Liquid Crystal Nightingale

by EeLeen Lee

  She had seen through him long before the testing stage, and was expecting Ignazia Madrugal to cease their private conversation—which she soon did.

  “Put the test fan down on the bench,” ordered Ignazia. “Make sure it doesn’t drip venom onto any more of my new lawn.”

  Saurebaras placed the fan on a nearby bench carved out of a single pallasite meteorite made of iron and nickel. The black peacock venom was still dripping from its opened membranes as Ignazia picked it up. Saurebaras observed the venom pooling around the bottle-green olivine crystals set into the bench.

  “Fan membranes display a slightly improved absorbency over previous test batch,” said Saurebaras.

  “I suggest you proceed with this batch,” said Ignazia.

  “How much more uta will we have to bleed on another batch?” Madrugal frowned.

  “At least ten more rounds of accessories testing are required before I’m satisfied. Then we give our military contractors their much-anticipated demonstration before the year’s end.”

  Ignazia nodded at Saurebaras to indicate her involvement.

  “You will allow her to perform the demonstration?” asked Madrugal.

  “She’s more than capable by now. It’ll be a ‘touch-and-retreat’ style of display. If the contractors remain unconvinced by the end, she could always kill a Tagmat guard to make a point.” Ignazia noted her husband’s furrowed brow and quickly said, “I’m joking.”

  Her perfectionist tone changed when she noticed Saurebaras describing a figure of eight in the air with the peacock feather. “Do you have anything else to add, Arodasi?”

  Without hesitation Saurebaras held out the feather. “Put more of these eyes on my fans.”

  Ignazia looked askance at her husband. “We have already finalised the aesthetics over the previous year.”

  “‘Intention fashions the weapon. And—’” began Saurebaras, ready to launch into an oft-repeated speech about the value of distraction.

  “I know!” snapped Ignazia. “I coined that so you don’t need to quote it at me.”

  Saurebaras ran a finger along the feather’s shaft, waiting for Ignazia’s mood to subside. “I know it’s a last-minute detail, but it’d enhance the demonstration. I’d perform better.”

  Madrugal nodded in tentative agreement.

  “We’re creating a new physical language with every moment. There’s still so much potential.”

  “I’ll consider your request,” said Ignazia as she picked up the test fan. Before she and Madrugal left the garden she told Saurebaras, “Remember: we found you dancing for uta along the bank of the Leroi—I can easily put you back there.”

  Against Saurebaras’s expectations, six fans were custom made and delivered to Saurebaras within a fortnight. They arrived suspended in a sealed gift box filled with brine solution. The fans were mesmerizingly beautiful when she opened them for inspection; the vivid turquoise eyespots stared at her from the membranes. But their inconsistent placement irked Saurebaras at first; some eyes were too near the ribs, others right in the centre. Ignazia still had final say over the end product.

  Saurebaras was down to her last fan when she realised Ignazia’s one-upmanship had done her an indirect favour: the fans’ unique patterns forced her to adapt to them. When faced with the unexpected, it helped to shut out distractions. She used the peacock feather eyes on the fans as a focus for her daily meditation—Be stillness incarnate. When the world is whipping itself into a frenzied blur around you become and remain the eye.

  Years later, this mantra served Saurebaras well when a stale perfume, a blend of oakmoss and benzoin spiked with citrus, heralded Matriarch Aront’s arrival with her private security detail. Saurebaras was prepared to be courteous, but planned to cut short the visit by feigning a mild injury.

  The perfume seeped through the reinforced door of Saurebaras’s private living quarters. Does the Gorgon subject all of her friends and associates to this odour? Don’t these Tier Dwellers send proxies to attend to matters in their place?

  Saurebaras forgot about her planned charade when she saw how nondescript and absurd the Matriarch appeared out of context, where she was not hamming it up at some official function or swanning around the other Tiers. One hulking Dogtooth guard waited outside while the other entered first, sweeping the place. Strings of multicoloured beads dangling from the low ceiling brushed the top of the guard’s head. Satisfied there were no threats, he gestured for the Matriarch to come inside.

  She walked with a stiff gait, trying not to let the overhanging coloured beads affect the tilt of her head. Her jaw twitched and clicked sporadically, as if it was prepared to dislocate itself at any moment and swallow trays of delicacies or people’s reputations whole. Apart from Gia’s attendance, the Aronts had no stake in Polyteknical or interest in fla-tessen, and as far as Saurebaras was aware, there no reason for the Matriarch to make an unannounced visit. Of course, she still wanted to inject drama into this tiny space by barging through the narrow doorway.

  Fixed in the beam of her disconcerting yellow gaze, Saurebaras hesitated under the decorative beads, repelled and yet amused by the thought that Matriarch Aront was going to plant a big wet kiss her cheek.

  And yet she imposed no such familiarity upon Saurebaras during that initial meeting: holding out a hand for her to kiss a ring set with a glittering black diamond as large as a quail’s egg. Saurebaras slowly dropped into a deep curtsy and the Matriarch tsked with impatience, flexing her finger and making the flesh bulge around the thick gold band. The choice of jewellery struck Saurebaras as odd; it lacked the characteristic Tier Dweller ostentation. Was Matriarch Aront in mourning, and for whom?

  “I’ve never dropped in to visit you before.”

  That voice can scour years of rust off the oldest canal bridge in seconds. She pressed her hands to her temples.

  “A delightful surprise, Matriarch!” Saurebaras effused, removing her hands from her temples, and clapped like a child presented with a choice of gifts. At the same time she wondered when had Matriarch Aront become so concerned about Gia’s progress, or the genuine lack of it, that it justified a personal visit?

  Matriarch Aront remained Sphinx-like. Without turning, she gestured to the guard to leave Saurebaras’s quarters.

  “Is this about Gia’s involvement in the unveiling ceremony to the new monument Aront Corp is building?” asked Saurebaras, trying to buy time. “I told your daughter only Adepts dance in public shows, and one only attains Adept level on merit.”

  “I applaud your integrity,” replied Matriarch Aront, “but I’m here regarding your involvement in another matter.”

  “Such as?”

  “Did you know the choosing of a successor is the most delicate issue for family businesses?”

  And does Matriarch Aront always begin with an irrelevant question?

  “The issue is better discussed with your husband,” said Saurebaras.

  But her question proved far from irrelevant, when Matriarch Aront mentioned a familiar name. “Oh, believe me, I’ve tried, so many times, to discuss Gia’s future with him. He’s much too sentimental.” Her dusky yellow eyes were moist with fervent purpose. Machinations had been set into motion long before her presence in this room, all worked out with a pathological precision. “It’s all scheduled.”

  As she spoke, Matriarch Aront lifted three fingers as though bestowing a benediction on Saurebaras, who was both chilled and infuriated by the gesture.

  This is bad theatre, but you’re miles above it. Act nonplussed. Show this woman that you’re unflappable and that you’ve been through much worse. Tier Dwellers are so used to buying people with a snap of their fingers. And burying them once they’ve outlived their usefulness.

  But the relentless precision of the decisions broke her resolve.

  “Monster!” Saurebaras had finally spat, despite herself, the word freezing the air in her quarters. “You and your husband, both sick, corrupt monsters!”

  “But ahh, ones
who think ahead,” replied Matriarch Aront, without expression. “You’re past any sort of refusal now. Be a part of this as I now ask, or face the consequences.”

  The ground was prepared, no matter how much Saurebaras resisted. Rankling at this intimidation in her private space, Saurebaras visualised a swift blow between the shoulder blades, enough to make warm spinal fluid and blood shoot out of the Matriarch’s bulbous nose. Anything to halt these plans, make this awful machinery judder to a halt forever.

  But as always, her reconditioning reflex took over and locked her joints in place. The steel whip emerged from her chest and lashed her arms to her sides.

  “It helps to remember you don’t have a choice, madame. Nothing more can happen to you,” Matriarch Aront said lazily, as she brought her face close to Saurebaras’s, intensifying the reek of perfume. “Chatoyance has already done its worst to you.”

  She poked Saurebaras in the chest, making her flinch. The Matriarch raised a tattooed eyebrow, no doubt impressed at the reconditioning she must have heard rumours about.

  At this slight Saurebaras retaliated like the peacock in Madrugals’ garden. She spat at the Matriarch’s golden eyes but missed, flecking her forehead and hairpiece.

  A Dogtooth stepped forward to deal with Saurebaras, but Matriarch Aront waved him back. She saw Matriarch Aront pull back her arm before feeling a different sort of pain—a slap across her face, making her forget about the steel whip around her body for a moment.

  “They’ve buried you, but used your own body as a coffin.”

  And three of her personal guards relayed Matriarch Aront out of the room, no doubt to bathe in foully perfumed waters again. As she left, she pinned a posy of stiff white flowers on the door jamb, flowers that were made of dogs’ claws; an Aront calling card.

  After the visit, Saurebaras realised she had been wrong about the Aronts: they had suborned her. It was crucial that Saurebaras had to transform from the eye of the storm into shimmering chaos around them to thwart their plans.

  “I can become so inspired that I could explode with what is inside of me,” Saurebaras had told Ignazia during the fla-tessen trials. Now these words took on a new, unexpected meaning.

  The sense of her ghastly purpose consumed Saurebaras until she could no longer keep her fragile surface tension under control. She had no choice but to be swallowed up into the maelstrom kept at bay by the reconditioning. Face down and confront every secret and demon that, for most people, would be quietly lurking in their subconscious, but for her were building funeral pyres and waging battles.

  When she did ultimately resurface, she did so with the radiant serenity of a goddess, as if she was reborn with no trace of the agonies that had threatened to overcome her.

  If Ignazia hadn’t been so dismissive of thoughtforms she would still be alive, long enough to be flabbergasted by Saurebaras’s mastery. The body, via the mind, had its own set of memories, and Saurebaras drew on hers when she dove into the inner pit. Her thoughtform never needed summoning—it was always with her, tugging on the chains of the reconditioning. The shawl stretched and twisted around itself until it became as hard and gnarled as a flail. A little crude, but she dispensed with grace and artistry at this moment. Deadly force required less energy but more precision.

  Never a problem for Saurebaras.

  Back on the bench Saurebaras waited for time and her body to snap back into rhythm. Three years of baseline frustration and discomfort had blossomed over the past weeks into imminent dread and guilt over what the Aronts were forcing her to do.

  In her plans, the Matriarch had chosen another victim.

  It was not Gia.

  CHAPTER TEN

  PLEO TRIED TO slip into the climate-controlled atmosphere of the main lecture lab. Too late—the glares of her classmates were already burning holes into her back. They murmured to each other in desultory tones and she tasted rust as her tongue soldered itself to the roof of her mouth.

  She went to sip some water from a wash basin at the rear of the lecture lab, picking her way past students huddled over the benches. The facility was modest by Polyteknical standards, although it was four times the floor area of Pleo’s home; ten benches were laid out in arena style. Cables dangled like vines from the ceiling and like insect limbs at rest, retractable lamps folded into recesses set into the benches’ surfaces.

  “When a material reaches the limit of its strength, it deforms or fractures...”

  The focus of the seminar was on the tensile strength of mineral substances. Current semester work was harder: although she did well in the theory courses and passed the oral examinations, lab work and practicals still eluded her. She excelled at pinpoint handling and manual analysis of mineral specimens.

  Pleo sat down and drummed the benchtop with her fingers, risking a glare from the lecturer. When would Kim Petani reach her personal limit, as Cerussa did? Soon after she elbowed Pleo outside the dorm rooms? Would Kim die of complications after her final procedure? A cascade of hemorrhaging from her infected eyebrow ridges, swollen with pus and components that refused to take? A scene that Pleo never actually witnessed but was suggested by the blurred-out images of other Nosebleeds on the obit-highlights in the dormitories.

  Pleo performed a discreet prayer gesture for Cerussa and the other Nosebleeds.

  The seminar ended soon after, much to Pleo’s relief. She scrambled out of the basement of interconnected labs and rushed across the street to the main Polyteknical building, taking the shortest way through the main courtyard and the Garden of Contemplation.

  Passing through this oasis of calm brought Pleo’s plan into sharper focus. Now she had 70,000 uta and had to wait until her hair grew back to the right length, another fortnight. 84,000 uta was more than enough to cover passage to Steris, on the outer perimeter of the Archer’s Ring, just beyond Chatoyance’s jurisdiction.

  She stopped thinking about money when she entered the fla-tessen changing rooms opposite the hall. She grasped the notch under her collar and tore off her disposable lab smock, then threw on a fla-tessen shift. It marked its wearer as low-intermediate level, a shade of washed-out taupe so bleak and nondescript that Polyteknical students nicknamed them “hard currency block shifts” after the corroded cladding found in the Vice District. She slipped on a stiff padded white bib which protected the chest and abdomen, and gathered her fla-tessen shawl under one arm.

  Pleo navigated her way around racks of assorted training uniforms, extremely glad that she had saved enough uta to buy her own shawl and shift. Every time Pleo passed through here she grimaced at this textile chronicle of previous students surrounding her. How many had worn these? Some shifts were musty and stiff from long storage. There were starched white ones for beginners in order to make blood from injuries more visible from a distance, the dull taupe for intermediates now worn by Pleo, and matte black trimmed with gold brocade for Higher-Intermediates. Vests and light jackets were available for men, but they preferred to pair the padded vest with altered knee-length shifts for more freedom of movement. In general, fla-tessen instructors wore what they liked.

  Pleo broke free from the eerie mustiness of the forest of racks and reached the prep station, where she rinsed her hands in a trough of milky anaesthetic solution until they were sufficiently numbed. After shaking her hands dry she went to select a training fan from its nine other companions displayed on a wall-mounted rack.

  An insistent dripping got louder as she approached. When not in use, training fans had to be kept hydrated in a special nutrient-rich solution—the rack was fitted with pipes for the purpose—or else the membranes would shrink and warp the fan. Pleo discovered the source of the drip when she trod in a large puddle of the stuff below the rack and nearly slipped.

  The leaking rack had deprived eight fans of their nutrients, leaving their membranes shrivelled and unusable. She prised the remaining good fan out of its holder and folded it shut, wiping the sticky briny liquid off the guard. The red tassel looped through the head
of the fan pulsated in her grip, trying to send minute tendrils into the numbed skin of her palm via processes she never wished to understand. Pleo had to go through this until she reached Higher-Intermediate level. For now she was stuck with common-use fans which had to adapt to the user every session; beginners and intermediaries were not allowed to own personal fans.

  She placed the fan on the rim of the trough and took out her case of grip powder.

  As she was dusting her palms, she sensed a presence behind her.

  “Who’s there?” she called out.

  Only the creaking racks answered.

  She had not heard anyone else enter the changing room. But just in case, she suggested with a sudden exaggerated politeness, “I’m afraid they’ve taken all the training fans for today. Maybe use your own castanets or practise feints with a shawl.”

  The unchecked dripping set her on edge. The puddle was extending, expanding, until it looked like a human figure. Pleo stared at it, trying to dismiss it as her overactive imagination.

  She had a brief, panicked notion that what had followed her father back from Kerte Yurgi had attached itself to her. Possibly it needed a new victim or host body; her father was already nothing but ash.

  More nutrient solution dripped from the rack and changed the shape of the puddle, interrupting Pleo’s train of thought. The figure’s head was suddenly elongated, its arms raised over its head in warning. She picked up the fan again and allowed it to send out tendrils into the skin of her left palm. It stung, but she welcomed the discomfort; it helped to cancel out her tension.

  When Pleo was finally ready, she opened the door leading to the hall and was startled to find Saurebaras already waiting for her outside, impatiently tapping her fan against her thigh. She peered inside the changing room to check for stragglers, her gaze lingering on the human-shaped puddle of solution.

  “It was already leaking when I went in,” said Pleo, feeling nervous.

  Saurebaras narrowed her eyes at Pleo but, to her relief, motioned for her to join the other students waiting for class to start.