Luna: New Moon (13 page)

‘For you.’ Carlinhos scoops handful of green braids from the printer. ‘I’m giving you the colour of my orixa, Ogun.’ He shows her how to tie them around her joints, how much of a tail to leave hanging. The footgloves feel as if they are sucking her toes. ‘You can run, can’t you?’

Marina follows him down ladeiros. The staircases are narrow and shallow, difficult to jog. Passersby press in to the walls and nod greetings. She runs at Carlinhos’s shoulder along Third, parallel to the central Prospekt but three levels higher. Bicycles and motos whirl past. Marina smells grilling corn, hot oil, frying falafel. Music beats from tiny five-seater bars carved into naked rock. The skyline dims towards purples and reds. Carlinhos takes a left on to a cross-passage. Marina is now under artificial lights. From a T-junction main tunnel ahead she thinks she hears chanting voices. Then she sees a body of runners sweep past along the tunnel, their familiars a hovering choir. Bare skin glistens with oil, sweat, body-paint. Tassels and braids stream from elbows and knees, wrists and throats and foreheads. Singing. They are singing. Marina almost stops dead in surprise.

‘Come on pick it up,’ Carlinhos says and adds half a metre to his stride. Marina lunges after him. She is not a runner but she still has Earth muscle and she catches him easily. Carlinhos turns into the intersecting tunnel, a wide service way curving gently to the right. Marina is unfamiliar with this part of João de Deus. Ahead is the pack of runners, tightly bunched, a peloton. Under lunar gravity they surge and lunge like running gazelles. A rolling sea of movement. Marina hears drums, whistles, the chime of finger cymbals over the chanting. Carlinhos catches up with the back markers. Marina is two steps behind him. The runners part to admit them and Marina falls in easily with the pace.

‘Pick it up again,’ Carlinhos calls and pulls ahead. Marina kicks and follows him into the heart of the pack. Beats engulf her, their rhythm the rhythm of her heart, her feet. The chanting voices call to her voice. She can’t understand the words but she wants to join them. She is expanded. Her senses, her personal space overlap with the runners close around her, yet at the same time she is radiantly conscious of her body. Lungs, nerves, bones and brain are a unity. She moves effortlessly, perfectly. Every sense is tuned to its highest possible note. She hears the drums in her knees, her heels. She smells the sweat of Carlinhos’s skin. The play of the tassels across her skin is erotic. She can distinguish every hovering dust mote. She recognises a shoulder tattoo at the head of the pack and, as if her look was a touch, Saadia from her squad turns and acknowledges her. A wave of undiluted joy breaks through Marina’s entire body.

The words. She knows them now. They are Portuguese, a language she doesn’t fully understand, in a dialect she can’t comprehend, but their meaning is clear.
St George, lord of iron, my husband. Saint strike boldly. St George has water but bathes in blood. St George has two cutlasses. One for cutting grass, one for making marks. He wears robes of fire. He wears a shirt of blood. He has three houses. The house of riches. The house of wealth. The house of war.
The words are in her throat, the words are on her lips. Marina has no idea how they got there.

‘Pick it up, Marina,’ Carlinhos says a third time and together they move through the press of bodies and familiars to the head of the pack of runners. There is nothing in front of Marina. The tunnel curves away forever before her. Air eddies cool on her skin. She could run like this forever. Body and mind, soul and senses are one thing, greater and more perceptive than any of its elements.

‘Marina.’ The voice has been calling her name for some time. ‘Drop back.’ They peel from the lead position and drop down the side of the pack. ‘Take this right.’

It’s physical pain to leave the runners for the cross tunnel, but the emotional hurt is crushing. Marina comes to a halt, hands on thighs, head bowed, and howls with loss. She hears the voices and drums and chimes of the runners disappearing into the distance and it is like she has been cast out of elf-land. Beat by beat she remembers who she is. Who he is.

‘I’m sorry. Oh God.’

‘Better to keep moving or you will lock up.’

She coaxes her body into a painful jog. The cross tunnel opens on to Third Santa Barbra Quadra. The skyline is dark, the quadra glows with low pools of street light and ten thousand windows. Marina is cold now.

‘How long was I …’

‘Two complete circuits. Sixteen kilometres.’

‘I didn’t notice …’

‘You don’t. That’s the idea.’

‘How long …’

‘No one really knows, but it’s been going on all my life. The idea is that it never stops. Runners drop in, runners drop out. We cycle through the saints. It’s my church. It’s where I heal, where I disappear for a time. Where I stop being Carlinhos Corta.’

Now the weight of those sixteen kilometres descends on Marina’s thighs and calves. She had only ever been a reluctant runner in pre-launch training. This is different. Part of her will always be out there, running in that ever-circling wheel of praise. She can’t wait to go back.

‘Thank you,’ she says. Anything more would tarnish the moment. ‘So what do we do now?’

‘Now,’ says Carlinhos Corta, ‘we shower.’

Analiese Mackenzie descends the spiral staircase from the bedroom into the entrails of a fly; exploded, expanded, enhanced and annotated. Wings unfold into vanes, eyes disintegrate into their component lens, legs and pulps and proboscis, nanochips and protein processors whirl around her head. At the centre sits Wagner, back turned, naked as he likes to be when he is concentrating, summoning and dismissing, enlarging and superimposing images in their shared sight. It’s dazzling, it’s dizzying, it’s four thirty in the morning.

‘Ana.’

She made no sound she’s aware of but Wagner has picked her out of the apartment’s background of hisses and hums and creaks. It starts with heightened sensitivities, restlessness, a boundless energy. This insomnia is something new.

‘Wagner, it’s …’

‘Take a look at this.’

Wagner leans back his chair, slips an arm around Analiese’s ass. His other hand spins dismembered fly around the room.

‘What is this?’ Analiese asks.

‘This is the fly that tried to kill my brother.’

‘Before you jump to any conclusions, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t any of us.’

‘Oh I’m sure of that.’ Wagner reaches out, pulls a knot of protein circuit out of the exploded fly and dismisses everything else. ‘See?’ He twists his hand, enlarges it until it fills the small room; a brain of folded proteins.

‘You know I’ve got no eye for this kind of thing.’ Analiese works in custom meta logics and plays sitar in a classical Persian ensemble.

‘Heitor Pereira wouldn’t have known what to look for. Not even the R&D guys. It took me a while to find it but the moment I saw it, I thought, that has to be it, and I blew it up and it was, I mean, it’s written all over the molecules, it’s like she scrawled her tag all over it but you have to know what you’re looking for, you have to know how to see.’

‘Wagner.’

‘Am I talking really fast?’

‘Yes you are. I think it’s starting.’

‘It can’t. It’s too early.’

‘It’s been getting earlier and earlier.’

‘It can’t!’ Wagner snaps. ‘It’s a clock. Sun rises, sun sets. You can’t change that. That’s astronomy.’

‘Wagner …’

‘Sorry. Sorry.’ He kisses the hollow of her belly and he feels the muscles tighten beneath the honey skin, a thing he loves so hard, because it’s not tech or code or math; it’s physical and chemical. But he can feel the change, like the sun beneath the horizon. He had thought it was the fascination, the dedication that drove his mood, but he realises it’s the change driving his fascination. When the Earth is full, he can work for days on end, burning. ‘I have to go to Meridian.’

He feels Analiese pull away from him.

‘You know I hate it when you go there.’

‘It’s where the woman who made this processor is.’

‘You never had to make excuses before.’

He kisses her strong belly again and she slips a hand behind his head, lacing her fingers through his hair. Analiese smells of vanilla and fabric-conditioned sheets. Wagner breathes deep and pulls away.

‘I got some more work to do.’

‘Go to bed, Analiese,’ Analiese says.

‘I’ll be up later.’

‘You won’t. Promise me, you will be here in the morning.’

‘I will.’

‘You didn’t promise.’

When Analiese has gone Wagner opens his arms and pulls his hands together in a slow clap, summoning the exploded elements of assassin-fly. He set them in slow orbit around him, looking for other clues to its builders but his concentration is broken. On the edge of his hearing, on the edge of every sense, he can hear his pack calling across the Sea of Tranquillity.

For the Pavilion of the White Hare, Ariel Corta wears a reprint 1955 Dior in chocolate with a Chantilly cap-sleeve blouse, deep plunging, ruched. A pillbox hat with a brown silk rose, gloves to mid forearm, complementing bag and shoes. Co-ordinating, not odiously matchy-matchy. Professional but not starchy.

A receptionist takes Ariel up to the conference suite. The hotel is tasteful, the service discreet, but it is far from the most expensive or opulent Meridian offers. In the elevator Ariel switches off Beijaflor as instructed. There is a level of political and social life where constant connectivity is a liability. Nagai Rieko greets Ariel in the lobby where the counsellors socialise in the lobby drinking tea, taking sweet-bean baozi from trays. Fourteen, including the outgoing members. So many exquisite dresses, so many bare shoulders. Ariel feels as if she has been admitted to a secret louche sex party: improper, a little scandalous.

Rieko makes the introductions. Jaiyue Sun, head of development at Taiyang; Stephany Mayor Robles the educationalist from Queen of the South. Professor Monique Dujardin from the Faculty of Astrophysics at the University of Farside. Daw Suu Hla, her family allies of the Asamoahs by blood and business, Ataa Afua Asamoah of the Kotoko trying to keep an over-lively pet meerkat under control. Fashionable chef Marin Olmstead: Ariel blinks at his presence:
Everyone does that,
he says. He’s been in the White Hare for four years. Pyotr Vorontsov from VTO. Marlena Lesnik from Sanafil Health, the major medical insurers. Sheikh Mohammed el-Tayyeb, Grand Mufti of the Queen of the South Central Mosque, scholar and legalist, famous for his fatwa excusing the necessity of the Haj on the lunar acclimated. Outgoing Niles Hanrahan, and V. P. Singh the poet, his replacement. Six women, five men, one neutro: all successful, professional, moneyed.

‘Vidhya Rao.’ A small, elderly neutro shakes Ariel’s hand vigorously. ‘A pleasure, Senhora Corta. Your family’s presence in the White Hare is long overdue.’

‘Pleasure is mine,’ Ariel says but she is already scanning the room, smart as the meerkat, seeking social advantage.

‘Long overdue,’ Vidhya Rao says again. ‘I was a doctor of mathematics at Farside but for the past ten years I’ve been on the board at Whitacre Goddard.’

Ariel’s attention snaps back to the neutro.

‘The Rao forward.’

Vidhya Rao claps er hands in pleasure.

‘Thank you. I’m honoured.’

‘I’m aware of the Rao forward, but I don’t really understand it. My brother speculates regularly in them.’

‘I would have thought Lucas Corta was far too canny to gamble on the forwards market.’

‘He is. It’s Rafa. Lucas insists he only use his own money.’ Rafa has explained Rao forwards several times – too many times. They are financial instruments, a variant of a futures contract that exploits the 1.26 second communications gap between Earth and moon: the time it takes any signal, travelling at the speed of light, to cross 384,000 kilometres. Time enough for price differentials to open between terrestrial and lunar markets: differentials traders can exploit. The Rao forward is a short-term contract to buy or sell on the LMX exchange at a set price. If the lunar price drops, you are in the money. If it rises, you are out. Like all futures trading, it is a guessing game; a good one, adjudicated by the iron law of the speed of light. That is where Ariel Corta’s understanding ends. The rest is voodoo. To the AIs that trade in milliseconds on the electronic markets, 1.26 seconds is an aeon. Billions of forwards, trillions of dollars, are traded back and forth between Earth and moon. Ariel has heard that the Vorontsovs are considering building an automated trading platform at the L1 point between moon and Earth, setting up a secondary forwards market; time delay .75 of a second. ‘Lucas believes that you should never invest in something you don’t understand.’

‘Lucas Corta is a wise man,’ says Vidhya Rao with a smile. The doors to the suite open. Inside are low tables, deep sofas upholstered in vat-grown leather, tasteful art works.

‘Shall we?’

‘Shouldn’t we wait for the Eagle?’ Ariel asks.

‘Oh, he’s not invited,’ Vidhya Rao says. ‘Marin is our liaison.’ E nods at the celebrity chef.

‘It’s all very informal,’ Judge Rieko says at the door. With Niles Hanrahan she remains outside as Ariel follows Vidhya Rao into the room. Then the hotel staff close the doors and the Pavilion of the White Hare is in session.

‘Hey.’

Kojo Asamoah lies facing the wall. Medical bots flit and dart around him. At the sound of Lucasinho’s voice he rolls over, sits up in surprise.

‘Hey!’ A wave of the hand banishes the medical machines. They flock in the corners of the room; digitally concerned. Access to the medical centre had not been so easy now that Lucasinho was Kid Off-grid. Grigori Vorontsov had swung it. He had always been the best coder in the colloquium.

‘What are you wearing?’

Lucasinho shows off in the suit-liner. The clothes Ariel printed are top-marque, of the mode, but he tried them on once and then consigned them to the backpack. He likes the look of the suit-liner now. It turns him into a lean rebel. People notice. Eyes catch him as he swings past. That’s good. He might even become a fashion.

He kisses Kojo on the mouth, like a boy.