“Thank you, Sajur. Not tonight.” The rasa stood, leather clothing skreeking against his metal limbs. “I will let you sleep.”
Sajur’s voice quavered a little, drunkenly. “Are you quite sure?”
Tast’annin shook his head. “Yes, Sajur. It is late, I’ll leave you with your ’files and—”
He inclined his head toward the crystal decanter winking in the dim light. “Another time, perhaps, we’ll watch ‘Khibel the Fool.’ ”
Sajur walked with him to the door. “I’m sorry Hobi wasn’t here to see you. Khum said he went out with—a guest—this afternoon. I know he wanted to offer his congratulations….”
“Give him my best.”
Tast’annin let the man hold the door for him. Outside, the deep indigo light that demarcated evening gleamed above the pagodas and spires of Cherubim. The rasa stared up to where the central Quincunx Dome curved, a great gleaming black hand cupped over the sleeping city. He raised his own hand in imitation, palm down, and turned away.
“Good night, Sajur.”
“Good night, Margalis,” the Architect Imperator called softly. He raised his hand in farewell, but the rasa did not look back.
Shiyung winced as the eyra screamed again. She had miscalculated something in the final stage of the great cat’s compressed gestation. When she pulled it from the vat the epidermal layer of its skull had not completely formed, and the pink skin had sloughed from it like icing from a too-warm cake. The creature lay at her feet, shrieking, while nucleic starter pooled around it. Delicately she lifted one foot and stepped over the steaming liquid, reached down and gently prodded its chin. Its screams became a dull moan, and then silence.
“Damn.”
It was the third one that day. Shiyung was impatient and had difficulty waiting the correct amount of time when indulging her hobby. Now she turned and walked to the door, sidestepping other damp places on the floor of her laboratory. “Me-suh,” she called softly. “Me-suh, I think I’m finished for today.”
Her replicant assistant appeared, a copper woman with snaky hair and a pronounced list to one side. Robotic engineering had been an earlier passion of Shiyung’s. “I’m going to try another breed of big cat tomorrow, Me-suh. Maybe a tiger. I think there’s something wrong with this strain.”
Me-suh bowed, her bad shoulder scraping the wall, and headed for the dead cougar. With a sigh Shiyung started upstairs.
The message chamber showed a call from Nike, her sister yawning as she mumbled something about a ruined inquisition. Shiyung grimaced and replayed it, then went through the other calls until she found one from ziz.
“—thought I’d tell you first it’s nothing, absolutely nothing ,” ziz’s aggrieved voice scraped through the air. “An idiot morphodite, she’s been detained of course, but of course there are all these rumors now, and then there was that explosion on Archangels, so I think we’d better—”
Shiyung rolled her eyes, switched off her sister’s peevish voice, and went into her bedroom. Another great cat, a caracal, sprawled upon the bed, like ghee poured upon the black coverlet. It meowed throatily when it saw Shiyung. Shiyung wrinkled her nose as she pushed it to the floor: really, she needed a less fulsome hobby. But the rewards of bioengineering were greater than those of robotics. She couldn’t control the actions of her great cats and half-human creations, and she derived a perverse satisfaction from that. As the youngest of the Orsinate, Shiyung had always prided herself on being unpredictable—refusing to use human servers; taking the side of the moujiks during the Medifac Insurgency when she was only nine years old; attending mass at the Church of Christ Cadillac and even driving one of their ancient vehicles into the flaming wall during the sect’s communion rites. In the last few months she had been fascinated by what she heard of an eerie new cult formed by the rasas, and she had even entertained thoughts of having another natural child. She would be more careful this time, and choose a father whose genotype was not so similar to hers. It was a shame that baby had been deformed, but at least the Children of Mercy had been glad to have it, if only for a little while.
It would be interesting, she thought, to have a living child. Children were so spontaneous. Her great cats and geneslaves were beautiful but lacked that element of uncertainty, their wild instincts bred out of them centuries before.
“Right, Bast?” she murmured, stroking the caracal’s proud jaw. Someone had told her once that she looked like a panther, a biotech she’d slept with during Æstival Tide.
“Green eyes and a cruel jaw and velvet hands,” the woman had whispered to her over a hubble-bubble on the beach. Shiyung had to look up the word and its image to see what a panther was, but after that she began toying with the genus Felidae in her laboratory. For a little while the biotech had assisted her, but then she’d grown rather too demanding and Shiyung had her put with the other Chosen during the Hecatombs.
But Shiyung’s passion for predators remained. She’d filled her chambers with caracals and ocelots and servals, and was disappointed when they didn’t kill the birds and squirrels she made for them. Then for a while she’d gone in for canines, jackals and fennecs and even an aardwolf, technically a different strain but so unusual. But the cats still offered the most visually pleasing effects, and recently she’d begun to try to revive their aggressive instincts, with mixed results.
“Ah, Bast,” whispered Shiyung, pulling the caracal back beside her. She reached for one of the camphor cigarettes kept in a silver holder at her bedside. As she lit it a bell chimed and the foyer scholiast’s voice echoed, “You have a visitor.”
Shiyung exhaled. The caracal sneezed and slid from the bed, taking the woolen comforters with her. “Who is it?”
“The Aviator Imperator Margalis Tast’annin.”
Shiyung smoked in silence for another minute. Finally she said, “Show him in, please.” She put out her cigarette and crossed to her armoire. She had just dropped her laboratory robes and stood before the mirror in a white silk chemise when Tast’annin appeared in the door.
“Forgive me, Margravine. I’ll wait until you’re dressed.”
Without glancing at him Shiyung pulled a flannel kimono from the wardrobe and shrugged into it. “Oh, please, Margalis, I think we’re past all that now. Especially now.”
She turned. She was alone with him for the first time since she’d pulled his brain from the crucible and begun the complicated procedure of bonding it to its metal form. He wore not the NASNA Aviator’s uniform but a simple robe of black jacquard. As he entered the room she glimpsed glints of white and crimson light glowing within the silken folds. “Thank you for seeing me, Shiyung.”
She sank into a chair near the curtained window and regarded him critically. It was unsettling to hear that hollow voice echoing from a mouthless mask. “It’s late, isn’t it? Although of course you don’t get tired now. Not that you ever slept very well.”
He shrugged. The robe rippled along his shoulders and she saw the sleek line of metal there, melting into the crimson curve of his neck. “Sleep. It’s interesting that you should mention sleep—may I sit?—because it is a dream that brought me here.”
“How interesting.” She motioned at the bed. The rasa sat. At his feet the caracal blinked, then growled softly, and Shiyung smiled with false ingenuousness. “I had no idea that rasas could dream.”
“Not my dream. ziz’s.”
“Ah.” Shiyung made a chucking sound and the caracal curled at her side. “I heard about that. ziz called me. Oh, Me-suh—”
The server appeared in the doorway. “Some iced vitro for me. Margalis?”
For a moment his translucent eyes flickered from gray to dark blue. He said, “No, thank you.”
“Of course, forgive me—you have no mouth.” Shiyung wrinkled her nose and covered her face, a naughty child stifling a laugh. When the server returned with the tumbler of blue ice she sipped it, staring at the rasa through slitted eyes. After a few minutes she leaned forward and asked conspiratorially,
“So tell me, Margalis: what is it like? Is it different, really? Can you still feel things? I mean—”
She gestured at her thighs with one slender hand, pulled aside her kimono. “Like that, what’s it like now?”
A strained sound from the rasa; then, “Nothing. I feel nothing anymore. At least I don’t feel it physically. But of course I remember many things.”
Shiyung gave a small disappointed sigh and let her kimono drape back across her legs. She took another sip of her vitro. “It must be painful for you. Remembering things.”
Tast’annin tipped his head so that she saw the mask’s smooth contours, crimson threaded with silver in a pattern that appeared only when it caught the light at a certain angle. His eyes glowed dangerously. “It is worse than any torment I could have imagined,” he said at last.
For some minutes they sat without speaking. Shiyung sipped her drink. At her feet the caracal snored softly. The rasa seemed deep in thought, at least his posture assumed pensive lines as he stared at the floor with its simple grass carpeting. Finally he looked up. Tast’annin’s ice-pale eyes stared out at Shiyung as he said, “There was a hermaphrodite at the dream inquisition this evening. An interloper of some sort. She correctly scryed my dream—my “memory—and then ziz asked her to read hers.”
“Yes. She told me.” Shiyung was bored. Her pleasure in Tast’annin’s plight had not been as acute as she had hoped. She felt neither glee nor the rarer thrill of remorse and pity; only a detached vicarious curiosity that Tast’annin seemed unlikely to indulge. “ziz had a little fit and had her locked up.”
“I’d like to see her.”
Shiyung raised an eyebrow and finished her drink. The faintest note of something—pleading, maybe, or anger; it was so hard to tell when he had no face—had crept into the rasa’s nearly uninflected voice. “ziz?”
“No. The hermaphrodite. The one she’s imprisoned.”
“Hmm.”
Shiyung set the tall tumbler on a night table and stood, stretching. Her kimono fell open on a swath of buttery skin and she did not bother to close it as she walked to the window. She was thinking again about the child she had given birth to fifteen years before. Another one of her whims. She and Nasrani had been sharing a bed, and she had decided it might be interesting to have a natural child. Only something had gone wrong—the physicians warned her about it, and with her dabbling in genetics she had known there was a chance of something like this. Too many Orsinas together over too many centuries. When the child was born she couldn’t bear to look at it, the tiny penis and behind it the pink vulva, and witch’s milk oozing from its breasts. The last report she’d had of it, from the Chambers of Mercy, was that it was a true hermaphrodite, the first to be born of natural parents in many years. She hadn’t bothered finding out the details of its final disposition.
Now, thinking of this morphodite who had so upset ziz, she wondered what had happened to that other one. Perhaps it had been cruel of her to give it to the Chambers of Mercy. Perhaps—her heart beat a little faster at the thought—perhaps there were reparations to be made. Perhaps Blessed Narouz (or Christ Cadillac, or Prophet Rayburn) had sent this other morph just for this purpose, to permit her to make amends. It might be a noble thing for her to do, to save this gynander. Especially at Æstival Tide. Shiyung was very fond of doing noble things under the right, usually public, circumstances.
She pulled the draperies back, displaying a dizzying view of Araboth: the cobalt reaches of the dome above, indigo and rose-pink and viridian sweeps of light below, darkening from level to level, until at the very bottom an inky blue gleamed, as though reflecting back the fastnesses of Seraphim.
She looked up at the domes and pointed. “You can see the stars tonight. There—?”
Tast’annin stood and stepped beside her. He placed one hand on her shoulder. It was warm, warmer than any human hand would be, and vibrated so that her shoulder tensed beneath it. “Yes, those are stars. Some of them, at least. There, and—”
He pointed to the faint light salted across the dark curves of the dome. “There. That is Orion.”
“That star?”
“No. That set of stars. A constellation. The Hunter.”
“And that?” She pointed at a glorious sweep of color trailing from horizon to horizon. “The Milky Way?”
He made a small sound meant to be laughter. “That is the reflection of the palace lights in the dome.”
“Ah.”
Behind them the caracal continued to snore. Shiyung let the curtains fall back across the window and turned to Tast’annin. “Why do you want to see her, this hermaphrodite? Why didn’t you go to ziz?”
The rasa shrugged. “I knew she would refuse me, at least tonight while she’s still angry. And who knows, tomorrow the hermaphrodite might be dead.”
Shiyung nodded thoughtfully. “Probably. Was she pretty?”
“Childish. But yes, she was attractive.”
Shiyung settled onto the bed and motioned for the rasa to join her. “But that’s not why you want to see her.”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s not. She said something tonight, about ziz’s dream. She said it symbolized the Green Country.”
Shiyung was silent. She bunched up a corner of the woolen comforter and released it, glanced up to see the rasa staring at her with those eerie bright eyes.
“Well,” she said after a moment. “Rather careless on her part, I’d say. No wonder ziz had her locked up.” She nibbled her lip thoughtfully. “I wonder why ziz didn’t tell me. I mean when she called, she said the morph had been detained but she didn’t say why. So my sister has dreamed of the Green Country.”
She stood and paced the room, nudging the caracal as she passed it. It sat up, startled, then stretched and slunk beside its mistress.
The Green Country. Of all the superstitions that haunted the city, the most potent. Not even ziz would have been able to keep from succumbing to some fear when she heard that particular twist given to her dream. It must have been a very stupid morphodite, to just spit out something like that. Very, very stupid.
Or—
And here Shiyung slowed her pace and stared at the mirror that hung across from her bed. A chrome crucifix dangled above it, with a tiny plastic automobile hanging from the cross’s horizontal bar. Beside this hung a polyimage of Blessed Narouz and a vial of petroleum, a moujik prayer wheel, and a plastic bas-relief of Nefer-ka’ ehlvi.
Or, thought Shiyung as she flicked the prayer wheel so that it spun with a loud whir, perhaps the morph has the true Sight. The Final Ascension had been predicted for centuries now, mostly by those who suffered under the tyranny of the Orsinate Ascendants. Recently there had been Signs that were difficult to ignore, even by an Orsina, and especially if one listened to those on the lower levels. The rasa cult, for instance—surely that was evidence of something, the dead seeking some kind of revelatory meaning in their hopeless, horrible existence. And these shakings and tremblings of the ground; and last night an explosion in one of the refineries. And of course the usual claims of publicity-seekers that they had heard the Redeemer waking early from its decade-long sleep, or seen the mad geneslave Zalophus flying like a fouga beneath the domes.
Her sisters scoffed at these tales—at least ziz scoffed; Nike nodded absently and took more morpha—but Shiyung considered it a point of honor to pay attention to such things. No mongrel cult was too rabid for her to partake in its rites at least once; no moujik witch so deranged but that Shiyung wouldn’t take a vial of her spittle and carry it back to Seraphim to display on her wall or in one of her curio cabinets.
“Did she have a name, this morphodite? Do you remember what they called her?” She turned back to the rasa. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes glistened as she hurried to sit beside him.
Tast’annin nodded. “Reive.”
“Reive? Just that? No other name, no number?”
“Reive, that’s all she said. Very young and thin, with very black hair. I think she wore—
”
“No, that’s all right, I can find her. Reive.” The caracal nudged her knee and Shiyung took its head between her palms and squeezed it absently, until it whined. “Me-suh! Come here, I need you to locate someone for me—”
The snaky-haired server creaked back into the room, its linen covering flapping across its copper torso. Shiyung explained, “A hermaphrodite named Reive, detained by the Reception Committee this evening. By my sister ziz.”
“What crime, mistress?” Me-suh’s voice came out in a low croak.
“I have no idea. Sedition, probably. Or—well, I don’t know. There was a disturbance at that dream inquisition in the Four Hundredth Room. Run her name through the main file.”
The server nodded and creaked back out again. Shiyung tapped her foot on the floor and hummed to herself. After a few minutes Me-suh returned.
“She is on Cherubim, mistress. In the Howarth Reception Area.”
Shiyung clapped and plucked at Tast’annin’s sleeve excitedly. “Did you hear that? Howarth. That’s right below here, it will only take a few minutes—”
Howarth was where political prisoners were received.
She stood and went to the armoire, flung aside coats and robes and lumen-accented tunics until she found matching trousers and blouse of a deep burgundy shade. She dressed quickly, then pulled her dark hair back so that it fell in a shining line past her shoulders. Finally she tugged a dark hood around her face. Watching her the rasa’s eyes closed for a moment. When they opened again she stood by the door, waiting.
“All right, Margalis, we’ll go visit your little friend.”
He slipped beside her and the door hissed shut behind them. For a moment Shiyung looked at him with shining eyes.
“I stayed home this evening to work—everyone else is always sleeping this late. It’s nice to have company for a change.”
He stared at her without answering, and then followed her down the hall.
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