Luna: New Moon

But Robson is perfectly safe. I swear to you. God and his mother. Robson’s safe, Luna’s safe; Boa Vista is safe. I don’t want to have to fight you. I don’t want to fight you. Think about Luna. She’ll be in the middle. Come back. Back to Boa Vista, coracão. You promised me it would only be for a little time. Come back. It’s not about the kids. It’s about me …

Bare-skinned, barefoot, shivering with alcohol and a betrayal she expected but which still wounds, Sohni turns, walks away, dresses, picks up her few things, leaves the moon forever.

In the end, Adriana orders Paulo out of his own kitchen. He is her cook, he has studied the technique, and printers have already produced the flask, the mesh, the lid and plunger. But he has never prepared it, tested it, even smelled it. Adriana has. He leaves with poor grace. The aroma passes through Boa Vista’s aircon. What is that thing?

I think it’s coffee.

Staff are lined up outside Paulo’s kitchen: what’s Senhora Corta doing? She’s measuring it. She’s boiling water. She’s taking the water off the boil. She’s counting. She’s pouring the water on to the stuff, from a height. What’s that about? Oxygenation, says Paulo. She’ll stir it too: the flavour develops fully through an oxidation reaction. Now she’s waiting. How does it smell? Not like anything I’d want past my lips. What’s she doing now? Still waiting. It’s a bit of a ritual, this coffee.

Adriana Corta depresses the plunger. A bronze crema floats on the top of the French press. One cup.

Adriana sips her last cup of coffee. She pushes down the thought. This is a celebration, a small one, a private one, the true one before the gaudy carnival Lucas insists on for her birthday. Not this time, she whispers, to the Mackenzies and to death. But her life is filling with last things, like flooding water filling a tunnel. A rising level: or perhaps it is that her life is descending towards it.

The coffee doesn’t taste the way it smells. For that Adriana is thankful. If it did, humans would never do anything other than drink it. Smell is the sense of memory. Each coffee would recall countless memories, boundless memories. Coffee as the drug of remembering.

‘Thank you, Lucas,’ Adriana Corta says and pours a second cup. The press is empty, only moist grounds. Coffee is precious stuff. Rarer than gold, Adriana whispers, a memory from her duster days. The gold we throw away.

Adriana takes the two cups out to the São Sebastião pavilion. Two cups, two chairs. One for her, one for Irmã Loa. Adriana takes another sip of coffee. How did she ever love this earthy, musky, bitter brew: how did anyone? Another sip. It is the cup of memories. As she sips this coffee, she sips again her previous cup: forty-eight years ago. That coffee too had been a memorial. Her boys have been magnificent; their achievement in stealing Mare Anguis from between the Mackenzies’ grasping fingers will be moon legend for generations, but coffee will always bring her back to Achi.

SIX

I met Achi because free fall sex made me sick. It was all the talk during training. Freefall sex. It’s all they do, it’s all they want to do. It ruins you forever. After freefall sex, heavy sex is gross and ugly. Those Vorontsov Space people; they’re sex ninjas.

They were matching us up even as we swam in through the lock. Those Vorontsov Space people. There was one guy: he looked and I looked back and nodded yes, I will, yes even as the tether snatched the transfer pod away from the cycler and cut our last connection with Earth. I’m no prude. I’ve got the New Year Barra beach bangles. I’m up for a party and a chance for life-changing sex; you don’t pass on that. I wanted to try it with this guy. We went up to the hub. There were bodies everywhere, drifting, bumping into each other. The men had to use condoms. You didn’t want to get hit by that stuff, flying. I said be kind and I did something worse than flying cum. I threw up all over him. I couldn’t stop throwing up. That’s not sexy. Zero gee turned everything inside me upside down. He was very polite and vacuumed it all up while I retreated to gravity.