I’m probably scaring you to death. But you get used to it. No one could live with that level of constant dread. But if you ever once get sloppy, it will have no mercy. Carlinhos tells me we usually have at least one death each induction squad. I’m being extra careful that it’s not me.
My squad: Oleg, José, Saadia, Thandeka, Patience and me. I’m the only Norte. They look at me. They would say things about me but the only common language is Globo and I’m a native anglophone. They don’t like me. Carlinhos works more or less one to one with me and that makes me different. The special one. So the trainers think I’m a Corta spy and class thinks I’m teacher’s pet. The one who dislikes me least is Patience. She’s originally from Botswana but, like the rest of the squad, she’s been in universities and corporations all over the worlds. Jo Moonbeams must be the most educated immigrants in history. Patience will talk to me and share tea. José wants me dead. If he could engineer it without him getting caught I think he might. He interrupts everything I have to say. I can’t work out if it’s because I’m a woman or a North American. Probably both. Asshole. The squad mentality is like a college football team. Everything in your face in your face in your face. Every breath you taste testosterone. It’s not just because it’s extractive industries; everyone is young, smart, ambitious and very very motivated. At the same time, this is the most sexually liberal society that has ever existed. Lunar Globo doesn’t even have words for straight or gay. Everyone is on the spectrum somewhere.
I’ll tell you what’s hard. Learning Portuguese. What kind of language is this? You have to make yourself sound like you have a permanent head-cold. Nothing sounds the way it spells. At least Portuguese reads logically. But the pronunciation … There is Portuguese pronunciation, and then there is Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation. And then there is Rio Brazilian Pronunciation. And last of all there is the Lunar Variant Rio Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation; and that’s what Corta Hélio speaks. I suggested Hetty translates everything: the looks I got. So, it’s time to learn Portuguese. Which means, adeus, eu te amo, e eu vou falar com você de novo em breve!
Lucas Corta spirals down as light and fragile as a dream through pillars of leaves. Water drips and runs, trickles and riffles, through the runnels and pipes that connect the tiers of grow-tanks. He spirals around the central column of mirrors, reflecting sunlight on to the stacks. Glances up: the green goes up forever until it merges with the blinding sun-coin of the farm cylinder cap. The agriculture shaft is a kilometre deep. The Obuasi agrarium contains five such shafts, and Twé lies at the centre of a pentagram of seventy-five such agraria. Lettuces, salad vegetables, packed so tight a beetle could not crawl between them. If there were beetles on the moon but there are none, nor aphids, nor chewing caterpillars: no insect pests. Potato plants the size of trees; climbing beans reach a hundred metres up the support lattices. The fronds of root vegetables; verdant banks of calaloo and aki. Yams and sweet potatoes; gourds and cucurbits: pumpkins the size of Meridian motos. All nurtured by the run and trickle of nutritionally enriched water, crossplanted and symbiotically managed in self-sustaining micro-ecosystems. Obuasi has never lost a harvest, and it crops four times a year. Now Lucas looks down. Far below, on the catwalks over the fish tanks, are two insect-figures. Ducks gabble, frogs belch. One of those tiny figures is him.
‘The audio quality is extraordinary,’ he says, blinking out of the vision on his lens.
‘Thank you,’ says Kobby Asamoah. He is a vast man, tall and broad. Lucas Corta is a pale shadow next to him. He lifts a hand and the fly lands on it.
‘May I?’
A thought sends the fly from Kobby Asamoah’s hand to Lucas’s. He lifts it to eye-level.
‘You could kill us all in our sleep. I like it.’ Lucas Corta throws the fly up into the air and watches it climb up the shaft of light and green and dank chlorophyll until it is lost to vision. ‘I’ll buy it.’
‘Unit life is three days,’ Kobby Asamoah says.
‘I’ll need thirty.’
‘We can deliver ten and print the rest up.’
‘Deal.’
Toquinho takes the price from Kobby Asamoah’s familiar and flashes it up on Lucas’s lens. It is quite obscene.
‘Authorise payment,’ Lucas orders.
‘We’ll have them for you at the station,’ Kobby Asamoah says. His big, wide open face works again. ‘With respect, Mr Corta, isn’t it a rather excessive way to keep an eye on your son?’
Lucas Corta laughs aloud. Lucas Corta’s laugh is deep, resonant, like chiming music. It quite startles Kobby Asamoah. The ducks and frogs of Obuasi agrarium tubefarm five fall silent.
‘Who says it’s for my son?’
Heitor Pereira lets the fly run over his hand, tiny hooked feet tickling his dark, wrinkled skin. Whichever way he turns the hand, the Asamoah fly stays uppermost.
Lucas says, ‘I want twenty-four-hour surveillance.’
‘Of course, Senhor. Who is the target?’
‘My brother.’
‘Carlinhos?’
‘Rafael.’
‘Very good, Senhor.’
‘I want to know when my brother fucks, farts or finances. Everything. My mother is not to know. No one is to know, except you and me.’
‘Very good, Senhor.’
‘Toquinho will send you the protocols. I want you to handle it personally. No one else. I want daily reports, encrypted, to Toquinho.’
Lucas reads the distaste on Heitor Pereira’s face. He is a former Brazilian naval officer, cashiered when Brazil privatised its defence forces. He fell from grace with the sea and left it for the moon where, like so many ex-military, he set up a private security company. Those days when Adriana was tearing Corta Hélio from the ribcage of Mackenzie Metals were bloody days, of claim jumping and duels of honour and faction fights, when legal disputes were more quickly and economically ended with a knife in the dark. Lives pressed up close against each other, breathing each other’s air. Heitor Pereira has stopped many a blade for Adriana Corta. His loyalty, his bravery and honour are beyond question. They are just irrelevant. Corta Hélio has moved around him. But the loathing Lucas sees is not for that, not even the surveillance fly. Heitor hates that his lapse at the moon-run party has led him into a yoke and harness. Lucas can ask anything of him, forever more.
‘And Heitor?’
‘Senhor?’
‘Don’t fail me.’
An archipelago of dried semen lies across the perfect hollow of Lucasinho Corta’s left ass cheek. He gently lifts Grigori Vorontsov’s arm and slides out from the boy’s embrace. He stretches, tightens muscles, cracks joints. The Vorontsov kid is heavy. And demanding. Five times he had been tottering on the edge of sleep when he felt the prickle of beard against his cheek, the whisper in his ear – hey, hey – the throb of hardening penis against his inner thigh.
Lucasinho has always known that Grigori is hot for him – mad hot, Afua in the study group had said, in one of those girls’ games where you are never told the rules but are punished horribly if you break them – but not that he was such a consummate fucker. He could fuck for hours. Steady, deep, hard. A relentless fucker. And generous with the reach-round. He had hardly been able even to moan. Who would have known the passion inside the guy across the table, when they met up at their weekly in-person colloquium seminars? It was great, tremendous, the best sex he has ever had with a boy, but no more now, right? No more.
For such as Lucasinho Corta has received, what shall he give? Cake. Since his father cut him off he has little else to give. While Grigori snores Lucasinho searches the cooler. Almost as bare as Ariel’s, but there’s enough to bake up a batch of flourless brownies. Two batches. Lucasinho is thinking of his next bed. He can’t stay another night in this one. He can’t take it. Lucasinho drips a little of Grigori’s stash of THC juice into the mix. They had vaped it last night, sprawled across each other on the couch, sharing smokes and kisses. He glances back at Grigori spread like a star across the bed. So hairy. They say that about the Vorontsovs. Hairy and weird. Touched by space. Lucasinho knows the legends. House Vorontsov descends from Valery, the original patriarch, an oligarch who invested in a private launch facility in Central Asia. Wherever that is. They built the orbital tethers, the two cyclers that loop constantly in a figure of eight between moon and Earth; the BALTRAN, the rail network. Space has changed them. They have bred strange: weird, elongated things born to freefall. No one has seen a cycler crewperson for years. They can never come down. Gravity would crush them like decorative butterflies. But none so strange as Valery himself – still alive, a monster grown so huge, so bloated that he fills all the core of a cycler. The legends can never agree whether it’s Sts Peter and Paul or Alexander Nevsky. That’s how you know it’s true. Stories are always too neat.