Aestival Tide (39 page)

He crooked his thumb at the door. “Guards.” His voice was so low and hoarse she could not at first understand what he said. “For us, Reive. They're taking us.”

“Taking us?” For a moment she thought of Zalophus, heard him booming
Come with me,
recalled the splinter of blue gleaming above the watergates. She thought of him repeating her name: Reive, Reive Orsina. She stood, ignoring Rudyard Planck patting her hand comfortingly. The cell door slid open onto the waiting guards. Reive shook her head, heedless of the blood dried on her scalp, the tendrils of hair left where the mullah had shaved her carelessly. She walked up to one of the guards and pointed to Ceryl.

“We want you to burn her properly.
No medifacs.
Have her pyre set on Dominations—”

The guard stared at her, eyes furrowed, and then started to grin. Reive looked at him coldly and said, “Dominations! Do you hear us? We are Reive Orsina, heir to the Orsinate! We want that woman given full obsequies and burned this morning.
Before
the Gate is opened.”

The guard looked startled, glanced at Reive and at Ceryl's body and then at the other guard. Slowly they both nodded. Reive looked back at the dwarf staring openmouthed and said, “Come on, Rudyard. We don't want to keep the margravines waiting.” The guards stood aside for him, then led them down the hall.

Nike Orsina stood staring at the corpse of her sister Shiyung. Of course, it wasn't exactly a corpse, because the body that floated in the narrow steel vat was not precisely dead. Tubes ran from Shiyung's nostrils and ears and anus, delicate wires had been fitted to her shaved skull and to her fingers. A corrugated black hose fed into her mouth; Nike could see it move very slightly, in and out, like a bellows. The body was immersed in a clear liquid that smelled like standing water, with a faint undertone of cabbages.

Nike wrinkled her nose and leaned away from the tank. It had been her own idea to come here, to the laboratory on Dominations where the
rasas
were rehabilitated. After she had left the Four Hundredth Room and returned to her own chambers she could not sleep. Sajur's death had frightened her, and Âziz's insane obstinacy in the face of so many terrible omens. The dream of the Green Country; the tremors that, since last evening, shook the entire city with alarming regularity; that uncanny morphodite. She kept seeing her, so young and thin, looking so much like Shiyung when she was a girl. How could anyone see her and not recognize her as an Orsina? Âziz believed that Nike did not notice things—Shiyung had thought so too, and Nasrani, before he was exiled—but Nike
did
notice, more than they knew. It was a common belief among morpha habitues that, far from numbing the senses, frequent—and in Nike's case, nearly constant—use of the drug made it possible to see and sense things outside the perimeters of normal consciousness. Nike had discussed this with Shiyung once and her sister had agreed, stating that once while under the influence of kef she had watched Nasrani's thoughts leaving his head, in the form of small orange globes. This had not been what Nike meant; but she recalled it now, gazing at Shiyung's face beneath the vat's bubbling surface.

The morphodite was Shiyung and Nasrani's child, sole heir to the thirteenth Orsinate. The first heir in hundreds of years, if one believed the histories 'filed in spools on Powers Level. It was an abomination, of course, a natural child and a heteroclite; but it would be a greater abomination to kill it and have no living heir to the dynasty. Nasrani was exiled, Nike herself had never had any interest in governance, and the demands of despotism had driven Âziz quite mad. Of Shiyung nothing remained, certainly not within that empty carapace. Nike was sure of that. If anything, since the corpse had been given to the biotechnicians for regeneration, it looked less alive than anything Nike had ever seen. Its skin was soft and pulpy; a whitish fuzz grew from the corner of one eye. The fingers splayed open like a frog's, moving back and forth as nucleic starter was pumped into the tank. It was grotesque, worse than the flayed smelting children of Archangels; worse than Shiyung's most addled experiments at geneslaves. Another sign of Âziz's madness: there was no way Shiyung's
rasa
could be presented to the multitudes as Tast'annin had been. They would riot and kill the surviving margravines rather than have such a horrifying reminder of their beloved Shiyung stalking witlessly through the city. A sudden horror seized Nike: that this was how
she
would end up someday, a gormless thing resuscitated in the bowels of Araboth and then forgotten, left to wander the lower levels with all the other doomed and deathless toys of the Ascendants.

“No,” she whispered. She groped at the banks of switches on the wall beside her and turned back to the tank. The liquid churned inside it, flowing over the top and spilling through grates on the floor beneath. She muttered to herself, then closing her eyes she reached into the vat and grabbed the thick hose that covered the corpse's mouth. Nike gasped—the flux was freezing cold, viscous; the hose heavier than she could have thought possible. She yanked it once, then again and again, until finally it slipped loose. Then, teeth chattering, she snatched her hands back and looked wildly about the room for something to dry them on. She found a biotech's robe and wrapped her hands in that, and returned to the tank.

Shiyung's corpse had risen as the liquid did, and now bumped against one edge of the vat. A milky ichor stained the nucleic starter around her mouth. Fine white threads of tissue streamed from her nostrils and a small hole above one eye. As Nike stared in horror the corpse's eyelids rolled back, to show pale irises corrupted with tiny yellow spores. It gazed up at her, its pupils mere specks floating atop cloudy green yolks; then suddenly the eyes moved to stare at the side of its tank. Nike shrieked and stumbled backward. More and more starter poured onto the floor, and before she could do anything the corpse was falling as well, pushed by the weight of the liquid bubbling up from the vat.

Nike screamed. The corpse flopped onto its side but otherwise did not move. Its flabby white limbs sprawled across the grates. Its head faced Nike; its eyes remained open, staring blindly at her. A tiny pink delta of flesh, like a kitten's tongue, protruded from one corner of its mouth. Nike turned and fled, shouting at a startled biotech in the hallway to seal the laboratory until she gave further orders. It was not until she reached the Seraphim's gravator that she stopped, panting, and tipped the contents of a morpha tube between her trembling lips.

Originally, the Lahatiel Gate was to serve in emergencies only. In the event of holocaust or direct attack by the Commonwealth, the entire population of Araboth could be funneled through the immense steel mouth and evacuated onto the shore outside. An intricate system of gravators fed onto the eastern rim of Archangels where the Gate loomed, arching up and up into the darkness, its ribs and spikes entwined with bas-relief images of ancient janissaries and war machinery, flames and floodwaters, and above all of it the Ascendants' motto picked out in letters of bronze and jet. When the Gate was open, one could see immediately outside of it a sweeping promenade that led down to the beach, copper pilasters and brazen steps long since tarnished to a moldering green and swept with sand. The sand itself was a different color here than that just a few yards away—dark, almost blackish. It always felt damp, and stained one's bare feet a rusty color, and it did not glitter in the sun as the sand did elsewhere. It might have been as the moujiks said, that the earth could not swallow so much blood.

From where she stood on the Orsinate's viewing platform, Âziz would in a few hours be able to look through that gate and down those sweeping steps to the beach, to the pale turquoise water swelling beyond. She would never have admitted it to her sisters or brother, but sometimes she wished she just could open the Gate and gaze out at that calm expanse of white and green and gold. It was a terrible weakness on her part, Âziz knew that. It distracted her, kept her from focusing on the business of ruling the city and dispatching the Aviators on their endless missions against the Balkhash Commonwealth and the Håbilis Emirate. Instead, over the years she had grown increasingly obsessed with her climatic chambers, the engines and programs that allowed her to create rain within the Four Hundredth Room, snow and sleet and even, by means of a series of brilliant lamps, a modest simulation of sunlight. And it was this obsession that had become the chink in her consciousness whereby the dream of the Green Country had burrowed, to haunt her restive nights and now stalk her even during Araboth's false daylight.

She thought of all of these things as she watched the moujik crews finish polishing the Lahatiel Gate's elaborate finials and hydrolically charged hinges. In a few hours they would gather here, all the levels of Araboth. As she was each Æstival Tide, she would be struck by how few of them there were, really. Perhaps ten thousand living humans in a city that had been designed to hold a million. And how many of that ten thousand were moujiks, tainted blood? Or sterile marabous like the morphodites? Add another thousand or so
rasas
, and the more intelligent of the geneslaves, and it still was not enough of a population to warrant the effort and energy expended by the Architects to maintain the Quincunx Domes.

Not to mention the energies of the woman who ruled it. Âziz drew one cool white hand across her brow, and sighed. Each year there were the usual complaints from the cabinets, overeducated anthropologists and demographers who claimed the hecatombs of Æstival Tide were no longer justified. What had begun in the years following the Third Shining as a method of population control, combining elements of both circus and sacristy, had over the centuries degenerated into the
timoria,
the Feast of Fear. Even with the
rasas
toiling in the infernal flames and darkness of the refineries, there was scarcely enough of a human work force left to perform those services that were beyond the nearly omniscient powers of the Architects. And so learned persons suggested that it would be better for the city, Better For The People, if the feast was annulled, or its nature altered. There was even talk of doing away with the Redeemer—its terrible appetite could scarcely afford to be whetted on those rare occasions when it was roused from its nearly endless slumber. It was a grotesque pet, really, nothing more; the margravines themselves loathed it and always had, but it belonged to the Orsinate, had been their charge through the centuries like the city itself, and Âziz could not truly imagine destroying it, no more than she could imagine a ten-year cycle without its Æstival Tide.

Because the Feast of Fear was more than an occasion for mere torment and bloodshed, sacral madness and terror. Without the overwhelming anxieties engendered by this brief glimpse of the world Outside, combined with the threat of the Compassionate Redeemer, what was there to keep the people of Araboth from rioting, even from attempting to flee the domes? The Orsinate had very carefully created the machinery of superstition and sacrifice, twisted scientific faith and religious belief in their powers to rule the city. They knew that the Architects were the true powers behind Araboth. Without them the air processors would fail. The tiny but deadly storms that sometimes erupted in the uppermost reaches of the domes would not be dispersed; the water filters would rust and decay. The surgical interventions that provided safe if unnatural childbirth and the
rasas'
morbid nativities would become impossible. The Redeemer in its carefully monitored hibernation would wake and sing its demented aria; the geneslaves would turn upon their creators. And finally the domes themselves would crumble and collapse, exposing the city's vulnerable heart to the firestorms and viral rains that raged Outside.

It was unthinkable, of course. Since the First Ascension there had been how many celebrations—forty? forty-three?—a small number, really. If each feast had been an individual, why there would scarcely be enough of them to fill a room! But they were precious individuals, like the margravines themselves, and their fates were not to be decided by monkish social scientists and religious fanatics.

Âziz gripped the edge of the balustrade in front of her. Far below the viewing platform she could sense a rumbling, not another tremor but the Redeemer turning in its waning sleep. Already the smell of singed roses sweetened the medifac's noisome air, and Âziz fought the urge to go down to the creature's cell. Soon enough, soon enough its scent would change, when, hunger appeased at last, it crept back into its cell, and the odor of burning roses faded into that of lilies (said to be the favorite of the Ascendant who had created the monster).

But Âziz's concerns were not with the Redeemer. She was thinking of what Sajur Panggang had said before he died: that he had programmed the destruction of the city. That, like their Imperator, the Architects had at last turned against the Orsinate; and—like his—that betrayal would be their last.

It did not seem possible. For nearly five centuries the city had stood, impervious to the buffets of gales and waves Outside. Why, not even a drop of rain had ever made its way beneath the Quincunx Domes—

Though it seemed perhaps that was to change. From the floor far beneath her echoed the crash of something falling. A moujik cried out; the viewing balcony shook, and flakes of metal drifted past her. In the uneven light spilling from lanterns high overhead the flakes looked green. They fell in a slow unbroken rain upon Âziz's head.

Sudden tears seared the margravine's eyes. She bowed, pressed her head against her hands. It
could
happen, of course. Sajur was certainly dead, and frightful events had shaken them all in the last few days. There were precedents for this sort of thing— Pompeii choked by Vesuvius, Hiroshima a cindery shadow against the distant mountains, San Francisco swallowed by the no-longer
pacific
ocean. Cries echoed from far below her, and she clutched the balustrade as it swung, as beneath her feet the flooring whipped as though it were a carpet being shaken. After a moment it subsided, only to tremble again; and at this Âziz wept.