by C L Corona
"This one could not say." There was a tremor now to its voice.
"And you remember nothing of those few minutes—did Olsten react as though he'd seen someone else, did he greet anyone?" Even as she asked, Elian was certain this line of questioning would prove fruitless. The cine-cam had shown only the chimera, steadily plunging its fork into its master, gouging flesh and eyeballs from bone.
What she'd really hoped was that by bringing Ulixes' here she'd trigger some kind of buried memory.
"This one remembers nothing, just the blood. The blood," Ulixes repeated. There was a definite warble as though it were trying not to cry, to keep sobs from its voice. Not that chimeras could cry. There'd been no need for them to do so.
"Dammit," Elian said. "All that for nothing." She'd been hoping to avoid any direct confrontation with the family themselves—one tended to make a hash of things when one questioned the newly-bereaved as murder suspects.
She turned, holding Ulixes' head up so it could survey the room in its entirety. "Who was the last person who spoke to you before you came here, before you went to Olsten's office?"
"Clarice," Ulixes said. "Clarice. She always made the coffee, said no one else could get it just how Master Olsten liked."
Could Mrs. Olsten have manipulated the chimera's code? Its memory? That was impossible. Ridiculous as the rot about secret phrases and codes that could manipulate a chimera; the conspiracy nonsense of the type that anti-chimera protesters liked to spew when they weren't off trying to save the world from each other. "It can't have been Clarice," she muttered to herself.
"No. This one is wrong. This one remembers now. Master Tomas stopped it on the steps, to tell it something." The chimera sounded amazed, as though were reliving a long-forgotten memory.
Certainly, it had never mentioned a conversation with Tomas prior to old man Olsten's death before. Elian frowned. "And—what did he say to you?"
"This one....this one...cannot remember."
Starting Fires
"Where to now?" Martyn pulled the desert-scoured bakkie out of the line-up of fancy cars, and shouldered into the traffic. "Or are you done with playing detective?"
"So snippy," said Elian. "I'm far from done. My reputation as one of the creators of the chimeras is at stake."
"No, it's not," Martyn said. "No one cares about your reputation any more, you're a footnote."
"Who exactly pissed in your breakfast cereal?" Elian snapped. "My reputation matters to me, if no one else."
"And the chimera?"
"What about it?"
"Do you care what happens to it?"
"Obviously. It would be an utter waste for the thing to be destroyed, especially when, as I've explained to you at length, it could not have committed the crime."
"I'm just driving aimlessly now. A direction would be nice." Martyn said.
With a sigh, Elian gave him the name of the hotel where she'd booked a suite. "It bothers you, this thing with the chimera," she said, after a long silence, the bakkie veering and shearing between startled motorists. "Lack of your usual alchemicals aside, it isn't like you to be so, so, so unlike you."
"What? Angry?" he snorted. "Of course it bothers me." Martyn jerked the wheel. "I put up with a lot of your cruelty, mainly because I don't think you mean it. It's an afterthought. But this is bigger than bossing me around like I'm a house-chimera, or teasing infatuated grad students. You don't seem to care that a man died, that his family is grieving, and that an innocent will be destroyed. It's all just a game to you, isn't it?"
"Nothing is ever a game—hang on." Elian leaned forward and tapped the dash. "What's what? Up ahead." A long plume of smoke twisted up through the air, black and thick against the dull red of the late afternoon sky.
"Smoke," Martyn said. "Back in human land, we like to think that it comes about when there's fire."
"Cheeky doesn't suit you, Martyn. It makes you sound like a petulant child. The Greenriver is there," she added. "It would be the cherry on this faeces-sundae if the hotel had decided to burn itself down."
"Yes, gods forbid you might be inconvenienced."
Elian narrowed her eyes. "Indeed. Still, we'll find out soon enough," she said, as they lurched around a corner and sent a handful of pedestrians scattering from the cross-walk.
The crowd of people on foot had become thicker, and the few cars on the road were barely moving at more than a slow crawl. Some had been abandoned, their sleek interiors empty. To Elian they looked like the discarded shells of dead creatures, surrounded by a stream of jostling lesser beings. Like ants around the carcass of a beetle.
"Traffic's stalled," Martyn said, unnecessarily. "I can try backing out and looking for another route-"
"In a minute. I want a gander at whatever's going on up there." Elian unbuckled her seat belt and slipped down from the high carriage of the bakkie, landing nimbly. "I'll be a moment," she yelled back. "Wait here."
Elian had always been slight and small, and could move through crowds like a minnow slipping through a child's fingers. Now, with added advantage of being clad all in crimson and veiled like a plague-carrier, she darted through the mass of humans, following her nose.
The smell of the smoke was heavy and chemical, and potentially toxic. Not that it would make any difference to her, but more than a few of the bystanders would end up in an emergency ward that night, hacking up black bits of lung. It was like that with humans—they always had to have a ringside seat at tragedy, not matter what it cost them.
And what does that make you? a little voice asked in her mind. It sounded annoyingly like Martyn. "Dear gods," Elian said. "If I must develop a conscience, can it not sound like my sulking apprentice."
The stink was stronger now. A light breeze billowed the black smoke through the streets. The crowd was thinning, driven off by the putrid chemical burn. Elian slowed and put one arm over her mouth in a pretence of battling though the choking cloud. The veil and black smoke together made viewing difficult, but the source of the smoke was now apparent.
At one end of a large cul-de-sac, a giant throne of car tyres had been built and set alight. Perched on them like a king, and tied in place with thick steel-cored rope was a figure. It was still recognisable through the ruin of its body, the dripping fluid, the melting carapace, the flaring wires.
It said nothing, though it was still alive, Elian knew. It could have shut down its sensors, but it would have needed a human's permission. She doubted this one had been given the option.
"Why?" she asked it.
The chimera turned what was left of its blazing head to stare down at her. This one hadn't even been a U-model. It wore the wide, round face, cheerful grin and bright eyes of a D-Model. They'd once been popular as nannies and child-minders. Nowadays, most of them had been bought out by the Leeburg council and set to work as litter-collectors and street-sweepers.
The chimera didn't reply. The vocal unit had been destroyed in the flames.
There was no reason to ask why the crowd had taken action. It didn't matter that this pathetic ruin was the wrong chimera. All that mattered was that it was not human, merely wore the pretence of one.
Elian knelt down to pick up a charred remnant of what had been a hastily-painted cardboard placard.
Some rant about how Unhumans Are Soulless. Amazing what those in apparent possession of a soul were capable of. "You may shut down," Elian said, and the chimera, though it could offer no expression nor any word of thanks, seemed to shudder minutely in relief, then was still.
Elian left the remains to the choking fumes and the eager flames.
◆◆◆
Still under the pretence of needing a live-in carer thanks to her advanced age and obvious frailty, Elian had booked a two-bedroomed suite at the Greenriver. Some of that obvious frailty may have been in doubt when she took the narrow staircase up to the third floor, two steps at a time, but Elian had never been fond of the jerking, caged elevators that the hotels in Leeburg were so inordinately fond of.<
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Martyn had tipped the porter, and hauled his rucksack and Elian's travel suitcase into their respective bedrooms. The rest of the luggage containing the various parts of Ulixes was sitting in the lounge area.
"Are you going to tell me what happened?" Martyn asked.
"It wasn't important," she said. "As you said. Just a fire."
"If you say so." Martyn slumped down in the largest couch of the living room. He'd obviously found time while unpacking to give himself a little pick-me-up, since he was twitching less, and his eyes were slightly glazed.
"I do say so." Elian pointed to the bags. "Since you're at your best with technical fiddling while high, you can reassemble our friend. I have a dinner invitation."
Martyn glanced down, brow furrowed. "What if I put her back together all wrong?"
"It. And a monkey could do it, so if you get stuck, pretend you're a small chattering primate. it shouldn't be a huge stretch."
"You saw something," Martyn said. "Whatever you say. You always get ruder when you lie."
"I do not." Elian considered. "There was a—a protest action, a chimera was burned."
A look of utter revulsion crossed Martyn's thin, boyish features. "Alive?"
"Yes. Well, as alive as these things are, I suppose. On second thoughts, perhaps it's best to leave our friend as it is."
Martyn nodded in agreement, though he kept glancing toward the large bag that still held Ulixes' head. "Do you think it hurts?"
"What does?"
"To be scattered like that—aware of every part, knowing each section of yourself is somewhere, still alive, but separated. What do you think she—it must feel, not knowing of ever all the parts will be put together again?" He shook his head. "And your body's all wrong, and anyone could change it and rearrange you to suit them no matter what you wanted. It's a nightmare."
"Only if you think about it," Elian said. She paused, then said, softer. "If we spent all our lives thinking of the horrors each of us suffers, we would get nothing done."
Martyn managed a half-smile. "Is that what you do, pretend to be callous because it's more practical?"
"I don't have to pretend," Elian said. "And now, I'll leave you to your moping. I need to get out of these funeral rags, I have a dinner engagement."
"Theudor?"
"No." Elian found that even the mention of her grandson could no longer make her bristle. Perhaps losing your emotions wasn't all bad. She walked through to her private room. "What would be the point? It's too late to save him."
She closed the door and leaned back against it. She could already picture Martyn's expression. He expected her to make overtures of familial love, when all that mattered to her was that Theudor was now a reminder of everything she'd managed to cock up along the way.
No, she had no time for family. She was going to see an old friend. Someone who understood her. And who might hold a key to Ulixes' innocence.
The God in the Tower
Selest Tower was, despite the grandiose moniker and the thirteen floors, a rather unassuming building. Judakael had not raised a huge glass and steel modernist monstrosity to his own name, but instead taken over one of the old granite buildings that had once housed a trading lord and his family, many centuries back. It was dull for the most part, only sometimes glimmering softly when the stone caught the light.
It was on the inside that things got interesting. The building had been gutted and reinvented. The ground floor, which had served as a warehouse back in the mists of time, was now an open space with small kiosks and fountains, and new windows carefully worked into the old architecture to open up the space and bring light into the dank interior. It was lit with hundreds of strands of imp-lights which criss-crossed the ceiling in a web of shimmers, sparkling down on the heads of the revellers buying beer and noodles, art and fashion. Shops and shoppers, small galleries and boutiques. Public info-systems and widescreens brought news to the masses. The library—funded by the good man himself—ran workshops and vocational training as well as providing leisure.
It was Judakael's vision of humanity’s future in miniature—a happy little society functioning in egalitarian bliss, where small traders could find space for their wares, and a sense of community would be built from the ground up.
People would help each other, and the world would be a better place.
Again, Elian noticed that the space was remarkably clear of biochanicals, though she could detect no shortage of teens high on legal and illegal drugs. A few had tentacle growths protruding from their faces that they did their best to hide. A sure sign of relying on student-alchemists for their stash. The problem with alchemy was that, like it or not, it was closer to magic than science.
When something went wrong, you could be risking more than just death. As Elian herself knew.
She moved through the evening crowd, the air thick and greasy with the smell of fat transparent noodles and curried fish, coffee and chocolate malt, and breathed deep. There was something to this mess of sound and smell and colour—such a far cry for the sand-bitten austerity of the house on Wilderstrand—that called to some primitive human part of her.
Both herself and Judakael had dealt with their fate in their own way, Elian thought as the elevator doors closed and she was hidden away in a vacuum of silence, leaving the madding crowd behind. Elian pressed her palms together, willing the journey over. No choice to take the stairs here. To get to the high room, the nerve centre of Selest Towers, there was only one route. She had the key, of course. For all his talk of a world where everyone had everything, Judakael Selest still kept himself apart from the common riff-raff he claimed to love so dearly.
The lift doors slid open.
There he stood, waiting for her, smiling, still the same. Exactly as he had looked thirty-six years before. Not a new wrinkle, not another silver hair. Judakael had always managed to look dapper, even in his younger days, but now, permanently marked as a man on the verge of sixty, he had fallen into his role as a silver dandy with obvious relish. he could afford it. Judakael had done his time as a penniless coder working for big firms, and his breakthrough on the Chimera project had ensured he'd ended up a wealthy man.
"It's been a while," Elian said, still standing in the metal tomb of the elevator.
"At least a decade." Judakael smiled sadly. "Too long, my dear. I hate thinking of you holed up out in the wasteland like that, all alone." He beckoned her into the sumptuous front room of the apartment.
"We all hole ourselves up in different wastelands." Elian stepped forward, her feet sinking slightly into the plush green carpet. "Some of us just have better views." She marched past him toward the glass wall at the far end of the lounge where the apartment overlooked the curving central park. From this height it looked like a charming stretch of woodland and green spaces, its walkways garlanded with delicate lights. Past that, the city smouldered, awash with gas and suntowers and modern electricity, side by side—an uneasy harmony.
"Not bad," she said. "As these things go."
"Beats a desert." Judakael had followed her to stand by her side, both of them taking in Leeburg—ancient and modern.
Elian sniffed in response.
"I'm glad you accepted my invitation," Judakael said. "I was beginning to worry. We've had our differences, perhaps you'd decided never to see me again."
"I've seen you," Elian murmured. "You're constantly in the papers, playing at god."
"Being a philanthropist is hardly the same thing as pretending to be a deity, Ellie." Judakael cleared his throat with a clicking cough, as though trying to dislodge a beetle. "We each dealt with our...accident...in a way we saw fit. You decided to go sulk in the sand, and I decided to improve humanity's lot. If that makes me playing at god, then so be it."
"Gloves off, is it?" Elian said. "Good, well, then I shan't waste time by pretending this is some pathetic attempt at rekindling old flames."
"I never suspected it was." Judakael said. "At least have dinner, and we can wor
k on our pretences at civil conversation." He waved toward the next room, where a table lay set, and a silent chimera stood waiting, bearing a bottle of wine.
"Another U-model," Elian said. "Not the most popular one right now, of course."
"You remember Ursa," Judakael said. "Also a U-38, but an earlier version."
"Of course," Elian nodded at Ursa. She knew it; their very first U-model to have her own alchemical augmentation and fail-safes. It had been their beautiful monster. The first chimera brought to life. Aleksia's own house-chimera, before her untimely death. "Good evening."
"Good evening, Doctor Maxwell," Ursa said. The face was deceptively human, though it was unblinking and expressionless. Still a Ghima Face—the hero's. Curiously asexual, with a voice that was a product of three voices: Judakael, Alexia, and herself. The threading of tones made the chimera's voice sound like a song. "This one is glad to see you once more."
"Indeed," Elian said flatly. She liked Ursa—correction—she remembered once liking Ursa. Once, she'd have been glad to see the familiar chimera too.
It was, as much as she hated to admit it, getting worse. Ten years, and already she no longer cared enough to miss anything or anyone. That cure wasn't going to create itself, and here she was, wasting time on trying to save a reputation no-one cared about except her. She couldn't even lie to herself and say she was doing it to save Ulixes.
Elian sighed, and turned away from the chimera. "You promised me dinner," she said to Judakael.
"I did." He gestured for her to take a seat at a small polished table; the settings intimate in their closeness, while still chillingly austere. The cutlery looked like it would do as good a job stabbing an enemy as cutting up the main course. "And you promised me details on your obsession with undoing your immortality."
Elian seated herself, and waited, staring across the display of delicate white flowers that made up the centrepiece. Fake. Very good fakes, delicate as hand stitched silk. They had no scent, and would never wither. "My obsession, as you call it, is progressing."
