by Ian Whates
It didn’t matter to Alejandro that his new wife trod on his toes or that they stumbled when he tried, unwisely, to sweep her up in a dramatic turn.
All that mattered was her smile. She stared up at him and he saw himself reflected in her eyes and it seem that the man she saw was bigger and prouder and happier than he ever remembered being. He was a man with hope, a man who would do great things and who would always have this beautiful woman beside him.
He lifted her off her feet and she squealed his name as he whirled them both around, her dress ballooning out, one shoe flying off across the floor to land at the feet of the band’s guitarist. And when he put her down she threw her head back and laughed, her face wide and open and honest with simple pleasure. And then all their friends were around them, clapping him on the back, kissing his new wife and then dancing themselves – just as clumsily – and laughing.
It was a perfect moment.
GIDEON PUT A hand on Alejandro’s shoulder and the memory dropped away. He lifted the cap off the old man’s head and rolled it up.
“We’re done,” Gideon said.
Alejandro sprang from the chair, surprising the boy with his sudden vigour, and gripped Gideon in a tight embrace.
“Thank you,” Alejandro stepped back, his eyes filling with tears. The old man wiped roughly at his face. “Thank you so much. You always were a good boy.”
Alejandro pulled out a small fold of neat bills and pressed them into Gideon’s palm.
The boy, as gently as he could, refused them.
“No, Mister Marichal –”
The old man pushed them back.
Gideon looked at the notes. He peeled away the top two and handed the rest back.
“That is enough.”
Appeased, Alejandro nodded; then he reached up to grab Gideon’s face. He pulled the boy’s head forward and craned to kiss him on the forehead, his lips touching a cool metal stud.
“Thank you for giving me back my Teresita.”
The old man turned and walked out the door.
“Mister Marichal?” Gideon called after him but he was gone. The young man stared, confused for a moment, looking around the room.
Then he went over to the low table with the scroll.
The download from the Muninn was complete, the copy ready to play, unused.
If he returned it, the old man could have his precious memories one more time. Gideon fiddled with the mesh cap in his hands then turned towards the door, intending to chase after Mister Marichal and explain there had been a mistake.
Then he remembered how the old man had looked and he paused.
Thank you for giving me back my Teresita.
Gideon sat down in the old, battered armchair and gently ran his fingers along the studs in his skull.
Mister Marichal had been happy and that was enough. The old man didn’t need the download.
He already had everything he needed.
STILL LIFE
WITH SKULL
MIKE ALLEN
Mike Allen edited a trilogy of weird fiction anthologies called Clockwork Phoenix from 2008 to 2010, and thanks to the miracle of a $10,000 Kickstarter campaign, he’s now in the process of assembling Clockwork Phoenix 4. A 2008 Nebula Award finalist, his stories have appeared most recently in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Not One of Us. His first short fiction collection, The Button Bin and Other Stories, is forthcoming from Dagan Books, and his first novel, The Black Fire Concerto, is on its way from Black Gate Books. You can learn more about his work at descentintolight.com and www.mythicdelirium.com
THIS PART I remember. My old life ended here. What’s left starts this way:
When that girl from the belowground stole into my workshop, I wasn’t wired for running. I was wired for show. I had to be my own saleswoman without having to speak a word.
My cranium had corners, and each one sprouted a chain that helped suspend my head from the grid of railracks overhead. A bit illusory, those chains, as neurofibers wound through them, so I could sync the bearings as I rolled my dangling head along the grid from one end of the shop to the other. No need to stick close to my body. The tubing from neck to trunk could flex and telescope a long way.
I kept my body simple, an elegant cube with two slender alabaster arms worthy of any Venus curving out from each vertical face, balanced on a single pair of sleek, muscular legs. Everyone wants to perch on beautiful legs and that never changes. Who’d trust me with their bodywork if I couldn’t shape a pair for myself?
I don’t do the full works. Integration with nanorobotics, consciousness transplants, I don’t touch that ghost-in-the-machine garbage. Coming to me for genitalia removal’s like asking a hivemind to add single digit integers, but most everyone’s had that taken care of long before they ever consider my services. Removing a heart, replacing it, I’m happy to do that and good riddance to those useless antiques. Duplicate pumps throughout the body, replaceable on request, that’s the way to go. My most requested modification, but I can do so much more.
I had a client split onto three different tables, connected by fibers and hose. I choose to keep up a pretense to gender but this customer did not out of deference to the Hierophant hirself – a deference I don’t share, but I respected hir wishes nonetheless.
Se wanted hir head nestled in earflaps like flower petals atop a long stalk, descending into a birdcage of ribs that would moan musically when se breathed. And legs, always the sculpted legs. My head hovered over hir as my hands did the delicate work.
And that crazy painter, Encolpio, the one with the natural-born, unaltered body that ought to be archivally preserved before the fool simply dies of old age. He was there. He loved to paint me and the clients I worked on. I let him hang out for the sake of atmosphere. Something to make my shop stick in the memory. These denizens could go their whole lives without ever seeing anything like him.
The oil fumes wafted from his canvas, coursed across my tongue. My customer sighed and fluttered hir eyes as I reconnect the last cranial fiber, and it chimed soft in hir torso, a slow gong. The door into my workshop irised open, though I’d heard no request for access and granted no permission, and the girl who stepped through it said, “Unmake me.”
I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” but at the same time my client managed to swivel hir head on the table, stared with narrowed eyes at the intruder and blurted out through hir ribs, “You don’t belong here!”
How fast that girl moved, right up to the tables in a blink, and thick fibers sprouted from her palms, winding all through the cavities in my customer’s torso. Hir eyes fluttered and shut and hir mouth went slack.
The painter dropped his brush.
“Don’t play dumb,” the girl said. “One touch and I’ll know if you’re lying.”
My body configuration wasn’t tailored for quick escape. Before I could even run I had to contract my neck and position my body where I could withdrew my chain-tentacles out of the ceiling grid and perch my head like a spider over the cube of my body. That would take at least ten seconds.
I met the girl’s gaze. She glared back with grids of diamond-shaped pupils. The woven gray cloth of her unisuit, its fibers perhaps made from real animal hair, marked her as a belowgrounder. Dark hair trimmed almost to her scalp, knees bent and back hunched in an aggressive stance – I knew she had to be enhanced in all sorts of ways but she hadn’t deviated from the basic human blueprint that so many denizens of the Hives eschewed. Her smooth features made her appear just past pubescence, but who could really know anymore? And how could she possibly know about unmaking? About me?
“Why would you ask such a thing?”
“I’m not asking.”
“From everything I’ve heard, unmaking is a complex and traumatic process.” I wasn’t about to admit aloud that I’d ever re-engineered a living, conscious person’s DNA to completely change them at the cellular level. Talking about it would definitely perk up the Hierophant’s nanoscopic Ears. Admitting kno
wledge will bring hir minions straight to you in a matter of minutes. Actually doing it – well, that’s best left unsaid. “Not one bit of equipment in this studio could be used for such a thing.” I spun my body a half-step closer to her. “You want to see if I’m lying, the base of my neck’s the easiest place to plug in.”
She continued to stare.
“Is se going to be all right?” Encolpio pointed at the unconscious customer. The intruder glanced his way. Then dashed at him. He swung his easel between them, a completely ineffectual defense.
I rolled my head toward my body at triplespeed and dropped out of the grid.
The girl tried to immobilize Encolpio the way she had my customer, but despite his antiquated body the old man proved surprisingly agile at staying just out of her reach.
Some ancient customs still make practical sense. I touched fingertips to the central counter in my surgical array. A drawer sprang open.
“Stop it, kid!” I shouted. She turned and I made sure she saw that I held firesprayers in three of my four hands, all aimed at her. “You can leave now.”
Her eyegrids widened.
My entry bell sounded again. And I knew that couldn’t be a customer. “Who is that?” I demanded, but the girl set her jaw and glared.
“Hey, Athiva,” Encolpio said, “can you stop whoever that is from coming in here?”
I couldn’t get to the controls quickly enough anyway, and in another moment it didn’t matter, as once again the portal opened without seeking my input. Clearly I needed a security upgrade at the next install opportunity.
The girl started breathing harder, in excitement or fear – I’d not seen a physical reaction like it in years. Then she said, “Do you have another way out?”
Encolpio replied “No” at the same time I narrowed my eyes and said, “Yes.”
As the painter started, the girl said, “Better use it.”
Four figures stepped through the portal; all naked, all sexless, all identical, each about the size of the girl. One of her eyes turned to track them while the other stayed fixed on my weapons.
With my chain-tentacles I gripped the corners of my shoulders tight. And I ran. My body aimed where it needed to go, I swiveled my face and firesprayers toward the newcomers.
All of them split and bloomed, their pink innards unfolding in a manner more mechanical than fleshy, interlocking together and slotting into each other to form one much larger creature. I uttered a noise somewhere between a gasp and a shriek as the resulting monster raised six massive arms and brought two of them down on my unconscious customer and crushed hir.
Red stripes of oxygen-consuming aerocapillaries roped across the golem’s thoracic chambers, giving it grotesque symmetry as it bounded over my work tables, a thing made of raw, glistening muscle that combined elements of toad, monkey and spider. It had no head, no visible sensory organs.
The juggernaut scrambled at us. I’m no fool. It might be there for the girl, but it would leave no witnesses. I squeezed two of my sprayers, sent jets of fire right into its exposed guts. No mouths opened but the thing screamed and recoiled, its components peeling apart.
And immediately recombined, jettisoning what had charred, the new shape more compact with more legs that bent and sprang to propel it through the air, straight at us. Spraying it would just result in a mass of burning flesh raining right on top of us. I reached the far wall and slammed my free hand palm-flat against the hidden scanlock.
The emergency door dropped straight down into the floor, leaving a rectangular gap. I spun through. As I slapped the scanlock on the other side I confess I wasn’t paying close attention to whether my impromptu companions in flight made it through.
A deafening thud as the door pistoned back into its place with a burst of blood and torn flesh.
The girl, curse her speed, had passed through the opening before I had. A bloody tangle lay where the door had gaped. My hearts pounded until I spotted Encolpio across from me in the secret corridor, scrambling backward away from the mess.
The quivering parts on the floor began to rearrange themselves.
“Back!” I shouted, and hosed the rising mass with the firesprayers. Smoke filled the corridor before the ventilation sucked it away.
Fists pounded the wall from inside my shop, the other half, trying to find us.
The girl hadn’t run, nor had she tried any neurofiber moves on me. I trained my weapons on her again, their nozzles still smoldering. “Who are you?”
“Procne,” the girl said.
“Is that your real name?”
Her lips pursed before she answered. “It’s the name I have.”
Another pound on the wall. “And what is that? And why is it chasing you?”
Encolpio tried to speak, coughed, started again. “Can we do this somewhere else?”
“No,” I said. My livelihood was ruined, the chosen existence I’d worked so hard to construct likely destroyed. Procne’s next words would determine whether or not she left the corridor alive.
“His name is Hundig,” she said. “He wants to take me back to his conscriptor so she can engineer me into something just like him, only smaller and smarter. And quicker.”
“But you don’t want this? You can’t tell me you had those eyes and palm-fibers added so you could tend livestock in an underground pod.”
She bristled, but remembered who held the weapons. “I won’t be an owned thing.”
“Who is this conscriptor?” I had to raise my voice over the beating on the walls.
“I don’t know her real name. She has an artificial vessel that holds her mind. Sometimes it’s shaped like a bird, sometimes like spiders.” Her shoulders hunched, her speech became hesitant. Speaking of this woman scared her. “She told me to call her Philomela.”
Instinct told me what she wasn’t sharing. “You signed a blood contract, didn’t you – and now you’re trying to break it.” And before she could answer: “And you dared to involve me? Who claims I know anything about unmaking?”
“Her name is Sieglinda.”
Now there was a name I thought I’d never hear again. But I wasn’t primed to buy yet. “Describe Sieglinda to me.”
“She told me you would ask that. She told me to say that she’s never let me see her compass rose tattoo, but it remains in the same place where you saw it.”
I’m still amazed I didn’t drop any of the firesprayers. The hooks were in me from that moment on. “And you didn’t think to bring this up when you first came in?”
She shrugged but wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I was short on time.”
“How did you meet her?”
Another grimace. “I was supposed to kill her. She helped me escape.”
I lowered my weapons. “We need to get out of here.”
“About time,” Encolpio said.
I did not under any circumstances want to admit in front of the painter that Procne was right about me, though he already had to be guessing and I suspected he wouldn’t be the least bit bothered if he knew. But the ears and eyes of the Hierophant are everywhere, and the open admission of unmaking is one of the few things that will bring hir minions to you at maximum speed.
Se doesn’t bat any of hir many eyes when a member of hir citizenry changes their cell structure to the point they’re no longer recognizable as their former self. Do it without hir knowing, though – that se can’t abide, if se ever finds out. They say hir attention is stretched so thin that you really have to work to attract it, no matter how vile your business. But some things are guaranteed to cause hir gendarmes to gather.
To pursue an unmaking you find someone like I used to be.
In ancient days on another continent there was a thriving industry in liquor made outside the law, untaxed and unaccounted for by the government. There was no rational reason for the business to be conducted outside the law beyond keeping the flow of commerce concealed, and yet because it was outside the law it thrived. Unmaking is like that.
Beyond t
hat secret hallway my memories fragment. I deduce we must have parted ways with Encolpio afterward. I didn’t dare let him stay involved, though I can imagine his protests at leaving me alone with Procne. But that’s a guess. A wall rises in my mind and won’t yield, much as I feel pressed to force a way through.
This pressure shifts, prying at the name Sieglinda. Images, sensations stutter. She was like me, insistent on a gender, but she bared herself in a way I didn’t, her transparent skin flaunting her morphologic choices even more than most. I recall a warm hand on my neck. My body was different then, more like a natural-born. Sieglinda’s fingers playfully caressed a vein as my gaze tracked the tableaus of figures etched into her temple and across the crown of her skull. A kiss, sweet and electrifying. And nothing more than that. The rest of her no longer belongs to me.
My eyes have retained their tear ducts. Perhaps tears appear. This pressure releases me and my memories move forward, resuming here.
We stood before a reeking pool of brown liquid in a long cellar room fifty stories below the ground level of an old-money oligarch’s ziggurat. Said oligarch, a former client of mine, no longer remembered that this room existed or that we were in it.
“You have to be the one to do it. I’m not built for swimming anymore,” I said.
“I won’t go in there,” Procne said, her tone defiant, but the way she shrank away from the edge suggested otherwise.
I had no sympathy to offer. “Then you’ve ruined my life for nothing.”
I had taken my direst risk yet, adding a personal rhythm to the coded telepathic impulses that gained me audience with the oligarch, but a face-to-face meeting was necessary to speak the combination that would temporarily trigger hir memories of me from hir previous identity and remind hir of the debt se owed me. And also remind hir for that same interval of the secret room built within hir home where my guest and I needed to go.
I must, in the back of my mind, have thought I might one day have need of my old gene-ensorcelling services, for myself at least. Why else would I have built in all these safeguarded spaces instead of purging my old life completely?