Unwelcome Bodies

by Jennifer Pelland

  There wasn’t much talking for a while after that. Just bodies moving together, breath coming hard and ragged, moans and sighs, and the rhythmic slapping of skin on forbidden skin.

  They came apart and sank to the ground, tucking their clothes back into place. Roland lay his cheek on Seph’s lap, and Seph used gloved fingers to tease blue streaks of hair out of the sea of black. “You’re right,” Seph said. “This isn’t just about sex anymore.”

  “It hasn’t been for a while,” Roland said, and shifted onto his back. “But that’s all it can be. We both know that.”

  Damn the Makers.

  “I’m going to have to get married soon,” Roland said. “My father’s already picked out several potential husbands for me. They’re the most boring pack of—” He snapped his mouth shut, staring off into space. “None of them are creative. You’ve spoiled me that way.”

  “I’m married. It doesn’t have to stop you.”

  “It’s different up there. I don’t think any of them will be keen on me sneaking out every night to have sex with someone else, especially down here.” Roland sat up, focused his black-rimmed gaze on Seph and said, “I have to stop this, now.”

  Seph rested his hand on Roland’s chest, feeling his heart beat under his palm. “No, you don’t.”

  “I won’t be back tomorrow night.”

  “I will.”

  “Seph—”

  “I’ll be here tomorrow night. And so will you.”

  Roland looked away. “No. This has to stop. I can’t keep pretending that this can go on forever.”

  “I’ll be here tomorrow night,” Seph repeated.

  Roland eased himself to his feet, his back turned to Seph. He hesitated for a moment, one hand pressed against the rough brick, his beautiful shoulder blades sliding under the satin of his shirt, before shaking his head again and slowly walking away.

  Seph let out a long breath, then took off his gloves, not caring that he was risking a citation from the Caste Police if they caught him, and ran his bare hands over the still warm spot on his lap where Roland’s head had been. A flash of color caught his eye, and he pulled a blue strand of hair from his black trousers.

  A bitter smile creased his face. Another fucking souvenir. He pulled the silk scarf out from his pocket, placed the strand of hair onto it, then folded it up and tucked it back away. Then he patted his face, searching for bare spots, and finding none, pulled his gloves back on and took the first crawler home. The scarf and its captive hair went onto the top shelf of the closet. Then he headed for the washroom and stood under the sonics. He selected a slow Mongolian song, and let the music vibrate the paint from his skin, the sweat from his hair, the dust from his clothes.

  He’d be back in that alley tomorrow night.

  Even if it meant he’d be there alone.

  * * * *

  After a night spent mostly staring at the ceiling, Seph thought about sleeping in for the first time in his adult life and letting Order paint his face. But in the end, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. If Roland came down to the seventh floor today, he wasn’t going to face him in a machine’s paint job. Not now that he knew who Seph was.

  Not that Seph could afford to hazard a peek at him anymore.

  Lenore came in just as he was finishing and stuck her head in the Face Maker. “Black and white,” she said, studying the effect in the mirror. “Order’s being pretty boring today.”

  Seph painted the last bit of black on his lips, then put his paints away. He’d need more black soon if this kept up.

  Lenore leaned against the wall and said, “So, judging by the tossing and turning, I’d say there’s trouble in paradise.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Seph said, as much to convince himself as anything.

  “It can’t be fine. You’re different castes.”

  “I should go to work,” he said, and headed for the closet.

  “Me too.” Lenore followed him out of the washroom to root through her omnipresent piles of clothes. “Oh, Seph?”

  Seph pulled on his jacket and performed his skin check in the mirror. “Hmm?”

  “We tried watching Views from Earth last night at the party, but it was a re-run of the Yangtze River Dam collapse special. Do you know if there’s some sort of transmission disruption? They didn’t say, which was weird.”

  “I don’t know. We’ve been doing repeats at work, so something’s going on.”

  “Weird.”

  Seph skipped breakfast and hopped a crawler straight to the Colcourt Tower. No new work, no new Views from Earth—an electromagnetic storm would make perfect sense, except Order always gave them time off for storms. And what was with all the depressing programming? It just didn’t add up.

  There were similar murmurs all around the office that day, murmurs that intensified after Sire Imprimatur left his office to go up above the canal.

  “I have a Hitler speech in my queue,” Persis whispered.

  Seph looked in his own queue, then looked back over at Persis. “I’ve got Pol Pot.”

  Old news, bad news. He struggled to put aside his concerns and concentrate on the work, but it was no use. By the Mid-day Bell, he wasn’t certain he’d mined anything useful.

  As the lunch carts were wheeled in, Sire Imprimatur descended from above on his lift cloud. “Everyone look at me.” His painted lips were pulled into such a tight line that they were nearly invisible. “Please finish your lunch, and then take the afternoon off. We’ll call you as soon as there’s work again. Don’t worry, Order will keep paying your salaries during the work stoppage.”

  He disappeared into his office, clouding the walls.

  Nobody spoke during lunch, and as soon as it was over, Seph found himself walking toward Old Town. Generally, the marketplace tended to be all but deserted midday, but today, there were a handful of people milling about, looking lost. Seph overheard one young woman saying to another, “I just can’t be around Walls anymore. Why can’t they show something happy? I thought Earth was supposed to make us happy.”

  So, he wasn’t the only one who’d noticed.

  He ducked out of the way of a passing crawler and found himself standing across the street from the face painter his parents used to bring him to every Rest Day. They’d wanted him to understand what had been lost when Order had taken over. The shingle above the door was faded, but he could still make out the words “Mauro’s Face Parlor” on it. The place looked like it had been closed for quite a while.

  He wondered if anything was still left inside.

  Seph stood at the grimy window and peered in through the faded, gauzy curtains.

  Was that movement?

  The door creaked open, and there, in the doorway, stood Mauro, the man who Seph had admired so dearly as a child. Time had not been kind to him. The skin hung from his bones like melted taffy, but his proudly arched nose rose unmistakably above the fray. “Sorry, I’m not open for business anymore.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Seph said. “I was just curious—”

  “Hold on.” Mauro stepped outside and examined Seph’s face in the blue-tinged light. “Those are actual brush strokes. You did this yourself?”

  “Yes. I always do my own paint. I suppose it’s partly thanks to you.”

  “Well then, come in.” Mauro stepped back, and Seph walked through the door, smiling as the memories washed over him. If he looked past the dust, the shop was just as he remembered from his childhood—glimmering sheets of designs hanging from the ceiling, the fat collection of brushes sitting next to the tightly-sealed jars of paint, the kneeling cushions for those coming in to be painted from the waist up rather than just the neck up. When was the last time he’d seen someone in body paint? He couldn’t remember.

  Suddenly, he couldn’t see past the dust anymore.

  Fuck Order.

  “Please, sit down.” Mauro gestured toward the kneeling cushions with a set of metal hands. A familiar anger boiled up through Seph’s belly at the sight of
them, and he clenched his teeth to keep from cursing out loud.

  Mauro noticed the scrutiny. “The Caste Police don’t like it when you paint original patterns on people outside of the proper bells. And they don’t give out replacement hands that can handle fine brushwork. Hence, the shop being closed.”

  “Bastards.”

  He shrugged. “I should have been more careful. So, you do your own work. Very nice. Very subtle, too. That’s smart. Not a lot of people have the discernment to notice your brush work, I’m sure. You’re already more careful than I ever was. You know, I’ve been hoping Order would send me a replacement. It’s a shame to stay closed.”

  “Could I really get Order to assign me here?”

  “Don’t you mean ‘reassign’?”

  “I’m not so sure I have a job anymore.”

  “Ah, you must be a data miner.”

  Seph’s eyebrows flew up. “How did you know?”

  Mauro folded his metal hands together and leaned forward. “You’re not a prejudiced man, are you? Not particularly fond of the caste system, I take it?”

  Seph shook his head. “You have no idea.”

  Mauro raised his voice. “You can come out now.”

  Three Masked women walked in from a back room wearing their caste’s ubiquitous baggy gray jumpsuits. Their plain white masks hung around their necks, exposing faces as bare as any Unadorned. “Pipes are a wonderful conductor of sound,” the palest one said. “It’s amazing what we can pick up down there.”

  Masked.

  This was the first time Seph had ever seen a Masked’s face. They weren’t supposed to be above ground without hoods and escorts, not even here in Old Town. One word from Seph, and they’d be killed.

  And if he protected them, he’d be made one of them.

  “You know, you can talk to them,” Mauro said.

  “Sorry,” Seph said. “I’ve never—” He cleared his throat and grimaced at himself. “What have you heard?”

  The three of them exchanged glances, and the crop-haired one said, “You might want to think about a new career.”

  “Why?”

  She opened her mouth, but was cut off by the third woman. “No loose lips topside. You remember what happened to Toryl.”

  The pale one grew paler, her lips going nearly as white as her face. “We should go.”

  “You’re always welcome here,” Mauro said, and waved as they returned to the back room. Seph heard the scrape of metal against metal, then nothing.

  Mauro turned back to Seph and said, “So, can I show you around?”

  Seph pointed at the back room. “What have they heard down there?”

  Mauro opened his metal hands wide. “We’ve just met. Let’s wait a day to exchange secrets, shall we? For all I know, you’re Caste Police.”

  “If I were Caste Police, wouldn’t I have arrested you by now?”

  Mauro bobbed his head. “Probably. But you’re a cagy lot.”

  Seph rose to his feet, tangling his gloved hands in his hair. If he was losing his job, that meant that the Skinless Empress had decided to cut them off from Earth.

  Or that there were no more transmissions.

  No, that couldn’t—

  He turned and stared at Mauro, who merely grinned up at him from his cushion.

  “If I lose my job—”

  “Then come back and we’ll talk. At least about the shop.”

  Seph nodded, backed out of the door, and boarded the first crawler back to the safety of his apartment.

  What had those Masked heard?

  * * * *

  Lenore only came to the apartment long enough to toss on a dashiki and headscarf. “It’s a full moons party at the U.N. General Assembly Club,” she said as she dashed out.

  Seph sat on the sofa wall, one hand worrying at his lower lip, the other pushing away Lenore’s over-amorous creeper as it repeatedly tried to hump his thigh. He’d left the Wall playing in the background, just to see what it was showing. Last hour, it had been a repeat of the News from Earth on the Challenger and Columbia disasters. The hour before that, it showed a program on the Bhola Cyclone and the Concert for Bangladesh. Now, it was playing a two-hour documentary on autism, a condition that had long since been wiped out in the City, but which apparently still thrived on Earth—at least, it had still been thriving when the television broadcasts had left the planet.

  The Masked had said that Seph would be looking for work soon.

  He didn’t want to think about what that meant.

  Only, he did.

  It meant no more broadcasts. They’d have to go back to their old ways after so many decades of worshiping their home planet from afar.

  This was a good thing, wasn’t it?

  He looked up at the timer running in the upper right corner of the Wall. It was nearly Dark Night Bells.

  No time to put on a new face.

  He caught the next crawler to Old Town and made his way to the familiar warren of Masked Quarter alleys. As the moons slowly tracked across the sky, he brushed off three propositions from bored Adorned boys and was just about to leave when he felt a hand on his arm. “Seph.”

  He turned and gazed into perfect pale blue eyes.

  “I wasn’t going to come, but I have news.” Roland pulled him deeper into the darkness and murmured, “They’re going to be closing your department any day now, then closing mine a week or so later. It’s not official yet, but from what I’m hearing, word will be coming down from the twentieth floor in a matter of days.”

  Could the Masked really hear up to the Unadorned levels? “Roland, what’s going on?”

  Roland leaned in close and whispered, “There aren’t any more transmissions coming in from Earth, ever.”

  “So the cloudscrapers are cutting us off.”

  “No, I mean the transmissions have stopped. Look, I don’t know the details, but we’ve been hearing rumors on the eighth floor for a couple of weeks now. That’s why we’ve been stretching our work out.”

  What was going on that it was being kept even from the Adorned?

  “Seph, once we’re no longer working together…” Roland raised his eyebrows meaningfully.

  Seph narrowed his eyes. “What about your impending future husband?”

  “Fuck him. As little as possible.”

  “I’ll be here the night I get fired.”

  Roland smiled, the dim light of the alley twinkling off of his lip rings. “It’s a date.” He cupped Seph’s painted cheeks with his hands, and planted a long, hard kiss on his mouth.

  When Seph opened his eyes again, he was alone.

  But he could still feel Roland’s lips on his.

  * * * *

  Order didn’t inform Seph that his office was closed for the day until after he’d finished painting his face.

  He stepped out of the washroom to see Lenore lounging on the sofa, playing with a new set of Russian nesting dolls that had been painted to look like famous plastic surgery disasters of the 21st century. “You look chipper,” she said.

  “I might be losing my job,” Seph said.

  Lenore raised her eyebrows. “And that’s a cause for celebration?”

  “If Roland and I are no longer coworkers—”

  “Ah, say no more.”

  Rather than spend the day wading through Lenore’s clutter, he decided to venture back into Old Town, to Mauro’s shop. Once the door was securely closed behind him, he said, “Your friends were right.”

  Mauro peered out the curtains, then lead Seph deeper into the shop. “What have you heard?”

  “An Adorned…coworker tells me that my department’s closing. He says that the transmissions have stopped.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard too,” Mauro said. “My friends won’t tell me why, though. Sit. Have some caffe.”

  “Thank you.”

  As Mauro warmed two bulbs in the hot box, Seph wandered through the shop, running a gloved finger along a counter and flicking the thick pad of dust from
his fingertip to the floor. The brushes didn’t look like they’d been properly cared for. He picked one up, tugged down his collar, and ran the bristles across a patch of bare skin on his collarbone. No. Too scratchy. He’d need to replace them all if he landed this job.

  Mauro handed a warm bulb to Seph with one metallic hand and asked, “So, are you here about the job, or are you just here to figure out why you might need it?”

  Seph took a sip of the sweet, dark liquid, and swirled it around his mouth while he considered his answer. “Let’s start with the job. Do you really think there’s any chance of Order assigning me here?”

  Mauro set his bulb down on a nearby counter and picked up a dried-out vial of red paint. “No. Order isn’t issuing any new commerce licenses, and old ones are being revoked every day. I think you’d have to take this on as an after-hours thing for barter.”

  Did Seph want to give up his evenings?

  Then again, if he only worked between Evening and Dark Night Bells, he’d just be a short walk away from the old Masked Quarter every night. He took another sip from his bulb and walked deeper into the store. “So, if I take this as a second job, I’ll inherit this store from you. All of it.” He stopped outside the entrance to the back room and looked at the metal door in the floor.

  Mauro stood behind him and said, “Exactly.”

  “Did you talk to them before the Caste Police took your hands?”

  “A little. I uncovered that access hatch about ten years ago when I tore up the floor to do renovations. It was one of the old feast days, and they were singing.” Mauro stepped past Seph, shaking his head. “I tossed some fruit and flowers down in appreciation. I don’t think they get much of either of those things. Then we started having conversations through the door. It was never anything major. I was just…” He stared at the metal door. “I was curious.”

  Seph set his bulb down. “Have you visited them?”

  Mauro shook his head. “No. I was too cowardly to go down there before they took my hands. Now, I couldn’t even if I wanted to. My replacement hands only work when I stay in the designated Paintclad levels. But after losing my hands, I started inviting them up.”