The second platform grew crowded. “Smile!” Tomov ordered, each time she forgot. They danced; occasionally they sat together, striking graceful poses and sipping pastel drinks. They stood at the balustrade, looking out over the boiling main floor. Celebrants hopped and swayed in a glory of color. “They look like insects,” she said. “Poisoned into convulsions, kicking their legs, twitching their feelers.”
Tomov shot a disturbed glance at her.
Again they danced. A mech approached and Tomov redoubled his efforts. His eyes were wide and staring, his skin gleamed with sweat, his mouth pulled up in a frozen confident grin. He danced with desperate energy, and she followed him easily.
She laughed, and he hissed, jerking his head at the mech. The crowd had fallen back, giving Tomov room for his exertions. The mech dropped down beside them as Tomov handed her through one more twirl.
“Chosen,” it said.
They both reached for the token it held; it put the token in her hand. Tomov looked stricken, but a moment later there was a token for him. His eyes glittered. “I want to be there when you’re crowned,” he said. “And after.”
“Oh, yes,” she said.
On the third level the faces were less predatory, perhaps because many of the celebrants were former Fashion Gods, down from the aeries to mingle with the handsomest candidates of the season. The music was sweeter, more intense. A greater sense of ease prevailed on the third platform, though it did not extend to Tomov; he was gray with expectation.
The night grew late. She swam effortlessly through this more exclusive ocean. She saw the moon set. She looked up at the tall narrow towers where the Fashion Gods lived. The towers were threads of black against the starfields, rising above Arcimor’s back like a thousand masts; at the top of each burned a pale lamp.
She finally found herself dancing alone in a cloud of small gleaming godeyes, the remote sensors through which most of the tower dwellers watched. They dipped and swooped, following her movements, more and more of them, hundreds of them. A long time later she stopped, the godeyes so thick she could see nothing through their golden glittering blaze.
There was a ceremony; suffocating cheers, the embrace of the Old God, the conferring of a pair of mech bodyguards. She was introduced to a small, neat, exquisitely mannered man who was to be her majordomo. Then her hand was thrust into a machine, and the key to her tower implanted in a bone. She felt a trickle of blood at her wrist.
She was the Fashion Goddess.
The evening merged into morning. Many of the revelers went out to the wall and the waiting sea.
Madeira leaned on the balustrade, watching them leap. Tomov stood across the pavilion, and she could feel his uneasiness. Several times in the last hour, he had approached her and been turned away by her mech guards. Each time she had contrived to look somewhere else.
The first rays of sunlight flickered across the pavilion. “Come,” she said to her majordomo. “Take me home.”
She went to the dropshaft, convoyed by the mechs. Tomov trailed uncertainly behind, a wretched smile fixed on his face.
On the main floor, he trotted after her. “Ammon,” he called, his voice bright and strained. She walked on. When she reached the security lock of her tower, Tomov had managed to close the gap, so that he again seemed part of her party.
The majordomo bowed deeply, and indicated the staff with one elegant gloved hand. She mounted the steps to the lock and the servants stepped back, bowing.
Tomov made as if to follow, but the mechs stopped him. When he tried to force his way past, they gave him a jolt of electropain that raised his hair into a wild cloud. He fell and rolled, howling. Madeira turned and laughed.
Tomov got to his feet, shoulders sagging, empty and small.
She looked past him to see Binter, watching from the darkness of a service hatch. He was so ugly, so shockingly ugly. She shuddered and looked away.
Later she would think of many things she might have done. But she was frozen into her pose and her thoughts had slowed and stuck fast in that long moment of triumph. Tomov turned and shuffled off to the seawall, and then Binter was gone too. The mech she sent after Binter returned alone.
She shut the door to her chambers at the top of the aerie, and leaned against it. The Flesh Tinker was there, standing by the arches that led out to the terrace. He turned in a swirl of glittering blue, and fixed burning eyes on her. “So,” he said, in that dark voice. “The fool is dead. Your revenge is complete?”
“Yes,” she said.
The Flesh Tinker looked at her, eyes narrowing. “That’s good. I suppose. But now, time to go!”
She shrank back against the door. “I’m the Fashion Goddess!”
The Flesh Tinker’s face chilled. “You made a bargain.” The potent voice had dropped an octave, was now an inhuman rumble. “You made a bargain; do you now tell me that you wish to dally about here, performing the same meaningless antics you despised in your enemy? You truly want to live in this terrible city?”
Madeira was pinned under the Flesh Tinker’s hot magenta gaze. The ancient face quaked with warring emotions.
Her voice seemed to have gone where she could not find it.
"Do you know why you do this? Why you boil and ferment, endlessly unsatisfied, cutting throats for the tiniest edge in grace? And when beauty fades a little, or you lose at the game of Musical Friends once too often, then it’s off to the wall. Hi ho!”
He loomed over her, quivering, lips drawn back over strong white teeth. Spittle gleamed on his chin. She tried to turn away, but he moved with frightening speed to block her. “Listen! You will listen! Arcimor is a profit-making venture of Seed Corporation. Arcimor exports fashion. Ah! Can you imagine? Vast numbers of plain women will commit hideous heartless deeds to get a fraction of the beauty you wore last night. The notion beggars even my imagination. You really didn’t see the men with the cameras? The three clumsy ones with the tasseled windowcaps and damask elfboots?” He laughed wildly. “No. Of course not! They were gauche beyond words — invisible.”
She huddled away from him.
He spoke on, his voice deeper and colder still. “Your city was built for one purpose — to breed people who care for nothing but finery. Your fashions are sold on a thousand pangalac worlds. And a profitable trade it is.”
He pushed his terrible face close to hers and his voice dropped into an intimate whisper. “It pleases me to people the worlds with my own standard of beauty, ‘Ammon Tiyado.’ In a few years, her face will be everywhere I go, once again, sweet to my old eyes. A lovely prank, eh?” The Flesh Tinker drew a deep breath. “Worthy of her memory.”
His face was for once impassive, composed, the eyes unseeing. “Such beauty is irresistible. You couldn’t lose; had you worn a wool bag to the ball, you would be the Goddess now. Your part is ended, child. No one will notice or care if you are never seen again. New-made Gods often go to the wall, their purpose exhausted. Get away, while you can. Do you imagine that the Fashion Gods lead delectable lives in their aeries? Do you? Every year a little older, a little less beautiful — what a fitting torment for men and women who live only for beauty. ”
She pressed her hands over her ears, and this time he did not hinder her from running away, into the inner rooms.
Before the sun was high, she took her mechs and went to look for Binter.
The storeroom was unoccupied, with a palpable air of abandonment, and she was suddenly sure that Binter had gone to the wall. She ran through the waterline corridors, her eyes blind with tears, to ask the men with the barbed poles to look for his body. But they thought she was a night person, with her beauty and her mech guards, and they fled in terror. She trotted from port to port, looking out at the dead who floated there, but she could not find him among the thousands.