Robson runs ahead of her. He’s seen Hadley Mackenzie at the lock to the next compartment, his favourite uncle, though only eight years separate them. Hadley is the son of patriarch Robert from his winter marriage to Jade Sun. An uncle then, but more like an older brother. Only sons are born to Robert Mackenzie. It’s the Man in the Moon, the old monster still jokes. Through selective abortion, embryo mapping, chromosome engineering the joke has become a truth. Hadley scoops Robson up into the air. The boy flies high, laughing and Hadley Mackenzie’s strong arms catch him.
‘Result with the Brazilian then,’ Hadley says. He kisses his step-niece on each cheek.
‘I really think he’s the child,’ Rachel Mackenzie says.
‘I hate the thought of Robbo growing up there,’ Hadley says. He’s short, wire and steel, knots of wrought muscle and sinew. Blade of the Mackenzies; deeply freckled from sessions in sun-rooms. Spots upon spots; a leopard of a man. He picks and scratches constantly at his pelt. Too long under the sun-lamps, working on his vitamin D. ‘That’s no place for a kid to learn how to live right.’
Message from Robert Mackenzie, announces Cameny, Rachel’s familiar. Hadley and Robson’s expressions tell Rachel that they are receiving the same communication. ‘Rachel, my love. I’m glad you’ve brought Robson home safe. Delighted. Come and see me.’ The voice is soft, still accented with Western Australian, and unreal. Robert Mackenzie hasn’t sounded like that longer than any of the three people in the lobby have been alive. The image in the lenses isn’t Robert Mackenzie, but his familiar: Red Dog, the symbol of the town that birthed his ambition.
‘I’ll take you up to him,’ Hadley says.
A capsule takes Rachel, Robson and Hadley to the head of Crucible; ten kilometres upline. The maglev drive of the capsule seems to Rachel to amplify the gentle but ever-present tremor of movement. The slow rock of the Crucible on its tracks is the heartbeat of home. Rachel Mackenzie was a reading child, and on those screens, among those worlds built of words, she sailed oceans of water with dire pirates and swashbucklers. In her world of stone seas, this is the closest she can imagine to being on a sailing ship.
The capsule decelerates abruptly and docks. The lock opens. Rachel breathes green and rot, humidity and chlorophyll. This carriage is a great glass conservatory. Under constant sunlight and low lunar gravity, ferns grow to stupendous heights; a green vault of fronds against the curved ribs of the greenhouse. Dappled light, tiger-stripe light: the sun stands unmoving, a hair off the zenith. The ferns all lean towards it. Among the ferns, bird-calls and bright flickers of plumage. Something is whooping somewhere. This is a paradise garden but Robson takes his mother’s hand. Bob Mackenzie dwells here.
A path winds between pools and softly gurgling streams.
‘Rachel. Darling!’
Jade Sun-Mackenzie greets her step-granddaughter with two kisses. The same for Robson. She is tall, long-fingered, elegant and delicate as the fronds around her. She looks not a day older than the one on which she married Robert Mackenzie, nineteen years ago. None of Robert Mackenzie’s offspring are deceived by her appearance. She’s wire and thorn and tight, sinewy will. ‘He can’t wait to see you.’
Robson’s hand tightens on his mother’s.
‘He’s been in a foul mood since the Cortas stole that Chinese output deal,’ Jade throws over her shoulder. She sees Robson glance up at at his mother. ‘But you’ll sweeten it.’
Robert Mackenzie waits in a belvedere shaped from woven ferns. Budgerigars and parakeets keep up an insane gossip of chirps and whistles. Robot butterflies flap lazily on wide iridescent polymer wings.
The legend is that the chair keeps Robert Mackenzie alive but one look tells the truth: it is the will that burns in the back of his eyes. Will to power, will to own, will to hold and let nothing be taken, not even his husk of a life. Robert Mackenzie stares down death. The life-support system towers over his head like a crown, a halo. Tubes pulse, pumps hiss and spin, motors hum. The backs of his hands are blotched with slow-healing haemotomas where needles and cannulas pierce the flesh. No one can bear to look more than an instant at the tube in his throat. The perfume of fern, the smell of fresh water, can’t hide the smell. Rachel Mackenzie’s stomach lifts at the taint of colostomy.
‘My darling.’
Rachel bends to kiss the sunken cheeks. Robert Mackenzie would notice any hesitation or revulsion.
‘Robson.’ He opens his arms to embrace. Robson steps forward and lets the arms enfold him. A kiss from the hideous old mummy, on both cheeks. Robert Mackenzie was forty-eight years old when he chose Mare Insularum over Western Australia and committed family and future to the moon. Too old to go to the moon. He would never survive the lift to orbit, let alone the slow gnaw of low gravity on his bones and blood vessels and lungs, the steady sleet of radiation. Leave it to the kids and the robots. Robert Mackenzie came and sunk the foundations of the moon’s million-strong society. This thing in the life-support chair can rightly claim to be the Man in the Moon. One hundred and three years old, a dozen medical AIs monitor and maintain his body, but its fuel is the same will in his pale blue eyes.
‘You’re a good kid, Robson,’ Robert Mackenzie breathes in the boy’s ear. ‘A good kid. It’s good to have you back where you belong, away from those Corta thieves.’ The papery claw hands shake the boy. ‘Welcome home.’ Robson tears himself free from the frail claws. ‘They won’t steal you back.’
‘My husband has been thinking,’ says Jade Sun. She stands behind him, one hand on the old man’s shoulder. The hand is slim, refined, nails lacquered, but Robert Mackenzie seems to sag under its tiny weight. ‘Is there any reason why Robson shouldn’t be married?’
Hi Mom, hi Kessie. Kids, if you see this, hi. I’ve been kind of quiet for a while. I have an excuse. So: as I said in my really rushed mail, I am working for the Dragons. Corta Hélio. The helium-3 miners.
I’m working for Corta Hélio. I just thought I’d say that again so you can appreciate it. What it means right up front is, no more worrying about oxygen or water or carbon or network, which is why I can send you this. I don’t think I can make you understand how it feels not to have to worry about the Four Elementals again. It’s like winning a lotteria, where you get to keep breathing rather than winning ten million dollars.
I can’t tell you too much about how I got the job – it’s a security thing: the Five Dragons are like the Mafia, always at each other’s throats. But I can say that I am under the personal watch of Carlinhos Corta. Kessie, sister. You should emigrate. This rock is full of hot bodies.
I’m in a surface activity induction squad. Moon-walking. There’s a lot to learn. The moon knows a thousand ways to kill you. That’s rule one and it rules everything. There are ways of moving, reading signs and signals, being in or out of communications, analysing data from your suit and you need to know them or the one tiny thing you’ve overlooked will cook you or freeze you or asphyxiate you or shoot you full of radiation. We spent three whole days on dust. There are fifteen kinds of dust and you need to know the physical properties of each one from abrasion to electrostatic properties to adhesion. Like Sherlock Holmes learning his fifty types of cigar ash? There’s battery recharge times, lunar navigation – Jo Moonbeams misjudge the horizon and think everything is much further away than it is. And they haven’t even taken us up on the surface yet. And the sasuits. I know they’re meant to be tight, but are they sure they’ve got the size right? Took me ten minutes to get into the thing. Wouldn’t want to do that in a depressurisation. Put it on wrong and you get bruising where the seams pinch. Mind, if the environment deepees, bruising is the least of your worries.