“We missed you at Nike’s inquisition last night,” she said. As she spoke the coder in her throat pulsed violet and orange—last season’s accessory, still affected by members of the Toxins Cabal who claimed the coders helped them focus on the subtleties of the poisons they designed. The lurid colors made Ceryl’s head ache. She rubbed her temples distractedly and glanced over her shoulder at the body in the rickshaw. Tatsun ignored her pained expression and added, “It was lovely, there was a new morph there who obviously had never scryed for the margravines before—she was so awful it was funny, Âziz and I laughed and laughed! And that awful Rudyard Planck was there with one of his new generation of puppets, aren’t they just awful ? He gave me this one,” she added with a smug grin. The puppet continued to stare at Ceryl, working its mouth so that its long white tongue slid lewdly in and out between evil little teeth.
Ceryl sighed loudly. This was the second inquisition she’d missed this week. Soon there would be talk. But she couldn’t tell the others about her nightmare, the vision night after night of the dome cracked like a limpet’s shell and the sea burrowing into it like a huge green tongue. She looked up to see Tatsun gazing disapprovingly at the dead moujik girl, her aardman carrier staring into space.
“You’re timoring,” Tatsun said, a little primly. She had recently joined the Disciples of Blessed Narouz’s Refinery, a sect that, unlike many others—the First Church of Christ Cadillac the Daughters of Graves—frowned upon timoring and its attendant horrors. “Is that why you weren’t at the dream inquisition?”
Flushing, Ceryl shrugged. The puppet cackled gleefully, slunk to Tatsun’s other shoulder, and raising one leg squirted some acrid-smelling liquid into the air. The aardman snarled. Tatsun scolded the puppet and looked again down at Ceryl, frowning.
“Nice shoes,” Ceryl said at last. She started to ask about the dream inquisition, but the puppet’s leering eyes stopped her. She put her hand on the edge of the rickshaw door. “I’d better go—I just needed some air, that’s all.”
Tatsun shook her head. The puppet hissed, “Let her rot! Go, let’s go —” Tatsun whispered something to the aardman, who tightened his grip about her, turned, and began to stride off. As they disappeared around the curving avenue Tatsun called back to Ceryl, “Âziz is hosting a reception after the Investiture. Next week. In the Four Hundredth Room.”
“I’ll be there,” Ceryl sighed.
“You’d better be,” the puppet said, giggling wildly. In a moment they were gone.
Ceryl rubbed her forehead. It ached again, as it usually did after she had been to a timoring, or after a . night full of bad dreams. She was uneasy now: it had been a bad idea to skip the inquisition.
From the front of the rickshaw the driver cleared his throat. Ceryl looked up. “Sorry.” She clambered in beside the girl’s corpse, grimacing. “Bring me back down to Principalities—”
The rickshaw driver nodded and headed for the gravator. Once inside, the rickshaw jounced as the transportation chamber moved, the worn-out gears turning with a deafening squeal as they dropped, level by level. Ceryl winced and covered her ears. The narrow windows darkened as the chamber passed through Dominations, Virtues, Powers. When the doors opened on Principalities, the rickshaw shuddered out onto an avenue in such disrepair that some of its sidewalk plates bounced up behind them, jangling like broken glass. A hazy crimson light suffused everything, rising from the refineries on Archangels. Here on Principalities there was the stench to contend with as well. Peering through the slats at the rickshaw driver, Ceryl saw that he had pulled a mask over his face. Ceryl covered her nose and coughed. Kef smoke, burning rubber, rancid oil, and fenugreek. Over all a thick smell of the abattoir, of death and blood and singed hair; the smell of the medifacs.
“There—” Ceryl called out, choking, to the driver. “Stop there by that bonfire—”
Around the sputtering blaze a half-dozen moujiks were gathered, toasting something on twisted metal skewers and smoking kef. Ceryl gestured at them, pointing at the seat beside her as she leaned over to open the door. As she did so they ran to the cab, pushing her aside as their hands swarmed over the corpse, gabbling in their harsh patois. Ceryl leaned rigidly against the seat, gasping as the last one darted from the cab and followed the others toward the bonfire, all of them clicking their tongues excitedly.
“Now what?” the rickshaw driver sighed as she slammed the door shut. He looked at her wearily through the slats, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth stained red from chewing betel. Ceryl twisted a strand of hair around her finger, glanced up at the Nuclear CLOCK suspended from the Central Quincunx Dome. After eighteen already. She’d skip returning to Thrones, go directly to the vivariums.
“Back to Dominations, I guess,” she sighed. “To my workchambers.”
The rickshaw driver spat and yawned, then hitched up his poles and began pulling the rickshaw toward the gravator.
Obviously not everyone had heard of the disaster with last week’s diplomat: several biotechs solicited the gynander on her way to Dominations. Reive turned them down, hoping to find a more affluent patron from a higher level. Finally she consented to the demands of a plum-skinned young man wearing the pink fez and white skirts of the Disciples of Blessed Narouz’s Refinery. He made several lewd suggestions, touching Reive’s penis lightly with a finger. She shook her head—
“We are celibate,” she said somewhat curtly. Gynanders were sexually immature. They sometimes enjoyed passionate friendships with each other or were adopted by lustful patrons. Otherwise they avoided sensual attachments.
“A reading then—here—” The young man fumbled in the pockets of his loose white skirt and finally came up with a parchment card, imprinted in yellow ink with an invitation to a party that evening on Cherubim Level. “I’ll give you this, I can’t go—”
When Reive nodded he took her hand, small and pale and limp as her penis, and kissed her palm. Then he recited his dream in low urgent tones.
Reive listened, eyes closed. The young man finished and fell silent. She breathed deeply, letting his dream speak to her in its own words. From very far away she heard a strange plink… plink… plink, as of water dripping. When she slipped her hand from the boy’s and brought it to her face she could smell, very faintly, the refined petroleum used in Blessed Narouz’s rites. The young man stared at her eagerly.
“There is a small melanoma within your brain,” she began. “That is the symbolism of the burrowing worm. The girl with no eyes means that you will be refused treatment, because of your affiliation with the new cult. To prevent suffering we would suggest you offer yourself to the medifacs.” She heard him stifle a gasp. “We are sorry,” she added gently. She got to her feet, reaching for the parchment invitation. The young man snatched it away, cursing, and Reive turned and fled. As she ran down the corridor leading to the vivariums she heard him shrieking after her.
The Architects had left the entry to the vivariums unchanged for many years. Reive disliked it—an immense doorway of black resin, shaped like the head of an aardman with protuberant crimson eyes and fearsome teeth. She passed through its open mouth, beneath the archway where the motto of the Orsinate Ascendancy had been etched in looming block letters.
PAULO MAIORA CANAMUS!
The motto of the Second Ascension, the deranged Governors who had created the first generation of geneslaves, and released the horrors of the viral microphages across the continents. A psycholinguist in the pleasure cabinet had translated it for Reive one night after an inquisition.