Luna: New Moon

SEVEN

‘Threw us around like fucking girls.’ Twenty monitors on Robert Mackenzie’s life-support chair peak into the orange. ‘One of them was a fucking girl.’

The news had flashed down Crucible’s spinal chord, familiar to familiar: Duncan Mackenzie is leaving Fern Gully. Unprecedented. Unthinkable. Unholy. Jade Sun oversaw the delicate loading of her husband’s life-support unit into transit capsule. Her words were soft and kind and encouraging and left the ancillary staff pale with fear. The capsule sped along beneath the incinerating glare of smelting mirrors to Car 27. Duncan Mackenzie’s private apartments.

‘She was a Jo Moonbeam,’ Duncan Mackenzie says.

‘You offer any kind of excuse for this?’ Jade Sun says, always one discreet step behind Bob Mackenzie’s right shoulder.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘It’s not the fight, it’s never a fucking duster fight,’ Bob Mackenzie says. His voice is a rattle of respirators, his lungs half moon from years of inhaling dust. ‘They bent us over and fucked it right up us. Have you see the social net? Asamoahs, Vorontsovs, even the Suns are laughing at us. Even the Eagle of the fucking Moon.’

‘We would never laugh at your misfortune, my love,’ Jade Sun says.

‘Well you’re a fool. I would if I were you. Fucking Brazilians on kids’ bikes.’

‘They got the jump on us,’ Duncan says. ‘It’s a set-back.’ You smell vile, Duncan realises. A sickly excremental tang, the sourness of urine, the thin disguise of sterilising swabs and anti-bacterial. His skin smells, his hair smells. Oils and caked sweats and exudations. His teeth smell; his vile hideous teeth. Duncan can’t bear to look at those yellow stumps. How much better one fast, sharp punch and knock them out so he would never have to look at them again. That would kill the old man. Punch clean through packboard-soft crumbling bone into the soft pulp of his brain.

‘A set-back?’ Bob Mackenzie says. ‘We’ve lost our entire north-west quadrant project. We’ll be five years getting our helium operation out from under this pile of shit. Adrian had the tip-off directly from the Eagle. Adrian is a greasy little weasel but he knows how to protect a source. Someone leaked it. One of ours. We’ve a traitor. More than anything, I fucking hate traitors.’

‘I’ve read Eoin Keefe’s report. Our encryption is secure.’

‘Eoin Keefe is a coward who’s never put his balls on the block for this family.’ One step behind Jade Sun’s right shoulder; a lithe, intimidating presence, is Hadley Mackenzie. Duncan detests his father’s presence in his private rooms, but he is patriarch, silverback, he has the right. Hadley he resents because his presence implies soft words and murmured decisions among the green fronds of Fern Gully, decisions to which Duncan is not party.

‘Hadley has replaced Eoin Keefe,’ Jade Sun says mildly.

‘This is not your call,’ Duncan says. ‘You do not replace my heads of department.’

‘I replace who the fuck I want when the fuck I want,’ Robert Mackenzie says and Duncan understands the vulnerability of his position.

‘This is a board decision,’ Duncan murmurs.

‘Board!’ Robert Mackenzie shouts with all the spit he can summon. ‘This family is at war.’

Does Duncan see a small smile flicker across Jade Sun’s face?

‘We’re a business. Businesses don’t fight wars.’

‘I did,’ Robert Mackenzie says.

‘This is a whole new moon.’

‘The moon doesn’t change.’

‘There is no profit in fighting the Cortas.’

‘We’d have our pride,’ Hadley says. Duncan stands close to him; eye to eye, breath-close.

‘Can you breathe pride? Step out there and say that to Lady Moon: I’ve got my Mackenzie pride. We fight them the way we do best. We make money. Mackenzie Metals isn’t pride, Mackenzie Metals isn’t family; it’s a machine for making money. It’s a machine for sending profits back to all those investors; those fund owners and venture capitalists back on Earth who trusted you, Dad, to take their money to the moon and make it work for them. They’re Mackenzie Metals. Not us.’

Robert Mackenzie growls in his stone lungs.

‘My husband is very tired,’ Jade Sun says. ‘Emotions are exhausting for him.’ Robert’s LSU chair turns and Duncan knows it is against the old monster’s will. The inlock to the transit capsule opens. Hadley nods to his half-brother and follows the slow-rolling entourage.

‘We need peace with the Cortas!’ Duncan shouts after them.

She sees Wagner in the chair and freezes.

‘Everyone in this bar is a wolf,’ Wagner says. She looks around. The two women at the near table, the group at the far table, the lone drinker at the bar, the handsome couple in the booth, turn and look at her. The bartender nods. Wagner indicates the seat opposite him.

‘Please. Something to drink?’

She names a herbal cocktail unknown to Wagner. You were frightened before you entered this room, he thinks. But you became angry the moment you saw me. I can read this in the dilation of your pupils, the fixtures of your jawline, the lines on the back of your hand around the glass, the flare of your nostrils; a hundred micro-tells. Sometimes the heightened senses of his full-self overwhelms Wagner in barrage of impressions; sometimes their insight is as precise as a fighting knife. He can smell the components of her drink: a basil and tarragon spritzer with a dash of sours. The water is Peary ice-fresh.

‘You set that up well,’ she says.

‘Thank you. I worked hard at it. I knew you’d run background checks. Did you like the social profile? Minor shareholder in the Polar Lunatics. I actually took a position in the team, in case you checked that. I sold it back when my people told me you were at the door.’ He’s over-telling. It’s a danger in his light-self. Everything is there at once inside him: words fight for a place through the narrow doors of thought and voice. Mundanes are so slow.

‘You were never that diligent in the colloquium.’

‘Diligent. Diligent, yes. No. I’ve changed a lot since then.’

‘So I’ve heard. That’s your usual familiar?’

‘Everything is different when the Earth is round,’ Wagner says.

‘I am scared of you,’ Elisa Stracchi says.

‘Of course. Yes. I had to make sure you wouldn’t run. But I just want information, Elisa.’

‘I didn’t know what it was for.’

Wagner leans forward. Elisa Stracchi flinches at the intensity of his gaze.

‘I don’t think I believe that. No, I don’t believe that at all. An assassination attempt on my brother? Bio-processors specifically designed for a fly-based neurotoxin delivery system? I don’t believe that.’

‘Would you believe me if I told you I have no idea who the client was?’

‘I do believe that you would carry out the same due diligence on your client as you did on me. From which I can conclude that the real client was concealed by a similar nest of shell companies.’

‘You sound like a fucking dick, Wagner,’ Elisa says. Her foot jerks under the table. It does not take wolf senses to read that tell.

‘Sorry. Sorry. Who did you deliver to?’

‘Am I safe, Wagner?’

Wagner wishes he could stop reading her face. Every unconscious muscular twitch and tensing triggers empathies and anxieties in him. Sometimes he wishes that he could just stop perceiving so minutely, reading so deeply. To stop that would be to stop being Wagner Corta.

‘We will protect you.’

She flicks Dr Luz the address of a corporate upload box. Dr Luz interrogates. A shell company, now closed down. She must have known this. The question for Wagner is how many other shell companies and dead drops the file went through before arriving at an assembler. His thoughts are already scurrying along a dozen different paths at once. Wagner thinks of his full mind as a quantum computer; exploring possibilities in many parallel universes at once, then collapsing the superimposed states to a single decision. He knows what to do next.

‘Wagner.’

It’s seconds before Wagner can refocus. Then, full seconds are instants to mundane folk.

‘Fuck you forever. Once a Corta, always a fucking Corta. No one’s ever said no to you, have they? You don’t even understand the word.’

But she hesitates, just a second, just enough, when she turns to leave and finds the bar empty. Wagner doesn’t have the authority to hire private security on the Corta account. He can hire a bar out of his own pocket. And he can crew it with his friends, his family, his pack mates.

That night he runs with his pack up into the roof of the city. Up there, as close as architecture allows to the light of the Earth, old service tunnels have been scraped out into chambers and vesicles. It’s a bar, a club, a lair. It’s like partying in a lung. The air is stagnant and stale. The bar smells of bodies and perfumes and cheap vodka with the polycarbonate tang of the manufactories. The light is blue, Earthshine blue, the music real not piped privately through familiars and so loud it’s physical.

The Magdalena pack from Queen of the South has come to Meridian. They’re the oldest of the moon packs; from the dream-time they have been led by Sasha Volchonok Ermin. Né claims to be the oldest wolf on the moon; first to lift up ner eyes and howl at the Earth. First to claim the pronoun. Né’s a First gen, a head shorter than any of ner pack, but ner charisma lights the bar like Diwali. Wagner finds ner intimidating; né has no regard for him, thinks him a soft aristocrat, no true wolf. Ner pack are rough and aggressive and believe themselves true heirs of the two natures. But they give good party. Already fighters are lining up in the pit, stripped to skins and hankering to wrestle. Wagner is a talker not a fighter and he finds a cavity in the warren of tunnels equally distant from the cheering and the DJ where he holds three conversations simultaneously with a roboticist with Taiyang Moongrid, a broker in physics-limited derivatives and an interior designer specialising in custom woods.

A Magdalena girl arrives on the edge of the conversations. When the Earth is round the wolves of the moon scorn mundane fashion: she is dressed in a lime-green suit-liner, be-scribbled by marker pens in the frenetic, spiralling, winding doodles of the Earth-lit visual imagination.

‘You’re small you’re sweet you smell good,’ she whispers and Wagner picks out every word from the weave of small talk.

‘That’s a look,’ he says.

‘It was a thing, then not a thing, so now a thing again,’ she says. ‘I’m Irina.’ Her familiar is a horned skull with flames flickering from its eyes and nostrils. Another look that was a thing, then not a thing, then a thing again. Wagner has always wondered where the short-lived fad for graffitied suit-liners came from.

‘I’m …’

‘I know who you are, Little Wolf.’

She closes her teeth on his earlobe and whispers, ‘I like to bite.’

‘I like to be bitten,’ Wagner says but before she can haul him away he puts a hand on her breastbone. He can feel every heartbeat, every breath, every surge of blood through her arteries. She smells of honey and patchouli. ‘I have to go to my mamãe’s birthday party tomorrow.’

‘Then respect your Mom and don’t show her too much skin.’

The two suits step in on either side of Lucasinho. He doesn’t know who they are but he knows whose they are.

Lucas Corta sits on the couch where Lucasinho slept. Neat, precise, hands lightly resting on his thighs. Flavia crouches in a corner, among the saints. Her eyes are wide with fear. Her chest heaves, she visibly fights for every breath. Her hands flutter at her chest. Lucasinho has never seen this before but every moon-born know what it is. Her breath has been shorted. She is drowning in clear air.

‘Give her her breath back!’ Lucasinho yells. He crouches beside Madrinha Flavia, his arm around her.

‘Of course,’ Lucas Corta says. ‘Toquinho.’ Flavia takes a deep, rattling, whooping breath, breaks into coughing and choking. Lucasinho pulls her close. Her eyes are scared.

‘Wagner pays for—’

‘I made the LDC a better offer,’ Lucas says. ‘It seems a sensible precaution. If you don’t breathe, you don’t talk.’

‘Fuck you,’ Lucasinho says.

‘You’ve been off the network so you may not know that we’ve scored a famous victory. Corta Hélio. Your family. We’ve staked out new helium-3 exploitation territories in Mare Anguis. The Court of Clavius has recognised our claim. I’ve secured the future for you, son. What do you say to that?’

‘Congratulations.’

‘Thank you.’

Madrinha Flavia’s breathing is even now but still she cowers as if each breath might be her last.

‘Oh, yes. I almost forgot. Switch on Jinji. Go on. You might as well.

Boot is successful, Jinji says. Full access to your accounts has been restored.

‘Feels good to have money and carbon and network, doesn’t it?’ Lucas says. ‘Toquinho.’ The pattern of notes above Lucas’s shoulder spin. There is a spray of virtual notes.

I’ve received a contract transfer, Jinji says. It’s the Four Elementals account for Flavia Vila Nova. Do you accept?

‘Your madrinha looked after you,’ Lucas says. ‘It’s only proper that you should look after her.’

Do you accept? Jinji urges.

‘Flavia,’ Lucasinho says, ‘It’s your account. Pai wants me to take it over. I have to do that.’ Then, to his father, ‘I accept. It’s still your money.’

‘Yes. But I never did buy you a pet when you were a boy, did I?’ Lucas stands up, brushes imaginary dust from his trousers. A nod, the security suits move to the door. ‘One last thing. The important bit. The reason I came. You love parties. Everyone loves parties. I’ve a party invitation for you. Your grandmother’s birthday. Bring a cake. You’re good at cakes. I don’t care if you keep your clothes on or off when you’re making it, but it’s eighty candles.’

Yemanja wakes Adriana Corta with music: Aguas de Marco: her favourite. Elis and Tom cover.

Thank you, she whispers to her familiar and lies under her light sheet, looking up at the ceiling, listening to the music, wondering why this tune, this morning. She remembers. It is her birthday. She is eighty years old today.

Yemanja has chosen birthday dresses: for itself the triple-crescent of the moon herself and for Adriana: Pierre Balmain, 1953, a wing-collared suit, long-sleeved, a tight pencil skirt and an outsized bow on the left hip. Gloves. Bag. Elegant. Flattering on eighty-year-old flesh. Before she dresses, Adriana swims for twenty minutes in the endless pool. She venerates the orixas outside her window with gin and incense. She takes her medication and gags as little as she does every day. She eats five slices of mango while Yemanja updates her on her family’s business. A thousand concerns flock, but they will not land today. Not on her birthday.

First to greet her is Helen de Braga. A kiss, an embrace. Now Heitor Pereira wishes her congratulations for the day. In her honour he wears a fantastical uniform, braid and buttons and shoulder pads that would be ridiculous did he not bear it with such dignity. An embrace, a kiss.

Are you well? they ask.

I am joyful, she says. Death gnaws at her, a little more gone each day and her succession is uncertain but she woke this morning aflame with joy. Joy in the small things, the particular fall of the sunline across the faces of the orixas, the creep of the water up over her body as she lowered herself into the pool, the sweet-sour musk of the mangoes, the rustle of the fabric of her party clothes. Marvellous banalities. There are still new sensations to appreciate in this small world.

Now the grandchildren come running. Robson has a new card trick to show her: in the shuttle, anzinho. Luna brings flowers, a posy of blue that matches her dress. Adriana accepts them though her skin crawls at the touch of the once-living, now dead. She sniffs deeply – Luna giggles: Violetas have no smell, Vo.

Next the okos. There is only one remaining at Boa Vista. Amanda Sun embraces her mother-in-law and kisses her on each cheek.

The madrinhas now. Amalia and Ivete and Monica, Elis casting an eye over Robson, adjusting the knot of his tie, the set of his collar. Rafa, Lucas, Ariel and Carlinhos have long moved out of Boa Vista but their madrinhas remain. Adriana would never banish them from Boa Vista: Cortas honour their obligations. She would rather have them in one place, under her sky, rather than scattered across the world with their gossip and secrets. Like that other one. The faithless one. One by one the madrinhas embrace and kiss their benefactor.

Last in line are the staff. It’s a long process, shaking the hands, acknowledging the good wishes for this auspicious day but Adriana Corta works assiduously; a word here, a smile there. Security falls in behind her at the entrance to the station. They form a dark-suited barricade between Adriana and her grandchildren, her oldest retainers, her people. Everyone, from her Director of Finance to her gardener, has reskinned their familiars in party shapes and colours.

The station out-door swishes open. Hands reach for knives: Heitor Pereira had balked at holding the party outside Boa Vista but Adriana insisted. Corta Hélio would not cower inside its fortress. The hands fall away. It’s Lucasinho, with a small paper box.

‘Happy birthday, Vo.’ The box holds a cake, a green-frosted dome delicately decorated with a baroque lace of icing. ‘It’s Swedish Princess cake. I don’t know what Swedish means.’ Embrace and kiss. Lucasinho’s pierces dimple his grandmother’s skin.

‘With or without clothes?’ Adriana asks. ‘I do hope without.’ Lucasinho blushes. It’s quite adorable on him. ‘Are you wearing make-up?’

‘I am, Vo.’

‘That colour liner really brings out the gold in your eyes. Maybe highlight the cheekbones a little more. Play to your strengths.’ He is a sweet boy.

The party will travel in two trams. Entourage first; Adriana, immediate family and security in the second shuttle. In the three-minute journey Robson shows his vo his new card trick – it’s themed around people evacuating a leaking habitat: court cards all escaping from the top of the deck – and everyone gets their fingers a little green and sticky with Lucasinho’s cake.

João de Deus is a working city and Adriana Corta would never sacrifice profit to declare a universal holiday, even on her eightieth birthday but many residents and contractees have taken a few minutes’ leave and turned out to salute the First Lady of Helium. They watch the fleet of motos ferry the Cortas down Kondakova Prospect and up the ramp to the hotel where Lucas has arranged the birthday lunch. They applaud, some wave. Adriana Corta raises a gloved hand in acknowledgement. Blimps in the shape of cartoon animals manoeuvre on hushed micro-fans through São Sebastião Quadra like a divine circus. Adriana looks up as the shadow of M-Kat Xu falls over her. She smiles.

Heitor Pereira’s people have been working for days, discreetly securing the hotel. Since mid-morning they have been discreetly scanning the guests. Applause; turning heads. Adriana arrives in the middle of a cocktail reception, whirled from face to face, party dress to party dress; kiss to kiss. Her boys, her handsome boys in their best suits. Ariel is late, Ariel is always late for family. Lucas is visibly annoyed but he is not his sister’s keeper. This is a world without police, even family police.

Family close and far: a warm embrace from Lousika Asamoah, always Adriana’s favourite among the okos. Cousins by blood and marriage; the Sores from Carlos’s side of the family and minor clans; allies by nikah. Society next. An apology has been received from the Eagle of the Moon – no Eagle has ever accepted Adriana’s birthday invitation. Adriana dances an elegant waltz among Asamoahs from Twé and immaculate Suns from the Palace of Eternal Light and Vorontsov grandees; houses lesser and petty, socialites and trend-setters, reporters and celebrities, amors and okos. Lucasinho’s moon-run cohort are here, self-conscious and remaining in each other’s social orbit. Adriana Corta has a word for each. Her social wake spirals off a hundred conversations and liaisons.

Politics last of all. LDC bureaucrats and Farside University deans. Soap stars and chart musicians, artists and architects and engineers. Adriana Corta has always filled her anniversaries with engineers. The media: social net reporters and fashion commentators; sharers and content-creators. The religious: Cardinal Okogie and Grand Mufti el-Tayyeb; Abbot Sumedho and, all in white, a Sister of the Lords of Now. Irmã Loa curtsies to her patron.

Ariel appears at her mother’s side. A kiss and an apology, which Adriana waves away.

Thank you.

If I’d missed your eightieth, you’d never have forgiven me.

That’s not what I’m thanking you for.

Ariel snaps her vaper to its full length and lets the party claim her.

Adriana looks up in delight at the sound of music. Bossa nova. The party parts before her as she is drawn to its source.

It’s the same band we had at Lucasinho’s moon-run, Adriana says. How lovely.

Lucas is at her side. He has never been more than two steps away from her through all the social turns and pirouettes of Adriana’s progress.

All your favourites, Mamãe. The old tunes.

Adriana runs her hand over Lucas’s cheek.

You are a good boy, Lucas.

Wagner Corta slips late into the restaurant, still trying to get comfortable in his print-fresh suit. The dimensions are right but it sits wrong, tight where it needs to be generous, rubbing where it needs to caress.

‘Lobinho!’ Rafa greets Wagner open-armed and effusive. Crushing embrace, heavy back slaps. Wagner winces. Man-breath. Wagner can identify the constituents of every cocktail his brother has thrown down his throat. ‘It’s Mamãe’s birthday, could you not have shaved?’ Rafa looks Wagner up and down. ‘And your familiar isn’t familiar.’

With a thought Wagner banishes Dr Luz and summons Sombra though everyone who knows he is of the two selves can tell he’s the wolf from his fidgeting in his skin, the way he looks as if he is listening to several conversations at once, the generous stubble on his face.

‘She missed you at the receiving line.’ Rafa scoops a cocktail from a tray and slips it into Wagner’s hand. ‘Just make sure you get to her before you get to Lucas. He’s not in a forgiving mood today.’

Wagner barely made the express; savouring every moment with Irina. She had bitten him. She had sucked his flesh so hard she left bruises. She had pinched and twisted and made him cry out. She had tugged his skin with gentle loving teeth. The sex had been the least part of it, perfunctory, obvious. She awoke sensations and emotions new to Wagner. His senses rang all night. He picked up the suit from the station printer, changed in the train washroom, gingerly pulling shirt and pants over still raw wounds and bruises. Each tiny pain was an ecstasy. She had obeyed Wagner’s instruction and left hands, neck, face unmarked.

‘I’ve found something,’ Wagner says.

‘Tell me.’

‘I recognised one of the protein processors. You wouldn’t be able to see it but, to me, it’s like putting your name up in neon.’

‘You’re talking kind of fast, Little Wolf.’

‘Sorry. Sorry. I met up with the designer – we went to university together. Same colloquium. She gave me an inbox address. Dead of course. But I got the pack to work on it.’

‘Slowly slowly. You did what?’

‘Got the pack to work on it.’

The Meridian pack are agriculturalists, dusters, roboticists, nail artists, bartenders, sports performers, musicians, masseurs, lawyers, club owners, track-engineers, families great and small; a diversity of skills and learning; yet, when they come together, when they focus on one task, something marvellous happens. The pack seems to share knowledge, to instinctively complement each other, to form a perfect team; a unity of purpose: almost a gestalt. Wagner has seen it rarely, participated in it once only but never called on it until now. The pack convened, minds and talents and wills blurred and merged and within five hours he had the identity of the engineering shop that built the assassin-fly. There’s nothing supernatural about it; Wagner doesn’t believe in the supernatural; it’s a rational miracle. It’s a new way of being human.

‘It was a one-shot engineering house called Smallest Birds,’ Wagner says. ‘Based in Queen of the South. Registered to Joachim Lisberger and Jake Tenglong Sun.’

‘Jake Tenglong Sun.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything. The company produced one item, delivered it and then dissolved.’

‘Do we know who they delivered it to?’

‘Trying to find that out. I’m more interested in who commissioned it.’

‘And do you have any leads on that?’

‘I may take this up with Jake Sun, personally,’ Wagner says.

‘Good work, Little Wolf,’ Rafa says. Another agonising slap on the back. Every bite mark shrieks. Rafa has steered Wagner to the edge of Adriana’s progress through the well-wishers.

‘Mamãe, happy birthday.’

Adriana Corta’s lips tighten. Then she leans towards him, an invitation to kiss. Two kisses.

‘You could have shaved,’ she says, to small laughter from her entourage, but as she wheels away into the party she whispers in his ear, ‘if you want to stay a while, your old apartment at Boa Vista is ready for you.’

Marina hates the dress. It catches and itches, it’s voluminous and uncomfortable. She feels naked in it; vulnerable, that one too-abrupt move and it will fall from her shoulders around her ankles. And the shoes are ridiculous. But it’s fashionable and it’s expected and while no one would whisper if she turned up in a pant-suit or men’s tailoring, Carlinhos makes it clear to Marina that Adriana would notice.

Marina is trapped in a dull conversation whorl dominated by a loud sociologist from Farside U and his theories about post-national identities in second and third generation lunarians.

All this and you can’t come up with a better name for moon-dwellers that Lunarians, Marina thinks. She runs phrases: Moonfolk, lunarites, loonie moonie moonish loonish. None good. Rescue me, she pleads to the orixa of parties.

She spies Carlinhos pushing through the press of bodies and festive familiars and cocktail glasses.

‘My mother wants to meet you.’

‘Me? What?’

‘She’s asked.’

He’s already leading her by the hand through the party.

‘Mãe, this is Marina Calzaghe.’

Marina’s first impression of Adriana Corta had been coloured by a knife blade at her throat, but she seems to have aged more than the intervening lunes – no, not aged: withered, collapsed, become more transparent.

‘Many happy returns, Senhora Corta.’

Marina’s proud of her Portuguese now, but Adriana Corta flows to Globo.

‘It seems once again my family is obliged to you.’

‘Like they say, I was just doing my job, ma’am.’

‘If I gave you another job, would you execute it as faithfully?’

‘I’d do my best.’

‘I do have another job. I need you to look after someone.’

‘Senhora Corta, I’ve never been been good with small children. I scare them …’

‘You won’t scare this child. Though she may scare you.’

Adriana’s nod directs Marina across the room, to Ariel Corta, a brilliant flame at the heart of a clutch of soberly dressed court officials and LDC technocrats. She laughs, she throws her head back, tosses her hair, weaves ideograms of smoke from her vaper.

‘I don’t understand, Senhora Corta.’

‘I need someone to mind my daughter. I fear for her.’

‘If you want a bodyguard, Senhora Corta, there are trained fighters …’

‘If I wanted a bodyguard she would have one already. I have dozens of bodyguards. I want an agent. I want you to be my eyes, my ears, my voice. I want you to be her friend and her chaperone. She’ll hate you, she’ll fight you, she’ll try to get rid of you, she’ll shun you and snub you and be vile to you. But you will stay with her. Can you do this?’

Marina has no words. This is impossible, to do, to refuse. In her scratchy dress she stands in front of Adriana Corta and all she can think is but Carlinhos won’t be there.

Carlinhos nudges her. Adriana Corta is waiting.

‘I can, Senhora Corta.’

‘Thank you.’ Her smile is true, and the kiss on Marina’s cheek warm but Marina shivers, chilled by the eternal waiting cold.

She leads him through the party, a dance in a red dress. She glances back to see if he is still looking, still following, moving on to keep her distance from him. Rafa catches her on the balcony. The balloon bestiary has flocked in around the restaurant, they wait, bobbing in the sky like prototype gods that never successfully auditioned for a pantheon.

Without a word, Rafa draws her to him. They kiss.

‘You are the most beautiful thing in this world,’ Rafa says. ‘In both worlds.’

Lousika Asamoah smiles.

‘Who’s looking after Luna?’ she asks.

‘Madrinha Elis. She misses you. She wants her mamãe back.’

‘Sssh.’ Lousika Asamoah touches a carmine nail to Rafa’s lips. ‘It’s always this.’ They kiss again.

‘Lousika, the contract.’

‘Our marriage expires in six lunes.’

‘I want to renew it.’

‘Even though I’m living in Twé and and you’re keeping my daughter and we only ever see each other at your family’s social events.’

‘Even so.’

‘Rafa, I’ve been invited on to the Kotoko.’

Rafa admires and is at the same time baffled by AKA politics. The Golden Stool is a council of eight family members representing the abusuas. The Chair, the Stool, the Omahene, rotates annually through those members, as the Golden Stool itself moves from AKA habitat to habitat. It seems unnecessarily complex and democratic to Rafa Corta. Continuity is preserved by the Sunsum, the familiar of the Omahene which contains all the records and wisdoms of its preceding Omahenes.

‘Does this mean you won’t come back to Boa Vista?’

‘It’ll be eight years before I get to sit on the Golden Stool again. Luna will be fourteen. A lot can happen. I can’t turn it down.’

Rafa steps back and holds his wife at arm’s length, as if examining her for signs of divinity or madness.

‘I want to renew the contract, Rafa. But I can’t come back to Boa Vista. Not just yet.’

Rafa chews back furious disappointment. He forces himself to take time, swallow the words he feels.

‘That’s enough,’ he says.

Lousika takes the lapels of his jacket and pulls him to her. Their familiars merge and mingle; inter-penetrating illusions.

‘Could we not just sneak away from this party?’

Lucas spirals in from the edge of the party and cuts out Amanda Sun from among her laughing siblings and cousins. A touch on her elbow.

‘A word. In private.’

He takes her by the elbow to the dining room, set out for the birthday feast around a ceiling-scraping ice-sculpture of birds taking flight. Through the swing doors to the kitchen.

‘Lucas, what is this?’

Past the stoves and sinks and titanium work-surfaces, past the chillers and food-safes, the rise and fall of blades and choppers to a store room.

‘Lucas, what is wrong with you? Let go of me. You’re scaring me.’

‘I’m going to divorce you, Amanda.’

She laughs. The small, almost irritated laugh that finds what has just been said ridiculous. Unthinkable. Like the moon crashing into Hudson Bay. Then, ‘Oh my God, you are serious.’

‘Have I ever been anything else?’

‘No one could say that you weren’t serious, Lucas. And I can’t say that the idea doesn’t appeal to me. But we aren’t free in these things, are we? My father won’t tolerate an insult to his daughter.’

‘It wasn’t me insisted on the monogamy clause.’

‘You signed it. What is this really, Lucas?’ Amanda studies his face, as if divining sickness or insanity. ‘Oh my God. This is love, isn’t it? You actually love someone.’

‘Yes,’ Lucas Corta says. ‘Do you want me to break the contract, or will both parties agree to an annulment?’

‘You’re in love.’

‘I’d appreciate it if you moved everything out of Boa Vista before the end of the lune,’ Lucas calls back from the storeroom door. The restaurant staff work intently on placing and plating and glazing their sculpted amuse-bouches. ‘There will be no question over Lucasinho. He’s of majority.’ Lucas stalks through the kitchen. In the store-room, Amanda Sun laughs and laughs, laughs until she has to rest to hands on her knees in exhaustion, then laughs again.

‘Hey.’

‘So hey.’

‘So why were you bouncing my messages?’

Abena Asamoah twists the toe of a satin Rayne stiletto, looks away. She flicks the stud in Lucasinho’s ear.

‘You’ve still got it. That make-up really works on you.’

He has run her down here at the cocktail bar, edged her into a quiet corner. Part of him says, This is stalkery, Luca.

‘My grandmother thinks so too.’

Lucasinho grins and sees it touch Abena and draw the smallest of smiles from her.

‘So if I had a real emergency, I could go to you.’ Lucasinho taps the spike.

‘Of course. That’s what it means.’

‘It’s just …’

‘What?’

‘When I was at the pool party at Twé, you wouldn’t even look at me.’

‘When you were at that pool party you were all over Ya Afuom, and you were out of your skull on gods-know-what.’

‘Nothing happened with Ya Afuom.’

‘I know.’

‘And why would it matter to you if something had happened?’

Abena takes a deep breath, as if about to explain a hard truth, like vacuum, or the Four Elementals, to a child.

‘When you saved Kojo, I would have done anything for you. I respected you. I respected you so much much. You were brave and you were kind – you still are. But when you go to see Kojo in Med Centre, all you want is to get his apartment. You used him. Like you let Grigori Vorontsov use you like a sex toy. I’m not a prude, Luca, but that was gross. You needed stuff and you used anyone who could get it for you. You stopped respecting other people, you stopped respecting yourself and I stopped respecting you.’

Lucasinho’s face burns. He thinks of excuses, defences, justifications – I was angry at my father, my dad cut me off, I’d nowhere to go, I was off the network, it was all people I felt something for, I was exploring, it was a mad time, it was only for a little time, I didn’t hurt anyone – not badly. They sound like whining. They can’t abolish the truth. He didn’t fuck Ya Asamoah, but if he had it would have been for a few nights in her apartment; a soft bed and warm flesh and laughing. Like Grigori, like Kojo. Like his own aunt. He is guilty. His only hope for repairing hearts with Abena is to admit it.

‘You’re right.’

Abena stands, arms folded, magnificently magisterial.

‘You’re right.’

Still not a word.

‘It’s true. I was vile to people.’

‘People who cared about you.’

‘Yes. People who cared about me.’

‘Make me a cake,’ Abena says. ‘Isn’t that what you do to make amends? Bake them a cake?’

‘I’ll make you a cake.’

‘I want cupcakes. Thirty-two. I want a cup-cake party with my abusua-sisters.’

‘What kind of flavour?’

‘Every kind of flavour.’

‘Okay. Thirty-two cupcakes. And I’ll stream you the video of me making them, so you can see I’m making them right.’

Abena gives a little shriek of false outrage, slips off her right shoe and bangs Lucasinho none-too-gently on his chest.

‘You are an insolent boy.’

‘You tried to drink my blood.’

Security alert, Jinji says in Lucasinho’s ear. Remain calm, Corta Hélio security personnel are en route. Across the room hands fly to ears, faces ask questions: what where? A woman in a Tina Leser frock vaults over the bar, pushes Abena away and puts herself between Lucasinho and the danger. She has a knife in each hand.

‘What’s going on?’ Lucasinho says and then the movement of the guests away from the restaurant door shows him. With six corporate blades at his back, Duncan Mackenzie has crashed the party.

Heitor Pereira strides forward to confront Duncan Mackenzie. The CEO of Mackenzie Metals stops centimetres from the outstretched hand. He raises an eyebrow at the Corta man’s flamboyant uniform. Behind both men are their armed retainers, hands on blades.

Rafa pushes through the line of security personnel. Lucas is a step behind him, on either shoulder Carlinhos and Wagner. Lucas flicks a glance to his son; Lucasinho pushes past his bodyguard to fall in with the men.

‘What are you doing here?’ Rafa says. The room is motionless. Not a cocktail supped, not a glass of tea sipped.

‘I’m here to pay the compliments of the day to your mother,’ says Duncan Mackenzie.

‘We’ll throw you out like we threw you out at Beikou,’ a voice shouts from the line of security men. Rafa raises a hand: enough.

‘Boys, boys.’ Adriana touches Rafa on the hip and he drifts aside. ‘You’re welcome here, Duncan. But so many men?’

‘Trust is a short market right now.’

Adriana extends a hand. Duncan Mackenzie stoops to kiss it.

‘Happy birthday.’ Then, in a whisper of Portuguese, ‘We need words. Family to family.’

‘We do,’ Adriana replies in the same tongue, then, in command, ‘Have another place set at my table. Beside me. Drinks for Mr Mackenzie’s entourage.’

‘Mamãe?’ Lucas says. Adriana brushes by.

‘You’re not hwaejang yet. None of you.’

The food is exquisite, dish after dish, course after course of harmonious flavours and discordant textures, liquids and gels, geometries and temperatures but Adriana can only pick at it with her poison-sensing chopsticks. A scent, a taste to understand the theory and the skill. On her left hand Duncan Mackenzie eats with enthusiasm and many compliments; honouring the skill by not speaking until the last course is cleared.

‘Congratulations on the Mare Anguis,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. He lifts his glass of mint tea.

‘You don’t mean that,’ Adriana says.

‘Of course I don’t. But it was cutely done and I admire that. You have fucked up our helium-3 development plan. How did you hear about the licence?’

‘Ariel is in the Pavilion of the White Hare.’

Duncan Mackenzie chews over this aftertaste for a few moments.

‘We should have known that.’

‘How did you learn about it?’

‘The Eagle of the Moon is a terrible pillow talker.’

‘If I can find an advantage for my own people, I’ll take it,’ Adriana says.

‘The Iron Law,’ Duncan Mackenzie says. ‘Served us well. I must have a word with Adrian. He needs some new tricks for the Eagle.’

‘Why are you here, Duncan?’

Duncan Mackenzie has Lucas’s place at Adriana’s left hand; Lucas is banished to a low table from which he repeatedly glances with clear loathing. Adriana catches his glance: This is not your business.

‘Birthdays are a time for looking forwards.’

‘Not at my age.’

‘Humour me. Five years, where will we be?’

‘In this room, celebrating.’

‘Or up in the Bairro Alto, selling our piss and clawing for food and water and fighting for every breath. The moon is changing. It’s not the world it was when you and my dad fought. If we fight now, we will both lose.’ Duncan Mackenzie speaks on a private channel, Esperance to Yemanja, subvocalising his words. Adriana responds in the same small voice.

‘I have no desire to go back to the corporate wars.’

‘But we are heading that way. The Beikou fight was only the start. There’s been trouble at St Ekaterina and Port Imbrium. Someone will be killed. We caught one of your surface workers at Torricelli trying to sabotage a Mackenzie Metals rover.’

‘What have you done with them?’

‘We’re holding her. There’ll be a fee, but it’s better than what Hadley wanted, which was to put her out the lock.’

‘My grandson Robson is surprisingly good with a knife. Do you know where he learned that? From Hadley. He’s over there. See him showing a card trick to Jaden Wen Sun? He’s been doing that ever since he escaped from Crucible. If anyone’s touched him—’

‘I assure you no one has. But you have your son. My daughter is dead.’

‘We had nothing to do with that.’

The silent speech is becoming impassioned, betraying itself in clenched jaws, tense throats, moving lips. Ariel looks across from her seat at the round table. Adriana knows her daughter is a talented lipreader. It’s a useful courtroom skill.

‘Who profits if we fight?’

‘When Dragons fight, everyone burns,’ Adriana says. It’s a Sun proverb, of recent, lunar provenance.

‘I’ll rein my people in if you do the same for yours.’

‘Agreed.’

‘That includes your family.’

Adriana’s mouth twitches with anger at the presumption. Rafa takes his hot temper from his mother, but she has a control, shaped over decades of corporate wars and board-room battles, investor pitches and legal tussles that he has never needed to learn. Anger is one of his many privileges.

‘Rafa is bu-hwaejang.’

‘I’m not saying demote him. I would never presume that. I’m suggesting maybe he could share responsibilities.’

‘With whom?’

‘Lucas.’

‘You know my family too well,’ Adriana says.

‘We didn’t try to assassinate Rafa,’ Duncan says aloud.

‘We didn’t kill Rachel,’ Adriana says. Heads are turning now. ‘Excuse me, Duncan. I’ll pass the word. I’m expected to make a speech now.’ She taps her cocktail glass with her chopstick, a clear chime that silences the chattering room. Adriana Corta rises to her feet.

‘My dear guests; friends, colleagues, associates, family. I am eighty years old today. Eighty years ago I was born in Barra de Tijuca in Brazil, on another world. For fifty of those years, over half of my life, I have lived on this world. I came to it as one of the first settlers, I have watched two generations grow up; my children’s and my grandchildren’s, and now it seems I am a Founding Mother. The moon has changed me in many ways. It has changed my body so that I can never go back to the world I came from. To you of the younger generations, that is a strange notion. You have never known anywhere other than this world, and though I talk about the changes the moon has worked on me, they are nothing compared to the ones I see in you. So tall! So elegant! And my grandchildren, why, I think I would need wings to be able to fly up to kiss you! The moon has changed my life. The girl from Barra, Outrinha, the Plain One is the owner of a powerful corporation. When I go up to the observation dome and look with my bare eyes at the Earth, I see those webs of lights across night on Earth and I think, I light those lights. That’s another thing the moon changes in people: there is no gain from modesty.

‘The moon changes families: I see friends and relatives and colleagues from all Five Dragons, I see retainers and madrinhas; but I am not like you. You came with your families, you Suns and Asamoahs and Vorontsovs, you Mackenzies, you of no great family. When I set up Corta Hélio I offered every member of my family back on Earth the chance to follow me to the moon and work with me. Not one took my offer. Not one had the courage or the hope to leave Earth. So, I built my own family; my dear Carlos and his family, but also dear friends who are as close to me as family; Helen, and Heitor. Thank you for your years of service, and love.

‘And the moon has changed my heart. I came here as a Brazilian, I stand here as a woman of the moon. I gave up one identity to build another one. It’s the same for all of us, I think; we keep our language and our customs, our cultures and our names, but we are the moon.

‘But the greatest thing the moon changes is itself. I’ve seen this world go from a research base to a handful of industrial habitats to a full civilisation. Fifty years is a long time in a human life; it’s even longer in the life of a new nation. We are no mean satellite; we are a world now. Down on Earth they say we’ve raped it, taken its natural beauty and despoiled it with our tracks and our trains and our extractors, our solar batteries and server farms and our billions and billions of eternal footprints. Our mirrors dazzle them, down there; our King Dong offends them. But the moon always was ugly. No, not ugly. Plain. To see the beauty of this place, you have to go under the surface. You have to dig down to the cities and quadras, the habitats and agraria. You have to see the people. I’ve played my part in building this wonderful world. More than my company, even more than my family, it’s my proudest achievement.

‘At the age of eighty, it’s time to enjoy my achievements. My world is in good shape, my family are proud and respected, my company has gone from strength to strength, not least our recent successful acquisition of the Mare Anguis fields. So, for Adriana Corta, at last, a rest. I am stepping down from my position as hwaejang of Corta Hélio. Rafael will be hwaejang, Lucas will be bu-hwaejang. You’ll find nothing changed: my boys have been effectively running the company for the past ten years. For me, I shall enjoy my retirement and the company of my family and friends. Thank you for your good wishes for this day; I shall treasure them in the days to come. Thank you.’

Adriana sits down to consternation. Around the room, around her table, mouths are open in astonishment. All but Duncan Mackenzie, who leans close to Adriana and whispers, ‘I sure picked the right party to crash.’ Adriana answers with a small laugh but its bright, silvery; almost a girl’s. An unburdened laugh. Ariel is leaning across the table, Rafa is on his feet, Carlinhos, Wagner; everyone asking questions at the same time, until a loud, steady handclap cuts through. Lucas stands, hands raising, applauding. Across the room another pair of hands replies; then two, then four, then the whole party is standing, raining applause on Adriana Corta. She stands, smiles, bows.

Lucas’s is the last pair of hands to fall silent.

After the shock, the questions.

Helen de Braga slides in a whisper before Ariel’s arrival.

‘I thought you said it was too morbid for your birthday.’

‘I only said I was retiring,’ Adriana says. She squeezes her old friend’s hand. ‘Later.’

Ariel kisses her mother.

‘I thought for one hideous moment you were going to give me a job.’

‘Oh, my love,’ Adriana says, then finds her tone of command to her entourage. ‘I’m very tired. It’s been a demanding day. I’d like to go home.’

Heitor Pereira summons security. They cordon Adriana from the inquisitions of her guests.

‘Congratulations on your retirement Senhora,’ Heitor says, ‘but with respect to my position; it’s no secret that Lucas wants rid of me.’

‘I look after my own, Heitor.’

The guards part for Rafa. Behind him is Lousika Asamoah. Rafa embraces his mãe.

‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I won’t let you down.’

‘I’ve thought about the succession long and hard.’ Adriana strokes his cheek.

‘Succession?’ Rafa asks but Adriana is already receiving a stiff embrace from Lucas.

‘Whatever possessed you, Mamãe?’

‘I’ve always been attracted to the dramatic.’

‘In front of that Mackenzie.’

‘He’d have found out. Whispers fly around the world in an instant.’

‘The CEO of Mackenzie Metals. They tried to kill Rafa.’

‘And I gave him my word that we would not go back to the old corporate war days.’

‘Mãe, you’re not hwaejang any more.’

‘I didn’t give him my word as hwaejang.’

‘They’ll break it. Duncan Mackenzie may give his word, but his father doesn’t forgive. The Mackenzies repay three times.’

‘I trust him, Lucas.’

Lucas purses his fingers, dips his head but Adriana knows he cannot concur. After him come Carlinhos, Wagner, the madrinhas and the children: Adriana progresses down an aisle of ringing applause and smiling faces. At the door she sees a figure among the ornamental trees.

‘Let me through.’

Irmã Loa lifts her crucifix from among her beads. Adriana Corta bends to kiss it.

‘When will you tell them?’ Irmã Loa whispers.

‘When the succession is secure,’ Adriana says. Familiars are listening, they can hear whispers but they can’t parse private code. Irmã Loa takes out a flask and sprinkles Adriana Corta with sacred water.

‘The blessing of Saints Jesus and Mary, Jeronimo and Our Lady of Conception, Saint George and Saint Sebastian, Cosmos and Damian and the Lord of the Cemeteries, Santa Barbra and Santa Anne on you, your family and all your projects.’

Motos glide in to the lobby, silent and accurate.

Ariel’s heels are glorious and impractical but they add elegance to her flounce to the lobby. But Marina is surface-fit, a Long-runner and she catches Ariel by the elbow.

‘I don’t like it either, but your mother ordered me—’

A hand, a grip, a twist and Marina follows the path that doesn’t end in dislocated joints, snapped bones. The party spins and she’s on her back, winded on the waxed wooden floor.

‘When you can do this to me, maybe then I’ll need a bodyguard,’ Ariel says and steps into the moto that has opened up like before her like a hand.

‘It’s still my job,’ Marina mutters as Corta security picks her up and sets her on her feet again but the moto is a half of Kondakova Prospekt away by now, a bright bauble of advertising, tracked by the balloon bestiary.

‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’

Abena’s touch on Lucasinho’s arm.

‘You doing anything?’

‘Why?’

‘Just, some of us are going on to a club.’

She could have messaged him through Jinji, but she came in person, to touch him.

‘Who?’

‘Me, my abusua-sisters, Nadia and Kseniya Vorontsov. We’re meeting up with some of the folk from the Zé Ka Colloquium. You coming?’

They’re looking over at him, in their party clothes and coloured shoes and he wants more than anything to go with them, to be with Abena and look for chances; to redeem himself, to impress her. Two images won’t leave his head: his father’s two suits on either side of him. Flavia huddled among her saints, fighting to breathe.

‘I can’t. I really have to go spend some time with my madrinha.’

Parties decay by half-life. Conversations lose momentum. Topics are exhausted. It’s tiring to talk. Everyone who should be cruised has been cruised. The hook-ups have hooked up, or failed and no one’s listening to the music any more. The staff begin to clear. There is an evening service in an hour’s time.

Lucas lingers, aware that he is in the way and that his presence is barely tolerated but wanting to bestow thanks here, a handshake there, a tip or a bonus. He has always appreciated work well done and believed it should be rewarded.

‘My mãe was delighted,’ he says to the restaurateur. ‘I’m very happy.’

The band pack their instruments. They seem pleased with their performance. Lucas thanks them individually; Toquinho is generous with its tips. A whisper to Jorge: A moment, if you would.

A look from Lucas clears the balcony.

‘Another balcony,’ Jorge says. Lucas leans on the glass wall, looking down the length of São Sebastião Quadra. The birthday blimps have been flown down to ground level, puny humans struggle to wrangle the floating gods with ropes and grapples and deflate them.

‘Thank you, Jorge,’ Lucas says and there is a tone in his voice that kills every quip or levity in Jorge’s conversation. A rawness, a choke.

‘Thank you, Senhor Corta,’ Jorge says.

‘Senhor …’ Lucas begins. ‘You made my mamãe’s day. No, this isn’t what I want to say. I am bu-hwaejang of Corta Hélio, I argue strategy in the board, I talk for a living and I can’t speak. I had a preamble, Jorge. All my justifications and realisations. All about me.’

‘When my fingers freeze, when I can’t get a line, when I feel the music wrong in me, I remember that I’m there because I’m doing something no one else in that room can,’ Jorge says. ‘I’m not like everyone. I’m exceptional. I’m allowed to be arrogant about that. You, Lucas; you’ve every right to say whatever you want, whatever you think.’

Lucas starts, as if realisation were a nail driven between his eyes. His hands grasp the glass rail.

‘Yes. Simple.’ He looks at Jorge. ‘Jorge, will you marry me?’

This time, Duncan Mackenzie is summoned to the glasshouse. The shuttle has arrived, Esperance announces. Duncan adjusts the lie of his lapels, the fall of his trouser turn-ups, the length of his cuffs. He checks his appearance once more through Esperance. A whistle of breath through the teeth and he steps into the shuttle.

His father waits among the tree ferns. The air smells of damp and rot. Duncan can no longer read any emotion in his father’s face. Everything is age, lines deep moon-carved. How easy to pull that plug, tug that line, rip out that tube and watch his father leak and gurgle himself to death all over the floor of his precious Fern Gully. Compost to compost. Food for plants. The medics would only bring him back to life again. They have done it three times already, catching that light in his eyes before it guttered out and using it to rekindle his ruin of a body. This is what I have to look forward to.

Behind Robert Mackenzie stands Jade Sun.

‘Her birthday. Did you sing “Happy Birthday to you, dear Adriana”?’

‘Not her.’ Duncan flicks a look at Jade Sun.

‘Whatever you say to Robert you say to me,’ Jade Sun says. ‘With or without familiars.’

‘What she says,’ Robert Mackenzie says. ‘I thought we were a laughing stock before. Jesus God boy, you went to her birthday party.’

‘I talked to her, Dragon to Dragon.’

‘You talked to her pussy to pussy. You’ll rein our people in? Our people? What kind of pussy deal is that? You’d tie our hands and let those thieves turn us out bare-ass naked on to the surface. In my day we knew how to deal with enemies.’

‘Forty years ago, Dad. Forty years ago. This is a new moon.’

‘The moon doesn’t change.’

‘Adriana Corta is retiring.’

‘Rafael is hwaejang. Fucking clown. Lucas will run the show. That cunt has the right stuff. He’d never sign up to some kind of gentleman’s agreement.’

‘Ariel is a member of the White Hare,’ Duncan says. The old man sheds spittle as he rages. In lunar gravity it flies in long, elegant, poisonous arcs.

‘I fucking know that. I’ve known that for weeks. Adrian told me.’

‘You didn’t tell me.’

‘And a good thing too. It would just have sent you running and hiding. She’s much more than a White Hare, Ariel Corta.’

‘Ariel Corta has been inducted into the Lunarian Society,’ Jade Sun says.

‘The what?’ Duncan Mackenzie shakes his head with confused frustration. There is nothing he can hold in this fight, no grips on his father.

‘A grouping of influential industrial, academic and legal talents,’ Jade Sun says. ‘They advocate lunar independence. Vidhya Rao has recruited her. Darren Mackenzie is a member.’

‘You kept this from me?’

‘Your father’s political beliefs differ from ours. The Suns have always been staunch for independence, since we threw off the People’s Republic. We believe it was the the Lunarian Society leaked the information about the claim release to Ariel Corta.’

‘We?’

‘The Three August Sages,’ Jade Sun says.

‘They’re not real.’ It is one of the legends of the moon; birthed as soon as Taiyang began to thread its AI systems through every part of lunar society and infrastructure: the computers so powerful, the algorithm so subtle, that it could predict the future.

‘I assure you they are. Whitacre Goddard has been running a quantum stochastic algorithmic system we built for them for over a year now. Do you really think we’d let Whitacre Goddard run our hardware without installing a back door?’

‘Yeah yeah,’ Robert Mackenzie. ‘Quantum voodoo. White Hare and Lunarians: what matters is; we need to be able to wheel and deal. To do business our way. You’ve threatened our business model, boy. Worse, you’ve brought shame on the family. You’re fired.’

The words are tiny, shrill as the bird whistles in this terrarium; heard but pushed to a distance.

‘This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.’

‘I’m CEO now.’

‘You can’t do that. The board—’

‘Not this again. The board—’

‘I know about the fucking board. You can’t because I resign.’

‘You know, you always were a petulant little shit. That’s why I did it five minutes ago. Your executive authorisations are revoked. I’m in sole possession of the codes.’

The shuttle has arrived, Esperance says.

‘I’m back, son,’ Robert Mackenzie says and now Duncan sees emotion where before there had only been rage and impotence. The body still pops and hisses, the stench is still sickly but that light that is Robert Mackenzie’s life burns bright and hot. There is tension in his jaw, resolve in the set of his mouth. Duncan Mackenzie is defeated. He is sick with shame. The humiliation is absolute but not yet complete. The final humiliation comes when he turns the heel, walks away through the moist, rattling ferns to the shuttle lock.

‘Do I have to call Hadley?’ Jade Sun asks.

Duncan Mackenzie swallows bile-sick anger. He will never stop hearing the sound of his defeated heels on the deck.

‘You’ve done this!’ he shouts from the lock at Jade Sun. ‘You and all your fucking family. I will punish you for this. We’re the Mackenzies, not your fucking monkeys.’