‘That’s, um, wow,’ Marina says. When she arrived as a print-fresh Jo Moonbeam, Marina explored the moon’s sexual diversity but there are niches in the ecosystem – a sexual rainforest – she has never imagined.
‘You’re so terrestrial,’ Ariel says with a flick of the vaper. ‘Sex with other people is always compromise. Always barging and shoving and trying to get it all to fit and who comes first and who likes what and you don’t like what they like and they don’t like what you like. Always something held back; that secret thing you love or want to try or that makes you lose everything and scream yourself sick that you can’t say because you’re scared they’ll look at you and say, you want to do what? and see not their lover but a monster. Nowhere is as dirty as the inside of your head. When you’re with yourself, when you’re jilling off, flicking the bean, fishing for pearls, playing women’s handball, cutting a siririca; there’s no one else to worry about, nothing to hold back from. No one’s judging you, no one’s comparing you, no one’s got someone else in their head they’re not telling you about. Me-sex is the only honest sex.’
‘Me-sex?’ Marina says.
‘Self-sex sounds grubby, auto-sex is bots fucking and anything with the word “erotica” in it is by definition un-erotic.’
‘But what do you—’
‘Do? Everything darling.’
‘That room you wouldn’t let me into, in your apartment …’
‘That’s where I go fuck myself. The things I have in there. The fun I’ve had.’
‘Is this an appropriate employer/employee conversation?’
‘As you keep reminding me, I’m not your employer.’
‘Goodness,’ Marina says; an old grandma expression, but the only one she can think of that adequately expresses her sense of wonder and shock. It is as if she opened that locked door in the small, bare apartment and found an endless wonderland of meadows and rainbows, oiled skin and soft flesh and orgasmic choirs.
‘Who are you thinking about?’ Ariel asks.
‘I’m not—’
Ariel cuts her short.
‘Yes you are. When you tell anyone you’re A, they immediately start comparing the best they’ve done solo with the best they’re doing with their current other. Every time. Who is it?’
It’s the dark, it’s the smallness of the hour, it’s the click and whirr of lunar machinery, always present but in this room on this level loud and present; it’s the feeling that there is only her and Ariel in this whole world that gives Marina the courage to say, ‘Your brother.’
A grin of delight spreads across Ariel’s face.
‘Oh you ambitious girl. One of the family. That’s why I do like you so very much. Carlinhos? Of course it’s Carlinhos. He’s gorgeous. Really looks after himself. Doesn’t talk too much either. If I were the kind of girl who fucked other people, I’d want to fuck him.’ Ariel’s vaper freezes on its way to her lips. Her eyes widen. She sits forward and grasps Marina’s hands in her own. The gesture is startling, the skin still hot and dry from medications.
‘Oh mi coração,’ Ariel says. ‘You have, haven’t you? Please don’t tell me you love him. Oh you silly woman. Did my mother not tell you this about my family? Don’t get close to us, don’t care for us; above all, don’t love us.’
With a huff of effort, a bite of the lower lip in pain, Ariel Corta swings herself on to the edge of the bed. Marina watches in agony.
‘Can I?’
‘No you fucking cannot,’ Ariel says. She pushes herself to the very edge of the bed, legs dangling, pulls the petticoats and skirts of the full-length dress up around her thighs. ‘Come legs.’
In the corner of the room legs whirr and stir. Corta Hélio roboticists designed and built them in under a day: all other projects suspended to the imperative of making Ariel Corta walk. The legs stride across the floor to the bed. Their gait is natural, easy, human and quite quite horrifying to Marina. They’re like bones a body has stepped out of. They’ll be stalking through her nightmares for lunes. They nuzzle against Ariel’s hanging legs, open like traps and lock from foot to thigh. ‘I need your help now,’ Ariel says. Marina gets an arm around Ariel’s waist, a shoulder under her arm and holds Ariel up as the neural links spider up her spine seeking the socket the surgeons have set into her back. The woman is as light as thought; bone and air, but Marina feels her tight-wired strength. The spiders scuttle over skin beneath bunched fabric and sink connectors into the socket. Ariel hisses in discomfort. Two drips of blood.
‘Let’s try this.’
Marina steps away. Ariel drops down to the floor. The machine legs buckle, for an instant she might topple, then the gyros and servos mesh with her intentions and she stands firm.
‘Hold the dress up.’
Ariel takes a step forward. There is no hesitation or faltering in it. She takes a tour of the room, Ariel holding up the train of her dress like a courtier.
‘How does it feel?’
‘Like I’m seven years old and wearing Mamãe’s shoes,’ Ariel says. ‘All right. Make me presentable.’
Marina lets fall the dress and straightens out the folds and layers. It gives no flash of the prosthetics beneath. Ariel examines herself through Beijaflor.
‘It’ll do for now.’ The grafts have already restored some control to bladder and bowel but the voluminous dress conceals discreet colostomy equipment. ‘I’m not wearing floor-length frocks for the rest of my life. Unless I set a new trend. Please keep behind me. I want to make an entrance.’
Lucas is first to applaud as Ariel waltzes through the door into the reception room but Marina marks the momentary flicker of sour across his face. Kisses. Then Adriana embraces her daughter, stands back to admire what Corta engineers have wrought.
‘Oh my love.’
‘It’s temporary,’ Ariel chides. ‘Purely cosmetic.’
The third member of the family to have come to the med centre is Wagner. He is the most intriguing Corta to Marina. Since the party in Boa Vista, Marina has seen him only once, at the birthday celebration. Like Carlinhos he serves the family outside the board room but Marina senses this is through politics not temperament. He is dark-eyed and -skinned, long-lashed and high cheekboned, his familiar is a sphere of oily black rubber spikes and he is here when Rafa and Carlinhos are not.
Ariel sits, crosses her legs, flicks out her vaper. Marina stands behind her, enjoying the show.
‘Lucas. A proper nikah.’ Familiars flicker with data transfer. ‘That’ll keep the boy safe and happy. Don’t read it, just sign it and don’t mess around with things you don’t understand again.’
‘Have the Mackenzies agreed?’
‘They will or they’ll be years renegotiating every clause and Jonathon Kayode is very impatient for a glam wedding.’
Lucas dips his head but again Marina reads resentment.
‘Wagner has something to report to us,’ Adriana says.
‘Ariel, your bodyguard,’ Lucas says.
‘Marina stays,’ Ariel says. ‘I trust her with my life.’
Lucas looks to his mother.
‘She has saved the lives of two of my children,’ Adriana says.
‘I know I don’t have a position at the centre of this family,’ Wagner says. ‘I made an arrangement with Rafa, after the attack at the moon-run party. I’d make some investigations. My special … situation … means I can see things the rest of you can’t.’
Ariel catches Marina’s puzzled frown.
He’s a wolf, Beijaflor whispers on Marina’s private channel.