Luna: New Moon

I took a couple of weeks’ accumulated leave back in Queen. I called Achi about hooking up but she was at a new dig at Twé where the Asamoahs were building a corporate headquarters. I felt relieved. Then I felt guilty that I had felt relieved. Sex had made everything different. I drank, I partied, I had one-night stands, I talked long hours of expensive bandwidth with Mum and Dad back in Barra. The entire family gathered in front of the lens to thank me for the money, especially the tiny kids. They said I looked different. Longer. Drawn out. There they were, happy and safe. The money I sent them bought their education. Health, weddings, babies. And here I was, on the moon. Outrinha Adriana, who would never get a man, but who got the education, who got the degree, who got the job, sending them the money from the moon.

They were right. I was different. I never felt the same about that blue pearl of Earth in the sky. I never again hired a sasuit to go look at it, just look at it. Out on the surface, I disregarded it.

The Mackenzies sent me out to the Lansberg extraction zone and there I saw the thing that made everything different.

Five extractors were working Lansberg. Have you seen an extractor? Of course not, forgive me. You’ve never been on the surface. They are ugly things, with their insides exposed; they were no more elegant then. But to me they were beautiful. Marvellous bones and muscles. I saw them one day, out on the regolith, and I almost fell flat from the revelation. Not what they were made for – separating rare-earth metals from lunar regolith – but what they threw away. Launched in high, arching ballistic jets on either side of the big, slow machines.

It was the thing I saw every day. One day you look at the boy on the bus and he sets your heart alight. One day you look at the jets of industrial waste and you see riches beyond measure. The plan formed there and then, all at once in my head. By the time I made it back to the rover it was in place, every last detail, intricate and engineered and beautiful and I knew it would work straight out of the box. But for it to work, I had to put distance between myself and anything that might link me to regolith waste and beautiful rainbows of dust. The Mackenzies could have no claim on any part of it. I quit Mackenzie and became a Vorontsov track queen.

I went up to Meridian to rent a data crypt and hunt for the leanest, freshest, hungriest law firm to protect the thing I had seen out on Lansberg. And there I saw Achi again. She had been called back from Twé to solve a problem with microbiota in the Obuasi agrarium that had left it a pillar of stinking black slime.

One city, two friends, two amors. We went out to party. And found we couldn’t. The frocks were fabulous, the cocktails disgraceful, the company louche and the narcotics dazzling but in each bar, club, private party we ended up in a corner together, talking. Partying was boring. Talk was lovely and bottomless and fascinating. We ended up in bed again, of course. We couldn’t wait. Glorious, impractical 1980s frocks lay crumpled on the floor, ready for the recycler.

I remember when Achi asked: What do you want? She was lying on the bed and inhaling THC from a vaper. I could never take that stuff. It made me paranoid. And she also said: Dream and don’t be afraid.

And I answered: I want to be a Dragon. Achi laughed and punched me on the thigh, but I had never said truer words.

In the year and a half we had been on the moon, our small world had changed. Things moved fast in those early days. We could build an entire city in months. We had energy and raw materials and human ambition. Four companies had emerged as major economic forces. The four families. The Mackenzies were the longest established. They had been joined by the Asamoahs in food and living space. The Vorontsovs finally moved their operations off Earth entirely and ran the cycler, the moonloop, the bus service and were wrapping the world in rails. The Suns had been fighting the People’s Republic’s representatives on the LDC board and had finally broken free from terrestrial control. Four companies: Four Dragons. And I would be the Fifth Dragon.

I didn’t tell her about what I’d seen out there on Lansberg. I didn’t tell her about the data vault and the squad of legal AIs. I didn’t tell her about the brilliant idea. She knew I was keeping secrets from her. I put a shadow in her heart.