“You want to torture me.”
“Always.”
They made their rounds, walking the three levels of mezzanines, her arm locked over his. She comported herself as if she was holding a contest for the most brief pleasantries to everyone she passed, in record time. Then he chuckled to himself, finally realizing she didn’t really like anybody, particularly, but was just playing a manners game. “Where’s Venus?” Thorn finally asked her.
“Phhh. Give up looking. She’ll be in later… with a damn surprise.”
“A what?” he asked.
“It’s a party. A surprise. She used to be an entertainer, for her off hours hobby. Don’t they have parties where you come from? Didn’t people pop out of cakes?” She thought about it for a second, then added, “Never mind. I don’t want to know about the parties where you came from.” They finally found empty chairs together at one of the many long tables, and sat.
Thorn asked, “Where’s Eleven Jane? Would she dance with me, you think?”
“If she comes, it won’t be in person. We’re in the sinful side of the rock. This place is in the city.”
Thorn asked, “Not in person?”
Lady Hatchet said, “No! Now stop thinking about her. An old woman like me doesn’t like to spend the evening with the young likes of you talking and talking and talking about the young likes of her!”
“I can’t stop thinking about her. No matter what else I think about, I’m wondering about her all the time, too.”
Lady Hatchet rolled her eyes. “Are you in love with a hippiestick?”
“Love?”
“Love!”
Thorn shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know I want to hug her tight and never let go. And listen to her voice. And I wish I could smell her. I bet she smells better than everybody.”
“Her? Phhh! That damn little tart.”
“I would love to taste her. What does she taste like if I were to lick her?”
Lady Hatchet slammed the table. “No more ignorant clone talk.”
Thorn smiled sheepishly. He looked around. “I don’t see Christopher Goi anywhere either. Why wouldn’t he be here?”
“He’s not coming.”
“Boycotting this? Is this party evil?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. It’s that he’s too busy right now and running out of time.”
Thorn asked, “Busy doing what?”
“A lot of technicians are away right now preparing for tomorrow. What you see here tonight is mostly just the union’s chop-shop division. It’s just us dummies who don’t know anything about rocket science who can afford to party like loons.”
“The who?”
“The chop-shop.”
“What?”
“We cart away dead clone guts to all the right places… and things.”
“Sorry I asked.”
Lady Hatchet frowned. “A flea has brain enough to do what we do. Look around. It’s not the most shining crowd of people ever assembled. But we know how to drink.”
Plates of food dropped down in front of them. “What’s this?” Thorn asked.
“You assume they took the time to name it.” Lady Hatchet poked at her glop suspiciously.
Gas infused drinks poured out into their glasses. Though Thorn couldn’t taste his, he liked the way it made the front part of his brain feel. Soon he felt like he was floating up off his seat. “You know, you’re the very most, a very beautiful old lady, for an old lady,” he said to Lady Hatchet with a big goony smile.
“Oh phhh!” She waved him off.
“Really!”
She reduced the incline of her frown. “If that’s the way you really feel, then please drink more. A lot more.”
After a communal meal, a show started. The stage flipped down from the ceiling and more invented flowers pushed forward. A voice said, “We thought she had retired from the stage but she was just taking a dirt nap. Now she’s back, a lot older but who’s counting around here anymore. The outrageous chanteuse…”
Venus appeared out of a huge clamshell that opened. She was decked out in cascading sparkles. She sashayed to the edge of the stage then sang with a mocking lilt, “I’m a girl of damn laser and light. A plastic surgeon’s delight. If I bend down to touch my green toes, my gall bladder blows out my damn nose. I’ve been laser beamed more than one time, so my damn navel is starting to climb.”
Lady Hatchet stood and shouted, “You sing like a squashed frog!” Thorn pulled her down.
“I sport breasts like hare ears. When I pee, my eyes fill with pee tears.”
Applause erupted louder as twelve life-sized marionettes of Venus fell down out of the ceiling and danced in unison behind her, as she continued singing.
The marionettes swooped forward and scooped Venus up into their arms then carried her away into the ceiling until she was gone. Holograms of giant beaming eyeballs shifted the crowd’s attention to opposing border columns as Malbri Three and Eleven Jane projected themselves dancing sideways on them.
Thorn stood! “It’s her! Look at her! How can she be dancing sideways?”
Lady Hatchet said, “She’s just here in hologram, of course. That way she can be here but not be here.”
“I wish I could see up her skirt.”
Lady Hatchet slapped at his arm. “You’re really drunk!”
“I wanna see up her skirt!”
“Sit down, man!”
He did. “What does she do all day?”
Lady Hatchet looked into her glass. “Sing hippie songs and grow weird vegetables, probably. Who knows.”
Quickly bored with the holograms of the hippisticks who weren’t even really there, the union workers stood, raised their drinks and joined together in a labor protest song, “It’s back to Earth to eat daises, instead of rubber clone crazies. It’s back to Earth to swim oceans, instead of biological lotions. Oh robber rust, oh robber rust, oh where have your little grunts gone? Oh scientists, oh scientists, your grunts have moved on, have moved on.”
The crowd filled with tears as they bellowed on, since the old labor song was finally becoming a literal reality. Mack broadly waved his arms as if leading everyone, but few paid attention to him. They were busy hugging and pressing cheeks with each other. “It’s back to Earth to hop mountains, instead of capping blood fountains. It’s back to see Reagan on Rushmore, instead of anymore clone gore. Oh hippisticks, oh hippisticks, where have your mom and dad gone? Oh hippisticks, oh hippisticks, your mom and dad have moved on.”
“Venus is such a glurgy old slog!” Lady Hatchet turned to Thorn. “You can put a pile of bones in a dress but that don’t make her a damn lady. Phhh! She opens her mouth and her diction kills her every time.”
He asked, “Is that what makes one a lady? Diction? I always wondered.”
She put her nose in the air but then busted out laughing. “I took six years of speech classes to be a lady. I even learned some new odd big words, to be the cherry on top.”
“Well, how did you speak before?”
Lady Hatchet started laughing in fits and finally put her drink down so she wouldn’t slosh anymore of it onto the back of her hand. “Most of us came to this rust bucket to get away from something because we thought we could start something over in our lives. I grew up on a damn filthy leaky houseboat shoved full of filthy people in the filthy swamps.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Miette,” she admitted. “That’s it. Just that. It means crumb. If I ever hear you say it I’ll kill you and I will. It is legal, here, you know, to kill a damn lab clone.” She laughed. “And then for awhile I went by the name Hubris. I thought it sounded pretty and it’s what they called me. Then I looked it up. I don’t go by that name anymore.”
“Mack once told me your real name back on Earth was Tractor Oil.”
“Let him say that to my damn face. Do you know here he came from?”
“Here,” Thorn answered. “That’s what he says.”
“Yeah and so he
hasn’t ever seen the damn real light of day! So don’t let him ever let you think he was once a real nobody!”
“Where’s Venus from?”
“Earth. Oh I could just make Venus eat her boat-load of buttons. She is who she is. She has no pretense or re-creation. Now that she’s so old she sings like she’s murdered. And she just wants to find some ancient hobby, sewing and buttons, to help her whole universe have meaning. Buttons! Sewing! Can you just laugh? How futile.”
“Maybe it’s just something to do,” Thorn said. “Don’t make anymore of it than it is.”
Lady Hatchet started bawling, hugging Thorn, tightly. “Oh, I’m so damn confused. I miss Earth! But I want to live forever! I want a young clone of me to carry on! I was so beautiful once! If you’d seen me in my youth you’d be as hot for me as you are for that damn Eleven Jane. Maybe if I hadn’t of been so very beautiful once then getting old like this wouldn’t be so hard. It really does hurt my feelings. You just ugly up around the edges when you get old. There’s no getting around it.” She grinned sweetly at him as if she expected a contrary compliment in return.
“Your skin is weird but I can see you have fine bones.”
“You have a way of putting things.” She gave him a cagey glare.
Venus walked up to them, changed into a loud caftan, and gushed to Lady Hatchet, “Wasn’t I the bee’s knees?” They kissed.
“Is that what it was?”
“Venus in buttons! Coming out of the shell from the ocean of space. I’m so cosmic.”
Lady Hatchet feigned surprise. “That was a shell? That’s what that was?”
“I was Venus rising from the ocean of all space. The ocean of all time.”
“I thought that was a mouth … and you were a bit of stringy vomit.”
“Pretend with me.”
Lady Hatchet lowered her eyebrows. “Now you’re fishing for compliments.”
Venus raised an eyebrow. “I don’t fish. I’m the catch.”
Lady Hatchet put her hand on her hip. “Sometimes when I feel like nobody understands me it helps to think of you. Nobody understands you either.”
Venus laughed and ribbed her. “Rust bucket poetry suits you.”
Lady Hatchet smiled. “That dress you just had on was a bit much. I’ve never seen a dress before that even accents an old woman’s wrinkled spleen. Did you stay up all night stitching it together?”
Venus shook her head. “I wouldn’t want something like that to have stitches so I had some spiders spin it up. Wasn’t it flawless? It flowed off of me like shimmering water, like I was just swimming in a hippstick asteroid ritual, and now rising like a goddess.”
“Goddess? It looked like a new lab experiment that fell off the table.”
“Oh no. Are your ankles swelling again?”
“Damn no. Damn you. Made me look.”
“Women. Women.” Thorn chuckled. “Will the entertainment never end?”
Lady Hatchet said, “A damn lady is a matter of diction. So there is only one technically present, technically. I am the universal lady.” She grandly put her arms out, to repeat, “The universal lady.” She spilled her drink. Venus wasn’t even listening to Lady Hatchet anymore. She was absorbing the many compliments flooding over her from admirers in the crowd.
Later in the evening at the farewell party, when things had quieted considerably and people started leaving so they could go to sleep, Thorn went over to Mack and asked, “Are you afraid the robber scientists will try and stop you all from leaving tomorrow?”
“They’re all dead. I don’t think the clones of them really care enough to have conniptions about anything.”
“What if they do?”
Mack shook his head. “We’ve submitted union protests, formally, three times. That’s the law they signed off on. They haven’t responded. Maybe they don’t really care about the old union, either. So it’s not our problem anymore. If they ignore us like that then we can legally go. If they shoot us out of space then they are illegal.”
Thorn asked, “Why don’t you just see them and talk to their face, to make sure they’re cool with all this.”
Mack let out an impatient sigh. “To see them looking so relived that we’re getting out of their hair? We haven’t seen any of them in years, anyway. Madam Wintermirror would just send her picture if she was ever invited to a meeting, saying she didn’t want to breathe their rarified air. Besides, it isn’t our problem to make their job easier for them, or to do their job for them. We follow rules they signed off on, that they agreed to. And then I don’t worry about it anymore beyond that.”
“Well then, how do you even know any of them are still here on this asteroid at all? The robber scientists’ clones probably aren’t as dedicated, since they’re different people.”
“We get radio signals, remember.”
“How do you know they haven’t given up on cloning themselves? Maybe they’ve just left to go back to Earth to enjoy themselves. Maybe this is all remote control, or run just by middle management robots.”
Mack thought about it, and then let out a boisterous laugh. “If that’s where they really are then I’m going back to Earth to kick their rockets!”
* *
The next midday, Thorn, Christopher Goi, Venus and Lady Hatchet stepped out of an elevator into a watchtower that stuck out of the asteroid. The watchtower overlooked rows of rocket hangers cut into the surface of the rock, and an elevated runway.
Venus said to Thorn, “Your elevator ride to heaven. This is as far away as you can go on this rock. And the view is heaven!”
Thorn asked, “What’s underneath us between here and where we got on the elevator?”
Venus said, “It’s all a lot of solid rock between the inside and outside of the asteroid. That way we can get hit by smaller asteroids all the time and only get craters. We wouldn’t even feel a thing.” She pointed out the window to a crater. There’s a nice big one. But not too big. The impact of that was no danger to the city. Maybe the rockets out here that keep the asteroid in its spin had to fire to compensate for it, or maybe not. Maybe it wasn’t even big enough for that.”
Thorn stepped close to the window and watched the view of the asteroid’s surface. On the runway they could see a large passenger spaceship. The starry sky over it was dotted with other gleaming asteroids, rising together as if in a herd. “Yes, I can see that we’re spinning, if I watch the edge. The view out there always changes, then, doesn’t it. What if an asteroid hits the solar panels?”
Venus said, “All that metal and glass is very replaceable.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Every week?”
Venus said, “It looks like a mess out here but everything you see has been in its orbit for so long that nothing touches anymore.”
Thorn sat at a desk. “I bet a person could just look out there for hours.” Christopher Goi and Venus sat next to him.
Lady Hatchet reclined on a couch and stared at everyone like a moody old cat. “I’ll be damn glad when it’s all gone and this is all over and I can get back to my war.”
The room vibrated slightly as the union spaceship slid out of the runway, with pert blasts. Then when it was aloft there was a flash of light and the room vibrated again. The first vibration was from the rockets of the spaceship and the second from the runway blowing up. Venus waved, though they couldn’t see her.
Christopher Goi looked puzzled. “I didn’t know the runway was going to blow up behind them like that.”
Venus smiled. “Maybe it was a union trick. They don’t call us aggressive for nothing.”
He shook his head. “Mack didn’t do it. Not that I know of. When would he have found time to arrange that?”
Thorn said, “It’s a shame Mack didn’t get much of a run as our union boss.”
Christopher Goi sighed. “He’ll be even more of a big nobody back on Earth.”
“Bye bye.” Venus waved some more. “You’ll damn miss me. I was the only famous chanteuse you knew. Eart
h is overrun with so many nobodies that they get lost in it all.”
The hangers blew up and their pieces floated away, ruining the spaceport’s airlock. A few bits of debris clanked against the outside of their window. Venus put her hand up in front of her face as if that would help. The junk bounced away and sprayed out into space. Venus looked around, worried. “Junk like that flying around is very dangerous.”
“Most everybody left and you’re worried about space junk?” Lady Hatchet leaned all the way back into the couch, smashing her hair twist, looking up at the ceiling. “Is that it? They are here and they are gone? That’s all there is to it?”
Venus turned. “Don’t get so damn saturnine about it. This isn’t the first time people left here.”
Lady Hatchet smiled at her. “There. Now you can’t go back to Earth. There went your ride.”
Venus waved her off. “Nonsense. There are a few dozen other busses going, yet, from some of the smaller docks, for those who don’t want to stay behind. I’m leaving with them later.”
“Phhh. You aren’t going. You know you don’t want to go that far on a tiny bus when you could have gone on a big spaceship. You’re just dragging your feet because you don’t want to go at all. Not really or you would have just gone. There’s nothing back there for us on Earth anymore and you know it. Not really.”
Venus explained. “Whether we’re on a big bus or a small bus we’re all knocked out the whole trip on the same drugs.”
“Why do I feel insulted?” Thorn asked Christopher Goi.
“The new union and the old union just told both us clones that we couldn’t go with them, that’s why.”
Thorn said, “They aren’t the only ride out of here.”
Christopher Goi shook his head. “And they know that. But they didn’t want us with them. They wanted to pretend they aren’t really involved with anything anymore with this place and all of its messes.”
“Yeah, we’re a mess.” Thorn nodded. “Why don’t we just do what we want, then?”
Christopher Goi smirked. “It doesn’t matter that they left, or not, to stop the experiments. The clone experiments here will all putter out soon, no matter what.”
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