Clockwork Phoenix 4

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Clockwork Phoenix 4 Page 19

by Mike Allen


  “Then what?”

  Her eyes were distant, looking at the memories. “It was all confused, so I tried to find out what was going on. I grabbed at the sleeve of a soldier crawling past me in the tube. We hung there for a moment, ignoring the protests of those behind us. What’s going on? I said. He told me that the guidance mechanism was out. The ship was falling into the sun.”

  She swallowed and went on. “The other soldier made to move on. I reversed my direction and followed him. He was moving with some purpose in mind, at least. We emerged into one of the bubbles that watch the outside, filled with people running back and forth in confusion. He said we could die with the ship, boiling away in heat, the air scorched in our lungs, burning from the inside. Or choose our moment, here and now. And as he spoke, I saw that many were choosing to die now, moving to the airlocks in order to jump out into the darkness, the vacuum. Some had joined hands, as though wanting to comfort and be comforted; they leaped in pairs, outward, falling into the stars in aberrant trajectories. One cluster of five or six flew out in a ring, as though parachuting, the circle of clasped hands tumbling in space and falling apart as they died and lost their grip on each other to float away, alone despite their efforts, visible only as they eclipsed the faint stars. I was so horrified I could not breathe. My guide moved away in the crowd, and I didn’t see him again.”

  I watched her face and the flickers of emotion playing over it. People jostled past us in the corridor, but she stood as still as though she was a fixture. Finally, I spoke.

  “But here, how did you get here?”

  Her eyes rose to mine. “I don’t know. I stayed on the ship while everyone else left. By the time I decided I wanted to jump, I was alone. I didn’t want to jump alone. The ship screamed as something crashed into it, and I must have hit my head and fallen. When I woke up, I was here, in another ship.”

  Moving closer, she rested her fingertips on my arm. “I don’t want to go back.”

  I took her to the meddie offices, signed her in to get tested. While I was waiting, I headed over to the closest bars, the bars spacers are likely to hit. At the third one, I got results.

  “Sure, I remember her,” the pilot said. He was a gnarled chimp, a gray wool cap covering the bulge of his modified brain. “You wouldn’t believe where we found her. We were mining near the Planck twin suns, where the black holes are thick, and found her floating in space.”

  “What kind of suit was she in?”

  He shook his head, his face creasing in a bemused, curled lip smile. “That was the really hyperbolic thing. No suit. We thought she was dead, took her in to see if there was any salvage. And she sits up, looks around at us. I nearly shit my pants. She couldn’t speak Common at first—wild huh? Must have been from some backwater. But she picked it up soon enough.”

  I bought his next drink and thanked him.

  Back at the offices, she was surrounded by medics. She moved through the crowd towards me, her face relieved, brushing them aside with ruthless ease to hand me the file.

  “They want to buy me,” she said, panic in her voice. “I don’t want to be owned. I want to come work for you, and have my own room.”

  The medics dispersed at the sight of my scowl. I looked the file over and finally took it over to the nurse station. “Can you explain some of these results to me?”

  It boiled down to this: they couldn’t explain her. She shouldn’t exist, really, they said, and offered a lot of money for her contract. I lied and said she was already locked down to me.

  As we walked back, she kept moving close, touching me with little brushes and pats. I felt desire aching in me like a deep, hollow bruise every time I moved away, every time she looked at me, puzzled.

  Training and four battles. That’s all she experienced of life before she came here. That’s all she knew.

  At the House, I started assembling a kit with what she’d need, keycard for her room and the outside, voucher book, list of necessaries.

  “You’re going to hire her?” Net said in disbelief.

  “Her story checks out,” I said. “Or close enough. She wants a place to stay. Security. The Teacup can provide it.”

  “We don’t usually hire lovers.”

  “Trust me,” I said.

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  I went out into the main room, where she was waiting.

  “All right,” I said. “Here’s the deal. We give you a room. If you want to help out with cooking, food’s free, otherwise there’s a cost of 40 solars a cycle. You get 50% of profits from every trick. Costumes, specialty items, and supplies come out of your pay, but we only charge you cost. The House pays your license, and splits the cost of meddie treatments with you. Clients can give you gifts, but if you’re extorting or skimming, you’re fired first time it happens.”

  I tossed her the kit. “And the other part is this: you don’t fuck any member of the house. No one, no whores for sure. And not me, not Net, not Linor. Got that?”

  She gave me a slow nod, her eyes full of questions.

  I didn’t pause, just said “Good” and went into the kitchen where Net was shuffling out tiles, pretending like he hadn’t been watching.

  He gave me a questioning look. “How long can you wait?” he said, nodding at the doorway.

  I slumped into a chair and picked up the hand he’d dealt me. “Long enough,” I said. “Long as it takes for her to grow up.”

  He laid his first tile down, and I matched it, but nothing more was said. My needs are particular, but I’m a patient soul.

  HAPPY HOUR AT THE TOOTH AND CLAW

  Shira Lipkin

  The Vampire

  Agony Jones walks into the bar.

  The Werewolf

  Mary Magdalene Kendall walks into the bar.

  The Witch

  I’m already in the bar; I’m in all the bars. I am at a table facing the door, back to the wall, and I am drinking a sweet tea and not a rum & Coke because bending reality and alcohol don’t mix well. Things get tangled or severed. This is where someone else might say “and then there’s all the paperwork!” but I don’t do paperwork; I do, however, like to keep the bar tidy.

  The Bar

  The bar is every bar. The bar has always been here. It’s the tavern where you meet your party, it’s the saloon where all the action goes down, it’s the only place on the space station worth hanging out in. I sit at a fixed point and the bars shoot off in all directions like spokes on a rimless wheel, infinitely small slices of reality all stacked up against each other, with minimal bleedthrough.

  This one has karaoke.

  The Witch

  I can work this little bit of bleedthrough because the vampire and werewolf bars are so similar—so similar, even, that my wardrobe is the same. I’m female in both bars, wearing tight leather pants that show off a tribal lower back tattoo where my slightly-ragged black tank top rides up in back. My stomach is perfectly flat here, and my hair is long and dark. My spine feels more malleable than usual, even. It’s very precise, the wardrobe in this sort of bar, very cookie-cutter. I’m designed not to stand out too much in a crowd, but this sort of bar is more homogenous than most.

  I doodle on my napkin in a language no one in this bar knows.

  Well. Almost no one.

  The Angel

  The angel who tends bar goes by the name of Jack. He won’t tell me his real name, which is, I suppose, perfectly reasonable. I don’t do name magic, but for all he knows, I know someone who does.

  Jack is a cherub. Not a little Renaissance putto, a for-real cherub. Here we only see his man head, but he tends four bars simultaneously, and in the others I’ve seen his other heads—ox, lion, eagle. He hides his wings in this bar, too, but sometimes he sheds through the veil between realities, and I’ve found silvery feathers trodden under peanut shells.

  Jack does not like it when I fuck around in here. He doesn’t get bored—he has four separate places to be at any given
time, and that keeps him more than occupied enough. I can see everything from here, but that’s so passive.

  The Witch

  I have siblings who’ve turned to stone from being so damn passive, from doing nothing but observing. I have siblings who’ve turned into stars or free-floating ideals or trees. But I’m restless. So I reach out and I apply a little friction to two realities. I wear the veil just a little thin.

  The Vampire

  Agony Jones is less than five feet tall. She compensates with screaming red hair cut short and choppy, tall boots, and an aggressive stomp. She cases the joint as she walks in; she notes all of the exits. She’s freshly fed and looks nearly human, if a bit out of date. She claims a table in the corner and watches the crowd; she winces when the beginning of karaoke night is announced.

  The Werewolf

  Mary Magdalene Kendall, all worn denim and soft black tee and long black hair, goes by Maggie or Mags. Too many Marys in her family. She walks in with a few women from her pack, laughing; she nods at Jack when she passes him, and he nods back. Mags and her pack aren’t trouble. Or, well, they are, but they keep the trouble outside. Here they are model citizens whose only crime is that they hog the pool table sometimes.

  The Angel

  Jack notices that Agony and Mags are in the same bar. He is not happy. I don’t think I’m getting a refill on my sweet tea.

  The Witch

  Fuck it. I lean forward, shake some salt in my hand, and sing. Very quietly, and if even Jack knows this language, I will be very surprised. And pissed off at the family lorekeepers.

  The Vampire and the Werewolf

  They notice each other from across the room.

  Agony straightens from her perpetual slouch as she watches Mags flip her long dark hair over one shoulder to make her shot—something ball in the corner pocket, I don’t care, I don’t shoot pool. Mags feels her eyes on her and looks up after the ball goes in, reflexively smiling—Agony’s a solo predator but Mags is all pack, so she feels safe enough to smile. Agony doesn’t get to show anyone more than that spiky fuck-you persona most days. Not many people smile at Agony Jones. They’re usually running and screaming.

  But Mags smiles. And then she smells what Agony is. She nods thoughtfully. But doesn’t stop smiling.

  Mags turns to talk to her packmates, and Agony notices that Mags has a truly superb ass. Also, that she is a werewolf. Agony thinks about whether that matters. She decides that it doesn’t matter a damn to her, but she doesn’t know what Mags’s position on that would be.

  And then the damn werewolves get into the karaoke.

  Agony would leave right now if it wasn’t for Mags. Because fuck karaoke. Very few people are good at karaoke, and the bar is full of people who are not those people. It’s ear-assaulting shite, and Agony wishes she could still get drunk, because that would help. But the pretty wolfgirl in her supple leather vest keeps looking over shyly, and no one’s looked at Agony like that in a damn long time, so she waits. Her skin itches, almost. She doesn’t know what this is.

  And then Mags gets up on stage, and Agony braces herself for her little crush to be over—

  And Mags busts out a perfect Johnette Napolitano. Concrete Blonde. “Bloodletting.” The wolfgirl is singing a vampire song. She is working the stage, and her hips are almost as mesmerizing as her eyes. Which are on Agony. Shy little wolfgirl needed a musical excuse. It’s a hell of a way to say hi. She’s got the ways and means indeed.

  She finishes to great applause; she laughs, blushing, her eye contact with Agony a little less direct—and Agony meets her at the edge of the stage, hands jammed in her back pockets, trying to be casual.

  “You wanna get out of here?” Agony says, fake-cool. “Karaoke sucks. Present company excepted.”

  “You don’t want to sing?”

  “You don’t want to hear me sing.”

  “Fair enough.” She laughs, her voice a little rough in the most interesting ways. “I’m Mags.”

  “I’m Agony. Long story.”

  “Wanna tell me about it?”

  Agony grins, not bothering to hide her fangs. “If you want.”

  They leave the bar. It’s drizzling just a little, more a mist than anything else. Miniature droplets gather like dew on Mags’s long hair.

  The Witch

  I bring my glass back to the bar. Jack gives me a look too dirty to come from an angel. “What?” I say. “They were lonely.”

  “You were lonely. They’re not your toys, Zee.”

  “If they wouldn’t have liked each other anyway, the charm wouldn’t have worked. You know that. It doesn’t create love out of nothing. It just jump-starts the process.”

  “Zee—a vampire and a werewolf?”

  “Why not?”

  “Different worlds?”

  “Not too different. Some boundaries are arbitrary. This is one of them.”

  “And how long will this thinning between worlds last?”

  I shrug. “A while. Would forever be bad? You wouldn’t want to tear the new sweethearts apart, would you?”

  Jack sighs. A small, downy feather spirals down from the empty space over his shoulder. It lands in the remains of a draft beer. “You need a hobby that doesn’t involve violating laws of physics.”

  I pluck the feather from the beer and blow it back at him; he winces as it splats on his forearm. Angels don’t like to be less than pristine. I touch his wrist, and with the slightest twist of two strands of reality, I am in another bar, grinning at his lion head. He grumps at me when he realizes what I’ve done, a little huff and a snort, and I slide off the barstool to track down Allemande Left.

  The Alien Stripper

  “I’m not a stripper,” Allemande Left says, her voice syrup-slow as she concentrates on sliding the strip of ridged silicone into one of the sliverthin pockets above her natural cheekbones. “I’m a courtesan.”

  The Alien Courtesan

  “And I’m not an alien; I just cater to them.”

  The Courtesan

  “Better.”

  Allemande Left studies herself in the mirror and shifts the ridge upwards a bit, then dusts the skin over it with opalescent powder to draw the eye. She looks over her shoulder critically, ensuring that her back ridges are aligned. Allemande Left is a perfectionist. I watch myself watch her, and I stretch, relieved to be out of the body I’m locked into at the vamp/were bars. Here I am preternaturally slender and genderless, ever so slightly silver, large-eyed, with a 1950s-atom halo of tiny processors orbiting my bare head. My clothes drape soft with a muted shimmer like a knife in a dirty mirror. Here I scan as a technomancer more than a witch. Allemande Left believes in science like Agony Jones believes in blood.

  “Zee,” she says. “Where did you come from this time?”

  “Leather and beer and animal urges. Allemande Left, where are you going?”

  “Dancing.”

  “You’re always dancing.”

  “Breathing is dancing. Contract negotiation is dancing. Sleeping is dancing.”

  Allemande Left comes from a dance background, she says. Really, she comes from centuries of dance background, ancestors and ancestresses at the Joffrey and ABT, Ballet Russes and Alvin Ailey. She keeps them all in a slimline chip embedded in the inside of her delicate wrist. All of them who’ve been uploaded at least. Every Tuesday, Allemande Left takes tea with them. It’s all very formal. Allemande Left, who took her name from a great-great-aunt with a secret love of folk and square dance, loves ritual more than she loves anything but dance.

  She arranges her costume. The wearable parts—she was nearly done with the insertable parts before I got here. She almost always is. “Allemande Left, I have never seen your real face.”

  “They’re all my real face.”

  I know that, too.

  I would describe her, but next time she’ll be different. She is Allemande Left, and she is whoever you need, for an evening and a morning. She kisses my cheek; she smells of sandalwood and metal. The
ribbons of her costume brush over me, and the bells on her belt chime as she stands. Her smile is dreamy, as if she’s half-gone already, already well on her way to being whoever she is tonight. Her eyes flash silverbright. “Come see me soon, Zee. I miss you.”

  And she is gone.

  The Angel

  “You know better.”

  Even Jack’s voice seems furry somehow. Here at the Mercy Seat, right at the tip of the sleekest space station I’ve ever seen. It’s been a damn long time since humans built it and moved on; it crumbled only slightly into disrepair before the Conglomerate moved in and made it better than new. The Mercy Seat was gutted and revamped, with booths that cater to specific species.

  No one here knows Jack’s origin. No one here believes in angels, not like Mary Magdalene Kendall believes in angels, not like humans in general regard them as a nice story. Jack says he usually passes for some exotic bodymod addict. They can do lion heads and wings here, if you pay enough.

  “Better than what?”

  I am watching Allemande Left. She is graceful and sinuous and I swear the bells at her waist only chime exactly when she wants them to. I have no idea how she does that.

  “Better than to hang around while she’s working.”

  If Allemande Left turned around right now, she would not recognize me. I take another drink. “Do I have anything better to do? You don’t like it when I quantum tunnel.”

  Jack growls softly. I know he doesn’t like this place as much, because it’s so perfect that he doesn’t need to do anything—in any other bar, he’d be wiping things down to seem busy, but these are all self-cleaning surfaces. Instead, he folds his arms across his broad, bare chest. “You’re not going to start anything tonight, are you?”

  “You gonna kick me out if I do?” I smile and stretch. He can’t kick me out. Things like him have no authority over things like me.

  “I wouldn’t mind so much if you finished what you started.” He flicks the strictly-for-display towel at me.

 

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