Dispatch from a Colored Room

by Matt Weber

I was recovered enough to walk around again, he offered me a little something to celebrate. He wanted me clean, to keep Sim healthy—"

  "—and then he wanted you preoccupied."

  Aimée looks at me, her eyes huge and bright and miserable, not even a semblance of humor on her face. "Preoccupied," she says. "That's the word I'll use for it from now on."

  I don't dare press her. I want to say something comforting, but what is there? "Sim's a strong boy," I manage at last. "He'll grow up well, I think."

  "Maybe," she says. "As long as I'm not too 'preoccupied' to protect him." She shakes her head slowly. "Elias took such good care of him when he was tiny. I don't know when it started. Have you noticed I don't let him play with dolls?"

  I look around the toys that carpet the room like varicolored mold or lichen. There are autokinetons, ornithopters, buildings and building blocks, animals fantastic and mundane; costumes, armor, wands and weapons; books, balls, a kitchen in miniature with plass food, cookware, and utensils. Nothing with a human shape.

  "That was how I found out," she says, her voice rough and cracked as bare earth in summer. "Even a preoccupied mother notices that kind of play."

  "Not always," I say, as though I know anything about it. "And not everyone who does, will do what needs doing."

  "Who says I did what needed doing?"

  "Imen's horn, Aimée, it seems to have gotten done, does it not?"

  We wait for a long time in silence, but when I move to leave she says "Please don't go," so I sit.

  At last she says what I'd been dreading to hear. "My mother died not long after Sim was conceived." She casts her eye over to the box of documents. "We took that heliotype, and a couple of weeks later she was gone. She would have protected Sim. I think Elias knew that."

  Do you really think he's that dangerous? I want to ask, but she does, and she'd know better than I would, so I don't ask. Instead I go for platitudes. "The griffons crack everybody's bones in the end," I say, "but today Sim is safe in his house with all the toys he could think to ask for. Don't take credit for it if you don't care to. Just believe that things are better."

  "For now," she says.

  "That's what I'm saying," I say.

  "What if I put out a dandelion?" she asks, leaning her head back to stare at the ceiling. "What if the Dandelion Knight gave me a wish? I'd publish anything they want if they'd get Elias out of my way."

  "You think that's true, then?" I ask. "What Gauthier wrote?"

  "What do you think?"

  "I think it's his last letter, Mlle Leblanc," I say. (Remember that, for all our revealing boudoir conversations, I am still, at this point, her employee.) "I think perhaps he knew what he risked when he went to visit Jesson Desrosiers. I think perhaps he was writing something romantic for a little girl who was going to lose her father very soon --

  —blot and sand me, Daniel, this is very nearly the emotional climax of the fucking thing, can you not cross your legs and hold it in for a bit?

  All right, very well. The extremely rudely interposed question, which is the only one I'll answer before I say "the end," was this: What did Gauthier Leblanc have to gain from visiting Jesson Desrosiers, if he was actually full of sparrowshit and going to die and not planning to visit Aimée at all?

  And the answer is, I have absolutely no idea. The forensics says he did visit Desrosiers, and Desrosiers killed him, so he obviously thought he had something to gain. I also know that he had an entire life, career, and friendship involving Desrosiers, almost none of which made it into these you've got to admit rather navel-gazing letters the man wrote for the benefit of, not future nigglers with nothing better to do but scrutinize the motivation behind his every action, but rather his tiny baby girl, to whom he cared only about communicating love and comfort and maybe, maybe, a carefully managed impression of understanding. I don't have the full portrait, just a few crumbling flakes of paint. Just enough to get a sense for color, if I squint and think.

  —Daniel, it isn't a script, and you couldn't direct it if you wanted to, so forgive me if I find it hard to care what you'd do if you found it on your desk. Which is, if I may remind you, presently a smear of char at the bottom of the smoke-belching hole that used to be the Antechamber. So, if you do make it through this alive, you're going to be sorely in need of new submissions.

  In any case, if you'd just sat back and shut up, you'd have learned by now that I'd been wrong about Gauthier anyway.

  Imen scratch and strike me, what was I saying?

  Ah, yes. I'm condescending to Aimée, telling her her father might have been gently pulling her leg, for all the best imaginable reasons, with the bit about the Dandelion Knight. And Aimée looks at me, obviously close to boiling over, and says, in much the tone I used with Daniel Utterquick just now:

  "You think you know an awful lot about my father, Pel, because you know his finances. And now you've read his letters. But I've read his letters too, now, and I've got something you'll never have: I spent practically my whole life living with Gauthier Leblanc's wife. So when I tell you, as I'm telling you, that my father was not given to flights of fancy, it comes from a well of knowledge you don't have any right to question."

  Well, this was fair, and furthermore it was a pronouncement from my boss, which on its own should have telegraphed, to any right-thinking person, the correct response. But recall, now, what happened with my last boss. Or, for that matter, anything that you who know me know about me.

  So what do I say? I say, "For a man of no fancy, he's a tolerable enough poet, it would seem."

  And that was the end of conversation for the evening, as you can imagine.

  Here's what frustrates a girl with a taste for well-cut fabric. You've all read this script in one form or another, the one where some lazy writer uses a Wormhome Alley suit as a signifier for wealth and taste. You and I all roll our eyes at it by now, because we know the costumer will make a "Wormhome Alley suit" out of any old thing that fits—but the writers keep doing it because it works. It works because the audience hears "Wormhome Alley" and thinks "good suit, wealth and taste," even though they manifestly can't tell a Wormhome Alley suit from an unwanted castoff in a costume closet. And they *can't* tell because there's a tradition in Wormhome Alley: No window displays, and no browsing unless you put up cash. Enter Eldberc's or the Cuirasserie and you'll be confronted by a very nice man about eight times your size, politely requesting a security deposit of about a hundred shekels. If you make a purchase, it's deducted from your price, otherwise it's deducted from your wallet.

  There have been many times, over the years, when a hundred shekels has been a large multiple of my net worth. But not when I worked for Aimée Leblanc. And a hundred-shekel fee for browsing privileges means you don't have to worry about casual run-ins; the people you see in a Wormhome Alley tailor's are there to do business. So when I drop my tithe into the big man's purse to follow the well-dressed genie from Dawnroad into the Greaves & Mail, I'm reasonably confident we won't be interrupted.

  It's not a big shop, and the cravat nook can only really fit one person comfortably, so he notices when I follow him in. His suit for the day is some buttery fabric I can't even identify, a red so dark you'd have thought it was brown but for the way it picks up the highlights in his hair. He's wearing some subtle attar, a sweet scent that burns my nose. "Mlle Pelerine," he says. "What an unexpected pleasure. Do you shop here often?"

  "Not these days," I say. "Too much mail to go through."

  "Ah, well," he says. "You know, no one's taking any actual property from your mistress. The whole negotiation is over votes. She can sit back and watch the cash roll in from her thirty-three percent whenever she likes, and the mail will stop."

  "She wants her votes," I say. "She deserves a say in the company's future. Which you people are squandering, by the way. It's a press, not a money-laundering operation for bored Aerestan capitalists with artistic pretensions. When was the last time Greyking sold a book worth reading?"


  "When was the last time Aimée Leblanc read a book worth reading?" he asks. "Would she know one if you broke her nose with it?"

  "You leave that to me," I say. "Did you know one of Greyking's board members has been investigated five times for indecency toward minors?"

  I can see his back stiffen up a little, see his fingers dig a bit deeper into the silk of the royal blue cravat. "Dawnroad Bank has excellent in-house counsel, Mlle Pelerine, as you know—"

  "Oh, he's not a Dawnroad executive."

  He looks at me.

  "He's the board's most recent addition. I went down to the sixth and checked."

  This is true, by the way; I've spared you the details of the trip because they're boring. After Sim's reaction to Elias, it was the obvious thing to do. The gendarmerie down in Elias' neighborhood were happy enough to talk about it; they seemed shocked that no one had ever asked. Apparently the order had come down from above: These sorts of cases are always word against word, they aren't winnable even if the accusations are true.

  Here's another interesting thing: The families had all moved away.

  No one moves away from that bit of the sixth, bandits and barons. Moving costs. Moving means you spend a few days or weeks without work, between finding your new home, packing up your old one, and actually executing the transfer. You all know how hard it is to make that happen—and you’re