New Moon by Ian McDonald

Author:Ian McDonald [McDonald, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Hard Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781466847637
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2015-09-21T23:00:00+00:00

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.

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