Luna: New Moon

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.