Luna: New Moon

‘I know.’ Lucas takes Jorge’s empty glass and sets a fresh one in his hand. ‘I have a son. I find myself unexpectedly proud of him. He ran away from home. We live in the most enclosed, surveilled society in human history and young people still try to do that. I cut him off, naturally. Nothing fatal, nothing health-limiting. He lives by his wits. It seems he has some. And charm. He doesn’t take after me in that. He’s making some success of it. He’s become a minor celebrity. Five days of fame and then everyone will forget him. I can pull him in any time I want but I don’t want to. Not yet. I want to see what else he finds inside himself. He has qualities I don’t. He’s kind, it seems, and quite honourable. Too kind and honourable for the company, I fear. I fear a lot for the future. What do you think of this one?’ Lucas tilts his glass towards Jorge’s.

‘It’s different. Smokier. Tougher.’

‘Tougher. Yes. That’s my own cachaca. It’s what we should be drinking when we make bossa. I find it a little uncouth. So, I must stage a board-room coup. I must fight my family to save my family. And I’m telling all this to a bossa nova singer. And you’re thinking, am I his therapist, his confessor? His minstrel, his fool?’

‘I’m not a fool.’ Jorge snatches up his guitar. Lucas stops him three paces from the door.

‘In old Europe the king’s fool was the only one the king could trust with the truth, and the only one who could tell the truth to the king.’

‘Is that an apology?’

‘Yes.’

‘I should still go.’ Jorge looks ruefully at the glass in his other hand.

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Same time next week, Senhor Corta?’

‘Lucas.’

‘Lucas.’

‘Could we make it a little earlier?’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Mamãe?’

Adriana wakes with a small cry. She is in a bed in a room but she doesn’t know where and her body will not answer her though it feels light as a dream, insubstantial as fate. A presence over her, close as breath, breathing in as she breathes out.

‘Carlos?’

‘Mama, it’s all right.’

The voice is inside her head.

‘Who?’

‘Mama, it’s me. Lucas.’

That name, that voice.

‘Oh. Lucas. What time is it?’

‘Late, Mamãe. Sorry to disturb you. Are you all right?’

‘I slept badly.’

The light swells. She is in her bed, in her room, in her palace. The looming, breath-eating ghost is Lucas, rendered on her lens.

‘I’ve told you to see Dr Macaraeg about that. She can give you something.’

‘Can she give me thirty years?’

Lucas smiles. Adriana wishes she could touch him.

‘I’ll not disturb you then. Get some sleep. I just want you to know that we haven’t lost Mare Anguis. I have a plan.’

‘I’d hate to lose that, Lucas. I’d hate that more than anything.’

‘You won’t, Mama, if Carlinhos and those damn fool dustbikes of his are up to it.’

‘You’re a good boy, Lucas. Let me know.’

‘I will. Sleep well, Mama.’

Marina rides back with the corpse strapped beside her. It’s close enough to rub thighs and shoulders but that is better than it facing her in the opposite seat. The suit, the featureless helmet, the seat harness restricting movement; there is little to distinguish the meat from the dead. Knowledge, that’s the horror. Behind that blank face is a blank face: dead.

Cause of death was a swift and catastrophic rise in body temperature that cooked Paulo Ribiero to death in his suit. Carlinhos sifts data, trying to discern what went wrong. If a duster with a thousand surface hours on his log can die inside three minutes, anyone can. So can she, Marina Calzaghe, strapped into an open, unpressurised roll frame; hurtling at one hundred and eighty kilometres per hour through hard, irradiated vacuum. Nothing between her and it but this flim-flam suit, this bubble of helmet visor. Even now, a thousand tiny failures could be conspiring, multiplying, allying. Marina Calzaghe bolts back panic like yellow bile. In the Sea of Tranquillity she had almost taken her helmet off.

‘You all right?’ Carlinhos on her private channel.

‘Yes.’ Liar. ‘It’s a shock. That’s all.’

‘You’re fit to continue?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘We’ve been redeployed.’

‘Where?’

‘I’m going to turn you into a drinking game,’ Carlinhos says. ‘Every time you ask a question, I take a drink. We’re catching a train.’

Marina can’t discern any change in the rover’s course but an hour later it skids to a halt at the side of Equatorial One. Seat harnesses lift, the squad disembarks shaking stiffness out of their limbs. Marina gingerly rests a foot on the track, feeling for the vibration of an approaching express. Nothing of course. And the outer rails are reserved for the Mackenzie mobile foundry – Crucible, Marina remembers from her briefings. The expresses runs on the inner four maglev tracks. She can see the adjacent power tracks. Touch a foot to those and your death would be clean and instantaneous and light up Carlinhos’s hud like Diwali.