’s growing a new toe. I saved him. But they roll straight with the next question: Whatever are you’re wearing?

Xiaoting Sun has hired Banyana Ramilepe, the new narco-DJ. She mixes and prints custom highs and moods and loves into juice for a battery of vapers. Lucasinho drifts through the party, gorgeous in tight pink, inhaling empathy, religious awe, pleasure that’s better than any sex, euphoria, golden melancholy. For twenty minutes he is in deep deep love with a short, wide-hipped serious Budiño girl. She is an angel, a goddess, love divine, every day he’ll just sit and stare at her, sit and stare. Then the chemicals break up into nothing and they are sitting and staring at each other and he drops new juice into his vaper. By the end of the night a boy and a girl are drawing hallucination-creatures on his suit-liner with marker pens.

No one comes back with him to Kojo’s.

At the party the next night in Orion Quadra there are two girls in suit-liners, fluorescent green and hi-visibility orange. He’s still trying to work out if one of them was at the Sun party when a bubble-blonde white girl appears in front of him and asks, Can I see the money?

He flicks out the notes and fans them like a street magician.

And this is bitsies?

Five ten twenty fifty one hundred.

A crowd has gathered, the notes pass from fingers to fingers, feeling the textures, the crumple.

And if I just took it?

And if I tore it in half?

And if I set fire to it?

It would be dead money, Lucasinho says. This stuff doesn’t have insurance.

A boy takes a five bitsie note and scribbles on it with a pencil. He’s one of those moços whose tongue sticks out a little when they concentrate. He’s not used to writing.

What about this?

He’s changed the Five to Five Million.

Doesn’t make any difference, Lucasinho says. The boy has left another message, written along the edge in a hand so bad Lucasinho can barely read it. A location in Antares Quadra, and a time.