And what if Ugghiutu himself realized what he had done? What if Ugghiutu became furious at him? Such a notion no longer seemed irrational to him. Not after his dreams—the way they had resonated in him. Continued to resonate in him, like a nauseating vibration in his nerves, his guts . . . in his soul.
But ultimately, maybe the main reason he had not hidden irreverent text in his drawing was pride. Because he had done such an impeccable job of replicating the artwork, he had not wanted to deface it at the last moment.
He saw Nhil out there on the street, among the other pressing bodies. The Kalian smiled through the glass at Maxim. A moment later, he was inside and approaching the table.
“Ah, you have it!” Nhil exclaimed, taking the opposite seat, as Maxim lifted the padded envelope and placed it on the table between them. “May I?”
“Of course,” Maxim said, watching as the Kalian slipped the double sheets of plastic out of the envelope and lifted the top sheet away.
“Magnificent.” Nhil wagged his head as if in awe. “Our faith in you was not ill founded.” He reached into the little pouch he wore at his waist. Maxim’s heart jolted, as he expected another wad of twenty thousand munits to be lifted into view. Instead, it was a folded pair of spectacles. Nhil put them on, tapped a key on their frames, and leaned in to examine the drawing again.
Maxim’s intestines knotted tight. He held his breath. It was as though he feared he had unconsciously buried some message of his own inside the artwork after all.
Nhil shook his head again, then sat up straighter, removed his digital specs, and grinned. “Perfection.”
“It’s gratifying that you like it,” Maxim said.
“You did not fail us.” Nhil replaced the specs in his pouch, and this time he did withdraw a tightly bound stack of munits that he slid across the table. Maxim pocketed the bundle quickly, lest someone at another table witness the transaction and decide to mug him on his way back to his vehicle. “You earned every munit, Mr. Komaroff. Narik Guul’s treasure is lost to us forever, but you have still done more than you know to undo the damage caused by that deluded young girl. Once again, the unique cycle of prayer The Summoning of the Outsider provides is accessible to us.”
“Aren’t you afraid her friends there in the Octoplex might try to do the same thing?”
Nhil narrowed his eyes slightly. “So you know those lunatics live at the Octoplex?”
“I read about Kaleet a little,” Maxim admitted. He badly wanted to swallow, so he took a sip of his cooling coffee.
“Someday, I assure you, blasphemers like those wretched children—whose minds have been polluted by exposure to outside cultures—will cease to be a threat to our faith.”
“Would you be willing to destroy a whole city to eliminate one tiny group of radicals?” Maxim asked. “As collateral damage? Or would destroying an entire city of the unfaithful even be a desirable bonus?”
Nhil leaned against the backrest of his bench and smiled at Maxim in a whole new way, though the expression was a subtle one. “What a curious thing to say, Mr. Komaroff. Please tell me . . . what is it exactly you’re thinking?”
“Nothing,” Maxim mumbled, breaking his gaze. He gulped down the rest of his coffee, then rose from the table. “I’d best make a trip to my bank. Thank your associates for me, please, Mr. Nhil.” He extended his hand out of mechanical politeness.
Nhil took his hand and squeezed it in a strong grip. “I trust you will attend the official reception, when the piece is revealed to the public. I’ll contact you with details.”
“Are you sure the museum will accept my work?”
“Oh, I have no doubt of it. So you must attend, of course. This is quite the coup for you; the pinnacle of your career, I should think.”
“I’ll be there,” Maxim said, slipping his hand free and heading for the door.
8
The turnout at the Alfreda Cubillos-Garavito Museum for the unveiling of Maxim’s drawing was impressive and looked like a miniature cross-section of the city’s sentient races. Kalians dominated, but that was no surprise to him. Several journalists were present, and Maxim’s picture was taken as the museum’s director shook his drawing hand. The director was an Earther like himself, though at this point Maxim had expected this man to be a Kalian, too.
Coffee, tea, wine, pastries and cheese—all of it expensive and exquisite. Maxim had worn his best suit, which to his eyes still looked shabby alongside the attire of the other attendees.
Maxim noted that no Kalian women had attended. Traditional Kalian women were not even permitted to speak outside their homes.
He should have been drunk with pleasure at all this—the realization of his loftiest fantasies. Especially when a beautiful blue-skinned Sinanese woman began flirting with him, touching his arm for emphasis as she spoke. But he knew that the smile he wore on his face tonight was like a dying animal doggedly dragging itself along. His heart, buried inside him like a secret line of text even he couldn’t read, felt much the same. What are you celebrating? he wanted to ask these pretty, fragile people. The end of this city? The end of your lives? He wanted to ask the Sinanese woman, her petite slender body sheathed in a form-fitting green silk gown, if she would like to go to bed with him, where they could lie together and look out the windows of his apartment as a cold, pure blackness spread its ravenous bulk through every street of Punktown.
As he listened to the Sinanese woman, grinning rigidly and nodding, he nervously fingered an object in the right-hand pocket of his suit jacket. It was his erasing pen, which projected a delicate beam that could burn away dried ink without damaging the paper beneath. He knew its beam was still effective when penetrating glass, because he had experimented with this earlier today at home.
Several times already he had ascended the coiling staircase to stand beside his mounted drawing, to have his picture taken and to explain his approach to various fascinated museum patrons and fellow artists. But now, with a vague excuse, he extricated himself from the Sinanese beauty and started up the stairs on his own, hoping that none of the other attendees intercepted him on his way. His heart shouted at him with every upward step he took, past Narik Guul’s drawings numbered 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . .
His heart blurted: “Don’t do this now, in front of so many witnesses!” And with the next step: “Come back another time, when no one else is in the Nautilus Chamber!” But his mind retorted: “It could be too late by then. Too late for those Kalians at the Octoplex. Maybe even too late for Punktown.”
5 . . . 6 . . .7 . . .
His heart cried: “Come here in disguise to do it! Then run, and use your money to escape to Miniosis, or the Outback Colony, or even to Earth!”
His mind said: “They got Alfreda on Earth.”
8.
He stood before his drawing, and for the first time he gazed on it without pride . . . only poisonous contempt. He felt tricked, exploited. Today he was a cherished fool. His hand closed around the little wand-like device in his pocket, squeezing it like the handle of a knife. Right now he wished it was a knife, to slash right through the paper itself. But the museum’s new security scan, in the foyer, would have detected such a crude implement. The wand was the tool of an artist, and it was the artist’s prerogative to unmake his work.
He started withdrawing his hand from his pocket. His heart throbbed: “No-no! No-no! No-no! No-no!”
A hand closed on his right wrist, so gently that at first he thought the Sinanese woman had crept up after him, but when he looked around he saw it was the tall Kalian guard in his sharply cut black suit. In reaching for Maxim’s arm, his jacket had opened enough for the artist to see again the gun strapped to the man’s ribs. Leaning in close to Maxim’s ear, the guard said quietly, “Perhaps you’ve had too much wine, Mr. Komaroff. Perhaps you should go home and rest.”
Maxim met the man’s eyes, and after a second or two of paralysis that seemed to last much longer, he finally nodded his head and murmured, “Yes. Yes
. . . I was going to do that.”
And he turned away from his artwork, titled The Outsider Triumphant, brushed past the perplexed Sinanese woman as she was climbing the stairs toward him, and started for the exit from the Nautilus Chamber. He passed Nhil on his way. The Kalian was beaming tonight, as if he were the artist of Drawing No. 8 himself.
He smiled—knowingly, Maxim felt, so knowingly—and said, “Good night, Mr. Komaroff.”
Maxim ignored him and wandered out into the museum in a shuffling kind of daze, as if he actually had imbibed too much wine tonight. He hadn’t, but he planned to when he got back to his apartment. Not wine, though; he had that bottle of expensive whiskey. That was his only plan now. At this moment he could not wrap his mind around a return to the Nautilus Chamber on a quieter day, or in disguise, or any other scenario. There was only that bottle of golden oblivion.
Oblivion. It was life’s lone certainty, life’s lone destiny. Whether humankind lived for another millennium, another year, another day—and in the vastness of time, those increments were much the same thing—in the end there was no escape from mortality. In the full scope of things, Maxim told himself, it didn’t really matter in the end whether a person was a hero or a coward, strong or weak. How could it? What difference could he hope to make, this puny creature wielding his little pen like a child’s toy sword against a real dragon?
And yet, he answered himself back, though he didn’t know if it was his mind countering his heart or his heart countering his mind, wasn’t it you who gave that dragon the means to rise up, by wielding your little pen?
He recognized that he was trying to convince himself not to fight—that he wanted to be impotent.
Whiskey. He craved it more than forty thousand munits. More than a harem of Sinanese women.
In the museum’s underground garage, he fidgeted restlessly while he waited for the mechanical arm to hunt out his vehicle, retrieve it from its slot, and deliver it to him. It was after regular visiting hours, and his reception went on without him, so he was currently the only person in the garage. He glanced around nervously at the shadowy tiers of stacked vehicles. The shadows seemed to throb. He imagined they were rubbery and cold to the touch.
The arm whispered along its track, mindlessly taking its time. Maxim kept glancing toward the elevator he had emerged from, expecting to see its doors open any time now and that soft-spoken guard emerge, holding out a pistol with an internal silencing feature.
His hovercar was set down delicately at his feet, and he hurried to lock himself inside, for the flimsy security the familiar little compartment afforded him. The car levitated a bit above the garage floor, and he pointed its nose toward the exit to the street.
Outside, Punktown loomed both black and bright around him, as if to reassure him with its lurid bravado. The gargantuan city almost convinced him that it was too vile a creature, itself, to allow any other vileness to overtake it. Almost convinced him.
He reached his apartment. He reached for his whiskey.
Having lost count of how many times he filled his shot glass, and spilling the last shot when he tried to set the glass down on a windowsill and missed, he tottered to his bed, fell upon it, and plunged immediately into sleep. Immediately into dream.
He stood in a spacious room with a polished black floor and a single circular wall surrounding him, like the inside of a dome, also black and smooth as onyx. From the high concave ceiling, four young girls on the brink of womanhood were hanging upside-down by their ankles. The cords that bound their ankles were smooth and black as well, more like rubbery tendrils than any kind of rope, and seemed to grow from the ceiling of stone itself. These four girls wore black leotards that left their slender arms and legs exposed, lacy black tulle skirts, and black ballet slippers. Their arms hung down limply, their fingertips just falling short of grazing the black floor. The skin of their limbs was not just pale, but ash gray.
Maxim looked down at himself and saw that in his left hand he held a small empty glass jar. In his right hand he held the utility knife with a cutter beam that he kept in his kitchen cabinet.
Looking up at the nearest of the suspended girls, Maxim said, “I’m sorry . . . I need this.”
She wasn’t dead yet. Her eyes were open, black as space, and gazing at him passively. She knew this was her fate; she had been raised for it like a veal calf.
He took several steps closer to her, ready with the jar to catch the stream of blood he knew would be black instead of red, and he flicked on the knife’s soundless beam. He brought the beam so close to the girl’s taut, smooth throat that the red glow was reflected on her skin.
Just before the beam could burn through her delicate flesh, Maxim was awakened by the sensation of two people seizing hold of both his arms and pinning them down to the mattress.
Enough hours had passed while he slept, and enough adrenaline surged through his body, that Maxim snapped awake sober. Glancing right and left, wide-eyed, he saw that it was two Kalian men who had gripped his arms. They didn’t wear clothing of metallic gold material. They didn’t wear blue head wrappings.
A young woman climbed onto the bed, swinging a leg over him and sitting atop his thighs like a lover. She too was a Kalian. She too was without a blue turban. Her hair was exposed, unthinkably, but chopped short and spiky. She held a knife with a curved single-edged blade, which she put to Maxim’s throat. He stopped jerking his head from side to side to look at the two young men.
Leaning over him, her features fierce and contemptuous, the woman said, “You painted magic for them, in the blood of innocents. You opened a door for them—a door our sister died to close. Now they will attack us for revenge, and we will be lucky if we can stop them.”
Maxim stared up at her, as if listening to the accusations of a judge before sentencing.
The woman straddling him continued, “If we’d known about you earlier, and what you were going to do for them, we’d have already killed you.”
“I wish you had,” Maxim whispered.
The woman said nothing for a second, as if absorbing Maxim’s words and the look in his eyes. Perhaps in that second she almost reconsidered. But then she pressed the knife’s razor-keen blade down against his throat and drew it across. Maxim’s blood splashed free and spread quickly across his pillow and sheets like paint upon a blank canvas.
Redemption Express
One of the people who had been sheltering on the grounds of the unfinished construction project was an elderly man—an indigenous Choom like Posy herself—whose name she didn’t know. One day he was rummaging through large plastic garbage cans outside a little Thai restaurant, across an alley at the rear of the construction site, when an automated trash zapper came gliding around the corner. Startled, as if afraid he’d get in trouble, the old man had tried to make a dash, but in so doing collided with a trash can, overturning and falling atop it. He and the garbage can were crushed between the bottom of the hovering zapper and the curb. Posy saw his upper body extending from under the trash zapper, rolling beneath it with arms flopping as the machine slowly came to a halt. When at last he was uncovered, he’d been torn in half, leaving a long smear of blood and wilted lettuce on the sidewalk. He was still alive, however, with one arm covering his eyes and his head moving from side to side. Posy stepped from the shadows and ventured toward him, though Aargh and Welder had tried to catch hold of her. She was slippery that way. Once, the wide-brimmed white bride’s hat someone had discarded and which she always wore, so big on her ten-year-old head, had been covered in a profusion of synthetic flowers. Now there were only a few left. She plucked one flower from her hat and knelt down to place it in the man’s hand. He clenched his fist around it without removing his other arm from his eyes, holding onto the flower as if she had tossed him a lifeline. His head stopped moving from side to side a few minutes later. Posy stood over him until, almost an hour later, a vehicle finally came to take the old man’s remains away, like so much trash himself.
*
Posy didn’t know what this building’s purpose was to have been before its construction was halted, or even why construction had never been completed. She had heard conflicting explanations, probably just theories, from others who sheltered here. An office block for a company that had run out of funds with the latest dip in the economy. An apartment complex that had been found to be in violation of health codes. A syndy casino that the authorities had shut down for lack of sufficient bribes.
Four levels, including the ground floor, had been sketched out in lines of girder and beam. Would there have been more levels later? There was a basement, too, but members of an Asian gang called the Snakeheads had claimed that. Posy had never seen it, though once she had almost been brought down there against her will. Anyway, she knew the rest of the skeletal building well. Some sections of the floors on the upper levels were more or less finished. There were even portions of wall, seemingly laid in arbitrarily. Mostly the walls were open, though sometimes great sheets of clear plastic or blue tarps had been stretched taut or draped loosely to shield against the elements. There were some roughed-in staircases. Work lights were strung throughout, here and there, tied into thick bundles of cables laid onto ceiling supports that looked like ladders or inverted train tracks. Fat silvery ducting hoses snaked in and out of the exposed ceiling beams like maggots fattened on the great carcass. Graffiti abounded. Graffiti seemed to bind the whole house of cards together. One squatter, a soft-spoken middle-aged addict, remarking on the seeming chaos of it all, had told Posy, “I think it wasn’t supposed to be a building. It’s an artwork. And it isn’t unfinished. This is the way the artist wanted it.”
Posy had only listened and digested the possibility, but drew no conclusions of her own. Whatever it had been meant to be, this place was, very simply, her home. Just as whatever life she might have had was irrelevant to her. It was beyond her imagining, or at least her desire to imagine. There was only this life. That way of thinking, she’d found in the two long years she had lived on her own, was the only way to stay alive.
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