by Rich Horton
Brea kept to the perimeter of the square as shots rang out. She ducked down an alley, hurried by a body-collector and his horse-drawn wagon. His calls for dead struck a chord in Brea. This was a savage world she’d muddled into.
Brea’s guard dragged her to a halt. Embracing, they stumbled through the nearest doorway. She smelled the plague-bodies within, but they were irrelevant as her sores erupted. The gunshots got closer. The lovers landed on a bed, barely noticing they shared it with a corpse.
Her olfactory spell had worn off. The guard was in possession of his faculties, but nevertheless divergent, and now they were on equal footing. They writhed for interface, but the new part of her stood aloof. She allowed the coupling to proceed because she was ill. Astoria was far from immuno-equilibrium. It might have taken her just one partner to get the region’s antibodies. Perhaps she was the first immuno sapiens to consummate four ninety-or-aboves in so short a time.
Broichin wrote of the first orgies. He never mentioned transcending immuno-love.
They came to their senses. The stench of the room overwhelmed them. They crept naked into the alley, she still sick. Finally she remembered her purpose.
“Put it in me,” she said.
“What?”
“I need your sperm.”
She backed him against a wall and grabbed his penis. He seemed scandalized, but he stiffened in her hand. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Repro-arousal or illness? She had no idea if her contraceptive treatment was still working. There was only one way to find out.
They were standing in a small kitchen. The meat on the counter hadn’t gone bad yet. She was stroking his organ when the kitchen window, and the young man’s head, exploded.
For a ludicrous moment she thought she’d caused this. The gunfire had become background noise. He crashed against the counter, skull spouting blood. A clamorous mob rushed by the front door. Brea watched blood saturate a loaf of bread. She went naked down the alley, benumbed. The air buzzed with bullets. She passed fey through an abandoned market warren.
There was a child standing in her path.
One of the mainland’s countless urchins: grimy, holding a chunk of raw meat to its mouth. It watched her with feral concentration. She found herself kneeling, extending a hand. In other circumstances, this creature would’ve fled, but Brea’s scent calmed it. The meat hit the pavement. The child came at Brea, arms outstretched. “Mamma,” it squeaked.
This kind of thing didn’t happen in the Feast, where children got immunity from machines. People equated immuno-sharing with sex, because it created something like romantic attachment between adults—but it wasn’t sex.
And on the mainland, this “perversion” kept children alive.
She cradled the child and wanted to nurse it. This was nothing like immuno-sharing with an adult. There was no urge to dominate or submit, tease or withhold. Brea had never thought of immuno-sharing as human. After all, a virus had delivered humanity’s new immune system, and noses. Romantics like Broichin and Vedrum called it love.
And now, unfortunately, Brea wasn’t experiencing maternal love, which she knew firsthand. She’d failed in her quest.
• • •
8
“The virus that delivered our new immune systems spread itself by extended phenotype, inspiring the old lust to establish the new.”
—Broichin, Pleasure and Plague
Revolutionaries dragged Torquil from his burning car. The old man was given a paper bib and dunce cap to wear, then shoved into a parade of reactionaries. His adornments proclaimed him an “immunity hoarder” and “plague rat.” He walked with “infection-roaders,” “secondary vectors,” and other pitiful specimens.
Vedrum watched the shaming parade from a safe distance. He let the revolutionary mob carry him toward Pioneer Square, where reactionaries burned alive on pyres of plague bodies.
“Brother, did you hear?” Did she mean revolutionary brother, or fellow mansion staff? The woman beside him wore the same uniform as he. “The governor’s house is bombed,” she said. “Ruined!”
Vedrum tried to see the hilltop through the pall.
“Don’t I know you?” the woman said.
He shouldered away through the crowd, crying plague on newspaper photographs: the four of them at the railing, dazed and aglow, surrounded by immunity hoarders. It had only been a few days ago. Vedrum had taken five lovers since his revolutionary, five dissolutions of self. He’d experienced illness. He felt older, if not wiser.
Astoria had been far from equilibrium before he arrived: at a confluence of plagues. A powder keg waiting for an Archipelagic spark. Vedrum struggled with profound attractions. He would consummate again soon, but first he wanted news of his companions.
At the south gate of the square, a firebrand on an upturned cart bellowed: “. . . plague rats!” The man seemed stricken himself, with Archipelagic plague, or Aleutian or Incan. Many in the crowd, revolutionary and plague-rat alike, were sick.
Vedrum snatched a newspaper from a pile by the gate. The Gaze had become a revolutionary organ; the front page celebrated the palace bombing. Vedrum scanned as he walked. He stopped just inside the square and read:
“. . . but some of the governor’s foreign guests survived. The Archipelagic Jee-ang, the one that tried to jump, is coupling as fast as she can at Midnight Dawn headquarters. The swoony one, Virdrim, is at large in the city. We also have an Incan and a McMurdoan in stable condition . . .”
Vedrum dropped the pages. So he was the “swoony” one—wonderful. No word of Aerd or Brea. He hurried through the square and tried not to see the screaming, burning reactionaries. On the smoldering hilltop, he picked through the ruin with the other crows, but he sought something specific. Burnt bones littered pits of blackened rubble. Vedrum tapped his left temple as he scanned the craters, waking his vizcort implant. This would light up other vizcorts in the area. They were tough little buggers, some kind of spooky-ceramic. They fed on body movement, on any kinetic energy, and were basically immortal. Vedrum’s flagged Aerd on the lip of a crater.
Aerd’s icon flashed yellow. He was dead, the selfish bastard.
Now who would mock Vedrum during his funks? He bent and vomited a gruel of Astorian bread. When he looked up there was another flagged vizcort approaching Aerd’s: Brea.
They met near the rubble-buried body. Brea wore a deep hood that hid her face. “He wanted children more than me,” she said, her breath hitching. “I’d never met anyone like that before. He wanted to be a parent, but he didn’t shout about it like I did.”
She was sobbing, and Vedrum joined her, and then they were hugging. They’d consummated once before the skiff journey—something under a twenty-five. They’d gone into it with the usual curiosity: divergence was a measure of potential benefit to both parties, so a low rating could mean that one immune system stood to gain much more than the other. It chanced that Vedrum had more to give on that long-ago night.
They’d never been close friends, but they had Aerd in common. Every few years or so they had an all-night conversation about him. It seemed inevitable that they were alone together at his wake.
“I’ve been ill,” Brea said, “really ill. Our suppression ran out fast. I never could have imagined . . . it changes you.”
“I know.”
Vedrum had been deathly ill four lovers ago. Through much of it he’d thought back on the Feaster custom of belittling plague, joking about it—even lauding it. Vedrum had been no different. Now it made him cringe. His infection, unsuppressed and nearly fatal, had burned something out of the core of him. Feasters mapped pathogen genomes, but they didn’t truly understand plague. How could they?
“I can’t go back to the Feast, Ved.”
He held her at arm’s length and studied her eyes. She always seemed to know what he was thinking. It used to annoy him, but now he found it oddly comforting. “You had me figured out back in Torquil’s car. I guess I’m a simple sod. But why did you come?”
>
A Feast study had found that 10 percent of its population were unreformed breeders. During blissful post, when many resorted to repro-sex, breeders might conceive, overcoming their Feast contraceptive tech. There was a correlation between this ability and strong parental instinct. Brea and Aerd were of the 10 percent. Vedrum suspected it long before their conception and legal problems. Long before he introduced them, in fact.
Brea used to dismiss immuno-love as a fad, shocking many with her repro leanings. Vedrum and Aerd had both fallen for that. “Let me help you,” he said.
“With what?”
“Whatever you’re up to. Do you need sperm? I can put my penis in you, if that will help.”
“Thanks anyway Ved. I’m through trying to get pregnant.”
He thought for a moment. “Not sure what else I have to offer.”
Brea smirked, and suddenly Vedrum was afraid. “There is something you can help me with. . . . ”
• • •
9
“You can’t be healed without first falling ill. To consummate divergence, you must roam a plague-wracked world, imperiled.”
—Broichin, Pleasure and Plague
Jiang’s ulcerated corpse was naked but tastefully decked in flowers. The funeral litter floated on a sea of hands toward the square. Mourners sang. Brea’s impetuous Jiang had become a folk hero. She who nearly jumped to her death for revolutionary ardor—so the songs went. A true revolutionary would die to bring the people immunity. Photos of Jiang on the railing were plastered all over the city.
Brea followed the procession to the square, where Vedrum waited in his ridiculous servant uniform.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “She seemed . . . nice?”
“She was avaricious and headstrong,” Brea said, watching the body glide past. “She was never nice to anyone, not even me. Yet I loved her. Whatever that means.”
Brea thought this would put Vedrum at a loss, but he surprised her: “I know what that’s like. I’ve loved scoundrels and maniacs. I was just being polite.”
“Thanks,” she said briskly. “What did you get?”
Vedrum pulled a hefty antique pistol from his coat. “One shot,” he said, “but it packs a wallop.”
Brea produced her drum pistol. She’d made her latest lover, a revolutionary guardsman, show her the way of this primitive weapon. He’d been a marked step down from previous lovers. She was on the steep slope of the divergence curve now. “I’m hoping security is lax. Nobody tries to enter these dens, I’m told.”
Vedrum made his disapproving face.
“I’ll talk our way in,” she said, moving toward the alley gate. The way snaked through an organic tangle of tenements. The local waif-master’s den was near, according to intelligence from Brea’s recent lovers—some of whom had children under the man’s tutelage. She couldn’t fathom this. In another life she’d objected to the Feast’s system of deep-interface education, but mainland complacency had it beat. Mainland children accrued to grown-up thieves. They learned to survive, or perished.
She couldn’t abandon her child to this fate.
Around a bend stood a hulking man twirling a riot club. Summoning her best Astorian accent, she said: “Business with Master Dresht! Step aside!”
“Dresht ain’t receivin’ today.”
She stepped closer, leveraging their divergence. “Why be that way?” Smelling him, the divergence felt low. She couldn’t guess like Vedrum, but she put it under fifty. Charm would only get her so far. “He’ll want to see us,” she said, producing a handful of banknotes and gold.
A bequest from her lover before the revolutionary: the old woman, that mad complex one. It was strange, the weight of actual “money” in her hand. These mainlanders were so primitive. Brea tossed the fortune at the thug’s feet. “Move?” she said.
He fell to gathering the bribe, and they walked by, Vedrum glaring in amazement. They hadn’t gone far when children began to emerge from doorways and warrens. They chattered in their street cant, clogging the alleyway. Brea and Vedrum swatted at clever questing hands. Brea scanned their grimy little faces.
No sign of her boy. She’d woken from their post-sharing haze to find him gone. The maternal love she sought had awakened at that point. With a vengeance.
Vedrum pulled out his weapon, to save it from pilfering, and children scattered. Brea forged ahead and came to a crumbling gateway. She stepped over the ghost jamb, and entered a courtyard swarming with children.
Master Dresht, a striking young man in a patchy fur coat, stood in their midst. The children chanted in their thieves argot. Brea’s boy stood sleepily in a clamoring mass of children. His sores flaked away like rice paper. The roiling knot of little ones was a divergence frenzy. Her boy had brought new immunity here. Beside him was another grimy child, male or female wasn’t clear, also with flaking sores. The two of them were at a premium, jostled by vying suitors.
Dresht held a machine pistol at his side, pointed earthward. His gaze was dreamy. “You must be here about. . . ” He gestured at her boy, “ . . . little Liam.”
Liam. Her child’s name was Liam.
“I’ll have him back.” She produced another handful of gold coins. “Surely this is enough. He’s already spread the immunity.”
“My chucks bring me plenty of coin. What else ya got?”
Vedrum was beside her. He raised his weapon, leaving her no choice but to draw.
Dresht seemed unphased. “You won’t use those.” For all his sordid surroundings, the man cut a dashing figure. She realized their divergence was at play—a high divergence, considering the way things were going. “Clearly you’re a breeder,” he said. “Why else come after Liam? Ain’t in you to endanger children, so let’s talk this out. Gold’s fine, but I think you got something better. Like little machines in your blood? That’s a shaky bead you got there. I don’t think you know guns. I think you’re one of them Archipelagics. Ain’t that right, Feaster?”
Maybe he had greater immuno-detachment than she. The children brought him immunity, along with wallets and watches, but he hadn’t taken Brea’s immunity from Liam yet. The concept of this man suddenly repulsed her. The world he embodied made her sick. And now he wanted her blood.
“Fucking mainland savage,” she said.
“Savage? Would you like to see mainland savagery?”
Dresht raised his weapon, aiming at Liam. Her boy was cuddling fiercely with a new child while others tried to pull them apart.
Brea fired and missed—a terrific concussion in this little courtyard, but she fired again in the ringing silence, and again. Automatic fire squirted from Dresht as he fell. Vedrum’s wallop came too late, tearing through Dresht’s middle as he landed.
The children were scattering, except for Liam and his new partner—and the three that Dresht’s burst had killed. The vague hiss of the city returned, and the muffled gunshots of revolution.
Brea stepped over the dead children to reach Liam. She guessed that in a time before immuno-sharing, she might have shrunk from such carnage. The little bodies were horrible, of course, and she was to blame, but part of her remained cold. They were not hers.
She lifted Liam, along with his sore-fastened partner—a frail girl who would have to come along for the ride. Brea wouldn’t sunder their coupling. She’d heard stories of how that felt. She couldn’t do that to her boy.
Vedrum sat down on the ghost jamb. He hung his head between his knees, rocking back and forth.
“We should get back to the skiff,” Brea said. “It won’t have opened for mainlanders.” Gunfire echoed from Pioneer Square, challenges and answers. Perhaps the surviving reactionaries were being rescued. “Get up, Ved.” He couldn’t seem to catch his breath, the poor thing. She could no more abandon him than Liam. “I’ll drop you off at the Feast. Think of the sensation you’ll be!”
That got his attention. His breath found its pace. “What about you?”
“I told you, I can’t go back. I’m a defectiv
e immuno-sapiens.”
• • •
10
“Our love is based on corpse fires, the pus of lanced boils. Therefor I love these things. What greater assurance of love could there be? To love you is to love death.”
—Broichin, Pleasure and Plague
Vedrum got lost in Brea’s gaze. The horror of the courtyard receded. His heart stirred, and for once it had nothing to do with divergence. He and Brea had never been great. Now it was next to nil.
If he returned to the Feast, he would indeed be a sensation. Doubtless other Feasters had ventured to the mainland by now, but he’d likely be the first—or one of the first—to return. Another season of immuno-celebrity, this time in the comfort and safety of the Feast. But then what? Life, at any rate. Pathogen suppression, political stability. The Feast was in decline, but had a few more generations in it. He’d had his mainland adventure. It made perfect sense to return.
“I can’t go back either,” he said.
“Really?” Brea said.
In saying it, he’d realized it. The thrill in his breast was something new—new to him, anyway. He sensed that actually it was something older than immuno-love, something ancient. Did he want to put his penis in her? Maybe, but that wasn’t the crux of it.
“The skiff is alive,” she said. “If we treat it right, we could live in it for a long time. Head north around the Rim, explore Asia.”
Vedrum hadn’t known the skiff was alive—or hadn’t thought of it that way. Her novel perspective had been surprising him for years—quickening him. He’d been taking that for granted, he realized.
“Get up, Ved.”
He did, and she put the dozy children in his arms, then retrieved Dresht’s machine pistol. Vedrum was going to leave his civilization behind for her. This fact struck him with fear and wonder. Why was he doing this? He didn’t know, and maybe he never would. There was just something about her.
Bark, Blood, and Sacrifice
by Alexandra Seidel
Come in closer, close enough for confessions. All I have is a story, though. I want to tell you how I met Labyrinth.