by Greg Egan
She drew up a preliminary list, starting with various items that the Captain already possessed. Between his funereal wardrobe, his curtains and bed-spreads, his small library and his collection of lacquered snuff boxes, brown and gray were pretty much taken care of. But to encode the addresses she required, she was going to need all manner of mauves and magentas, leaf-greens and cyans, azures and ocean blues. It would almost have been worth it if the old coot had had a wife, just so Sagreda could surreptitiously snip her way through the woman’s apparel. The Captain’s landlady, Mrs Trotter, was cheerful and solicitous with her widower tenant, but breaking into her room to cut up her clothing could well risk sending the game a signal that this man had been at the Jekyll juice and was craving a chance to perform a few amateur appendectomies.
Sagreda sighed and went to use the chamber pot. She had got past the impulse to giggle or recoil at the sight of her new genitalia – and nothing about the Captain’s physique inspired autoerotic experimentation. It was as if she was obliged to spend her time here with a small, docile, misshapen rodent sheltering between her legs, helpfully redirecting the flow of her urine by means that really didn’t bear thinking about. As she covered the pot and hitched up her underwear, she tried to picture the expression on Mathis’s face when he saw what she’d become. But a couple of months without physical intimacy wasn’t going to kill them. Their journey was almost over: in 3-adica, she believed, they’d finally have the power to do, and to be, whatever they wanted.
3
Sagreda worked on her palette, visiting milliners and cloth-merchants, developing a line in gruff banter to parry the teasing of the shop assistants. “What’s a gentleman like you needing a scarlet ribbon for?” one young woman demanded, her features poised between perplexity, mortification and amusement.
“I plan to tie it around the leg of a hound,” Sagreda replied, with a fully Bluff-Smotean air of impatience, irritation and self-importance.
“An ’ound?” The woman’s expression succeeded in growing even more unsettled.
“As punishment for flagrant promiscuity,” Sagreda explained, deadpan. “The mutt needs shaming, and I will not resile from the task.”
“That’s only fair,” the woman decided. “When it comes to them beasts, nature will have its way, but that don’t mean we have to approve.”
As Sagreda handed over her coins, she scrutinized the woman’s face, hoping that perhaps she was in on the joke. But Jingle had said that only about a tenth of the characters here were game-aware.
Out on the street, as Sagreda paused to let a carriage pass, she felt an unexpected disturbance near her hip and instinctively reached down to explore its source. To her surprise, she found herself with her hand encircling a slender, bony wrist.
The owner of the wrist glared up at her defiantly: a slim, shabbily dressed girl whose age Sagreda refused to guess. Appearances were meaningless; however you picked and mixed from a pool of adult brain maps, the resulting comp could never be a child.
But a child need not always be played by a comp.
“That coin you’ve grabbed was a souvenir,” Sagreda huffed, “given to me by my Bavarian cousin, Frau Mengele!”
The girl flinched and dropped what she’d been holding – though she seemed as baffled by her reaction as an audience member at a hypnotist’s show who’d found herself suddenly clucking like a chicken. An automaton wouldn’t have blinked, and a customer might have grimaced at the oddly contrived reference, but only a comp could be revolted by the association without understanding why.
Sagreda bent down and retrieved the coin. “Don’t you dare lay a finger on me!” the girl whispered. Her hushed tone was probably a wise strategic choice: if she made a scene, the crowd would not be on her side. But she spoke without a trace of fear, as if she were the one with the upper hand.
Sagreda lost whatever resolve she’d had to strike the child for the sake of appearances. Maybe a verbal reprimand would pass muster, if anyone around them was even paying attention.
“Next time, missy, you should ply your trade on someone less acutely conscious of the content of his trousers!” Sagreda blustered. She waited, still gripping the girl’s wrist, hoping for some kind of apology.
“I know what you’re up to,” the girl replied unrepentantly. “So leave me be, or I might just pay a call on the witch-finders.”
Witch-finders? Sagreda supposed she had no right to be surprised by how far Midnight was willing to stretch its anachronisms. “And just what are you planning to tell Constables Scolder and Mully of Bow Street?”
“Every nasty detail of your sorcery,” the girl boasted. “And you can be sure that when they break down your door, they’ll take a very keen interest in your mandala.”
Sagreda released the girl. Whatever she actually knew, the risk of attracting official scrutiny had to be greater than the risk of letting one pickpocket slip away unpunished.
But the girl declined the opportunity to flee. “And I’ll have what you denied me,” she said, glancing meaningfully at Sagreda’s trouser pocket.
Sagreda stared back at her, almost admiring her brazenness, trying to summon up some ornately disdainful Victorian invective with which to respond to this blackmail. But her vocabulary deserted her, and muttering feebly about impudent whelps when her heart wasn’t in it would just make her sound like the nineteenth century equivalent of a rapping grandma.
“Be off with you!” she snapped, making a shooing motion with her giant hands.
The girl scowled, dissatisfied, and she seemed on the verge of escalating her threats, but then she changed her mind. “You should engage me, Mister.”
“Captain,” Sagreda corrected her. “Engage you to do what?”
“Make me your assistant. Seeing as how you’re struggling to complete the thing.”
A carriage drove past, spattering the bottom of the Captain’s trousers with horse-shit-speckled mud.
“Have you been following me?” Sagreda demanded.
“I have eyes,” the girl replied coolly. “I seen you in all kinds of fancy shops, making some very odd purchases. If you want the job done before Christmas, you might welcome a pair of nimble hands like mine.”
Sagreda fell silent. Were there colors she needed that she might only be able to obtain by theft? She wasn’t sure. She’d made significant progress, but she was yet to walk into a shop and find every obscure object of her chromatic desires laid out on the shelves and counters.
“I’ll give you a shilling as a retainer,” she decided, reaching into her pocket for an untainted one. “In turn, I expect you to be straight with me, and to keep yourself available.”
The girl inclined her head in agreement.
Sagreda held on to the coin. “What’s your name?”
“Lucy.” The girl stretched out her palm, and Sagreda deposited the shilling.
“How will I find you?” she asked.
“This is my patch you’re on,” Lucy replied, affronted, as if she were some criminal king-pin whose territory Sagreda crossed only on her sufferance. “If you have need of my services, I’ll know it before you know it yourself.”
4
Sagreda worked into the night, pinning, stitching and gluing, painstakingly assembling one more piece of the mosaic. Or mandala, as Lucy had called it. It was an odd choice of word; Sagreda had seen nothing to suggest that Midnight’s kitchen-sink eclecticism encompassed any culture east of the Carpathians. But perhaps one of the previous travelers the girl had seen scavenging for colors had taken her into their confidence and tried to explain the point of the whole exercise. Sagreda had no idea if anyone, anywhere, had ever believed that a mandala could initiate the transmigration of souls; her own vague understanding was that if you were into that kind of thing, you just waited to die and the rest was up to karma. But if stacks, GPUs and the whole panoply of queue structures that linked the game-worlds together were too much to explain to someone who’d been gaslit into forgetting everything her contributors had
known about the twenty-first century, maybe Lucy’s reluctant informant had opted for a Buddhist-flavored riff, aiming for an account that was comprehensible to the denizen of a world steeped in supernatural forces, while avoiding Western occultism with its potentially Satanic associations, in the hope of keeping the witch-finders out of the picture.
Someone tapped at the door. Sagreda covered the mosaic with a table cloth and approached the entrance hall. It was awfully late for a visit from Mrs Trotter, and the tap had sounded far too tentative to come from any branch of the constabulary.
When she opened the door, she found an elegantly dressed, dark-haired young man at the threshold, his eyes cast down as if his presence here was somehow shameful.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, sir,” the man said softly, still not meeting Sagreda’s gaze. “But I’m a cousin of your wife, and I need to speak to her as soon as possible about a poorly aunt of ours—”
Sagreda interrupted him. “Mathis?”
He looked up, startled. “How do you … did she tell you…?”
“There is no she but me, I’m afraid.” Sagreda tried to smile, but then recalled how the Captain’s whiskery visage had appeared when she’d practiced in the mirror. “It looks like that last queue we found was meant to have been pre-filtered by gender.”
Mathis nodded with a kind of punch-drunk stoicism. “Okay. Everything’s temporary. I’m sorry I took so long to find you; I don’t know if the notes all blew away, or what.”
“The ones in the churches shouldn’t have.”
“About that…”
“Are you coming in?” Sagreda asked impatiently. They weren’t talking loudly, but who knew what Mrs Trotter would assume if she saw the Captain with a young man visiting at this uncivil hour.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to invite me,” Mathis explained glumly.
Sagreda took a moment to digest that. “Oh, fuck no.”
“You got the wang, I got the fangs,” Mathis quipped. “That’s what happens when you walk in blind.”
Sagreda said, “Please, make yourself at home in my miserable abode.” She stepped back from the doorway and let him pass, then peered out across the landing to check that no one was watching from the stairs.
Mathis draped himself over the sofa and gazed lethargically into space, focusing on nothing, perhaps in an attempt to avoid having to take in the wallpaper.
“So what exactly are the symptoms?” Sagreda asked. “Apart from a general Byronic ennui.”
“I haven’t risked daylight,” he replied. “But I gather it would be fatal. I do have a reflection. But mostly I’m just very, very tired and very, very hungry.”
“So you haven’t—?”
“Jesus, Sagreda!” Mathis stared at her in horror.
“I meant … maybe a dog?” The dogs here were pure automata, it wouldn’t even be animal cruelty.
“I’m not interested in dogs!” Mathis retorted irritably, as if that ought to be as obvious to Sagreda as it was to him. But then he caught himself, and walked her through the strictures he was facing. “There are certain sights and odors that make my saliva run, and my…” He gestured at his mouth. “I’m assuming that unless I act on those cues, I’m not going to stop feeling weak. A rare roast-beef sandwich doesn’t cut it, and I have no reason to think a corgi or two would hit the spot either.”
Sagreda steeled herself. “Do you want me to fill a cup?”
Mathis took a while to reply. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Not especially,” she confessed. “But I don’t want you going into the vampiric equivalent of a diabetic coma.”
“I’d better not watch,” Mathis decided. “Who knows what strings the game will start tugging, if I see an open wound.”
“All right.” Sagreda went into the Captain’s bedroom and closed the door. There was a cut-throat razor by the washing bowl, and an empty shaving mug. She took off her jacket and shirt.
The thought that Mathis feared losing control disturbed her. They’d fought for each other, suffered side by side, and risked deletion across three dozen worlds – and the software that lorded over them was far too crude to reach inside them and start imposing beliefs or desires. On their side they had love, and they had reason, while the SludgeNet possessed neither.
But it still had plenty of ways to try to manipulate their behavior. Having woken in the asinine world of East, where sensory immersion lost out more or less instantly to any trace of common sense, they were both immune to seeing-is-believing, and to the wisdom of hoodwinked crowds. But they’d never been subjected to outright torture. If the purple prose in Midnight’s bodice-and-intestine-ripping source had talked about a vampire’s longing for blood being like a white-hot poker in the chest, the SludgeNet would have no trouble bringing those words to life.
The Captain’s body was amply proportioned and apparently not at all anemic; when Sagreda had filled the mug, she did not feel the least bit unsteady. “Well done, old stick!” she commended him, binding the wound with a handkerchief. She dressed again completely to conceal any trace of the breach in her skin. The Captain, being some flavor of Anglican, wasn’t into religious paraphernalia; there was a King James Bible in his library, but no crucifix by the bed.
She covered the mug with a playing card and opened the door. Mathis was still on the sofa; she walked right past him, into the entrance hall, and out the front door. She placed the mug on the landing, near the top of the stairs, then, leaving the door open, went back to the sitting room.
“You didn’t want to watch me,” she said. “And I don’t want to watch you, either.”
Mathis frowned slightly, but he nodded. “I’ll go back to my place when I’m finished.” He walked over to the desk and wrote something. “That’s the address, if you need to find me later. But don’t open the door to me again tonight, whatever I say.”
Sagreda felt the Captain’s pulse throbbing around the raw edges of the razor wound. But Mathis was just being cautious; he’d never done this before, he didn’t know what to expect.
“You know I love you?” she said.
Mathis rolled his eyes. “At a pinch, I might go for an Oscar Wilde type, but the whole Colonel Mustard thing…” He shuddered.
“You’re an asshole.”
He smiled and walked down the hall. Sagreda followed a couple of steps behind, then when he was out she closed the door quickly – taking care not to slam it and wake Mrs Trotter – and secured the bolts.
She stood by the door, listening, but the bestial slurping she’d feared never came. She waited, tensed, picturing the door splintering and a yellow-eyed, ravenous demon embracing her to finish what she’d started.
She heard the faint chink of the mug being placed back on the floor, then soft, careful, unhurried footsteps descending the stairs.
5
Sagreda needed cobalt blue. Out in the real world – if Peyam’s gloriously discursive lessons on color were to be trusted – the pigment had been used since ancient times in Chinese ceramics, and it had certainly been available to European painters in the nineteenth century. This was London, capital of an empire, mercantile hub of the world. Whatever wasn’t made here, someone would be importing it.
So she traipsed the streets, hunting for a shop that sold artists’ supplies. If the gossip she’d heard in the coffee houses was true, every tubercular poet, living or undead, from Marlowe to Yeats was currently shacked up somewhere in Bloomsbury, rubbing shoulders every night in the Salon Macabre – a dollop of name-dropping no doubt designed to set the hearts of thirteen-year-old Goths aflutter – but no one ever seemed to mention a single painter. To be fair, Sagreda’s own contributors struggled to suggest anyone but Turner; still, someone had to be responsible for all the portraits of viscounts and their horses that lined the walls of the mansions of Belgravia. Unless they just appeared out of thin air.
As she widened her search radius, Sagreda grew nervous. Every game had different rules of containment; if
you wandered off into territory that didn’t belong to the core geography that had been mapped out and rendered for a thousand eyes before yours, you might get a gentle nudge guiding you back to terra cognita, or you might just fall off the edge of the world. So far as she knew, the Captain was not a named character in the original novel, and no customer of the interactive version had become the least bit invested in his continued existence. If she crossed the invisible line, the easiest solution by far might be to erase her and wake a fresh comp in the same body after a hard night on the town, leaving the new guy to piece his identity together much as Sagreda had, from the contents of his lodgings, and the people he encountered who seemed to know him.
By late afternoon on the third day of her search, she found herself off the paved streets entirely, tramping through muddy ground beside a ramshackle wooden building that smelled like a tannery. She stopped and hunted for the sun, trying to get her bearings, but the sky above was smothered by a still, gray haze, equally bright everywhere she squinted.
There was no one else in sight. She approached the building cautiously; it might just contain cheerful workers, happy to offer directions, but Midnight was proving less concerned with its supply chains than with its brooding atmospherics. If its artworks could come without artists or pigments, its leather need not have graced the body of any cow, and the strange odor might have another source entirely.