Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  The replica of the guest wing in which Luca now lived had been the idea of Lady Pacioli, Luca’s mother. It was not a particularly original idea because endless ambassadors had undergone training in replica palaces before taking up their posts. The novelty lay in Lady Pacioli’s suggestion that the replica should be taken with them.

  A feat less difficult than it sounded since all she needed was to acquire enough spiders to create whichever replica was appropriate. The secret was to instruct the spiders so they knew in advance exactly what they were meant to be doing.

  The way Luca said this made Tris decide that he was reciting it from memory rather than actually understanding what spiders were or how they could grow a palace from the ground up.

  “It’s falling apart,” Luca said.

  “What is?”

  “All of this.” The stare he turned on the girl seemed heavy with too much knowledge and a realization that he’d never reach wherever it was he once thought he was going. “I’m sorry it’s not better.”

  Luca looked so sad that Tris decided she probably had to sleep with him. It wouldn’t be her first time and Tris wasn’t worried about getting pregnant because Luca was obviously other than human and the mix never took in cases like that.

  This piece of information came from Doc Joyce. And though the Doc had talked about exceptions, Tris felt it unlikely that Luca would carry the kind of germline fix needed to let him father children on stray humans…Of course, Tris didn’t exactly think like this. She just thought, It’s not going to happen.

  And somehow that was enough.

  “You own a bath?”

  Luca’s face froze and it took Tris a second to realize she’d just offended him. “I’m not saying you need one,” she said hurriedly. “I mean, I’ve never had a bath. So if you’ve got one can I borrow it?”

  “It’s been a while,” Luca said.

  “What has?”

  “Since I talked to anyone alive.”

  Tris decided not to think too deeply about that. Nodding at a random door, she said, “Through there…?”

  “Sure,” said Luca. “Why not?”

  When Tris reached the doorway the room on the other side was busy rearranging itself, a divan melting into a wall as floor tiles stretched and sank to produce a bath twice her length.

  “Too large,” said Luca behind her and the tiles shifted again. “You’ll still need some water,” he said. “There should be water.”

  He led Tris to a courtyard where a huge cauldron stood, filled to the brim with rainwater. The cauldron was green with verdigris and the dragons that supported it had oxidized so badly in the rain that their scales were almost flat.

  Below the cauldron stood a hearth heaped with ashes and when Luca swept these away Tris could see filaments of gold, some of which had melted and run together.

  “We’ll need some wood,” Luca said. Instead of heading for a log pile, he wandered back into the pavilion, grabbed a gilded stool and smashed it hard against a doorpost. Scars on the post suggested this wasn’t the first time it had been used that way.

  “Try the table,” suggested Luca.

  Made from a honey-dark wood new to Tris, the table’s top was carved into an ornate and aerodynamically sleek dragon, with vast wings which caught the wind like sails. On the back of the beast was a monk whose robes, beads and beard fluttered in the slipstream.

  “Yes,” said Luca, “that one.”

  So Tris picked up the table and carried it to the door. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “Isn’t it?” agreed Luca. “Here, let me.” Taking the table from Tris’s hands, he swung it hard into the doorpost, cracking monk and dragon into three. “It’s not hard when you know how,” he said. “The trick’s in the wrist.”

  A temple carving followed the table, reduced to tinder in a single swing. “That should do us for now,” said Luca.

  To build his fire, Luca simply banked up fragments of table around a core of temple carving. And when both wood and kindling were ready, he flicked the fingers of his right hand across his thumb, like flint across steel.

  “The water will take about a minute,” he promised.

  “How…?”

  “The cauldron multiplies the heat. Whatever the cauldron takes in, it gives out more.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Tris.

  “Most things are,” Luca said, “if you think about them for long enough.”

  Kneeling next to the kindling, he reached out and Tris watched fire dance from his fingertips, catching ragged wood on a fragment of screen and turning those edges to gold.

  “Watch,” he said.

  Flames caught the splintered screen and fire soon licked the underneath of the ancient cauldron, sliding up its sides until the flames grew, lost colour and disappeared into a heat so hot it was sufficient to make Tris stand back a little. All the same, the flames were nothing compared to the quantity of cold water in the cauldron and yet the inside rim was already beginning to birth bubbles, which grew fatter and fatter, until suddenly the whole slick surface began to roil and break.

  “You’ll need a bucket,” Luca said, “to carry the hot water…We used to have servants,” he added, “but they died.” Seeing Tris’s slight nod, Luca hesitated. “Did I tell you that already?” he said

  Only Tris had stopped listening. She stood in the doorway of the pavilion looking bemused.

  “The table…”

  It was back, not yet complete but soft-edged and almost. A wax sculpture of woodwork melted by the sun. On the wall, a gold and red oblong was coalescing into a temple carving, its gold leaf and red undercoat becoming crazed with age.

  “How?” the girl demanded.

  “This is what the house does,” Luca said. “Endlessly and always the same…Until something gives and suddenly a fire no longer lights itself or the shutters begin to ignore the rain. It will die eventually,” he added, his voice entirely matter-of-fact, “but probably not before I do.”

  Tipping the first bucket into the bath, Luca went back for another. He worked with the rhythm of someone used to the world he inhabited, his life worn loosely.

  “How old are you?” Tris asked. The question had been worrying her.

  “You know,” said Luca, as he scooped another bucket into the cauldron, “it’s hard to say.” He lifted the full bucket without appearing to notice its weight and carried it through the doorway in which she stood.

  “Why is it hard?”

  Luca shrugged and as he passed Tris on his way back their eyes met. It was nothing significant. Luca was just doing his best not to look at her breast where the top had torn. “Not sure I can answer that either,” he said, sounding embarrassed for the first time since they’d met. “We live time differently.”

  “How do you live it?”

  Like that, he wanted to say. Except this would be wrong, because the water in the cauldron boiled so simply, bubbles rising and currents defined by convection, properties of matter and the shape of the vessel in which it was all held. Time worked in all directions but was lived by humans only in one. At least that was what Luca had been taught.

  And there were other differences. The girl’s brain contained no pain fibres, for her, synaptic action was a pain-free process. Her brain could rot and she’d feel nothing. When Luca said a thought hurt he meant it.

  “I live it one way,” he said, “you another.” Scooping up water, he carried his bucket into the pavilion, poured it into the bath and came out again. After that Luca worked in silence until the bath was full. “All yours,” he said.

  The girl glanced doubtfully at steam rising from the surface.

  “No problem,” Luca assured her, “the temperature will adjust. Well, it should do, unless that’s stopped working as well.”

  In the end Tris tried the water with one toe, and then, when she realized Luca didn’t intend to leave, she stripped off her ragged top, shook herself free from the trousers and stepped into her bath.

  “
Can you make me more clothes?”

  “Maybe the house can,” Luca said. “Whether you’ll want to wear them…” And then he smiled, his gaze catching the latex rags she’d kicked into one corner of the room. “I’ll see what we can do,” he said, and with that he was gone, leaving the girl to soak away her doubts.

  Tris said later, mostly to herself, that she couldn’t remember why she agreed to sex. Although this was inaccurate because Tris was the one who instigated it by climbing from her bath and walking naked through the pavilion until she finally found Luca in an attic room, drawing something on a long scroll of paper. An ink stone and mixing pot stood beside him and a small bamboo brush was held elegantly in one hand.

  “CV-1,” he said blushing.

  And Tris saw a sketch of her genitals, a dotted line inked between vulva and anus. “CV-1?”

  “A tsubo point,” Luca said. “Good for heart attacks, near-drowning and strikes by lightning. Inconveniently positioned, however.”

  Yeah, thought Tris, you could put it that way. He’d used the handle of that brush to activate the nerve. She’d seen him putting it back into its holder when she came awake at the edge of the road.

  “I’ve grown you some clothes,” Luca said quickly.

  Tris glanced at the padded blue jacket, wafer-thin silk trousers and rope sandals. “Thanks,” she said. “I think.”

  Somehow Luca looked even younger when he slept, his face was less strained and his mouth had relaxed into a child-like smile. Even his eyes rested easy under their lids.

  “Sweet dreams,” she said.

  The man stank of vaginal secretions and of things Tris hadn’t even realized people did to each other in bed and she stank of the same. What Tris didn’t stink of was Luca because he had no scent. At least, no scent that she could detect.

  Tris leant closer, just to make sure.

  “Whatever.”

  Rolling out of bed, Tris landed lightly and grinned, tucking the single silk sheet tightly around Luca’s sleeping body. In part this was because she didn’t want the man to get cold, but mostly it was because Tris intended to search his room and wrapping sleeping punters in a sheet to make them feel secure was an old trick. One she’d learnt as a child from listening in on the whores at Schwarzschilds.

  “Tuck them in,” Bella had been saying, “so they’re safe and tight.” Then she’d glanced round and seen the kid standing by the wall, nursing a frosted glass of something purple and sighed. “Don’t just stand there,” she said. “If you want to learn, come over here and learn.”

  Tris did what she was told.

  “There’s this five minutes, honey,” Bella said. “When men’s heads go walkabout and that’s the time to tuck ’em in and strip their wallets of anything worth taking.”

  Only the sex was hours behind her and Tris had no intention of searching Luca’s pockets, she just wanted to look around. Most of the drawers in the attic refused to open for her, being owner specific. So in the end all Tris found to open was a long sandalwood chest full of clean sheets. Glancing at what she could see of the filthy mattress visible beneath Luca’s sleeping head, Tris shrugged and filed the query away to unpuzzle later.

  Under the last of the sheets was a full court dress, Mandarin Third Class, although the jade buckle looked rather grander than this. Tris knew about court grades from the feeds because everybody on Rip knew about stuff like that.

  Beneath the court dress she found a sword with an ivory grip, ruby pommel and sharkskin sheath. The blade was oiled but felt blunt to her touch. Since Tris had no way of sharpening the blade and the obvious value of the sword frightened her a little, she placed it carefully on the floor and kept digging.

  Another court dress, much smaller this time and more suited to a child. And a second sword, only this one was so tiny that it was barely more than a long dagger. The kind of thing an ambassador’s son might carry if he was expected to be presented at court.

  Tris felt no guilt at stealing the weapon. What was a small boy’s sword compared to a racing yacht? And, besides, she needed a weapon. Of course, she could pretend she was taking it to protect herself against wild animals, or that it was needed to fight off imperial guards. But those would be lies and Tris never lied to herself. At least not more than was required to stay human or sane. Lying to others was different. That was what people like her did if they wanted to remain alive.

  She intended to use the small sword to cut out Chuang Tzu’s heart. That was all. Any other reason Tris gave would have been untrue.

  At the bottom of the chest was a map, a scroll and a jewellery box made from mottled shell. Inside the box nestled a jade necklace so fabulous it had to be real. The map was of Rapture and the scroll contained Ambassador Pacioli’s credentials. No one had even broken the seal.

  Shutting the jewellery box on its necklace, Tris carefully repacked the scroll, both sets of court dress, the larger of the two swords and the sheets; then she dressed herself in the padded blue jacket, thin trousers and rope sandals that Luca had grown for her.

  As payment to Luca for the little sword she left the yacht’s memory, sitting on top of the chest looking blue and lonely in the daylight.

  CHAPTER 41

  Marrakech, Summer 1977

  Celia, the woman who once sacked a Glaswegian punk band mid-tour while facing down a drunk roadie on a twenty-four-hour, amphetamine-enhanced rampage, was scared. And the man who scared her was a balding and badly dressed French official who stank of death and carried himself like a man entering hospital for the last time.

  Jake, however, was angry.

  There might have been some fear in Jake’s anger. A level of self-protection that displayed itself in a snarl and an upturned, arrogant set to his chin, but it was real fury, of the kind which took no prisoners and expected no mercy in return. The object of his anger was Claude de Greuze and the fact that Major Abbas also stood in the courtyard of Riad al-Razor was a barely noticed irrelevance.

  That Jake had decided his real argument was with de Greuze and not the Major was accurate; it also spoke volumes about Jake’s background and cultural limitations, not to mention a mind-set he affected to despise.

  “Look at him,” Jake demanded, hands clenched into fists. They were talking about Moz, in particular about Moz’s split lip and the camouflage pattern of bruises that mottled the boy’s temples and cheeks. “Is this how you treat children?”

  It was, Moz had to admit, one of the stupidest things he’d ever heard Jake say, among a whole list of stupid things. Everyone knew that compared to the old days, those now advising the government were as children themselves, casually cruel but not coruscated by decades of hate.

  “I don’t think,” said de Greuze, “you realize how serious this is.”

  “No,” said Jake, his fists still balled but now almost grinding into his hips, his pose unconscious but still taken straight from the cover of his second LP, Anemone of the State. “You don’t realize how serious this is. You kidnap a child, torture him, only bring him back after I telephone the US consul and police HQ to report the boy missing.”

  Jake had called the Hotel de Police?

  Moz was shocked. No one involved themselves in the affairs of the police unless they had little alternative and, even then, most Marrakchi would find an alternative.

  “Go to Celia.” Jake’s voice was sharp.

  Moz glanced from the Major to the woman with the blonde bob. She sat, still scared but now more openly defiant, on a wicker divan which Jake and Moz had painted pink for a joke one morning a couple of weeks earlier.

  “Sit here,” Celia said. “You’re safe now.” And it sounded as if she half believed what she said, that somehow the purple-painted walls of the riad’s courtyard, the pink wicker and the sheer fury in Jake’s face could save Moz even from this.

  Celia looked as if she’d spent the morning in tears. Dark landslides of mascara deepened her pale blue eyes. Moz wanted to say It’s okay, although obviously it wasn’t and probab
ly never would be.

  Having mentally discounted Major Abbas, Jake was now concentrating his vitriol on Claude de Greuze, each word accompanied by a stab of his finger that never quite touched the old man’s chest. “The boy’s with me,” he said. “Have you got that?”

  “With you?” Major Abbas said suddenly. “How, exactly, ‘with you’?”

  Too angry to be careful, Jake flicked his attention from de Greuze to the small police officer. “Ah yes,” he said, “you…The man from the station. The one who was so helpful when Celia’s watch was stolen. How could I forget?” Contempt practically dripped from Jake’s lips while his eyes racked up and down the policeman, finding him wanting.

  Moz wanted to explain that this was Major Abbas. The son and grandson of police officers. A man feared throughout the Mellah. And the nasrani with him, the Frenchman, was more dangerous still. They were not people to whom Jake should be rude.

  Only Jake was nasrani himself and the world he saw through his eyes was not the one Moz saw, no matter that he had nasrani blood himself, for only a foreigner could have showed such open anger to an officer of the Sécurité.

  “Stolen?” Major Abbas said. “Didn’t you sign a declaration saying it had been lost?”

  Jake shrugged away the detail like the technicality it was. Lost/stolen, what difference did it make? Celia had got her gold Omega back and, if it had gone, he’d have just bought her another.

  “You know exactly what I mean,” said Jake.

  “I very much hope,” said Major Abbas, “that I don’t.”

  The American grinned, a wolfish grin that exposed one canine and creased up his eyes until he could have been staring into the lens of a Hasselblad. It was a look Celia had seen before and she didn’t like what it presaged. The only thing worse than Jake drunk or wired out of his skull was Jake self-consciously flying in the face of hidebound, bourgeois convention.

  “You wouldn’t believe,” he told Major Abbas, “I mean, you really wouldn’t believe some of the VIPs who’ve come to my parties.” Suggestions of naked children, drugged roadies, copious hashish and doubtful politics hung in the air between them.