Liquid Crystal Nightingale

by EeLeen Lee

  He waved Marsh onto the escalator. Maybe it was the end of his shift and he did not want trouble.

  IF MARSH HAD hoped to catch some shuteye inside the Parade station when Shineshift wound down, he was out of luck. An out-of-service T-Car hung underneath the platform and commuters were waiting as they caught up with the highlights or sent messages back and forth.

  Marsh hung back at the top of the escalator and waited for a few minutes, then descended into the T-Car when it was activated. The cool empty carriage offered welcome respite from the strain of holding himself together while Dumortier had spoken to him. A klaxon blared, and another T-Car passed by on the opposite track, the rumble of its passage dopplering out. Marsh’s nervousness dissipated like the afternoon haze. His left shoulder still throbbed, five parallel slashes of muted pain that kept him company for the remainder of the journey. He reached out for the carriage pole, favouring his right arm, but stifled a yelp as the faulty pole hoisted him up with a series of jerks.

  The Canal That Quenches All Thirst ran through the old Hospital Quarter, connecting both death and commerce, yet the lives of the people living on opposite ends appeared aeons apart. On Lantern Street, posters still hung onto the ornate lampposts. Marsh read fragments of old advertisements sloughing off in reverse chronological order in the breeze: Ancient Streets, Modern Amenities. Exhibition of PostTransit Society Sculpture, Plenary Hall 7, Pupil Convenient Centre. Towards A Post-Transit Society; Canal Mouth Development: Office and Retail Units now available. Marsh still did not know what any of it meant; their context was lost long before he started living there.

  The retrofitted display block loomed over Marsh, reminding him of the counters he spent his working hours attending to or standing behind. As a precaution he counted the storeys to locate his nanoapartment at mid-level, and saw no strange shadows moving in the window. He passed through the once-vermillion entrance gates, now faded to terracotta over the years.

  A cluster of sparks lit up the row of windows above the main door, accompanied by a sporadic hissing and crackling that died off. The cheap crowning-shield reinforcing the walls was struggling to connect to the main power grid. As a secondary precaution before making his way inside, Marsh picked up a pebble and hurled it against the wall facing him, where the grimy vertical panels bumped up against the worn moulded slabs on the ground. With a pop, the pebble bounced off the crowning-shield, shot past his legs and landed next to one of the gate posts. At least the block wasn’t collapsing tonight. Somewhat reassured, he retrieved the pebble and went inside.

  He ducked to avoid the crisis-crossing lines of laundry hanging overhead and picked his way through the corridors, too narrow for residential living. On the upper floors, most of his neighbours’ doors were open, letting out warm air, aromas of cooking and glimpses of domestic life: steam whistling out of retrofitted samovars, stoves crowded with trays and pans. On the worn dining table lay an assemblage of auspicious objects left over from the New Year’s festival: a string of firecrackers to ward off evil, and oranges and pomegranates to represent the wish for wealth, honour and many descendants in other settlements. Over a mother-of-pearl-inlaid table a wallscreen blared, a rerun of a soap opera on Khtn-3—the channel broadcasting from Anul, the largest shepherd moon, and part-owned by various Cabuchoner entrepreneurs. Two children standing in their doorways eyed him with casual disinterest and an old man squeezed past him and mumbled profanities, as though Marsh could avoid brushing up against him in the tight space. The feeling is mutual, Marsh often felt like yelling back.

  Marsh’s nanoapartment was dim and sparse, but it suited him since he was out for most of the day. “Flea boxes” was the more familiar term among their denizens. Sliding screens attached to tracks hung from the ceiling allowed him to convert the tiny space into different rooms, convenient for the few occasions when he had taken a lover. Right now he was too exhausted to bother with the routine of compartmentalising. The only clue to his background was a poster of the Cedar Avenue back on Cabuchon, facing his cot. He missed the public parks of Zen-like stillness, containing oases encompassed in larger oases resting on terraformed acres of land. Works of art were displayed on cultivated victory cedars; the tree was both a symbol and pride of Cabuchon. For 20 juta an augury vendor on the avenue would tell your fortune by consulting the cedar leaf oracle: choose a leaf at random from a bunch of sixty leaves, repeat six times and take note of the results.

  Six months before he left Cabuchon the oracle had warned him of a shock in the near future which would shake him out of his current stagnation, and now he saw the truth in its message for the first time. Today, instead of tossing his carrier onto the worn floor next to his dirty clothes, he set the bag down by the door and stood in front of a mirror hanging next to it, gingerly taking off his shirt to inspect his injuries.

  He was very impressed with the healing—Setona hadn’t been overselling the properties of the epithelialix paste she had applied on him. The bleeding had stopped and the paste had reduced the swelling. There was minimal risk of infection if he kept the wounds covered for another day. Pain still throbbed under the skin of his shoulder, but the epithelialix concealed the wounds too well. The gouges did not show through the thick layer and his shoulder appeared normal and uninjured in the mirror. In disbelief he rubbed hard, feeling the fresh scabs under the seal.

  The woman on my T-Car every morning, the one I found at the fountain, has marked me, he thought, and felt strangely honoured with this connection.

  As he reached out to pick up his carrier Marsh felt one gouge split open and something jut out from under the skin. Repulsed and scared in equal measures, he steeled himself to reach for his shoulder and his fingers brushed over a slender foreign object. He returned to look in the mirror: the object was as long as his ring finger and it gleamed white despite the dimly lit nanoapartment. A forcep: it must have broken off when she had stabbed him earlier and become embedded in his shoulder.

  Marsh gritted his teeth, grasped the tip of the forcep where it poked out from his scapula, and tugged twice. The result was an agonising split-second of resistance before the tender skin gave way in a ragged shiny strip. Blood quickly refilled the wound and trickled down his back, cold air rushing over exposed tissue. He worked a fingernail under the edge of the epitheliax seal and peeled it back, one sticky piece at a time.

  When he had finished the five parallel gouges reappeared on his shoulder. The wounds tingled.

  Due to space constraints Marsh lacked the full range of gem identification equipment, but he still made the best of it. He had fixed a lamp under the sorting pad which doubled as a desk, and now sat on a high stool, donned his eye loupe and held the forcep under the light. It was almost weightless, like fish bone, and dazzling white. Marsh bent it in all directions between his fingers and it sprang back with a defiant strength.

  He picked up the finest diamond scribe from his opened toolkit and ran its tip over the length of the forcep, but it resisted his attempts to score its surface. Switching to dark field illumination, he made out minute filaments at the tip of the forcep, probably for holding mineral samples via sub-molecular tension, like the toe pads of a gecko. Most of the forcep was intact; whatever had attached the forcep to the sheath had broken instead—there was grey discolouration at the base where the forcep had broken off. Marsh adjusted the loupe to the highest possible magnification to examine the rough cross section. A grainy pattern, alternating dark and faint chevrons intersecting in narrowly spaced arcs against the grey, resolved into focus.

  He wrenched away the loupe and set it on a tray, rubbing his eyes in disbelief. Then as though in a trance he put the loupe on again. Marsh stared at the image until his eyes blurred with the strain after two minutes of examination. He readjusted the magnification, searching the length of the forcep for other signs of inlaid hardware such as grid patterns or serial numbers but found none.

  It was not possible for Schreger lines to be present for they only manifested in organics such a
s ivory and dentine. His discovery meant the forceps were organic, or at least comprised of an organic matrix.

  Fifty-seven bones in the human hand. These students had five more, in the form of teeth in their fingers.

  But since when? Up until now, stolen Polyteknical implants had all be made of foreign materials, albeit compatible with surrounding body tissues. The DryWare Market was the only place to confirm his discovery. Finding a Bio-equipper unmoved by palm-greasing and not caught up in internecine protection rackets in that tangle of side streets and making it out alive was like getting a definite answer from the cedar leaf oracle—impossible. Most of the traders had a covert taskforce of goons under their command, who murdered clients with valuable finds. Was his tentative protection deal with the 555 Triumvirate still valid? The satellite markets were slightly less risky and outside known gang turfs. He went through a mental roster of contingency plans in case the DryWare and WetWare Markets turned out to be unworkable. Art and jewel theft were suddenly so insignificant and yet so much safer.

  Marsh went to the window, ready to hurl the forcep out, listen to it hit the short-circuiting crowning-shield and sizzle into charred specks. The portion of night sky visible to him through the window lit up with lightning. Cabuchon winked at him, a fine bead out of reach.

  Return the forcep to her as it was part of her. Do right by her.

  But not before a thorough evaluation. Here was his big chance to make it off Chatoyance.

  The forcep was as slender as a cedar leaf and now imbued with greater significance. Marsh saw a line of cedar trees stretching out to a distant vanishing point that was his future. He recalled the rest of his reading: It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind blows.

  His skin itched, trying to heal and restore itself. He had promised that he wouldn’t return to what he used to be. But if it helped him get off Chatoyance?

  He decided not to wait for the next Shineshift. The intermittent darkness was pregnant with possibilities and Marsh was going to exploit it. He placed the forcep in an airtight sheath and strapped it to his arm, then left his flea box. Outside, the crowning-shield glitched and sent him off with a volley of sparks.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  NADIRA MORAD (LANDING name: Gaspard) was both salamander and human. To what extent she was more of each, she still was not sure.

  When she was ten years old, she had modest dreams of living forever in the Anium canton on the edge of the Signet System. She would own a thriving aquaculture farm and tend to it in perpetuity—aided by the best immortality treatments, of course.

  Years later, she got her wish in the guise of SeForTec transfusions. She heard the term used by the medical technicians as they rattled off details from their charts the first time they had revived her:

  “—personnel name: Nadira Morad (landing name: Gaspard).”

  “—pulse is 64 bpm. Level with baseline.”

  “—all vitals are stable.”

  “—all extremities intact and functioning.”

  She had sat up too hastily in the recovery tray and coughed up a bedpan’s worth of warm briny synthetic amniotic fluid.

  “Transfusion complete.”

  Nadira had managed a weak laugh at the way the technicians used the word; it sounded so understated and straightforward. They called it a transfusion, yet she felt like a newborn.

  A technician’s freezing gloved hand patted her on the shoulder—the gesture was a cue to get out of the bedpan.

  She had stood on the observation deck suspended above the rows of SeForTec vats extending as far as she could see in the storage facility. Banks of maintenance and life-sign monitors scanned and hummed in the background. The faint outlines of her colleagues and ex-colleagues—past, present and future—were visible in the translucent vats. It had been a reassuring sight; only a few empty vats per row, suggesting no backlog of cases. Bodies and limbs floated in the translucent vats, all labelled with names, dates, designations, and case numbers.

  Back in her early days, they all slept easy.

  A woman’s voice had called out to her from the opposite walkway. “Welcome back, Salamander.”

  She saluted in return. “Thank you, Cicada. Rest well until you’re needed again.”

  Nadira and her colleagues had long discovered camaraderie in the examination of cadavers and crime scenes, and assigned each other epithets chosen from assorted symbols of new life, energy and resurrection. ‘Salamander’ was for the recently activated, ‘cicada’ for those off-duty and about to enter or reenter suspension, to replace lost or depleted components before going back into circulation.

  The rigorous SeForTec reconditioning was an essential bulwark against bleedover: the risk of past memories overwhelming her at any time. Reports and firsthand accounts varied about the nature of bleedover: it was not exactly flashbacks, because the memories remain vivid without the sensory experience. Nadira tended to give more weight to the accounts. She had heard anecdotes about SeForTecs locked into silence by memories from their previous manifestations: to speak of those experiences was to relive them. Others experienced narcolepsy, PTSD or dysmorphia.

  She was able to remember without it affecting her current state. Somatic therapy helped, as did cortical reorganisation to improve motor control, in extreme cases. Under controlled conditions, SeForTecs were permitted moments of catharsis. At night, or when off duty, she would lie in her cot and allow the seismic pressure of past memories to build up under her body for a glorious, disorientating minute. With years of practice, the pressure always receded.

  “Consider your accumulated memories as though they were documentaries. The subject of all of them is you, of course.”

  When Nadira first heard those words of advice, they had rung out across the hammered sheet-metal floor of a makeshift auditorium.

  Everything was makeshift back in those early days, including advice. Easy to say when it was difficult to discern between what was you, and what an imperfect memory. But it was not always about her, Nadira realised over her first four transfusions (not ‘incarnations’ and nothing as crude as was denoted by ‘decantations’; the rest of the interdepartmental staff liked to use those terms interchangeably). Constabulary went to work by channeling her into the same vessel indefinitely, as long as her mind was still viable.

  Old software into new wetware. New wetware equipped with new dryware. Transfer and transfuse. Repeat until the physical broke down or became irreplaceable. Reassignment or resignation—Constabulary always gave a SeForTech the choice between the two.

  Nadira had rejected both from the beginning. She secretly hoped to remain in stasis until Constabulary came up with another alternative.

  NADIRA AND DUMORTIER were ahead of schedule as they made their way into the Orchard sector. Orchard was built on a small artificial mesa and Nadira had to steer the Shirpen onto a steep ramp, cruising past the base of the Aront Tier. The particulate-rich morning haze pushed the vehicle’s filter-visor to its limit. She switched it off and slowed down the vehicle, squinting at the Aront Tier in wonder as if it had sprung up overnight.

  A giant mushroom.

  No doubt it was continuously watered and fertilised by ill-gotten wealth. If she stayed to watch the Tier at night she might see it emanate clouds of poisonous spores that merged with Chatoyance’s haze. The Tiers, and their residents, seeding the atmosphere with largesse—or with sanctioned corruption (both were the same these days), if she wanted to be facetious. But she couldn’t afford to be; she was an avatar of Constabulary and she executed its will.

  The Aront Tier also reminded her of a command centre, sentinel-like as it waited for its next set of orders. She had been up on most of the other Tiers but the Aront Tier was not exactly the most graceful collection of angles. It lacked the glamour and the cliched touches to convey wealth and superficial status—as if the Aronts considered themselves beyond all of that. No glass lift cars ascending and descending on tracks laid into the support columns, which also lacked
heraldic patterns in unique colour schemes. It could be charitably dubbed ‘militant luxury.’

  In an unexpected touch of whimsy, the Aront residential tier’s resemblance was closer to a parasol, casting large shadows over the ground directly below it. A parasol to be carried into battle, she guessed as she picked out a few security features on the rim: floodlights, guard posts, and fortified surfacing. All sent the same message to potential intruders and attackers: It’s not worth the effort.

  She had little doubt the Tier Dwellers were deliberate architects of their own prisons, a design resulting from both hubris and desperation.

  “You think the others already have Tyro Pleo Tanza?” Dumortier watched a cluster of purple dots pulsate over a section of the Orchard covered in blue gridlines in the windscreen display.

  “That activity is on the Madrugal Tier—not likely.” Nadira glanced over. “Looks concentrated.”

  “It’s either a party or a funeral. For Tier Dwellers there’s often no difference.” Dumortier killed the display. “If the Aronts put a price on her head, they’ll save you and me a landfill’s worth of paperwork.”

  “You wouldn’t need me either,” said Nadira. “You’d be riding with Detainment.”

  The Shirpen turned into a concourse and settled into a discreet docking enclave behind nine hulking Dogtooth vehicles. Nadira and Dumortier waited for a guard escort to greet them before they got out of the Shirpen.

  “Did they tell you that joining Constabulary would give you a front row seat to the greatest show in the Archer’s Ring?” Dumortier asked as they waited.

  “Academy warned us during the first week,” replied Nadira.

  “Give up your seat—now we’re going behind the scenes.”