by Robert Reed
I lost her in the end.
It was to another admirer—someone who could give her more and expect less in return—yet Zebulina was fair to the end. At least with me. She gave back her apartment and its furnishings and even her pet dinosaur. I sold everything but the dinosaur. I kept it until it died of old age. From somewhere I heard that Zebulina was also dead. I don’t know the reason, nor do I care. Someone else told me she was Ghosted, but I can’t believe such a thing. Not from her. Not knowing her like I did…
—excerpt from autobiographical notes, accessed from World-Net by the Magician
There was a time when April would do anything for the man and men in her life. That time is good and passed, she thinks, and she’s glad for the freedom. Glad and proud too. She thinks of that younger self in the same way someone might think of a younger, wilder sister. She’s a very different person today, and better. She doesn’t have a doubt.
Gabbro calls her crazy. He likes to tell her all the different ways in which he suspects insanity in her blood.
She counters with stories from her past. Bad things have happened. Things undeserved and things that can’t help but change a person. Life has shit on her many times, or so she claims. Maybe she exaggerates, sure. But the basic flavor and emphasis is never far off the mark, and the stories serve to keep him quiet for a little while.
Irrationality helps. It makes Gabbro patient and his patience lets her make demands on him. That earlier April never made demands on her men. As a consequence they were abundant and ever-changing and thoroughly unreliable. Of course there are times when she wonders if she has a real problem. There are moments when she loses all control of her actions. She has fits. Gabbro has seen plenty of her fits. But most of the time, peering back to what she’s done, she can find some kernel of sensibility to her craziness. Just look how long we’ve lasted together, she thinks. It must be doing some good, she thinks. Crazy blood.
April is lying on the oversized couch, feet up and her head up and the room around her made of tall walls and precious little floor space. The furnishings are to her taste and Gabbro’s needs, and the entire apartment has been designed to serve Brulé’s miners—the original apartment gutted and expanded in two directions, down into the earth and across the hallway into the next unit. But it still seems small, particularly with Gabbro home and rooting about in his massive way. He’s home now, and April can hear him in the oversized shower. The water is running, hot enough to cook meat, and the ultrasound scrubber is doing its best to remove the day’s grit and grime. She herself is watching a drama on World-Net, thinking that she hasn’t been applying herself because she feels lost. AIs produce the show. There are some human writers, but their roles come in a general way. This particular program is eight centuries old and vastly popular. It’s set in some fictional City-State on some mythical tropical island. It has approximately one million characters, give or take—each one of them identifiable with his own history and problems and joys.
A viewer watches whomever she wishes, from any vantage point. April can find and track the certain people she knows best. Some are emotionally closer to her than many flesh-on-blood sorts. Their voices are like friends’ voices. She has seen them eat together and love together and bear children and die in a myriad of ways. Since this is fantasy, naturally, the people tend to live interesting, even spectacular lives. Like these two people, she thinks. He owns lucrative businesses that allow him to wear fragrant clothes worth fortunes and own at least five different homes, all spacious and lovely. The woman is his trim and lovely wife—a fashion designer forced to travel to all kinds of exotic locations and meet all kinds of people. In their spare time the two of them have affairs and mild drug addictions and deal with such out-of-the-blue troubles as deep-space pirates and sudden strange diseases. Just now they’re making love. Twenty years they have been married, yet the intensity of the act makes it seem as if they are doing it for the very first time.
On the long table in front of the couch, chilled and brightly colored, is April’s afternoon drink. She sits up now and takes a long sip, the alcohol sweet and biting. Then she lies down again, her head on round pillows, and she handles the World-Net controls to change the angle of the picture.
Gabbro is done in the bathroom.
She hears him coming into the short hallway, and she lifts her head enough to look at him, at his broad back, as he goes into the bedroom to lie down on his special bed. She says, “Good dreams,” and he mutters something in agreement. He worked another long shift today, and today she believes him and feels for him. Hyperfiber mimics flesh too well, she thinks. The bosses work him too hard. She’s never been inside the mines—few Small Fry get the opportunity—but she’s seen countless features on the local news, and documentaries on the process itself. It’s his exhaustion that leads to his uneven performance in bed and elsewhere. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, she thinks, if they improved the hyperfiber so he wouldn’t need all the down-time? Gabbro is now plugging himself into a length of thick cable. In the small of his back, almost undetectable, is a linkup to his various batteries. He sleeps and the shell sleeps too, recharging itself. Sometimes it scares her to think of the energy flowing into him, and sometimes she goes to him just to touch the cable, glass wires humming inside a cool steel-gray sheath.
She sits up. She calls to him, asking, “Maybe we can go somewhere later. When you’re rested, okay?”
He says, “Later,” with his wrung-out voice.
“That’s what I mean. Later.” She says, “Promise?”
“Yeah.”
“Good dreams, darling.”
“Yeah.”
Time passes. She drinks and watches the lovers, keeping her view discrete yet erotic. She knows for a fact that the husband slept with a girlfriend this morning, yet here he is able to perform with a champion’s poise and energy. The third time is too much. They’re showboating, she decides, and she flips to another character in another part of the rich City-State. Now here is something to watch. This woman is having obvious problems. Someone has kidnapped her and lashed her to a cold metal wall. Unseen machines hum in the shadows. A hunched figure walks toward her, one hand holding some inexplicable tool. April certainly hasn’t been keeping up! Who is the kidnapper? What is he, or she, after? Whatever is going on, April is sucked into the action. She leans forward with her fingers working the controls. She almost misses the tap-tap-tapping sound.
Then the tapping stops. Its absence causes her to turn and look up at the glass door. A familiar figure stands on their little patio. He’s wearing shorts and a soaked shirt and a small pack, and he’s standing against the bright summer sky.
She stands and opens the door, saying, “Hello?” She says, “Steward, isn’t it?”
“Hello, April.” He gives a polite nod and a shy smile.
“Come in,” she says.
“Is Gabbro home?” he asks. He seems to take in the room with a glance. “I’m afraid I need to talk to him. Could I talk to him?”
“You want me to wake him?”
He shrugs as if to say yes, he knows it’s an enormous imposition but it’s got to be this way.
For a moment, if only for distraction, April gives his face a good hard look and wonders about the potentials in him. The man has been working somewhere, sweating rivers and smelling harsh. She doesn’t like his smell. She’s heard the usual stories about him, intriguing mysteries so far as they go, but when she is actually with him, toe to toe, Steward seems as remarkable as any of their neighbors. Which means he is pure tap water. Through the years, over and over, she’s found that she has a natural unerring judgment about these kinds of things.
“Come wait,” she says. “I’ll go and wake him.”
He says, “Thanks.”
“Oh,” she says, “and would you watch the show? Tell me if I miss anything. Please?”
Gabbro is aware of April’s voice. He comes awake and knows he hasn’t been sleeping for long. The hyperfiber aches as badly as ever.
April is dressed in those same ugly shorts and the plain shirt, her breasts spilling down against the fabric. “You’ve got company,” she is saying. “Our neighbor. Steward.” The light from the window falls in the same way, too. “I don’t know why, but he wants to talk. Is that okay?”
He says, “Why not? I’m up, aren’t I?”
“Don’t be mad at me,” she warns. Leaning over the bed, she asks, “Do you want me to unplug you?”
“Do I ever?” She has this habit of asking, and he’s never allowed it. Not once. He tells her it isn’t proper. Does he ask if he can spoon food into her mouth or wipe her rear end? This is a private function. Besides, he thinks, she’s too eager somehow. It bothers him to think how eager she looks.
The plug detaches. The gentle reassuring hum quits.
He sits up and stands up and sees Steward waiting in the front room. “What can I do for you?” he asks, walking stiffly.
“I’m sorry to bother you people.”
“Don’t be,” he swears. “No problem.”
“If we can, can we talk outside? The two of us?” Steward doesn’t look anywhere but at Gabbro’s eyes. “Just for a minute.”
“Sure.”
April stares after them. She won’t like being left out of the show, and Gabbro decides to have fun with it. Tease her with it, maybe. He’s got to admit he’s curious. What’s this about? He has a couple of ideas, one sillier than the next. Maybe it’s a secret and April can’t know. That gives him a wicked good feeling.
The air is full of flies now. Trillions of little black flies. The wind is finished for the day. Clouds are to the east and south, towering and smooth-faced and brilliant in the sunshine. There’s rain in the east but not over Brulé. The line between rain and no rain is absolute, arrow-straight, and Gabbro looks at the clouds while the two of them stand beside one another.
“Listen,” Steward begins, “I want to ask a favor.”
“Do.” Gabbro smiles, expecting it to start this way. “What is it?”
“A venture,” he says.
“A venture?”
“Of a kind.” He seems calm in the face. Sober. It takes a moment for him to say, “I want you and some other Morningers, a dozen or so, to do something for me.”
“Oh yeah?”
There comes the faint, far rumble of thunder and the glint of rainboys pulling the storm through the stillness. Steward is telling what he wants. Gabbro watches the clouds and tries to follow the quiet voice, making him stop once to tell it again. Then Steward asks, “Are you interested?”
Gabbro couldn’t have imagined this circumstance if he had tried. He says he is interested, sure, and Steward quotes him a price. “What?” asks Gabbro. “Who’s that for?”
“Each of you. Except you. Carry this off and I’ll give you a bonus. A double share.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you interested?”
“Pretty much. Sure.”
“And you can find the Morningers?”
“For the money? Not more than a couple hundred of them.”
“Twelve is plenty,” he says. “And another thing—”
“Yeah?”
“It has to happen tonight. I’ll call you to give you the exact time, but it’ll probably be after midnight.”
Gabbro takes a breath and studies the discriminating storm, thinking this is pretty damned crazy but it sure sounds fun. It sounds fun enough to do without pay or prodding. He notices the intensity of the distant rain, how it falls straight and gray to the fields and jungles. He breathes again and says, “I’m curious about one thing—”
“Why get you to do it?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to tell you,” says Steward.
“You’re the good kind of crazy, I think.” Gabbro considers every detail, top to bottom, and finds one snag. “What about laws?”
“I’ll pay fines. You won’t be jailed.” He says, “Trust me,” and takes Gabbro by the forearm, squeezing as a friend might to give some encouragement. Gabbro doesn’t know many Terrans so open, and the gesture surprises him because it means so much to him. “I know there’s going to be an element of danger. I’m hiring you. I’m responsible—”
“Listen—”
“No, no. I mean this. I have my limits, but I will do what I can to help you. A lot of things might happen.” Steward’s face is calm and watchful and patient. “But the chances are remote—”
“Hey. Don’t give it a thought!”
Steward says nothing.
So Gabbro, smiling to himself, asks, “Is this whole business a secret? I can’t tell anyone anything, can I?”
“I never hired you. We never talked. No one, even your best friends, should hear a word about any of this.” Steward is emphatic, hooks in his voice.
And Gabbro sees April in the doorway, watching them. “Good,” he says. “Real good.”
She can’t hear them. They’re talking too softly and that worries Chiffon in a bad way. Standing this close to the balcony’s glass, she can’t help but feel exposed. Yet she struggles to read lips and watches how Steward touches the cyborg’s arm, something decided now. Maybe it doesn’t involve me, she thinks. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe she’s spent too much time alone in these rooms, thinking about everything and all the time helpless, and her paranoias are coming into play to warp her poise and sense.
She can trust Steward, she reminds herself. He will never, never do her intentional harm.
The trouble comes from the other direction. The flight to Hell is navigated with good deeds…and so on…and so on…
She isn’t thinking about the Quito boy anymore. She’s decided that he’s dead or he’s so well known to Dirk that he’s watched like bait now, the trap set and she the prize. No, she thinks, her best prospect remains Steward. Dirk can’t know him. It was all too much of a lovely fluke, their meeting the way they did. And she has the chips buried in her healing leg. They’re another asset, all right. But riches have their limits. She sees that now. The Magician probably never lost a night’s sleep because she might try running with the entire fortune. A Flower is helpless in the world at large. Flower is a telling word, she tells herself. Blossoms are pretty things, sweet to the senses, but they depend on such prosaic things like roots and leaves and stems. Like she depends on Steward. A lovely fluke, that man. Not enough for always, she thinks, but he’s enough for now.
Gabbro is going indoors now. His girlfriend stands waiting with arms folded across her chest. She asks questions, but Gabbro won’t answer. He merely shrugs and walks downward and vanishes, the last thing visible being one enormous hand waving April off with a harried indifference.
Steward’s coming indoors too.
She makes ready for him, teasing her hair and sitting on the bed with his books, waiting. Out of simple boredom she has been reading. Nothing yet holds her attention, but it makes time pass. Daydreams do the same. This afternoon, after Steward called, she spent a long while imagining herself in a golden palace all her own. It was Dirk’s daydream originally—a personal comet, terraformed into a lush palace that would drift through the cold emptiness of the Oort Cloud. She had stolen it from Dirk long ago, no one the wiser. She had imagined the Magician’s tricks putting her inside fresh bodies every few months. Flower bodies. Now the Magician is dead, and of course that makes it complicated. But the System is huge and no technology is ever invented by one person alone, is it? There is a kind of beauty in the image. She has her palace on the remote margins of the System, and her Flower bodies, and she holds court over visitors from every exotic place. With her billions, she thinks, she could strap an engine on her palace and travel. Sure. It all sounds so fun. Lying awake in Dirk’s apartment, nude and stinking of Dirk’s sweat, she would think about all the possibilities. The zero-gee forests. The enormous halls and rooms. The parties. The sense of endless wealth. She built it all in her head, and she builds it even now. She thinks of Dirk in his bed and her beside him, and she remembers how she would
turn to his snoring face, bold beyond words, and mutter:
Your bones. I’ll fertilize my world with your old bones.
The front door opens and shuts and she rises to greet Steward. “Good afternoon, love.” She goes to him, all shining smiles and happy eyes. “How are you?”
“Look at you,” he says. “You’ve changed.”
They are his clothes. She found them in a closet, worn and wonderfully drab, and she cut them down so they’re merely baggy, her body hidden as much as possible. “You don’t mind?” she wonders. “I thought—”
“I don’t mind. They’re fine.”
“I should have asked—”
“No.” He’s emphatic. “Take what you want. Whatever.”
She says, “I missed you, Steward. So much.” She tells him to sit and treats him like a prince. “Do you want anything? A drink? What?”
“Water.”
She gets a big glass and kneels between his legs, squeezing his free hand. “How did your work go?”
“Good.”
“Did you accomplish much?”
“Tons.”
She looks through the glass while he drinks, studying his dirty face and the tightly shut eyes. “Does it involve me? The work?”
“Let me ask a question,” he says. “Why won’t you tell me your owner’s name? Is there a reason?”
“I can’t.” She feels unsure of how to act, what to say or to hint. “I just can’t tell it.”
“Okay.” He seems satisfied. He sets the glass on a low table, then he looks at her with his features softened and his hands stroking hers. “I guess we’ll both play by the rules, won’t we? You can’t give me a name…and I understand. Fine. He’s playing a rough game and you’re still his Flower. That’s fine.”
There is a cold place inside Chiffon. She waits.
He says, “I’ve got Yellowknife rules. After everything, I do. So some things I can’t talk about either.” He says, “Come up here. Come on.” She climbs into his lap, cooing. A sweaty pack is beside him, and she grabs it as if to ease to the floor. It’s not light. It rattles and strains her arm.