Heart of Gold

by Sharon Shinn

  “I hope so,” she said, and kissed him good-bye once more. They were standing on the street outside his apartment, and her mother’s traveling car waited. The driver was an ancient blue-skin, schooled in patience. They could kiss as long as they liked. “I miss you, and I’m not even out of the city. Good-bye. Take care of yourself.”

  “I miss you more,” he said. “Travel safely.”

  And she had left, and he had taken the Centrifuge to work, and all his perceptions were off. He had to drive slowly, in the bottom lane, for most of the trip, because he did not trust his reflexes in the upper levels. He had not piloted a ringcar since Leesa arrived in town five days ago; he was out of practice. But it was more than that. It had something to do with the fact that Analeesa Corova did not like the ringcars, considered them dirty and noisy and probably dangerous, so that this morning Nolan could not be comfortable and skillful in the Centrifuge as he usually was. He exited at the North Zero gate and ran for the trolley, then looked around and realized that he shared its seats and aisles with albinos, gulden, and indigo of every caste, and this made his skin prickle and his bones attempt to retract into the cavities of his skeleton. He walked the final short distance from the trolley stop to the Complex and felt a marveling, incredulous distaste at the fact that he brushed shoulders with men and women of every race, purchased goods from the same vendors, breathed from the same compressed cubic feet of air. How could this be? They were foreign and inferior; how had he come to overlook, even tolerate, their presence for so long?

  Once he stepped inside the Biolab, the feeling for a few hours actually intensified. He made no effort to join the informal morning gathering in Melina’s office. He couldn’t think how he would answer if Pakt or Colt or one of the other gulden addressed him. But the world seemed strange, askew, even as he sat in his own office playing with familiar figures on his computer screen. What was he doing here, what did these numbers mean, and even if he deciphered them, how had he materially benefited the world? Why was he here in the city when everything of any worth or value was several hundred miles distant, living a far more gracious life?

  He kept himself locked in his office the whole morning, laboriously going over old formulas just for the comfort of their familiarity. Eventually, some of the symmetry and intractability of the numbers gave him back a measure of security; these were equations that would not change, that held true no matter how they were influenced by outside factors and new variables. Their core values remained intact. They could shift to new places, new formulas, and mean exactly the same thing.

  Melina came for him at lunchtime, stepping quietly into the room and shutting the door behind her. For a second, her clipped hair and lively expression looked wrong to him, out of place, but in a moment Leesa’s superimposed image faded. “Good morning,” Nolan said formally. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. I just came in to chat. You’ve been working awfully hard, and everyone just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  Nolan raised his eyebrows in surprise. He had forgotten there were other people in the world who might wonder about him. “Oh. Yes. I’m just a little behind here, and I thought I’d try to catch up—”

  Melina crossed the room and took a seat close to his, leaning forward to peer at him. “Is Leesa still here?” she asked.

  “No, she left this morning.”

  Melina leaned back in her chair. “Ah. I know. It’s a strange feeling, isn’t it? When my mother comes in for a visit, I have to take a vacation day after she leaves. I walk around from place to place, reminding myself why I love the city. And I won’t let Julitta come over till I’m back to normal. Otherwise, I say things that hurt her feelings.”

  Nolan stared at her, bringing her fine face into sharper focus. “How can they do that to us?” he asked at last. “What kind of indigo magic is it?”

  “Pakt would call it the spell of heritage,” Melina said. “Those of us who live in the city have contravened all the social, political, and ethnic laws we were taught from childhood. Anything you learn that young has a sort of mystical hold on you. It’s hard to shake off.” She paused, thought of something, and gave a light laugh. “Did you ever have any low-caste servants working for you? Girls from the swamplands where they have those atrocious nasal accents?”

  “Yes,” said Nolan. “But my mother only hired the ones who had a more cultivated speech. There were vocal coaches, I know, who made a living training low-caste girls to speak like high-caste servants.”

  “Exactly,” Melina said, nodding. “Ours could talk like the Higher Hundred, too. We had one woman who had been employed by my mother since she was about fifteen. She spoke more beautifully than I could. But I happened to be nearby once when her sister and her cousin came up to visit her, both of them talking with that awful swampland accent. In less than a minute, Lelia was talking exactly like them—same inflection, same word choice, same intonation. It was amazing. And I think you and I do the same thing when we’re back with our birth culture. We pick up the accent. We revert.”

  “This seems to go a little deeper than speech,” Nolan said.

  Melina smiled. “It was a metaphor, silly boy. Of course it goes deeper than speech. But you’re also smarter than Lelia, and you can see what’s happening to you. And you can make an effort not to alienate your coworkers who wonder why you’ve suddenly become a snob.”

  That made Nolan look over at her sharply. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Relax. I told everyone you were missing your girlfriend. But that doesn’t mean they won’t notice if the only one you talk to is your blueskin social equal.”

  “Well. Right. What can I—”

  She came to her feet. “We ordered sandwiches to eat in my office. I ordered one for you, and the food’s on the way. Will you join us?”

  “Of course,” Nolan said, standing as well. “Just do what you can to make sure I’m not rude to anyone else.”

  She laid a mock fist against his cheek. “I’ll whop you on the head,” she said affectionately. “Is that subtle enough for you?”

  “Yes, thank you. I’m sure no one else will notice.”

  Everyone but Cerisa was in Melina’s office. Colt and Hiram had managed to pry open two of the windows, so a shredded breath of the fresh spring breeze was able to curl through the stuffy room. The mingled smells of bread, meat, cheese, and onions made Nolan realize how hungry he was.

  “Hey, the hermit’s come out to join us,” Colt greeted him with his usual edged voice. “Have you decided we’re good enough company for you after all?”

  Nolan gave a faint smile. “Sorry,” he said. “Leesa left this morning, and I guess I’m sort of daydreaming.”

  “Nothing like food to take your mind off the lack of sex,” Colt said, and Melina burst out laughing. Nolan felt a moment’s shocked outrage sparkle down his spine, but when he saw Pakt’s grin, he managed a weak smile of his own.

  “I don’t know,” Nolan said. “It would have to be pretty damn good food.”

  “And this isn’t,” Melina said, handing him a sandwich, “but it will have to do.”

  “So tell me,” Pakt said, pulling up a chair. As usual, the two gulden men, Melina, and Nolan had fallen into a small closed group while the others held their own conversations around them. It struck Nolan as strange that this should seem so familiar, these three friends, these three mismatched cohorts. “Melina tells me you were both at this famous ball last night. What really did happen with the guldman?”

  Nolan shot him a quick, uneasy glance, and then looked over at Colt. Pakt seemed genuinely interested; Colt appeared more suspicious.

  “How did you hear about that already?” Melina demanded.

  “Word travels fast,” Colt said tightly.

  Melina shook her head in wonder. “Well. I don’t want to say anything that riles you, but he was the last person any of the indigo expected to s
ee there. And I know Aliria Carvon was merely trying to be shocking, but I think she really was being deliberately cruel, because she should have known that the last place he would be treated with any civility would be a Higher Hundred ball. He didn’t belong there, and the whole evening became awkward because he was there.”

  “I agree he didn’t belong,” Pakt said. “But having brought him there, didn’t she at least owe him some courtesy? As I heard the tale, she abandoned him the minute they came through the door.”

  “An hour or so after they arrived,” Melina corrected. “But yes, she abandoned him. And yes, she treated him badly. And I for one think she got what she deserved.”

  “Hardly,” Colt said in a low voice. “What she deserved was to be killed for deliberate dishonor.”

  “An old code,” Pakt said to him in a gentle voice. “Even in Geldricht, a death over a dishonorable deed is no longer considered honorable in itself.”

  “It is by some,” Colt said.

  “I don’t know about Geldricht,” Melina said, “but in the city, if he’d murdered that girl, he’d have been dead himself inside of fifteen minutes. Would that have made you any happier?” Colt gave her a quick frowning look, for he plainly did not like the question restated in that way. “I would not have been pleased with that outcome, but nothing about the story pleases me,” he said curtly. “She should not have exposed him to humiliation that way.”

  “I agree. She’s a bitch. But he agreed to go with her, and he must have known he wouldn’t be welcome there. What were his motives? Did he think he’d be able to humiliate the Higher Hundred just by showing up at the door? That’s what I think. Which makes me think he may have gotten a little of what he deserved, too.”

  “He in good faith accepted an invitation extended by a woman he presumed to be honorable,” Colt said coldly. “If he—”

  “If I invited you to my mother’s house for the spring holidays,” Melina interrupted, “would you go with me? Knowing what you know about my mother, and my family—and me? Wouldn’t you wonder why I’d invited you? Wouldn’t you think I only brought you along to create a stir in my mother’s house? Wouldn’t that give you a moment’s pause?”

  Colt looked stormy for a moment and then broke into an unexpected, though somewhat alarming, smile. “If I went to your mother’s house,” he said, “she and her sisters would run screaming through the doors, shouting ‘Barbarian!’ ‘Savage!’ ‘Save yourselves!’ ” Colt said disdainfully. “Even if I came with you clinging to my arm.”

  “Exactly,” Melina said. “So why would this guldman expect anything different? He didn’t. He knew what he was in for, and he went anyway. I blame Aliria, but I wonder about him.”

  “It’s the curfew,” Pakt said quietly.

  “What?” the other three said in unison.

  “The curfew,” Pakt repeated. “It’s made all the young guldmen edgy. Spoiling for a fight. I think he was looking forward to having a chance to disrupt an indigo household. I’m just glad it didn’t turn more violent than it did, or we’d be seeing a lot worse than the curfew. We’d be seeing arrests and executions.”

  “Surely not,” Melina said.

  Pakt nodded. “It happened twelve years ago. An altercation on the street. Who knows who said what first? But the indigo girl claimed that the guldman touched her hand. Touched her hand, mind you—he didn’t strike her or hurt her in any way. She screamed assault, and twenty guldmen were rounded up. She chose one at random, for even she admitted she couldn’t identify this man she called her ‘attacker.’ She picked a man, and he was put to death.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Melina said.

  “Ask Cerisa,” Pakt said. “It was her daughter.”

  There was a long moment of silence, while the blueskins contemplated their sandwiches, unable to take another bite, and the guldmen reviewed the bitter past. Melina was the first to recover, shaking her head as if to dislodge a clinging ghost. “But that was twelve years ago,” she said. “So much has changed since then.”

  “Has it?” Colt said.

  “We have made progress, certainly,” Pakt said. “But there is no true equality between races. I have lived long enough to wonder if there ever will be. Not in my lifetime, I’m afraid.”

  “And a guldman may still be arrested for taking a woman by the hand,” Nolan said. “We’ve all seen that. But I don’t think he’d be executed. Not today.”

  “I want to see the day when he isn’t even arrested,” Colt said. “I want to see the day when it doesn’t matter.”

  “You’ll see the day when it happens,” Melina said, in the quietest voice any of them had heard from her. She reached out and laid her fine blue palm over Colt’s large gold hand. None of the rest of them moved; Colt stared at her, unblinking. “But perhaps there won’t ever come a day when it doesn’t matter.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The next day’s lunch was less eventful, and only involved Nolan and Melina. The topic was again the contretemps at Corzehia’s ball, since word of the incident had spread throughout the city. Ariana Bayless’s response had been to extend the curfew by a week—although, to give her credit, she did issue a statement saying that any indigo caught baiting a gulden would be subject to swift arrest.

  “Trying to be neutral,” Melina said, reading over the accounts in the news. She had requested hard copies from both a gulden monitor and an indigo one, saying that was the only way to get a true perspective on events in the city. “But she can’t help but appear to favor the blueskins.”

  Nolan had browsed through the gulden news, utterly fascinated. He had never before had occasion to glance at a gulden monitor, let alone pay for a hard copy to read the pages at leisure. He was surprised to find it printed in dual languages and illustrated with clever, colorful graphics.

  “Why do they print it in two languages?” he asked Melina. “Don’t all the gulden speak goldtongue?”

  “I think it’s a political thing,” she said, glancing up from her own reading. “Proving to any blueskin who takes the trouble to read their news that they can be fair and accurate reporters.”

  “Yes, but, unless we could actually read goldtongue as well, we wouldn’t know if the translation is accurate,” Nolan pointed out.

  Melina laughed. “True. I’ll have to ask Colt. Maybe they’re not so respectable after all.”

  She returned to her reading, so Nolan continued thumbing through his hard copy. Some of the articles merely repeated the city news, of the day, but others reflected a totally different lifestyle than the one he knew. There were listings of athletic and academic accomplishments, in sports and subjects Nolan had never heard of; there were recipes given with ingredients he could not even pronounce. A small box in the corner of the third page noted “Dishonors done,” and gave names and offenses committed by one gulden against another. Nolan read them all, wholly engrossed. Insulted on the street. Word disbelieved. Father mentioned with disrespect. Clan dishonored. A second column across from the offenses listed the status of the event: “settled” or “pending.” Details were not given.

  He kept reading, learning how to make a tolerable red fabric dye from the inferior pigments sold in city stores, and then how to grow some exotic flowering plant in the imperfect lowland climate. He was all the way to the last page of the printout before he got to the small news item about another death in the gulden prison. He knew nothing about the gulden jail except that it was twice the size of the indigo one, so he read the brief article from start to finish.

  “Huh,” he said, as he came to the end. “That’s strange.”

  “I know,” Melina said absently. “Those recipes. Even if you could figure out how to make it, you wouldn’t want to eat it.”

  “No,” Nolan said. “There have been a handful of unexplained deaths at the gulden jail. They think maybe there’s a virus or something.”
>
  Now Melina looked up again. “A handful? How many?”

  “Well, four for sure and one that might have been a virus or might have been the result of a stab wound. The guy was sick before he got knifed,” Nolan explained.

  Melina rolled her eyes. “Well, four people, that’s not an epidemic. I’m sure Cerisa’s watching it, though. Any more people die, she’ll probably send one of us in.”

  “You think she knows about it?”

  “Cerisa knows everything. She reads the gulden monitors every day. It’s where I picked up the habit.”

  “I wonder if—” Nolan began, but he didn’t have a chance to finish the thought. They were hailed by a lovely indigo woman with waist-length black hair and enormous blue eyes. Melina jumped to her feet to give the newcomer a hug and make quick introductions. Nolan smiled politely, but prepared to depart without attempting to make conversation.

  “I’ll tell Pakt you’ll be a few minutes late,” he said to Melina. “See you back at the lab.”

  He meant to ask Colt or Pakt about the translations in the newspaper, but he never got a chance. When he returned to the office, Varella and Hiram and Sochin were huddled together, gazing fearfully down the hall toward Cerisa’s closed door. Nolan could catch the sound of raised voices but no distinct words.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” he demanded.

  “Something to do with Colt,” Varella said. “Cerisa’s furious.”

  “Is Pakt in there, too?”

  “Yes, but he didn’t look too happy either.”

  They knew nothing more by the time Melina returned, ten minutes later, but on her advice they all scattered to their own offices before Cerisa found them eavesdropping in the hall. So none of them could see exactly what happened when Cerisa’s door was flung open and angry footsteps went stomping down the hall. They heard Pakt call out, “No, wait!” and they heard the cool, liquid tones of Cerisa’s voice saying, “Don’t even try to stop him.”