The Amber Columns (The City of Dark Pleasures Book 2)

by Rizer, Bibi

  “I’d like to write something about the Culls,” I recite, dutifully, like I’ve been saying in every editorial meeting for two months. Doulton stifles a laugh behind her chubby hand. Meier just shakes her head.

  “No one wants to read about the Culls right now, O’Mara,” Goldwyn says, dully. “Not in springtime.”

  She says it as though by autumn things will have changed.

  “Okay?” The brightness has returned to her voice. “Let’s have a great week everyone.”

  We all stand. Goldwyn lays her hand on my arm. “Stay for a moment, O’Mara.”

  I sit as we watch the others leave. Goldwyn closes the door.

  “You know it’s not because I don’t care about the Culls,” she says.

  I nod, looking at my own chewed fingernails. Barely two hours has passed since Tully had his tongue and fingers inside me, but it’s already starting to feel like those things happened to someone else. As soon as I got to a terminal I tried to book another pass to the Pleasures for tonight, but I was declined. “Recent negative sexual experience is contraindicated” the bot said. I could have asked for a human review but how would that go? Me crying and begging to be allowed to see him again? Not a good idea.

  “Are you okay, O’Mara?” Goldwyn asks in the kind of motherly tone that only makes things worse.

  “I’m fine. I was up late last night.”

  “Some fabulous party I wasn’t invited to?”

  I’m supposed to think she’s being witty, but I know she’s fishing for details. Goldwyn can’t turn off her journalistic curiosity. She thinks there’s a story lurking under every used coffee cup.

  “I went to the Pleasures for a massage, but one thing led to another.”

  Goldwyn claps her hands again. Nothing excites her more than hearing about someone else getting penetrated. She confessed to me once, in hushed tones, that she doesn’t care for penetration herself. Lucky for her that her wife feels the same way. And she knows I strongly prefer men. “Boy crazy” she called me once, affectionately, as though such inclinations are not socially crippling in our world.

  “And who did you find?” she asks gleefully. “Someone nice? Did you ever try that man with the tattoos again?”

  I would never tell her the truth. Even if I didn’t have the idea that falling in love with a Cull might be something not discussed in polite company, I wouldn’t tell her. I want to keep it to myself. And I don’t want to lose my shit in front of her.

  “I tried a machine in Obsidian,” I say, and even manage to blush convincingly.

  “Lovely! Machines are always fun. No pressure. No surprises. I sometimes wish they’d allow them outside the gates.”

  I just nod and we fall into one of those silences that screams “someone please change the subject!”

  “I do understand you’re looking for something a bit more in depth,” Goldwyn says.

  I’m confused for a second. More in depth than a fucking machine? Are we really going to discuss my sexual needs in such intimate detail? But she saves me.

  “Something to sink your teeth into,” she continues. “A real story about real things. I know you think all we do here is fluff but there is room for more serious stuff.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think I have just the thing for you. I was going to give it to Doulton but her work has been so dull lately. Ever since she joined her harem she’s lost her edge. It always happens.”

  I’m not sure that Doulton ever had an edge but I keep that thought to myself.

  “It’s an interview,” Goldwyn goes on. “If I gave it to Meier she’d turn it into a puff piece but since you’re feeling so feisty lately you might be able to make something quite substantial out of it.

  I should hope so. I spent months studying interview techniques in my course. Techniques I’ve barely used. I tried to interview Tully the first time I met him. And look how that turned out.

  Also,” Goldwyn adds with a conspiratorial gleam in her eye, “The subject asked for you by name.”

  “Who is the subject?” I ask.

  “Trenoweth Portero.”

  I cough. “The Trenoweth Portero?”

  “The one and only. I knew you’d be pleased.”

  “But he NEVER gives interviews. And why would he agree to an interview with our...uh…feed?” I nearly said “stupid feed”. I’m pretty sure Goldwyn feels the same way but still. It’s not something that should be said out loud to your boss.

  “People are making noises about elections and such, probably. The Portero family does a media blitz every five years or so, just to firm up their position. It’s been this way since before…well, you know.”

  I know. The thing no one talks about. The genocide, the roots of which are only ever whispered, and even then with a conspiratorial giggle, as though it’s juicy gossip rather than the murder and mutilation of a million young men.

  “When is this interview booked?” I ask.

  “Friday. So you have a few days to prepare. No late nights at the Pleasures for you this week, young lady.” She wags her pointing pink talon at me, fixing me in a falsely stern glare. I force a laugh.

  “Can I have a pass to the restricted data servers?”

  “I’ll look into it,” Goldwyn says as she gathers her files, teetering towards the door in her precarious heels. “In the meantime there’s a bit of information on the open servers. You can start there.”

  I watch her round ass in the lime green trousers wiggle away down the hall to her office. As an intern I don’t have an office; I usually work wherever I can find the space and a free terminal.

  “Scheduler? Who has the boardroom booked for the rest of the day?”

  “The boardroom is free until six PM,” the bot says from the wall terminal.

  I sit back down at the table and activate one of the terminals. “Open server search,” I say. “Authority Chairman, Trenoweth Portero.”

  I get the predictable results. All stuff I know. He’s sixty years old, though it seems to me he’s been sixty years old for several years now. There’s a thousand reports of awesome things he’s done. Designated funds to the college. Repelled a squadron of mainland submarines in the Opal Sea that he assured us were headed for our off shore oil rigs. Patted a three legged puppy. I’m not sure anyone believes any of these stories. There are rumors that he hardly leaves the Chairman’s palace anymore. He has over a thousand wives, apparently. How would he find the time?

  I snicker to myself, giving thanks that no one has invented a mind-reading bot. Such unpatriotic thoughts about the Chairman would have my name added to some dire list somewhere. People don’t disappear these days as much as they used to, but I remember my mother’s friends who just never came around anymore. I wonder if they ended up at the Pleasures.

  Trenoweth Portero’s tanned and wide jawed face fills the terminal screen. He wears a military uniform wherever he goes, when he is seen, even though I don’t think he ever actually served. He denies ever being on a cut gang. He claims he survived the violence of the Expiation by remaining in his wealthy family’s compound. But he was the chairman already by that time. As if the gangs would have gone for the chairman and his family.

  He has many children, we hear, though no one identifies as such. It’s thought they go by other names, attend the more expensive schools and live with their mothers in the posh domed neighborhoods around the palace.

  I’ve never seen vids of him with any wives or children. Perhaps he visits them under cover of darkness, in the middle of the curfew. Maybe he has underground passages directly into their bedrooms. Or he might bring them to the palace by bus, like a maintenance team.

  Now I’m giggling. Outside the boardroom door, Doulton shambles by, turning her plump face to look quizzically at me.

  “Cat video,” I say. One of the few media imports still allowed from the mainland. There are hardly any cats left on our island, and those there are live wild in the ruins. But people still love the vids.

 
Doulton just frowns dumbly and wanders away.

  What to ask the most powerful man in my world? There’s nothing on the open server of any interest. And it could be days before I get a permit to use the restricted server, if at all. As I shut the terminal down I think of something my mother use to say, when I was struggling to complete my assignments in journalism school: “When in doubt, try a hard copy.” Her voice was feather light by this time, weakened by an illness that took her lungs away cell by cell.

  I gather my jacket and bag, stride out past the cubicles and wave my wrist pass over the exit scanner.

  “Research at the Archiva. Leave my timecard logged in.”

  “Approved,” the bot intones. The door to the magways swishes open.

  In the Expiation many records were destroyed on purpose. Mainly it was economic records at first. With so many men dying people just claimed their property, destroying any records of ownership. But as the conflagration grew that violence spread to other records – history books, archives, evidence of a past so long removed that few remember it without help. And a lot of that help was lost. At the height of the chaos several groups of women formed the Archiva, gathering hard copy documents and securing them in secret locations. Now the fruits of their labor are available to select citizens (journalists and students included) to view on request.

  I cross onto the magway that will take me to the center of the information district, where the Archiva occupies one of the few old buildings outside the Pleasures.

  The incongruous marble columns rise up from the magnetized walkway, extending all the way up the glass dome and through it, into the blazing blue sky above. It’s days like these I’m tempted to leave the controlled areas most, if only to enjoy fresh air and sunshine directly, rather than have it mediated by UV protective glass, pumps and filters. Only in the Pleasures do citizens regularly enjoy the actual outdoors, and even there it’s a simulated environment, colored by lights and smoke and artificial scents.

  School kids visit the forests and gardens outside the controlled city in field trips. They all make it back alive. I don’t know why adults don’t do it to. Maybe we like our cages.

  The door to the archive is ornate and carved, reminding me painfully of the door to Tully’s boudoir. I scan my wrist pass and my press ID pops up on the scanner screen.

  “Welcome citizen O’Mara Tanner,” the bot says as I pass.

  But I’ve already been overcome with that magical smell and sight: shelves and shelves of books.

  An archivist looks up from her work as I enter, giving me a welcoming smile.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m O’Mara Tanner, a journalist with Island News. I’ve been assigned a piece about the Portero family and I wondered if you had anything.”

  Her smile wavers for a moment. There’s an air of distrust that permeates our society and it’s never more evident than when we speak of the upper echelons.

  “We have some things,” she says guardedly. “But none of it has been cataloged so it’s a bit of a mess.”

  Even better, I think. If they catalogued it they would be more likely to come across things they thought people might be better off not seeing. And perhaps hide those things away somewhere. Or even destroy them.

  “I’m fine with a mess. I just want some things to go on. Light-hearted stuff. Childhood or school or whatever.”

  She looks doubtful, but steps out from behind her work-table and gestures for me to follow her.

  Moments later, after hurrying to keep up with her long stride down a seemingly endless corridor, we arrive at a numbered door, which hisses open at a wave of the archivist’s wrist pass. Behind the door is a long narrow room lined with shelves piled high with books and papers. There doesn’t seem to be any order at all that I can discern.

  “There’s no rhyme or reason to this. It just hasn’t been a priority all these years. We’ve been trying to make sense of critical stuff – medical, engineering and the like. So this is…well it’s all a jumble. But if you poke around you might find something. I’ll leave the door open.”

  I don’t watch her leave. I’m too mesmerized by all the data just lying around, waiting for me to explore it. I did visit the Archiva a few times when I was in college, but I never got into any of these uncatalogued storage rooms. I feel like a fairy tale thief about to plunder a dragon’s hoard.

  But where to start? There are piles of yellowing file folders – a quick glance at those tells me they are financial records. Nothing of interest there – the Porteros are as rich as it is possible to be. Everyone knows that. One tumble of books seems to be genealogical records dating back centuries. While it might be interesting to see what the family was up to before the Climate Wars it’s hardly something that might be discussed in an interview.

  I step back for a moment, feeling a little overwhelmed. There’s so much here, it’s hard to know where to start. I try to hear my mother’s voice again. Though she wasn’t a journalist herself, she had a wealth of advice about it for me. None of it has ever steered me wrong.

  “Look in the least obvious place first,” she would say, both when I was researching an assignment and when I’d lost a shoe or a data-stick.

  I scan over the shelves and piles again. My natural inclination is the stuff that looks important, official—the large leather volumes of genealogy, the brown edged broadsheet newspapers, a relic of the days when we could still import wood pulp for paper. They look serious, like things educated people would read. They look like they would print the truth.

  But by the time Trenoweth Portero came to power, truth was a tricky thing, and the influence of money on the media had already resulted in a lot of pain and suffering.

  I turn instead to a pile of colorful glossy magazines. Among the piles are print copies of the very trashy publication I now work for—Island News Daily. I run my fingers over the gloss finish, which has become slightly sticky over time. “Hottest Bachelors” is one headline, with Portero’s gormless smile dominating. He’s one of those men who has improved with age. When he was a young bachelor, over forty years ago now, he had a rather doughy face. Age has chiseled him somewhat, frosted his hair, rendered his plastic appearance more like stone or wood. He’s not handsome, but I can see why some women would find him a worthy husband, even to share with a thousand others.

  Later issues talk of his first marriage, then subsequent ones. He already had a dozen wives when the Expiation started. There’s a tragic story about him bidding his many younger sons goodbye as they fled on a refugee boat to the mainland. “Refugee boat”. It looks like a luxury yacht. His older sons…

  I turn the sweaty page and find an advertisement for luncheon meat. Someone has torn the next page of the article out. Now I’ll never know what happened to the older sons. Perhaps they were killed by mobs as so many boys were.

  I flip back to the beginning of the article, the title “Tragic farewell” emblazoned over a faded photograph of a stream of small boys boarding the boat. Portero himself stands off to the side, looking stoic, watching his sons with a grim expression. There are crying women behind him—his wives, the mothers of the boys I assume. I can only imagine their sorrow, their fear.

  Well, I don’t have to imagine it that much. I saw my own mother in the days after my brother died. I remember her screams. That’s not something you easily forget.

  Among the wives, one looks up, straight at the camera, an air of defiance in her face. I find myself oddly drawn to her, though I’m not sure why. The photo is grainy, and the light in this storeroom is dim. I take out a data-stick and turn on the photo function. No one has told me I can’t take pictures so I’m taking that as authorization that I can.

  I click the data-stick over the image, then slip it back into the pocket of my jacket, clicking it into the d-port there. Then I lift my sleeve and activate the view screen. I used my last paycheck to upgrade my view screen so the image that pops up is crisp and clear. With my finger I draw a square around the woman
’s face.

  “Enlarge,” I say. Her face fills my screen. “Enhance”

  The picture begins to rebuild, the software of the display analyzing the grainy image and extrapolating a high resolution replacement. It won’t be perfect, but many hidden things are discovered this way.

  I gaze around the room again as the picture reloads, line by line, infuriatingly slowly, thinking perhaps I’ll investigate the pile of cheesily published memoirs next. Almost every member of the Portero family wrote one in those days—it was quite fashionable.

  I glance back at my display screen and my heart jumps so quickly it causes my sensor to do a scan, buzzing my neck like a moth has landed there.

  The woman looking at the camera has vibrant golden eyes.

  A resolution glitch, I think. Golden eyes are rare. Brown is the most common color and occasionally blue. But this caramel shade is very rare. I’ve only seen it once before.

  On Tully.

  I quickly draw a square around the faces of several of the other women, repeating the process. Enhanced I can see all of them have the dark brown eyes that are typical on our island – like mine, my mother’s, my brother and father’s.

  My wrist scanner beeps. I look down at it. Apparently it doesn’t like my heart rate.

  “Reading something exciting,” I say. The scanner beeps in reply. I find myself smiling. Several times with dorm sisters, sneaking around somewhere we weren’t supposed to be I would give this same excuse when my scanner beeped its dismay at my elevated heart rate. This time I’m telling the truth.

  I look at the golden eyed woman again. It could just be a coincidence. That eye color is rare, but not unheard of. But now I have the idea in my head I’m aching to see what was on that torn out page.

  I search through the other magazines, hoping there might be another copy. No luck. Nor are there any other issues from around the same time, or anything else that seems to include information about Portero’s family, his sons.

  I flip back to the article, closing the magazine and looking at the cover and the date of publication. I tap my wrist pass.