Heiresses of Russ 2014

by Melissa Scott

  It was during that week that Lavinia met Mr de Borba, as Lavinia’s father being overcome by grief, her brother Miguel in London on business, and her mother and sisters still abroad and only arriving back from Bogotá in time for the funeral, it fell to Lavinia to attend to the few details that required the family touch.

  Seeing how comfortable Mr de Borba was with death, Lavinia felt an odd kinship with him, and in the month after the funeral (where Lavinia had caught sight of Death, in solemn mourning dress standing quietly amongst villagers from her grandfather’s estate, and been so startled that her bowshot had almost gone wide, but the pyre had been well-doused with kerosene and caught easily despite the arrow striking near the edge of the boat), Lavinia approached him about apprenticing.

  Thankfully, any lingering effects from the scarlet fever had vanished following the conversation with Death in the garden, so Lavinia was able to start learning her new craft soon after.

  It took years, of course, to not only simply acquire the skills but to improve beyond the point of common mastery and into true artistry. Meanwhile, Lavinia saw her beloved as she always had: on the periphery of her life, and occasionally in person. She kept each and every memory of her, vouchsafed against loss now that she had her own understanding with Death.

  Meanwhile, each coffin that she helped to make taught Lavinia a bit more about her craft, and just as surely, a bit more about people. Each taught her about herself, and what it meant to be mortal and to love.

  Two years into her courtship and her apprenticeship, Mr de Borba allowed Lavinia to design a coffin and make it completely on her own. It was a simple affair: stained ash heartwood, copper nails, and demure muslin linings. It was ordered for a young girl of the petite bourgeoisie who had drowned in the Plata, whose family had the taste to avoid parvenu ostentation and choose instead elegant and affordable simplicity.

  It was a lullaby set in a minor key, dressed in wood and mourning.

  When Lavinia proudly mentioned the accomplishment to her mother, Mrs Parrish (who by then had grown somewhat accustomed to the eccentricities of her youngest daughter) had pursed her lips in thought as she imagined the coffin and then complimented Lavinia’s taste.

  Lavinia knew that Death went to every funeral, touched every casket or urn, stood by every pyre or shallow grave. She visited each person who would die, and paid her respects after. So Lavinia knew that Death would see her work, and Lavinia knew in her heart that Death would know that it was hers.

  And so the coffin was a love letter to her beloved.

  Soon after that burial, gowned in funeral black, Death paid Lavinia a visit, and they made love for the first time.

  More years passed, and the coffin love letters grew more elaborate and accomplished. Each one occasioned a visit from Death, which made Lavinia happy.

  Each time, they had the same conversation, which made Lavinia sad:

  “Being who you are, my love,” she said, “I know that you know my heart.”

  “Being who you are, my dear,” Death replied, “you know that I do.”

  “And if I were to ask the question?”

  “I should prefer that you not.”

  “Oh.”

  “A lady must be wooed, my love.”

  This went on for many more long years, and never did Lavinia point out that she, too, was a lady. When Lavinia made the coffin for her father, and later, for her mother, Death came, wordless and gentle, and they did not speak, but instead Death held her in her arms as she cried.

  Years passed, and slowly everyone Lavinia had known, and everyone she had loved, died. Lavinia’s hands grew rough from work and her face soft from age. Her hair greyed and, as a courtesy, so did Death’s. Each time a loved one died, they had the same conversation, and Lavinia’s questions did not change, and neither did Death’s replies.

  Then it came time to make her own coffin: her marriage bed, she still hoped.

  Lavinia Parrish chose mountain walnut for the wood, out of love of its color and the feel of it under her crooked fingers. She planed and sanded it right; it would require no varnish at all for the wood to shine.

  She thought her beloved would like that.

  She used no nails, either. Instead, Lavinia used full-blind dovetails to join the planks. She wanted a simple coffin; the frame one theme, one long conversation in the intimate night. As she worked, back bent, she remembered her master and whispered love songs and poetry to the wood. She was sure that it listened attentively.

  For the lining she chose bleached raw silk, backed with cotton batting imported from plantations across the sea. Lavinia told it good-humored bawdy stories that she had read from books with falsely modest covers and thought that her beloved would appreciate the laughter.

  Lavinia used small, sharp, aged bronze tacks to attach the upholstery inside. She thought that Death would like their quiet elegance more than the bright shine of brass. To them she murmured simple accounts of the pain of love and distance, and the mixed joy of wanting. She pricked her fingers with each one, the red tears of life welling up and staining each with her bittersweet memories.

  Death would appreciate the truth of such things, and more: Lavinia did.

  The hinges were bronze, too. Lavinia had them made especial for the coffin-bed. Stories of marital joy were what she shared with them, of couples who loved each other more after lifetimes spent together, couples that partnered and danced in their happiness even if their mortal frames no longer held them up quite straight because of palsy and quake.

  When it was complete, Lavinia’s coffin was beautiful, and she was glad, as she knew that her time was very short.

  She waited patiently for Death in the gathered dusk of her last evening, a lifetime of memories and hopes held softly in her heart, like soft hands holding a newborn, or cradling a moribund lover.

  When Death arrived, Lavinia knew that she had finally come for her. She had always claimed to read the contents of Lavinia’s heart on her face, but after a lifetime, Lavinia could read hers, too.

  Death opened her mouth to speak, but Lavinia raised a hand to forestall her, and spoke the words:

  “Being who you are, my love,” she said, “I know that you know my heart.”

  “Being who you are, my dear,” Death replied, tears falling, “you know that I do.”

  “And if I were to ask the question?”

  “I would answer ‘yes.’ ”

  “Oh!”

  “A lady must be wooed, my love, and you have.”

  •

  Terminal City

  Zoë Blade

  It’s three in the morning when I find Spark’s body. I’ve come into the store early to perform some extra work while my boss is asleep. I know there’s something wrong when the door isn’t locked and the fan’s on. I smell it before I see it, a putrid smell I can’t put into words. I walk behind the counter, and that’s when I see him, on his back, staring up at the ceiling, a pool of congealed blood surrounding his body, soaking into the dusty wooden planks that serve as the floor. He must have been like that for a good few hours, because the rats are already there, licking at the sticky red puddle. If you’re not actively working in K block, the entropy envelops you, devours you. Food, as in meat, as in anyone not strong enough to fend them off, is eaten by the rats. Between the planks, I can just about make out the cable and light store below ours, a dark red puddle staining their counter. Mr. Wu won’t be happy tomorrow morning.

  The cops say it was a robbery gone wrong. The till’s empty, but it doesn’t add up. Not that they see it that way. As far as they’re concerned, everything adds up just fine, all neat and tidy like columns in a spreadsheet, and they move on to their next case, save for a single cop guarding Spark’s door for a few hours. All they’re good for is targets. While I answer their mundane questions—Did I see anyone looking suspicious? Did I know anyone who might have a grudge against Spark?—my transponder’s wirelessly interfacing with theirs, silently cloning their badges, copying their p
rivate keys to my personal stash. It’s a dangerous move, sure, but worth it for the access it grants me.

  I’m not saying I know better than them. Maybe I just care about Spark a whole lot more than they do. It just doesn’t sit right with me. There are plenty of stores in the area, most more profitable than ours. Bright, loud arcades, full of electromechanical gambling machines that must have a good few hundred coins in each of them. Off-licenses. Hell, even the dentist next door probably has more in his cash register than we did.

  So I decide to do a little research of my own. My boss, David, calls it denial. Trying to get my dead co-worker back. But it’s not like that. We were friends, sure. That’s why he talked to me. Why he told me he was onto something. And those crazy eyes of his, back when they had been alive and animated, had told me he believed what he was saying. He was building something. Something he believed was important. David, being the sentimental type, gives me the day off—without pay, natch—and I pay Spark’s place a little visit.

  Although we both work—worked—topside, where the rain’s thick and during the day you can occasionally even glimpse sunlight, we don’t—didn’t—make anywhere near enough money to live there. Spark’s apartment’s deep in the bowels of K block, like mine, beneath all the stores you feel reasonably safe in without a weapon. Where the constant onslaught of rain is replaced by drips running down walls made of decaying wood, rusting iron, and concrete. Where the only light is provided by fluoros hanging limply from the thick braids of cables that people use to syphon electricity off of one another, swaying as people walk hurriedly along the planks of wood that serve as the floor above.

  Back when it was built, K block was all concrete, high ceilings. But such luxury soon gave way to economy. Nothing so wasteful could last very long in a microcosm of pure supply and demand, and space was so very much in demand. The first squatters retrofitted iron skeletons like climbing frames on every floor, filling them with wooden planks. Now the whole thing’s layered like a rotting cake. Twice as many floors, each half the height. Then they went out onto the roof, and they built up.

  The bowels live up to their name. Maintenance pipes scattered throughout seep raw sewage into thoughtfully placed buckets or, worse, puddles with the optional plank of wood providing a handy gangway. There’s so much steam coming out of the tiny factories and kitchens that in some parts, you can’t see further ahead than two or three people. You have to rely on your memory to guide you. It would be enough to make you faint, but you wouldn’t find a clean surface to faint on.

  It doesn’t really have an outside so much as endless corridors, and if you want to get home, you have to hope the stores between these corridors and your apartment are all open, although of course they always are, workers pairing up to alternate twelve hour shifts. If you’re lucky, you can afford to fortify your ceiling with tarpaulin, somewhere between your neighbor’s floor above you and your light. Spark was into tech enough to concentrate the little money he had into buying whatever he needed to keep his workbench going, so at least it’ll be reasonably dry there.

  There’s a cop guarding Spark’s door, trying his best not to show how uncomfortable he is in his uniform. The door to Spark’s place isn’t in a corridor so much as the back of a noodle bar, just a meter or so away from the open fire of the kitchen stove, but the graying, weathered looking chef dutifully ignores us as he fries his product. My stomach grumbles, awakened by the aroma of fresh food, but I can’t eat right now.

  I get into character, putting on my well-practiced look of routine boredom. The cop’s transponder makes a friendly electronic chirp, signifying that someone with the correct privileges is in proximity. As far as it’s concerned, I’m Lieutenant Emily Long. It flashes up her badge number on its miniature Nixie tubes. I hope he doesn’t look down at it. He presumably works with the real Emily Long. It’s a hell of a risk, trying to pass for a cop without a uniform. I stay calm, focus on my breathing, and walk up to the door as if I have every right to be there. But already his eyes are on me, looking me up and down, studying my giveaway K block native clothes. He looks down at his transponder, at his co-worker’s badge number.

  “Listen,” he says, reading the number, “I don’t know who you are, lady—” but by the time he looks back up, I’m already gone.

  From behind, I reach around his neck with my arm, trying not to let his flailing arms unnerve me, squeezing just enough to make him pass out for a few minutes. It’s over quickly. “And you never will.”

  The chef focuses intently on his craft as I slip into Spark’s apartment, leaving the cop in a heap on the floor, too heavy to drag inside.

  Spark’s apartment stinks more than most I’ve visited. I tug on the piece of string hanging from the bare bulb in the center of the ceiling, and the place lights up. The few dishes he owned are all piled up in the washing up bowl, waiting to be taken to the nearest public tap and scrubbed clean. I half expect a rat to crawl out of the pile of circuit boards and cables lining the floor. Even by K block standards, Spark didn’t really seem to believe in furniture. Not a second chair or coffee table at any rate. He wasn’t the social type. Didn’t entertain houseguests much. He was a worker, like me. Driven by this sick compulsion to always make things, to always take things apart, to fix them, to make them more efficient, or simply to understand how they work, until you fall asleep at your workbench at sunrise. Sunrise. You’d be hard pressed to remember what that was after a few days down here.

  His place isn’t really an apartment, it’s a workshop which happens to have a microwave, kettle and washing up bowl. A lone shelf holds a cassette deck, but no actual tapes. There’s a dustless gap where presumably tapes were until recently. Odd, I never had him pegged for much of a music fan.

  A wooden ladder leads up to the top bunk of what must have once been a bunk bed, although now it’s little more than a few planks of wood with a mattress, pillow and faded cotton duvet on it, looming over what would have been the bottom bunk, the centerpiece of the tiny room, his workbench. A door the other side of the room unfolds to reveal a toilet. On those rare occasions when he took a shower, he must have ventured out into the city proper. It’s the kind of place your mother—not to mention your amygdala—warns you to stay away from.

  Most of the workbench is buried under a mess of wires, and the whole thing is stained by dozens of blobs of congealed solder, scarred by a thousand tiny scratches. It tells a story, a story of single minded obsession. It’s clearly the place where he carried out his passion in life. KT seventy-twos, your standard issue catties, lay strewn about the place in various stages of disembowelment. For tech, this place looks like a rogue doctor’s makeshift emergency room and morgue all rolled into one, only without the sterility.

  But I’m not interested in what’s on the operating table, so much as in what isn’t there. There’s a gap. A clearly defined area of no clutter, where there should be…something. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so did Spark’s own personal chaos. At any given time, something would have been the center of focus, but right now, the desk lamps, the magnifying glasses, the clips, everything that snakes out from the frame at the back of the workbench points to an empty space. Something was on his workbench until recently. Where is it? What is it?

  I head back out into the noodle bar, carefully walking around the cop’s gently breathing body. I try to nod respectfully to the chef, but he refuses to make eye contact with me. In K block, you live to be his age by minding your own business.

  Next stop’s my place. I have some money and water in my backpack, plus a hacked transponder, ratty receiver, some spare batteries and my keys, but not much else. I need to eat. I need to sleep. I make my way through the labyrinthine narrow hallways that pass for the streets of K block, letting years of memories guide me while I concentrate on more pressing matters, until suddenly I’m at my front door.

  Immediately, I can tell something’s wrong. My transponder’s vibrating. I glance at its tiny screen. My silent alarm’s been trippe
d. Every inch of my body suddenly screams at me to get out. I try to hide it, to just carry on walking past as if I never intended to go in there. Suddenly breaking into a jog would be too obvious. I walk past, as casually as I can, hoping no one’s worked out exactly where I was when I looked at my pocket and is putting the pieces together to work out it wasn’t a coincidence. But it’s too late.

  Just as I’m about to turn a corner, there’s a loud burst right by my head. I turn around to find the chipboard sheet that serves as a wall has a new hole in it, right where my ear was. I’m suddenly aware of a sting of pain. I put my finger up to my earlobe and then look at it, at the small streak of blood. There’s screaming the other side of the wall, where presumably someone wasn’t as lucky as I was, while the people this side who can see the shooter have enough sense to dive out of the way, more or less silently, giving this shadowy figure a clearer shot at me.

  I give up any pretense, and I run. I never see who’s behind me. I don’t turn back to look. I just keep going forwards, guided by years of experience, avoiding all the dead ends and flooded rooms as I dive left into a belt maker’s place, straight past a teenaged boy, maybe Brazilian, clanging away at a counterfeit big brand buckle so intently that he barely seems to notice me, then right into a noodle factory, past huge sacks of wheat, a bunch of rats and two elderly Chinese women shouting at me in their native tongue, up a ladder onto the wooden floor above, along more stores, down another ladder, and along the solid concrete ground floor again, running towards the bright light at the end, until I finally manage to burst free into the real world, running and squinting in the golden sunrise, the cool breeze on my skin at last. If I’ve just been reborn, maybe it’s time to become someone else.