Luna--Wolf Moon--A Novel Page 8

  He learned the power of the helium that had built his family’s fortune. Clean electricity, no radiation, no carbon emissions. Tightly controlled. Fusion reactors were few and expensive. Each nation guarded its power plants viciously – against other nation states, against the unconventional forces of the parastates and freedom armies and warlords dislodged by the droughts, the crop failures, the famines, the civil wars. At any time in the past fifty years, Lucas read, there were over two hundred micro-wars burning on the face of the earth. He studied long to try to comprehend nation states and the many many allegiance groups that challenged them. The moon survived by denying power to groups and factions. There were individuals and there were families. The Five Dragons – Four Dragons, he corrected himself, feeling that pinch of pain as a discipline to sentimentality – were family corporations. The Lunar Development Corporation was an ineffectual board of governors of an international holding company; designed to be at permanent loggerheads with itself.

  States, with identities and sets of privileges and obligations and geographical boundaries where those stopped, seemed arbitrary and inefficient to Lucas Corta. The notion of being loyal to one bank of a river and the bitter enemy of the other was ludicrous. Rivers, Lucas Corta had learned, ran between banks. And there was no consent in any of this. Lucas could not understand how people tolerated their powerlessness. The law claimed to defend and oppress all equally but a cursory survey of the rolling news – Lucas had become an avid consumer of terrestrial current affairs, from religious wars to celebrity gossip – bared the old lie. Wealth and power bought a brighter class of law. Not so different from the moon in that. Lucas was no lawyer but he understood that lunar law stood on three legs: more law is bad law; everything, including the law, is negotiable; and in the Court of Clavius everything, including the Court of Clavius, is on trial. Terrestrial law protected the people but what protected the people from the law? Everything was imposed. Nothing was negotiable. Governments imposed blanket policies on the basis of ideologies, not evidence. How did these governments propose to compensate those citizens negatively impacted by their policies? Riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas.

  These things Lucas asked Dr Chesnokov at the timetabled check-ups where he reviewed the data from Lucas’s many medical monitors. You love CSKA Moscow Football team and you love Russia. Which is the greater of those loves? You pay taxes, but the law doesn’t allow you any say in how they are spent, let alone the option to withhold them when you want to influence Government policy. How is this a good contract? Education, the legal system, the military and the police are all under the control of the state; health and transport are not. How is that a consistent position for a capitalist society? Dr Chesnokov went quiet when Lucas asked him questions about his government and its politics, almost as if he feared being overheard.

  In time Dr Chesnokov cycled down and Dr Volikova cycled back for another tour of duty. She started at the sight of Lucas Corta in her office.

  ‘You’re a beast,’ she said. ‘A bear.’

  He had forgotten how much he had changed in the two lunes she had been down on Earth. He had broadened ten centimetres. His shoulders sloped to his neck. His chest was two slabs of hard muscle, his legs were curves and bulges. His thighs did not meet properly. Veins stood out like lunar rilles on his biceps and calves. Even his face was square and broad. He hated his new face. It made him look like a duster. It made him look stupid.

  ‘Hate and Bill Evans got me there,’ Lucas said. ‘I want to walk the third ring.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No thank you, Galya’

  ‘Then I’ll be monitoring you.’

  A new gravity, a new music. In the elevator he ordered Toquinho to cue up a representative free jazz playlist. Instruments beat around his head, flurries and skirmishes of notes, horns and saxes sharpened and abrading. His mind reeled. Here were challenges. Ornette Coleman summoned storms of triplets and Lucas felt gravity take hold and tug and test and tear at his great, brutal body.

  The elevator door opened. Lucas stepped out. Shocks of pain struck each ankle. His knee felt as if a rod of hot titanium had been stabbed up through it. Ligaments shifted and twisted and threatened to yield. He gritted his teeth. The chaotic music was the hand and voice of a mad guru. Move. Two steps three four steps five. There was a rhythm to be found to walking in earth gravity, not the loose-hipped swing of lunar motion; a lifting and pushing forward and laying down of weight. On the moon it would have sent him soaring. In the outer ring of Saints Peter and Paul it just about kept him from the decking. Ten steps twenty steps. He was already further than his first foolish attempt on Earth-gee. Now he could look back over his shoulder and see that point vanish behind the horizon of the ring. The cycler was on the outward curve of its orbit; the outermost ring was thronged with Jo Moonbeams and researchers at Farside and a handful of business visitors, corporate agents, politicians and tourists. In a few days they would migrate up to the intermediate rim, then to the inner, lunar gee ring, where the spin and the low gravity and the effect of a new means of locomotion on the inner ear would flatten eighty per cent of them with motion sickness. They nodded to him as he strode past, arms swinging, face tight with determination. Steel bands compressed his swollen heart, blood pulsed red behind his eyes with every beat, his eyeballs felt as if they were sagging in their sockets.

  He could do this. He was doing this. He would do this.

  He could see the elevator doors up the curve of the ring. He calculated the number of steps. His heart surged with the small joy. Joy made him careless. The careful rhythm of his steps broke. He lost his balance. Gravity snatched him. Lucas hit the deck with a blow that drove every breath and thought from him except that he had never been hit so hard in his life. He lay paralysed by pain. He lay on his side, unable to move. Gravity pinned him to the deck. Earth people clustered around him. Was he all right? What had happened? He slapped away the helping hands.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  A medical bot came skirling along the corridor. That humiliation he would not bear. He pushed his torso up on wavering arms. Drew his legs under him. The transition from crouch to stand seemed impossible. The muscles of his right thigh fluttered and he was not certain his knee would bear him. The red eye of the bot accused him.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said and with a tearing pain that wrenched a cry from him, Lucas Corta got to his feet. The bot circled in behind him like an attention-seeking pet ferret. He would have loved to have kicked it away. Sometime, not this time. He took a step. Acid pain ran from his right foot to his right shoulder. He gasped.

  The step was firm. It was only pain.

  The bot tagged along in Lucas Corta’s footsteps as he walked the final few dozen metres to the elevator.

  ‘You were lucky not to break something,’ Dr Volikova said. ‘That might have been the end of it.’

  ‘Bones heal.’

  ‘Earth bones. Jo Moonbeam bones. There is no literature on moon-born bones, with Earth-type bone density.’

  ‘You could do a paper on me.’

  ‘I am,’ Dr Volikova said.

  ‘But my bone density is Earth-type.’

  ‘Earth-type for a seventy-year-old suffering from osteoporosis. I’ll have to up your calcium regime again.’

  Lucas was already building a plan on the foundation of the words ‘Earth-type’. Walk until his feet had the feel of it, his hips the sway of it. Walk more. Then walk three minutes, run one minute. Repeat until the pain was bearable. Walk two minutes, run two minutes. Walk one minute run three minutes. Run.

  ‘How are you finding the free jazz?’ Dr Volikova asked.

  ‘It demands you come to it,’ Lucas said. ‘It doesn’t compromise.’

  ‘I can’t approach it. Too much jazz for me.’

  ‘You have to work to find the beauty.’

  Lucas didn’t like this music, but he did admire it. It was the ideal soundtrack for what he had to do now. The hard stuff. The s
tuff he did best, the stuff he had always done best, his one gift and talent. Scheming.

  The governments would always be the most difficult so he worked them first. China of course, because it was China, and because of its long war against the Suns. The United States of America, for its wealth, its historic animosity to China and because no empire is quicker to defend its honour than a decaying one. Ghana. Not a major player, but it had seen what a handful of its bold citizens had built on the moon and wanted some. And Accra perennially wanted to one-up its larger and more powerful neighbour, Lagos. India, which had missed the moon-rush and still smarted from that failure. Russia, because of the deal he had done with VTO and because some day he might have to betray the Vorontsovs. To the governments of these nations the fall of Corta Hélio was a local fracas, only important in its effect on helium-3 prices. He would have to teach them to listen to him. There were channels, names to talk to who would give access to other names. Chains of names, the slow ascent of the political hierarchy. This would be difficult and entertaining. Ornette Coleman best sound-tracked this work.

  While exploring the recording legacy of John Coltrane Lucas worked his way into the terrestrial corporates. Robotics, yes, but they were ten-a-bitsie and he wanted a business that understood his offer, in both short term and the long. Banking and venture capitalism: here he trod warily, for though he knew money and its ways he had never understood the frenetically complex instruments of finance and the ways they intersected in the global markets. These meetings were easier to set up, the people he talked to genuinely interested – delighted even – in the daring of the scheme. They would have researched him, known of his downfall. The destruction of Corta Hélio would have touched them. They would listen to a moon man prepared to give a year of his time and health to come down out of the sky to talk to them.

  Every day, as the wheels of Saints Peter and Paul spun around the moon, he talked to power. Name by name he hauled his way into conferences and one-to-ones. In his berth he played off investors against speculators, government against government. Who to trust, and how much, and when to end it. Who to betray, and when, and how. Who was susceptible to bribery, who to blackmail. Whose vanity could he stroke, whose paranoia could he stoke? Meeting after meeting fell into place. He would need at least three lunes on Earth.

  ‘I’d prefer four,’ he said again to Dr Volikova. He was running the third circle every day now. He was a middle-aged man, past his prime, taking on a physical challenge that would give pause to a man half his age. That might yet kill him, or cripple him beyond even the power of lunar medicine to heal.

  ‘You need another month,’ Dr Volikova said. ‘Preferably two.’

  ‘I can’t afford two. I remember I told you I would leave for earth after fourteen months. There’s a window, one tiny window.’

  ‘A month.’

  ‘One terrestrial month from now, I take the orbiter down. And I will never get Ornette Coleman.’

  The final month, as he had planned, he relaxed into Afro Cuban jazz. Here were sounds and rhythms warm to his heart, that made him smile. From here he could reach out and catch hold of the hand of bossa nova. He enjoyed the insouciance of the play-listed tunes but soon found the rhythm too prescriptive, too forward. When he exercised in the outer ring gym it forced him to its beat, which he hated. It seemed too frivolous for the work which engaged his last days: his own identity and security. Valery Vorontsov had made him an employee of VTO Space: VTO Earth’s judicious bribes had secured him a Kazakh passport. What little remained of his wealth was moved into forms he could access quickly and easily. Earth was suspicious of money in motion. At every step there were checks, questions, enquiries about money laundering. Lucas was affronted. He was not some petty narc baron or graceless minor despot. All he desired was his company back. Niggling, irritating work that was never done but always seemed to require some further identification or clarification.

  ‘My mother came up on this ship,’ Lucas said to Dr Volikova at his final pre-flight assessment.

  ‘Fifty years ago,’ Dr Volikova said. ‘It’s changed a lot since then.’

  ‘It’s just additions. Re-engineering. You haven’t got rid of anything.’

  ‘What do you want, Lucas?’

  ‘I’d like to sleep in the same berth as my mother.’

  ‘I won’t even begin to go into the psychiatry of that.’

  ‘Humour me.’

  ‘It won’t be the same.’

  ‘I know. Humour me.’

  ‘There will be a record somewhere. The Vorontsovs never forget.’

  Ring three, blue quadrant, 34 right. Dr Volikova opened the private cabin. It was little bigger than the pod in which Lucas had arrived on the cycler. He pulled himself into it, lay in his clothes on the pad, for the struggle in taking them off was too much for now. The pad was soft and supportive, the cabin well-equipped and at every moment the only thing he was conscious of was gravity. Months of this to come. On the ship he could escape to the centre ring, even the inner, moon-gee ring when gravity grew too much to bear. There would be no escape on Earth. That scared him. The pod was close and comfortable. Lucas was a creature of small spaces, nests and chambers; he had lived his whole life closed in under roofs. That world down there had a sky. Open to space. Agoraphobia scared him. Everything scared him. He wasn’t ready. He would never be ready. No one could be ready. All he could do was trust the talents that had brought him here, that had saved him from the fall of Corta Hélio.

  That would be enough.

  Before he fell into hard sleep, he recalled the faces. Lucasinho. So pretty, so lost. Ariel, in the crash bed in the med centre, after a blade came within a nerve of killing her. Carlinhos at Lucasinho’s Moonrun party, big and broad as the sky and smiling as he strode across the lawns, sasuit helmet under his arm. Rafa. Golden, always golden. Laughing. His children around him, his okos at his side; laughing. Adriana. Lucas could only picture her at a distance, in the doorway of the crèche, in her favourite pavilion among the stone faces of the orixas of Boa Vista, at the other end of a board table.

  He slept then, and for the next four nights, in the old cabin. His dreams were heavy, sweat drains, scream dreams. They always would be, under alien gravity.

  On the fifth morning, he went down to Earth.

  * * *

  The lock crew balked at his tie. It would float, it would choke him, it would be a hazard to others. Lucas drew the knot sharp and tight until it was a knife tip at his throat, in the late twenty-tens style. Three piece single breasted Thom Sweeney suit in mid grey. Narrow cut, three centimetre turn-ups.

  ‘I’m not arriving on Earth like some Bairro Alto up-and-out,’ he declared. He undid the bottom button of his waistcoat.

  ‘You will if you throw up all over it.’

  The lock sealed. It seemed to take an age for the pressure to equalise with the transfer capsule. Dread beat in Lucas’s ribcage. The suit had been a distraction, a way to assert himself against the dread. A way to be Lucas Corta again. Thirteen lunes between worlds – one less than he had budgeted – thirteen lunes of geopolitics and global economics, of deal brokering and precisely manipulated bribes, of discerning and exploiting antagonisms, of relentless training, had focused down to this. The tip of the blade. Ship to capsule. Capsule to tether. Tether to SSTO. SSTO to Earth. In less than four hours it would be over. There was no consolation in that.

  The lock opened. Lucas seized a handhold and kicked into the capsule.

  Farewell indignity, functional clothing and mid 20th Century jazz.

  The transfer capsule was a twenty-metre cylinder, windowless, completely automated. Ten rows of seats. Dr Volikova grabbed a handle and buckled in beside him.

  ‘You’ll need your physician.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Five more passengers, then the lock sealed. Always fewer going down than coming up. Safety announcements, either superfluous or ineffectual. Toquinho, linked to the capsule AI, offered Lucas views through the ext
erior cameras. He took one look at the blue world huge beneath him and switched them off. He cued up a long-curated play list of classic bossa. Tunes he knew, tunes he loved, tunes he had asked Jorge to play for him, in the best sound room in two worlds.

  A series of bangs; lurches. Silence. The capsule was free from Saints Peter and Paul, a pellet of lives falling across the face of the blue world. He had studied this. He knew how it worked. It was all controlled falling. He asked Toquinho to show him a model of the transfer tether wheeling around the limb of the planet. The schematics comforted him.

  Lucas had drifted into a doze when he was woken by a clank he could feel through the hull. The tether had connected. The floor dropped out of his stomach, gee forces took hold as the tether accelerated the capsule into a docking orbit with the SSTO. Lucas had made a tether transfer once before, escaping from the moon, when the Moonloop had snatched him from the top of the tower and slung him into a transfer orbit with the cycler. Acceleration had peaked at three, four lunar gravities. This was far beyond the Moonloop. Lucas felt his lips peel back from his teeth, his eyes flatten in their sockets, the blood pool in the back of his skull. He couldn’t breathe.