by Nik Korpon
Sometimes I think the job is his form of retaliation, that he hasn’t forgiven me for slapping him in front of our men when he announced his decision to leave the rebellion and join the Tathadann, and stealing memories from the people we tried to save is the only suitable punishment for me embarrassing him.
Other times I think he was taking pity on me because my wife and son were crushed in the riot that I incited.
* * *
I stand across the street from Johnstone’s and survey the faces, looking for any Tathadann scouts. When I’m convinced there are none, I hurry across, head down, then push open the heavy wooden door to Johnstone’s, already tasting the bourbon. I know it won’t wash away the image of life draining from someone’s face – it never does – but that’s never stopped me from trying. A lone man sits on a stool at the bar, a scar tracing the curve of his face from above his mouth up into the hairline by his ear. Even from across the bar I can peg him as a longtime lagon without seeing that dead-eyed stare.
Emeríann leans down to eye level behind the bar, bottle in hand, drops of clear alcohol slipping into a cracked tumbler. She’s prettier than any woman I could’ve hoped for under our circumstances, her hair dirty yellow like my memory of the sun. When I said that, trying to compliment her, she waved her slender hands in wispy circles, so I stopped saying it after the second time.
She lays her hand on the bar top when she’s done with the alcohol. The man sets three bills in her hand and she curls her fingers for more. Another four bills and she stuffs them in her pocket, pulls out a lighter. She takes a swig of the liquor, presses two fingers between her lips, then lights her fingers and spits out the alcohol, the burst of flame setting the man’s drink on fire. He spins the glass in slow circles, enraptured by the flames as they scorch the liquid, small specks sifting downward. Emeríann swishes water around her mouth and cleans her fingers and chin with a towel.
“Let me guess,” I say. “He’s chasing either arson or explosion?” I sit, three stools away from the man.
“Campfire, actually,” she says.
“Really?”
“You don’t always have to assume the worst.” She sets a tumbler before me, holds a bottle of bourbon in one hand and homebrewed liquor in the other. I nod at the bourbon. “Feeling sensitive today?” she says.
“I don’t want to piss fire later.”
“It’s OK, love. I’m only having fun at your expense.”
I spin the glass in my hand, liquor coating the side then slipping down in elongated spikes. Though everyone on this side of the city knows liquor is made with the same contaminated water that’s in our homes, the sting of alcohol is pungent enough to cover it up, strong enough to help us forget. If you want actual water, you need deeper pockets and different credentials.
The man waves his hand over the dying flames, trying to nurse them back to their full height.
“To be fair,” she says, gesturing toward the man, “I think the campfire popped and one of the people burned to death.”
I nod.
The Tathadann took complete control after our failed rebellion, revising the historical dead. There was no longer a Struggle against the party, no Resource Wars. There was only the Tathadann. To ensure that, they outlawed memory of anything that came before them. And around that ban, like weeds growing from a sidewalk crack, a black market emerged.
Straight lagonael can become frustrating. By nature, there’s a barrier between you and the experience, and when you can no longer mentally put yourself in the memory it can be worse than not watching at all. Most longtime lagons will resort to vaporizing Paradise to make the memory immersive, to create smell and taste – sometimes even touch if you vaporize enough. But where years of lagonael will only make your brain lazy, Paradise completely dissolves memory. The more a lagon fills his skull with artificial memories and Paradise, the less personal ones he retains, until he can’t remember who he is, where he is, and sometimes how to speak.
The man sighs as the flames snuff out, tips his head back and pours the alcohol in his mouth, letting it sit there, absorb, reconstitute into something approximating grey matter to tide him over until he can score again. I’d try to sell him something, but Emeríann doesn’t quite approve of it, especially not in her bar. When he returns to the present, he looks my way and a smile spreads across his face like oil on water.
“Hey.” He extends his hand. “I want to shake – thank you for everything – then, back then, during all that fighting.”
I give him a stately nod and shake his hand. Emeríann scratches her nose to disguise a snicker.
“It’s a shame what you have – you working like – a tragedy, I say.” He bows his head for a moment. Then he focuses and he looks at me from the top of his eyes. “Say, you – you have anything, do you?”
“What the hell do you know about tragedy?” I clear my throat and move away from him, swallow my drink, squint away the liquor burn and images of Riab’s grandfather. “Damn junkies.”
“They’re an important part of the community,” Emeríann says. She manages not to smile when she says it. I raise an eyebrow and she holds up the cash. “They keep us employed, anyway.”
I wet my lips and hope the nod is implicit.
“Well, hell, King Sunshine,” she coos, with a girlish twang. “‘How was your day, Emeríann?’ ‘Oh, it was OK, Henraek, but it’s better now that I get to see you.’ ‘Oh, you’re so sweet.’ ‘Well, ain’t that the goddamned truth.’” She moves her head when she changes parts, carrying both sides of the conversation for us.
I slide her my glass.
“Lovely to see you too.” She snatches the glass from the bar but I grab her hand before she can move away, kiss her knuckles, her elbow, her jaw and lips. She gives me a patronizing smile and says I’m cute but still have to pay for my drinks.
I reposition myself, the stool rocking beneath me. I test the one beside me, and the one beside that, but none sits evenly.
“You should combine all these stools and get one that works,” I say.
“Or I could set them all on fire as payback for the problems they’ve given me.”
“You could do that, yes.” I stretch over the bar for a bottle to top off my drink – which elicits a smack from Emeríann – and almost knock over the smooth, carved rock that sits on a shelf. It’s an abstract version of a woman, three inches high, except with a snout and two tusks where the face should be. I nod to it. “You trying to catch spirits?”
“Don’t start,” she says, picking up the statuette and wiping away the dust beneath.
It’s from the grandmother of Forgall, the other bartender. His family was hill-people, a couple counties over, and this is Nimah, their family god, one of the old ones. She’s an avatar of Esin, who rules over Nahoeg, and in this avatar Nimah is the goddess of safety. She had a son or lover who was a boar, or something. I can’t remember. The Tathadann outlawed any open worship of Esin when they came to power – especially the cultish subsets Nimah attracts – and I wasn’t much for religion in the first place. I don’t know if Forgall actually believes the totem will protect the bar or if he thinks it will send out some signal audible only to Daghda Morrigan, in whatever world he exists, the natural or the ethereal.
I sip at the remainder of my drink, and, as if conjured, the door opens, sending a ripple through the thick air. I clock a massive reflection in the glasses, then glance behind me and see Forgall, carrying rolls of paper.
Emeríann says, “You’re back early,” then looks down at his hands and gives him a headshake so slight I would have missed it were I not two feet from her.
“Had to meet a contact. It went quicker than I thought.”
I spin on my stool to face him. His hands are stained purple and brown from what I now recognize are schematics. Red, yellow, and white wires hang from his jacket pocket.
“Congratulations on your promotion,” I say to him.
“What?” he says.
“Henraek,”
Emeríann says, “knock it off.”
“You’re a secretary now, right? I thought that’s why you were carrying all those prints,” I say to Forgall. “Because if you told me you could actually read them, I might die of shock and–” I look around the bar, “–it’s too nice a day for that.”
“Every day’s been the same for years,” he says. “Or do they only allow you to read the revisionist weather reports?”
He starts past me but I hold my arm out.
“No one allows me to do anything,” I say. “You need to understand that.”
“Hey,” she says. “Come on.”
Forgall lowers his head, smiles as if something on the floor is incredibly amusing, then shifts the papers and takes a deep breath.
“You were not my lieutenant back then,” he says. He looks up and his jaw could have been chipped from a piece of granite, with rivers of burned skin and buckshot pockmarks. “And you sure as hell have no authority over me now.”
The lagon slides his stool up, his belly cascading over the edge of the bar. “Miss, can I – one for the road – and the ditch, please.”
“You,” Forgall says to him. “Get the hell out of here.” He sets his jaw, exhales hard, his nostrils flaring. “This is your fault,” Forgall says to me, motioning to the junkie. “What’s happening to everyone.”
“She doesn’t seem to mind,” I say. “They tip well.”
“First you made us believe. Then you deserted us. Now you’re taking the city apart one person at a time.”
“You are one to talk.” The glass is heavy in my hand. It would be nothing to drive it into his eye socket, twist and cup and pull the whole thing out. I look over to Emeríann, possibly to gauge her response, to mentally implore her to look the other way for a moment, but she’s staring at the schematics in Forgall’s hand. She flicks her eyes to the side and he deftly pushes the wires for rigging pulse-explosives down into his pocket.
“Emeríann,” I say, “what are you planning?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I don’t want arguments in here.”
“I don’t know if he would understand it, Emer.”
“Don’t call her that,” I say. “You’re not familiar enough to call her Emer.”
“Both of you shut up,” she says.
“Forgall, if I can take down the Tathadann comm systems with a handful of men–”
“It was a power substation,” Forgall says, “not the comm systems.”
“The substation powered the comm systems, correct? So, yes, we took out the comm systems.” I wait for him to argue but he only seethes. “What I’m saying here is, I’m pretty sure I can figure out the bottlerockets you have planned.”
He gives that smile again and even though I’m sure he could snap me in half, the only reason I don’t smash a bottle against his teeth is because Emeríann would have to clean it up.
“You might be able to hurt me, but it’d be hard to do any actual damage without your four-hundred-pound pet rat here to help,” he says. “You’re a team, right? One can’t work without the other.”
I jump to my feet, my face inches from his, and despite all the battle wounds the prick still manages to remain handsome. Pride has a strange way of preserving a man’s looks, even with all that wicked blood coursing through him.
“Enough,” Emeríann yells, but from the tone of her voice I can tell she won’t get involved. She will be rightly pissed at home tonight, however.
Forgall and I shift on our feet, the reptilian parts of our brains feeding our self-image as men of violence, of conviction.
She growls, “I said, enough.”
“What are you planning, Emeríann?”
A soft fwap, her wipe rag landing on the bar top.
“Emeríann, don’t,” Forgall says, a forcefulness in his voice that almost brings me to hit him.
“Dammit, Henraek.” She glances at Forgall, then back to me, and sighs hard. “We’re going to blow up the water supply.”
2
Walleus
I’m standing at the front door of the Gallery, next to the seven-piece hologram band playing some crap from hundreds of years ago that’s supposed to make people feel safe and nostalgic but to me sounds like the musical equivalent of a psychic fugue. I have to be near two hundred paces away from Lady Morrigan, way in the back, with fifty people milling between us. And I can still see her raven-feather hat from way over here. Looks like some ancient monster devoured a nest of birds then threw them up on top of her head. All she has to do is add a handful of dirt-stained pearls and she can call it a day.
I lower Cobb from my arm down to the floor.
“How about you make something for a little bit while Daddy takes care of some business?” I shuffle him into one of the leather booths meant for Gallery patrons and flip on the screen in the table then select the sculpting module. “You remember how this one goes, right?” He clicks twice. The program loads, projecting a dozen shapes and forms that Cobb can mold into something. They have better modules with more options, but they tend to overwhelm him.
Before I can deal with Lady Morrigan and get on about my day, the door swings open and two soldiers enter, their Tathadann fatigues splattered with dirt and blood, dragging a man between them. His clothes are all torn to hell.
“Hey, I’m trying to run a business here,” I say to the soldiers. “Don’t bother my customers.”
One gives half a laugh, and the other a hearty, “Yes, sir.”
The beaten man appears to have been shot with some sedative, probably to avoid an outburst that might shake the patrons’ faith in the Tathadann’s control. Judging by the slashes of blood ringing the man’s mouth, I doubt he’d give much fuss anyway.
They pass the booth where Belousz and a few others from my crew sit gambling, then give Lady Morrigan a quick salute. She appraises the man then nods. The soldiers exit the main gallery through a cloaked door in the back.
Gonna be a bad day for that guy.
Stilian, who coordinates the separation and cataloging of harvested memories under the supervision of Doctor Mebeth, is set up in another booth, recording it all in our ledgers then organizing the vials in groups: food, nature, family, sex. Things that used to be inalienable rights. The fact that a Tathadann man sells a Tathadann-banned product in a Tathadann-controlled building for money that will go to back to the Tathadann cracks me up. In a city as dysfunctional as Eitan, it’s refreshing to know the government is consistently corrupt.
“Imagine my surprise,” Lady Morrigan says as I approach, “when I came to check your progress on the new cells and found you were out at the park eating ice cream cones with your son.”
“I had a soda. Cobb wanted something salty.” I nod toward the back, where the man is likely begging for his life. “A good leader compels his men to perform without him.”
“Without and in spite of don’t mean the same thing,” she says.
“And we were walking through the park on our way here, not sitting and eating and staring at the pigeons.” I stick a toothpick between my teeth, feel the point scrape against my gum. “Seems you need to get me some new ears out there if that’s what you heard.”
“Oh?”
I shrug. “Dairy upsets my stomach.”
“For such a dull brain, you’ve got an incredibly sharp tongue.” She presses a feather back into place, her fingers cold and slender like claws.
“That’s part of my charm, Lady Morrigan.”
Greig, one of my intel gatherers who also happens to be a real shitbird, lays his chips on the table, forfeiting to the rest of the crew, and leaves the game. He moseys into our periphery like a hyena to a carcass, looking for an opportunity to insert himself into our conversation.
“Then why don’t you draw on that charm to infiltrate the forming cells as I’ve asked, instead of relying on your friend Henraek?”
“Is my face different yet?” I say.
“What?”
“I figure there must be some kind of
connection between my features changing and you asking me the same question over and over.” I wait for her to answer and a howl erupts from the back room.
“Is this one of your interrogation tactics?” she says. “Attempt to be witty until the subject can no longer bear it and gives you the information so you’ll stop?”
“What I’m saying is, there’s no way they’d let me get anywhere near. Ever. I am persona non grata. Carve my ass with a piece of glass, hear? You understand what I’m saying?”
Her dress makes sharp rustling sounds when she shifts positions, the capped shoulders digging into her purple-tinted skin. I’ll give it to her: dead husband or no, she’s determined to stay true to the vision of the party, regardless of how ridiculous she looks.
They say her first husband, Daghda Morrigan, didn’t share his brother’s penchant for aristocratic excess, which Macuil had picked up to overcompensate for their hill-people roots. Ridiculous clothing. Pointlessly elaborate food. Refusing to incorporate any of our advances into their home, the same way those old kings inbred until their gene pool was as contaminated as Regent Pond. Story goes, after he and Macuil formed the Tathadann and saved Eitan from the chaos of the Resource Wars, it quickly became obvious to the Lady that Macuil – not her husband, Daghda – was the more flamboyant and easily manipulated one, so the Lady turned one brother against the other and had Daghda shanghaied out in the hinterlands with orders to shoot him on sight should he return, then married Macuil. That pretty much set up the Tathadann’s MO and they’ve been screwing people ever since.