Luna: New Moon

The only other person in the centrifuge arm was this caramel-eyed girl, slender hands and long fingers, her face flickering every few moments into an unconscious micro-frown. She would barely meet my eyes; she seemed shy and inward-gazing. Her name was Achi Debasso. I couldn’t place the name; it was like nothing I had ever heard before, but, like mine, it was a name rolled by tide of history. She was Syrian. Syriac. That one letter was a universe of difference. Her family were Syrian Christians who had fled the civil war. She left Damascus as a cluster of cells in her mother’s womb. London born, London raised, MIT educated but she was never allowed to forget – you are Syriac. Achi was born an exile. Now she was headed into a deeper exile.

Up in the hub our future co-workers fucked. Down in the centrifuge pod we talked and the stars and the moon arced across the window beneath our feet. And each time we met the whirling moon was a little bigger and we knew each other a little bit better and by the end of the week the moon filled the whole of the window and we had moved from conversationalists into friends.

She was a girl filled with ghosts, Achi. The ghost of having no roots. The ghost of being an exile from a dead country. The ghost of privilege: Daddy was a software engineer, Mummy came from money. London welcomed refugees like that. The ghost of guilt; that she was alive when tens of thousands were dead. Her darkest ghost was the ghost of atonement. She could not change the place or order of her birth, but she could apologise for it by being useful. This ghost rode her all life, shouting in her ear: Be useful Achi! All the way through grad at UCL, post-grad at MIT: Make things right! Atone! The ghost of useful sent her to battle desertification, salinisation, eutrophication. She was an -ation warrior. In the end it drove her to the moon. Nothing more useful than sheltering and feeding a whole world.

If these were her ghosts, her guiding spirit, her orixa, was Yemanja. Achi was a water girl. Her family home was near the Olympic pool – her mother had dropped her into water days out of the hospital. She had sunk, then she swam. She swam and surfed: long British summer evenings on the western beaches. Cold British water. She was small and slight but feared no wave. I grew up with the sounds of waves in my bedroom but never dipped more than a toe in the warm Atlantic. I come from beach people, not ocean people. She missed the ocean terribly, on the moon. She tuned the screens in her apartment to make it look like she lived on a coral reef. It always made me a bit sick. As soon as any new tank or pool was built and there was a chance for swimming, she would be there, stroking up and down through the water. The way she moved through it was so natural, so beautiful. I would watch her dive and push herself down through the water and I wanted her to stay down there forever, her hair floating around her, her breasts weightless in the water, her hands and feet making these tiny, beautiful movements that held her in position, or send her flashing across the tank. I see her still, in water.

She introduced me to her ghosts, I showed her mine: Outrinha: Average Jane: Little Lady Look at Me. Plain Jane and the Mermaid. They would need each other very much in the days and the months to come. The moon was a wild place then. Now she is old like me. But then, in the early days, she was the land of riches and danger, opportunity and death. It was the land of the young and the ambitious. You needed aggression to survive on the moon. She would try and kill you any way she could; by force, by trickery, by seduction. There were five men for every woman, and they were young males, middle class, educated, ambitious and scared. The moon was not a safe place for men, even less safe for women. For the women, it was not just the moon, there were the men too. And we were all scared, all the time. Scared as the moonlop spun up to meet us at the transfer capsule docked and we knew that the only way was forward. We needed each other, and we stuck, and we clung, in our suits, all the way down.

The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It’s more like mutual bondage.

We came out of the moonloop dock – there was only one transfer tether then, in a polar orbit: one hundred and twenty Jo Moonbeams. It’s an old word that, one of the oldest on the moon. Jo Moonbeam. It sounds bright and wide-eyed and innocent. We were all that.