Back | Next
Contents

Gutter Ballet

Christopher Ruocchio

The girl was less than human, anyone with eyes could see. Still, the shape of her was persuasive, all leg and graceful lines. She moved like water, flowing over the cracked tiles of the office. Still, Simon could sense the tension in her, the nervousness betrayed by the way she held her head and the rapid darting of her eyes as she hurried to take in drab walls, the exposed pipes, the low glow of the sconces, the peeling opera posters. The false moonlight fell through the oval windows behind Simon’s desk, and the glare of neon cut the eye where the sign for the off-station imports shop blinked its wanton promise into the night.

“You Mr. Fabray?” the girl asked. “The door said I could come down.”

Had he forgotten to close up for the night? Damn.

“That’s right, madam.” Simon took his feet off the desk, shrugged his coat closed over his chest. The lights from his implant would not draw so much as a second glance here on Hyadon, but he was still enough the empire-man to feel shame and still even horror at the metal thing socketed to his chest. “And I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come back tomorrow. It’s late.” His eyes flickered to the half-empty glass of cheap spirits on the desk by the hilt of his sword. He’d been about to go for dinner.

The air seemed to go out of the girl then. Her shoulders slumped, and her hair—rich black and smoother than oil—fell across her lovely face. Simon studied her, sure he’d been right. She wasn’t human. She looked like one of the odalisques who languished in the courts of the great princes of Jadd. Her face was like graven marble, her features too perfect, too symmetrical; her skin too white and without blemish. She wasn’t a machine, of that at least he was sure. She was a homunculus, grown and tailored cell by cell, her body built for—well, it wasn’t gentlemanly to speculate.

“I don’t suppose…” Her eyes flickered to his face—amber and very, very large. They flicked away again. “Sir, it’s my sister. I think she’s been killed.”

Damn. Simon raised a hand to his eyes and sat forward, shoving the half-filled glass of spirits away, its contents sloshing on the surface, distorting and scattering the images projected in the dark glass. Letting his hand fall, he said, “What’s your name?”

The girl rallied almost at once, pressed her lips together as she lifted her head and squared those alabaster shoulders beneath the translucent plastic poncho she wore over her dress. “Eirene,” she said.

“Just Eirene?” Simon asked. It was an Imperial name, but her accent was all native to Hyadon, all Extrasolarian.

“Just Eirene,” she echoed, and taking in a breath added, as though she had almost forgotten it, “My sisters call me Nines.”

Simon blinked at her. “Serial number?”

“I’m sorry?” She took a step back. “Oh. Yes.” She made a gesture as if to remove the synthetic poncho, seemed to think better of it. “My sisters and I…we’re dancers. Part of a dancing company—Madame Vigran’s. Do you know it?” Her amber eyes darted to the opera posters on the wall opposite the exposed plumbing.

Simon shook his head. “Why don’t you take a seat?” He gestured to the chair opposite, and, pausing long enough to remove the poncho, she took the offered seat. Simon said nothing, only studied the girl as she perched herself on the very lip of the seat. She hardly moved. Even though distress etched itself like acid on her white face, her poise never faltered. He wondered how much of her dancer’s training was genetic, the result of RNA indoctrination and not years of careful practice.

She was struggling to find her words. It was a look he knew well. In this line of work he’d found for his second life, Simon Fabray was always seeing people on the worst days of their lives—or the day before it. This was one of the latter cases, he could tell. She’d said it herself, and said it again a moment later. “I think my sister’s been killed.”

Think. Her worst day was coming, then, would arrive when she knew. There was always the chance the girl was alive, but on Hyadon Station, missing meant dead. If you were worth enough to ransom, the people expected to pay would know about it, and if you weren’t, well…most people were worth less than the organs that kept them running.

“Why’d you come to me?” he asked when at last the silence stretched to breaking.

Nines’ perfect face twisted into a frown. “You help people.”

“I’m a detective,” he said. “For those as can’t afford the bigger sec firms.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but you help people. I hear stories, Mister Fabray. About what you did for the Sisters of Mercy. About the Natalists Guild. They say you’re a knight. From the empire.”

“I was a knight. Once,” Simon countered, hand going to the iron thing crouched where his heart used to be. “That was a long time ago.” The girl bit her lip, an affecting gesture, even through her distress. Simon chewed his own tongue a moment before asking, “What’s her name?”

Nines blinked. “What?”

“Your sister,” Simon said. “Another homunculus, is she?”

The girl flinched. “I…yes, sir. Her name was…is Maria.” With that, she reached into the bodice of her dress and fished out an ivory cameo the size of a gold hurasam. She pulled the chain from around her exquisite neck and set the pendant on the table between them.

The two mirrored faces repelled one another as Simon opened the cameo to reveal the projector concealed behind the carved motif of nymphs and flowers. A cone of faint, white light streamed forth, and within it the image of more than a dozen women stood arm-in-arm and bowed before lifting their faces, smiling at unheard applause. Each was pale as the woman opposite him, each black of hair, each amber eyed, skinny but not androgynous, perfect in every way. Each wore matching red leotards cut to emphasize the sculpted shape of hip and thigh, and each girl’s face had been starkly painted after the fashion of all stage performers to emphasize the hard line of cheekbone and jaw.

The image froze, seventeen girls all smiling matching smiles.

“That’s her,” the girl called Nines said, poking her finger through the holograph of the girl third from the right. Simon could hardly tell them apart, though they were not quite identical.

“How long has she been missing?” he asked, trying to decide which of the girls in the image was the one seated in his dark office.

Eirene cleared her throat. “Three days.”

“She’s dead,” Simon said, and regretted his words as the girl’s shoulders collapsed. Her attention momentarily diverted, he dragged the hilt of his old sword across the desktop and vanished it into a pocket of his coat. Better not to leave the weapon lying around. It was an Imperial weapon, a knight’s weapon, and the last thing he wanted was her asking questions. Hearing the girl sniff, he said, “I’m sorry. But if it’s been this long, she’s floating in one of the canals.”

The homunculus clenched her tailored jaw. “I know that’s probably true, Mr. Fabray. Really, I know it. I just want to know what happened to her.”

“And you didn’t go to your owner? What’s her name?”

“Madame Vigran?” The girl’s eyes went very wide. “Oh, no, sir.” Again she bit her lip, hands twisting in her lap. “Maria was seeing a boy. Some sailor. She never told us his name. Madame Vigran would have had her caned if she knew.”

Leaning over his desk, Simon dragged the glass back toward himself and lifted it to drink. “She know now?”

“I mean…she knows Maria is missing, but we haven’t told her about the boy.” Nines had grown, if anything, even paler. “She’d have us all caned for keeping it a secret. She’s very hard on us.” The dancer ducked her head. “We’d not be living were it not for her. We owe her honesty. Owe her everything. It’s only that Maria was so…so happy. With her sailor, I mean. I didn’t want to take that from her. None of us did. And now she’s…” She choked, held a hand to her mouth and shut her eyes.

His glass drained, Simon shut the cameo, extinguishing the image of the ballerinas.

“It isn’t your fault, miss,” he said, trying to soothe her. From the way her shoulders tightened, Simon guessed that he’d failed. “You and your sisters: You’re clones, aren’t you?”

Letting her hand drop, Nines nodded stiffly.

“Are you clones of her?”

The homunculus nodded again, and a moment later. “Yes.”

“I see.”

“She was a great dancer, in her day. From one of the great Mandari companies. We keep her legacy alive,” she smiled, and the light of it cut sharper than the neon through the oval windows behind Simon’s desk. “I think it’s wonderful. Don’t you?”

Simon touched his implant at the thought of something being kept alive, and grimaced. He’d been a corpse when Basil brought him to Hyadon Station and paid for the machine whose burning candle replaced his ruined heart. The Extrasolarian machine—forbidden in the empire—had saved his life, had kept him alive, but it came with a cost. He could never go home. With his false heart burning in his chest, his people would stone him for abomination.

There was something to be said for death, for letting things go.

For letting things end.

That was just the problem with these Extras. Mother Earth and Evolution intended man to live his day and die, but there were lengths men might obtain in defiance of natural order, prolonging life. Some were wholesome, such as porphyrogenesis practiced by the lords of the empire, but most were not. Among the Extras, men carved out their brains and placed them in bodies of metal or jars of clear glass; or filled their bodies with unholy machines to replace their failing organs. There were whispers that some among the bonecutters in the city traded in new bodies entire—though Simon did not believe it—while others…

“I’m going to ask you just one question, miss,” Simon said, and again the girl’s posture stiffened, ready for flight. She chewed her lip, waiting. “What makes you think she didn’t kill your sister?”

Nines blinked. “Madame Vigran?” The girl shook her head furiously, her silken hair floating about her face. “No! Why? Never!” She almost laughed. “Why would she?”

Her confusion was itself almost funny. Like a bird so used to its cage it has mistaken the gilt bars for sunlight in an open sky, the girl who was not quite a girl could not see the truth when it was staring her plain in her gene-sculpted face. He laughed then, a harsh, rough sound, loud and unkind. “You’re spare parts, girl! A walking organ bank—you and your sisters. It’s not just her legacy you’re keeping alive. It’s her.”

Eirene stood so sharply she knocked the chair to the ground. She stepped back, nearly fell. Simon lurched to his feet, though he stood no chance of reaching her in time. But Eirene righted herself, skipping back several steps. “You can’t be serious!” she exclaimed. “Madame Vigran would never do that!”

“Then why are you halfway round the ring talking to some old guy in the hydroponics district?” he said. “You knew all along, girl. Don’t lie to me. Your Madame wouldn’t be the first to keep a harem of organ donors. It’s practically a cliché about you Extras where I come from. You had to know.”

The girl Eirene was silent, stood hugging herself beyond the overturned chair. Through the windows at Simon’s back, a light flared as the drive-glow of a flier slid past as set the panes to rattling. Though her lip trembled, she held herself still as any queen.

Simon crossed his arms, did not regain his seat. Though he’d risen to try and help her, he stayed standing to face her down, counting on his size and patrician scars to frighten her to speech. “Tell me the truth,” he said.

“I don’t…”

“You want me to kill her? Is that it?” he asked, and took an incongruous step back.

“The Sisters,” Eirene, called Nines, said. “You saved their convent from Yin’s men. You killed Yin.”

Simon’s face was as much a mask as those of the girls on the holograph. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You help people,” the homunculus insisted. “They said you help people.”

“You’re not people,” Simon said, voice cold as the space beyond the station’s superstructure. “And I’m not an assassin. You want one? Go down-spin to Mauvancor. You’ll find no shortage of cutthroats willing to take you on for a hurasam or an hour in a pod hotel with you.”

Eirene’s shoulders slumped, and her whole person seemed to sag like a glacier tumbling into the sea. “I’m not a whore, Mr. Fabray,” she said.

“And I told you,” he said. “I’m not a killer.”

Silence unspooled between them, neither speaking. Neither moved. At length, Simon broke the stalemate, and circling back to his desk collected the short glass and the tall bottle not far from it. He thought better of the glass, and pulling the stopper free tipped the tasteless liquor down his throat. It burned as it went down, and he grimaced at his reflection in the purple light from the window. The white lines of surgical scars shone bright in the dim reflection, half-hidden by the shadow of his ill-shaven beard. After more than a hundred years hard living and his fatal brush with death, his hair was starting to go gray at the roots, and there was a leathern cast to the skin of his face, amplified by the crooked profile of his once-broken nose.

Life is very long, he thought, and asked, “What do you want from me?” His eyes never left his ghostly face in the window glass. “And I mean it, girl. Don’t lie.”

He could see her shape in the glass, too, pale and slight and desperately alone. She didn’t speak at once, and when she did it was in a voice small and hard and brittle as ceramic. “I want to know, Mr. Fabray. I want to know if Madame Vigran killed my sister. I want to know if I and the rest of my sisters are safe, and yes—” She faltered then, but when she pressed forward, it was with a new sharpness, as though that brittle ceramic had shattered and would cut. “If she did it. I want her dead.”

Simon lifted the vodka to his lips again and drank. “I can’t help you.” A small, strangled sound escaped the girl behind him. He half turned, looking back over his shoulder. “I’m not a killer. I told you. You have the wrong man.”

“I need your help,” she said again, voice gone high with strain.

“You have the wrong man,” he said again.

Her reflection snatched up her poncho and turned to go. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

“Girl!” he called after her, conscious of the faint humming in his chest implant.

Eirene stopped.

“If you head up to 117th Street and go left almost to the rim wall, you’ll find a Cid Arthurian temple. The monks will take you in. They might even be able to pay for your way off-station. They can keep you safe.”

Eirene didn’t move for just a second. Then she left without another word.

* * *

The great lamps that served for false suns on Hyadon were all dark by the time Simon hit the streets at last. Steam rose from vents in the street and drifted to mingle with the catwalks and the tubeways that stretched between the towers of the great city—many of them piercing the roof of the world overhead and continuing up toward the empty center of the great ring.

The street rose ahead, the throng and silver serpents of the elevated tramline rising as up the face of a mountain before him. Like so many of the great station-cities of the galaxy, Hyadon was built on a ring, a great hoop three miles in diameter and more than a mile wide. Simon wasn’t sure how many people lived on the ring. It must have been millions, all of them crammed on top of one another, living in insulae, in apartments smaller than the scullery in his father’s manor back home on Varadeto.

His offices were in one of the old industrial zones, just above one of the fisheries whose waters—choked with algae and lotus blossoms—helped support the city’s atmosphere for the millions who called it home. Canals ran beneath the streets that circled the turning ring like inlay on a globe. Hyadon had no formal state, no government as Simon understood it, only shareholders—though often it seemed the plutocrats of Hyadon had only reinvented lordship in their wretched and cutthroat way.

The streets glowed with advertisements, with holographs shimmering, products flashing and chasing would-be customers as they passed glass storefronts and eateries. One shop beside a bakery advertised cerebral implants, while another sold whole-cloth memories—by appointment only. Simon could hardly leave his office—could hardly look out his window—without recalling how foreign he was, and how foreign all Hyadon was to him. Man was meant to live on the skin of a world beneath the open sky. He missed his father’s estate on Varadeto, the olive groves and the mountains marching at the horizon beyond the pampas. The old house would have been his, in time.

If he’d but lived.

The Mandari noodle shop was wedged beneath an office tower that pierced the roof of the ring and continued out into space. Simon clattered down the steps to the basement level and into the smoky shop. The man behind the counter grunted at him and bobbed his head, and Simon sagged into an open seat at the bar, and signaled in answer to the fellow’s question that, yes, he’d take the usual. The server placed a clay teacup on the bar and went about his business.

Simon’s business with the girl had left him with a foul taste in his mouth. It didn’t sit right with him leaving her to twist as he had, but he could hardly throw himself against a grand dame of the Mandari clans on Hyadon. The Mandari owned half the ring.

But it wasn’t right. There was nothing stopping this Vigran woman from just printing the parts she needed. That was how it was done in the empire—for those injuries fresh organs could cure. The pressure of his implant against his arms crossed on the bar practically screamed at him. Keeping the girls around whole and healthy, it was an ugliness that made him wish the empire would find Hyadon and burn it out of the sky. But the city was down on no Imperial charts. Like nearly all the Extrasolarian backspace holdings, its power and freedom depended on secrecy. It orbited no star, no world, but winged its black way through the blackest space far from the light of true civilization, a refuge for outcasts, derelicts and freaks.

Like me. Simon sipped his tea.

Dinner came in time, noodles and poached fish grown on-station. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad, either. Simon ate in silence, called the server to refill his tea. On a holograph plate above the bar, images flashed, reporting the market closures for the Hyadon Exchange, and news had come in regarding the sale at auction of a sculpture—a single marble wing that once might have belonged to an angel of victory—that had reportedly come from Old Earth herself. The wing was to be displayed in the headquarters of Sen Biologics, one of the corporate interests who called Hyadon Station home. Evidently the corp had purchased the antiquity for several million talents of platinum specie, a staggering price and a blasphemy, for such artifacts of the Mother and the Golden Age of Man were beyond price in truth, but not among such barbarians.

“You want dessert?” the server asked, jolting Simon from his contemplation. The fellow peered at Simon with glassy, colorless eyes. He had lost the ones Mother Earth and Evolution had given him in a vacuum accident, Simon knew, and tried not to stare.

“Not today, Qiu,” the detective said, going for the credit chit he kept sealed in an inner pocket of his old white jacket. Some feminine blur of motion had caught his eye, commanded his attention as only women can command, and looking back at the holograph he saw a pale woman in white leap against starry blackness. As he watched, she turned a pirouette, her dress fanning like the arms of the galaxy as the camera twisted overhead. It was Eirene. Or was it? So like was she to her sisters that even Simon—who had just passed an hour with her—could not be certain.

In the end it didn’t matter. The camera cut and showed the homunculi all dancing together, as perfect in their motions as the mechanisms of a Durantine clock. Their lovely faces each were painted red as suns, their hair pinned back and chased with gold, and when the ad was done, the Mandari pictograms painted themselves white against the darkened screen.

Xinyi Vigran presents…

River of Stars.

Information for the ordering of tickets flashed for a moment and faded before Simon could look away, the moment come and gone.

* * *

It had not been difficult to find the opera house; the address had been in advertisement, and a simple inquiry on his pocket terminal had produced the answer—and the same advertisement again. His chest ached about his implant as he rounded the street corner, peering up at the iron sky where the spire of a high-rise rose above the curving, incoherent shape of the theater itself. It was an ugly building, without the graceful arches and fine pillars or stained glass and statuary one might find on such a building in the empire. It was cold and white, its domes like waves of metal and glass beneath the tower that pierced the roof of the world.

He found the stage access via a loading dock. There must have been no performance that night, for the dock was empty and the sounds of the city were hushed, the nearest noise that of the trams on the main street and of a solitary cargo van moving up the alley behind. Simon felt certain there were cameras. There were always cameras. On Hyadon, as in the empire, no man was every truly alone, even in his own home. The daimon machines upon whose service the Extrasolarians depended, who controlled everything from lights to airlocks to temperature regulation—were always listening. And yet it was always possible, even easy, to force one’s way into a place. All one needed was a spine, a smile, and—for the tricky spots—a terminal complete with a suite of cybersecurity tools of the sort you could find in such lawless climes as Hyadon Station. On Hyadon, money—not blood—was king, and might was the only law.

“You there!” a rough voice called out. “Who are you? You shouldn’t be in here.”

Simon halted in the white corridor just inside the loading dock. A man in charcoal body armor with a face like weathered stone moved toward him. That hadn’t taken long. Simon recognized the white fist emblem on the man’s arm as belonging to a sec firm of the very type he’d mentioned to Eirene earlier that evening.

The man who once had been a knight did his best to smile blandly. He did not lie easily, but he lied well. Decades of living on the station had forced him to learn. “Courier, sir. Private message for the lady.”

The man looked him over, eyes very narrow. “Courier, is it? Who is it sent you?”

“Can’t say, sir,” Simon said, averting his eyes. “Private, as I say.”

“Well, let’s have it then.” The man extended a hand, gestured for Simon to hand it over.

“You misunderstand me,” he said, and tapped his forehead. “I have the message.” It was not uncommon—both on Hyadon and in the empire—for the truly secret, the truly intimate messages sent between the great of the galaxy to be sent not via radio or quantum telegraph, but on paper or in the minds of the messenger. Such systems were less vulnerable to sabotage and interception, more secure.

Nonplussed by this, the man leaned back, eyes gone narrower still. “Who do you work for?”

“I told you,” Simon said, sensing his ruse was nearing its end. “I can’t say, but I’ve a message for Madame Vigran that won’t wait.” Even as the words tumbled from his mouth, Simon was not sure why he didn’t turn and leave. He might have done, and done so with relative ease, told the guardsman he’d be back with identification, forget the whole affair. Liquor was cheap, and sleep cheaper still. He owed Eirene and her dead sister nothing. They weren’t even human, not really.

And he was no knight.

The guard stepped back, lips drawn together. “No, I mean…what company you with? You’re a fighting man, that much is obvious.”

“Freelance,” Simon said brightly, and beginning to second-guess his non-plan, he added, “I can come back tomorrow. Get verification.”

The guard shook his head, took his hand away from the shock-stick slotted into a holster on his thigh. “No need,” he said, raising a hand to his wrist comm. “I’ll call it in.” He turned his head to make the call, pressing fingers to the conduction patch behind his ear.

Simon didn’t hesitate. Turning from his hips, he slammed the heel of his hand down into the man’s temple with all the force and weight of his body. The overhanded blow caught the man completely by surprise, and he buckled as he struck the wall.

“Sorry,” the one-time knight said, though the guard could not hear him. Crouching, Simon checked his pulse. Still alive. That was good. He was only doing his job, and no man deserved to die for that. Not for the first time that night, Simon Fabray wondered what he was doing there, but then—he was no stranger to the question. He’d asked himself what he was doing when he took out Morrison’s gang for harassing the Sisters uptown, or when he’d saved that batch of embryos Captain Montero had stolen from the Natalists.

It just wasn’t right.

Nothing about Hyadon was right.

Perhaps that was all. He had come so far from home, to a half-life beyond the death that took his heart and whole world. He was a dead man, had been a long time, and so death had lost its sting. Better to die setting the world to rights—or a part of it, only—than to live on like some walking shadow. Far better. His second life had been a gift, and if all he did with it was find a way to give it back, maybe that was right. They were hard worlds, all of them, and broken. But a man needn’t be broken himself, not where it counted.

When Simon emerged from the utility closet where he left the unconscious guard, it was with the man’s terminal in his hand. He’d used the fellow’s thumbprint to unlock it, and kept it open by repeatedly tapping the display. He found the key for the stairs easily enough, and climbed up a level. With each passing moment he expected an alarm to sound, but it never did. It took finesse to be a criminal on a station like Hyadon, where there was a log for every door and every ventilator flap. It took far more to seek any sort of justice, for it was the criminals who ruled. And yet the theater and the annex attached to it—and that tower—were not the fortress of some genetics baron. The wealthy scion of a Mandari clan Xinyi Vigran might have been, but if she was one of the shareholders who ruled the ring city, she was not one of the great ones. Simon didn’t see another guard as he plodded along the corridor, passing one-way mirrors that looked in on the flat, false-wood floor of a dance studio. He passed by the sealed bulkhead of a lavatory door opposite a side passage, and beyond that found a shuttered recreation room. The lights were down.

There was no performance in the theater proper that night, he’d made sure of that, checking the station’s datasphere as he picked his way through the streets to reach it. The other girls were doubtless in their beds in what passed for a dormitory in that strange and silent place. The silhouettes of ballerinas showed in images hung on the walls, strangely sterile. Commercial art hung to convey a theme.

They felt almost oppressive, as though they were totems meant to impose their horizon on all who came to that hall. For the girls were to be only dancers, only dancers and…that other thing.

“Who are you?”

A familiar voice called from behind.

Simon turned, simultaneously trying to hide the guard’s pilfered terminal and to reach for his sword hilt where it lay concealed in a pocket of his white coat.

Eirene stood in the mouth of the lavatory, the bulkhead swung open behind her. She wore a dancer’s leotards, pale blue, though no paint altered the harsh line of jaw and cheekbone. A terminal in a band on her upper arm played wordless music softly in the still air. Had she been practicing alone?

“How did you get in here.”

The one-time knight did his best to smile, and polished his earlier lie to answer her first question. “I’m a courier, miss. Come from Master Zeitelmann for your Madame.”

The homunculus nodded only slowly, comprehending. She had heard of Arnulf Zeitelmann, and she should; he owned a fifth of the ring. Of course he would have a message for the dancer’s mistress, she was the center of the girl’s world, after all. “Madame’s sick,” she said. “We haven’t seen her down here in weeks. Only Doctor Afonso sees her.”

The illusion that she was Eirene broke as the girl tossed her head. The voice was the same—or nearly so—but there was a hauteur in this one unlike the nerves and timid shyness of the girl who’d come to his office earlier that evening. She was one of the others, another of Madame Vigran’s clones. An idea struck Simon then, and he said, “My master found one of your sisters wandering the city.”

The girl brightened at once. “Maria?”

Simon kept his composure. He was sure the girl Maria—what was left of her—was in the building. The fate of any such a clone was no mystery on Hyadon, only a reality most were too squeamish or too polite to countenance. Let this girl think whatever she wanted, he wanted to see the woman in charge.

“I’ve said too much already,” he said, sure he had her interest. “My master sent me to inquire if there was a bounty for her safe conduct. He would be only too happy to restore her to you all.” Simon made a show of looking round the hall. “Would it be possible to see your mistress?” He circled back to an earlier question, and said, “The guards below said I was to be admitted.”

The girl looked him over, and if the thought that the guard should have accompanied him upstairs crossed her mind, she did not voice it. “I told you,” she said, at last silencing the soft music from her terminal, “no one’s seen Madame in weeks. Only the doctor.”

“That’s just fine,” Simon said, pocketing the guard’s terminal as discreetly as he could. He would not need it. “Is he here? Can you take me to him?”

* * *

The door unsealed itself and rolled into a pocket in the wall as the girl—the image of Eirene and the murdered Maria, both—led Simon over the threshold into the annex above and behind the theater proper. He could hardly believe his luck. Of all the sorts of people he might have found wandering the halls below—security guards, custodial workers, lonely stage hands—he had happened upon one of those most able to assist his entry and most likely to believe his lie. Doubtless the girl cared for her sisters, and Simon had counted on that care to make her believe. On top of that, she was one of the Madame’s prized possessions, and though she was a kind of slave, her gilded cage offered its privileges, as all cages did.

Twice men in the charcoal of the guard he’d met below stopped them to inquire who Simon was, and twice the girl told his lie for him. “He’s from Master Zeitelmann, says he has a message for the Madame.”

Twice the guards waved them on.

She led Simon to a lift and up another three levels to a spot where the halls glowed a sanitary white. They stopped before another door, this one of heavy, mirrored glass. The girl keyed the comm panel—a black mirror itself to the right of the frame.

“Doctor Afonso?” she said.

An older man’s voice came across the comm after a few moments’ silence. “Rhea, is that you? I told you not to bother me after the dinner hour.”

“No, Doctor. It’s Phoebe.”

“Phoebe?” the older man said. “What is it? You know I’m busy. Madame is unwell. She needs me.”

The dancer, Phoebe, bobbed her head apologetically and pressed her lips together before saying, “I know, sir, but there’s a man here. A courier from Lord Zeitelmann. He says he has news about Maria.”

“Maria?” the doctor’s voice rose sharply. Surprise? Confusion? If Simon had any doubts about the homunculi’s fate, that dispelled them. He felt a black knot forming in the pit of his stomach. “Well, send him in, girl. Send him in.” In the instant before the doctor cut the comms, he could be heard to mutter. “News about Maria?”

The mirror depolarized, turning the door to glass as it slid aside.

The door closed again before Simon realized the girl Phoebe had not followed him. Another gleaming white hall greeted him, minutely tiled and shining beneath the tube lights overhead. A man emerged from the side door a moment later. Small, bald, black eyed and dressed in slick gray-blues. Simon recognized the logo of Sen Biologics pinned to his lapel. He was far shorter than Simon was, and peered up at him owlishly. “You’ve an Imperial look about you,” he said without preamble.

“What?”

“The scars!” he waggled a finger at Simon’s face and neck. “They always leave the scars on those they uplift. They don’t have to. Empire just wants you marked. We can clean those up, you know.”

Simon took a step back. The man had come very close. “I don’t want them cleaned. I won them.”

“Ah! You are Imperial, then,” the doctor said, face gone grave. “Patrician? A knight? What’s a knight want with the Madame?”

Simon crossed his arms, bringing one hand inside his jacket and near the hilt of his sword. “The girls don’t know, do they?”

“Know what?” Afonso blinked, evidently surprised by this question.

“That they’re clones.”

“Oh, that!” The doctor shifted, hand in his pockets. “They know that!”

“Of her.”

Then it was Afonso’s turn to step back, tension stretching like a line between them, pulled taut and fit to sing. “They know that, too. The Madame was great in her day, a true artist, you understand. She is very old now, and her health…it is not so good as once it was.” He pursed his lips. “But you have news of Maria, I understand. Phoebe said you are from Zeitelmann? This is most irregular.”

“Not about Maria,” Simon said. “About Eirene.”

“Eirene?” Surprised, Afonso took his hands from his pockets, where just before Simon was sure he’d held a weapon or the fob of some panic alarm. If Simon was right, the little man had probably killed Maria himself, carved her up for parts. He knew Zeitelmann would have no news of Maria, could have none. But the mention of the other clone had caught him off guard. Did he believe Simon could be trusted now? Did he believe himself safe? “What of Eirene?”

Simon pressed forward, using his advantage to push past the doctor through the side door whence the little man had come. “You knew she was missing?” Simon asked, certain the answer was yes. She could not have been allowed the freedom of the city.

“Gone this morning. We had men looking for her.” Afonso followed Simon into the room.

The laboratory was immaculate, clean as clean and whiter—if such a thing were possible—than the hall itself. Terminal displays shone in an arc along one wall above a desk where a clay tea service stood beside a small, carefully pruned tree. Shears lay to one side, and a neat pile of trimmings lay with it. But Simon glanced at these for only a passing instant. His eyes were drawn to the sample that lay under glass on the operating table, a suite of mechanical arms hovering about it, momentarily lifeless and oddly baroque, like the painting of some terrible battle, an instant frozen in time.

He didn’t need to be told it was human tissue. Some part of him just knew. But he wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking at first, the red flesh white beneath, two flat lobes laid open and yellowing, gray with corruption. Then he turned his head and understood. They were lungs. Each had been butterflied and folded open to reveal the alveoli. Simon was no physician, but he knew enough of butchery to know there was something very wrong with them.

“Am I to assume that your people found her?”

“She’s safe,” Simon said, hoping that the girl had kept running, had found the Cid Arthurian monastery he’d tried—half-heartedly—to steer her toward. He should have gone with her, should have seen her to safety, done the thing right. He shifted his position, cocked his head down at the lungs splayed and clamped open on the slab before him. They must have belonged to the Madame, he reasoned, and looked round as if expecting to find evidence of the murdered girl discarded in one corner, cast aside like the crumpled pages of a failed manuscript, a story cut short before its end.

“How much does Zeitelmann want for her?” the doctor asked. “It can’t be much. He must know the Madame has others, and more on the way. If he’s not willing to go low on price, he can keep the girl.”

A solitary hiss of cold laughter escaped by Simon’s nose. “Others.” He gripped the sword hilt hidden in the lining of his jacket. Simon didn’t believe the doctor for a moment. Clones such as Eirene were not cheap, nor was it cheap to raise and to maintain them—and what was more, the girl was not only a clone, but a fixture in the Madame’s ballet. She was too valuable to simply cast aside, and it was that callousness—the willingness to barter with her life, to pretend she held no value to them—that set his teeth on edge.

It’s all wrong, he thought. All wrong.

And jerking his chin at the organs on display, Simon said, “What’s wrong with her? Your Madame?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” said Doctor Afonso. “Patient confidentiality, you understand. My contract with the Madame forbids me to discuss her medical condition.”

“But they are donors?” Simon asked. He wanted to be sure. “The dancers?” Every second the doctor did not answer, Simon could feel his patience burning away, sloughing off until only a lump of fury black as charcoal remained in the little furnace that had replaced his heart. He knew the girl who’d come to ask for his help was not truly human, but he couldn’t make himself care. She was a girl in trouble, and whatever else may be, that trouble was real. What did it matter who was human, if the inhuman suffered the same? Was it not the pain that mattered?

He couldn’t remember drawing his sword, couldn’t remember squeezing the triggers that conjured the liquid metal blade. All he remembered was the hum and rippling shine of it, blue-white as crystal, as he slammed the blade down through the medical glass and through the lungs and the slab beneath them. The highmatter of that sword cut clean as a hot wire through wax, sliced glass and brushed metal and the steel of one robotic arm as if none of it were even there. Afonso yelped and leaped back.

His demonstration done, Simon lurched forward and seized the little man by his lapel, forcing him back against the wall. The man was sure to have neural implants, would be able to signal for help as soon as he remembered that he could, and how. Anticipating this, Simon raised the edge of his antique weapon to the man’s chin and held it there. “Call for help, and you’re done.”

“You’re not from Zeitelmann!” the doctor grunted, voice choked as Simon leaned his weight against him. Despite this a cavalcade of questions bubbling forth, each barely more than a whisper as Afonso stretched away from Simon’s blade. “Who are you? How did you get in here? Who let you in?”

“They are all donors, aren’t they?” Simon asked. He didn’t need the answer. “The girls?”

“What?” Afonso asked, and yelped when Simon jostled him. “Yes! Yes, of course they are! Madame Vigran is over five hundred years old! Even with the best gene tonics on the market, she needs a full refit every few years to prevent total collapse!”

Not releasing the doctor, Simon drew back half a step. He’d known the truth, known it from the minute Eirene walked into his office, and still the moment of confirmation was a shock. He was not at home, not in the galaxy he knew, the galaxy of light, of planets and plain order. Of decency. Of law. He was on Hyadon, in the Dark between the stars, and Hyadon was the gutter—one of the gutters—into which any who could not live in that light was inevitably drained. He was one such bit of refuse, one such refugee. But he did not have to live as they lived, where money was power and power was law. He was no libertine. Despite his circumstances, despite his wounds, down in the foundations of his soul—in his very bones—he was a knight of the Sollan Empire. Even still.

“So Maria is dead?” Simon asked.

“She served her purpose!” the doctor answered, voice defensive, as if this were any justification for murder, for butchery and the horrible vampirism it served.

It took every ounce of willpower Simon possessed not to strike the man down where he stood. “Her purpose?” he snarled through clenched teeth. “Her purpose!”

“That was why she was made!” Afonso said. “She would not have lived at all were it not for us! We’ve maintained the Madame’s contract for decades! Decades! It’s just the way things are done!”

The very earth reeled about him—which he supposed it did—and Simon released Doctor Afonso, shaking his head as if to clear it of some oppression. Belatedly then, he realized the doctor had soaked the front of his trousers from terror. Before the man could reconsider his circumstances and signal for aid, Simon raised his sword, aimed the point square at the evil fellow’s chest. “Take me to her.”

* * *

Gone was the sterile whiteness of the medical annex with its minute, polished tiles and the frigid crispness of the air. The lift—when Afonso opened it, walking gingerly in light of his wet pants—was richly paneled in brass and red velvet.

“Penthouse suite,” Afonso stammered, beady eyes wide as they would go as they followed the emitter end of Simon’s hilt like those of a child skirting round a standing cobra.

The lift began to move, ascending smoothly along what Simon guessed was the tower he’d seen rising above the lower theater building. As they went, he felt his weight begin to lessen. Hyadon Station spun to simulate the effects of gravity, but that gravity was normed at street level, so that a pound of gold weighed one pound in the hand. But the higher one climbed above the streets, the less and less that false gravity weighed upon the bones, so that the same gold piece might float were it placed at or near the center. Towering then above the street level, the great libertines who ruled Hyadon drifted about their palaces on light feet, feeling neither the weight of their bodies nor their actions.

The door chimed and slid open.

Simon pressed the doctor forward with the hilt of his sword. Afonso staggered ahead of him onto wine-dark Tavrosi carpets. Red-stained wood panels marked the lower walls, and richly frescoed plaster hid the metal superstructure of the station itself, softening the mechanical world to something that recalled almost the estate of some great Imperial lord. A tall vase—white and blue porcelain—stood on a plinth under glass ahead.

“Lead the way,” Simon said, and prodded the physician.

Afonso crossed the atrium to the open double doors. The sitting room beyond was as richly appointed. Frescoed walls showed a water garden filled with flowers and jewel-bright birds. A holography well sat sunk into the floor, couches circling about it, but the projector was dark, and the grand piano opposite stood closed and dusty from long neglect.

A short hall passed another room and the closed bulkhead of a private lavatory, and beyond…

Simon heard the beep of medical instruments before they crossed the threshold, smelled the bite of antiseptic and the underlying rot of disease. And there she was.

Everything the girl who’d come to his office that evening was, Xinyi Vigran was no longer. Slim as Eirene was, the woman that lay abed beneath coverlets of checkered black and white could not have weighed less than six hundred pounds at street level. It was no wonder she chose to dwell above, where the slower turning of Hyadon’s great wheel would ease the torment of her bones. If Eirene’s hair had been thick and dark and smoother than oil, what little remained of the Madame was white and brittle as chalk, leaving huge stripes of her pockmarked scalp bare and blotched. Her skin was not of porcelain to match the Earth-ware vase on display in her atrium, but so dry and stretched and wrinkled that the centuries could be read on her like the mountains and rivers of some ancient map.

Afonso bowed his head. “Madame, you have a visitor.”

The old leviathan did not stir.

“Is she dead?” Simon asked. But no, she could not be. White medical equipment half circled the antique carved wooden bedstead, as out of place as Simon felt. These chimed softly, and a holograph displayed her vitals in violent green. Beside her head, a silver staff rose, hooked to the ceiling, and from it a blood bag swayed like a lonely red fruit upon a tree of steel.

Still bowing his head, Afonso shuffled forward, voice quavering, “Madame, there is a knight to see you.”

Madame Vigran opened one fat-enfolded eye. It was the same bright amber as Eirene’s, though the orb seemed shrunken in that flat expanse she called a face. “A knight?” She stared at Simon blearily, not really seeing. “He is not from Vorgossos then? It is not my time?”

“There is no word from Vorgossos, ma’am,” the doctor said. “We are trying.”

“Vorgossos?” Simon frowned. He’d never heard the name.

Afonso answered. “She does not have long. More serious interventions are needed to sustain her. We don’t have the means. She but asks if you’re from those who do.” He raised his voice, “No, ma’am. He’s here about Eirene.”

“Eirene?” Madame Vigran’s second eye opened. “You found her?” Those familiar eyes flickered to Afonso. “A bounty hunter?”

“Not exactly,” Simon said. He could not tell how present the old woman was. There was a haziness in her eyes and a distance in her tone that made him wonder. But it was her will that had set this foul system in motion; whether or not she was in any state to captain her way, she had set the course. “Eirene is safe. You’re not to harm her. Not to look for her. She’s not yours anymore.”

One jewel-taloned finger found a control, and her bed tilted upward very, very slowly. “Not mine?” Vigran echoed. “She’s me. Would you rob an old woman of her support?”

“She’s not a crutch,” Simon said. “None of them are, but I haven’t come to save them.” The words and his intentions only crystallized for Simon as he spoke them. It was his only real option. He might barter for the one girl’s life, but he could not stop the cycle that so enslaved the others, not and live himself. “She knows what you are, anyway. She knows you killed Maria, and why. You can’t bring her back without poisoning the well. She’ll tell the others. She’s no good to you.”

“Her parts are good to me,” Vigran replied without hesitation. “I can have Afonso here put her on ice until I need her.” Her words were coming clearer with every syllable, though her eyes had yet to find their focus. “Unless you’ve some better offer, knight.”

Something whined as her bed stabilized her in a seated position, and it was only then that Simon saw the silvery tube shunted through the front of her throat. Some machine breathed for her, and Simon recalled the lungs pinned on the display in Afonso’s lab below. He followed the tube with his eyes, found the ventilator among the equipment at her bedside.

“These machines are keeping alive,” Simon said, lamely. “Why bother with the girls?”

Afonso stammered a response before his mistress had a chance. “Organ replacement is better,” he said. “The nubile tissue has rejuvenating effects on the body as a whole. Young organs, young blood encourages new development in older systems. Helps to lengthen overall life expectancy beyond what the machines can offer.”

The former knight felt himself recoil. The indecency, the ghoulish disregard for life—even the lives of homunculi, who in the empire were slaves and little more—twisted his guts. With his free hand, he touched his implant through the front of his shirt. “You can’t go back,” he said simply. “No matter how many of them you kill, you can’t be what you were.”

“I can,” she said. “Vorgossos will hear me. They can sell me a new body. A new brain. Everything.”

“Only they can,” Afonso said. The man was shaking and had edged as far from Simon as he could manage, though he was still within reach of the flash of the blade.

“And you’ve had no word,” Simon said, eyes sweeping over the machines that kept the vampire alive. “How many have you killed? For this?”

Neither answered.

“You don’t even know,” Simon realized, looking from one to the other.

The fog that sheened the old woman’s eyes had lifted somewhat, and they narrowed as she asked, “Who are you? How did you get in here? Afonso, explain yourself!”

“You don’t even know?” Simon could hardly find his breath. He had to steady himself against the arc of monitors to keep himself from falling in the reduced gravity of the suite. “You really have no idea?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “They’re my bodies, and mine to do with as I please. Can you honestly say you would do any differently, had you the means?”

Simon didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” he said, and tore at the buttons of his blue shirt to flash the silver of his implant. “I’d rather be dead than live like you.”

“You will be,” Vigran agreed. “Dead.”

Afonso’s eyes went wide, and he stood straighter. “No, Madame! No! He’s armed!” Simon was sure the doctor had a neural lace implanted in his brain, was equally sure that he’d heard with some sense other than hearing his mistress sound the alarm that Simon had threatened the doctor from ringing.

The next instant proved him right.

A siren wailed high and thin and terrible through the plastered metal walls.

“I don’t know who you think you are, sir,” the old woman said, using the Imperial honorific like a slur. “But you dare come here, to my house! And threaten me? Where is Eirene? Tell me, and I may permit you to walk out of here with your skin!”

Simon grimaced, tried to stand straight beneath the onslaught of the siren. His mind conjured images of the gray-armored guard rushing upstairs, crowding into the lift. He had but seconds. If he did not act, then and there, it all would be for nothing. If Vigran was right—if he was to die—he would die setting some small piece of the world to rights. He hoped Eirene had found the monks, hoped at least she might escape her lot, and the others, too. But if he hoped to live at all, there was but one thing he could do, just as Vigran had done all her evil life.

He raised his sword, blade flashing back into existence like the sun coming from behind a cloud. Afonso yelped and fell against the side of the bed in his haste to get away. But Simon did not kill him. He might have done, but Hyadon and the other stations like it were so full of men like him that his death never change the balance. He was a tool, an appendage of the behemoth in the checkered bed—and of all like her.

He slashed the ventilator instead, the liquid metal of his blade shearing through the braided silver tube and squat tower whence it ran. Vigran’s eyes went wide, and somehow despite the siren Simon heard her gasp and wheeze. One brightly taloned hand went to her neck, her arm flapping sheetlike in her panic.

She would be dead in seconds, and there was nothing her doctor could do.

Simon’s eyes raked over the tableau. One last look, one last instant. He needed to move. His eyes lighted on the blood bag hanging from the staff, red as the other monitors were turning. Maria’s blood, he was certain. He vanished his blade and fled toward the door. If he could make the lift, he decided—if he could make the lift, that would be far enough.

* * *

The weight of the ring-world pressed on him as Simon rode the lift down. He had no shield, no way to defend himself should the guards open fire. He knew he’d reached the end. He knew Madame Vigran was dead, but that was cold comfort as he leaned against the panel that controlled the lift. He’d be in the lobby in seconds.

Was it worth it?

He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t wanted to help the girl at all, and yet he found he could not ignore her and remain himself—and it was better to die himself than live on as someone else, something else. Like the Madame.

And yet like the Madame he had killed to save himself. He had a desperate and perhaps vain hope that by killing their employer, he had stripped her guards of any incentive to do him harm. They were not bound to her by any oath of loyalty, were obedient out of any devotion to her person or station. With Vigran dead, there was no one to pay them. It might not matter. The guards might not know she was dead, and even if they did, one might kill him for having terminated their contract along with their client. They might kill him because they could.

But no.

Simon stood straight, the weight of Hyadon fully on his shoulders once again. With Vigran gone, there would be no hounds for Eirene, no huntsman to carve away her heart. And the others might live. Phoebe and the rest. Perhaps they could run the theater themselves, or find a new one of their own. More likely, they would find themselves homeless, desperate and alone. But their lives would be their own, and maybe that was enough. Maybe any life was better than none.

He hoped so.

The lift slid to a halt. The door opened.

Simon stepped out like a man emerging onto a stage, his hands in the air and empty. Seeing two of the gray-clad guards advancing, disruptors raised, he lifted up his voice and cried out, “She’s dead!”


Back | Next
Framed