Steel Sky

by Andrew C. Murphy

  “Interesting. Why haven’t I heard of this?”

  “The concept of the End Time is primarily of importance to tertiaries and quaternaries, who believe the Winnower to be their champion.”

  Kitt frowns, leaning back against the couch. “So the myth isn’t relative to my clients . . . ”

  “On the contrary. What the underclasses believe inevitably comes to affect the psyche of the Hypogeum as a whole. They are the subconscious of the city.”

  “Nice line. I can use that.” Kitt sighs and taps her fingers on the armrests, musing: “Too bad the four-hundredth anniversary of the Hypogeum is still eighty years off . . .”

  “Not really,” the gentle voice replies. “The Founders followed a calendar of 365 days. The current 500-day year was invented after the Eternity Riots, as part of the revised chronometric standard. By the old system, the fourth century is less than a year away.”

  THE ASPIRANT

  The aspirant waits for the master to return. Dressed only in a short, black shift, he sits on the edge of a wide, sumptuous bed. The linens are soft and startlingly white. In fact, the entire apartment is decorated in pure white, softly lit from recesses in the walls. The aspirant, with his black clothes and his short, dark hair, stands out starkly against the monochromatic scene, a punctuation mark without a sentence. The aspirant is twelve, or perhaps thirteen, years old. Even he is not sure.

  The aspirant had a name once, and possessions, and a family. His parents he lost to cancer, the rest he renounced when he was accepted for induction into the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood noticed him when they took his parents. They saw that he was alone, with no one to support him. They did not come to him right away. First they let him grieve. And when he was done, they waited until he began to despair. He had no relatives, no friends who could help him, no destiny except to become a drudge down below until he wasted away. Only after he fully appreciated this fact did his master-to-be come to him. He offered the boy a chance to control the emptiness before it engulfed him.

  At first he was uneasy in his new life. Occasionally he would wonder if it was his master who had been the one to end his parents suffering. Later he came to realize that such questions were meaningless. Identity is superfluous. Individuality is for others.

  He has stopped thinking of the outside world and learned the joys of submission. He watches and learns from his master, and some day soon they will teach him the ways of silence and no-motion. They will implant him with a subvocal amplifier that will enable him to speak without moving his lips. They will give him a blender to make him invisible to human eyes. They will impart to him the deepest secrets of the Brotherhood. If he masters all these things, then they will give him the silver fingertips and make him a brother. If he does not — or if they decide they do not have need of another brother at that time — they will kill him. That is the way.

  The door slides open and the master glides into the wide, windowless room. To an untrained eye he would be invisible, but the aspirant has learned to see the perturbations of the air as the master moves through it. The master brushes past him, and the hairs on the back of the aspirant’s neck stand up. His master carries the scent of blood on him. That in itself is not unusual, but the aspirant senses from the way his master carries himself that something is wrong.

  The master reveals himself, his image wavering as the blender field dissipates. Clotting blood coats his left leg. His cloak hangs around him in tatters. He yanks off his hood and throws it to the floor. He is literally dripping with sweat. From behind round optical sensors his yellowed eyes stare at the boy. Spittle hangs from his chin and his hair sticks out in all directions.

  “Run a bath,” he commands, “and fetch me some clean strips of cloth.”

  As he rushes to obey his master’s instructions, the aspirant wonders if this sort of thing happens often to Deathsmen. He has never seen his master like this before. Should the aspirant expect this sort of danger if he — Koba willing — becomes a member of the Brotherhood? The aspirant suspects that his master is in some way different from the other Deathsmen, but he is not sure.

  While the bath is running, he rips apart an old sheet. When he returns to the main room, he sees that the Deathsman has removed his optical sensors and is waiting impatiently to be disrobed. As he unfastens his master’s collar, the aspirant glows inwardly at his master’s strength. Though he is gravely wounded, swaying with pain and exhaustion, he remains on his feet. The precepts must always be followed. Decorum must be maintained.

  “Throw everything in a bag,” the Deathsman says. “It will all need to be repaired and refitted.”

  The aspirant folds the tattered cloak into a pile and begins removing the blender, a complex, jointed machine that clings to his master’s back with long, silver legs. How fortunate, the aspirant thinks, that the blender was not damaged. The master could have been electrocuted.

  “How did this happen?” the aspirant asks.

  “A clop mistook me for the Winnower. He shot me.”

  The aspirant gasps at the audacity. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. The moment was not right.”

  “But surely he must be punished!”

  The Deathsman smiles. “In time,” he says. He puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You have yet to learn patience as the Deathsmen practice it. Patience, not only of moments, but of days, and even of years. That is our way.”

  The aspirant nods, shamed. He peels away his master’s uniform. As he pulls the fabric from the wound it begins to bleed again. Blood is nothing new to the aspirant. No sight of mutilation or decay frightens him any more. His horrific induction exposed him to more aspects of human mortality than he had ever thought existed. But this is different. This is no ordinary client; this is the sacred body of a Deathsman — deliberately attacked! This is his master!

  He suppresses his discomfort and helps the Deathsman into the tub. As he settles into the bath, the water turns bright pink, then scarlet. It seems as if the master is swimming in blood.

  “Are you certain this is the best thing to do?” the aspirant asks nervously.

  The Deathsman rests his head against the back of the tub and closes his eyes. “It feels good,” he says. “I will rest here for a little while, then we will clean the wound and bandage it.”

  “Perhaps you should see a doctor.”

  The Deathsman smiles. “I know one,” he says, “a good one. But that is not our way.”

  The aspirant bows his head. He wonders if he can ever be as great a Deathsman as his master is. He wonders if he will ever be able to put the Way before all else, including his own life and the lives of those he cares for, the way his master does.

  He raises his head, and realizes his master is looking at him. There is a small smile on his lips and a warm look in his yellow eyes. “I’ll be all right,” he says quietly.

  The aspirant nods, and turns his head to hide the tears welling up in his eyes. He cannot believe how lucky he is. He has spoken to other aspirants and heard stories of indifference and sometime even outright cruelty. Every brother must have an aspirant: they keep the traditions alive and provide companionship to the brothers, since women — as the bringers of life — are not permitted into the Brotherhood. But not every brother loves his aspirant as his master loves him. And not every brother is as great as his master is.

  The Deathsman reaches out and tousles his aspirant’s hair. “What happened to you today, then?” he asks.

  The aspirant thinks, and frowns with the memory of it. “One of the brothers came by for a visit. I think he was angry.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He must have been here for twenty centichrons, and he didn’t move a muscle or say a word the whole time. It was very odd.” Ah.” The Deathsman makes the smile that is not a smile. “Then they are angry.”

  “They?” The aspirant is worried. To have one brother angry with you is bad. To have the entire Brotherhood against you is disaster. “I don’
t understand,” he says. “Why should they be angry?”

  “They will say it is because I have broken the rules by exposing myself to a member of the public, that I have made the Brotherhood too visible.”

  “Is it true?”

  “It’s true I have broken the rules, or at least bent them, but that’s not why they are angry. The truth is they are angry at me because they are jealous.”

  “What are they jealous of?”

  The Deathsman’s smile becomes even wider, a long gash across his thin face. He slides downward into the bath until only his mouth and nose are sticking out from the red water. “My masterpiece,” he says, before submerging completely.

  CONFORMATION

  When Amarantha was a very young girl her mother took her to meet Kris Belford. She dimly remembers being frightened by the fidgety old man with his foul breath and his purple liver spots. Her mother picked her up by the armpits and made Amarantha kiss him. His face was dry and cool. She could feel the bone beneath his cheek, as if there was no substance to the man under his skin.

  Amarantha’s mother put her in a corner and made her wait while she talked to the old man. Amarantha sat in the hard, uncomfortable chair, wondering why they had come so far to meet this unpleasant old man who was not even a relative. He was very angry about something. He rattled on about “regressives,” whatever that meant, and how they had sabotaged his work. He waved his arms wildly as if to wipe his enemies away. He had a lot of energy for such an old man. Her mother knelt at his bedside, hanging on his every word. Occasionally, the old man’s manner would soften and he would reach out and stroke Amarantha’s mother’s hair, which was beginning to fade from green to yellow. Amarantha’s father, who would in coming years divorce his mother, and later die of Budd-Chiari syndrome, leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, a sour look on his face. On their way home, her parents argued in clipped, hushed voices. Her father asked her mother why she cared so much for an old man who had caused nothing but trouble. Amarantha could not understand everything they were saying. It was all too complex.

  Amarantha’s mother did a lot of confusing things no one else’s mother did, as far as Amarantha could tell. One thing she did was to make Amarantha play the conformation game. She had a big box filled with complex geometric shapes. She would hold them up in front of Amarantha and tell her to imagine the shapes fitting together, face to face. Amarantha was then required to describe the resulting larger form. Usually she was right, which surprised her, since Amarantha did not think of herself as being very smart. When she guessed wrong, her mother would make her do it again until she got it right. Amarantha came to know each of the thirty-two shapes well, and even to relate to them as if each one had a personality of its own. The simple ones with the flat surfaces were friendly and helpful. The more complex shapes, whose edges described sections of parabolas and other more complicated curves, were sullen and saturnine. The young Amarantha hated them all. She never understood the purpose of the conformation game. What was the point? It wasn’t until much later, when she was older, that she found out that the Engineered tended to perform much better than normals in problems of spatial relations. The conformation game was not really a game at all. It was not even education. It was a ritual.

  As she grew up, Amarantha learned that the Engineered had other, similar rituals. Each one was a reaffirmation and celebration of their uniqueness. The Engineered relished their individuality and rarely socialized with each other, but there was a strange sense of community among them that Amarantha found both comforting and oppressive. Kris Belford, the man who designed their distinctive gene sequence, had intended them to be smarter and stronger than normals — and in fact they were stronger, and on average tested better than normals in intelligence tests — but it didn’t really make a difference. They weren’t better businessmen, as the headstrong geneticist had hoped. They weren’t better scientists. They weren’t better people. All they were was outsiders.

  Amarantha was twelve years old when she found out what it really meant to be one of the Engineered. Her best friend was a boy named Luke. They had been friends for as long as Amarantha could remember. As she and Luke entered adolescence, Amarantha began to look at Luke differently. He was, she noticed, a handsome boy. Since he seemed slow to notice how beautiful Amarantha was, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She quietly suggested that it might be funny if the two of them pretended to be boyfriend and girlfriend. For a year it worked well, so well that Amarantha thought maybe they could stop pretending they were pretending, but as Luke grew into a man he began to get his own ideas. The older boys he was hanging around with now made comments to him about Amarantha when she wasn’t around. They criticized Luke for being friendly with a gunge-head. She overheard them once and was astonished to hear how they described her. She was arrogant, they said. She had gunge brains, so when she did well in school it didn’t really mean anything. And when she did poorly, it meant she was lazy. They said that she didn’t really care for Luke, she was just out to steal his ideas, the way gunge-heads always did.

  Luke stopped visiting her. He would not answer her comms. Once or twice he dropped by to see her, smiling gently as if he missed her friendship, but it wouldn’t be long before the hard look would return to his face, and he would come up with some excuse to leave.

  She told her mother what had happened. Her mother stroked her hair and let her cry on her shoulder, but she didn’t seem to be upset. In fact, she seemed to derive some grim satisfaction from Amarantha’s ordeal. She encouraged Amarantha to spend more time with other second-generation Engineered children, but Amarantha quickly realized that among the small Engineered community there was no one really right for her. They were all so odd.

  Her studies, which had never been exceptional, went downhill. She began taking long, random walks through the city. She found brown dye and tried to color her hair, but her mother discovered her and stopped her before she could finish. Amarantha went to school the next day with hair that was half green and half brown. She was teased more than ever.

  Amarantha’s mother did not hide her disappointment over Amarantha’s declining grades. She tried various disciplinary actions in an attempt to improve her performance, but Amarantha was past the point of being influenced by threats. She considered herself an adult now. She no longer saw any reason to be what her mother wanted her to be. Their fights were long and sometimes dangerous: Amarantha had inherited her mother’s habit of throwing things to emphasize a point.

  Finally she graduated and got a job as an electrician. She had hoped that the practice of fixing things with her hands would make her feel more useful, more a part of things. Unfortunately, the job turned out to be largely political, like everything else in the Hypogeum. She spent most of her time fighting to be allotted more wire, more tools, or simply more voltage. And there, too, she encountered prejudice. She was never able to feel completely comfortable with her co-workers.

  The next few years were not pleasant. Amarantha has tried to forget them. One day, on an assignment, she met a handsome man who introduced her to his friends, a group of tough, low-level tertiaries. She stayed with the man for a while in his tiny apartment. He and his friends were very poor, but they were exciting. They threw long, wild parties, and Amarantha enjoyed them to the fullest. She became a trophy for their group: an Engineered primary, the highest of the high, wallowing with the lowest of the low. For her own part, Amarantha enjoyed their lack of pretension, the absence of the continual pressure she felt among her upper-class friends. Amarantha could lose herself among them for days at a time. They lived crowded in a tiny basher, subsisting on whatever scraps they could scrounge together. She had sex with each of them, first one at a time, then all together. The mixture of pleasure and pain seemed appropriate to her.

  One day she took too much musth, and her heart began to fibrillate. Her friends dragged her to the tertiary hospital annex, then disappeared. The attendants at the hospital were able to stabilize
her condition, but she had to stay there for a few days, confined to her bed. The cramped, unsanitary conditions of the tertiary hospital frightened her. More unsettling was the fact that no one came to visit her. She thought of comming her tersh friends to ask them why they hadn’t come, but she thought better of it. It was over.

  She went back home, to her mother, who helped her get her old apartment and job back. She did not criticize Amarantha or even seem disappointed. She had no more expectations of her.

  TRIALS

  Amarantha feels Cadell put his arm around her shoulders and squeeze tight. “The waiting is the hardest part, isn’t it?” he asks.

  She nods. The blank whiteness of the waiting area is oppressive. She looks at the endless row of small doors in the long, curved wall. A few other people sit fidgeting on other benches, waiting for an opening in the examination booths that surround the Axial court. The hall is silent except for the hiss of the ventilators.

  “Am I doing the right thing, Cadell?” she whispers.

  “Yes,” he replies automatically. “Thraso says Selachian wants to take the monitors away from Orcus. This lawsuit may be the first wedge in breaking their power, toppling Second Son off his throne.”

  “Really?”

  “Mm-hmm. If it works, I’ll be in a very good position. The Culminant himself will actually owe me a favor. There are all sorts of possibilities.”

  She rests her head against him. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “I couldn’t do it without you, Amarantha. I couldn’t do anything without you.”

  Amarantha hugs him tight. When she opens her eyes, she notices that Cadell is peeking over her shoulder at his chronometer. “Weren’t you going to meet Eno Selachian today?” she asks.

  Cadell nods. “The expedition into the caves. They should be meeting at the First Church right about now.”

  Amarantha pulls away. “Cadell, you’ve got to go there.”

  “I can’t leave you here. Not now,” Cadell says. “You might get called at any moment. I can meet Selachian some other time.”