by Peter Watts
Nissaea wasn’t squeamish. She had seen her share of back-alley deaths, learning from an early age to hide when the Watch took out its need for hilarity on some vagabond. In particular, she’d learned enough to be distantly grateful that the guardsman who had taken her original hand, long ago, hadn’t thought of something more inventive to do.
Nevertheless, the corpse bothered her, mainly because of the finicky thoroughness with which it had been arranged. It was almost possible to regard it as a sculpture, or a puzzle. Focus on the cleanness of the incisions, of the precisely placed punctures that the wires made in the body, and you could admire the murderer’s skill; focus on the mathematical curve of the spine and the graceful angles of the limbs, and you had to wonder if the murderer had some aesthetic insight to convey.
“We should go,” the stranger said, only a little questioning. “There’s nothing useful left here.”
“What if the murderer’s down here looking for us too?” Nissaea said. There was an odd warning twinge in her leg, higher than the injury, and it worried her.
“Staying still won’t help us,” the stranger said dryly. “Please. Let’s go.”
Reluctantly, Nissaea looked away from the corpse, and they hobbled out of the chamber together. Her imagination insisted that the corpse was muttering at their backs, even if she couldn’t hear anything, and even if the flow of air currents was dank and steady.
They proceeded more carefully after that, alert to every chance clatter and pin-drop trickle of sound. It seemed that the Watch had lost their trail, or lost interest, anyway, but Nissaea couldn’t help flinching every time she heard something unexpected. To her mortification, her damaged hand went into convulsions just as they nudged their way onto a bridge of stiff swaying fibers, fingers spasming in rattling metallic syncopation. Not now, Nissaea begged the universe, although it was unlikely that it mattered at this point.
The stranger stopped, to her dismay. “This injury,” it said, gaze going directly to the prosthetic. “An old one?”
She tried to shove past it, which the bridge was too narrow to permit if it was determined not to let her. “It’s not important,” she said through her teeth. After all, she thought wildly, a hand that alternated between being dead and going into spasms still beat being cut up like the corpse back there. “We’re not far from the Cat-Eyed Gate. Let’s keep going.”
To her surprise, the stranger didn’t argue this, although she could sense its unhappiness. Why it wanted to deal with diagnostics just this moment was beyond her, but since it wasn’t pressing the point, neither would she.
At last the bridge was far behind them, and they reached the Cat-Eyed Gate. It had been mined out years ago, and nothing remained but the occasional chatoyant glimmer of green or blue or gold substrate.
“This is the gate?” the stranger asked.
By now Nissaea was panting softly. Her entire leg hurt now, hot raking fingers of pain that were even now reaching upward. “Yes,” she said, or thought she said. She wasn’t sure she had much of a voice left.
“Tell me where to take you,” the stranger said.
She had the vague thought that this had started with her intent to help the stranger and not the other way around. She opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out. It wasn’t as though she had any allies left anyway. Then the pain clawed up again, toward groin and torso, and she collapsed into a vast constricting darkness.
When human explorers discovered the city, they thought it was another ruin from some earlier wave of colonization. It wasn’t until settlers had abandoned the ship over a doctrinal schism that people discovered the city’s peculiar properties.
The city, which the majority sect named Contemplating Orthodoxy, originally showed the blandest of faces to its settlers. It was a sphere orbiting a dismal sun, hollowed out by nonorthogonal passages and irregular chambers, like an apple cored by enthusiastic worms. The chambers were composed of corroded walls and beams of bent metal and unreliable floors. People assessed the structure, shored up what needed shoring up, built their own dwellings and factories from a combination of their own supplies and the city’s excess material, and moved in.
Not long afterward, the walls changed. And the floors. And the ceilings. And the columns, and the bridges, and the doors, and the occasional couch. At first the phenomenon was confined to items made of the city’s original material, but later everything was affected.
Contemplating Orthodoxy, it turned out, had what one of the early philosopher-poets called mirror-nature. When it was uninhabited, it lay quiescent. When humans crept into it, it reflected them according to its own kaleidoscope understanding.
The form the city’s understanding took was, so to speak, spare parts for its inhabitants. From the walls grew tangled tendrils of wire, and the tendrils fused together into bones of strong composites, and the bones hinged together into hands, or feet, or hips sheathed in plastic or metal. There were eyes in every conceivable color, growing like fervent grapes from pillars, the sensors glittering pale and vigilant; there were infrared sensors and scanners and seismic analyzers.
Most people were convinced that this signaled that the city was going to eat them. The riots that followed involved smashing, hacking, and huddling in shelters ineffectually treated with everything from insecticide to surfactants in hopes of warding off the unsettling growths. But one surgeon hit upon the idea of harvesting an eye from the city and implanting it in his brother. According to some accounts, he pitied his brother for an eye maimed in an accident involving a staple gun. According to less flattering stories, he was driven by malicious curiosity. (Why the brother didn’t resist or flee, they don’t say.) Either way, the experiment was a success. The filaments that emerged from the back of the cybernetic eye successfully interfaced with human nerves, and, as a side-effect, gave the surgeon’s brother the ability to see partway into the ultraviolet.
It didn’t take long for other surgeons to begin offering this service, to say nothing of eager charlatans. After all, the riots had resulted in any number of injuries, and the regenerative tanks that the settlers had brought with them were running low on the necessary gels. People came around to the idea that ready-made spare parts and enhancements weren’t such a bad thing, even if they came in outlandish colors. Scarcely any time passed before the outlandish colors became a motivation in themselves, and soon after that, the first Harvests were organized in earnest.
Nissaea dreamt for a long time of low-lidded octopuses floating through space so black it was red, or so red it was black; of stars the color of incisions, and a bird singing in a voice like a bone flute on the verge of breaking. When at last she struggled awake, she blinked crusted eyelids against light sere and pitiless, as though it were part of the dream itself. “Jeni?” she asked hoarsely, mistaking the shape in front of her for a circle-sister from years past. But of course Jeni had died in a Watch raid.
“This is a name?” said a voice she didn’t recognize at first. “It’s not one I know.” A smooth hand, although not a soft one, pressed itself against her wrist, testing—perhaps for her pulse.
She flinched. Something about her wrist felt wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. Instead, she scrabbled uselessly among the blankets, scratchy but warmed by her own heat, for some weapon better than her fists—fist.
Fist. Her entire left hand was missing. It shocked her fully awake. She bolted out of the bed, blankets tangling her legs, and looked around, forcing herself to take in details that might help her escape. Walls that wound up to a cusp. No windows, although there were vents covered by lavender membranes, like fungus gills, that she might be able to tear through. The familiar whisk-whirr of the mass transit system somewhere beyond them. Flowers, of all things: not the cybernetic blossoms that the city produced, with their unwilting plastic petals and stamens shaped like upside-down catenary curves, but a dented steel can of genuine weeds, yellow-bright, with holes in the lopsided leaves. Next to the flowers was the exit she’d sough
t. The door was slightly ajar, and the stranger wasn’t standing in her way toward it.
All this, and no sign of her hand. She fixed the stranger with a stare.
The stranger wasn’t stupid. “It was infected,” it said simply. “That wasn’t just a cut you took. The nano-rot introduced by your wound was drawn to the faulty components in your hand. I removed it as a precaution.”
Nissaea narrowed her eyes at it. In full light, its features possessed the same patchwork sense of balance she had noted before, human and machine parts alternating with each other as though they were being weighed against each other. “If you’re a scrap surgeon,” she said, “what were you doing abandoned like a slab of meat gone bad?” Surreptitiously, she tensed and untensed the muscles of her afflicted leg. The cut still throbbed distantly, but otherwise most of the pain was gone.
Even a half-competent surgeon was usually valued enough that some circle would retain them. “Scrap surgeon” was a derogatory term, but the stranger showed no sign of offense. “I was always there,” it said in a voice tinged with sadness. It raised its chin, considered her, then shook its head.
Maybe its former circle had gotten rid of it because its mind wasn’t all there. Still, she raised her wrist, steeling herself, and inspected the amputation. A very clean job, the bone sawed and the stump capped with a bright green-gold metal. She had a brief phantom sensation of locked fingers, but that was old news. “Thank you,” she said. The truth was that she couldn’t afford work this good.
“I would have harvested a prosthesis for you already,” it added, “but I didn’t want to leave you unattended in case the fever got worse.”
Nissaea drew her breath in, not sure she had understood correctly. “I can’t pay—”
“It’s not a question of payment,” it said. “I want—” Its voice became unexpectedly scratchy on want. “I want a roof.”
“You mean sponsorship into a circle,” Nissaea said after she parsed the archaic word. She made herself look at it straight-on. “This is terrible recompense, but I can’t give you that. I’m not a circle-breaker, so the enforcers won’t shoot me, but my circle revoked my membership. I don’t have any connections.”
Looking into the stranger’s mismatched eyes told her only that its desire was real, but why wouldn’t it be? Even scavengers like Nissaea, even fences and circuit-cutters belonged to circles. It was the order of things.
“You gave me water and helped me out of the dark,” it said. “You didn’t have to do either. It’s not a circle’s companionship I want. It’s yours.”
She gentled her voice. “I don’t mean to be ungrateful. My name is Nissaea-of-the-Slant.” She’d been withholding it all this time, since you didn’t casually introduce your name-chant to a stranger, but it had probably saved her life and she didn’t see any point in being coy. “What should I call you?”
“I never needed a name before,” it said.
Did it come from one of the more esoteric circles where people called each other by numbers? There were a few of those. “Well, you could pick something you like?” she suggested.
“Muhad,” it said after a moment. “I don’t have a chant.”
“Muhad,” she said, being as careful with the name as she would with a delicate piece of jewelry. “Have I got it right?”
She was rewarded by Muhad’s smile, a curve made beautiful rather than perfect by its asymmetry, one side of the mouth a nudge higher than the other. Oh, do that again, she thought in spite of herself.
“Of course it’s right,” Muhad said, shyly. It would have been flirtatious coming from anyone else. Its gaze went to Nissaea’s stump. “I meant it, about a hand. You shouldn’t go without one.” It paused, suddenly uncertain. “Unless you wanted a different appendage?”
Pincers, tentacles, integrated guns . . . Nissaea had never been attracted to the more exotic options, which cost more anyway. “No,” she said hastily. “Just a hand. If I can find a compatible one without having to raid a parts bank.” Not that they’d have any luck doing that. They’d be safer picking a fight directly with the Watch.
“I can do that,” Muhad said. “I know of a lode in the deep places, now that you are well enough to travel.” It spoke as tranquilly as if it had made a simple statement of arithmetic, were it not for the shadow in its eyes.
“Then I’ll need supplies,” Nissaea said. “I’m out of confounders. I’m not going out without any.” She didn’t ask what Muhad meant by the “deep places,” and didn’t want to know until the last possible moment. There was no way such a harvest could be legal, even by the undercircles’ codes. But she found that she cared less and less. She’d followed the codes and worked hard at her profession, only to be tossed out like scrap. At this point, she might as well look out for herself and the one person who had showed her kindness.
Few people gave Nissaea so much as a pitying look when she showed up with a missing hand, even the ones who recognized her. Instead, they ignored her pointedly. Muhad drew more attention, although Nissaea stood protectively near it at all times. She knew they couldn’t linger. The local undercircles didn’t keep formal registries the way the high circles did, but the stranger’s presence would be marked, and sooner or later someone would be sent to investigate. Sideways Hano did attempt to draw Muhad into a discussion of heterodoxies in Chamberish theology when Nissaea was buying them grub fritters, but he did that to everyone, and after several rambling lectures, even he figured out that Muhad’s polite bewilderment wasn’t faked.
Getting together supplies didn’t take long, mainly because Nissaea had been flat broke before and she was still flat broke now. But they obtained confounders and a few other basics because Muhad matter-of-factly volunteered to have the decorative inlay work on its face removed. The angry-looking scar left behind saddened Nissaea. Silently, she promised to make it up to Muhad.
One of the things that Nissaea insisted on was shoes for Muhad. They didn’t fit very well. The soles were worn thin and the canvas looked all but translucent, and not in the aesthetic way either. Muhad didn’t seem to mind, however.
Nissaea’s nerves finally gave out when they slipped down into the mazeways. She asked about the lode: Would it be underwater? Flooded with acid? Require special breathing apparatus or hacked frequency keys? These were all things she should have asked before they went shopping, except for the fact that they couldn’t afford specialized equipment anyway. Even when she’d been in good standing with Addit’s circle, she’d only ever touched that kind of thing on loan, for particular assignments.
At last Muhad said, after a series of patient reassurances, “Nothing down there will harm you, Nissaea-of-the-Slant. I don’t think there’s even much to trip on.”
Nissaea opened her mouth to protest, then caught Muhad’s almost-smile and realized she was being teased.
They left for the lode during nighttime. The city’s cycles were signaled along the major thoroughfares by clocklights that changed color from morning pink to noon gold to alluring evening blue. According to a past circle-sister, the color scheme mimicked that of the original planet’s skies, something that reproductions of very old paintings and photographs suggested might have some basis in fact. Every few years one or another of the high circles petitioned to have the colors reprogrammed to match their livery (undercircles didn’t bother with livery), and the rest of the high circles quashed the notion. Nissaea wouldn’t have minded the variety, but she didn’t get a say. Besides, tonight’s dim blue glow was pretty enough.
The light faded behind them as they entered the mazeways beneath the statue called Embracing Birds. One of Nissaea’s former circle-kin stood guard in the hollows by the gate, collecting the toll. He was a cadaverous man, each rib emphasized by a pitted metal stripe, and his leg was ribbon-thin all the way up to the joint at his hip. A clear covering exposed the organs of his torso, but Nissaea had seen stranger things than a man’s inner workings.
“You know the toll,” the man said in a voice like ston
e scraped thin. The toll would be higher now that she was an independent.
In answer, Nissaea made an abbreviated gesture of respect and pressed her palm twice against his, once for herself and once for Muhad. There was a tiny beep as the transaction went through. She raised her eyebrows at the man, wondering if he would make trouble for her.
She was lucky, or in any case, not unluckier than she already had been for the last few days. The man shook his head, although the gleam in his eye suggested that he was thinking of reporting her and Muhad. Well, she could deal with that later. She nodded to Muhad, and they slipped into the mazeways together.
The transition into the mazeways always caused Nissaea’s breath to stutter in her lungs even after all these years. Great whippy tendrils of fiber and hungry iron-jawed mouths grew from the gate’s throat, slick with the dew of anticipated carrion. They were careful to walk precisely down the middle of the passage, so as not to attract the tendrils’ attention.
After years of being the one handling the navigation, Nissaea was dismayed to discover how rapidly she got lost following Muhad. If she hadn’t known better, she would have suspected that the mazeways had reshuffled themselves like a cheater’s hand of cards, except she’d never known them to do so with such haste. She paid attention to the scissored shadows, the malevolent gleam of fetal sensors, the grit beneath her feet the way she hadn’t since she was a small child clinging to her sister’s hand.
She couldn’t help wondering if they would run into another corpse, whether one neatly cracked open like the last one, or smashed into stains. It took an effort to make herself breathe evenly instead of hyperventilating. But the only human reek was her own rank sweat. Even Muhad, perhaps because its modifications were more extensive than her own, smelled only of pale salt.
Between one passage (paint peeling away like butterflies in transition, the occasional white mass that oozed when you didn’t look at it directly) and the next (a blast of acrid vapor from a hole in a pipe, rattling as of librarian lizards realphabetizing their movements), they arrived in a vast pulsing garden of hands. Nissaea had never seen anything like it before. She bet that even the high circles’ harvesters hadn’t seen anything like it in generations, either.
