“Give him my best.”
Tast’annin let the man hold the door for him. Outside, the deep indigo light that demarcated evening gleamed above the pagodas and spires of Cherubim. The rasa stared up to where the central Quincunx Dome curved, a great gleaming black hand cupped over the sleeping city. He raised his own hand in imitation, palm down, and turned away.
“Good night, Sajur.”
“Good night, Margalis,” the Architect Imperator called softly. He raised his hand in farewell, but the rasa did not look back.
Shiyung winced as the eyra screamed again. She had miscalculated something in the final stage of the great cat’s compressed gestation. When she pulled it from the vat the epidermal layer of its skull had not completely formed, and the pink skin had sloughed from it like icing from a too-warm cake. The creature lay at her feet, shrieking, while nucleic starter pooled around it. Delicately she lifted one foot and stepped over the steaming liquid, reached down and gently prodded its chin. Its screams became a dull moan, and then silence.
“Damn.”
It was the third one that day. Shiyung was impatient and had difficulty waiting the correct amount of time when indulging her hobby. Now she turned and walked to the door, sidestepping other damp places on the floor of her laboratory. “Me-suh,” she called softly. “Me-suh, I think I’m finished for today.”
Her replicant assistant appeared, a copper woman with snaky hair and a pronounced list to one side. Robotic engineering had been an earlier passion of Shiyung’s. “I’m going to try another breed of big cat tomorrow, Me-suh. Maybe a tiger. I think there’s something wrong with this strain.”
Me-suh bowed, her bad shoulder scraping the wall, and headed for the dead cougar. With a sigh Shiyung started upstairs.
The message chamber showed a call from Nike, her sister yawning as she mumbled something about a ruined inquisition. Shiyung grimaced and replayed it, then went through the other calls until she found one from Âziz.
“—thought I’d tell you first it’s nothing, absolutely nothing ,” Âziz’s aggrieved voice scraped through the air. “An idiot morphodite, she’s been detained of course, but of course there are all these rumors now, and then there was that explosion on Archangels, so I think we’d better—”
Shiyung rolled her eyes, switched off her sister’s peevish voice, and went into her bedroom. Another great cat, a caracal, sprawled upon the bed, like ghee poured upon the black coverlet. It meowed throatily when it saw Shiyung. Shiyung wrinkled her nose as she pushed it to the floor: really, she needed a less fulsome hobby. But the rewards of bioengineering were greater than those of robotics. She couldn’t control the actions of her great cats and half-human creations, and she derived a perverse satisfaction from that. As the youngest of the Orsinate, Shiyung had always prided herself on being unpredictable—refusing to use human servers; taking the side of the moujiks during the Medifac Insurgency when she was only nine years old; attending mass at the Church of Christ Cadillac and even driving one of their ancient vehicles into the flaming wall during the sect’s communion rites. In the last few months she had been fascinated by what she heard of an eerie new cult formed by the rasas, and she had even entertained thoughts of having another natural child. She would be more careful this time, and choose a father whose genotype was not so similar to hers. It was a shame that baby had been deformed, but at least the Children of Mercy had been glad to have it, if only for a little while.
It would be interesting, she thought, to have a living child. Children were so spontaneous. Her great cats and geneslaves were beautiful but lacked that element of uncertainty, their wild instincts bred out of them centuries before.
“Right, Bast?” she murmured, stroking the caracal’s proud jaw. Someone had told her once that she looked like a panther, a biotech she’d slept with during Æstival Tide.
“Green eyes and a cruel jaw and velvet hands,” the woman had whispered to her over a hubble-bubble on the beach. Shiyung had to look up the word and its image to see what a panther was, but after that she began toying with the genus Felidae in her laboratory. For a little while the biotech had assisted her, but then she’d grown rather too demanding and Shiyung had her put with the other Chosen during the Hecatombs.
But Shiyung’s passion for predators remained. She’d filled her chambers with caracals and ocelots and servals, and was disappointed when they didn’t kill the birds and squirrels she made for them. Then for a while she’d gone in for canines, jackals and fennecs and even an aardwolf, technically a different strain but so unusual. But the cats still offered the most visually pleasing effects, and recently she’d begun to try to revive their aggressive instincts, with mixed results.
“Ah, Bast,” whispered Shiyung, pulling the caracal back beside her. She reached for one of the camphor cigarettes kept in a silver holder at her bedside. As she lit it a bell chimed and the foyer scholiast’s voice echoed, “You have a visitor.”
Shiyung exhaled. The caracal sneezed and slid from the bed, taking the woolen comforters with her. “Who is it?”
“The Aviator Imperator Margalis Tast’annin.”
Shiyung smoked in silence for another minute. Finally she said, “Show him in, please.” She put out her cigarette and crossed to her armoire. She had just dropped her laboratory robes and stood before the mirror in a white silk chemise when Tast’annin appeared in the door.
“Forgive me, Margravine. I’ll wait until you’re dressed.”
Without glancing at him Shiyung pulled a flannel kimono from the wardrobe and shrugged into it. “Oh, please, Margalis, I think we’re past all that now. Especially now.”
She turned. She was alone with him for the first time since she’d pulled his brain from the crucible and begun the complicated procedure of bonding it to its metal form. He wore not the NASNA Aviator’s uniform but a simple robe of black jacquard. As he entered the room she glimpsed glints of white and crimson light glowing within the silken folds. “Thank you for seeing me, Shiyung.”
She sank into a chair near the curtained window and regarded him critically. It was unsettling to hear that hollow voice echoing from a mouthless mask. “It’s late, isn’t it? Although of course you don’t get tired now. Not that you ever slept very well.”
He shrugged. The robe rippled along his shoulders and she saw the sleek line of metal there, melting into the crimson curve of his neck. “Sleep. It’s interesting that you should mention sleep—may I sit?—because it is a dream that brought me here.”
“How interesting.” She motioned at the bed. The rasa sat. At his feet the caracal blinked, then growled softly, and Shiyung smiled with false ingenuousness. “I had no idea that rasas could dream.”
“Not my dream. Âziz’s.”
“Ah.” Shiyung made a chucking sound and the caracal curled at her side. “I heard about that. Âziz called me. Oh, Me-suh—”
The server appeared in the doorway. “Some iced vitro for me. Margalis?”
For a moment his translucent eyes flickered from gray to dark blue. He said, “No, thank you.”
“Of course, forgive me—you have no mouth.” Shiyung wrinkled her nose and covered her face, a naughty child stifling a laugh. When the server returned with the tumbler of blue ice she sipped it, staring at the rasa through slitted eyes. After a few minutes she leaned forward and asked conspiratorially, “So tell me, Margalis: what is it like? Is it different, really? Can you still feel things? I mean—”
She gestured at her thighs with one slender hand, pulled aside her kimono. “Like that, what’s it like now?”