Liquid Crystal Nightingale

by EeLeen Lee

  Both women covered their faces as the thing flew past their faces and hit the mural, smack between the eyes of Ignazia Madrugal. It was shaped like a sea star, matte black and bristling with silver mother-of-pearl spikes. Aside from training footage, Pleo had never seen a fla-tessen caltrop in use before.

  Saurebaras took long strides as she approached the mural, not so much walking but flowing towards it with purpose like mercury at room temperature. Gia and Pleo stood to attention, but Saurebaras dismissed them to get changed with the rest. Gia darted off but Pleo stopped halfway to the changing rooms to watch Saurebaras.

  She drew closer to Ignazia Madrugal, reaching out to touch the face of the painted image. Saurebaras was more interested in sizing up the damage she had just inflicted on the mural than admiring the artwork. Not enough, Pleo thought, judging from Saurebaras’s piqued expression. She had been aiming for the eyes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BLUE TARO AND Boxthorn had seethed like a wound turned septic, belying the deserted streets. Before the confirmation of Kerte Yurgi casualties, the neighbours could not keep out of the Tanza household; after receiving certified news from CIM there was only one survivor, they refused to acknowledge its existence.

  As soon as Idilman Tanza had returned home, Pleo set about shutting all the windows of the container home. She closed the porthole window last, shutting out what was left of the river of paper nightingales. Her mother had shunted her father into the cramped master bedroom where he remained, standing and staring at his surroundings. The bedroom remained closed to Pleo and Cerussa for a fortnight, although the light from the bedside table lamp seeped through the gap at the foot of the door.

  At the end of the two weeks, Guli had hurled the table lamp and the ground salt on to the porch. She ordered Pleo and Cerussa to leave it where it landed. Pleo would discover the shattered lamp fragments and the rock salt kicked over during the night, the word “akma” scratched on the door in reverse, to emphasise the word’s negative meaning: unfit. She covered the vandalism with paint before the rest of the neighbourhood left its mark on the door as well.

  Home had transformed into a vacuum—nothing went in and nothing went out: sound, light or emotion. Pleo’s initial relief at her father’s return vanished. Her mother understood Idilman Tanza was not the same man: less than a ghost. An imprint of ashes in his likeness, left behind after his personality and lifeforce had burned away.

  Remedies were available if he had come back as a ghost, as various annual festivals and household decorations testified: exorcism, appeasement or long-term tolerance. But he was a physical presence, unavoidable; he slept during the day and spent his rare moments of lucidity poring over the schematics of the Kerte Yurgi asteroid mine, or he worked himself to exhaustion by making unnecessary repairs to household gadgets and plumbing.

  The Incident, Cerussa and Pleo immediately started calling what happened, with their mother’s reluctant approval. A neutral shorthand, for exclusive use within their family. But nothing was neutral about what had happened to the other thirty-nine miners under her father’s supervision.

  One night, Pleo heard more movement in the kitchen than the usual house geckos. She was surprised to hear her mother and father in the kitchen at the same time. She had long given up trying to sense when either parent was awake.

  Guli asked Idilman, “Did you see the others die?”

  When Pleo heard that, she dropped her practice reticule and loupe to clatter on the study table, and Cerussa stopped tracing patterns from victory cedar leaves onto paper. The sisters exchanged a glance and winced at their mother’s directness. Any trace of mine supervisor or partner in her voice was shunted aside; this was confrontational. The voice belonged to someone who was close to giving up, even though only she was allowed to speak freely of what happened.

  Cerussa pressed a finger to her lips. Both sisters crept into the narrow passage outside their bedroom and stood to the side of the kitchen entrance.

  Idilman remained silent, and Pleo turned to go back to her desk. If he was not going to answer the question, her mother would leave him to watch the new electric lamp fuse and sputter out in the kitchen. He’d found a new terror of salt and salted water. The mere sight and smell were enough to make him run outside. Pleo had kept the remaining salt lamp in her bedroom.

  But after a beat he replied, sounding like he was speaking from behind a screen.

  “In the beginning, others passed news of fatalities to me. They stopped me from going to every dying person’s side. We had to spare each other the pain. What could I have done differently?”

  “Nothing,” insisted Guli. “You can’t afford regrets.”

  “I told our captors to take me instead, spare my crew.”

  Pleo and Cerussa waited for him to elaborate, because they did not dare broach the subject of the Artisans. When he did not, their mother spoke again.

  “Whatever you could’ve done, there’s always another choice.”

  “I keep telling myself that. It doesn’t help. Maybe I can join my crew soon. Still better than sitting at home and dying thirty-nine times a day.”

  A thump as Guli leaned forward and slapped both hands on the kitchen table. She replied, “You have nothing I’ve not seen before in other miners. Recovery is within your reach.”

  Pleo saw her father pointing at the front door and beyond it, to the clustered neighbourhoods of Boxthorn and Blue Taro. “They will never let me forget. I was supposed to die with the rest. Their minds were made up as soon as CIM brought me back. But I can’t blame them. Now they curse me, saying I died too, but brought something else back with me.”

  “Superstition,” muttered Guli in exasperation.

  Stories were rife, and Pleo had heard them while growing up. She didn’t understand all of them, but absorbed them like the filtered recycled air that had entered her lungs when she drew her first breath. Superstition was to be expected when hydrocarbon miners liked to joke, “Shift ends when you’re dead.” Similar to bats in dark caves, miners had developed sensitivity in the dark. Due to the strain of their work, a few were more susceptible than others, when one fear was replaced by another larger one. Everything was possible in darkness.

  Reports of hearing voices over the intercom and seeing ghosts of deceased colleagues were common. Stories of seeing colleagues in two mine locations at once. An apparition that could beckon you away from a section of tunnel that was going to collapse, or lure you inside it.

  “The old beliefs are unavoidable. The more high-tech we become, the more stubborn it gets. Do you know how much time is wasted on opening ceremonies when new shafts are begun?”

  Idilman didn’t wait for Guli’s reply; she already knew from her experiences. He went to the sink and splashed water on his face. “But you know, and I know, you can’t do away with the ceremonies. It’s a trade-off; if we don’t burn paper nightingales for protection, or allow miners to pray to Gachala or whatever divinities they believe created them, we save at least three hours on the first shift, but morale is affected. Most of the time it’s simply not worth it.”

  Pleo saw the eyes of her mother burrowing into her father’s back as she came to a realisation.

  “You didn’t let your crew perform the ceremony?”

  There, she had to say because he was unable to bring himself to say it to her.

  “Not that time.”

  “Why? You sacrificed your crew’s morale?”

  “I did it for you, for Pleo and Cerussa.”

  Her father returned to his seat, drying his face with sleeve. Or was he wiping away tears? He spoke, and managed to keep his voice from trembling. “It was my tour before my next performance review for promotion to project control manager. I had to bring in the crew’s work ahead of schedule. My record needed to be faultless. But it’s as if I invited the Artisans with that aspiration.”

  Two metal kitchen chairs yawned and squeaked as they were pushed under the table. Pleo and Cerusa hurried back to their studies.
Both parents’ voices floated past their room.

  “Well, don’t jump off the Lonely Heron Bridge, that’s what they want you to do. There’s even a betting pool going on.” Guli’s voice suddenly rang with indignation. Pleo heard Cerussa gasp and punched her in the shoulder to keep quiet. “As if the others don’t know the risks we all live with. An asteroid mine is always one mishap, one human error away from becoming a tomb.”

  “You should’ve never resigned.” Pleo heard the admiration in her father’s voice.

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  There was a small victory in her parents trying to resume their old banter, no matter how stilted.

  In Pleo’s mind there was a canyon blasted out of the landscape by the Incident, leaving her mother, sister and herself clinging on to the edge. It would not take much to push them below to join her father.

  Yet her mother remained hopeful. Perhaps his old self was still within him, or at least a version his family could still recognise; perhaps it could eventually be reached.

  It’s not only our father who suffers, dear Mother, Pleo thought. When Idilman Tanza had returned home, their community pronounced judgement. The canyon extended and came between the Tanzas and the other thirty-nine families. They acknowledged this difference by branding Pleo and Cerussa the children of a coward who had abandoned his fellow miners.

  Children of a survivor, the daughter of Idilman Tanza, Pleo liked to correct the gawkers and journalists who gathered on the street corner outside her home. She did not deny who she was.

  A MONTH AFTER the Incident and the confirmed news of the Forty had broke, CIM, Polyteknical, and the Investigation Committee were very kind, or made a good show of it. They found various ways to soften the blow. They deployed exosuited construction workers to resurface the roads going in and out of Blue Taro and Boxthorn and make basic repairs to roofs and walls. All the residents’ utility bills were subsidised for the rest of the year. A visiting apparatchik from the Corund, Cabuchon’s lower chamber of representatives, presided over the groundbreaking ceremony of a new community hall. In his speech he emphasised that the neighbourhood upkeep and the new hall was the least the people of the Archer’s Ring could do for the Forty until a proper monument was built in the city space.

  Pleo had sat in the back row of New Community Hall, facing the wall of glass and wooden panels next to her seat. The impression the decor was trying to achieve was not worth the fumes given off by the chemicals used to polish the wood. Were those same substances applied to the faces of the guest speakers? They all looked the same to her—waxy complexions smoothed over by endless cosmetic procedures, or by being fossilised inside. She witnessed them struggling to keep their masks of concern from slipping off. She bunched her hands into fists on the arms of her seat. How naive and provincial we must look to them, a bunch of low-class uneducated mine rats.

  The questions the other children of the thirty-nine had for the speakers were met with the same rehearsed answers and commiserating faces:

  “When will the bodies be returned to us?”

  After processing, next of kin will be invited to make formal identification. We ask for your patience in the meantime.

  The rows of people below Pleo glanced up at her and Cerussa. Pleo had sunk into her seat.

  “Are we in trouble with CIM?”

  No.

  “Will the Artisans attack Chatoyance? Or the Archer’s Ring?”

  According to the Corund our system’s defences are strong enough that it’ll never come to that.

  The answer did not reassure Pleo.

  In the wake of the Incident, CIM were going to decommission all the hydrocarbon mines in the Spilled Ink Lacunae. Pleo had read the planned procedures outlined in an auto-generated memorandum delivered to her home by company servitor, still addressed to her father:

  1. Isolate all hydrocarbon-bearing asteroids.

  2. Prevent leaks of hydrocarbon into surrounding space.

  3. Remove all traces of mining structures so that asteroids can be rehabilitated.

  A shrewd move, thought Pleo, to rehabilitate CIM’s image. Restore the Spilled Ink Lacunae to its original emptiness before CIM had earmarked its asteroids for profit and sent people into the void. Make a fresh start. Isolate, prevent leaks, remove, rehabilitate. Terms that also applied to the families of the Forty.

  CIM had almost convinced her there was no punitive motivation on their part. The company needed to keep the survivors’ children distracted with resurfaced roads, fixed roofs, and free utilities until the initial panic of the Artisan attack on Kerte Yurgi had calmed down. The end of the memo offered to assist any direct family members of the Forty to retrain or relocate on other settlements in the Archer’s Ring or Anium.

  She took the memo to her mother in the living room. She read it once and quickly gave it back to Pleo.

  “You don’t believe CIM will give us assistance?”

  “I used to work for them. First piece of advice given to me by my predecessor was, ‘Check every mine three times. If CIM says it’s safe, check four times.’”

  “That’s another miner’s joke,” said Pleo.

  “They told me help was coming when I went into labour with you and your sister.”

  “The medics did come, right?”

  Her mother stood before the shelves of rock carvings, toying with a piece of soapstone shaped into the likeness of an ant.

  “Yes, after I was on the floor for two hours. I was so scared and angry. But it didn’t matter when I saw you and your sister. Your father loves to say how he thought the most miraculous sight was a field of asteroids, glittering with iron pyrite and olivine, drifting past a red gas giant. Until he saw his newborn twin daughters.”

  Pleo bit her lip and folded the memo. She never had an appropriate response to the story.

  “I’ve seen CIM assistance: their type of help actually hinders. I don’t trust them not to put us on some backwater moon or deploy your father and I on a five-year tour to a mine and then close it in two years.” Her mother placed the ant sculpture back on its shelf. “CIM will conveniently forget about us after Kerte Yurgi.”

  With or without relocation and retraining, Pleo would have been more than happy to conveniently forget about CIM, and Chatoyance.

  Polyteknical was not so ready to forget about the Forty, which made Pleo suspicious of its sudden concern. Education was subsidised, especially in the areas of earth sciences, geology and gemmology, as a recruitment incentive. Apprenticeships and on-the-job training with CIM had already been available for years.

  “We came to listen and we believe you can be of assistance to us,” said the three Polyteknical speakers when they took the stage in the new community hall.

  Something in their voices had told Pleo they were downplaying the importance of their visit.

  “How so?” someone in the front row asked in a voice that lacked deference. One of the Shojib brothers, sounding surlier than usual.

  “What would you say is the main difficulty facing all of you after Kerte Yurgi?”

  “Compensation,” Pleo heard from the front.

  “Finding work,” piped up the middle rows without hesitation. The rest murmured in agreement.

  Three nods from onstage; the speakers were pleased with the reply. Without changing tack, they pressed upon their audience that these new lapidary implants, to be used from training level to advanced, somehow increased your employability, and made the wearers viable.

  Join the vast Chatoyance industrial machine as a component—as equipment. Your place is guaranteed.

  We aren’t pieces of equipment, Pleo wanted to scream, but she bit down on her knuckles. She feared ripping her vocal cords if she did.

  Asteroid miners did not regard all implants as taboo. If any necessary implants enhanced performance and health, they were permitted, although not encouraged. Yet Polyteknical took a dim view of this attitude. They insisted that making yourself more viable equated to better pay.
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br />   The speakers had half an hour. Near the end of it, they reiterated how they were here to gauge as many responses as possible and of course—of course—all concerns about the implants and the TI would be addressed.

  “Polyteknical and CIM owns the licenses and the implants are patented. At the end of your training, if you opt out of it or at any time during your working years, they will be removed.”

  “You think they mean it? About the removal?” Kim Petani, who had lost both parents in the Incident, muttered in the seat next to Pleo.

  Polyteknical’s sudden interest, and the speakers’ enthusiasm and attention to detail, only gave lie to their concern. Pleo raised her hand.

  “Why do you say these experimental hand and ocular implants are indispensable?”

  Her question sent waves of unease rippling through the hall. Someone at the back laughed, although nothing about her question was funny. She looked around to gauge response; all eyes were on her. She sensed an undercurrent of conflict, but it was insubstantial.

  For now.

  The three speakers on stage—two male Polyteknical instructors and one medical functionary in her blue veil of profession—exchanged knowing glances. Immediately Pleo saw what they were thinking: the daughters of the sole survivor. They were expecting trouble. Their masks finally slipped, only to be replaced with another, just as fake and grotesque. Pleo imagined endless layers sloughing off and forming moist piles of translucent skin next to the podium. No point in hitting one of these representatives in the face, there was nothing to hurt.

  “‘Indispensable’? No, we never said that.”

  “That’s what we’re hearing,” replied Pleo. “Or else why are you so insistent on them?”

  On the ‘we’ she felt the disapproving glances boring into her back. Speak for yourself, Tanza.

  Oh, I will speak, she thought. Especially when no one else is speaking up.