Luna: New Moon (25 page)

She holds the dildo up before her eyes, panting in dread and expectation as her own voice tells her exactly what she is going to do with it, how deep and how fast and how long, every position and stroke. It will take hours. Hours. At the end, Ariel Corta will crawl from a sex room soaking with sweat and saliva and body fluids and creamy lubrication and slowly release herself from her binding leather. No lover, no body, no flesh can compare with the perfect sex she has with herself.

Since the age of thirteen Ariel Corta has been joyously, enthusiastically, monogamously autosexual.

The man goes low, swinging for her knees with the wrench. Marina dives away. Her strength and momentum carry her high, far. High and far are vulnerable. Momentum kills. Marina comes down hard enough to knock the wind out of her, slides, slams into a girder. The Mackenzie man knows how to fight. He’s on his feet, wrench raised to bring it down on her chest. Marina kicks out. Her boot connects with kneecap. The crunch of bone, the scream silences the dock for a moment. The man goes down, felled. Marina picks up the wrench.

‘Marina!’ Carlinhos’s voice. ‘Don’t.’

The Mackenzie is tall, fit, male. She is short, female, but she is a Jo Moonbeam. She has the strength of three moon-men. She could crush this man’s ribcage with a single blow of her fist.

How did the fight start? Like any fight starts: like a fire: combustible tempers, proximity, a spark, something to feed the ignition. Beikou Lock Control kept Team Corta in the holding bay while a Mackenzie Metals rover squadron docked and locked. The squad fretted: enough confining tunnels, foul air, old water. They wanted home. Patience frayed. The Mackenzie squad – all men, Marina observed – filed in from the outlock carrying the spicy smell of moon dust. As the squad leader passed Carlinhos: two words:
Corta thieves
. Patience snapped. Carlinhos roared and felled him with a head-butt and the holding bay exploded.

Marina has never been in a fight. She has seen them in bars, in student houses, at parties but she was never part of them. Here she is a target. These men want to hurt her. These men don’t care if she dies. The Mackenzie man is down and out of the fighting, burbling faintly in shock. Marina crouches – low is strong – scanning the room. Real fights are not movie fights. Fighters go to ground, tug and claw and try to smash each other’s heads in. Carlinhos is down, on his back. Marina grabs his attacker by the arm. The man screams. She has dislocated his shoulder. She picks him up by suit collar and belt and slings him across the dock as easily as if he were a piece of clothing. Marina spins, charges at the first Mackenzie she sees. She mashes the Mackenzie man against a stanchion. She stands, panting. She has superpowers. She is She-Hulk.

‘Where are the cops?’ she yells to Carlinhos.

‘Earth,’ he yells back, sweeps an attacker’s legs from under him. Carlinhos drives fist into face. Blood sprays from the crushed nose; slow falling red.

‘Fuck!’ Marina cries. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck.’ She throws herself into the fight. The seduction of power is horrible and juicy. This is what it’s like to be a man on Earth, to know that you will always have strength. She kicks, she grabs, she seizes and snaps, she smashes. And it’s over. Blood on the sinter. Burbling sobbing. Dock control has arrived and are holding the parties apart with tasers and knives but fights have half-lives and this one has decayed into pointing and lunging and shouting. The argument now is over who pays, who compensates. The legal AIs fight now.

‘You all right?’ Carlinhos asks. Marina smells violence from him. Her gooseflesh rises: he fought without restraint or passion, as if violence were another tool of his business. Out on the dustbikes, he had said,
Rafa’s the charmer, Lucas is the schemer, Ariel’s the talker; I’m the fighter
. Marina thought he was speaking metaphorically. No. He is a fighter and a strong one. She is a little afraid.

Marina nods. Now the shaking comes, the physical and chemical release. She hurt people. She broke bodies, smashed faces and she feels as pure and euphoric and alive as she did after Carlinhos took her on the Long Run. Elated and intense; dirty, itchy, degraded: a blood-slut. She doesn’t recognise herself.

‘The bus is here. Let’s go home.’

The cold perhaps, or the subtle realignment of weight, or the tiny, careful noises that night amplifies, but when Sohni Sharma wakes she knows Rafa isn’t there. The sex had been almost an afterthought; cursory, due diligence.
Come back to my club,
he had said and perhaps she should have read the warning in those words. Loud men, some drunk, in their own place and space, looking her up and down, weighing and assaying and slipping sly looks and eyebrow-raises and smiles to Rafa. Men who own things. Then the news came through about the deal – some new extraction rights, territory claimed – that not only annihilated Rafa’s bar-room darkness, but reversed it; turned it into golden light. The club was his. Drinks for everyone; all my friends, drink drink. Raucous and laddish and backslapping; crude and congratulatory: she was trophy and promise. To the victor the prize. Rafa’s arm around her all night, into the vanishing hours. The Professional Handball Owners Club was not a safe space but she stayed.

Her eyes ache, her joints throb, she is as dehydrated as the surface of the moon. How bad is it to ride the moonloop hung over?

Time. Oh five twelve. The sunline is a strip of indigo along the top of the world. She should move, get her stuff, get things together. Where is Rafa? Not in the bedroom, nor the ensuite, the office or the generous living space she tiptoes through, bare-skinned. The air still smells clean, washed. He’s on a chair on a shallow balcony, perched on the edge. The only thing he wears, against all club etiquette, is his familiar. He’s talking, voice low, back turned, a conversation not meant to be overheard. Overhear it she must.

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.

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. Syria
c
. 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.

Even before they officially welcome, the LDC planted the chibs on our eyeballs. We had ten inhalations free, then we started paying. We’ve been paying ever since. Air, water, carbon, data. The Four Elementals. You were born here, you won’t remember a time when you didn’t have those numbers in your eye. But I tell you, the first time you see the numbers change because the market has shifted, your breath catches in your throat. Nothing tells you that you are not on Earth any more than exhaling at one price and inhaling at another. Then they pushed us into medical. They wanted to look at my bones. You don’t think about the bones. To Jo Moonbeams everything is new and demanding. You need to learn how to move – you need to learn how to stand. You need to learn how to see and hear. You learn about your blood, and your heart, and dust and how that’s the thing that is most likely to kill you. You learn evacuation drills and depressurisation alarms and what side of a door to be on and when it’s safe to open it. You learn when to help people and when to abandon people. You learn how to live on top of each other, breathe each other’s air, drink each other’s water. You learn that when you die LDC will take you and break you down and recycle you for carbon and calcium and compost. You learn that you don’t own your body. You don’t own anything. From the moment you step off the moonloop, everything is rented.

You don’t think about the bones, but they tick away, under the skin, hour by hour, day by day, lune by lune losing mass and structure. Again, Sister, you were born here. This is your home. You can never go to Earth. But I had a window through which I could return. I had two years until my bone density and muscle tone deteriorated to a point where Earth gravity would be fatal to me. Two years. It was the same for all of us: two years. It’s still the same for every Jo Moonbeam who arrives at Meridian looking for the land of opportunity. We all of us face our Moonday, when we have to decide, do I stay or do I go?

They looked at my bones. They looked at Achi’s bones. And then we forgot about them.

We moved into barracks, Achi and I. The Jo Moonbeam accommodation was a warehouse with partitions to mark off your living space. Shared bathrooms, mess hall meals. There was no privacy, what you couldn’t see you could hear and what you couldn’t hear you could smell. The smell. Sewage and electricity and dust and unwashed bodies. The women naturally banded together: Achi and I traded to get cubicles beside each other, then merged them into one space. We held a little ritual that night and swore undying sisterhood over weird-tasting cocktails made from industrial vodka. Humans had been on the moon only five years and already there was a vodka industry. We made decorations from fabric scraps, we grew hydroponic flowers. We had socials and parties and we were the central point for the tampon trade. It was like a prison economy, with tampons instead of cigarettes. We had a natural social gravity, Achi and I. We drew the women, and the men who got tired of all the loud voices and the macho boasting: we’re the world-breakers, the moon-busters: we’re gonna take this rock and shake a million bitsies out of it. We’re going to fuck this moon. I’ve never been in the military, but I think it might be a bit like the moon in those early days.

We weren’t safe. No one was safe. Ten per cent of Jo Moonbeams died within three months. In my first week an extraction worker from Xinjiang was crushed in a pressure lock. Twenty-four launched from Korou on my OTV: three were dead before we even finished surface-activity training. One was the man who had flown up in the seat next to me. I can’t remember his name now. We recycled their bodies and reused them and we ate the vegetables and fruit they fertilised and never thought twice about the blood in the soil. You survive by choosing what not to see and hear.

I told you about the stink of the moon. What it stank of most was men. Testosterone. You breathed constant sexual tension. Every woman had been assaulted. It happened to me: once. An older worker, a duster, in the lock as I was changing into my training suit. He tried to slip the hand. I caught and threw him the length of the lock. USP Brazilian jiu jitsu team. My father would have been proud. I had no trouble from that man, or any other man, but I was still scared they would come as a gang. I couldn’t have fought a gang. They could hurt me, they might even kill me. There were contracts and codes of behaviour, but there were only company managers to enforce them. Sexual violence was a disciplinary matter.

But Achi didn’t know Brazilian jiu jitsu. She didn’t know any fighting art, she had no way to defend herself when the man tried to rape her. He didn’t succeed – a group of other men pulled him off. He was lucky. If I had caught him, I would have stabbed him. I was glad of those men. They understood that we had to find a way to live together. The moon couldn’t be another Earth. If we turned on each other, we would all die. I did think about finding that man and killing him. Cortas cut. That’s our name. Hard sharp fast. There are a million ways of killing cleverly on the moon. I thought about it long and hard: should it be secret vengeance, or should my face be the last thing he ever saw? I chose another way. I am many things but I am not a killer.

For Achi’s attacker I used slower, subtler weapons. I found his surface-activity training squad. I made some adjustments to his suit thermostat. It would look like a perfect malfunction. I’m a good engineer. He didn’t die. He wasn’t meant to die. I count his frostbitten thumb and three toes as my trophies. Everyone knew it was me, but nothing was ever proved. I liked the legend. If it made men look at me with fear, that was good. Hanif was his name. He swore he’d rape me and gut me from his hospital bed. By the time he got out of med centre, Achi and I were out on contract.

Achi got a contract with the Asamoahs designing ecosystems for their new agrarium under Amundsen. My contract with Mackenzie Metals took me out on to the open seas. She would be a digger, I would be a duster. In two days we would be parted. We clung to the I and A barracks, we clung to our cabins, our friends. We clung to each other. We were scared. The other women threw a party for us; moon mojitos and sing-alongs to tablet music software. But before the music and the drinking: a special gift for Achi. Her work with AKA would keep her underground; digging and scooping and sowing. She need never go on the surface. She could go her whole career – her whole life – in the caverns and lava tubes and huge agraria. She need never see the raw sky.

I used all my charm and reputation but the suit hire was still cosmologically expensive. I contracted thirty minutes in a GP surface-activity shell. It was an armoured hulk next to my lithe sasuit spiderwoman. We held hands in the outlock as the pressure door slid up. We walked up the ramp amongst a hundred thousand bootprints. We walked a few metres out on to the surface, still holding hands. There, beyond the coms towers and the power relays and the charging points for the buses and rovers; beyond the grey line of the crater rim that curved on the close horizon and the shadows the sun had never touched; there perched above the edge of our tiny world we saw the full Earth. Full and blue and white, mottled with greens and ochres. Full and impossible and beautiful beyond any words of mine. It was winter and the southern hemisphere was offered to us; the ocean half of the planet. I saw great Africa. I saw dear Brazil.

Then my suit AI advised me that we were nearing the expiry of our contract and we turned our backs on the blue Earth and walked back down into the moon.

That night we drank to our jobs our friends, our loves and our bones. In the morning we parted.

It was six lunes before I saw Achi again. Six lunes on the Sea of Fecundity, sifting dust. I was stationed at Mackenzie Metals’ Messier unit. It was old, cramped, creaking: cut-and-cover pods under bulldozed regolith berms. Too frequently I was evacuated to the new-cut deep levels because of a radiation alarm. Every time I saw the alarm flash its yellow trefoil in my lens I felt my ovaries tighten. Day and night the tunnels trembled to the vibration of the digging machines, eating deep rock. There were eighty dusters in Messier.

There was a sweet man; his name was Chuyu. A 3D print designer. Kind and funny and talented with his body. After a month of laughing and sweet sex, he asked me to join his amory: Chuyu, his amor in Queen, his amor in Meridian, her amor also in Meridian. We agreed terms: six months, who I would and would not have sex with, seeing others outside the amory, bringing others into the amory. We had nikahs even then. It had taken him so long to ask me, Chuyu confessed, because of my rep. Word about Achi’s attacker had reached Messier.
I wouldn’t do that to an amor,
I said.
Not unless severely provoked.
Then I kissed him. The amory was warmth and sex, but it wasn’t Achi. We talked or networked almost every day but I still felt the separation. Lovers are not friends.