He feels her rouse and turn toward him. “What is it?” Her voice is groggy.
“A light!” he says. “I need light!”
She turns again and slips away from him. His fingers are left groping at empty air. “Where are you?”
The room fills with green light. Astrid is standing by the bed with a glowstick in her hand.
“Where’s the bath?” he asks.
“Over there,” she says, pointing.
In the opposite corner of the room is a tiled depression, a hole in the floor with a spigot over it. He stumbles to the corner and vomits into the hole. The nausea ebbs away, but the pain in his skull remains. When he is done, he rinses his mouth and spits what is left into the hole. “A drink,” he says. “Bring me a drink.”
“You mean alcoholic or not?”
“A drink, damn it! Alcoholic.”
She shrugs and reaches into the cabinet. She pulls out a bottle and climbs across the bed to bring it to him. He takes the bottle and drains it. “Vasodilator,” he explains, wiping his lips. “To get rid of the migraine.”
“Are you on drugs?” she asks.
“Sort of.” Already he can feel his blood vessels opening. The throbbing in his head subsides as the alcohol flows through his veins. “I’ve been developing a compound designed to enable people to breathe the fumatory, at least for short periods of time. It’s still experimental. It increases the oxygen-carrying capability of the blood and breaks down carbon monoxide and other poisons in the bloodstream. I’ve been testing it on myself.”
“That’s why you’re sick?”
“Well, the fumatory causes its own effects, but yes, the serum has side effects. The problem is the profusion of erythrocytes in my blood. My hematocrit is off the charts. If I don’t take an anticoagulant regularly, I’m at risk of cerebral embolism . . . a stroke. There may be some other problems, too. I’m still working on it.”
“You’re not going to die here right now, are you?”
He smiles wryly. She is totally uninterested in his welfare; her only concern is that he might inconvenience her by dying on her bed before he has settled his bill. “Not right now,” he says. “But I’d better get back to my office and run some tests.”
“You’re leaving already?”
“Would you miss me if I left?”
“Of course I would.” She stretches out across the bed, casually displaying her naked body. “Guys as smart and handsome as you don’t come by that often, you know.”
He smiles again. Surely she is lying, or at least exaggerating, but she says it with such easy charm that he doesn’t care if she is sincere or not. “Then come with me,” he says. “I’ll show you the Chandelier.”
She sighs. “I told you, I can’t leave. This is my place. I come with the room.”
“Let me take you away. I can give you a better life.”
“I can’t leave, Edward. That was part of the deal, when my agent got me the room and paid for the resculpting. The room is tuned to my biofrequency. I can’t leave it.”
“Astrid, I don’t know what kind of superstitious foolishness your agent’s been feeding you, but as a trained physician I can tell you there’s no such thing as a ‘biofrequency.’ He’s scamming you.”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried? The moment I walk out that door my gut starts churning. And the further I walk, the worse it gets. I’ve never made it further than a few meters.”
“Then we’ll leave the way I came in. Through the vent.”
Astrid looks at the hole in the wall, and Edward sees the first real emotion she has dared to reveal to him, a glimmer of hope. “That might work,” she says.
“I’ll show you the Chandelier,” he promises. “I’ll show you the river. I’ll show you the Sun. You’ve never seen the Sun, have you?”
She shakes her head. No.
“Will you come with me?” Edward asks.
She stands and looks around the room, eyes darting from one knickknack to the next. “I’d need to bring some things with me . . .”
He stands behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders. “Don’t bother. It’s a long way, and it’s hard to carry things through the vents. I’ll buy you whatever you need when we reach the upper decks. We’ll get you a whole new wardrobe.”
She turns her head and looks at him, but her eyes are reluctant to rest on his. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yes!” He grips her arm. “Yes. Come with me.”
Without answering, she steps away and pulls a small, transparent cube from the wall. Flecks of paint come with it. Edward can see that the room has been painted many, many times. Astrid holds the cube in both hands and stares into it. Blobs of colored light roll and jump slowly within. “I wonder if I should bring this,” she says. “It’s the only thing in the room that’s really mine. Samael gave it to me. Everything else was already here when I came.”
Edward has seen these cubes for sale in the Atrium. They are cheap trinkets, part of a forgotten fad among tertiaries, but she doesn’t know that. “We can bring it if you like.”
“No,” she says, dropping it on the bed. “Leave it for whoever the room eats next.”
LOGIC AND POWER
“Sorry, you’re not cleared for this deck.”
Cadell stares through the horizontal bars at the clop standing on the other side. The clop looks back, his face shadowed in the small booth. His crimson eyeband is squeezed between bushy eyebrows and fat cheeks.
“What did you say?” Cadell asks.
“Machine says you’re not cleared,” the clop repeats, his thick lips pursed.
“That’s ridiculous. I’m a primary. I’ve walked through this gate a thousand times.” Cadell points to the stripe on his shoulder.
The clop shakes his head. “Machine says no.”
Cadell slaps his ident against the identification plate again. Again he sees the negative red light illuminate the clop’s eroding face.
“Your machine must be malfunctioning,” Cadell says.
“Can’t be. Had it checked yesterday.”
Cadell presses himself up against the bars. All the force he can muster doesn’t move them a micron. He feels something like panic driving him into a frenzy. How could he have been so stupid as to leave Amarantha, even for a moment? “Listen,” he says, “I don’t have time for this. My wife needs me . . .”
With an effort, the clop stands and squeezes out of his booth. Cadell has finally succeeded in bothering him.
“I mean, not my wife . . .” Cadell shoves his arm though the bars. “Look, you can read my ident manually, can’t you? I’m a primary, I swear!”
The clop takes a quick step backward and pulls out his gun. “You want to get shot?” he says. Cadell yanks his arm back in. “Because I’ll shoot you,” the clop continues, warming up to the idea.
Cadell realizes he is going about this the wrong way. He is treating the clop as if he is stupid, but he isn’t. Cadell is arguing logically, but to the clop this isn’t an issue of logic. It’s an issue of power, of relative status. By insisting on logic, Cadell is only making the clop mad.
Cadell hurries out of the booth and maneuvers into the line waiting at the next booth over. The man at the front of the line begins to object, but Cadell pushes past him and the bars of the booth snap shut behind him. He puts his ident against the panel. The bars in front of him slide open.
The clop lumbers toward the booth. “I’d like to read your ident manually,” he says.
Cadell pushes him out of the way and bounds up the stairs. As he reaches the landing, he looks back briefly. The clop has his gun pointing in Cadell’s direction but seems reluctant to pull the trigger. Cadell feels a prick of regret. He would never have believed he was capable of assaulting a clop.
He turns the corner, leaving the clop behind, and keeps running.
A QUESTION OF CHARACTER
“She did not want to admit to her boyfriend that she was still in love with me,” Second Son is saying
, his small face bobbing up and down across the monitor. “The attack of the Winnower exposed our tryst, but it also gave her a ready-made excuse. She told him that I had assaulted her, tried to rape her. He saw in her story an opportunity to advance himself politically by bringing a suit against me. That’s really why we’re here today. Not because this woman was hurt — clearly she wasn’t — but because her boyfriend has allied himself with my political enemies.”
Amarantha sits with her arms folded across her chest, watching him talk. She has finished her presentation, but she does not want to leave while Second Son is still making his argument. She is allowed to stay as long as she can stand it, and she intends to wait him out.
Second Son gets to his feet. There is not much room in the examination booths, but somehow he manages. He clasps his hands together behind his back and takes a deep breath, playing it up for the camera. “Later in my presentation, I will present an episode in which Miss Kirton and her boyfriend discuss how they would like to see my family stripped of its prestige and the cameras ripped down. But first I’d like to call up an episode from 324.17.5, in Domus 412, Sector 12, Deck 7.”
Amarantha strains to recall when and where that was, what Second Son could possibly be thinking of. Then it hits her. “Oh, no,” she whispers. “No, you can’t do that.”
“It’s an episode relating to the character of the plaintiff,” Second Son says with a smirk.
“Personal history isn’t relevant!” Amarantha objects, her voice rising in fear. She doesn’t remember the exact date that Second Son has asked for, but the episode is from her bad times, when she was living in the lower decks with the group of tertiaries.
“I would never do such a thing,” Second Son repeats to her. “Those were your words. You brought up the issue of character yourself. You made it relevant.”
“Image!” she pleads. “You can’t let him!”
“I’m afraid he is correct.”
The episode begins to play on the monitor. Amarantha is lying naked on a dirty bedspread, musth dripping out of one ear. Her eyes are unfocused. A man lies beside her, his hands on her breast. Another man is behind her.
“That was years ago,” Amarantha says, unable to make her faltering voice rise. “I was just a kid. My boyfriend had dumped me. My father was dead.”
Image says, “The veniremen will take those things into consideration.”
The men slide closer to her, touching her with their hands, their mouths. The movement of other people, just beyond the edge of the viewing area, becomes apparent. The men move languidly, with intermittent bursts of sudden activity. She responds sluggishly, sensual only in the grossest sense of the word.
He lets the pictures run for a long time.
THE PUNISHMENT
“Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all.”
Horsen curses out loud, though the room is empty. Why not? No one is willing to come near him, so why shouldn’t he curse at no one?
“Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em.” He chants it over and over like a mantra.
He sits slouched in a large chair in one corner of his domus. An empty bottle of oddka lies on the floor by his side. Occasionally he lifts the soft gun he stole from work and points it at the triple-locked door. “Zip!” he says, pretending to fire it. “Zap!”
He imagines his wife walking through the door. “Zip!” He imagines his friends walking in. “Zip!”
But none of these people have been near Horsen for days, and none will be coming by today. Nobody wants to be seen with the guy who shot the Deathsman.
“Fuck you all,” he mutters, laying the gun down on the floor. “Cowards.”
He tried to return to work, but everyone turned their heads. They wouldn’t let him come within five meters of them. They all fled like he had the plague. His boss wouldn’t give him any more assignments, told him to just go home. And wait. He actually said that, the bastard.
No one understands that this was not his fault. From the very beginning, none of this has been his fault.
Horsen snatches up the gun again and aims. Door! He swings the gun around, weaving drunkenly in the chair. Vent! Service hatch! He has all the possible entrances covered, and he can wait as long as they can.
They. “Corpse-loving freaks,” he mutters. With their stupid death rituals and their silly black masks. Everyone’s afraid of them. But not Horsen. No, they don’t scare him. Not a bit. Not the only man to face the Winnower and live.
He imagines a Deathsman in the middle of the room. He aims at it. Just for the hell of it, he decides to pull the trigger, see the flash and hear the sizzle. Nothing happens. He sits frozen for a moment, staring at his hand, at the finger that refuses to move. Shit, he thinks. He realizes he can’t feel his fingers, can’t feel the gun. His arm goes numb and drops to his side. Slowly, without his volition, his fingers unclench, and the gun tumbles to the floor. He tries to lift his other arm, but it has gone numb, too.
There is a darkness in the corner of his eye. He turns his head, and he sees it, a black phantom squeezing into reality. Horsen tries to stand and flee, but the Deathsman moves faster. He sweeps around Horsen, touching each of Horsen’s legs with quick, neat precision. Horsen collapses back into the chair, twitching violently as his nerves spasm, then go dead. He tries to lean forward, but the silver fingertips push him back. He looks down at the Deathsman’s hand, and at his own body, which has suddenly become alien to him. He can no longer feel his lungs breathing or his heart beating, though he can see his chest rise and fall, and he can feel his pulse pounding in his temples.
The Deathsman steps back and pauses for a moment to let Horsen assess the situation. Horsen looks wildly around, then opens his mouth to scream for help, but the Deathsman’s hand darts forward, touching an index finger to Horsen’s lips. The scream dies in his throat. His mouth hangs open, and he feels drool begin to drip down his chin. The Deathsman walks around the chair and gently touches Horsen’s throat at the larynx. Horsen’s head wobbles and falls back against the chair. He stares up at the ceiling, struggling inwardly for some control of his body, but he can feel nothing. The Deathsman limps around him, a menacing black shape sliding across the periphery of his vision.
He touches Horsen’s ears next. They ring for a while, then everything goes silent. He steps back again, regarding Horsen carefully, as if making sure that he has done the job right, that he hasn’t missed anything. Horsen watches from the corner of his eyes, tears running down the side of his face. The Deathsman nods, satisfied. He touches Horsen’s nose almost playfully, just to be thorough.
The eyes come last.
ESCAPE
“I’m going to put the mask on now. Don’t be afraid.”
As the helmet locks into place, Edward feels the now-familiar sensation of power and anonymity. It flows through him as if he actually is possessed by the ancient avenging spirit, as if he truly has become the Winnower. He cannot resist glancing at himself in the mirror.
“I’m not afraid,” Astrid says, moving closer. She runs her hands across the breastplate, which is cast in the shape of a muscular chest. It’s a poor design, really, because it weakens the structural integrity of the metal.
“Are you ready?” he asks.
She nods. “You know, you sound different with it on.”
“I know.” He slips his arms into the hole and pulls himself through. “I’ve got to go in a bit before I can turn around,” he shouts back to her. “Then I’ll come back to help you get in.”
He shimmies through the narrow duct until he reaches a junction large enough for him to reverse himself. By the time he returns to the opening, she has already worked her way into the duct.
“It’s dark in here,” she says.
“I’ll guide you.” He takes her hand — his metal claw almost engulfing it — and works his way backward through the duct.
“Oh,” she says.
“What’s the matter?”
“The pain. It’s starting.”
&n
bsp; “Ignore it,” Edward says. “It’ll go away.”
He continues to pull her forward, but she moves more slowly now. Her breath is quick and shallow. She grips his hand in spasms of pain. “It’s getting worse.”
“It’s psychosomatic,” he insists. “There’s no such thing as a ‘biofrequency’. It’s just a story he told you to keep you in line. Keep moving.”
“I can’t! I’m on fire!”
“You’re not. You’re fine.” He pulls her into the junction with the larger duct. There is enough room here for him to kneel and put his arm around her. He cannot see her in the darkness, but he can feel her shaking. When he touches her face he can feel that it is slick with sweat.
“I’ve got to go back,” she moans. “It’s ripping me apart!”
He wraps his arm around her chest, restraining her. “It’s all in your head. Just relax, and it’ll go away.”
“Let go of me!” she screams. “How could you know what it feels like?” She writhes in his grasp, trying to escape.
“Keep it down,” he whispers fiercely. “Do you want to tell everyone where we are? Do you want to get us both killed?”
“I don’t care! I’ve got to go back!”
“Quiet! I can’t go back to that room, and neither can you!”
“Let me go! Let me go!” Despite his greater bulk, she has nearly succeeded in dragging him back into the smaller duct.
“Quiet!” He wraps one hand around her face, smothering her mouth and nose with steel. Still she scrambles to return to her room, her fingernails scratching against the walls of the duct.
He pulls her back, her entire body wrapped in the crook of his arm. Her face is turned up toward his, her eyes wide. Now she is struggling not to escape, but simply to breathe. She whips her head back and forth, trying to break free of his grasp. He squeezes tighter, until she cannot move her head at all.
She tries to strike him in the face with her fists, but she cannot reach around his arm. Her struggles grow weaker. Her muffled screams become pitiful mewls, smothered by steel. Her body twists in occasional weak spasms, which come further and further apart.
Steel Sky Page 23
