The Menace from Farside Read online

  I feel machinery moving above my head, the cable shackles opening. The elevator locks unseal. We are here, canned-up and waiting.

  ‘Cari,’ Sidibe says. ‘We all told you our scary stories. You never told us yours.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I didn’t, did I?

  Acceleration like nothing I have ever felt before grabs me and tries to push me into the floor. A million tons on my head, my legs, a million tons on every organ. I see red, my head swims.

  ‘Fuck,’ I whisper and every letter takes a million years. And I go in an instant from multiple-gee to zero-gee. The tether has swung up to the top of its rotation and let go. We are flying free across the Sea of Tranquility. My stomach hits my throat. Do not vom. Whatever happens, whatever you feel, do not vom in free-fall. The next tether in cycle is spinning towards us across the wild highland east of Fecunditatis. It will catch us, spin us up, sling us onwards.

  What if it misses?

  It’s never missed. Like Jair said, machines got it now.

  But what if machine ain’t got it?

  It’ll be quick. We’ll make our own crater. They might even name it after me. Cariad Crater or Corcoran Crater?

  If something did go wrong, I’d know because I have the cold numbers.

  Would I tell them they were falling to their deaths?

  I like to think I wouldn’t.

  And then there is another snap and I have weight and momentum and pain as the waiting tether locks with the capsule latches and we are swung up and around, too scared to scream, to even sob, and slung out over the craters and tiny lost seas of Farside.

  This is the trick of it. This is how we live. We put the body of Lady Luna between us and the sun-squall. She knows a thousand ways to kill you, but sometimes, she saves. But there’s always a price. Her price: her shield isn’t total. For the last five minutes as the last tether drops us down to Meridian port, we’re in the full glare of the sun. Under the nuclear hammer. No way around it. Five minutes shouldn’t kill us. Might not even make us sick.

  Cariad Corcoran hates hates hates having only bad choices.

  I told them that one. I had to. In case like, our hair falls out or something.

  Again—again—a million tons of shit drops on me. The third tether. A whole thundering turn—my eyes, my brain, are drained of blood and thought, of anything except get me home, get me home, get me back to Osman Tower. And free. Streaking out over the Grimaldi and the highlands of east Farside, over west Procellarum, over Maestlin and Lansberg and St Olga: flying home. I’m blind and deaf in this capsule and dumb with fright, but the eye in my mind sees ahead of me the terminator; the line of light and fire where we pass from Lady Luna’s shadow into the burning light. One final test. One final catch. The final tether is the first tether, wheeled all the widdershins way around the moon.

  This time I scream. This time I open my mouth and my lungs and roar all the way around and all the way down, through the radiation ticking from my suit’s comms, the white flashes of charged particles stabbing through my brain. Then the rotation speed of the tether matches the orbital velocity of the moon, we come to rest relative to each other. The latches decouple and we are deposited soft as a kiss on the platform.

  I stop screaming and realise my suit comms has been pinging me for over a minute. We’re back in the networked world. People need to talk to me.

  1128, 1128?

  I don’t recognise the voice. That’s a good thing. I don’t recognise the number, wait: yes: that’s us. Our capsule ident.

  ‘Hi, this is 1128, Cari—Emer—Corcoran.’

  ‘Hello, 1128, this is Meridian Moonloop Control. What’s your status, Emer?’

  I blink up the monitors. God and her mother, I will be so so so happy to get out of this helmet. Greens all the way up and all the way down. I think this is what she means when she asks me about status.

  ‘We are good,’ I say, and then the words open like flowers and I start to laugh. Laugh and laugh and laugh without end. Moonloop Control tries to get a sensible answer out of me but she never will, so in the end she just says, Bringing you home, 1128, and I’m sure I hear my laugh in the edges of her voice as we ride the elevator down into the welcoming underground.

  We made it. I took us to the First Footprint and escaped energy-bandits and the lost city of Hypatia and flew us right round the whole of the moon and got us all back home again.

  Captain Cariad.

  ‘Look,’ Sidibe says on the common channel, but all I can see is visors in the gloaming. Then she flicks an image onto my visor, onto all our visors. It’s from the Moonloop tower cameras. Earth, half in light, half in night, up at the top of the sky like she always is, ever spinning, never moving. It’s winter in the bottom half of the world, and in the dark around the southern pole is a wonder: a scarf of green fire, gleaming, shifting, streaming like a festival dragon. It is beautiful and eerie and makes my heart hurt with all the things I want but can never have. The aurora.

  I flick it off my visor.

  They should never show you the Earth. This is all we have and it’s bare and hard and ugly and wants to kill you, but it’s enough. More than enough.

  Clamps unlock, I feel us lifted, then set. Moonloop 1128 is docked. The First Footprint Expedition is home.

  The capsule door opens. Light spills in. There are people out there. I unlock my helmet and lift it. The adventure is over. Thank fuck.

  * * *

  Remember I told you about going out to Nobile to pick up Sidibe’s wings from the BALTRAN, and laughing at all the grey, sicky people coming out of the cans?

  We looked a lot worse than that, coming off the Moonloop.

  * * *

  The medics keep us in for observation in Meridian to make sure we haven’t got anything too fried on our final descent. (Delicate things like Jair and Kobe’s balls: me, I got enough—maybe too much?—fat to protect my Fem-parts.) Laine and Gebre have to postpone the wedding. That’s another not-happy to add to the Pile of Pissed-nesses. Which is now probably visible from Earth. Not a long postpone, a day or so, but as all the guests have booked travel they’re stuck in Queen for three days, and rings have a lot of guests. Oh, you can’t imagine how many guests.

  Lots of guests is good. Lots of guests can shelter you from a shit-fountain.

  And so it’s wedding day and we all go to the banya and the beautician and the hair-stylist and print out glorious gear and troop to the park. Gebre’s derecha presents the to-be-weds, the commitments are made, the contracts are signed, and the ring is made whole under the tall tall trees. I see Laine facing Gebre and she looks—I cannot lie—fantastic and I feel like a skid-mark in my best pants for fucking up her day. Her day. Not mine. Then they are married and I cheer and clap and set free boxes of party-butterflies and as we all parade to the feast Kobe slides in beside me (he smartens up really good—handsome boy) and whispers, When do you think we should give her the pictures?

  And I whisper back, Kobe, never. Ever.

  And you know the worst? On Laine and Gebre’s Great Day, all anyone wants to do is ask us about the Expedition. Because we came out of Meridian med-centre famous. Celebrid-ees. Our Adventure became everyone’s adventure the moment Jair called home and said, We need help. Everyone cared for us, everyone was scared for us, everyone owned us, everyone feels part of our Adventure.

  Then the guests go home, the zabbaleen take away the waste, and the wedding clothes go into the reprinter, and there is no shelter from the shit-shower.

  It’s bad. Not as bad as I feared, because Laine and Gebre are so glad to have us back, to have us whole and alive, to have each other. I’ve been dreading the expense most. We could have saddled everyone with lifetimes of debt. It’s strangely all right. The celebrity helps—Gebre fields nonstop offers from gossip sites until he realised there’s money to be made from the gossip sites. He auctions exclusive rights to the story. While we’re hot. Celebrity has the shortest half-life of any human-made substance. We go to LunaLuna!, the b
ig new gossip network. We’re interviewed and profiled individually and together. I sit with Kobe. Jair gets hundreds of you-so-adorables from girls and boys and kids from Meridian to Coriolis, Queen of the South to Rozhdestvenskiy. Sidibe is the breakout star. Of course. In a separate deal she gets offered her own network slot. She turns it down. I think that noble of her. There’s talk of a telenovela. I want to know who’s in it, but like most of these sort of things, it doesn’t go anywhere.

  The money is good. Better than good. And when VTO decides that the whole thing is really good publicity for them and their transport system, they write off about forty years of the debt and by the time all the media payments come in, we’re in money.

  Ten days later, we’re cold as yesterday’s shit. That’s when the consequences arrive. There have to be consequences. We can’t get away with our crime and then profit from it. Profit big.

  I’m sentenced to house arrest. Hey ho. I can live with that. That’s what the network’s for. And I’ve got words and stories and I need to work out a way to make our Adventure into something big and exciting that people will want to buy into. Captain Cariad’s Crisis Camp. Peril Suits: Ten Surprising Things You Didn’t Know.

  To Kobe the time-out from the world is almost philosophical: his universe is already limited and controlled by his own choice: it’s how he deals with it.

  Sidibe is grounded: literally. Gebre takes her wings away. Three lunes in the no-fly zone. That is cruel and unusual. She goes up to the platform where she took her first flight with us—Osman Tower has put on another ten stories since then, at least—sits with her feet over the edge watching her flyer-friends throwing loops around the towers. I could never do that. Not just the heights; the torture of watching other people doing something I can’t.

  Thinking about it, that may be how I got us into this in the first place.

  Jair: oh, Jair. Dolores sends him to her iz Esteban out at the new Very Large Array build at Tereshkova. Someone comes from Farside, one goes to Farside. Within two days he’s turned every head. And loves it. And Esteban is pretty good as a ceegee. Jair’s moved across to him and her iz, Chinelo. And, he’s realised, the university is a good place for a neko like Jair.

  Right, so.

  Well, Cariad Corcoran has realised a thing too. It’s this, neko. That when you were here, in my home on your ledge and in your perches, when you spent hours perking up your hair into ears and printing out paw-and-claw gloves and obsessing over your makeup; all that time I thought I might have had something with you. You know? Yes, that sort of thing. But I couldn’t do anything, because that’s the way in rings: anyone but your iz or derecha. But now you’re all the way around the moon, in a new link of the ring with new ceegees, so I can, and you know what? I realise I don’t want that sort of thing with you. Not just now, I never really did. It was the forbidden fruit thing. (Who forbids fruit? Fruit is good for you. Vitamins and fibre.) Because maybe all those university girls and boys and kids think you’re wonderful, but Cariad Corcoran sees through you.

  You can be a real shit, Jair.

  And, last of all, we get sent for therapy.

  * * *

  Which is how I come to be talking to you, machine.

  Yes, I know that’s machine-ist. Yes, I know I can afford a human counsellor. You think I’m going to spend my hard-earned bitsies on that?

  Yes, I’m hostile.

  Did you like the story?

  I disagree. I think it did reveal the real me. The ‘real me’ tells stories. That’s the deep and wide of it. Understand this: I don’t think there’s anything underneath any of us. We’re not deep and profound. We’re wide and shallow. Pools and puddles like you get after they make it rain here. Pools and puddles and little streams running between them. We don’t know why we do what we do. I couldn’t tell you why I made us go on an Adventure. I could tell you I was jealous of Sidibe, I could tell you I felt my home was under threat, I could tell you it was change like a moonquake and I would even admit that, yes, I don’t much like change that I haven’t officially sanctioned. But those are pools and puddles. There’s no deep well from which they all flow. This is the moon. There are no deep sources here. It falls from the sky in drops. There’s no one real reason. It just felt right at the time.

  You know what makes storytellers laugh? That people really think their story reveals something about the person who tells it. It doesn’t. Stories are control. First, last, always. It tells you something about who’s hearing it.

  And no, I didn’t tell you the most scared I ever was.

  You can guess. But that’s just your guess.

  So: Sidibe. In the end there was nothing I could really do to stop the menace from Farside. There never was, without breaking Oruka Ring into pieces. Jair out, Sidibe in. We get on now. We get on pretty well. She’ll be getting her wings back in five days’ time and she’s already talking to them. I’ll be back at colloquium and I know I will rule it now with an axe of meteoric iron. We have our own spaces, we’ve negotiated where they cross and where the boundaries are solid as the roof of the world. And that, I think, is the Rule of Everything: moon and rings alike. Everything is negotiable.

  Except, when you think about it, it’s not so much a ring as a chain. Links leading off everywhere, connecting everything and everyone. Keeping them tight, keeping them safe. And, you know, you can never break the chain.

  Family, right so?

  About the Author

  Photograph by Jim C. Hines

  IAN McDONALD was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965 where he has remained ever since, through Troubles and peace. His most recent fiction is the Luna trilogy. He has won the Locus Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Hugo. He now lives just outside Belfast. Find him on twitter at @iannmcdonald.

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  BOOKS BY IAN MCDONALD

  LUNA TRILOGY

  Luna: New Moon

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  EVERNESS SERIES

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  Be My Enemy

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  DESOLATION ROAD SERIES

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  Ares Express

  STAND-ALONE NOVELS

  The Dervish House

  Brasyl

  Sacrifice of Fools

  Necroville

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  Out on Blue Six

  COLLECTIONS

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  Speaking in Tongues

  King of Morning, Queen of Day

  Empire Dreams

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  1

  About the Author

  BOOKS BY IAN MCDONALD

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE MENACE FROM FARSIDEr />
  Copyright © 2019 by Ian McDonald

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Richard Anderson

  Cover design by Christine Foltzer

  Edited by Jonathan Strahan

  A Tor.com Book

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  ISBN 978-1-250-24778-0 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-250-24779-7 (trade paperback)

  First Edition: November 2019

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