Luna: New Moon

‘Abena!’ Lucasinho calls but she’s gone and now Ya Afuom is gone too. ‘Abena! Ya! What’s going on?’ Some game of abusua-sisters. Now the air is chill and the semi is gone and the hangover of the multiple hallucinogen hits makes him shivery and paranoid and the party has soured. He finds his clothes, begs a favour to get a ticket back to Meridian and finds the apartment very full of Kojo and his new toe. Lucasinho can stay the night but only the night. Homeless fuckless Abena-less.

Wagner is late into Meridian. Theophilus is a small town, a thousand lives on the northern edge of the great desolation of Sinus Asperitatis where only machines move. The rail link to the mainline went in three years ago, three hundred kilometres of single track; four railcars a day to the interchange at Hypatia. A micrometeorite strike took out the signalling gear at Torricelli, trapping Wagner – pacing, scratching his itchy skin, drinking glass after glass of ice tea, howling in his heart – for six hours until the maintenance bots slotted in a new module. The railcar was crowded, standing room only for the hour-long ride.

Am I changing before your eyes? Wagner thought. Do I smell different, other than human? He has always imagined he does.

The Torricelli strike has thrown out travel plans over much of the western hemisphere. By the time Wagner gets into Hypatia Station – little more than the junction of four branch lines from the southern seas and central Tranquillity with Equatorial One – the platforms are thronged with commuters and shift workers, grandparents on pilgrimage around their extended families. Tribes of children; running, shrieking; sometimes complaining at the long wait. Their voices grate on Wagner’s heightened senses. His familiar has managed to book him on to Regional 37; three hours’ wait. He finds a dark and quiet place away from the families and the discarded noodle cartons and drinks cups, sits down with his back against a pillar, pulls his knees up and puts his head down and redesigns his familiar. Adeus, Sombra: olá Dr Luz. The pillars shake, the long halls ring to the impact of fast-passing trains, up there. Zabbaleen robots sniff around him, seeking recyclables. Calls, messages, pictures from Meridian. Where are you we want you it’s kicking off. Train trouble. Miss you, Little Wolf. None from Analiese. She knows the rules. There is the light half of life, and there is the dark half.

Dr Luz couldn’t book Wagner his usual window seat so he can’t spend the journey gazing up at the Earth. That’s good: there’s work to be done. He has to devise a strategy. He can’t arrange a meeting. One whisper of Corta and Elisa Stracchi will run. He’ll lure her with a commission, but he’ll have to make it convincing and exciting. She will do due diligence. Companies within companies, nested structures, a labyrinth of holding bodies; a typical lunar corporate set-up. Not too complicated; that too will spark suspicion. He will need a new familiar, a counterfeit social media trail, an online history. Corta Hélio AIs can fabricate these but it takes time even for them. It’s hard to be thorough when he can feel the Earth up there, tearing at him, quickening and changing him with every fast kilometre. It’s like the first days of love, like being sick with excitement, like the moment of euphoria at the edge of being drunk, like dance hall drugs, like vertigo, but these are weak analogs; none of the moon’s languages has a word for what it’s like to change when the Earth is round.

He almost runs from the station. It’s small morning hours when he falls into the Packhouse. Amal is waiting.

‘Wagner.’ Amal has embraced the culture of the two selves more fully than Wagner and has taken the Alter pronoun. Why should pronouns only be about gender? né says. Né pulls Wagner to ner, bites his lower lip, tugs with enough force to cause pain and assert ner authority. Né is pack leader. Then the true kiss. ‘You hungry, you want anything?’ Wagner’s demeanour says exhaustion more eloquently than words. Change days burn human resources. ‘Go on, kid. Jose and Eiji have still to arrive.’

In the dressing room Wagner peels off his clothes. Showers. Pads soft-footed to the bedroom. The sleeping pit is already full. He lowers himself in; the soft upholstery, the fake-fur lining caress him. Bodies grunt and turn and mutter in their sleep. Wagner slides in among them, cupping and curling like a child. Skin presses close to him. His breathing falls into rhythm. Familiars stand over the entwined bodies; angels of the innocent. The union of the pack.