by Moira Crone
In that light, they looked quite transluscent, not only their gowns, their skin. I felt more concrete by contrast. They were perfectly still, did not move. I saw a man at the far end, who did not have on the gown the others wore—instead a rumpled suit, fancy and very out of style. He was in the same trance as the others, though.
There was nothing really wrong with these people. So Camille was lying, but where was she?
Then, a low pitched wail startled me.
The figure in the suit trembled, then shook, then rattled, awful, like something coming up through him from a hollow place under the pavement. Louder, then softer, then louder again. He shook so violently I thought his limbs would come off.
The others yelled, in sympathy—a whole chorus of gravelly Heir voices.
I went in closer.
I recognized the white-less eyes.
Him. The only Heir I actively disliked. Now he was truly frightening, rattling like that in his chair. Scaring up his cohorts. O.
For old reasons and new ones, I wanted to run. I turned.
“You believe me then?” Camille had come up behind me. I startled.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What would it take for you to?” she said. She looked at me from head to toe, drew me in with her eyes. I felt this in my arms, my whole trunk, something bright running down. It was awful. Wonderful. The web, like before, bigger now. I closed my eyes, opened them.
Only inches away. Cinnamon on her breath. She whispered, very faintly, “No, you can’t, you can’t believe me. I can’t believe you. You can’t believe in me. I can’t believe in you. ”
“Yes you can,” I said. I took her towards me, dragged her away from the sheen of the orbitals, high on poles above, and kissed her perfect, perfect mouth. She stepped away, folded her arms in front. Finally, I said, “Why won’t you believe in me?”
“You’ll be one of those!” She pointed, and then she was running down the winding path.
I chased after her, the Heirs’ moans rising, my face filling with tears—I never cried, but I was crying. My chest, my whole body gouged out, gaping, wanting. I had never hurt like that.
*
A few days later, I learned that Dr. Greenmore was “preparing” my assignment. The first news I’d had from her a month. I also heard that Camille had a new job, in another Tower. Nobody had any explanation—someone just said she had switched departments, and, “we thought you knew.” A short blond fellow with a Gaist patch on his pale green medic’s shirt took a urine sample from me, looked into my pupils with a little flashlight and said, “You are almost back, de Lazarus. Ready for adventure?”
“What adventure is that?” I asked.
“How should I know what the doctor wants you for?” he asked. “Who can tell what they want? I’ve never figured it out. They have what they want. That’s the matter with them.”
I came home one night a few days later, and found my door ajar.
I prayed it was Camille, but instead, it was the last person I’d ever thought I’d see. He’d broken into the Curing Towers, no mean feat, and talked a guard into letting him in my room, even though he looked a fright. Ariel.
I knew what Lazarus had told me, but I couldn’t help myself. I wasn’t unhappy to see him.
His hair was tied up in a bandana, his legs folded tailor-style in my chair. Tanned the color of fine maple wood, and his dark hair, which was not quite as curly as mine, wavy and long, had been bronzed in the sun.
An old ghost of an urge to hug him. I did it. He stank a little. “What do you want?”
“If you thought about it, you could guess,” he said.
“Sorry, I’m no good at that.”
“It’s a little thing. But for me, life and death.”
I was actually going to call Securitas, but then Ariel said, “Remember the last time we did a Sim together? There’s something I need to say about that. ”
I couldn’t call any officers.
*
It was an awful story.
When I was at my peak, around eleven by count, I had really high billing in a Sim. With my influence, I had gotten Ariel a part. I thought he could try again, come into the business on my coat tails. It wasn’t that long after the time I found him weeping, claiming he was permanently estranged from O.
It was a funny-all Sim, with lots of extras, quite the sensation that year. Ariel’s role was, “Walker, Religious Processional.” He had to march around a track, with a huge puppet on his back, of a man tied to two crossed sticks. The thing must have weighed sixty pounds. Ariel didn’t weigh much more.
No surprise, he wasn’t grateful. He kept asking me if O, or friends of O, were in the audience, to see his troubles. He complained bitterly during every break. I heard him whining to Vee, who was doing the catering for the Nats on that set. Vee took him aside at one point, and told him, “They aren’t like us, Ariel. They have no sense of time, no sense of proportion—it can’t be helped.” I knew Vee didn’t believe in Sims, didn’t believe in “mimesis.” It was one of the rules of the Chef Menteurians, but he realized Ariel needed to play along.
This funny-all was like all the rest, we “mourned” around a coffin, and there were parades, and lots of mock tears—this would go on for days. Then, eventually, the one whose portrait we were all carrying, the one who had “so-longed,” an Heir, would emerge from hiding at the moment the coffin was found empty, and say, “I’m still here! Ha-Ha! Ha-Ha!” And the music would go up tempo, we’d all dance. A “rough comedy,” as Jeremy described it in the publicity “With Old New Orleans touches, and brass.” A tragedy with a happy ending. The Heirs devoured these, loved the joke, and the part where they got to cavort with us low types.
It wasn’t just Ariel. Things weren’t so great for me either. I was playing the youngest “mourner” at the Sim. The “son.” My shoes, these contraptions tied closed with wax string, were two sizes too small, and the blisters were excruciating. On top of that, Jeremy had given me a drug so I could cry, which was dehydrating me—I was ready to fall down.
The T crowds were huge. We had already done the whole Sim three times, because of encores, when the incident with Ariel happened.
I was standing by the coffin, wondering if I would be able to speak on cue—the inside of my mouth was a grave, a white salt dry gulch, my eyes were like dry rocks to drag my lids over. I saw Ariel trudge by, under the doll on crossed sticks. He was supposed to be crying, too.
I looked into his dark eyes when he came round, and his exhaustion entered me, I couldn’t keep it out. Something terrible was going to happen, I knew. Just at my cue, Ariel collapsed. Mouth open, face in the dust. I thought he was biting the black. That I’d done him in. I was sure. I ran to him—broke character, a great blunder.
The crowd convulsed, with disappointment.
The Heirs, booing. Jeremy came out, tried to calm them.
When I reached my stricken “brother,” he sat up. Sat up! And said, in a perfectly normal, not even a parched voice.
“What’s got into you? What about the play?”
“You?” I asked. “You are okay?”
“I am fed up with this awful gig. It is so moronic. Give me a Disney in a flat any day,” he said, then he sucked on a fluid tube, offered it to me. He had a camelback pouch of water hidden under his costume. I was ready to kill him.
Jeremy arrived then, terribly out of breath. “Malcolm? What were you thinking?”
When Ariel stood, some of the more sophisticated in the crowd decided the whole thing was a sort of parody, a play on the resurrection idea, and they started to laugh. Then Jeremy tried to agree, saying it was a “Variation.” Critics were there. He had to do something. But only a few in the audience were that avant garde. They mostly liked everything played the way the script was written, and then, an encore, and another encore. The idea of “once,” was beyond them. Even Jeremy complained sometimes, though he made them pay for every repetition.
All this time I re
member Vee’s look of horror. “Why always a joke of so-longs?” he asked me. “Why don’t they joke about something else?”
After that, it was clear Ariel was never going to make it as a rental. Jeremy was furious. Ariel would go back to O. I recovered. I soldiered back. I survived. But the anger had never left.
*
“You deliberately tried to play me,” I said in my room that night when I’d discovered him. “I was working.”
“I wanted to tell you I am sorry. I should never have done that. And I am sorry.”
He never apologized. “But that isn’t why you came!”
“You know who is here?” Ariel said. “O. He’s turned to a hard Chronic. A while ago, Lazarus and he had a big fight. My Trust couldn’t have two sponsors, he said, couldn’t be split. He said I had to choose. I suppose Lazarus thought it was obvious I’d choose him. But I chose O.”
I already knew some of this but not the reason.
“He bribed me. Said I’d profit. Isn’t that the whole game? Anything, anything, for…So Lazarus transferred my Trust, then, not so long after, they had to haul O here. After all I went through with that wretch.”
“What did you? Really?”
“You don’t want to know,” he said, shaking his head so fast his bangs flew out. “You are lucky. You never knew anything else. You couldn’t compare. I always compared. I shouldn’t have. Believe Lazarus. ‘You will have hundreds of years to iron everything out,’” he quoted sarcastically. “Don’t ask me about the past. O’s in here now, and he can’t help me, or run my Trust.”
“What now?”
“I’m going to control the thing myself. Become an Unsponsored Nyet Like Jeremy. Be emancipated. Run my own affairs.”
“Jeremy didn’t make it,” I said. “You know what happened? When you control your own Trust, they charge you all sorts of fees, take percentages. It’s better to have it in Heir hands. It is never worth it.”
“Well Jeremy isn’t me,” Ariel said. “I can do it.”
“Isn’t it getting harder?”
“So? There’s always a little nook or cranny somewhere. A way to get through, get up. Didn’t Lazarus teach you that? O has been here too long. They haven’t fixed him yet. He’s got every anomaly. You’ve seen him?” Ariel was standing now, pushing back his long frayed sleeves. Part of me just wanted to give him a hot bath, clean clothes, and calm him down. I knew what Lazarus wanted from me, to ignore Ariel, the ingrate, but I wasn’t strong enough.
“Brother?”
“I’ll help you, but stop that lie.”
“That is what we are,” he said.
He was taller, and more slender and rangy than me. His body wrapped around the objects he sat upon, which gave the impression he was built of bendable bones. He wasn’t strong in a square, straight sort of way, like I was. He didn’t have the posture Jeremy forced me to have.
He touched his upper lip, which was exactly like mine—that I had to admit.
“I can’t get there by myself. I don’t have the codes,” I said.
“Who does?”
“Camille Benoit, or she used to. Except—I’ve not seen her in a while.”
“Well show me to her. I’ll persuade her,” he said.
“I don’t want you to use her,” I said. But I was thinking of seeing her, and I didn’t care. I would tell her she ruled my dreams. I cared only about the delight of her, not her life.
“Please,” Ariel said. And I nodded.
Soon after, we had sneaked over to the enclaver quarters behind the South Tower and were throwing rocks at Camille’s window. I had only just found out that she’d moved there, where I could see her at night, and had been planning to go there by myself.
She poked her head out, surprised. She didn’t frown when she realized it was me. “Exit door at the end,” she said.
When we got to the east porch, she opened and leaned out. She wore a long shirt and white pajama pants.
“What you want?” she spoke directly to me, her amber eyes widening, then looked over at Ariel, whom she found suspicious. I knew this by the way her bottom teeth bit her upper lip. “What is this? Your brother?” she asked.
“Why do you say that?”
“You look just alike,” she said. “Except he slumps.” She pointed at him. Her nails were rough, broken. She was doing difficult cleaning work, I’d heard, and had to sleep on the premises because her shift was eleven to dawn. In the old days she’d gone home to Port Gramercy after work.
“We do not,” I said.
“Get me in to see O? A Chronic in the North Tower. Please.” Ariel, leaning in close to her. I didn’t like that.
“Well Dr. Greenmore seems to think I spent too much time with you,” she said to me. “What did you tell her? What did you say I said to you? Or did with you?”
“Nothing. Really,” I said. It was true. I hadn’t seen Greenmore, lately, or spoken to her of Camille.
“She’s just harassing me then,” she shrugged, smiling, believing me. “When I asked for a new assignment, she asked me a bunch of questions about you. Wanted to know did I have any knowledge of history? Did I talk to you about those things? What did you say when you came down off the Galcyon? She asked me did I know you were smart. Had somebody taught you? I told her I thought you had some privacy.”
“You talked back to her?”
“What do I care about Shades? I say what I please.”
My heart fell away, left me. I was cut. I was dying. She asked for a new assignment. To avoid me.
“My name’s Ariel,” he butted in. “I’m his brother, but he doesn’t remember. He was too young.” He was trying to figure out if she was the type to be persuaded by empathy or irony. He asked, “Will you help me? It’s life and death.”
The conniver, I thought.
“It depends whose life, ” she said, looking at me as if to say, again, who is this?
She had asked to leave me.
Ariel tried to explain his plight. A Nyet with a Trust in a rogue Chronic’s hands. I wasn’t sure Camille would sympathize.
“What do I owe to you?” she said to me.
I was caught. I didn’t think anything.
“I am going to lose everything, my Trust that I have worked for, if you don’t—” Ariel was going on.
“Is he for real? Tell me.” Her eyelashes catching the blue orb light, waves, like water.
I didn’t want to say it. Ariel elbowed me. “He says something true,” I mumbled.
“Okay,” she said. It didn’t take much. I thought she should have said no. I thought she would. My nod was very faint. Her upper lip, almost moist, inviting.
“Why don’t we sneak in and see what astral plane the North Tower crowd is flying now?” she asked.
Ariel laughed.
She turned, stopped, and looked at him, so strong it seemed she might hurt him. “You owe me like I’m your momma, you hear?”
I was in love, I knew it. This was love. I had never been in love before. It was like, all the time, you were burning.
*
We got to O’s private chamber at midnight. There were no windows in the room, only lights up at the ceiling, disks, illuminating the scene. Against one wall, a bed, and beside that, a shelf of ancient history books. O was in one corner, in a chair, his eyes open, but he did not seem to see us, or hear us. He was still as a stone.
“Shh,” Camille hushed us, and she brought Ariel over to his old sponsor.
I stayed slightly behind, and scanned the titles on the shelf, “Early Settlements in Pre-Reveal Louisiana,” “The Deaccessions: Concentration, Consolidation, Cleansing,” “The Geography of the Purchase, Quadricentennial,” “Federations Into Enclaves 2050-2093,” “One Hundred Years After the Miracle of the Reveal.”
Ariel whispered, “Doesn’t he complain? It’s so meager here, so—I can hardly believe he lives like this. He’s so used to luxury.”
“I’m not sure he does live here, they go all over high heaven, you d
on’t know about Chronics?” Camille asked, adding, “Shh, shh—” as she turned O around in his swivel chair, so both of us could see him, and the light would shine on him. Then she hunched down and looked at him square in his huge black-blue eyes. “Come here honey,” she said. She sidled up to his ear. “It’s me, come here, don’t be out there now,” she said. “See me.” She snapped her fingers, came close to touching him, but refrained.
O jerked, his shoulders stiffened.
“Okay, he’s in focus now. He will hear you,” she said, reaching over and grabbing Ariel by the ragged sleeve. She brought him down to O’s eye level. “You know this one?”
O’s gravelly voice came, very deep, wavering, “Some time I knew him.”
She turned to Ariel. “Speak to him. He’s alert.”
“Here,” Ariel complied. “Here I am.” He bent down and kissed O on the cheek—I’d never seen that in my whole life, one of us kiss an Heir, it gave me a jolt, made me slightly sick, I couldn’t look, and O gushed, “You were the prince.”
“Yes, I was your prince,” Ariel said, and I could hear something in his voice breaking. “Your pet—”
“You flew, like Peter,” O said.
“You wanted me to,” Ariel said, pulling away, out of respect or fear or a sense of propriety, or all three, and in his face I saw a range of feelings—shame, and desire, too, wishing to be loved, the same as I felt that night, so I knew it. What a dangerous feeling. Then, I saw his pliant fingers, when he was seven, showing me the way, telling me what was in store, and then I saw his little boy’s arms, now wide open, reaching for the air—“And so I did,” he said. “Remember? I remember.” He reached into his long cuff and produced a thick black pen and a rolled-up piece of paper. The contract that released the Trust. He placed the pen in the v of O’s right hand. “Here,” he said, pulling down a hard, dense voice from somewhere, a controlling voice, one that said some kind of No to all that. “Now. Do this for Peter. For Pan. For your little prince. Write your whole old name. You. Now.”
I felt that thing I sometimes felt with Ariel. That he knew some heart I didn’t know—at the same time, I wanted to reach over and pull Camille toward me.
