Luna: New Moon (40 page)

Helen de Braga,
Toquinho says. Esperança Maria, her familiar, appears in the dark before him.

‘Lucas, your mother asked me to call you.’

It’s time then. Lucas feels no fear, no dread, no anxiety. He has prepared for this moment, rehearsed his emotions again and again.

‘Can you come to Boa Vista?’

‘I’m on my way.’

Helen De Braga meets Lucas on the tram platform. They kiss formally.

‘When did you find out?’

‘I called you as soon as Dr Macaraeg told me.’

Lucas has never had much regard for Dr Macaraeg. Hers is an unnecessary profession. Machines do medicine so much better; cleanly, impersonally.

‘Your mother’s condition has deteriorated.’ Dr Macaraeg says. Lucas turns the full chill of his stare on her and she flinches. Another thing the machines do better: truth.

‘Since when?’

‘Since before her birthday. Senhora Corta instructed us …’

‘Do you have ambitions, Dr Macaraeg?’

The doctor is taken aback. She flusters.

‘I’m not ashamed to say it, but yes, I have ambitions to further private consultancy.’

‘Good. Modesty is a vastly overrated attribute. I hope you’re able to achieve them. My mother must have told you about her condition. Yet you kept the full degree of it secret from me. How do you think I should respond to that?’

‘I am Senhora Corta’s private physician.’

‘Of course you are, yes. Is there any medical reason why I can’t see my mother?’

‘She is very weak. Her condition is—’

‘Very good then. Where is she?’

‘She’s in the surface observatory,’ Dr Macaraeg says and slips away from Lucas’s attention. Boa Vista’s staff have turned out under Nilson Nunes on the tailored lawns. Their questions Lucas Corta can’t answer, but he is a Corta, he is authority. He nods acknowledgement to each of them. Good faithful people. Next the madrinhas, a word for each.

‘How long does she really have?’ Lucas asks Helen de Braga.

‘Days at the most. Maybe only hours.’

Lucas leans a moment against the polished rock lintel of the elevator lobby.

‘I can’t blame her doctor for obeying her.’

‘She asked for you and you alone, Lucas,’ Helen de Braga says.

‘You!’ Lucas shouts. His eye has been caught by a movement of white: Irmã Loa blowing like paper between the pillars of the lobby. ‘Out of my house!’

‘I’m your mother’s spiritual adviser.’ Irmã Loa faces Lucas Corta.

‘You are a liar and a parasite.’

Helen de Braga touches Lucas’s arm.

‘She’s taken great comfort from the Sisterhood,’ Irmã Loa says.

‘I’ve called security. They’re not under any orders to be gentle.’

‘Mãe Odunlade warned me about your manners.’

Heitor Pereira and a smart security suit arrive. She flicks away the arresting hands.

‘I’m leaving.’

‘This woman is banned from Boa Vista,’ Lucas says.

‘We’re not your enemies, Lucas!’ Irmã Loa calls.

‘We’re not your project,’ Lucas calls back and, before Helen de Braga can ask what he means, steps into the elevator.

The Earth’s last quarter stands over the Sea of Fecundity. Adriana has arranged her seat to look full on it. Wheel tracks in the dust hint at discreet medical bots concealed in the walls. The only thing attending Adriana is a side table with a cup of coffee.

‘Lucas.’

‘Mamãe.’

‘Someone’s been up here recently,’ Adriana says. Her voice is light and weak, a husk of will and Lucas hears in it the truth that her disease is very much more advanced than he or even Dr Macaraeg suspects.

‘Wagner,’ Lucas says. ‘Security saw him.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘The same as you. Looking at the Earth.’

The lightest of smiles crosses Adriana’s profile.

‘I was too hard on that boy. I don’t understand a thing about him but I never tried. It’s just that he made me so angry. Not anything he did; just that he
was
. Just him
being
constantly said,
You’re a fool, Adriana Corta.
That was wrong. Try and bring him in to the family.’

‘Mamãe, he’s not—’

‘He is.’

‘Mamãe, the doctor told me—’

‘Yes, I’ve been keeping secrets again. And what would you have done? Rallied the family? Pulled in every Corta from every quarter? The last thing I see is all of you standing looking at me all big eyed and solemn? Hideous. Hideous.’

‘At least Rafa—’

‘No, Lucas.’ Adriana’s voice can still find the snap of command. ‘Hold my hand, for gods’ sakes.’

Lucas cups the thin kite of skin between his two hands and is shocked at its dry heat. This is a dying woman. Adriana closes her eyes.

‘Some final things. Helen de Braga will retire. She’s done enough for this family. And I want her away from us; safe. She’s not a player. I’m afraid for us, Lucas. This is a terrible time to be dying. I don’t know what will happen.’

‘I’ll take care of the company, Mamãe.’

‘You all will. That’s the way I’ve arranged it. Don’t break it, Lucas. I chose this, I chose this.’

Adriana clenches her fist inside Lucas’s hands and he releases it.

‘I’m afraid for you,’ Adriana says. ‘Here. A secret just for you. Only you, Lucas. You’ll know when you need it. In the early days, when it looked like the Mackenzies would wipe us out, Carlos commissioned a revenge weapon. He planted a trojan inside Crucible’s smelter control systems. It’s still there. It’s a clever piece of code; it hides, it adapts, it self-updates. It’s very simple and elegant. It will redirect Crucible’s smelter mirrors, turn them on to Crucible itself.’

‘Dear gods.’

‘Yes. Here, Lucas.’

The briefest flicker of data between Yemanja and Toquinho.

‘Thank you, Mamãe.’

‘Don’t thank me. You’ll only use it when everything is lost and the family is destroyed.’

‘Then I’ll never use it.’

Adriana grasps Lucas’s hand with startling strength.

‘Oh, would you like some coffee? Esmeralda Geisha Special from Panama. That’s a country in Central America. I had it flown up. What else am I going it spend my money on?’

‘I never got the taste for it, Mamãe.’

‘That’s a pity. I’m not sure you could learn it now. Oh, can’t you see what I’m doing? Sit with me Lucas. Play me some music. You have such good taste. That boy you wanted to marry; it would have been good to have a musician in the family.’

‘The family was too much family for him.’

Adriana strokes the back of Lucas’s hand. ‘Still, you were right to divorce Amanda Sun. I never liked her sneaking around Boa Vista. I never liked her at all.’

‘You agreed to the nikah.’

Lucas feels Adriana’s hand start.

‘I did, didn’t I? I thought it was necessary for the family. The only thing that’s necessary for the family is the family.’

Lucas has no right words so he orders Toquinho to play.

‘Is that?’

‘Jorge. Yes.’

Tears soften Adriana’s eyes.

‘It’s all the little things, Lucas. Coffee and music. Luna’s favourite dress. Rafa telling me the results from his handball teams, whether they were good or bad. The sound of water outside my bedroom. The full Earth. Wagner’s right; you could lose yourself looking at it. It’s so dangerous: you daren’t look because it will snatch your eye and remind you of everything you’ve given up. This is an awful place, Lucas.’

Lucas hides the flinch of hurt from his mother. He grasps her hand again.

‘I’m afraid, Lucas. I’m afraid of death. It looks like an animal, like a dirty, sneaking animal that’s been hunting me all my life. That’s lovely music, Lucas.’

‘I’ll play his
Aguas de Marco.
’

‘Let it run, Lucas.’

Adriana opens her eyes. She had drifted off. That fills her with cold vertigo. It could have been the last sleep, with things unsaid. The cold shaking her heart is relentless now. Lucas sits with her. From his face Adriana guesses he is working; Toquinho a vortex of files and contacts and messages. The music has ended. It was very good. That boy can sing. She would ask Lucas to play it again but she doesn’t want to break this moment; aware without being noticed.

She turns her eyes to the Earth. Traitor. Yemanja showed her the shining path, drawn across the sea, out from that world to the moon. She followed it. It was a trap. There is no path back. No line of light across this dry sea.

‘Lucas.’

He looks up from his work. His smile is a delight. Small things.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what?’ Lucas says.

‘For bringing you here.’

‘You didn’t bring me here.’

‘Don’t be so literal. Why must you always take against things?’

‘That’s not my world up there. This is my world.’

‘World. Not home.’

‘You have nothing to be sorry for, Mamãe.’

Adriana reaches for the coffee on the table but the cup is cold.

‘I’ll have fresh made up,’ Lucas says.

‘Please.’

The terminator of the crescent Earth sweeps down across the Atlantic; the whorl of a tropical cyclone spinning north by north-west, the paisley-pattern cloud-avenues of the inter-tropical convergence zone disappearing silently into night. An edge of green, the tip of north-eastern Brazil, draws over the horizon. The night-side of the planet is edged in a lace-work of lights. Clusters and whorls; they mirror the patterns of meteorology. Those lives down there.

‘Do you know what happened to them?’

‘Who, Lucas?’

‘I know when you look at Earth like that, you’re thinking about them.’

‘They failed like everyone fails down there. What else could they do?’

‘It’s no easy world, this,’ Lucas says.

‘Neither is theirs. I’ve been thinking about my mãe, Lucas. In the apartment, singing; and Pai in the dealership, polishing his cars. They were so brilliant in the sun. I can see Caio. None of the others. Not even Achi clearly any more.’

‘You had courage,’ Lucas says. ‘There is only one Iron Hand.’

‘That stupid name!’ Adriana says. ‘It’s a curse, not a name. Play me that music again, Lucas.’

Adriana settles into the chair. Jorge’s whispering voice and agile guitar surround her. Lucas watches his mother drift down through the words and chords into shallow sleep. Still breathing.
The coffee is here,
Toquinho says. Lucas takes it from the maid and as he sets it on the table he sees that his mother is not breathing.

He takes her hand.

Toquinho shows him vital signs.

Gone.

Lucas feels his breath tremble in his chest, but it is not as terrible as he imagined; not so terrible at all. Yemanja slowly fades to white and folds in on itself. The crescent Earth stands eternally on the eastern horizon.

Luna, in a red dress, picking barefoot over the boulders and through the empty pools of Boa Vista. The streams have run dry, the water no longer falls from the eyes and lips of the ten orixas. Rafa can’t express why he shut down Boa Vista’s waters but no one except Luna objected. The only way he could articulate it was that Boa Vista needed to say something.

The memorial was ramshackle and disappointing. The guests could not outshine the Cortas in their eulogies, the Cortas had no valedictory tradition so their tributes were sincere but stumbling and poorly stage-managed and the Sisterhood, who understood religious theatre, had been barred from attending. The words were said, the handful of compost that was all the LDC would permit of Adriana Corta’s carbon for private ceremonials was scattered, the representatives of the great families made their way to the tram. Throughout the short ceremony, Luna wandered blithe as water, exploring her strange dry world.

‘Papai!’

‘Leave him, oheneba,’ Lousika Asamoah says. Like her daughter she wears a red dress; a funeral colour among the Asamoahs. ‘He has to get used to things.’

Rafa takes the stepping stones over the dry river, enters the bamboo. He looks up at the open-lipped, wide-eyed faces of the orixas. Small feet have drawn a path between the canes: Luna’s feet. She knows this place and all its secrets better than he. But it is his now, he is Senhor of Boa Vista. There is a universe of difference between living somewhere and owning it. Rafa runs the long, rough-edged bamboo leaves through his fingers. He had thought he would cry. He had thought he would be disconsolate, sobbing like a child. Rafa knows how easily his emotions are stirred, to anger or joy or exultation.
Your mother has died.
What he felt: shock, yes; the futile paralysis of needing to do something, a hundred things, knowing that none of them can change the truth of death. Anger – some; at the suddenness, at the revelation that Adriana had been sick for a long time, terminal since the moon-run party. Guilty that the whirlpool of events after the assassination attempt had drowned any signals Adriana might have given about her condition. Resentment that it was Lucas who had spent the final hours with her. Not disconsolate; not overwhelmed: no tears.

He stands a moment in São Sebastião Pavilion, its streams now dry; their sediments caking and cracking into hexagons. This had been her favourite of Boa Vista’s pavilions. There was a pavilion for drinking tea, a pavilion for meeting social guests and one for business guests, a pavilion for receiving relatives and one for reading, the morning pavilion and the evening pavilion but this one, at the eastern end of Boa Vista’s main chamber, was her working pavilion. Rafa has never liked the pavilions. He thinks them affected and silly. Adriana built Boa Vista selfishly; the palace of her particular dreams. It’s Rafa’s now but it will never be his. Adriana is in the dry ponds and watercourses, the bamboo, the domes of the pavilions, the faces of the orixas. He can’t change a leaf or a pebble of it.

‘Water,’ Rafa whispers and feels Boa Vista tremble as waters stir in pipes and pumps; a gurgle here, a trickle there; pouring from freshets and faucets; runnels merging into streams, channels filling, water chuckling around rocks, drawing eddies and foam and dead leaves; water gathering in the eyes and mouths of the orixas; a slow swell into great teardrops quivering with surface tension then burst into slow waterfalls; showers and trickles first, then bounding cascades. Until he silenced them, Rafa had never realised how the splash and trickle of moving waters filled Boa Vista.