Selling Out

by Justina Robson

  Amid the yelling in tiny voices Zal heard a soft, strange laugh and, in spite of the imp on his head, clinging to the mat of his hair, looked up. A girl with a wolf’s head was crouched near his hands on the bank. Her jaws were agape, panting slightly in the dawn heat of a new day, her pink tongue like a petal over the lower incisors. She held out her hand to him and her clawed fingers beckoned him to take hold. He got the impression she was smiling.

  The imps shrieked and scolded at her and made pretend moves to attack. She ignored them completely.

  “I am Adai,” she said in a gruff, growling voice. “Come, pilgrim. Take my hand. Be not afraid that you near Hell’s gate.” She paused and her grin widened to laughter. “You are in the land of the free now, where the scum also rises.”

  He lay at her feet, vomiting pondweed while the imps screamed at her until she savaged one to death with a snap of her jaws.

  The demons were worried he would die of his wounds so they let him accelerate Hell by taking him to a Hoodoo woman who gave him a dream vision; she sent his spirit into a parallel reality where he was more able, more lucky, better at being everything he had his heart set on.

  Zal agreed because he thought accelerate meant it would soon be over.

  He was in the alternate world for over a hundred and eighty years.

  After the first month he reckoned they had stranded him for their own amusement. After the first year he gave up on getting out. He was a passenger inside his own head, a mute observer of his better self. He could only watch and listen as Suhanathir Taliesetra returned to the Lightside world and set out to gain power in Alfheim by approved methods, always intending, once he had it, to turn that power towards the greater good.

  Zal in the Void remembered the Hoodoo woman. She was an ancient creation of driftwood tied together with ropes of seagrass, cackling, “I send him where all him dream come true!”

  And so they had. Suhanathir Taliesetra rose to the top of the Alfheim tree and became High Lord, over all clans and all people of the Lightside. Along the way he didn’t have to compromise too many principles, after all, when he had to lie to pretend to support the structure then it was getting him where he had to be, dragging key people with him. The details were not important in those years. The White Flower was a rose that would bloom late.

  When it did, his reforms required the exile or removal of his opponents. He had thought surely they would all come to his way of thinking. It was so logical and, moreover, it was true. He applied magical persuasions in the manner he had learned from his peers: aetheric seduction of the mind was always used to bring in stray sheep to the fold. It would be better for them to live free and in harmony, so the mild deception did not matter. It simply speeded the inevitable.

  But to his increasing disbelief there were always dissenters, the ones who wanted to return to the strong hierarchy of the High Light. To maintain the effects of his changes to the social laws governing the realm he was thus forced to keep that policed structure which many of his companions viewed as the source of all the trouble. So he compromised for authority’s sake. He maintained the hierarchy to keep himself in charge. The Flower began to criticise him—where was his professed free land? He showed them, sadly realising its truth, how total freedom and equality would only give rise to another order because the elves only understood order. They wanted it. There was no limitation for anyone who wished to do as they will, but to protect what freedom there was it was clear that he must stay in control of what forces remained, as benefactor of course, as good spirit of justice. Better that they who wanted no order, except the natural friendliness of one spirit to another, be in charge.

  A civil war fomented.

  He prevented it by a quiet campaign of assassinations and bribes. Every day found him signing warrants, issuing exile commands, begging for a recant from someone who spoke out against his lunatic policies of open borders and the sharing of all Light lands and wealth with the shadowkin and even beyond, to Faery and to the hated and feared realm of the Demons.

  As the shadowkin began to spread into the Lightside there began to be open fighting between the races. To suppress it Suha sent soldiers to police the region. He had to grow his army to keep the peace. He redistributed ancient stolen wealth and was accused of colluding with shadow leaders to strip the light of all its value—of grand treason, and corruption. He was taken to trial and further charged with crimes against nature when some of the Jayon Daga, his secret service, turned on him and told stories of the executions they had committed in his name.

  Suhanathir sat in his prison cell, baffled by the stupidity that was all around him, pressing him down, which would surely now find a way to kill him and move on to a fresh field of bigotry and slaughter, incensed by the removal of so much money and land, by the threat of the removal of more. Stupid people. He wondered how he had got there, even at the same moment he could see the path so clearly and every stone upon it was a good intention, a hard moral decision, a righteous way. How could it be that you might offer a perfect way to the people, and they would throw it aside in favour of the momentary gratifications of their own petty interests? He had had no life of his own for the last forty years. It had all been consumed by the endless struggle to survive politically. The costs had seemed worth it for the goal. But the goal was lost, and suddenly it was clear that those costs could not be repaid in any kind. They were outstanding debts upon his soul. So many.

  Zal remembered his imprisonment in Suhanathir’s world crystallised in that one moment in the cell. So much struggle, Suha thought, lying down to sleep because he had nothing else to do. Suha dreamed of a coloured flag, flying against blue skies, and tears fell in his sleep.

  Zal, always awake for a hundred and eighty years, missing nothing, stared at Suha with hatred and pity and wished him dead.

  At that moment the dream fell apart. He found himself looking at the Hoodoo woman, lying drunk and comatose on white rum and blood. She snored like a bull elephant, which was strange for someone whose nose was only a dark hole in a rotting piece of wood. Adai took his hand and helped him to his feet. His body was as wounded and sore as he had left it eighteen decades ago.

  Three minutes had passed in Demonia.

  “Come,” said Adai in her growl, giving him no time to feel any of the joys of self-control again. “We must get you to Madame quickly.” She hauled him to his feet, her claws scratching his skin painfully as she pulled him with her down long streets and narrow ways where healthy, vibrant demons hooted and screeched at him and tried to rip his andalune free of his body.

  At Madame Des Loupes’s house they were granted audience immediately. She came out of her home to the street to meet them and looked down at him from one black eye. “Would you choose reality over the dream?”

  “Always,” he croaked, leaning on Adai’s side, the cluster of demons around them becoming a crowd as they sensed the brimming of Madame’s power and saw that its focus was the unheard-of being—an elf. He wondered why they all rushed back suddenly to the limits of the little square as he staggered in the light on his unfamiliar legs and felt Adai at his back. Her hands had become iron on his arms, holding him up and still. His eyes watered so he could hardly see.

  “Then be free,” said Madame kindly, and stabbed him in the forehead with her huge, black beak, splitting his skull.

  Zal remembered that all right. It had hurt like nothing in the universe. She spoke into his eye chakra, the energy centre of all he perceived. “Let there be light.”

  Much later, in another agony in another region of Demonia, he remembered becoming demon, his wings unfolding and setting his clothes on fire. Everything hurt a lot in those days. He cried like a little kid most nights, but that was his secret. And one day he was walking down the street, a full and respected member of demon society, imp free, and heard Sorcha singing. He joined in and started to follow her.

  All day he followed her, harmonising on her tunes until she finally couldn’t keep up her cold indifferenc
e trick and turned around.

  “Are you like my shadow or something?” she snapped, melodious even in that.

  “I’m your brother,” he sang, as though in an opera, more sure he was right about this than he had been about anything.

  She laughed instantly, enormously, enough to double over and nearly fall on the floor. The demons with her looked at him with suspicion and nervousness and envy. Sorcha wiped tears of flame from her eyes and straightened up, sashayed across to him, and stared him in the face, opening her big, full, red lips.

  She looked. And then she sang back, “You are, you are, you are!” on a rising major chord. And continued singing in light operatic verse,“How very dear peculiar, I wish you were my junior,

  but sadly this effluvia of flame dictates a ru-li-er . . .

  of matters rather magical and terrible and tragical,

  I must admit you’re logical and right and true and ad-mra-ble . . .”

  She paused for breath and stood back, looking him up and down.

  “Your visage most inimical, your nature but a principle,

  you’re sadly near-invincible, your ears are truly wince-able,

  but you’re contemptible and sensible and all that you should be.

  As brother dear I’ll take you then, though sad my heart to know that

  when

  I want to slake a thirst for elf I’ll be hunting them all by myself.”

  They stood facing each other, the entire street staring at them. A light jalopy fell out of the sky as its drivers forgot to keep windtalking in astonishment.

  Sorcha grabbed hold of him and kissed him passionately on the mouth with a huge, audible-from-Mars kind of “Mwa!” at the end. She turned to the audience and sang, “Be glad it’s only me that has to suffer with the sibling curse, for I can tell you all at once that at kissing he is not the worst!”

  Then she added,“Sons of the trees were once my favourite toys,

  but now I charge each one of you to look out for Pinocchio-boy.

  And if you listen not to me the fire of unrequited love shall burn

  each and every one of you till you’re done to a turn!”

  She made the flourishing sign of a live curse with one red-taloned hand and the mark flared in the air before her. Then she turned to Suha and spoke normally, “So, bro, what’s you called at home?”

  “Zal,” Zal said.

  “Dinner’s at six. Get lost, I need to hang with my girls and call everyone in existence to tell them I was forced to sing a fucking improvised aria by a hippie tree-hugger.” She pointed. “House is that way. They’ll be expecting you by the time you find it.”

  He remembered standing in the dark room at Solomon’s Folly, full of a wretched desire to annoy the new bodyguard, to warn them that he wouldn’t be followed, to push them out of the danger zone as the people who wanted him dead closed in. He remembered singing “Blame It On the Sun,” channelling Stevie Wonder’s voice and then laying eyes for the first time on Lila Amanda Black as she came into his room, surrounded by huge magnetic fields that weren’t all to do with her machinery. He remembered stopping dead, his throat shut, able to see her before she noticed him. She was close enough to reach out and touch and he wanted to kiss her so much that if she had only come one step closer, he would have.

  Of course, she would have killed him. But it would have been okay.

  It was a fitting final moment, Zal thought as he lost even the sense of Mr. Head’s hand. He fervently wished Lila would be okay.

  And then he heard a woman’s voice singing, clear and true and light.

  I saw three ships come sailing in . . .

  “Heave to, my lads!” called a boy’s voice from above him in the vast grey. “Look there, lubbers in the water! Fetch the grapples and nets and make haste! Turnabout turnabout, man overboard!”

  A ship’s bell clanged, mournful and true.

  He heard the wash of the sea and felt the rise and fall of waves.

  “What have we here?” said the woman’s voice and he was suddenly being hauled up the side of a vast ironclad vessel that was as real and solid as true material but cold and weightless too. A ghost ship.

  He landed on its deck shivering, his andalune half frozen by its gelid aether.

  “What have we here?” echoed the boy, a coffee-coloured ten-year-old dressed in an outsize adult’s navy uniform, adjusting his tricorne admiral’s hat. His bare feet poked out beneath tattered blue trousers and a sword was fixed askew to his waist by a white leather belt wrapped around three times. It threatened to trip him up but he kept a firm grip on the hilt.

  “Oh this is Half,” said the woman’s voice, moving closer through the thick fog that shrouded them all. “But who is his companion?”

  Zal looked up into the unknowable face of Abida Ereba and said, “This is my research assistant, Mr. Head.” He gave what he hoped was a winning smile.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Lila felt a sharp pain in her ear and then the scratch of claws puncturing the skin of her shoulder.

  “Ta Daaa!” Thingamajig declared, standing in showman stance with a huge grin on his face.

  Max sat down on the sand, not entirely at her own will, mouth open. Buster and Rusty leapt up, barking furiously.

  Thingamajig kept his grin going, though it froze slightly. “Not too late, am I? Am I?”

  Keeping me for later in the show? Tath asked drily.

  Lila didn’t reply. She stood her weapons down and allowed the skin on her arms to remake itself. It did so slowly, like warm plastic melting together. The discarded sections withered in the sun. She hadn’t even known it could do that. She dressed again.

  The dogs circled anxiously around Max and whined. Max just stared and her T-shirt blew against her bony body like an old flag on a fallen pole. Buster whined and panted. Rusty cocked his head at Lila, ears going up and down in indecision.

  “Begone,” Lila commanded Thingamajig.

  “But I . . .”

  “Now.” She was going to cry in a moment and she knew it wasn’t for her. She didn’t deserve it.

  The imp prattled, “I can really help you out here. I am a trained counsellor and interlocutor for all kinds of disputation and debate. Family reunions are a speciality.”

  Tath did something Lila didn’t understand but she felt his energy leap up through her shoulder and into the demon’s tiny body like lightning. The imp squealed and snapped back to his stone form. Tath’s whirling assumed a pleased pattern and his smugness filled Lila’s empty stomach.

  It also gave her the energy necessary not to cry. She brushed at her skirt for a moment.

  Max’s mouth worked. Lila could tell it was all the snappy one-liners that Max was thinking of but not saying. Smart, sassy Max who always had something to say about anything. Lila silently willed her to get it together. She hadn’t wanted to reduce Max to a silent parody. She’d just wanted to get the horrible deed over with, to show the truth because somehow she couldn’t bring herself to tell it.

  “I . . . uh . . .” Max began. “I didn’t know you could get that on Medicaid.” The words ran out of her mouth on automatic, like she hardly knew they were coming. She looked up at Lila’s silver eyes without changing expression and babbled. “Isn’t it great what they can do these days? For a minute there I thought you’d turned into some kind of lethal weapon. That’s the cool version, right? Maybe they forgot to do the one with the whisks and the dough hook accessory and the can opener. Nothing really useful for the home on there . . .” She trailed off and her mouth finished on open. She sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, dug her hands into the sand.

  The dogs sat down together, starting to bore now the excitement was passed.

  “Wh-what does it . . . I mean . . .” Lila stammered. “What does it look like? Is it really bad?” She needed Max to tell her how it was. She needed to know and only a sister who’d always known about everything would know. Max would tell her what to do about it. Like always.

>   Max paused and covered up the smouldering stub of her cigarette with a little heap of sand. “You know, I think you’re on your own with this one,” she said after a while, then she looked back at Lila’s face, trying to meet her gaze, holding onto it as best she could. “It looks like way outta my league is what. Some accident, huh?”

  “Max,” Lila said, tight as a drum. “I think Mum and Dad are dead ’cos of me. This.”

  Max continued piling sand for a few moments. She watched her work. “Pyramids weren’t built in a day, Liles. Think this is gonna take longer to get through than just some talk on the beach, isn’t it?”

  Lila just nodded, waiting to see what Max’s plan was but so grateful that Max clearly had one. Her sister’s face had gone hard but determined. Lila had no idea sometimes where she yanked up her strength from. She always looked like she was about to wither away but just when the chips were down, Max would pull out a big hunk of grit from her soul and start wearing away at the problems with it; tough cookie.

  Max sighed. “Was that a demon on your shoulder?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Anything else in the inventory?”

  “An elf. Two. One dead. One not here. A faery. The one in the car. A demon. Bigger. Not here.”

  “And that woman with the death-ray hair?”

  “My boss.”

  “I didn’t like her.”

  “Me neither.”

  “She’s got victim eyes,” Max said. “People like that . . .” But she didn’t have to go on. People with victim eyes were dangerous. Mom had always said so. Lila wondered how she’d overlooked it for so long.

  With a groan of exhaustion Max pulled herself from the sand and dusted her pants off. The dogs got up slowly and circled her, waiting for the homeward turn.

  “Julie’s getting married,” Max announced to nobody in particular and stretched, looking out over the water of the Bay towards the far point where the glamorous districts of the city glittered with the obscene extravagance of casino lights and hotel billboards.