‘That’s interesting,’ Wagner said with tilt of his head, as if the weight of ideas had shifted him off balance. That’s your cute thing, Marina thought.
‘So have you any surface experience?’ Carlinhos interrupted.
‘I’ve been here eight weeks. I haven’t seen anything except the inside of Meridian.’
Both Corta brothers still wore their sasuits. The hi-visibility beading followed the lines of their musculature. Marina inhaled their perfume of gunpowder moon dust and recycled body-fluids. Sweat of the moon. The boys were relaxed and easy in their dirty pressure skins. They filled her with hurt and longing in that same way snowboard gear and goggles made her soul tighten. Her friends, they boarded; up at Snoqualmie and Mission Ridge. They were snow kids. They had offered once to take her and teach her but a paper was due. Not an impossible paper, but a troubling one. It needed time. So she stayed in the apartment while they loaded the car and cried with loneliness when it drove away. She completed the paper but she would always be the Girl Who Missed Snowboarding. The offer never came again. Every time she saw goggles and gloves and gear in the stores, when the weather reported first falls up in the ranges; she ached with want and loss. Someone out in a parallel universe, snowboarder Marina existed; fresh and joyful. The decal-plastered sasuits, the helmets; they called her like rumours of snow. The opportunity is back again. Do not be the Woman Who Missed the Moon.
‘I want to work on the surface. I want to be up there. I can learn it.’
‘You need to learn a whole set of physical skills,’ Wagner said.
‘I’ll teach you,’ Carlinhos said. ‘Report to the Corta Hélio Extractions Facility in João de Deus.’
‘I can do that.’ A subvocal whisper set Hetty on the task of finding accommodation.
‘Learn Portuguese,’ Carlinhos called as a farewell. Security was escorting huddles of guests and catering staff to the station. ‘And thank you.’
Marina leans back in her window seat. The job, the apartment, the complete transformation of her life, is reflected in one tiny, imperceptible movement: she flicks up her chib in the bottom right corner of her vision and sees the O2 gauge in gold. She’s breathing on the Corta account. Marina is nearing the bottom of her second mojitka as the train pulls into Meridian and the airlocks seal with the doors. The escalators bring her up into the roaring, chaotic cathedral of Orion Hub. Every tea and water stall, every shop and outlet, every street food stand and service kiosk is brilliant with things she can buy. Then she remembers Blake, up there in the roof of the city, coughing his lungs up gobbet by gobbet. Orca-Hetty puts out bids to farmacias, contracts a price for a course of phage therapy. Multiply-resistant tuberculosis is a recent invader from Earth despite the strict quarantine, and not long finding a lodging, clinging like white mould to the damp, stagnant high ribs of the quadras, up among the poor. The stall prints out twenty white tablets. Little white tablets.
Three bitsies for the express elevator. One bitsie for the escalator; riding up through the flat roofs and staircases and alleys of the West ’80s and ’90s. Beyond 110 nothing mechanical goes. She runs the rest of the way up into Bairro Alto, great tireless earth-leaps; whole stairways at a time. Here is the pissbuyer, here is our Lady of Kazan, still lightless and loveless. Here is the balcony from which she had envied the flying woman.
The room is empty. Everything is gone: mattress; water bottles, Blake’s scraps and orts of things. Plastic spoons and plates. Empty to the last fleck of mucus, the last grain of dust. Skin flakes are precious organics.
Surely she has come to the wrong house.
Surely Blake has moved.
Surely this can’t be.
Marina leans against the door frame. She can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. Hetty adjusts her lung function. Breathe. She shouldn’t breathe, oughtn’t breathe. Breathing undeserved air, while Blake is gone.
‘What happened?’ she shouts to the curtained doors and empty windows of the jostling cubicles. On the ladders and corridors, Bairro Alto turns backs to her. ‘Where were you?’
I have footage, Hetty says and Marina’s lens overlays the empty room with bodies. Zabbaleen with their robots. Scavengers. She glimpses a foot, ankle turned out, at the end of a mattress. The Zabbaleen close around it and shut it out from view. The video has been snatched from a street camera so the angle is obtuse and the magnification grainy. The Zabbaleen come out with a hefty metal cannister in each hand.
‘Take it away take it away!’ she screams. Hetty kills the feed just as Marina sees the machines covering the door and window in vacuum plastic. Every last skin flake. Every last drop of blood. And there is nothing to be done. No appeal to be made. Blake is dead but, on the moon, death is no release from debt. The Zabbaleen sill collect on Blake’s chib accounts by viciously recycling every part of his body into useful organics.
Coughing yourself to death, listening for the scritch-scratch of the Zabbaleen bots around your door, waiting for the coughs to fall silent.
‘Why didn’t you do anything?’ Marina shouts at the door and windows. ‘You could have done something. It wouldn’t take much. A couple of decimas from everyone. Would a couple of decimas have killed you? What kind of people are you?’ The empty doors, the turned backs, the shoulders hurrying away from her are her answer. People of the moon.
The tram denies him. Refuses him. Defies him.
Nothing has ever defied Lucasinho Corta before. For a moment the sheer affront paralyses him. He orders Jinji to open the lock again.
Access is denied to you, Jinji said.
‘What do you mean, denied to me?’
Access to the tram has been restricted from the following list of people: Luna Corta, Lucasinho Corta.
He had thought his father was joking when he told Lucasinho that Boa Vista was under lock down. Protect the children.
‘Over-ride it.’
I’m not able to that. I could inform security. Do you wish me to inform security?
‘Leave it.’
Lucasinho had liked the idea of hanging around Boa Vista and João de Deus a while. Live the way you’re meant to live. No hurry about getting back to the university: his colloquium will fill in what he missed. That’s what it’s for. Now his father has locked him down and he has to get out. This is claustrophobia. Boa Vista is a stone intestine. He is locked in the gut of the beast, being slowly digested. He raises a fist to strike the defiant metal of the gate. Stopped. Has a sudden, brilliant, better idea.
Carlinhos and Wagner came in through the surface lock. He can go out through it. And when he is through that lock, he can go anywhere. Everywhere. Away. Fuck lock-downs, fuck family security. Fuck family. Maybe not fuck his vo. She is old and not what she was, but she can still burn fierce and Lucasinho admires how she commands respect as naturally as breathing. And maybe not Carlinhos, though Lucasinho never quite knows what to say to his uncle, how to tell him that he thinks he’s all right. Lucasinho has feared for years that Carlinhos thinks him a dick. The kids aren’t even worth considering. The rest, fuck them.
Especially fuck his father.
The emergency suit-liners were not designed for third gens and it takes Lucasinho five minutes wrestling to pull it on. There is no room in the suit shell’s pressure pouch for his clothes. No loss. He can print new gear in João de Deus. He unpins his Lady Luna and packs her in the pouch. The emergency suit is a bulbous sci-fi robbie-robot, hi-viz orange, with flashers. Roomy enough inside for Lucasinho to move around. Jinji copies into the suit system and powers it up. On the surface he will be out of range of the network. Clamps clunk. Seals lock. Pressurisation hisses and fades.