‘Stop that,’ Lucas hissed. ‘I have to get up there and hand him over.’ The infection was irresistible. Lucas swallowed a tight giggle and discreetly wiped tears from his eyes. The orchestra stuck up The Blooming of Rainy Night Flowers. Bryce Mackenzie rose and took his position by the Orange Pavilion. Every head turned. Denny Mackenzie walked the rose petal path. His walk was clumsy, self-conscious, half-hearted. He had no idea what to do with his hands. Bryce Mackenzie beamed. Jonathon Kayode opened his arms like a summoning priest.
‘Show time,’ Rafa whispered to his brother. Then every Corta familiar whispered simultaneously call from Lucasinho.
Within thirty seconds Gupshup had sent the news around the moon. Lucasinho Corta: runaway groom.
‘You’ve been in touch with your son?’ Bryce Mackenzie asks.
‘I haven’t heard from him.’
‘Pleased to hear that. I was under the impression that this was something you had knocked up between you.’
‘You’re being ridiculous.’
Bryce Mackenzie shakes his head, a tic of annoyance.
‘The question now is how do we repair the damage?’
‘There’s damage?’
Another tic: a flare of the nostrils, an audible breath.
‘Damage to the image of my family, the reputation of Mackenzie Metals; our compensation for the suit Gupshup will bring against us.’
‘The drinks bill must be pretty high too,’ Lucas says. He has met Bryce Mackenzie twice, both times social occasions, never in business, but Lucas has worked out the man’s trick, his malandragem. Physical intimidation, not by muscle, but by mass. Bryce Mackenzie dominates a room as if by gravity; a trip, a fall will break you. I know how the trick is done, Lucas thinks. But you are the Earth and I am the moon. He feels lightheaded with potential. Everything is clear, clear as never before.
‘Flippant,’ Bryce Mackenzie says. He is sweating, big sweaty man.
‘Neither your family nor mine are intimidated by threats of litigation. What’s your proposal?’
‘The wedding is re-staged. We’ll split the costs. Can you give me a guarantee that your son will actually be there?’
‘I offer no guarantee,’ Lucas says. ‘I can’t speak for my son.’
‘Are you his father or not?’
‘As I said, I can’t speak for Lucasinho. But I stand by his decision with all my heart,’ Lucas says. ‘For me, I say, fuck you, Bryce Mackenzie.’
A third tic: a chewing in of the top lip. Those others had been irritation. This is fury.
‘Fine.’ Bryce’s blades enter from the lobby and help the man from the sofa, steady him on his stick and surprisingly neat feet. He stalks past Lucas, click by click. There is a third pleasure, Lucas realises, a small, mean but very sweet one, in discommoding Bryce Mackenzie.
At the door, Bryce turns, one finger raised, his stick dangling from its wrist-loop. ‘Oh yes. One final thing.’ Bryce takes a step forward and slaps Lucas across the face. There is little weight in the blow; Lucas reels from the shock, the daring, the implication. ‘Name your seconds and your zashitnik if you are to be represented. Time and location to be decided by the court. The Mackenzies will have blood for this.’
One by one the familiars of the Kotoko appear around Abena Maanu Asamoah. Her breath catches. She is more awestruck than she thought. The adinkras glow in her lens, every second a new one appears. She is ringed by shining aphorisms. Abena prepared her room respectfully. The board’s members may be the people you meet in the tunnels, in the tubefarms, on the streets and in the compounds, but the Kotoko is more than its individuals. It’s continuity and change, lineage and diversity, abusua and corporation. Anyone may consult the Kotoko; the implied question is, why do you need to? Abena has tidied away her few things, folded up the furniture, set biolights, black, red and white in a triangle on the floor and put herself at the centre of them. She’s showered.
Last to appear is the Sunsum, the familiar of the Omahene. Abena shivers. She has summoned powerful forces.
‘Abena,’ says Adofo Mensa Asamoah. The familiars speak with the voices of their clients. ‘How are you? Greetings from the Golden Stool.’
‘Yaa Doku Nana,’ Abena says.
‘Oh you’ve tidied, lovely,’ says Akosua Dedei from Farside.
‘Nice touch with the lights,’ says Kofi Anto from Twé.
‘So, what do you need to ask us?’ says Kwamina Manu from Mampong. The hidden question.
‘I made a promise,’ Abena says, her fingers unconsciously twisting the chain of her Gye Nyame necklace. ‘And now I’ve had to honour it, but I don’t know if I had the right to promise anything.’
‘This is about Lucasinho Corta,’ says the familiar that Abena knows is Lousika Asamoah.
‘Yes. I know we owe the Cortas for Kojo on the moon-run, but what if the Mackenzies turn on us like they turned on the Cortas?’
‘He asked for sanctuary,’ Abla Kande from Cyrillus agrarium says.
‘But was it mine to offer?’
‘What would the moon think of us if we failed to honour our promises?’ Adofo Mensa says. Voices whisper in chorus around the ring of familiars: Fawodhodie ene obre na enam. Independence comes with responsibilities.
‘But the MacKenzies, I mean, we’re not the biggest family, or the richest or the most powerful …’
‘Let me tell you a little history,’ says Omahene Adofo. ‘That’s true. AKA is not the richest or the oldest of the Five Dragons. We’re not exporters; we don’t keep the lights burning up there like the Cortas, or Earth’s tech industries fed like the Mackenzies. We’re not industrialists or IT giants. When we came to the moon we didn’t have political backing like the Suns or wealth like the Mackenzies or access to launch facilities like the Vorontsovs. We weren’t Asians or Westerns; we were Ghanaians. Ghanaians going to the moon! Such presumption! That’s for the white people and Chinese. But Efua Mensah had an idea, and saw an opportunity and worked and fought and argued her way all the way up to the moon. Do you know what she saw?’
‘You may become rich by shovelling the dirt, but you will become rich by selling the shovel,’ Abena says. Every child learns the proverb as soon as they’re socketed, lensed and linked for a familiar. She’s always thought it dull and worthy, old people’s wisdom. Storekeepers and greengrocers; not glamorous like the Cortas and the Mackenzies with their handsome dusters or the Vorontsovs with their exquisite toys.
‘We bought our independence dear,’ Adofo Mensa says. Her familiar is made from the Siamese Crocodiles and Ese Ne Tekrema, the adinkras of unity and interdependence ‘We don’t surrender it. We will not be bullied by the Mackenzies.’
‘By anyone,’ Kwamina Manu adds.
‘Are you answered?’ Omahene Adofu asks.
Abena dips her head and purses her fingers in the accepted lunar way. One by one the familiars of the Kotoko wink out. Last to shine is Lousika Kande Asamoah-Corta.
‘You’re not, are you?’
‘What?’
‘Answered.’
‘I am, I’m just not …’
‘Reassured?’
‘I think I put the family in danger.’
‘How many people are there on the moon?’
‘What? About a million and a half.’
‘One point seven million. That seems a lot but it’s not big enough that we don’t have to worry about the gene pool.’
‘Inbreeding, accumulating mutations, genetic drift. Background radiation. I did this in school.’
‘And each of us has a differed mechanism for dealing with it. We refined the abusua system and all those regulations about who can’t have sex with you. You’re a, what?’
‘Bretuo. Aseni, Oyoko, and of course my own abusua.’
‘The Suns intermarry everyone and anyone, half the moon is a Sun; the Cortas have their weird madrinha system, but they’re all ways to keep the gene pool open and clean. The Mackenzies, they’re different. They keep the family close and tight, they have a fear of polluting the gene line, about diluting their identity. They intermarry among themselves and backcross: where do think all those freckles come from? But it’s risky – very risky, so they have to make sure they breed true. They hire us to engineer the gene line. We’ve been doing it for thirty years. It’s our secret, but it’s the reason we’re safe from the Mackenzies. The fear of the two-headed baby.’