Luna: New Moon

‘I was born and grew up in Port Angeles, Washington State,’ Marina says, because there are only two of them, alone on the plain that curves away from them in every direction, she talks about growing up in the house up by the edge of the forest that was full of bird calls and windchimes and the fluttering of flying banners and windsocks. Mother: reiki practitioner and angelic healer and reader of the cards and feng shui arranger, cat sitter and dog walker and horse trainer: all the many jobs of late twenty-first service employment. Father: faithful in gifts at birthdays and holidays and graduations. Sister Kessie, brother Skyler. The dogs, the fogs, the log trucks; the engine-throb of the big ships out in the channel, the parade of RV and motorbikes and trailers passing through to mountains and water; the money that always appeared just as desperation turned its wheels into the front yard. The knowledge that the whole dance was one pay-cheque away from collapse.

‘I had this thing about the ships,’ Marina says, realising as she does that Carlinhos may have no referent for the gigantic carriers that sailed the strait of San Juan de Fuca. ‘When I was real small I imagined that they had giant legs, like spiders, dozens of legs and that they were really walking across the bottom of the sea.’

Thus engineers are built: from walking ships and a loved toy, an improving game for girls where the mission was to rescue imperiled animals using ribbons and pulleys and elevators and gears.

‘I liked to make them really complicated and spectacular,’ Marina says. ‘I videoed them and stuck them up online.’

Her mother was nonplussed and delighted that her eldest daughter showed a flair for problem-solving and engineering. It was an alien philosophy in the ramshackle, last-minute lives of family and friends and associated animals but Ellen-May Calzaghe was fierce in her support even if she did not completely understand what Marina was studying at university. Computational evolutionary biology in process control architecture was a jabber of tech-talk that sounded most like regular pay-cheques.

Then the tuberculosis came. It blew in from the east, from the sick city. People had been moving out from the city for years now, but the house had thought itself immune, protected. The disease blew past charms and chimes and astral warders and into Ellen-May’s lung and from there into the lining of her brain. One by one the antibiotics failed. Phages saved her, but the infection took her legs and twenty per cent of her mind. It left a bill for insane money. More money than any lifetime could earn. More money than any career; except black finance. Or one on the moon.

Marina never intended to go to the moon. She grew up knowing there were people up there, and that they kept the lights burning on the world below. Like every child of her generation she had borrowed a telescope to giggle at King Dong of Imbrium but the moon was as distant as a parallel universe. Not a place you could get to. Not from Port Angeles. Until Marina found that she not only could, but she must, that that world was crying out for her skills and discipline, that it would welcome her and pay her lunatic money.

‘And that skill is serving Blue Moons at Lucasinho’s moon-run party?’ Carlinhos says.

‘They found someone cheaper.’

‘You should have read the contract closer.’

‘It was the only contract on offer.’

‘This is the moon …’

‘Everything is negotiable. I know that. Now.’ Then she had known nothing, only the surge of impressions and experiences, that every sense was yelling strange, new, frightening. Her training failed. Nothing could prepare her for the reality of walking out of the tether port into the crush and colour and noise and reek of Meridian. Sensibility rebelled. Put this lens in your right eye quick. Move like this, walk this way, don’t trip folk up. Set up this account, and this and this and this. This is your familiar: have you got a name, a skin for it? Read that? So: sign here here and here. Is that woman flying?

‘Word from the south-east squad,’ Carlinhos interrupts. ‘The Mackenzies have arrived.’

‘How far are we?’

‘Open her up.’

Marina has been hoping he would say that. She feels the engine leap between her thighs. The dustbike answers with a surge of speed. Marina bends low. She doesn’t need to; there is no wind resistance to cut on the moon. It’s what you do on a fast bike. She and Carlinhos race side by side across the Mare Anguis.

‘And what about you?’ Marina asks.

‘Rafa’s the charmer, Lucas the schemer, Ariel’s the talker; I’m the fighter.’

‘What about Wagner?’

‘The wolf.’

‘I mean, Lucas can’t tolerate him. What’s that about?’