Belacqua typed and typed and typed. Finally, he spoke, on the day they saw the dead woman’s skull emerge like new land rising from the sea.
“Sergeant Tomek, I believe we can safely say that she received the markings on her back pre-mortem. Time of death could not have been sooner than six days before you discovered her.”
“And how do you know this, Detective Inspector?”
“If she had been killed later, we would have found the poor girl already turning orange at the edges, or worse. I detected then no discoloration nor any scent nor a lizard nor the sound of seagulls. Unfortunately for us, it could have been any number of days greater than six and we would not know it unless we could somehow kill something else and record its progress. Also when I cut into her, the body produced a quantity of pearls, whereas no pearls were found beside her on the road to Nowhere. Additionally, the gore of my cut shows a distinctly different shade of ultramarine than the carving on her back. Someone wrote patience on her while she yet lived, Tomek, and listened to her anguish, and did not stop.”
“It is dreadfully morbid,” the sergeant sighed. He laid a reverent hand on the delicate foot-bones of the body.
“On the contrary, my boy, it is science, and we have done it! Nothing could be more exciting than discovering, as we have done, that a set of rules lay in place of all eternity without us suspecting them. I assure you these are not the stages of mortal decomposition.” Belacqua hurried on before Tomek could wonder how he knew anything about living corpses, and uncover his illicit pursuit of fiction. “This is new. It is ours. It is native to Nowhere. No one else in all the yawning pit of time has ever known what you and I know now. We are, finally, unique. And now we two unique fellows must proceed further on, farther in, and re-compose this woman. Her name, her history, her associates, her enemies. What happened to her a fortnight ago, and how?” The detective frowned. “Perhaps we ought to interrogate the lizard.”
In its green glass bottle, the pale reptile hissed. It stuck out its blue tongue. The glass fogged with its breath. It said one word, and then steamed away like water.
Virtue.
PIETTA HAS BECOME a birdwatcher. She leaves Awo and Savonarola often to trail silently after the strigils as they move through the city. They are so unlike her. They wear clothes of many colors; they are always busy; they eat. They live in a different Nowhere than she does, one with automats and social clubs and places to be. She makes a study of them. This would be easier if she could bring herself to trade her colored glass or her belt or her scissors for one of Awo’s pens or the paper a tall man with very clean teeth wants to sell her, but she cannot. She does not know yet why they are precious, but she knows she doesn’t want to give them away, to let them become separate from her forever. She is not ready. So she must try to remember the birds she sees. Osprey. Oriole. Peregrine. Sparrow. Sandpiper. Ibis. Pelican. Starling. Raven. Heron. They are beautiful and they do not see her. To them, she is not Pietta. She is no one. She is blue, like the others, and blindered, like the others, and the only thing she can ever do to catch their attention, to bring their eyes down onto her, is to sin, to commit a crime, to err. When the man with clean teeth tries to steal her glass, the birds come. They smell, absurdly, like expensive perfume, like the counter in a fashionable shop. Their feathers rustle when they move like pages turning. They have no irises. Their voices are very nearly human. A woman with the head of an owl cuts away the sleeve of the man’s robe. Now everyone will know he is bad. Pietta is fascinated. But she is afraid to do anything very bad herself.
She meets Awo and Savonarola in a cloister fifteen years after they first drank wine together out of a barrel. It is a round room in the Largitio Quarter, with a high, domed ceiling, full of grand, tall tables set with empty bowls, safe from the wind and the slow, trudging lights on the mountain. Pietta longs to eat. She is never hungry, but she remembers the feeling of eating. Of tasting. A few dozen blue-ragged souls pool their objects on a table, picking and sorting. They are trying to assemble a chess set, though fights have broken out already over whether a pepper pot or a bone whistle or pocket Slovakian dictionary makes a better king. Nothing in Nowhere is important, so nothing is more important than the pepper pot and the whistle and the dictionary. Pietta watches them and imagines the players as birds. She hates chess. Savonarola agrees, though he plays anyway.
“Chess allows the frivolous to pretend their toys have deep meaning. The only honest game is tag,” he grouses, while taking an exquisitely-chinned teenaged girl’s queen. Both the sleeves have been torn from her dress.
“What are the strigils?” Pietta asks.
Savonarola snorts. “Where I come from they’re dull blades you use to scrape the sweat and grime from your back in a bath-house. Not that I ever used a bath-house, a seething puddle of greased sin. Not that I haven’t scoured the breadth of Nowhere for a damned bath.”
Awo has enough sewing needles to man her entire side, pawns and all. She sticks them upright in the soft wood of the table, two neat silver rows. “He can’t tell you. His theology was far too prim and tidy to contain bird-headed men in trenchcoats. I can’t tell you either. But if you suppose there are demons in one place and angels in the other, wouldn’t you also suppose something has to live here? Something has to be natural to Nowhere.”
“They came when the first people arrived,” says the girl with the lovely chin. She moves her knight (a mechanical library stamp). “And Nowhere was only an empty plain without a city. They are meant to make this place somewhat less than a Hell, and to keep us from making a Heaven of it.”
“How do you know that?” Savonarola snaps.
The girl shrugs. “I asked one. When I got arrested for writing my name a thousand times over the entrance to Benevolentia Sector. She had a wren’s face. She said they were formed not from clay like us nor fire nor light but from the stuff of the void on the face of the world, and they had not the breath of life but the heat of life and the fluid of it, and they had a beginning but no end, an alpha and an ellipsis, and then she drank my wine and said I was pretty and the truth was she didn’t remember very much more about being born than I did and she read all that off a historical plaque on the upper levels, but strigils have to keep up appearances, and they wouldn’t be worth much if we thought they were stuck here just like us only they didn’t even know how it happened to them, only what they had to do, so if you ask me, talking to a strigil is not so useful as you’d expect, and they drink a lot. Checkmate.”
That night, Pietta goes to be with Savonarola, because everything is the same and everything is nothing and what is the point of not doing anything now?