Luna: New Moon (26 page)

I had ten days furlough and my first thought was to spend it with Achi. I could see Chuyu’s disappointment as I kissed him goodbye at Messier’s bus lock. It wasn’t a betrayal: I’d said in the contract that I would not have sex with Achi Debasso. We were friends, not lovers. Achi had come up to the railhead at Hypatia to meet me and all the way down the line to Queen of the South we talked and laughed. So much laughter.

Such fun she had planned for me! Messier was smelly and cramped, Queen of the South was intense, loud, colourful. In only six lunes it had changed beyond recognition. Every street was longer, every tunnel wider, every chamber higher. Achi took me in a glass elevator down the side of the recently completed Thoth Quadra and I reeled from vertigo. Down on the quadra floor was a small copse of dwarf tree – full-size trees would reach the ceiling, Achi explained. There was a café. In that café I first tasted and immediately hated mint tea.

I built this,
Achi said.
These are my trees, this is my garden.

I was too busy looking up at the lights, all the lights, going up and up.

Such fun! Tea, then shops. I had to find a party dress. We were going to a special party, that night. Exclusive. We browsed the catalogues in five different print shops before I found something I could wear: very retro – it was the 1980s then – padded and cinched but it hid what I wanted hidden. Then, the shoes.

The special party was exclusive to Achi’s workgroup. A security locked rail capsule took us through a dark tunnel into a space so huge, so blinding, that I almost threw up over my Balenciaga. An agrarium, Achi’s last project. I was at the bottom of a shaft a kilometre tall, fifty metres wide. The horizon is close at eye level on the moon; everything curves. Underground, a different geometry applies. The agrarium was the straightest thing I had seen in months. And brilliant: a central core of mirrors ran the full height of the shaft, bouncing raw sunlight one to another to another to walls terraced with hydroponic racks. The base of the shaft was a mosaic of fish tanks, criss-crossed by walkways. The air was warm and dank and rank. I was woozy with CO2. In these conditions plants grew fast and tall; potato plants the size of bushes; tomato vines so tall I lost their heads in the tangle of leaves and fruit. Hyper-intensive agriculture: the agrarium was huge for a cave, small for an ecosystem. The tanks splashed with fish. Did I hear frogs? Were those ducks?

Achi’s team had built a new pond from waterproof sheetings and construction frame. A pool. A swimming pool. A sound system played Ghana-pop. There were cocktails. Yellow was the fashion. They matched my dress. Achi’s crew were friendly and expansive. They never failed to compliment me on my frock. I shucked it and my shoes and everything else for the pool. I lolled, I luxuriated. Over my head the mirrors moved. Achi swam up beside me and we trod water together, laughing and plashing. The agrarium crew had lowered a number of plastic chairs into the pool to make a shallow end. Achi and I wafted blood-warm water with our legs and drank golden bison-grass vodka.

I woke up in bed beside Achi the next morning; shit-headed with vodka. I remember mumbling, fumbling love. Shivering and stupid-whispering, skin to skin. Fingerworks. Achi was curled on her right side, facing me. She had kicked the sheet off in the night. A tiny string of drool ran from the corner of her mouth to the pillow and trembled in time to her breathing. I see it still.

I looked at her there, her breath rattling in the back of her throat in drunken sleep. We had made love. I had sex with my dearest friend. I had done a good thing, I had done a bad thing. I had done an irrevocable thing. Then I lay down and pressed myself close to her and she mumble-grumbled and moved in close to me and her fingers found me and we began again.

My mother used to say that love was the easiest thing in the world. Love is what you see every day. That was how she fell in love with my father; every day she passed him, welding.

I did not see Achi for several lunes after the party in Queen. Mackenzie Metals sent me out prospecting new terrain in the Sea of Vapours. Away from Sea of Vapours, it was plain to me and Sun Chuyu that the amory didn’t work for me. I had broken my contract, but in those days there were no financial implications of extra-contractual sex. All the amors agreed to annul the contract and let me leave the amory. No blame, no claim. A simple automated contract, terminated.

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.

I went to my new job, laying track. The work was good, easy and physical and satisfying. At the end of every up-shift you saw three kilometres of gleaming rail among the boot and track prints, and on the edge of the horizon, the blinding spark of Crucible, brighter than any star, advancing over yesterday’s rails, and you said, I made that. The work had real measure: the inexorable advance of Mackenzie Metals across the Mare Insularum, brighter than the brightest star. So bright it could burn a hole through your helmet sunscreen if you held it in your eyeline too long. Thousands of concave mirrors focusing sunlight on the smelting crucibles. In ten years the rail lines would circle the globe and the Crucible would follow the sun. By then, I would be a Dragon.

I was sintering ten kilometres ahead of Crucible when Achi’s call came. Ting ching and it all came apart. Achi’s voice blocking out my work-mix music, Achi’s face superimposed on the dirty grey hills of Rimae Maestlin. Achi telling me her routine medical had given her four weeks.

I hitched a ride on the construction car back down the rails to Crucible. I waited two hours, squatting in the shadows, tons of molten metal and ten thousand kelvin sunlight above my head. That’s time to realise the irony. That’s not a tradeable commodity here. I hid from the Mackenzies by working ahead of them; I lurked in the dark places of their capital. I rode a slow freight train to Meridian. Ten hours clinging on to a maintenance platform, not even room to turn around, let alone sit. I listened my way through my bossa nova collection. I played Connecto on my helmet hud until every time I blinked I saw tumbling, spinning gold stars. I scanned my family’s social space entries offline. By the time I got to Meridian I was two degrees off hypothermic. I couldn’t afford the time it would take to re-pressurise for the train, so I went dirty and fast, on the BALTRAN. I knew I would vomit. I held it until the third and final jump. The look on the BALTRAN attendant’s face when I came out of the capsule at Queen of the South was a thing to be seen. So I am told. I couldn’t see it. But if I could afford the capsule I could afford the shower to clean it up. And there are people in Queen who will happily clean vomit out of a sasuit for the right number of bitsies. Say what you like about the Vorontsovs, they pay handsomely.

All this I did, the endless hours riding the train like a moon-hobo, the hypothermia and being sling-shotted in a can of my own barf, because I knew that if Achi had four weeks, I could not be far behind.

We met in a café on the twelfth level of the new Chandra quadra. We hugged, we kissed, we cried a little. I smelled sweet by then. Below us, excavators dug and sculpted, a new level every ten days. We held each other at arm’s length and looked at each other. Then we drank mint tea on the balcony.

We didn’t talk about the bones at once. It was eight lunes since we last saw each other: we talked, we networked, we shared. I made Achi laugh. She laughed like soft rain. I told her about King Dong, that the Mackenzie dusters and Vorontsov track-queens were stamping out in the dust, like boys would. She clapped her hands to her mouth in naughty glee but laughed with her eyes. So wrong. So funny.

Achi was out of contract. The closer you are to your Moonday, the shorter the contract, sometimes down to minutes of employment, but this was different. AKA did not want her ideas. They were recruiting direct from Accra and Kumasi. Ghanaians for a Ghanaian company. She was pitching ideas to the LDC for their new port at Meridian – quadras three kilometres deep; a sculpted city; like living in the walls of a titanic cathedral. The LDC were polite but they had been talking about development funding for two lunes now. Her savings were running low. She woke up looking at the tick of the Four Elementals on her lens. She was considering moving to a smaller space.

‘I can pay your per diems,’ I said. ‘I have lots of money.’

And then we talked about the bones. Achi could not decide until I got my report. The guilt, the ghost of doing something wrong. She could not have borne it if her decision influenced my decision to stay with the moon or go back to Earth. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be here on this balcony drinking piss-tea. I didn’t want Achi to have forced the decision to go to the medics on me. I didn’t want there to be a decision for me to make.

Then the wonder. I remember it so clearly: a flash of gold in the corner of my vision. Something marvellous. A woman flying. A flying woman. Her arms were outspread, she hung in the sky like a crucifix. Our Lady of Flight. Then I saw wings shimmer and run with rainbow colours; wings transparent and strong as a dragonfly’s. The woman hung a moment, then folded her gossamer wings around her, and fell. She tumbled, now diving heard-first, flicked her wrists, flexed her shoulders. A glimmer of wing slowed her; then she spread her full wing span and pulled up out of her dive into a soaring spiral, high above Chandra Quadra.

‘Oh,’ I said. I had been holding my breath. I was shaking with wonder. If you could fly why would you ever do anything else? It’s commonplace now; anyone can do it. But back then, there, I saw what we could do in this place.

I went to the Mackenzie Metals medical centre and the medic put me in the scanner. He passed magnetic fields through my body and the machine gave me my bone density analysis. I was eight days behind Achi. Five weeks, and then my residency on the moon would become citizenship.