Luna: New Moon

‘It’s coming,’ Carlinhos says. An atom of light appears on the western horizon, becoming three blinding headlights. The ground is shaking. At maglev speed, with so tight a horizon, the train is on them before Marina can make sense of her impressions: size, speed, blinding light; oppressive mass and utter silence. Windows blur past, then slow. The train is stopping. Marina sees a child’s face, hands cupped against the glass, peering out. The train comes to a halt. Two thirds of its kilometre-length are passenger carriages; freight and pallet cars take up the rear third. Carlinhos waves his crew across the tracks to the very last flatbed. Marina easily vaults up the sintered track-bed and hand-over-hands up the side of the open car. Motorbikes. Big, fat-tyred, studded with sensors and coms equipment, ugly and unaerodynamic, but unmistakably motorbikes.

Wha— she starts to ask but that would only gift Carlinhos another win in his drinking game.

‘We’re claim-staking,’ Carlinhos announces on the common channel. Rumbles of approval from the old dusters, squad and those who have come with the bikes. ‘Lucas tells us we’re heading to Mare Anguis. There’s a claim that Mackenzie Metals thinks only they know about. But we do, and we can steal it out from under them. They’ve got VTO’s surface fleet in their pockets but we’ve got these.’ He pats the handlebars of one of the motorbikes. ‘Corta Dustbike Team will win it. First, we ride train.’ A roar of approval. Marina finds her voice among them. Without lurch or jolt the train moves off. Marina watches the rover power up and swing away from Equatorial One, carrying its sole, dead passenger back to João de Deus.

Flavia makes food. It’s substantial, entirely vegetable like most lunar cuisine but it tastes thin to Lucasinho, like music from a guitar missing bass strings.

‘Is there something wrong with onions and garlic?’ he asks. ‘And chili?’

‘They are theologically improper vegetables,’ Flavia says. ‘They raise passions and stimulate base instincts.’

Lucasinho picks at his food.

‘Madrinha, why did you leave?’

Lucasinho was five when Flavia left Boa Vista. He remembers confusion more than hurt; an absence that filled quickly with grains of new normality. Amanda, his genetic mother, had quickly passed him to Elis, pregnant with Robson.

‘Has your father never told you?’

‘No.’

‘Your father and grandmother dismissed me and forced me to leave you and Boa Vista. I carried Carlinhos and I carried Wagner and last of all I carried you, Luca. Do you know what we madrinhas do?’

‘You are surrogate mothers.’

‘We sell our bodies, that’s what we do. We sell the very heart of our womanhood to someone else. It’s prostitution. We spread our legs and take someone else’s embryo into our wombs. You were conceived in a tube, Luca, and you were carried in a stranger’s uterus, for money. A lot of money. But you weren’t mine. You were Lucas Corta and Amanda Sun’s baby. Carlinhos was Carlos and Adriana Corta’s.’

‘You were Wagner’s madrinha too,’ Lucasinho says.

‘It’s the cruellest profession. If you had been taken away from me after birth, maybe that would have been easier. But the contract is that we don’t just gestate and birth you, we raise you. My life was dedicated to you, and Carlinhos. And Wagner. I was in every way a mother, except one.’

‘You didn’t have a baby of your own. I mean, one you made.’

‘You can’t imagine what it’s like to spend every hour with children that you carried, that are yours in everything but genetics, but aren’t yours, and never will be yours.’

‘But you could …’

‘You can’t understand, Luca. You can’t even begin. The contracts are exclusive. The only children I was allowed to have were Corta sons and daughters. I love you, Luca, and Carlinhos. And Wagner. I love you like you’re my own.’

Lucasinho’s head pounds. Pressure in the skull. Pressure behind the eyes. This is heavy stuff. Stuff he can’t factor, stuff that doesn’t play on any of the emotional processes he’s learned. Flavia is right. He can’t understand it. This is what adults feel.

‘And Wagner,’ Lucasinho says. ‘You keep saying “and Wagner”.’

‘You always were smarter than your father gives you credit for, Luca.’

‘Pai’s always said he’s not a Corta. Vovo can’t talk to him. As soon as he was eighteen he left Boa Vista.’

‘Leave, or was made to leave?’

‘What did you do?’

‘Wagner is half Corta. Half Corta, half Vila Nova.’

‘That’s you.’

‘Flavia Passos Vila Nova. Madrinhas are very well paid. Enough to hire an obstetric gynaecologist to fertilise and implant a different set of embryos.’

‘Vovo, Carlos’s …’ Lucasinho can’t say the words. Eggs, sperm, embarrassing. Moreso when they make you.