by EeLeen Lee
Pleo survived the operation, although after being admitted to the shared ward, she wished she hadn’t. Waking up was like struggling out from a waste disposal chute, stench included. She stayed for eight days, her upper body immobilised in a traction frame which raised her arms over her head to prevent blood from pooling in her fingertips. She remembered yelling at passing hospital servitors for extra sedatives, not for the pain but to take her mind off the blank stares and groans of the other tyros in their frames. On the fifth day, the traction frame was adjusted, and she was able to move her arms again. On the sixth day, a passing servitor knocked the corner of a tray against her left hand and ruptured a large suture across the wrist. Despite her constant and extremely verbal requests for attention, the wound lay open for another day.
After her discharge, Pleo rested at home. She didn’t remember how she got there. She had woken up in her tiny cot back in her bedroom, facing the narrow study desk shared with her sister. She had hoped either Cerussa or their parents had brought her back. According to Cerussa, it had been a Polyteknical transport.
The elbow spurs had been the easiest to get used to because they functioned as extensions of the ulna, the bone stretching from the little finger to the elbow. Pleo felt them as smooth titanium bumps when they were sheathed and not in use. She appreciated how they increased stability on various surfaces, so that the hands would not shake and drop when analysing valuable specimens or when balancing stones on dop sticks.
Aside from her new chromed fingernails and the keloid scars stretching over her wrist, her hands looked like her hands. Under the skin the forceps were housed in sheaths which had been integrated into the bones of her fingers, but she felt the sharp edges of the sheaths when she bent and flexed her fingers.
Pleo recalled the practice drills from the demonstrations and videos: make a fist and slowly open it, digit by digit, starting from index to little finger, to extend all forceps. Bend fingers in reverse order to retract forceps. Keep fingers away from face and other vulnerable areas.
Scratching her scalp and the tops of her thighs was now rendered more pleasurable and tactile. The forceps intensified the nerve endings in the index and middle fingertips, although rubbing her eyes and cracking her knuckles was now inadvisable. After too many near misses, Pleo moved away from mere drills and tried experimenting with her forceps in unconventional ways, such as running them along rough walls or submerging her hands in various liquids and releasing the forceps. Daily inspections by instructors prevented too much abuse among tyros.
The derogatory term for the forceps was “Nosepicks.” Extreme stress, high infection rates and the difficulty of adaptation meant that suicide rates for tyros were still high. Once implanted, there was no reversing the process. If you paid a back-alley surgeon to extract your forceps you risked turning your fingers inside out and paralysing your arms. Cut the forceps off and they grew back crooked, often emerging sideways out of the fingers or curling back into the bone.
But not every student was able to tolerate their implants. The preferred method of suicide among tyros was indeed nose picking carried out to its grisliest extent: ramming two fingers up the nostrils and extending the forceps past membrane and into brain matter. Pleo now knew all about it—Cerussa had been a Nosebleed.
PLEO’S SHOES WERE covered with filth after treading in a shallow drain. She swore, hurled her used fare tokens into the drain and hurried out of the station. She ran onto one of the numerous walkways suspended over the rundown networked density of Chatoyance below them. The walkways intersected and wound their way around the accommodation node so much so that the structure resembled a loose knot of tattered black ribbons. Cerussa’s former dormitory was suspended underneath the main node, resembling a giant leafcutter ants’ nest but displaying much less activity. Pleo walked past a few rooms that had been sealed off, ostensibly for maintenance, although someone had daubed the ancient numeral II in red onto the doors. The students had adopted it as the symbol for Nosebleed, representing the blood gushing out of the nostrils.
Draped in a beige lab coat, Kim Petani was already outside her room. She was named for Kimberlite pipes. Pleo recalled the term from her remedial theory classes, the vast subterranean deposits that produced the highest-grade diamonds back on old Earth. Kim was studying the opposite door with interest when Pleo walked up behind her and peered over her shoulder. There was a different symbol on this door, a crude daub of an I at eye level. The red paint was still wet.
Pleo thought the graffiti artist was sloppy or rushed. Kim turned to face Pleo with a scowl, obviously not in a mood to share opinions on the artist’s execution.
Kim had shaved off her brunette bob on making Mid-Level Gemmologist two weeks ago. Pleo tried not to look at the glistening black cannula inserted under the skin of her face, snaking out of the corners of Kim’s eyes and flowing down into her nostrils. The tubes were needed to moisten Kim’s eyes and drain off excess fluid in preparation for her intraocular lenses. White stents had been inserted into Kim’s browbones to enlarge her eye sockets for future implants.
“Cerussa died at home, if you must know.”
Kim glanced again at the mark on the door, as if Pleo had confirmed something she had long suspected.
“Did your parents grant her final dignity?”
“I gave it to her myself.”
A touch of admiration softened Kim’s expression. “But if your parents wouldn’t do it, then it’s not like you had a choice.”
“I didn’t.”
Kim nodded, not so much in sympathy as to change the subject. “You going to tell me what happened to you during your resits?”
“Nothing happened.”
Exasperation flushed in Kim’s cheeks, making the cannulas stand out more against her skin. “Exactly—you failed your qualifying exams and did the same with the resits.”
Conform. This time the directive came from Kim.
“You’re correct in observing I do so every time.” Pleo shrugged. “And so what? Does my failure affect you or the others?”
“If you’re malingering, then yes.”
“Who says I am?”
Kim began reciting names as if the list was printed out and hung on the door before her: “Tasren, Bhaten, Asan, the Shojib brothers…”
“Idle talk.”
“Then why can’t you pass?”
“A good question.” Pleo bared her teeth to challenge Kim, but she ended up looking pained. “It belongs with: ‘Why can’t I sleep well?’ or for the two us now: ‘Why can’t we talk like before?’”
The question hit home. Kim sucked in a wet breath through her cannulae before changing the subject. “Do you still have dry eyes?”
‘Before’ never included chit-chat relating to modifications. Pleo fell back on a stock reply. “Not since I started the taurine supplements.”
Kim tapped the side of her nose to stimulate tear flow and coughed, the kind that precedes a grand speech. She did not disappoint.
“Discomfort is nothing when you realise the significance of your role. Even the tiniest part has its function and integrity. Each unique from its neighbour and yet, all variations are accounted for.”
Pleo had noticed a similar fervour with Cerussa before she had her implants. It was especially pointless to talk to students who revel in quoting wholesale from the Lapidarist Manual (Third Edition). The implants subsumed the people they used to be, sparing only the necessary for locomotion and interaction.
“Everyone who passes Tyro level is awarded their implants. It is a mandatory precondition of our future work. You’re the only one out of the rest of us, the children of the Thirty-Nine, without intraoculares or extraoculares. The child of the sole survivor is still against the idea of the TI.”
Reform! Kim now beseeched.
The sanctimony brought out Pleo’s evasiveness, and yet she could not resist baiting Kim. “When I fail it’s not deliberate. I just don’t achieve the prescribed standards set by Polyteknical and�
�”
Kim was not convinced, judging from the way she pursed her chapped lips. “You think your mother, your sister and you are the only ones who’ve suffered?”
“I never said anything like that!”
“At least your father survived and your parents are still together. You can mourn him with pure dignity when his Designated Time comes.”
Resentment flooded back into Kim’s face. It was the truth, and Pleo could not say anything against it. Kim had lost both parents and, like the other thirty-nine families, was unable to claim the bodies of her loved ones.
Or unwilling to, Pleo thought, given their grotesque condition upon discovery.
Kim and Pleo looked away from each other, both unwilling to talk about the Pearl Miners so early in the day. Pleo made a show of examining her thumb forcep, allowing the tension between them to swell, wondering if Kim would back down first. Kim finally gurgled and emitted a wet prolonged cough. With the cannulas clogging her friend’s airways, Pleo realised that Kim had just attempted a nervous laugh.
Suddenly she took hold of Pleo’s arm, and her breath caught in her throat because Kim’s grasp was cold and hard. The sleeve of Kim’s lab coat had slipped back, revealing a hand wrapped in thin variegated copper bands that extended over her wrist and reached up to the elbow. The bands had been tightened until the entire forearm was the same thickness as Kim’s wrist. The slot for the elbow spur was outlined with a ring of white collagen.
Pleo had never seen these banded copper gauntlets before. She expected little comfort from the implants but there was nothing reassuring about these. Each successive batch of implants increasingly reinforced what the medical functionaries promised during the preparatory sessions: “The hands will be able to reach any point, in such a way that the student can manipulate, draw on and move objects towards or away from their body. The main function of the arm and elbow positioning spurs are to stabilise the hand for functional activities…”
“Put in more effort for your resits.” Kim turned around and pointed at the I painted on the door. “Otherwise you’re no better than one of them.”
“You’re saying I’m a potential Nosebleed?” countered Pleo.
“No offence meant to Cerussa.”
“None taken.”
Kim circled the red I with one of her forceps and sighed in uncomprehending exasperation at Pleo’s defensiveness.
“But when you see half of the sign, it means an ‘Attempted Nosebleed.’ This person failed at failing. Like you.”
As Kim left the dorm she pushed her way past Pleo, who recognised the dry click of an elbow spur unsheathing and made no effort to evade Kim or defend herself from the jab of righteous fury. Maybe she deserved to take the brunt of Kim’s rage.
The pain temporarily filled the void within her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
PLEO TRACKED THE twinkling paths of four Corona weather satellites above the horizon as she waited for the crunch of worn wheels trundling onto the bridge. The Salt Sellers would start crossing at dawn with their carts struggling under the weight of the white crystalline blocks. Her mother always bought three, although Pleo deemed that an excessive amount for mere food preparation and household use. The remaining salt filled the lamps outside the entrance. After Cerussa died, she bought an entire cart’s worth to crush up and sprinkle throughout the home.
With Cerussa gone, all comfort and illusion had disappeared as well. Her twin sister had left Pleo locked in a war of attrition with her parents: the home buzzed with a tension she couldn’t bear. Pleo felt like the child in the story of the quartz lamp shadows—deceived by the charade of adults who should know better.
At the unexpected memory of giving Cerussa over to the Charon at Leroi Minor Canal, Pleo threw up over the railing. Colourless bile hit the water and merged with the effluents on the surface. Her vomit was her contribution to Chatoyance, making her part of the ecosystem. She couldn’t leave yet.
She settled down on a worn bench on the Leroi Major end of the Throat Singing Waveform Viaduct. The structure’s curved ribs formed an alcove which sheltered her as she watched the end of Shineshift play out, momentarily transforming the sky into a black canopy. All mining families knew that Constabulary rarely patrolled the viaduct, because it couldn’t spare the manpower. She leaned her head against one of its undulating steel ribs, listening to the aqueduct’s famed vocalisations, vibrations generated by the sporadic footfall on its deck and transmitted by the canal. When she was young, the bridge was closed to the public because part of the deck had given way, rotted away by years of pedestrians and stray dogs urinating on it. The children took the risk of playing under the bridge whereas their families gathered to listen to its uluations in the evenings. Occasionally, layers of rotting wood fell off and disturbed their reverie.
The viaduct conveyed water to the households of the Blue Taro and Boxthorn New Areas. Their dim lights appeared like Pleo’s faded dream of her neighbourhood. How odd that such a sprawling place could feel so claustrophobic, but also welcoming.
A grave evoked the same feeling if it was deep enough.
Pleo took stock. She needed more time to find her way off Chatoyance. To be precise, 70 days, or two more Chatoyant months, as the city settlement took two thirty-five day orbits of Gachala. With the aid of nutritional supplements issued to all gemmological students of Polyteknical and some tweaks to her diet she grew her hair back to waist length within sixty days. She needed 84,000 uta and since Cerussa died, Pleo had sold her hair five times at 14,000 uta each, cutting it off at a middleman’s stall in the Back Bazaars. He accepted only long hair—natural, dyed or treated—due to the continuous high demand for naturalistic hair extensions with a lived-in look among wealthy Archer’s Ring denizens.
In the meantime, tension exhausted the Tanza household and came to a head via outside intervention.
Since Cerussa had been a Nosebleed, she was not to be cremated and her ashes were not to be infused into the glass of an oil lamp for her family to keep lit on the altar next to the entrance. Polyteknical took Cerussa away, and Polyteknical returned her; she had given them no choice.
Pleo had stopped figuring in her sister’s day-to-day existence. Pleo and her parents were soon replaced by details of Cerussa’s implants and adapting to them, another barrier between them as fraught as the Demarcation. Cerussa’s procedure had betrayed her sister, replacing their adolescent dreams to get off Chatoyance. The nights spent walking over the Lonely Heron to Leroi Minor Canal, a preview to a better life with both sisters sketching out their plans and filling them in with aspirations in every colours and shade, were secretly disregarded. Cerussa had scrawled a line of old song lyrics many times within all available margin space: Nightingale sings while lovers kiss in corners of lonely stations.
Her handwriting started out meandering, but near the end it ironically regained its clarity. But Cerussa had never been a music lover. Pleo went over the line countless times but nothing clicked; the incongruity of the lyrics with Cerussa’s day-to-day-day existence nagged at Pleo. Out of frustration, she had taken the journal to Leroi Minor Canal and dangled the notebook over the barrier, her sudden tears merging the lapping water and sky into a blur.
A page slipped out and landed on a resurfacing Canal Police Newt. The amphibious vehicle shone its yellow floodlights up at Pleo, forcing her back. She shielded her eyes as it went under and sped off, churning up foam and scum as it cut a swathe through a dense floating mat of stonewort and water spinach.
Pleo knew what was written on that loose page: a story told to reassure children of miners absent during year-long work cycles. About parents who went out to the asteroid mines, leaving their children at home. The eldest sibling comforted the younger ones by pointing to two shadows cast by a pair of quartz lamps and said, “Do not fear. See our mother and father watching over us now?”
A medical functionary and a pair of Spinels had arrived at the Tanza home with officious inevitability on the morning after Cerussa’s
death. The Spinels’ red robes and the streamlined cyan topcoat worn by the functionary imparted the three with a righteous zeal, like emissaries on a religious crusade. Sweeping through the home, the Spinels had collected Cerussa’s body as if they were repossessing the Catru teak furniture set. They swaddled her in a skein as translucent as the wrapping on manti dumplings and carried her into a waiting transport. With a proprietary gesture, the functionary handed her parents a folder containing documents to sign and imprint before the Spinels left.
“Joint acknowledgement of your daughter’s deprocessing is required,” said the functionary, impatient to discharge her duty.
As Idilman Tanza and Guli hesitated to place their palms on the documents, Pleo ran outside to the transport.
“Pleo!” Guli called after her.
Pleo had reached the door of the CIM transport, the forceps of her thumb, index and ring fingers already unsheathed and locked together in the glass-cutter configuration. No crowning-shield on the vehicle to stop her.
Glass is a solidified liquid and, no matter how reinforced or composite, always has a shatter point. Before she had a chance to put this fact to good use, a pair of red gloved hands hoisted her until she was kicking the air a metre off the ground. She lashed out with her elbow spurs. The Spinel holding her turned around to make Pleo face the medical functionary, who had been standing a little too close. Pleo’s arm swung out in a wide arc and raked the functionary’s cheek with the elbow spur.
The functionary jerked to a halt in front of Pleo as glistening blood trickled down her jaw and stained the cyan top coat. Pleo heard her mother gasp in the doorway as Idilman Tanza held Guli back.
Touching a hand to her cheek, the functionary studied the blood on her fingertips.
“Tyro Pleo Tanza?” she asked, emphasising each word.