“Everything’s fine. I’ve just got a broadcast question.”
“I’ll let you know when the Work Bell’s about to ring,” she said. The light glittered off of her very obviously fake left eye. Her real one had been removed by the Caste Police when she was a teenager for failing to wait to be addressed before looking up at the Adorned headmaster of her school. When the Caste Police removed a body part, they always supplied a replacement—albeit a substandard, obvious one. It wouldn’t do to lessen the productivity of one of the lesser castes, just as it wouldn’t do to pass up an opportunity to remind everyone around them of the hazards of transgression.
Damn the Takers. Damn Order. Damn the Skinless Empress.
And then he saw white sandals and bare legs approaching. Persis dashed off to her pod, and Seph kept his eyes firmly downcast, his gloved hands clasped at his waist.
The white sandals stopped immediately in front of him. “Yes? You may look at me. What’s your name? What do you want?”
Seph looked up into the Adorned face of Sire Imprimatur. As was his caste’s obligation, his eyes were expertly outlined in black, his lips reddened, cheeks rouged, arms and legs bare. And just like all other Adorned, he’d never learned how to see the faces of his employees under the paint. “I’m Seph Allele. Sire, this morning I saw an incomplete version of one of our recovered movies being broadcast. It’s a scene that I personally mined. It was passed upstairs to the data artists a month ago. I believe there might be a distribution issue.”
Sire Imprimatur scowled and touched the jeweled earbug clipped to his left lobe. “Roland? Are you at your desk?”
Shit.
“No,” Sire Imprimatur continued. “I’m being told that an old version of…” He focused on Seph. “What was the name of the movie?”
“Oliver!, sir.”
“I’m being told that there’s an old version of Oliver! still on the air. No, that’s not acceptable. Top priority must always go to updating incomplete reconstructions. Maybe if you spent your nights sleeping instead of carousing—”
He disappeared into his office and opaqued the wall clouds, cutting off all sound and light.
Seph resisted the urge to swear out loud. Just what he’d wanted—to get his lover into trouble.
He let out a small sigh, then made his way to his petal and knelt at his work pod. To his left and right, his coworkers were already absorbed in their morning tasks, so he plunged his hands into the control tubes, immersed his head in the view port, and called up his queue.
That was odd. Hadn’t they already mined a complete print of On the Beach several years ago? And even if they hadn’t, why were they having him spend time on a depressing movie? He looked over at Persis to his right to ask if she’d also been assigned a redo, but his attention was torn away as he saw Roland striding toward his father’s office.
And oh, he was even more beautiful by day. Those pale blue eyes, so perfectly ringed with black, and the matching black and blue hair falling in front of them. The lips painted brick red, with two glistening silver rings tantalizingly piercing each side of the lower lip. The hint of color high on the cheekbones, and the half-dozen silver earrings dangling from each perfect pale shell of an ear. The blue nails at the end of each long, delicate finger. The sleeveless white Mao Zedong shirt over flowing white shorts, accentuating the curve of his lower back, the swell of his buttocks.
By the Makers, that man was delicious.
Roland tapped an index finger against his earbug and said, “Daddy, dearest, I’m here for that lecture.” The crystal door slid open, and Seph watched, entranced, as Roland squared his shoulders, his shoulder blades sliding under the tight fabric of his shirt, and walked in.
“He’s pretty,” Persis whispered.
Seph cast her a quick glance and smiled. So, her eyes still knew how to roam where they didn’t belong. Good for her.
“Are you working on something old and depressing?” she asked.
“Mmm hmm.”
“Me too. They’ve sent me a fresh copy of the Pelosi assassination attempt. I wonder what’s going on.”
Seph looked over at the clouded walls of his boss’s office and had a feeling that no answers would be forthcoming.
He hoped he hadn’t gotten Roland into too much trouble.
He’d make it up to him tonight.
Maybe he’d even finally tell him his name when they were done.
With an anticipatory grin, he got back to work.
* * * *
By the time the Mid-day Bell rang, Seph was more than ready to get up and stretch. He’d spent all morning plucking strands of content from the broadcast jumble that filtered through the vast interstellar space between the City and Earth. He’d already given Order the cleaned-up strands to pass up a floor to Roland’s department. There, the data artists would stitch together the best strands before releasing the content to the Earth-hungry public.
Seph stood, planted his gloved hands at the base of his spine, and worked the kinks out of his back as the departmental lunch was wheeled in by a pair of Paintclad food service workers. As he and his colleagues lined up for their winterfruit soup and selection of cheeses, the lift cloud descended from the floor above and a laughing Roland stepped off of it with his younger brother Orsino. All the Paintclad froze, eyes downcast, as the two Adorned looked over the carts and selected a wedge of cheese each before making their way to their father’s office.
This was the closest he’d ever been to Roland at work. Seph hazarded a quick glance up.
At the door, Roland turned around and fixed Seph with a curious expression, then shook his head and disappeared into the clouded office.
Seph let out a long breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Could Roland actually see him through the paint?
If he couldn’t, was he going to be reported for looking at him?
He looked over at Persis, at her artificial eye.
Fuck the Takers. Fuck the Caste Police. Fuck them hard.
He knelt with the others around the low lunch oval, where talk turned to low mutters about their tasks for the morning. Everyone had been assigned old work, and none of it had been particularly cheery. “I wonder if there’s an electromagnetic storm disrupting transmissions again.”
“I think they would have told us if there were. They have before.”
“Face it, the folks upstairs aren’t exactly forthcoming.”
“Something’s going on.”
“It might be nothing.”
“If it were nothing, they would have said so. They hate gossip almost as much as they hate transgression.”
“But why so many depressing programs to clean up? No one watches them.”
“Not voluntarily.”
Seph fingered his trading cards through his jacket. “Infamous Murders” today. “20 Worst Natural Disasters” yesterday. “Plagues” the day before. “This isn’t the only bad news they’ve been feeding us,” he said. “Maybe something’s gone wrong.”
A sea of painted faces stared at him. “What do you mean?” Persis asked.
Seph shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe all the news from Earth has suddenly gotten bad?”
“Then why would they replace new bad news with old bad news?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he repeated.
A few other people around the table similarly rubbed their necklaces through their jackets, and Persis pulled hers out and looked at it as if seeing it for the first time. “I don’t like this.”
And then the group fell silent as a lift cloud brought a Masked worker to their floor. It was dressed in the typical baggy gray jumpsuit and thick gloves of its caste, and for its visit aboveground, it had been hooded and shackled. Its two Paintclad escorts gently guided it by the elbows to the Sire’s office, where they pressed their earbugs and waited with their gazes downcast for him to emerge and acknowledge them.
“Ah, excellent,” Sire Imprimatur said. “We’re having a problem with the automatics
in the Adorned washroom. Be sure the windows are covered and the door is closed before you take off its hood.”
The Paintclad escorts nodded and took the Masked away to do the dirty work that no other caste deigned to do.
It wasn’t right.
But if Seph tried to do anything about it, if he even so much as lifted the Masked’s hood to let it see a glimpse of water-filtered sunlight, he’d be made Masked himself.
It was a perfect system for keeping people quiet. No wonder no one fought it.
“So,” Roland said as he and his brother stepped back out of his father’s office, “which of your industrious little workers is the one who ratted me out this morning?”
Seph froze, his soup spoon halfway to his mouth, before hastily plunking the spoon back in the bowl. Shit.
Sire Imprimatur scanned the Paintclad faces around the lunch table, and Seph ducked his gaze down before he could catch him looking.
Shit.
And then there were two sets of white sandals in his peripheral vision.
“Son, this is Seph Allele.”
“Seph, eh?” Roland said.
Seph clenched his gloved hands under the table and let loose a string of curses in the privacy of his mind. He’d wanted to tell Roland his name when he was swimming in a post-coital haze, not in this antiseptic office where they couldn’t even acknowledge that they knew each other.
“Seph, you can look at me.”
He softened his jaw, and looked up.
And caught an unmistakable flash of recognition in Roland’s eyes.
A small grin quirked the corners of Roland’s mouth, and he held out his hand. “It’s good to meet someone who takes pride in his work. There’s not a lot of that above the seventh floor. Come on, let’s shake on it Earth style.”
Touching an Adorned in public was a punishable offense, even with gloves.
But Roland was the one asking for it. And there were Adorned witnesses, no less.
So Seph reached up and clasped Roland’s hand in his. Roland gave his hand a firm shake, then leaned in close and whispered, “Tonight, we talk.”
As Roland walked off to the lift cloud, Sire Imprimatur asked, “What did my son say to you? Did he threaten you?”
“No sir. He just complimented me again, sir.”
“Hrmph.”
After lunch, Seph was grateful for the repeat work in his queue, because he was too preoccupied to a new job justice. Did Roland want to talk about their relationship? Did Roland even think they had a relationship? Did he want one? Was he going to break things off? Or was he going to violate the unwritten rules of Old Town and show up with the Caste Police, declaring that Seph had taken advantage of him and demanding that he be punished. That punishment would likely involve removal of his penis, maybe his tongue, maybe both.
Even if Roland did want to have a relationship with Seph, he’d always have that power over him.
Was it even worth it?
He thought back to pale, bare skin under his gloves by the light of the filtered moons, and shot his concentration all over again.
When the Evening Bell rang, he went straight home, climbed up into his sleep cloud, and had it ascend nearly all the way to the ceiling. Roland wouldn’t be in Old Town until Dark Night Bells. That was hours away. He lowered the foot of his cloud so he could see the Wall, and switched it on, hoping for some mindless distraction, like, say, another episode of The Mating Habits of the European Pop Star. But all it offered were programs on the firebombing of Dresden, female infanticide in India, and an entertainment special on the rise and fall of Milli Vanilli.
He switched it off and stared instead at the collection of Tan Ying art posters tacked to his half of the ceiling, at the delicate brushwork he tried to recreate on his after-hours face.
“Tonight, we talk” could mean too many things.
He heard the front door open. “Seph?” Lenore called out. “Are you home?”
“I’m up here.”
“Are you coming down?”
“Probably not.”
“Well, I brought dinner. It’s Iron Chef night at the Ground Floor Café. They reconstructed the spiny sea urchin battle. Well, as best they could. I didn’t want to ask what they used in place of spiny sea urchin, but it smells good.”
“I’m not really hungry. Why don’t you just leave it in the fresher? I’ll eat it later.”
He heard the rustling of paper, and then a bag appeared at the foot of his sleep cloud, hoisted high by the telescoping waldo that Lenore had bought last week when the Plastic Doo-Dads store had its blue moons clearance sale. “No you won’t. I know you.”
Seph couldn’t help but smile. Lenore took her spousal duties seriously at all the right moments. Like all married couples, the two of them were frantically doing their best to live separate lives until the day that Order tied them down with children, but unlike many others, he and Lenore had been lucky enough to also become friends in the process. “Thanks.”
The waldo returned, this time with a drink bulb. “You are still going out to see him tonight, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll need to eat to keep your strength up.”
Seph nibbled at the food, and watched from the foot of his cloud as Lenore flipped through the three channels on the Wall, watching until each program hit a particularly depressing patch and then switching to the next. When the Dark Night Bell rang, he let his sleep cloud sink to the cluttered floor. Lenore was just pulling her long black coat on over a cardigan and pencil skirt, and there was a gas mask under her arm. Her work clothes were lying in a heap on the floor with her creeper writhing atop them, one leafy end burrowed into a discarded sock. “You’re not changing your paint tonight?” she asked.
Seph shook his head. It was every Paintclad’s right to wear whatever paint or clothes they wanted between Dark Night and Morning Bells, provided, of course, that they showed no bare skin, but he wanted to make it impossible for Roland to miss him tonight, so he was keeping on his day paint. “Where are you off to?”
“Oh, Rency is having a London Blitz party. We’re going to do authentic Earth makeup once the door’s locked. We’ll be prettier than the Adorned. I’ll bring back snappies.”
Seph saw his wife to the door, then went into the closet and pulled out the cream-colored scarf that Roland had given him several weeks back, the scarf that Roland had pulled over Seph’s painted eyes that night in the alley. “Let’s do something different,” he’d said, and Seph had been more than happy to comply.
He fingered the paint stains, hating himself for keeping it. But still, he put the scarf in his pocket before hopping the first crawler to Old Town.
And there, just inside their customary alley, was Roland, in slim black pants and a sleeveless satin shirt that matched his maroon lipstick. “So, your name is Seph.”
“Yes.”
“And how long have you known who I am?”
“The whole time.”
“Yes, of course,” Roland said, pinching his nose between thumb and forefinger. His silver nail-polish glittered in the dim light. “This was supposed to be anonymous. I wouldn’t go through all the trouble of going beneath the water and hanging out in alleys if I wanted a relationship.”
“That must be why you kept coming back to me.”
Roland looked down at his black cowboy boots and nodded. “You’ve got me there.” He let out a hard breath through his nose and looked back up, bare arms crossed tightly over his chest. “Look, you and I both know that this can only be about sex. But the fact that you knew my name—”
“Means nothing,” Seph said.
“No, I think it does.”
“It means that I saw you at work,” Seph said. “It means that I thought you were hot. It means that I wanted to have sex with you. That’s not a crime. Not in Old Town.”
“The fact that you’ve let me see flashes of your bare skin means that it is. I could have you arrested.”
“But you won�
��t.” It was almost a question the way Seph said it.
“No.”
And that was the answer he was hoping for.
Seph searched Roland’s face, watched the tension pulling his brows into a hard line, thinning his lips. He wanted to massage his thumb into the valley between his brows, trace his fingers down his rouged cheeks, plant painted mouth against painted mouth—
“I can’t do this,” Roland said. “Not anymore.”
Seph snapped painfully from his reverie, his gloved hands balling into fists by his thighs. “What?”
“I know your name,” Roland said. “I know where you work. It’s too dangerous for us to keep seeing each other.”
“I’ve been very good at pretending not to know you.”
“I caught you looking at me today,” Roland said.
Seph opened and closed his fists. “Just the once.”
“What if my father catches you looking at me? What if the Caste Police sneak someone into your work crew and—”
“What, you think I’ll stop looking at you if we stop fucking?”
“This isn’t just about sex anymore, is it? You wouldn’t be trying so hard to convince me if it were.”
Seph scoffed and held his two gloved hands out in front of him. “How can it be about anything more if I’m not even allowed to touch you with my bare hands? How can it be anything other than sex if you don’t even know what my face looks like?”
In a soft voice, Roland said, “Actually, I think I’ve figured it out.”
“What—”
Roland stepped forward and drew a finger down Seph’s cheek to his chin, teasing at its gentle cleft. “I’ve seen a sliver of your skin,” he said. “Dark against mine when I fuck you. I’ve memorized the planes of your face, the swell of your lower lip, the way your eyes widen just for a second when you first see me waiting for you here. Your paint doesn’t hide who you are. Not from me.”
His finger feathered a path around Seph’s lips, and Seph captured it between his teeth, swirling his tongue around the tip.
Unwelcome Bodies Page 20
