Luna: New Moon

NINE

He’s been here all along, sitting waiting for me to call him in, listening to all my stories and digressions and smiling because I’m the engineer, I’m the one who’s supposed to be no nonsense, get-to-the-point. He always was patient to a fault. Carlos, you’ll have to wait a little longer. But not much longer.

Achi left and I never saw her or talked to her again. I worked. I had things to do. No time to miss people. Look at my productivity! I didn’t miss her at all. It was a good thing she had gone; love would only have been a distraction. I had a business to build.

I was so busy, I missed my Moonday.

That’s a lie. It’s a lie too that I didn’t miss Achi. I missed her so hard the loss was an ache in me; a vacuum. I missed her sweet seriousness; her tiny kindnesses like tea by my bed every morning or laying out my surface suit neat and right; her tidiness where I was a slob, her attention to detail, the way she would straighten things if we were in the apartment or a hotel or a pod; set things square to the walls of the room. Her inability to get my jokes or pronounce Portuguese. So many things! I pushed them all down in my memory, did not think of them because thinking of her made me think of all the things I would lose forever on the moon. Breathing free. Sunlight on my naked face. Looking up into an open sky. The far horizon; the moon at the edge of the world laying a silver path out across the ocean. Oceans of water not dust. The wind: listen!

I worked like the devil; modelling and designing and planning. It would work. It was simple. But you can only work so much before it eats your stomach and soul. I took a break. An Adriana Corta break. My old mining school mates from DEMIN would have been proud. I worked the twelve bars of Orion Quadra. I fell in through the door of the ninth. By the tenth I was taking bets on how high a tower of shot glasses I could build on the bar – fifteen. By the eleventh I was in an alcove touching foreheads with this sweet big-eyed Santos boy and burbling all my plans and ambitions with his big eyes wide and pretending he was interested. I never made it to bar twelve. I was in bed with the Santos Big-eyes. I was a lousy lover. I cried all night. He was sweet enough to cry along.

I didn’t call my family for a long time after Moonday. I was afraid I would realise I had made a terrible decision, one that I could not reverse. Then I thought, for most of human history, migration has been a one-way trip. Old Portuguese families would hold funerals for children going off to a new life in Brazil. Agency is a comforting fairy story. Life is a series of doors that only open one way. We can never return. This is the world and we must live in it the best we can. But I did listen to a lot of music from the old world, the music my mother loved and sang around the house, and it was as if it floated up from that blue planet down there and settled itself over a new landscape, not the grey hills and scarps and rilles and all that ugliness, but the people. The only beautiful thing on the moon is the people.

So, I was a woman of the moon now. I had committed myself to a new world and a new life. I had an idea and I had money – if you emigrate, the return part of your fare, minus any outstanding balance and the inevitable fees, is refunded to you. I bought convertible LDC bonds. Safe, solid, with a high return. I had a stable of legal and design AIs and a model I was itching to test out in the real world. What I didn’t have was a clue. More specifically, I had no idea how to turn all this into a business. I didn’t have a plan. It was engineering of a kind different from any I knew; how to plan a company and make it work.

Then I met Helen. I had cast a dark net for potential finance directors – none of my people was ever any good with money and I was no exception. It was all deliciously clandestine; encrypted messages – this was before we had familiars – and secretive meetings in teahouses that shifted location at the last minute. I could not risk Mackenzie Metals discovering my plan. You think we live in a wild world now; it’s nothing like the frontier days. But there she was, this woman from Porto and she knew all her stuff and she knew which questions to ask and which not to ask but, can I tell you? What really decided me to take her on was that she spoke Portuguese. I learned English and I was learning Globo – it was beginning to take over as the common language, especially because the machines understood the accent – but there are things you can only say with your own words. We could talk.

I have worked with her every day since. She is my oldest and dearest friend. She will never disappoint me, though I know I have disappointed her many many times. She said, you don’t talk money. Ever. You don’t pay anything unless I tell you to. Ever. And you need a Project Engineer. And I happen to know one, a Brazilian boy, a Paulistano, three months up.

And that was Carlos.

Oh but he was an arrogant bastard. Tall and good looking and funny and knew it. He had that Paulistano sense of superiority: better educated, better food, better music, better work ethic. Cariocas lived on the beach and sat around drinking all night. Never did a stroke of work. We met in a bar, we ate shirataki noodles. You wonder that I remember we ate shirataki noodles. I remember everything about that meeting. 1980s casual was the look then and he wore chinos and a Hawaiian shirt. He treated everything I said as if it was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. He was arrogant and annoying and sexist and he made me so mad. I was a little in hate with him.

I said, ‘Is it all women you have a problem listening to, or just this one?’

Then he spent the next hour laying out the business plan that would become the foundations of Corta Hélio.

Oh but it was fun, that year when we chased our ideas all over the moon. Gods know how we managed to keep breathing. A fare refund is significant money but it runs from you like dust, even when your Finance Director and Project Engineer are only taking for the Four Elementals and sleeping on friends’ floors. The meetings, the pitches, the prospectuses, the promises. The rejections, the realisation that a quick no is better than a long maybe. The thrill when we pinned down an actual, real investor and tasted her bitsies. I was clear: I didn’t want Earth-based investors and equity funds, I didn’t want to be like the Suns, constantly fighting their way out of control from Beijing. I wanted to be like the Mackenzies. There was a proper lunar corporation. Bob Mackenzie had sold his entire terrestrial operation, transferred the funds to the moon and said to the rest of his family: Mackenzies are moon people now. Move up or move out. I had committed to the moon: I could never go back to Earth, I didn’t want Earth coming to me. They would be customers, not owners. Corta Hélio would be my child. Helen de Braga is my dearest friend, she’s a board member but she has never been an owner.

Helen and I worked on the money while Carlos developed the prototype and the business. The moon was a much smaller place then, we couldn’t have built and trialed an extractor without word running round the Farside and back again before we’d even locked helmets. So we went to the Farside and hired a couple of units from the faculty. It wasn’t the university then, it wasn’t much more than an observatory and outpost for research into lethal pathogens. If anything went wrong, it was as far as you could get from Earth and you could dump, DP and irradiate the entire site. The tunnels were far too close to the surface; every night I imagined the radiation sleeting through my ovaries. We coughed all the time. It could have been the dust but we suspected it was some little souvenir from the pathogen lab.

Carlos built the prototype extractor. I say built, I mean, he hired the contractors, the bots, the quality control teams. He showed it to me and I said no no no, that’s not going to work, that’s not robust enough, that process is inefficient; what about maintenance access? We fought like crazy. We fought like a married couple. Still I didn’t love him. I told Helen this. Over and over and over. I must have driven her mad telling her how stupid and arrogant and obstinate he was but she never once told me to just shut up and sleep with the guy. Because I was crazy about him. He could not have been more different from Achi. She went from friend to lover. He could be a lover but never a friend. The attractions were all different, all wrong, and real real real. I thought about him in bed. I thought about him naked, I thought about him doing something stupid and uncharacteristic and romantic like bending over the schematics to see what this annoying woman was on about and now and then kissing me. I flicked off to him. I think he heard. What is it about attraction?

I’ll tell you where I first kissed Carlos: in a little dome on the Mare Fecunditatis that he built for me. Not even a dome, it was a couple of rover pods bermed over with regolith that we used as a base for the field trials. We broke the prototype down and shipped it from Farside in anonymised crates by BALTRAN, jump after jump after jump so it looked random, yet they all ended up where we wanted them, when we wanted them. Then we ran them out by rover to our little base and our team put them all together, in the ass-end of nowhere, where no one would ever look.

We were burning money like oxygen by now. We had enough left for one field test, one tweak and our VIPs. It had to work. We all huddled in our pod and watched the extractor rumble out across the mare. I fired up the extraction heads, the separator screws. Then I hit the switch on the separator and the mirrors swivelled and caught the sun and turned it on the separator and I burst into tears. It was the greatest thing I had ever seen in my life.

We got our first reading after an hour. I don’t think I breathed once those entire sixty minutes. Gas spectrometer read outs: Hydrogen. Water. Helium 4. Carbon Monoxide. Carbon dioxide. Methane. Nitrogen, argon, neon, radon. Volatiles we could sell to AKA and the Vorontsovs. Not what we wanted, not what we were looking for: that tiny spike on the graph, so much smaller than all of the others. I magnified the axes. We all crowded around the display. There. There! Helium-3. Exactly where we thought it would be, in the proportions we expected. Sweet sweet little spectrograph spike. We were in helium. I screamed and danced up and down. Helen kissed me and then she burst into tears. Then I kissed Carlos. I kissed Carlos again. I kissed Carlos again and did not stop.

We drank cheap VTO vodka all huddled together in our tiny pod and got stupidly, dangerously drunk and then I pulled Carlos into my bunk and we made silent, furious, giggling sex while everyone else slept around us.

We conceived a city in that bunk. Those two pods, that shroud of regolith, over years and decades, became João de Deus.

I didn’t marry Carlos right away. I had to get the nikah right and anyway, after Mare Fecunditatis, there was too much to do. I made the calls to our VIPS and booked the tickets. Return trips, Earth-moon, for six people. Two from EDF/Areva, two from PFC India, two from Kansai Fusion. I had been working them for months; telepresence conferences, presentations, sales pitches. I knew they wanted to escape the US-Russian duopoly on terrestrial helium-3 that was keeping the prices of fusion power high and stifling development. It was the oil age again.

It was our biggest risk. Executives from three of Earth’s smaller fusion companies all arrive on the moon at the same time? Even the Mackenzies could work that one out. The question was when they would move, not if. Our sole advantage was that they didn’t know who we were. Yet. If we could could finish the demonstration, negotiate the deal and sign the contract before Bob Mackenzie loosed his blades, then we could defend the contract in the Court of Clavius.

We put them all up in Meridian’s best hotel. We took care of their Four Elementals. We bought the French delegates wine, the Indian delegates whiskey and the Japanese whiskey too. As I said, we were burning money like oxygen.

The night before we were due to ship the VIPs out to Mare Fecunditatis, Mackenzie Metals discovered us. I got a message from our Fecundity base. Dusters with Mackenzie Metals logos had blown up the prototype extractor. They were destroying the volatile storage tanks. They were coming for the base. They were at the base … I heard no more.

I remember I sat in my room and I had no idea what to do. I sat in my room and did not know what to feel. I was numb. I was falling. It was like free fall. I wanted to vomit. The extractor; all our work, but more, so much more, the lives. People I had laughed with, drunk with, worked with; people who were more my family than my family. People who had trusted me. They were dead because they had trusted me. I had killed them. We were children, I realised. We had been playing at businesses. The Mackenzies were adult and they did not play. We were a children’s crusade, marching into our own ignorance. I sat in my room and imagined Mackenzie blades in the elevator, at the door, outside the window.

Carlos saved me. Carlos pulled me down, Carlos was my gravity. We win by getting that output deal, he said. We win by building Corta Hélio.

That was the first time I had ever heard that name.

With his own money Carlos hired freelance security for our people and materiel. With my own money I booked the VIPS on to the moonloop and told them of our change of plan. We would be spinning them around the moon on a tether to Farside, where we stationed the second prototype of the helium-3 extractor.

Carlos had made the stipulation on the first day of his project management: never build just one prototype.

We put our VIPs into a capsule, slung them around the moon, followed in the next and showed them what our extractor could do. Then we took the extracted helium and fired it up in the University of Farside’s LDX reactor.

With the last of our money, we contracted legal AIs to draft the output deal and signed it that night.

Not quite the end of our money. With the very end of it, Carlos and I had the AIs draw up a marriage contract. With the very very end of it, we threw a wedding.

Oh but it was cheap and blissful. Helen was my bridesmaid, the only other attendee was the witness from the LDC. Then we went and had eggs and sperm frozen. There was no time for romanticism, or a family. We had an empire to build. But we wanted children, we wanted a dynasty, we wanted to safeguard the future, once we had built a future safe for them. And that could be years, decades.

Creating Corta Hélio was nothing compared to building Corta Hélio. I went for lunes without seeing Carlos. I slept, ate, exercised, made love when I could, which was little, rarely. We need allies, Carlos said. I tried to build relationships. The Four Dragons had heard the name of Corta Hélio. The Suns were aloof, engaged on their own projects and politics. The Vorontsovs had their eyes turned up to space, though I secured favourable moonloop launch rates from them. The Mackenzies were my enemies. The Asamoahs – maybe because our business did not threaten theirs, maybe because we both came to the moon with nothing and made something, maybe because they identified with the underdog – they became my friends. They are still my friends.

With a secure and steady supply of cheap fuel, my terrestrial customers soon achieved a market position that forced their competitors to negotiate with us or go bankrupt. Shortly after that the US and Russian helium-3 markets collapsed. I beat America and Russia! At the same time! Within two years Corta Hélio had moved into a monopoly position.

See? There’s no talk more boring than money and business talk. We built Corta Hélio. We turned the little hut where we made love into a city. High times. The highest times. We were breathless with excitement. A point came where our success bred its own success. We were making money just by existing. The extractors scooped up the dust, the moonloop sends the cannisters flying Earthwards. We stood on the surface with our helmets touching and looked at the lights of planet Earth. It was ridiculously easy. Anyone could have thought of it. But I did.

See how it hardens you? In all the rush and excitement and work work work, I forgot about the people who died out on the Sea of Fecundity; my team, the ones who gave to me and never got to see the success or share in it. People say the moon is hard; no, people are hard. Always people.

I was still sending money to my family. I made them rich, I made them celebrities. They were in Veja magazine: the sister, the brother of Our Lady of Helium. The Iron Hand, the woman who lit the world! They had a wonderful apartment and big cars and pools and private tutors and security guards and one day I said, Stop. You’ve taken taken taken, you’ve dined out and partied and grown fat on my money and name and not one word of thanks, not one acknowledgement of what I have done up here, not one glint of gratitude or appreciation. Your children, my nephews and nieces don’t even recognise my face. You call me the Iron Hand, well, here’s an iron judgement. The final gift from the moon. I have placed in a secure account fares for a one-way trip to the moon. If you want Corta Hélio money, work for Corta Hélio money. With Corta Hélio. Commit, or I will never send you so much as a single decima again.

Come to the moon. Come and join me. Come and build a world and a Corta dynasty.

Not one member of my family took up the offer.

I cut them off.

I haven’t spoken to any of them in forty years.

My family is here. This is the Corta dynasty.

Do you think that was harsh? The money; that’s nothing, none of them would ever be poor again. Do you think I was wrong to cut them off without a word, or even a thought? I could give you all the old excuses: everything is negotiable; if you don’t work you don’t breathe, the moon makes you hard. It’s true, the moon changes you. It changed me so that if I ever went back to Earth, my lungs would collapse, my legs would fold under me, my bones would flake and splinter. And those three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres count. When you talk to home and you hear that two and a half second delay before the reply comes, that pushes you away. You can never bridge that gap. It’s built into the structure of the universe. It’s physics that’s hard.

I haven’t thought about them in forty years. But I think about them now. I look back a lot; things come up from my past without my calling them. I tell myself I have no regrets, but do I?

I can’t help thinking that it was all those years putting the company together; more in a sasuit that out of one, in and out of rovers, up and down extractors, snuggling up with Carlos in that pod, the radiation shining through me …

It’s more advanced than I’ve told you, Sister. The only one who knows is Dr Macaraeg. I know Lucas went to the Motherhouse: he knows my condition but he doesn’t know its full extent. Listen to me: the euphemisms. Advanced, full extent. I can feel death, Sister, I can see its little black eyes. Sister, whatever Lucas says, whatever he threatens, don’t tell him this. He would only try and do something and there is nothing he can do. He always has to prove himself. And I’ve hurt him, oh I’ve hurt him so terribly. So much to put right. The light is running out.

But I haven’t even told you the story of the knife fight with Robert Mackenzie!

It’s legend. I’m legend. Maybe you haven’t heard it? I sometimes forget there are generations after me. Not forget – how could I forget my grandchildren? More that I can’t believe the time that has passed since those days; that people could forget them. Such days!

The Mackenzies stopped physical attacks on our materiel as soon as we had enough money to hire our own security. There was this Brazilian ex-naval officer; laid off whenever Brazil decided it couldn’t afford a navy any more. He had been in the submarines and his theory was that warfare on the moon was all submarine warfare. All vehicles under pressure, in a lethal environment. I hired him. He’s still my head of security. We decided one bold strike would end the war. We attacked Crucible. The Mackenzies and VTO had just completed Equatorial One; now Crucible could refine rare earths continuously. It was – it still is – a magnificent achievement. I forget I played a part in it, when I quit Mackenzie Metals and became a Vorontsov track queen on my way to founding Corta Hélio. Carlos conceived the plan: We shall breach Equatorial One and paralyse Crucible. I remember the faces around the table: there was shock, amazement, fear. Heitor said it can’t be done. Carlos said, It will be done. Your job is to tell me how we do it.

We did it with six rovers: two teams of three. We timed the attack just as Mackenzie Metals was to deliver on an important new rare-earths contract with Xiaomi. Carlos went with the first team. I rode with the second. It was so exciting! Two rovers full of big brawny escoltas, one with the demolition team. It was really quite simple. We hit Crucible on the eastern Procellarum. The escoltas formed a periphery; the demolition teams struck simultaneously three kilometres up line and down line from Crucible. I watched the charges blow. The rails flew up so high I thought they would go into orbit. I watched them tumble away, catching the sunlight, and it was the closest we can get to fireworks on the moon. Everyone cheered and whooped but I couldn’t because I hated to see fine, brilliant engineering destroyed in a flash. Track I might have laid myself. I hated it because no sooner had we built a thing to be proud of, we destroyed it.

The clever part was, even as we ran with Mackenzie Metals rovers on our tails, our secondary attacks went in twenty kilometres up and down the line. The VTO repair teams would have to bridge those breaches before they could rebuild the ones closer to Crucible. Even if VTO got teams out within the hour, Crucible would be in darkness for a week. They would miss the delivery deadline.

We lost their blades in the chaotic terrain of Eddington.

After the battle of East Procellarum, Mackenzie Metals moved their attacks to the Court of Clavius.

I think I would have preferred the war of blades and bombs.

Their tactics varied but their strategy was clear and simple: bleed Corta Hélio to death through legal fees. They hit us with suits for breach of contract, breach of copyright, personal injury, corporate damages, plagiarism, damages suits for every single crew person on Crucible on the day of the attack. Suit after suit after suit. Most of them were swept away by our AIs as soon as they were served but for every one we dismissed their AIs created ten more. AIs are prolific, and AIs are cheap but they’re not free. The judges we had agreed upon finally ruled against any further frivolous suits and that Mackenzie Metals lay a solid suit with a reasonable chance of success.

They did. It named Adriana Maria do Céu Mão de Ferro Arena de Corta in forty separate instances of breach of Mackenzie Metals patent in my designs for the extractor.

AIs, lawyers, judges settled in for a long trial.

I didn’t.

I knew this could drag and drag and Mackenzie Metals would file injunctions against our exports and for each one we dismissed, they would file another. They wanted us soiled goods. They wanted my name and reputation dust. They wanted our terrestrial clients leery of us, leery enough to consider investing a little seed money in a helium-3 extraction venture with an established company, of good standing, who could deliver the goods: Mackenzie Fusion.

I had to end this hard and fast.

I challenged Robert Mackenzie, in name and person, to trial by combat.

I didn’t tell any of my legals. I didn’t tell Helen, I didn’t tell Heitor, though he may have guessed because I asked him to teach me something of the way of the knife. I didn’t tell Carlos.

There is angry, and there is furious, and there is a deeper rage beyond those for which we don’t have a name. It’s pale and very pure and very cold. I imagine it’s what the Christian god feels at sin. I saw it in Carlos when he found out what I was going to do.

It ends it, I said. Once and for all.

And if you get hurt? Carlos said. And if you die?

If Corta Hélio dies, then I’m dead too, I said. Do you think they’ll just let us walk away? The Mackenzies repay three times.

Half the moon was in the court arena that day, or so it seemed to me. I came up on to the fighting floor and I just saw faces faces faces, all around me, going up up up. All those faces, and me in a pair of running shorts and a crop top, with a borrowed escolta knife in my hand.

I wasn’t afraid, no not a bit.

The judges called for Robert Mackenzie. The judges called again for Robert Mackenzie. They instructed his lawyers to approach them. I stood in the centre of the court-arena with another woman’s knife in my hand and looked up at all the faces. I wanted to ask them: Why have you come here? What have you come to see? Is it victory, or is it blood?

‘I call on you, Robert Mackenzie!’ I shouted. ‘Defend yourself!’

In a heartbeat, there was absolute silence in the arena.

Again I called on Robert Mackenzie.

And a third time, ‘I call on you, Robert Mackenzie, defend your self, your name and your company!’

I called him three times and at the end I stood alone on the fighting floor. And the the court erupted. The judges were shouting something but no one could hear over the uproar. I was lifted shoulder high and carried out of the Court of Clavius and I was laughing and laughing and laughing with my knife still gripped in my hand. I didn’t let go of it until I got to the hotel where Team Corta had set up headquarters.

Carlos didn’t know whether to laugh or rage. He cried.

You knew, he said.

All along, I said. Bob Mackenzie could never fight a woman.

Ten days later the Court of Clavius established a process to allow proxy fighters in the case of trial by combat. Mackenzie Metals tried to launch a new suit. No judge on the moon would touch it. Corta Hélio won. I won. I challenged Robert Mackenzie to a knife fight, and won.

And now no one remembers it. But I was legend.

Death and sex, isn’t that it? People make love after funerals. Sometimes during funerals. It’s the loud cry of life. Make more babies, make more life! Life is the only answer to death.

I defeated Bob Mackenzie in the court-arena. It wasn’t death – not that day – but it did focus my mind most wonderfully. Corta Hélio was secure. Time to build the dynasty now. I tell you this; there is no greater aphrodisiac than being carried out of the court-arena with your knife in your hand. Carlos couldn’t keep his hands off me. He was possessed. He was a big dick-machine. I know, it’s not seemly for an old woman to say such things. But he was: a fuck-bandit. He was deadly. And relentless. And it was the best time in my life, the only time I could lie back and say, I’m safe. So of course I said, Let’s make a baby.

We started interviewing madrinhas immediately.

I was forty years old. I had drunk a lot of vacuum, swallowed a lot of radiation, snorted a sea-full of dust. Gods know if things were still working in there, let alone if I was capable of carrying a normal healthy pregnancy to term. Too many uncertainties. I needed engineered solutions. Carlos had agreed with me: host mothers. Paid surrogates, who would be so much more than just rented wombs. We wanted them to be part of the family, to take on those elements of infant care that we simply didn’t have the time or, to be honest, the taste for. Babies are tedious. Kids only start to become human on their fifth birthday.

We must have interviewed thirty young, fit, healthy, fecund Brazilian women before we found Ivete. This is how I came into contact with your Sisterhood. The Brazilian community said, talk to Mãe Odunlade. She has family trees and genealogies and medical histories on every Brasileiro and Brasileira who comes to the moon, and a fair few Argentinians and Peruvians and Uruguayans and Ghanaians and Ivorians and Nigerians too. She will set you right. She did, and I rewarded her for her services, and, well, you know the rest of the story.

We drew up the contract and her legal systems looked over it and Mãe Odunlade advised her and we agreed. We had already started a number of embryos; we picked one and then asked Ivete how she wanted to do this. Did she just want to go to the med centre for implantation or did she want to have sex with me, or Carlos, or both of us? To make it personal, with affection, and connection.

We spent two nights in a hotel in Queen of the South and then we had the embryo implanted. It took right away. Mãe Odunlade had selected her madrinhas well. Ivete came to João de Deus with us and we gave her her own apartment and full-time medical support. Nine months later, Rafa was born. The gossip networks were full of pictures and excitement – picture rights were part of Ivete’s remuneration package – but the cheers were not warm. I could smell the disapproval. Surrogate mothers; rent-a-womb. They all had a weekend of wild sex together in a hotel in Queen. A threesome, you know.

Rafa was hardly off the teat before I was already planning the next in the succession. Carlos and I started looking for a new madrinha. At the same time I had my first visions of this place. João de Deus was no place to bring up a family. There are children there now, but back then it was a frontier town, it was a mining town, it was raw and rough and red-blooded. I remembered Achi’s parting gift to me. I found the bamboo document tube easily – ten years since she had left. So fast! Waterfalls and stone faces; a garden carved into the heart of the moon. It was as if she had seen the future, or the insides of my heart. I commissioned selenologists; found this place, hidden away in the rock like a geode for billions of years. A palace, a child, another one coming together in the Meridian Medical Facility. A business and a name. Finally I was the Iron Hand.

Then Carlos was killed.

Did you hear what I said? Carlos didn’t die. He was killed. There was intent in it. There was purpose and ill will. Nothing was ever proved, but I know he was killed. He was murdered. And I know who did it.

I’m sorry. I get over-emotional. It’s been so long – half my life without him, but I see him so clearly. He comes and stands so close to me: I can see the texture of his skin – he had terrible skin; I can smell him – he had a very distinct, very personal smell; sweet like sugar. Sweet-smelling sugar-man. His children have it too: the sweet sweat. I can hear him, I can hear the little whistle he made when he breathed through his nose. His chipped tooth. I see it all in such detail and yet it doesn’t seem real. It’s as unreal to me as Rio. Did I ever live there? Did I waggle my toes in the ocean? We were together so short a time. I have lived three lives: before the moon; Carlos; after Carlos. Three lives so different they don’t feel like me.

I still find it hard to talk about. I haven’t forgiven. I don’t even understand the concept; why should I stop feeling what I honestly feel, why should I pardon the injustice? Why should I take all the hurt that’s been done to him and say, None of that matters Carlos? I have forgiven. Pious nonsense. Forgiveness is for Christians, and I am no Christian.

He was out on a five-day inspection run across the new Mare Imbrium fields. His rover underwent an uncontrolled depressurisation in the Montes Caucasus. Uncontrolled depressurisation – you understand what that means? An explosion. It was forty years ago and our engineering was not as good as it is now, but even then, rovers were sturdy; rovers were tough. They did not undergo uncontrolled depressurisations. It was sabotaged. A small device, internal pressurisation would do the rest. I went out on a Vorontsov lifeboat. The rover was scattered over five kilometres. There wasn’t even enough to recycle for carbon. Do you hear my voice? Do you hear how I keep it flat and focused, how I choose my words like tools, precise and practical? This is still the only way I can talk about Carlos. I put a marker there; a pillar of laser-cut titanium. It will never rust, never discolour, never grow old and dusty. It will stand there for aeons. That’s right, I think. That’s long enough.

You killed Carlos Matheus de Madeiras Castro, Robert Mackenzie. I name you. You waited, you took your time and you worked out how to hurt me most. You destroyed the thing I loved dearest. You paid me back three times.

Three months later Lucas was born. I never loved him as I loved Rafa. I couldn’t. My Carlos was taken, Lucas was given back. It didn’t seem a fair trade. And that’s not right, that’s not just, but human hearts are seldom just. But it was Rafa who heard the name of his father’s killer whispered over his bed; he was the one grew up in that shadow, with hate in his heart. Cortas cut. We begin and end with our names.

Rafael, Lucas, Ariel, Carlinhos: little Carlos. Wagner. I couldn’t be kind to that boy. We get notions into our heads and then we look around and a lifetime has gone past and they become dogmas. And Ariel … Why didn’t I … No point. Once an engineer, always an engineer. It has taken me a lifetime to realise that lives are not problems to be solved. My children are the achievements that make me most proud. Money – what can we spend money on here? A faster printer, a bigger cave? Empire? It’s dust out there. Success? It has the shortest half-life of any known substance. But my children: do you think I’ve built strong enough to stand ten thousand years?

Yemanja laid a silver path out across the ocean and I walked up it until I came to the moon. What I like about the orixas – their particular wisdom: they don’t offer much. No holiness, no heaven, just one opportunity, once given. Miss it and it will never come again. Take it and you can walk all the way to the stars. I like that. My mamãe understood this.

My story is finished now. Everything else is just history. But do you know? I wasn’t average. I wasn’t Jane-outside. I was extraordinary.

Sister, excuse me. Yemanja has an emergency call.