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.
