Luna: New Moon

Before the train had even come to a halt Carlinhos gunned his engine and leaped off the flatbed, soaring high and beautiful, glinting in the earthlight, to land beyond the furthest rail track. By the time Marina craned her bike down to the surface and learned how to keep the machine from performing terrifying, deadly wheelies, Carlinhos was over the horizon.

She locked in the bearing, twisted the throttle and steered up the dust-trails. A burst of speed took her into the formation and there, to Carlinhos’s left, was a gap in the arrowhead. Marina kicked into it. Carlinhos turned his blank face and nodded to her.

The bikers plunge down the long shallow crater rim of Eimmart K. Marina veers to avoid a corpse-sized chunk of ejecta. It’s sat there for longer than life has existed on Earth, she thinks. Dumb grey in-the-way rock. Out on to the dead sea-floor.

Carlinhos raises a hand but familiars have already cued the riders. Three bikes peel off from the left trailing edge of the arrows and steer east-south-east. Marina watches their slow-settling dust plumes. They will strike the south-eastern vertex of the quadrangle. Nine bikes now, racing across the dark flatland; a lop-sided wing. The riding is easy and fast and monotonous and full of traps; the worst kind, the kind that come out of yourself, out of boredom and familiarity and monotony. Flat flat flat. Monotony monotony monotony. This can’t be the fun of it. Flat flat flat fast fast fast. Why invent a sport just about going fast in a straight line? Maybe that is it. Men and their sports. Everything can be turned into a pointless competition, even going fast across a lunar sea-bottom. There must be more to it. Stunts, skills. What Marina understands of sports is they are all stunts, scores or speed.

At the designated way point Carlinhos again raises his hand and the trailing right wingtip peels off and cuts a westerly arc across the Mare. The south-east corner of the claim is fifty kilometres distant. The five remaining bikes race on.

‘Do you like Brazilian music?’ Carlinho’s voice startles Marina. She wobbles, recovers.

‘Not really. It all sounds kind of elevator-y. Maybe there’s something I’m just too norte to get.’

‘I don’t get it either. Mamãe adores it. She grew up with it. It’s her link with home.’

‘Home,’ Marina says but it’s not a question.

‘Lucas is a big fan. He tried to explain to me once how it worked – saudade, bitter-sweet, all that, but I didn’t have the ear for it. I’m very simple. I like dance music. Beats. Something physical, with weight.’

‘I like to dance but I’m not a dancer,’ Marina says.

‘When we get back, when we’ve got this, we’ll go dancing.’

At one hundred and ninety-five kilometres per hour across the Mare Anguis, Marina’s heart leaps. ‘Is that a date?’

‘I’m taking everyone else in the squad as well,’ Carlinhos says. ‘You haven’t seen a Corta party.’

‘I was at the one in Boa Vista, remember?’ Marina says, backing away, crestfallen. Flushing hot inside her sasuit.

‘That wasn’t a Corta party,’ Carlinhos says. ‘So, what music do you like, Marina Calzaghe?’

‘I grew up in the Pacific Northwest so it’s guitars all the way down. I’m a rock girl.’

‘Ah. Metal. My squad, it’s all they listen to: metal.’

‘No. Rock.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘Big difference. Like your brother says, you have to have the ear for it.’

Forward radar paints an obstruction over the horizon. A detour would cost precious minutes.

‘You know a lot about me Marina Calzaghe – I like dance music, I follow the Long Run, I love my mother but I don’t like my big brothers. I love my kid brother and my sister I don’t understand at all. I hate business suits and having rocks over my head. But I still don’t know anything about you. You rock, you’re from the norte, you saved my brother: that’s it.’

The obstruction is an outcrop of rough highland terrain marooned when ancient basalts flooded the Mare Anguis basin. The transition is abrupt for the gentle, eroded moon, but Carlinhos shows no hesitation and steers straight for the rocks.

‘I kind of drifted here,’ Marina says.

‘No one drifts to the moon,’ Carlinhos says and his bike hits a ridge and goes flying, ten, twenty metres before splashing down in an explosion of dust. Marina follows him. She is powerless, abandoned; her heart chokes in panic. Hold it steady. Steady. Then the rear wheel touches down, she fights to hold the bike upright, then both wheels. Steer true. Steer true. She gasps with exhilaration.

‘So?’ Carlinhos’s voice on the private channel.

‘My mom got sick. Tubercular meningitis.’

Carlinhos whispers a Portuguese invocation to São Jorge.

‘She lost her right leg from the knee down and the use of both of them. She’s alive, she talks and gets around but it’s not her. Not the mom that I knew. Bits the hospital salvaged.’

‘So you work for the hospital.’

‘I work for Corta Hélio. And my mom.’

There are only two of them now. Carlinhos leads her down off the rocks and the Sea of Serpents is wide and open before them.