Aestival Tide (5 page)

“Don't stop,” it hissed loudly into Tatsun's ear. Rudyard Planck despised the Orsinate. He had mocked them first with a series of bioengineered urangutangs that strutted about imperiously and, when asked their names, grunted “Âziz,” or “Nike” or “Shiyung” in reply. Then there had been an argala, a sexslave with Shiyung's delicate features that bellowed like a man during coition. And now these hideous puppets, all of them possessing Âziz Orsina's nasal voice. It was one of the imponderables of Araboth that Planck's escalating burlesques of the ruling family had only earned him their favor.

“Go on, baggage. Eat spit. Faaugh.” The puppet drooled and gibbered at Ceryl until she had to look away. Tatsun gently cuffed the puppet's hairless skull and commanded the aardman to halt.

“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.

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.

“ ‘Let us raise a somewhat loftier strain.' ” She had laughed bitterly. Reive still didn't understand what it meant, but she didn't ask the linguist to explain.

From above the curving narrow corridor long diatomaceous tubes shed waves of ultramarine light. In places the walls opened onto vast arrays of glass and cable and steel, tanks and catwalks and bubbling alembics the size of small buildings. Then the walls would close in again and the fretwork of struts and spans would disappear, but the smells rising from the labs remained. Seawater and kelp from the oceanic tanks, steam from the heating ducts, the piny resins of the Northern Pacific Diorama. The gynander approached the hallway that led to the Chambers of Mercy. There the vivisectors practiced their sanguine art upon Araboth's dead, rehabilitating them into the
rasas
that tended the refineries and performed the most dangerous of the million tasks that kept the city alive. As she hurried by its entrance three novices passed her and nodded soberly. They wore faded yolk-yellow trousers and blouses of transparent fabric, to show that they had not yet attained full knowledge of their craft. Through the cloth she could see faint patterns tattooed upon their breasts, prescriptive nostrums to guard against natural childbirth and storms and
nerotus,
the psychic illness that afflicted those who spent too much time among the regenerated dead. The gynander returned the novices' cool gaze and turned down the hall leading to the vivarium. Behind her she could hear them, whispering.

In this hallway the light tubes flickered a paler blue, the diatoms fed a lower algae content. Aquariums were set into the curved walls, long narrow tanks and smaller round ones, some with cracks where the Architects had not accounted for the diurnal contraction in the polymers that formed the walls. Luminous fish floated in black water, green water, water of deepest blue. Anglerfish with glowing crab-shaped lures protruding from their skulls; delicate fairypipes, their skeletons luminous pink; lightning fish spearing their tanks with brilliant arrows. The tanks had been tended for hundreds of years. Many of these creatures were extinct now, Outside. Their keepers could no longer recall why it was they cared for them.

The gynander walked here slowly. She loved these things, and the other half-human heteroclites that had been engineered in the nucleovats and cellular refineries of Dominations. Strange things, stranger than the gynander herself, things from the First Days.

Things like Zalophus.

Ahead of her the ceiling arched, and the passage split into two wide corridors. To the right the hall curved down to where the ghoulish aardmen were bred, and the birdlike argalæ, and the arboretums where sentient plants caressed passersby with slender branches. Reive grimaced. The soft, steady pumping of the ventilation system wafted the pungent scent of the argalæ's excrement, nitrogen-rich and processed for fertilizer. She took the left-hand fork.

This was the final descent to the oceanic vivariums, where the biotechnicians imprisoned the genetically enhanced whales and sirens, the white-beaked telepathic inia and other dolphins, the manatees and orcas and half-human hydrapithecenes and, most ancient of all, sweet-voiced Zalophus, who would lure unwary visitors to his tank and devour them.

The corridor widened into a vast space, a sort of cavern that fed into the gulf Outside. Huge barred gates rose to the ceiling, allowing water to pass through the intricate system of weirs and nets and canals that supplied the open-air tanks. Mingled with the rush of waves sighing in and out were the explosive sounds of sirens breaching, the inquisitive whistles of dolphins, the soft insistent lies of the hydrapithecenes in their solitary enclosures.

“Free us,” they sang after Reive as she passed. She ignored the faces gazing at her from the depths. Faces from a nightmare, some of them, gilled and bearded with long fleshy tubes, or scaled like fish. Others more like their human ancestors, but with moist skin of palest peach or blue. Their lipless mouths twisted furiously, revealing the rows of razor teeth within, the suckers oozing toxins like ink through the water.

“Free yourself,” the gynander called airily; but she ran as one bearded siren smashed itself against the glass walls of its cage, blood swirling from its mouth as it screamed after her.

She met no one else. It was midnought, the middle of the thirty-two-hour day regulated by the Architects. On the levels above her, the Orsinate and their pleasure cabinet were still abroad, playing in the eternal twilight. On the levels below the workers would be rising, the 'filers on Powers readying for another broadcast day, the moujiks and
rasas
stumbling toward the refineries and medifacs. But here Reive was alone. She talked to herself, absently whispering invocations against Ucalegon, repeating the words she had replied to the plum-skinned boy's inquisition. She stopped to call to the dolphins, leaning down to graze her fingers against their smooth heads as they butted against the sides of their tank. They whistled plaintively when she left, then returned to their endless circuits of their prisons.

In the center of the chamber was Zalophus's pool, the largest in the vivarium, and the oldest. A marvel of the ancient engineers, it was rumored to plunge to unimaginable depths, to the Undercity itself, where the great whale slept and brooded, dreaming his endless dreams of hunger and escape. The Architects had designed his cage to resemble a huge grotto. Their memory files recalled such things; none of the Ascendants or the biotechnicians who toiled on Dominations had ever seen the lush green places Outside that inspired it. Boulders of molded, resin and real plants—bougainvillea, honeysuckle, purple eelgrass—cascaded beneath the brilliant growth lamps. Sea urchins nestled in a cleft between strands of kelp and sea fern. On one of the false boulders a cormorant perched drying its wings. It regarded Reive with one tangerine-colored eye and snapped its beak. She wondered if it had come from the labs, then shivered at the thought that it might be from Outside. Hastily she dipped her head and touched the whorls on her breast that formed the ward against Ucalegon.