Steel Sky

by Andrew C. Murphy

  “This is no game, Miss Marburg. Can I rely on you?”

  Kitt studies him, wishing she could see his eyes. “Suppose I do help you. If you die, or disappear, then you would have no objections to my talking about you?”

  The Winnower’s lips part, revealing white, even teeth. “How could I?”

  With a sudden sense of confusion, Kitt realizes that this man, this killer, has the most beautiful smile she has ever seen.

  THE STRANGER

  After repeated scenes of concern and reassurance, Cadell has finally left for the ghost cells. Amarantha looks at the door, still seeing the reluctant way he had looked at her as he shut it behind him. For the past few days, he has walked her to work and been waiting for her when she left to come home. At first Amarantha had appreciated his solicitude, but she had since come to realize it makes her uncomfortable. This morning, when she saw him getting ready to leave with her, not even bothering to ask if she wanted him there, something had snapped inside her.

  “Leave me alone!” she’d said. “Stop treating me like a child!”

  “I’m sorry,” he’d replied automatically, looking at her with that helpless, hurt expression he assumed so easily. He was incapable of understanding how any action of his could ever offend anyone. “I was only trying to help.”

  “I don’t need help! I’m not crippled!”

  Slipping on her shoes, Amarantha feels a pang of regret. Her frustration is not his fault, really. The fact is, she wants his help, and she is angry at herself for wanting it. There had been a time when she was completely self-reliant, when she took pride in neither wanting nor receiving assistance from anyone. Now that she is living with Cadell, with his more prestigious job, and his null-class friends, she is losing her sense of identity. Every time he regards her with that concerned expression of his, she is reminded that she’s become dependent, careless enough to be cornered by Second Son.

  As she reaches to open the door, she sees her hands are shaking. Her knuckles stand out. She is too thin. She has hardly eaten anything since the incident.

  She slaps her palm against the access plate. The door shudders and slides open, revealing the long, dark hallway.

  She steps out onto the threadbare carpet. For the first time, she is struck by the sterility of the architecture of her building, its unsympathetic functionality. The fluorescent lights cast double shadows on the rough walls, indigo ghosts in the corners of her vision. She takes a step forward, and the door snaps shut behind her. The sudden sound makes her jump.

  She looks back at the door, feeling an urge to run back into the room. She could call in sick, spend the day at home. No one would blame her.

  She moves forward down the hall, her jaw tight. If there’s one thing she can’t stand, it’s self-pity.

  The hiss of the vents is like an insistent whisper in her ear, growing louder as she walks forward. The air smells of cooked algae, making her stomach churn. Each step is an effort of will. The hallway stretches endless and empty in front of her. It’s easy for her to imagine she is the only living person in the Hypogeum.

  As if in answer to her thoughts, a door creaks open somewhere. Footsteps echo down the hall. Amarantha stops. She finds herself listening, hoping the stranger is headed in another direction. But the sounds grow louder, coming closer. The footsteps are soft and evenly spaced. The stranger is moving toward her at an unhurried pace, neither tarrying nor impatient. Amarantha listens carefully, trying to discern if it’s a man or a woman. Is it someone she knows?

  She shakes her head, suddenly self-conscious. Of course there are other people walking down the halls. Why should she care who they are? She begins to walk again.

  The stranger rounds a corner. Now she can see him: he is a middle-aged man, in a dull fuscous coverup. He is no one she recognizes, but this isn’t surprising. There are so many people in her building, it’s impossible to get to know them all. He may be a resident, or he could be an outsider, visiting for reasons of his own. He continues walking toward her with that same unhurried, inexorable pace.

  Unconsciously, Amarantha takes a step backward. Blood is pounding in her ears. The stranger is moving quickly, while she is trapped in slow motion. He is close enough now that she can see freckles on his scalp through his thinning hair. His eyes are cast down, focusing on the carpet in front of his feet. It seems impossible that he is not aware of her.

  She takes another step backward. He is going to pass much too close. She steps back again, feeling frantically behind her for the door, terrified that he will touch her. He is only a few meters away now, close enough that she could smell him if she could only remember how to breathe again. Keeping her eyes on him, she stretches her arm backward along the rough wall. Her heart sinks as she realizes she cannot feel the doorjamb. She does not know how to get back.

  Slowly, without altering his stride, the stranger raises his head, seemingly aware of Amarantha for the first time. Before his eyes can meet hers, Amarantha turns and runs. The door is right where it is supposed to be, just behind her. She slams her ident against the panel. The light does not come on, and for a moment she is afraid she has damaged the mechanism, the door will not open. She pulls at the door, her hands slick with sweat. But it does open, sliding in its groove, shuddering slightly. Amarantha pushes through the gap, scraping her shoulders against the edges.

  Inside, she leans against the wall. Her breath comes out in ragged bursts. The light, she realizes, is still on. She never turned off the light.

  As she reaches to pull the door shut, she looks back through the gap into the hallway. The stranger is walking past, still moving at the same unhurried pace. He glances at her idly as he passes, his eyes half-lidded. His only expression is one of slight confusion as to what all the commotion was about.

  ALWAYS FALLING

  Edward hangs his respirator by the door, making a mental note to replace the filter next time he goes out. Edward’s domus consists of a narrow pair of rooms with a single window at one end. The Sun shines opalescent through the tinted glass. It casts a long shadow as he removes his coverup and washes fumatory grit from the upper half of his face.

  The rooms are largely undecorated, with more bookcases than furniture. A cobalt blue vase sits alone on a pedestal by the window, greedily absorbing the light, releasing only bits and pieces, long slashes of color across the walls.

  Several pictures of his mother watch him from the walls. Color photographs. A charcoal rendering. An animation. Close-up. She turns, sees the camera. A slow, wise smile spreads across her face. Eyes narrow. Fade. Repeat. His father is also in one or two of the pictures. Edward does not remember his father. He had left when Edward was a child. To find someone easier to handle, his mother said, with that thin smile on her lips.

  Turn. Smile. Fade. Repeat.

  His mother, Renata, was a handsome woman with a narrow face and straight hair with streaks of white that she refused to dye. Her eyes were her most striking feature. They were slightly overlarge, dark, smoldering — the sort whose fierce magic makes any woman twice as attractive as she would otherwise be. She used that piercing gaze and a brutal wit to dominate conversations with her many friends and clients. Renata was a psychoanalyst, one of the last in the Hypogeum, though she preferred to call herself a social metaphysician. Men and women who didn’t trust the bland efficiency of Image or the glib assurances of chatters came to her for advice and consultation. But Edward suspected that people would have flocked to her no matter what her profession. She was one of those people who become famous in their circles simply for who they are, for how their minds work.

  Repeat.

  Her friends were radical thinkers. Very few of them had jobs, and Edward was never sure how they kept the Deathsmen from coming to take them away. A few were Levellers, but most were simple malcontents and nonconformists. They liked to try to shock one another, asking questions like, Where did the Founders come from? and Are there other cities in the rock? When Edward was still quite young, one of
his mother’s guests had frightened him by suggesting that, just as the Hypogeum was a bubble in the rock, so the rock itself was only a solid bubble in a much greater expanse of emptiness. What keeps it from falling? young Edward had asked. Nothing, the man replied. It’s always falling, only there’s nothing else around it for it to hit. The unpleasant notion had lodged in Edward’s head like a piece of gristle caught between his teeth, and to this day it still irritates his thoughts. Always falling.

  His mother’s guests would sit in her small domus, in chairs, on the floor, on the bed, and talk and drink after the lights went out. His mother would dim the window and light candles. Koba knew where she got them. The ceiling of her domus was black and shiny with the smoke of burning fat. As the evening wore on, the talk would become more abstract, the opinions more vehement. Sometimes the men would actually come to blows over some dispute of ideology. Other times the talk would grow quiet and couples would pair off, disappearing into the corners. A stranger would put his hand on his mother’s knee, and then it would be time for Edward to go to bed, whether he was tired or not.

  Edward’s mother always insisted he attend her soirées, hoping to impress upon him her love of conversation and intellectual combat. She hoped that he, too, would become an analyst and perpetuate the dying breed. When he announced his intention to become a medical doctor, she was not angry, only perplexed. Medicine seemed so . . . material.

  Nonetheless, when he studied he would often notice a book missing. He found that she was borrowing his materials, studying them herself. She learned medical terminology and argued about the latest medical theories with him. When he graduated and joined the hospital, she bragged about his achievements to her friends. He was her crowning creation, her best argument.

  As the years passed, his mother receded. He saw her only a few times a year, a practice that allowed him to watch her age as if in time-lapse. Her name in his comm file became like a classic novel on his shelf — fondly recalled but rarely returned to.

  When she finally became sick, it was a shock to Edward. He realized that he had honestly thought she might live forever. When he went to visit her, he was surprised at how old she looked. The character lines around her eyes and mouth had grown, become wrinkles. Her skin had shrunk to the bone and lost its color. You see? her face seemed to say. This happened because you didn’t appreciate me.

  Edward examined her. A large neoplasm was well established in her lung, with smaller ones beginning to take root. There was also evidence of metastasis. All those candles, it seemed, had finally taken their toll. Edward defied medical standards, and the advice of friends, by treating her himself. He pulled in the best equipment and the most knowledgeable experts the Hypogeum had to offer, but already the cancer was too far advanced. The malignant cells spread blindly and vigorously, eating his mother from within.

  She insisted no one be told the nature of her illness. Over the years she had expounded the theory that cancer was a psychogenic disease caused by erroneous or evasive “psycho-epistemology.” In her mind, her own sickness was a shameful indictment either of her philosophy or her self.

  Edward arranged for the operation to be performed as quickly as possible. Before the arduous procedure was over, the surgeon had been forced to remove one lobe of the left lung, the adjacent lymph nodes, and a rib. Still, the cancer had not been eliminated. His mother awoke in incredible pain that wore down her proud stoicism. Every time Edward came by to visit, she complained about the incompetence of the staff. She accused the nurses of spying on her, of stealing from her, and of other more obscure crimes that Edward could not quite understand. He promised her he would find someone better.

  Chemotherapy should have been the next step, but the cancer was spreading too quickly. Edward decided to proceed immediately to germ therapy, a risky proposition at the best of times. Biopsy samples of her tumors were fed to a flow cytometry assayer, which broke down their DNA and assembled a customized immunocytokine, a sort of super-antibody that would stimulate her immune system to seek out and destroy the cancerous cells. The problem lay in how much knowledge had been lost since the machine was built. Edward had no way to double-check the protein fusion, or to accurately predict what its effects might be.

  The immunocytokines were injected into his mother’s body. At first the results looked promising. CT scans showed noticeable shrinkage of the tumors. A histamine reaction caused inflammation of her extremities, a common side effect of the treatment, but this was alleviated with neopromethazine. For a little while, Edward allowed himself to hope. Then the cytokines mutated. Her antibodies began to attack her cells indiscriminately, multiplying by the trillions. White pustules developed on her lips and eyelids. She began to bleed from her nose, mouth and vagina. Worst of all, the histamine reaction accelerated, causing her body to swell like a sausage. The swelling closed off her windpipe so that it was impossible for her to breathe unaided. Megadoses of diuretics and targeted immune suppressants were able to reverse the symptoms and eventually eradi-cate the engineered antibodies from her body, but her organs had been dangerously weakened.

  She looked as if she had aged thirty years in a matter of days. No further treatment was possible; all Edward could do was try to ease her suffering as the cancer began to spread again. He took her out of the hospital and hired a private nurse to look after her at home.

  One day after work, he came to talk to her. Her bed had been moved to face the window. The Sun reflected off the polished facade of a nearby building, throwing a blinding nimbus around her. Her hooded eyes watched him as he walked around the bed. She was propped up by half a dozen pillows, her skeletal hands resting on a book in her lap. It was a very old book, one of the kinds that couldn’t read itself. The title, Edward saw, was Atrocities of the Time Riots.

  She caught the direction of his gaze. “I am studying,” she explained, her voice a weak rasp. “I am researching into the depths of human depravity.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Until recently I was quite blind to the extent of the darkness in men’s psyches. I had no idea how cruel people could be. I find some comfort in comparing my suffering to that of others.”

  Edward nodded unhappily. She had once told him that nothing could be learned from the study of history. Why study old mistakes? she had asked. Better to go out and make new ones. Now she was reduced to dipping into the gossip of antiquity.

  He sat carefully on the edge of the bed. “Is the nurse attending to you properly?” he asked.

  “For the most part. He’s incompetent, of course, but that’s only to be expected. No, he and the other strangers you’ve hired to be my new friends are treating me just fine. It’s my old friends who disappoint me. I’m not even dead yet, and already they’ve forgotten me.”

  “Now, mother, you know they come as often as they can. You don’t make it easy for them, the way you criticize them every time they come by.”

  “It’s not criticism, it’s analysis. Really, Edward, they have so many errors in their thinking, so many unresolved issues that need to be addressed. I need to make sure they’re all on the right track before I die. They should be grateful I give so much thought to their problems.”

  “Maybe you should let them live their own lives.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Did you bring any more medication?”

  Edward pulled a small bottle from his pocket. “Are you sure you need it?”

  “Give it to me.” Impatiently, she pushed the IV drip closer, sending the bag swaying like a pendulum. With a tiny syringe, Edward drew the umber fluid from the bottle. He had never been able to refuse her.

  “When I first was told I was sick, I thought it might be good for me to experience the pain,” his mother said. “I thought the pain might teach me something about life, or perhaps cleanse me in some way. But pain doesn’t teach you anything, Edward. It doesn’t make you grow. It doesn’t have a point or a purpose. It just hurts.”

  Edward stuck the needle into the IV bag and
slowly depressed the plunger. His mother leaned forward, thin muscles tight with tension, and watched the fractal patterns as the two fluids intertwined. She fiddled with the heparin lock in the back of her hand, making sure it was in the best position. The dark fluid trickled down the tube. Neither of them spoke.

  Finally the drug entered her veins, and his mother relaxed. She closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the pillows. The tendons of her neck stood out from her pale throat, and her eyes disappeared into the creases of her smile. With the sunlight suffused all around her, she looked like a hedonistic saint from some odd, forgotten cult.

  Edward adjusted the drip so the drug would not flow too quickly. He straightened her pillows. She seemed oblivious to him. He wondered if he should leave.

  His mother’s smile sagged, and water gathered in her eyelashes. A heavy tear rolled down the creases in her face. “I’m afraid,” she whispered, her face turned upward, her eyes still closed. “The drugs erase the pain, but they can’t take away the fear. I don’t want to die, Edward. My life has been very full. Full of adventure. Full of joy.”

  “I know.”

  “And now it all comes to an end. How long do you think I have?”

  “There’s no way to say for sure. You could last for a very long time.”

  Her eyes remained closed, but her mouth curled downward in distaste. “Don’t talk tripe, Edward!” she snapped. “I can feel the cancers growing inside my body. I have a few days more. Maybe as little as a single day. Isn’t that right?”

  Edward shuffled his feet. “I don’t know.”

  Her eyes snapped open. “Say it!”

  Edward opened his mouth to speak. She was right. The evidence was incontrovertible, but he could not speak it aloud. Uttering the words was too much like making it happen.

  She sighed. “All right. Have it your way.” She sunk back into the pillows. “It’s important to be honest, Edward. A man cannot be psychologically healthy unless he is honest with himself. Even when — especially when — it is the most painful.”