by IGMS
by D. Thomas Minton
Artwork by Larry Blamire
* * *
The second time I met Lucic, he was a chef.
He looked down at me, snowy flakes of ash from the persistent smoke settling on his shoulders. "What else do you have to do with your life?" he asked.
I pulled the tatters of my military jacket around my neck. The hollow pipes that are my legs burned against the flesh of my hips.
"I want you to run my floor," Lucic said, "be my maitre d'." He kept his hands in his pockets -- good thing. The sight of them, pink and soft, might have driven me to violence.
"Why should I help you?" I asked.
"Because you have skills I need," he said.
Machine gun fire rattled briefly in the distance. Lucic and I craned our heads into the following silence, wondering when the battle would again resume in earnest.
After a time, Lucic cleared his throat. I could not tell if it was because of the smoke or just to jar me back to the present. "I need people like you --"
"Half-men, you mean." I tapped my metal fingers on my threadbare trousers. The metal beneath rang hollowly.
Lucic's jaw twitched. He hated the name half-men, but I found it fitting, considering how people like me were treated.
"You're a leader, Bolduc, or at least you were. The others will respect you."
I looked at anything but his face -- the concrete rubble, the trees like driftwood, the grey, grey sky. The old timers talked about a world with color, but the only color I'd ever seen was red.
Lucic squatted next to me. His presence demanded my attention. "And I know you haven't given up on being human."
Before we open, Lucic reminds us all of our place. "You are restaurateurs, now," he says to the gathered half-men. "Whatever your thoughts about the Governor, put them aside."
One of the half-men, Paget, grumbles, but quickly falls silent when no one else joins him.
The Governor has grown fat on the blood of men like us. He sends us off to fight for his authority in exchange for the illusion of prosperity for the families we leave behind. When we come home broken, we are tossed aside like last year's toys.
That is all Lucic says. He expects it to be enough, and I trust his instincts. The staff breaks apart then, scattering into the kitchen and up into the rafters to make preparations.
Lucic opened his restaurant in the husk of a cathedral whose roof had been burned off long ago by incendiaries, leaving only the charred bones of thick timber crossbeams. On any given night, an observer -- perhaps a forgotten military man -- spying through a hole in the wall of the Café would have seen a half-dozen tables, clothed in white like marbles of moonlight, and the crimson sky reflected in the curves of spoons and the flats of knives. Around each table, dressed in their finest suits and gowns, men and women would sit savoring an aromatic daube with roots or the cef ravioli painstakingly crimped by kitchen hands. Occasionally, their eyes would turn upward toward the night sky, reddish-hued from the fires, but it's not the stars they sought.
The magic of the Café Renaissance wasn't in the arrangement of the tables, or the shine of the silver or crystal. It was in the food and the service. If our observer -- perhaps an orphan girl, her face disfigured by burn scars -- kept her eyes on the ground, she might draw the erroneous conclusion that Lucic had no serving staff. But his staff worked the floor without ever touching it. They worked it suspended from wires and pulleys and runners that allowed them to glide above the tables, trays in hand, as they dove like dirigibles on bombing runs, to deliver sweet carrot consommé or caramelized passerine yolks.
All of Lucic's staff were half-men, for whole-men were unavailable for something as frivolous as a restaurant. Even with this reality, I suspected Lucic always wanted people like me to work his Café. We were, after all and in a sense, his children, cursed and inadequate, with clumsy limbs that were inferior to those of flesh. Yet on the wires and unencumbered by our legs, we possessed the grace of hummingbirds. As we soared above them, the men and women below did not see half-men, but unexpected beauty.
The Governor arrives with his wife on his arm and an entourage of sycophants in his wake. I am polite, as much as it pains me. I seat them at a table in the center of the room.
"How can he sit and drink and eat," I say to Lucic later, "while boys die in the mud outside the City." I think, but do not say: he is a ghoul, feeding on the dead.
An explosion rattles the hanging pots. That incendiary was closer than the others. An errant bomb or a shift in the attack, I wonder. I can see in Lucic's face that he wonders the same.
"Appearances," Lucic says. "Leadership is about appearances, especially when leadership is tenuous."
From my time on the front, I know this is true, but I refuse to concede. The Governor is the one who stopped the veteran ration for half-men. He is the one who turned us out of the infirmaries. He is the one who took the other half of our humanity.
Lucic holds up a flaccid strip of grey flesh capped with a white almond-shaped shell. With the help of the other staff, and at Lucic's request, I had fished the gooseneck barnacles from debris in the harbor several days ago. "No one thinks to eat a barnacle," Lucic says. "It grows in the filth and slime. It looks wholly inedible, but tonight it will be a delicacy to be worshipped."
Lucic returns to his labor, his point made.
On the counter next to him is a bucket. Inside several discarded barnacles cling to bits of refuse. Sometimes a barnacle is simply a barnacle, and no amount of culinary magic can make it anything more.
I bounce my body lightly and the rapeller in the rafters spins, launching me up into the night. Tilting my weight to the right, the pulley system shifts, and kitchen falls away as I slide out into the dining area. Paget pivots to avoid me, shooting past in the near dark. The harness bolts tug at my hips as I loop to the left to avoid Marc-Andre. He slides by, silent as a ghost, a laden tray in his left hand.
Explosions flash across the sky in rapid succession. The building shakes.
For a moment, the diners pause. Each table is encased in its own droplet of candlelight. In the upturned faces, I see concern, but also resignation. No place is safe in the City. They think: if I am to die, then why not here, with a good meal in my belly.
I sweep downward toward the Governor's table. They have finished their course and sit conversing as they await the next. I pull the wires and slow to a stop above them, where they do not see me.
"The half-men are a danger," say one of the Governor's sycophants. They all look the same to me: plump and clueless. "The metal affects their brains and corrupts their moral capacity. That is what happened in Avignon, when the half-men rose up."
"They were no match for Avignon's army," says a second.
The first snorts. "Of course not. They are not men any longer."
"Where is your compassion?" asks the Governor. "They do not have metal hearts, unlike you perhaps." This draws snickers from the others.
"Now is not the time to grow soft," says a third sycophant.
The Governor's brow crinkles. "What have we become when compassion for our fellow man is weakness?"
"The world has no room for compassion," says the first sycophant. "Do you think our enemies will show us compassion? Send the half-men to the front, all of them, and let them prove --"
The Governor raises a hand, and the conversation halts.
I had not noticed the bombs going quiet. Now my gut constricts.
The Governor's wife turns her face up to the sky. She does not seem to see me, although she looks straight at me.
The sycophants look from one to the other, confused by the sudden quiet.
I drop down and pull to a stop at the Governor's side.
The Governor's face has blanched pale as a parsnip, and I realize he knows.
Before I can speak the door to the dining hall bursts open and soldiers flood across the floor, leveling bayonets and rifle muzzles at diners as they go. A man stands and reaches inside his
coat. Pop! Pop! He falls, two holes neatly pushed through his forehead.
A woman screams. It takes me a moment to realize it is the Governor's wife.
Before I can bounce my wire, a ring of guns surrounds us.
The Governor raises his hands to show they are empty and places them, palms up, on the table in front of him. The sycophants do the same.
I could have pulled my wires. The rapeller is strong and quick. If the night had been darker, I might have, but the sky's red tint would have silhouetted me and these soldier-boys have the eyes of hardened veterans.
The ring of soldiers parts. Into the candlelight steps a mustached face I prayed I'd never see again.
Unable to stop it, a curse slips through my lips.
"Looks like we have our prize," says the General.
My only encounter with the General happened three years ago, when I was a whole man. We had been taken by surprise, among the rubble and bodies, beneath a sky black with smoke and red with fire. They killed Petr in the ambush's opening salvo; a bullet through the cheek will do that.
We were lined up, and the General himself walked our ranks, his right hand resting on the butt of his pistol like he fancied himself an old time gunslinger.
He stopped in front of me and eyed the bars on the shoulder of my uniform. From the crinkle of his nose, he didn't like the smell of me, but the General didn't like the smell of anyone wearing our colors.
Without a movement or a word, he somehow instructed his attaché to draw his pistol. The soldier-boy, who couldn't have been more than half my age, drew his weapon and pointed it at my nose.
At least a bullet in the face is quick, I thought. Assuming the angle is right.
But the bullet wasn't for me. The soldier-boy swung the pistol toward the man on my left and fired. Michel dropped, a hole in his stomach. He writhed on the ground, trying to be silent, but his grunting and whimpering wrenched my gut more than any scream.
"A bullet in the stomach," the General said. "A gristly way to die." His accent was from the east, but none of us knew from where he actually came. "The acid leaks from the stomach. Eats into the muscles and the intestines."
I would have told the General everything if it would have bought us all bullets in the head, but I knew nothing of value.
The General removed a cigarette and a wooden match from a silver case. On the lid was engraved "With Love D.A.S." To this day, I still wonder if those initials belonged to someone dear to the General or if they embossed a spoil looted from another man's life.
He lit the cigarette. Its sweet smoke reminded me of my father who sold me to the military when I was twelve.
"Nothing to say?" asked the General around the smoke.
Michel begged them to shoot him again.
"When that man dies, shoot another, and then another. When this one is ready to say something, bring him to me."
When Michel went still, the attaché moved to the next man, but before he could shoot, a bomb exploded in our midst. I remember little: a geyser of dirt, screams, a flash that burned a hole in my retinas, but not before I saw the attaché's head cut from his body by a piece of shrapnel the size of a dinner plate. Mostly I remember the pain in my hips where my legs used to be. As I bled out, a platoon of our boys funneled down out of the rubble shooting and bayonetting the last of the General's men. A medic knelt over me and slipped a tourniquet around my stumps.
"No, no," I pleaded, but in my shock I couldn't manage the words I really wanted.
The General's new attaché waves his pistol and the soldiers in the ring grab everyone from the table but the Governor and his wife and push them into the dark.
I wait for the gunshots, but silence continues to rest on us like a noose on my shoulders.
The Governor squeezes his wife's hand, but it does not still her trembling.
Alone, next to the Governor, I feel naked. I cover my metal fingers with my flesh ones, but I can do nothing to hide my missing legs.
The attaché leans in from the darkness. "Twenty-six prisoner, one dead, and fourteen mechs," he says.
I hastily tally the numbers in my head. They have everyone.
The General removes his gloves by meticulously pulling the tip of each finger before sliding his hand out. He stacks the gloves together and hands them to his attaché, who tucks them neatly into his shirt pocket.
The General smooths his mustache by running his thumb and index finger around the sharp edges of his lips. He has a hateful mouth, like a jagged line cut with a serrated knife.
"Bring me the one in charge," the General says. The attaché slips back into the darkness, as if he were a piece of it.
"I am in charge here," says the Governor. His words sound strained.
The General grins. His silence says more than any words: You are in charge of nothing anymore.
The General's gaze slides from the Governor to me. He gives no indication that he recognizes who I am. Why should he? Surely I was one of thousands he had interrogated. I am not an individual to him; no, I am far below that. What he sees are no legs and a metal hand.
At that moment, Lucic is brought to the table. He gives no outward indication that anything is wrong; his composure is startling. I do not think Lucic ever spent time on the front, but he would have made an exceptional officer. "Welcome to the Café Renaissance," he says.
I flinch. While Lucic's voice holds no hint of mockery, how can anyone interpret it differently?
"I do not know how you do it," the General says. "Your guests dine while the City falls. Is the food that good?"
"It is humble fare for difficult times," says Lucic.
"Food for the end of the world," says the General.
"Catastrophe cuisine, yes."
"This I must try."
The attaché glances sidelong at the General, but says nothing.
The General sits opposite the Governor and his wife. He points at me. "Mech, where is my napkin?"
I do not move until Lucic nudges me. I pick up an unused linen and snap the ash from it. The crisp white cloth glows in the citron light. Reluctantly, I spread it across the General's lap.
He grabs my hand and holds it up. The metal glints in the candlelight. "To tolerate such abominations," he says to the Governor. "No wonder your City burns. You lack the balls to cull the weak, and it weakens you all." He releases my hand.
"You are the cook?" the General asks Lucic.
"I am the chef," Lucic admits.
"Bring the food then. The Governor and I have much to discuss."
The General allows Lucic and the other cooks to return to the kitchen.
Before he departs, I grab Lucic's arm with metal fingers. "I will serve the General," I say.
Lucic considers my statement and delivers a curt nod.
Once in the kitchen, Lucic insists we prepare enough for the entire room. Several of the cooks look hesitantly in my direction. I do not share Lucic's optimism that this will be anything other than a last meal, but I nod at the cooks, and they set about finishing the next course.
A soldier-boy stands guard at the end of the counter. Based on the scars puckering his face and neck, he is a grizzled veteran. The attaché circulates through the kitchen, poking his grimy face beneath rattling pot lids.
I pretend to help Lucic by clumsily chopping carrots at his side. "The General will kill us in the end," I whisper. The sound of my knife on the wooden board is loud enough so that no one else can hear me.
Lucic's hands deftly debone a small bird -- a pigeon or something like it that Paget had captured that morning from nests in the cathedral's rafters.
Pausing in my chopping, I watch his skillful hands extract each bone with little damage to the surrounding flesh. Those hands served him equally well on the battlefield; I imagined them cutting through the skin on my hand to remove the shattered bones so that metal ones could be grafted into their place.
"I know a place nearby to pick monks hood," I say. "A little in the sauce and that will be th
at."
Lucic's hands stop.
My brow furrows; I cannot look at him. To Lucic, the meal is sacred.
"Bolduc," he says. His voice is gentle, but tinged with disappointment. The way it stings me is confusing. "We must move beyond the killing," he says.
I bite my tongue.
The soldier ogles a turnip on the counter and sees nothing else.
"The payment for your morality will be a bayonet in the stomach," I say. "The General is a butcher and deserves to die."
"That is what some have said of me." Lucic gives me a knowing look.
"That was different," I say, averting my eyes.
"We are better than that."
Am I truly better than that? Right now I don't want to be.
My chopping knife sounds like a lazy machine gun staccato. Chunks of carrots roll across my board onto the stone countertop like little orange heads. I set the knife aside. My wrist hurts where the metal and flesh meet. The pain is always there, a constant reminder of what I am. I rub my hand, feeling where the metal phalanges meet the metacarpals under the skin of my palm. I have often thought that if I cut my hand off at the wrist no one would know what I am.
The grizzled veteran is still hypnotized by the turnip. I could bounce my wires and rocket up into the dark. Among the rafters and broken walls are many hiding places where those with legs could never reach. Then I look at my brethren scattered around the small kitchen, busily preparing the last meal, and I realize I cannot abandon them. I would rather be the first under the General's bayonet than to come down from the rafters at first light and alight among the human rubble.
Blood pounds in my ears, music that sings: you are still human.
The first time I met Lucic, he was a mechineer. In many ways, that's the same as a chef in that he took exotic ingredients that seemed ill-suited to be paired, mixed them in the right proportions, and produced something unexpected. For me it was copper pipe, lengths of filed steel -- probably cut from a bumper because of the camo paint still on them -- assorted brass gears, elastic bands, and bits of plastic and foam.