Luna: New Moon

SIX

I met Achi because free fall sex made me sick. It was all the talk during training. Freefall sex. It’s all they do, it’s all they want to do. It ruins you forever. After freefall sex, heavy sex is gross and ugly. Those Vorontsov Space people; they’re sex ninjas.

They were matching us up even as we swam in through the lock. Those Vorontsov Space people. There was one guy: he looked and I looked back and nodded yes, I will, yes even as the tether snatched the transfer pod away from the cycler and cut our last connection with Earth. I’m no prude. I’ve got the New Year Barra beach bangles. I’m up for a party and a chance for life-changing sex; you don’t pass on that. I wanted to try it with this guy. We went up to the hub. There were bodies everywhere, drifting, bumping into each other. The men had to use condoms. You didn’t want to get hit by that stuff, flying. I said be kind and I did something worse than flying cum. I threw up all over him. I couldn’t stop throwing up. That’s not sexy. Zero gee turned everything inside me upside down. He was very polite and vacuumed it all up while I retreated to gravity.

The only other person in the centrifuge arm was this caramel-eyed girl, slender hands and long fingers, her face flickering every few moments into an unconscious micro-frown. She would barely meet my eyes; she seemed shy and inward-gazing. Her name was Achi Debasso. I couldn’t place the name; it was like nothing I had ever heard before, but, like mine, it was a name rolled by tide of history. She was Syrian. Syriac. That one letter was a universe of difference. Her family were Syrian Christians who had fled the civil war. She left Damascus as a cluster of cells in her mother’s womb. London born, London raised, MIT educated but she was never allowed to forget – you are Syriac. Achi was born an exile. Now she was headed into a deeper exile.

Up in the hub our future co-workers fucked. Down in the centrifuge pod we talked and the stars and the moon arced across the window beneath our feet. And each time we met the whirling moon was a little bigger and we knew each other a little bit better and by the end of the week the moon filled the whole of the window and we had moved from conversationalists into friends.

She was a girl filled with ghosts, Achi. The ghost of having no roots. The ghost of being an exile from a dead country. The ghost of privilege: Daddy was a software engineer, Mummy came from money. London welcomed refugees like that. The ghost of guilt; that she was alive when tens of thousands were dead. Her darkest ghost was the ghost of atonement. She could not change the place or order of her birth, but she could apologise for it by being useful. This ghost rode her all life, shouting in her ear: Be useful Achi! All the way through grad at UCL, post-grad at MIT: Make things right! Atone! The ghost of useful sent her to battle desertification, salinisation, eutrophication. She was an -ation warrior. In the end it drove her to the moon. Nothing more useful than sheltering and feeding a whole world.

If these were her ghosts, her guiding spirit, her orixa, was Yemanja. Achi was a water girl. Her family home was near the Olympic pool – her mother had dropped her into water days out of the hospital. She had sunk, then she swam. She swam and surfed: long British summer evenings on the western beaches. Cold British water. She was small and slight but feared no wave. I grew up with the sounds of waves in my bedroom but never dipped more than a toe in the warm Atlantic. I come from beach people, not ocean people. She missed the ocean terribly, on the moon. She tuned the screens in her apartment to make it look like she lived on a coral reef. It always made me a bit sick. As soon as any new tank or pool was built and there was a chance for swimming, she would be there, stroking up and down through the water. The way she moved through it was so natural, so beautiful. I would watch her dive and push herself down through the water and I wanted her to stay down there forever, her hair floating around her, her breasts weightless in the water, her hands and feet making these tiny, beautiful movements that held her in position, or send her flashing across the tank. I see her still, in water.

She introduced me to her ghosts, I showed her mine: Outrinha: Average Jane: Little Lady Look at Me. Plain Jane and the Mermaid. They would need each other very much in the days and the months to come. The moon was a wild place then. Now she is old like me. But then, in the early days, she was the land of riches and danger, opportunity and death. It was the land of the young and the ambitious. You needed aggression to survive on the moon. She would try and kill you any way she could; by force, by trickery, by seduction. There were five men for every woman, and they were young males, middle class, educated, ambitious and scared. The moon was not a safe place for men, even less safe for women. For the women, it was not just the moon, there were the men too. And we were all scared, all the time. Scared as the moonlop spun up to meet us at the transfer capsule docked and we knew that the only way was forward. We needed each other, and we stuck, and we clung, in our suits, all the way down.

The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It’s more like mutual bondage.

We came out of the moonloop dock – there was only one transfer tether then, in a polar orbit: one hundred and twenty Jo Moonbeams. It’s an old word that, one of the oldest on the moon. Jo Moonbeam. It sounds bright and wide-eyed and innocent. We were all that.

Even before they officially welcome, the LDC planted the chibs on our eyeballs. We had ten inhalations free, then we started paying. We’ve been paying ever since. Air, water, carbon, data. The Four Elementals. You were born here, you won’t remember a time when you didn’t have those numbers in your eye. But I tell you, the first time you see the numbers change because the market has shifted, your breath catches in your throat. Nothing tells you that you are not on Earth any more than exhaling at one price and inhaling at another. Then they pushed us into medical. They wanted to look at my bones. You don’t think about the bones. To Jo Moonbeams everything is new and demanding. You need to learn how to move – you need to learn how to stand. You need to learn how to see and hear. You learn about your blood, and your heart, and dust and how that’s the thing that is most likely to kill you. You learn evacuation drills and depressurisation alarms and what side of a door to be on and when it’s safe to open it. You learn when to help people and when to abandon people. You learn how to live on top of each other, breathe each other’s air, drink each other’s water. You learn that when you die LDC will take you and break you down and recycle you for carbon and calcium and compost. You learn that you don’t own your body. You don’t own anything. From the moment you step off the moonloop, everything is rented.

You don’t think about the bones, but they tick away, under the skin, hour by hour, day by day, lune by lune losing mass and structure. Again, Sister, you were born here. This is your home. You can never go to Earth. But I had a window through which I could return. I had two years until my bone density and muscle tone deteriorated to a point where Earth gravity would be fatal to me. Two years. It was the same for all of us: two years. It’s still the same for every Jo Moonbeam who arrives at Meridian looking for the land of opportunity. We all of us face our Moonday, when we have to decide, do I stay or do I go?

They looked at my bones. They looked at Achi’s bones. And then we forgot about them.

We moved into barracks, Achi and I. The Jo Moonbeam accommodation was a warehouse with partitions to mark off your living space. Shared bathrooms, mess hall meals. There was no privacy, what you couldn’t see you could hear and what you couldn’t hear you could smell. The smell. Sewage and electricity and dust and unwashed bodies. The women naturally banded together: Achi and I traded to get cubicles beside each other, then merged them into one space. We held a little ritual that night and swore undying sisterhood over weird-tasting cocktails made from industrial vodka. Humans had been on the moon only five years and already there was a vodka industry. We made decorations from fabric scraps, we grew hydroponic flowers. We had socials and parties and we were the central point for the tampon trade. It was like a prison economy, with tampons instead of cigarettes. We had a natural social gravity, Achi and I. We drew the women, and the men who got tired of all the loud voices and the macho boasting: we’re the world-breakers, the moon-busters: we’re gonna take this rock and shake a million bitsies out of it. We’re going to fuck this moon. I’ve never been in the military, but I think it might be a bit like the moon in those early days.

We weren’t safe. No one was safe. Ten per cent of Jo Moonbeams died within three months. In my first week an extraction worker from Xinjiang was crushed in a pressure lock. Twenty-four launched from Korou on my OTV: three were dead before we even finished surface-activity training. One was the man who had flown up in the seat next to me. I can’t remember his name now. We recycled their bodies and reused them and we ate the vegetables and fruit they fertilised and never thought twice about the blood in the soil. You survive by choosing what not to see and hear.

I told you about the stink of the moon. What it stank of most was men. Testosterone. You breathed constant sexual tension. Every woman had been assaulted. It happened to me: once. An older worker, a duster, in the lock as I was changing into my training suit. He tried to slip the hand. I caught and threw him the length of the lock. USP Brazilian jiu jitsu team. My father would have been proud. I had no trouble from that man, or any other man, but I was still scared they would come as a gang. I couldn’t have fought a gang. They could hurt me, they might even kill me. There were contracts and codes of behaviour, but there were only company managers to enforce them. Sexual violence was a disciplinary matter.

But Achi didn’t know Brazilian jiu jitsu. She didn’t know any fighting art, she had no way to defend herself when the man tried to rape her. He didn’t succeed – a group of other men pulled him off. He was lucky. If I had caught him, I would have stabbed him. I was glad of those men. They understood that we had to find a way to live together. The moon couldn’t be another Earth. If we turned on each other, we would all die. I did think about finding that man and killing him. Cortas cut. That’s our name. Hard sharp fast. There are a million ways of killing cleverly on the moon. I thought about it long and hard: should it be secret vengeance, or should my face be the last thing he ever saw? I chose another way. I am many things but I am not a killer.

For Achi’s attacker I used slower, subtler weapons. I found his surface-activity training squad. I made some adjustments to his suit thermostat. It would look like a perfect malfunction. I’m a good engineer. He didn’t die. He wasn’t meant to die. I count his frostbitten thumb and three toes as my trophies. Everyone knew it was me, but nothing was ever proved. I liked the legend. If it made men look at me with fear, that was good. Hanif was his name. He swore he’d rape me and gut me from his hospital bed. By the time he got out of med centre, Achi and I were out on contract.

Achi got a contract with the Asamoahs designing ecosystems for their new agrarium under Amundsen. My contract with Mackenzie Metals took me out on to the open seas. She would be a digger, I would be a duster. In two days we would be parted. We clung to the I and A barracks, we clung to our cabins, our friends. We clung to each other. We were scared. The other women threw a party for us; moon mojitos and sing-alongs to tablet music software. But before the music and the drinking: a special gift for Achi. Her work with AKA would keep her underground; digging and scooping and sowing. She need never go on the surface. She could go her whole career – her whole life – in the caverns and lava tubes and huge agraria. She need never see the raw sky.

I used all my charm and reputation but the suit hire was still cosmologically expensive. I contracted thirty minutes in a GP surface-activity shell. It was an armoured hulk next to my lithe sasuit spiderwoman. We held hands in the outlock as the pressure door slid up. We walked up the ramp amongst a hundred thousand bootprints. We walked a few metres out on to the surface, still holding hands. There, beyond the coms towers and the power relays and the charging points for the buses and rovers; beyond the grey line of the crater rim that curved on the close horizon and the shadows the sun had never touched; there perched above the edge of our tiny world we saw the full Earth. Full and blue and white, mottled with greens and ochres. Full and impossible and beautiful beyond any words of mine. It was winter and the southern hemisphere was offered to us; the ocean half of the planet. I saw great Africa. I saw dear Brazil.

Then my suit AI advised me that we were nearing the expiry of our contract and we turned our backs on the blue Earth and walked back down into the moon.

That night we drank to our jobs our friends, our loves and our bones. In the morning we parted.

It was six lunes before I saw Achi again. Six lunes on the Sea of Fecundity, sifting dust. I was stationed at Mackenzie Metals’ Messier unit. It was old, cramped, creaking: cut-and-cover pods under bulldozed regolith berms. Too frequently I was evacuated to the new-cut deep levels because of a radiation alarm. Every time I saw the alarm flash its yellow trefoil in my lens I felt my ovaries tighten. Day and night the tunnels trembled to the vibration of the digging machines, eating deep rock. There were eighty dusters in Messier.

There was a sweet man; his name was Chuyu. A 3D print designer. Kind and funny and talented with his body. After a month of laughing and sweet sex, he asked me to join his amory: Chuyu, his amor in Queen, his amor in Meridian, her amor also in Meridian. We agreed terms: six months, who I would and would not have sex with, seeing others outside the amory, bringing others into the amory. We had nikahs even then. It had taken him so long to ask me, Chuyu confessed, because of my rep. Word about Achi’s attacker had reached Messier. I wouldn’t do that to an amor, I said. Not unless severely provoked. Then I kissed him. The amory was warmth and sex, but it wasn’t Achi. We talked or networked almost every day but I still felt the separation. Lovers are not friends.

I had ten days furlough and my first thought was to spend it with Achi. I could see Chuyu’s disappointment as I kissed him goodbye at Messier’s bus lock. It wasn’t a betrayal: I’d said in the contract that I would not have sex with Achi Debasso. We were friends, not lovers. Achi had come up to the railhead at Hypatia to meet me and all the way down the line to Queen of the South we talked and laughed. So much laughter.

Such fun she had planned for me! Messier was smelly and cramped, Queen of the South was intense, loud, colourful. In only six lunes it had changed beyond recognition. Every street was longer, every tunnel wider, every chamber higher. Achi took me in a glass elevator down the side of the recently completed Thoth Quadra and I reeled from vertigo. Down on the quadra floor was a small copse of dwarf tree – full-size trees would reach the ceiling, Achi explained. There was a café. In that café I first tasted and immediately hated mint tea.

I built this, Achi said. These are my trees, this is my garden.

I was too busy looking up at the lights, all the lights, going up and up.

Such fun! Tea, then shops. I had to find a party dress. We were going to a special party, that night. Exclusive. We browsed the catalogues in five different print shops before I found something I could wear: very retro – it was the 1980s then – padded and cinched but it hid what I wanted hidden. Then, the shoes.

The special party was exclusive to Achi’s workgroup. A security locked rail capsule took us through a dark tunnel into a space so huge, so blinding, that I almost threw up over my Balenciaga. An agrarium, Achi’s last project. I was at the bottom of a shaft a kilometre tall, fifty metres wide. The horizon is close at eye level on the moon; everything curves. Underground, a different geometry applies. The agrarium was the straightest thing I had seen in months. And brilliant: a central core of mirrors ran the full height of the shaft, bouncing raw sunlight one to another to another to walls terraced with hydroponic racks. The base of the shaft was a mosaic of fish tanks, criss-crossed by walkways. The air was warm and dank and rank. I was woozy with CO2. In these conditions plants grew fast and tall; potato plants the size of bushes; tomato vines so tall I lost their heads in the tangle of leaves and fruit. Hyper-intensive agriculture: the agrarium was huge for a cave, small for an ecosystem. The tanks splashed with fish. Did I hear frogs? Were those ducks?

Achi’s team had built a new pond from waterproof sheetings and construction frame. A pool. A swimming pool. A sound system played Ghana-pop. There were cocktails. Yellow was the fashion. They matched my dress. Achi’s crew were friendly and expansive. They never failed to compliment me on my frock. I shucked it and my shoes and everything else for the pool. I lolled, I luxuriated. Over my head the mirrors moved. Achi swam up beside me and we trod water together, laughing and plashing. The agrarium crew had lowered a number of plastic chairs into the pool to make a shallow end. Achi and I wafted blood-warm water with our legs and drank golden bison-grass vodka.

I woke up in bed beside Achi the next morning; shit-headed with vodka. I remember mumbling, fumbling love. Shivering and stupid-whispering, skin to skin. Fingerworks. Achi was curled on her right side, facing me. She had kicked the sheet off in the night. A tiny string of drool ran from the corner of her mouth to the pillow and trembled in time to her breathing. I see it still.

I looked at her there, her breath rattling in the back of her throat in drunken sleep. We had made love. I had sex with my dearest friend. I had done a good thing, I had done a bad thing. I had done an irrevocable thing. Then I lay down and pressed myself close to her and she mumble-grumbled and moved in close to me and her fingers found me and we began again.

My mother used to say that love was the easiest thing in the world. Love is what you see every day. That was how she fell in love with my father; every day she passed him, welding.

I did not see Achi for several lunes after the party in Queen. Mackenzie Metals sent me out prospecting new terrain in the Sea of Vapours. Away from Sea of Vapours, it was plain to me and Sun Chuyu that the amory didn’t work for me. I had broken my contract, but in those days there were no financial implications of extra-contractual sex. All the amors agreed to annul the contract and let me leave the amory. No blame, no claim. A simple automated contract, terminated.

I took a couple of weeks’ accumulated leave back in Queen. I called Achi about hooking up but she was at a new dig at Twé where the Asamoahs were building a corporate headquarters. I felt relieved. Then I felt guilty that I had felt relieved. Sex had made everything different. I drank, I partied, I had one-night stands, I talked long hours of expensive bandwidth with Mum and Dad back in Barra. The entire family gathered in front of the lens to thank me for the money, especially the tiny kids. They said I looked different. Longer. Drawn out. There they were, happy and safe. The money I sent them bought their education. Health, weddings, babies. And here I was, on the moon. Outrinha Adriana, who would never get a man, but who got the education, who got the degree, who got the job, sending them the money from the moon.

They were right. I was different. I never felt the same about that blue pearl of Earth in the sky. I never again hired a sasuit to go look at it, just look at it. Out on the surface, I disregarded it.

The Mackenzies sent me out to the Lansberg extraction zone and there I saw the thing that made everything different.

Five extractors were working Lansberg. Have you seen an extractor? Of course not, forgive me. You’ve never been on the surface. They are ugly things, with their insides exposed; they were no more elegant then. But to me they were beautiful. Marvellous bones and muscles. I saw them one day, out on the regolith, and I almost fell flat from the revelation. Not what they were made for – separating rare-earth metals from lunar regolith – but what they threw away. Launched in high, arching ballistic jets on either side of the big, slow machines.

It was the thing I saw every day. One day you look at the boy on the bus and he sets your heart alight. One day you look at the jets of industrial waste and you see riches beyond measure. The plan formed there and then, all at once in my head. By the time I made it back to the rover it was in place, every last detail, intricate and engineered and beautiful and I knew it would work straight out of the box. But for it to work, I had to put distance between myself and anything that might link me to regolith waste and beautiful rainbows of dust. The Mackenzies could have no claim on any part of it. I quit Mackenzie and became a Vorontsov track queen.

I went up to Meridian to rent a data crypt and hunt for the leanest, freshest, hungriest law firm to protect the thing I had seen out on Lansberg. And there I saw Achi again. She had been called back from Twé to solve a problem with microbiota in the Obuasi agrarium that had left it a pillar of stinking black slime.

One city, two friends, two amors. We went out to party. And found we couldn’t. The frocks were fabulous, the cocktails disgraceful, the company louche and the narcotics dazzling but in each bar, club, private party we ended up in a corner together, talking. Partying was boring. Talk was lovely and bottomless and fascinating. We ended up in bed again, of course. We couldn’t wait. Glorious, impractical 1980s frocks lay crumpled on the floor, ready for the recycler.

I remember when Achi asked: What do you want? She was lying on the bed and inhaling THC from a vaper. I could never take that stuff. It made me paranoid. And she also said: Dream and don’t be afraid.

And I answered: I want to be a Dragon. Achi laughed and punched me on the thigh, but I had never said truer words.

In the year and a half we had been on the moon, our small world had changed. Things moved fast in those early days. We could build an entire city in months. We had energy and raw materials and human ambition. Four companies had emerged as major economic forces. The four families. The Mackenzies were the longest established. They had been joined by the Asamoahs in food and living space. The Vorontsovs finally moved their operations off Earth entirely and ran the cycler, the moonloop, the bus service and were wrapping the world in rails. The Suns had been fighting the People’s Republic’s representatives on the LDC board and had finally broken free from terrestrial control. Four companies: Four Dragons. And I would be the Fifth Dragon.

I didn’t tell her about what I’d seen out there on Lansberg. I didn’t tell her about the data vault and the squad of legal AIs. I didn’t tell her about the brilliant idea. She knew I was keeping secrets from her. I put a shadow in her heart.

I went to my new job, laying track. The work was good, easy and physical and satisfying. At the end of every up-shift you saw three kilometres of gleaming rail among the boot and track prints, and on the edge of the horizon, the blinding spark of Crucible, brighter than any star, advancing over yesterday’s rails, and you said, I made that. The work had real measure: the inexorable advance of Mackenzie Metals across the Mare Insularum, brighter than the brightest star. So bright it could burn a hole through your helmet sunscreen if you held it in your eyeline too long. Thousands of concave mirrors focusing sunlight on the smelting crucibles. In ten years the rail lines would circle the globe and the Crucible would follow the sun. By then, I would be a Dragon.

I was sintering ten kilometres ahead of Crucible when Achi’s call came. Ting ching and it all came apart. Achi’s voice blocking out my work-mix music, Achi’s face superimposed on the dirty grey hills of Rimae Maestlin. Achi telling me her routine medical had given her four weeks.

I hitched a ride on the construction car back down the rails to Crucible. I waited two hours, squatting in the shadows, tons of molten metal and ten thousand kelvin sunlight above my head. That’s time to realise the irony. That’s not a tradeable commodity here. I hid from the Mackenzies by working ahead of them; I lurked in the dark places of their capital. I rode a slow freight train to Meridian. Ten hours clinging on to a maintenance platform, not even room to turn around, let alone sit. I listened my way through my bossa nova collection. I played Connecto on my helmet hud until every time I blinked I saw tumbling, spinning gold stars. I scanned my family’s social space entries offline. By the time I got to Meridian I was two degrees off hypothermic. I couldn’t afford the time it would take to re-pressurise for the train, so I went dirty and fast, on the BALTRAN. I knew I would vomit. I held it until the third and final jump. The look on the BALTRAN attendant’s face when I came out of the capsule at Queen of the South was a thing to be seen. So I am told. I couldn’t see it. But if I could afford the capsule I could afford the shower to clean it up. And there are people in Queen who will happily clean vomit out of a sasuit for the right number of bitsies. Say what you like about the Vorontsovs, they pay handsomely.

All this I did, the endless hours riding the train like a moon-hobo, the hypothermia and being sling-shotted in a can of my own barf, because I knew that if Achi had four weeks, I could not be far behind.

We met in a café on the twelfth level of the new Chandra quadra. We hugged, we kissed, we cried a little. I smelled sweet by then. Below us, excavators dug and sculpted, a new level every ten days. We held each other at arm’s length and looked at each other. Then we drank mint tea on the balcony.

We didn’t talk about the bones at once. It was eight lunes since we last saw each other: we talked, we networked, we shared. I made Achi laugh. She laughed like soft rain. I told her about King Dong, that the Mackenzie dusters and Vorontsov track-queens were stamping out in the dust, like boys would. She clapped her hands to her mouth in naughty glee but laughed with her eyes. So wrong. So funny.

Achi was out of contract. The closer you are to your Moonday, the shorter the contract, sometimes down to minutes of employment, but this was different. AKA did not want her ideas. They were recruiting direct from Accra and Kumasi. Ghanaians for a Ghanaian company. She was pitching ideas to the LDC for their new port at Meridian – quadras three kilometres deep; a sculpted city; like living in the walls of a titanic cathedral. The LDC were polite but they had been talking about development funding for two lunes now. Her savings were running low. She woke up looking at the tick of the Four Elementals on her lens. She was considering moving to a smaller space.

‘I can pay your per diems,’ I said. ‘I have lots of money.’

And then we talked about the bones. Achi could not decide until I got my report. The guilt, the ghost of doing something wrong. She could not have borne it if her decision influenced my decision to stay with the moon or go back to Earth. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be here on this balcony drinking piss-tea. I didn’t want Achi to have forced the decision to go to the medics on me. I didn’t want there to be a decision for me to make.

Then the wonder. I remember it so clearly: a flash of gold in the corner of my vision. Something marvellous. A woman flying. A flying woman. Her arms were outspread, she hung in the sky like a crucifix. Our Lady of Flight. Then I saw wings shimmer and run with rainbow colours; wings transparent and strong as a dragonfly’s. The woman hung a moment, then folded her gossamer wings around her, and fell. She tumbled, now diving heard-first, flicked her wrists, flexed her shoulders. A glimmer of wing slowed her; then she spread her full wing span and pulled up out of her dive into a soaring spiral, high above Chandra Quadra.

‘Oh,’ I said. I had been holding my breath. I was shaking with wonder. If you could fly why would you ever do anything else? It’s commonplace now; anyone can do it. But back then, there, I saw what we could do in this place.

I went to the Mackenzie Metals medical centre and the medic put me in the scanner. He passed magnetic fields through my body and the machine gave me my bone density analysis. I was eight days behind Achi. Five weeks, and then my residency on the moon would become citizenship.

Or I could fly back to Earth, to Brazil.

That night the golden woman swooped through my dreams. Achi slept beside me. I had booked a hostel room. The bed was wide, the air was as fresh as Queen of the South could make and the taste of the water did not set your teeth on edge.

Oh, that golden woman, flying loops through my certainties.

Queen of the South hadn’t gone to a three-shift society, so it never went completely dark. I pulled Achi’s sheet around me and went out on to the balcony. I leaned on the rail and looked out at the walls of lights. Lives and decisions behind every light. This was an ugly world. It put a price on everything. It demanded a negotiation from everyone. Out at the railhead I had seen a new thing among some of the surface workers: a medallion, or a little votive tucked into a patch pocket. A woman in Virgin Mary robes, one half of her face a black angel, the other half a naked skull. It was the first time I met Dona Luna. One half of her face dead, but the other was alive. The moon was not a dead satellite, she was a living world. Hands and hearts and hopes like mine shaped her. Here there was no Mother Nature, no Gaia to set against human will. Everything that lived, we made. Dona Luna was hard and unforgiving, but she was beautiful. She could be a woman, with dragonfly wings, flying.

I stayed on the hotel balcony until the roof reddened with sun-up. Then I went back to Achi. I wanted to make love with her again. My motives were all selfish. Things that are difficult with friends are easier with lovers.

It was Achi’s idea to make a game out of it. We must clench our fists behind our backs, like Scissors, Paper, Stone, and count to three. Then we open our fists and in them there will be something, some small object, that will say beyond any doubt what we have decided. We must not speak, because if we say even a word, we will influence each other. It was the only way she could bear it, if it was quick and clean and we didn’t speak a word. And a game.

We went back to the balcony table of the café to play the game. Two glasses of mint tea. I remember the air smelled of rock dust over the usual electricity and sewage. Every fifth sky panel was blinking. A less than perfect world.

‘I think we should do this kind of quickly,’ Achi said and her right hand was behind her back so fast I caught my breath. Now, the time was now. I slipped my small object out of my bag and clenched it in my hidden fist.

‘One two three,’ Achi said. We opened our fists.

She held a nazar: an Arabic charm: concentric teardrops of blue, white and black lunar glass, like an eye.

In my hand was a tiny icon of Dona Luna: black and white, living and dead.

The last things were simple and swift. All farewells should be sudden, I think. I booked Achi on the cycler out. There was always space on the return orbit. She booked me into the LDC medical centre. A flash of light and the chib was bonded permanently to my eye. No hand shake, no congratulations, no welcome. All I had done was decide to continue doing what I was doing.

The cycler would come round the Farside and rendezvous with the moonloop in three days. Three days: it focused our feelings, it kept us from crying too much.

I went with Achi on the train to Meridian. We had a whole side row of seats to ourselves and we curled up like small burrowing animals.

I’m scared, she said. It hurt, going back. The cycler slowly spins you up to Earth gravity and then there’s the gees coming down. She could be months in a wheelchair. Swimming, they say, is the closest a returnee can come to being on the moon. The water supports you while you build up muscle and bone mass again. Achi loved to swim. And then were the doubts. What if she had been mixed up with someone else and she was already past the point of no return? Would they try to bring her back to the moon? She couldn’t bear that. It would kill her as surely as the Earth shattering her bones, suffocating her under her own weight. I understood then that she hated the moon. She had always hated it; the danger, the fear, but most of all, the people. The same faces looking into your face, forever. Wanting something from you. Wanting and wanting and wanting. No one can live that way, she said. It’s inhuman. I was the only thing that made the moon bearable for her. And I was staying, and she was leaving.

So I told her the thing I kept secret: the thing I had seen out in Lansberg, that would make me a Dragon. It was so simple. I just looked at something I saw every day in a different way. Helium-3. The key to the post-oil economy. Mackenzie Metals threw away helium-3 every day. And I thought, how could the Mackenzies not see it? Surely they must … I couldn’t be the only one. But family and companies, and family companies especially, they have strange fixations and blindnesses. Mackenzies mine metal. Metal mining is what they do. They can’t imagine anything else and so they miss what’s right under their noses. I could make it work. That’s what I told Achi. I knew how to do it. But not with the Mackenzies. They’d take it off me. If I tried to fight, they’d just bury me. Or kill me. It’s cheaper. The Court of Clavius would make sure my family were compensated, but that would be the end of my hopes for dynasty. I would make it work for me, I would build a dynasty. I would be the Fifth Dragon. Mackenzie, Asamoah, Vorontsov, Sun: Corta. I liked the sound of that.

I told her this on the train to Meridian. The seat-back screen showed the surface. On a screen, outside your helmet, it is always the same. It is grey and soft and ugly and covered in footprints. Inside the train were workers and engineers; lovers and partners and even a couple of small children. There was noise and colour and drinking and laughing, swearing and sex. And us curled up in the back against the bulkhead. And, I thought, this is the moon.

Achi gave me a gift at the moonloop gate. It was the last thing she owned. Everything else had been sold. There were eight passengers at the departure gate, with friends, family, amors to see them off. No one left alone. The air smelled of coconut, so different from the vomit, sweat, unwashed bodies of the arrival gate. Mint tea was available from a dispensing machine. No one drank it.

Achi’s gift was a document cylinder, crafted from bamboo. My instructions were to open it after she was gone. The departure was so fast, the way they say executions are. The VTO staff had everyone strapped into their seats and were sealing the capsule door before either I or Achi could respond. I saw her mouth begin a goodbye, saw her wave fingers, then the locks sealed and the elevator took the capsule up to the tether platform.

I tried to imagine the moonloop: a spinning spoke of M5 fibre twenty centimetres wide and two hundred kilometres long. Up there the ascender was climbing towards the counterbalance mass, shifting the centre of gravity and sending the whole tether into a surface-grazing orbit. Only in the final moments of approach would the white cable be visible, seemingly descending vertically from the star-filled sky. The grapple connected and the capsule was snatched from the platform. Up there, one of those bright stars was the ascender, sliding down the tether, again shifting the centre of mass so that the whole ensemble moved into a higher orbit. At the top of the loop, the grapple would release and the cycler catch the capsule. All engineering, all process, all technical. So I kept the terrible emptiness from me, like charms. I tried to put names on the stars: the cycler, the ascender, the counterweight; the capsule freighted with my amor, my love, my friend. The comfort of physics. I watched until a new capsule was loaded into the gate. Already the next tether was wheeling up over the horizon.

Then I went to buy coffee.

Yes, coffee. The price was outrageous. I dug into my savings. But it was the real thing: imported, not spun up from an organic printer. The importer let me sniff it. I cried. She sold me the paraphernalia as well. The equipment I needed simply didn’t exist on the moon.

I took it all back to my hotel. I ground to the specified grain. I boiled the water. I let it cool to the correct temperature. I poured it from a height, for maximum aeration. I stirred it. I made it like I made this coffee, for you, Sister. You never forget these things.

While it drew I opened Achi’s gift. I unrolled drawings, concept art for a habitat the realities of the moon would never let her build. A lava tube, enlarged and sculpted with faces. The faces of the orixas, each a hundred metres high, round and smooth and serene, overlooked terraces of gardens and pools. Waters cascaded from their eyes and open lips. Pavilions and belvederes were scattered across the floor of the vast cavern; vertical gardens ran from floor to artificial sky, like the hair of the gods. Balconies – she loved balconies – galleries and arcades, windows. Pools. You could swim from one end of this Orixa-world to the other. She had inscribed it: a habitation for a dynasty.

This is Achi’s gift, all around you.

When the importer had rubbed a pinch of ground coffee under my nose, memories of childhood, the sea, college, friends, family, celebrations flooded me. They say smell is the sense most closely linked to memory. When I smelled the coffee I had prepared, I experienced something new. Not memories, but a vision. I saw the sea, and I saw Achi, Achi-gone-back, on a board, in the sea. It was night and she was paddling the board out, through the waves and beyond the waves, sculling herself forward, along the silver track of the moon on the sea.

I plunged, poured and savoured the aroma of the coffee.

I drank my coffee.

It still doesn’t taste the way it smells.