Asimov's Science Fiction (20 page)

All this kept Nadin away from the Argile Rouge and Burthen Street and thus from running into Leena.

He had spent the week after the accident nursing her. She'd had a secondary reaction to the culture that had taken her fingers, a fever and puffy splotches that threw her tattoos into wild relief. The doctor from the clinic had refused to see her after her impromptu surgery; it was not fair to imperil the women who relied on the clinic and whose problems were not self-inflicted, she had said when Nadin went to beg her help.

Sobette had sent vials of cultures that were meant to counter the other and Nadin had flushed them down the sink until the drain spit back bubbles that clung to the walls and smelled of old vinegary apples and rotted meat. They had opened all the windows and had fled to the Argile Rouge with Leena's hand covered by a shawl from the attention of the neighborhood informers and had gotten into an awful row which was, in hindsight, far more incriminating than a few missing fingers.

Leena had seen no reason at all for her accident to discourage her from further work with Sobette. The yeast had in fact done exactly what was intended in leaving the nerves alive and intact, she had said, and the work pointed to a merging of the bio-mechanical and the human, and wasn't that the solution to the problem of the
golethem?
What were his words? "As alien and impartial enforcers of the city's laws they have replaced morals and ethics with mere effect?"

Nadin had plucked at the shawl over her hand and hissed, "Words, yeah, but Leena, your fingers aren't 'mere effect.'" And with wine-bleared frustration added, "You can't change people by swapping out
parts."

And Leena had said, "I don't
want
to change people. I just want to give them choices."

"There are no easy choices in the city," Nadin had said, and had blushed over the triteness and spluttered, "I mean, if you
had
the power of the
golethem,
what would you choose?"

Leena had answered with a glare like a challenge, "I would save the people I love." And she'd waved her maimed hand there in the middle of the café and asked, "Does this look like an easy choice to you?"

And they'd gone around a few more times with him saying, "I wasn't talking about you, you're a different case altogether," until she said, "Words, words, dammit,
show
me," and he swore and stood up but she walked out first and that had been the end of autumn.

The winter's damp and relative warmth had led to widespread rot in the winter barley crop, and this in turn led to a shortage of the small beer that was a staple of the lower
divisiones.
The irony of this failure was much observed in both the upper and lower city, ruled as it was by the 'Chemist guilds and most particularly by the Brewers and their manipulated, manifold yeasts. The longshoremen and warehouse workers of the 9th made their observations known via a general strike and running battles with the militia, and after the
golethem
took and caged two students for painting slogans on the walls of the Brewers' Blue Tower, the 9th's anger frothed up in utter riot.

After four days of watching the mob and militia and the misshapen lumps of
golethem
from the safety of his hillside, Nadin could no longer deny the need to check on Leena. He wrote out a concerned yet correct message and threaded it into place around the acid vial of an Augur Bird, but instead of coiling in the route to her studio and launching the Bird from his porch he set it on the table and walked down the hill himself.

He knocked and Leena opened the door, half-stripped, sweaty and sooty, which meant she was casting metal. She was a bit thinner, but not unhealthily so, and had a new tattoo that spilled from her right shoulder all down her side.

"I thought you would send a Bird," she said, in a tone that made Nadin very glad he had not. "Help me finish this lot," she said and walked back to the casting pit; the new tattoo curved like a wing down her back as well and looked sharp enough to slice.

"This lot" proved to be linkages for a new run of Birds. Rakel and his cohort were manufacturing basic components these days using the facilities of most of the schools and universities of the lower city, but Leena still had the master molds and built some birds herself, start to finish. All but the map coils, of course. Only Nadin really understood their blend of geometry and geography; he etched them in his sink and passed them to Rakel every few weeks.

Once the parts were poured and cooling, Leena ducked into her room in the back and came out somewhat cleaner and more appropriately covered and they went to the Argile Rouge for omelets and a bottle of wine and Nadin thought that that had been a test, and that he had passed.

The test came afterward, though, back at the studio. Leena pulled out a box from under the workbench and took out a set of vials that were unmistakably from Sobette and syringes and swabs and something wrapped in soft cloth. She unwrapped that last to reveal half a hand, three fingers joined at the knuckles and made of polished brass and carbon biofoam tipped with crescents of onyx like claws. She showed Nadin the tiny pistons and bladders of yeasts, the delicate gears and cables, all familiar from the Augur Birds but stronger and more precise. And she explained to him the network of supports and terminals and razor-edged tubes that would slide into her palm and merge the fingers with her flesh and intent, once the cultures and yeasts had opened the way.

"You came just in time to help," she said.

Nadin surprised himself with a helpless but not joyless laugh, shook his head and said, " 'Sblood, girl, I came to make sure you were
okay."

"Exactly," Leena said, and Nadin realized that not only had he decided to help her but that it was both right to do so and what he wanted.

The process ended up taking the night and most of the next day and was messy at times and excruciating at others and at the end the fingers twitched and clattered of their own will. It took another two days before Leena could extend one finger while curling the others under—"Now I'm ready to join the riots," she said happily—and another week before she could hold Nadin's hand in hers without leaving scratches and a day beyond that before she admitted that she'd had the box stored beneath the workbench for a month, waiting for him.

Nadin's friendship with Leena settled into new patterns. They spent their time in serious planning for the Augur Birds or in absurd, drunkenly slurred conversation at the Argile Rouge. Leena's flirting was less frequent and less frivolous; Nadin was not sure that this was an improvement.

Nadin's series in the
Gazette
had been well received, and he was now writing a regular column on "Hidden Gems of the City" for the
Evening Rebuke.
And he was working on extending the network of Birds into the outer reaches of the city. He went on weeklong walks into the outlying towns and countryside in support of this latter effort, which meant an end to his tutoring and a subsequent cooling of his relationship with the Viscount d'Anon.

Leena, in turn, was working more and more directly with programmed cultures. She set up her own laboratory in Sobette's building and over time moved much of her equipment there. Her old studio became more and more a place to unwind and at times assemble a batch of Birds; the new work, the
art,
was taking place in the lab that was neither welcoming nor comfortable for visitors.

Nadin was surprised, therefore, to return from an outing that had taken him down the river into the scattered villages of the estuary and discover a wagon outside the studio and teamsters moving crates in rather than out.

Leena was inside, standing on a stool and hanging chains from hooks screwed into a beam, with metal stands and crates surrounding her like fortifications. She looked at him and nodded, more to herself than to him it seemed, and chewed her lip as she made the chains fast and the teamsters departed. Then she jumped down and crossed to him and put her hand on his chest.

"You're back," she said, like a question.

"Defeated," Nadin said with a laugh. "Mapping those shifting sands, not to mention the shifty villagers, is beyond my skills." There were questions in that as well, though, and in his looks at the rigging and the stacked chests.

She ran her fingers along the backpack straps across his chest; her control over the new fingers was perfect now and he had to look down to confirm that it was her hybrid hand. When he looked up again she was looking at him with her dark eyes narrowed and still questioning.

"Do you want to help me unpack?" she asked. "Or go unpack yourself and rest up after your trip?"

He shrugged and instantly regretted doing so, let the pack slip off his shoulders instead and slung it into a corner. "I rested enough over the winter," he said.

Leena needed a few minutes to adjust the chains and stands, so Nadin washed his face in the sink and made tea and put on a old shirt of his that Leena had been using as a smock or perhaps, judging by its state, a drop-cloth.

And then Leena said she was ready and they pried the staples from a crate and in it was a long curved shape, maybe two feet long or a bit more. The surface was a deep matte black traced with bronze and verdigris in fractal curves like veins or vines. Clusters of tubes and cables protruded from each end around massive joints of metal. Nadin ran a hand along a curve and only then recognized it as a massive thigh. The skin was slick but not cold and it gave slightly to his touch.

"What is this?" he asked.

"You've seen this stuff. It's that bio-layered skin I wanted to use for the Birds. Though I've figured out how to make it self-repairing."

Nadin looked at her until she flushed a bit, but then her eyebrow went up and she said, "Oh, come on, tell me you don't know."

"It's a
golethe,"
he said; it came out so angry that she stepped back, blinking in almost comic alarm.

"More like a not
-golethe,
hopefully. Not finished, regardless. I'm not really sure
what
it will be when it's complete." She stroked the carbon flank, rested her hand on his. "It will be easier to explain when it's set up."

He helped, even though he felt betrayed by the mere existence of the thing and terrified of its implications. But if this was some natural progression from the Augur Birds then he already shared some responsibility, he thought; better that he also share some understanding. And she was going to put it together regardless of his help.

It did not take long; the joints slid together effortlessly, the tubes and cables intertwining as if they had a life of their own. Which was to some extent true; sections were already primed with the yeasts and cultures that would serve as muscles and nerves and repair systems. It was like the Augur Birds and Leena's fingers but everywhere a layer more complex, more lifelike.

The assembled form hung from its chains and dwarfed even Nadin. From the front it seemed almost whole: polished black eyes like those of the Birds, faceted and glittering under brows of gold, arms and hands that gracefully tapered, a wide chest chased in bronze and ridged like wings, feet like talons. If it was not a man in scale or shape, it certainly was closer to it than to the squat-clubbed mockery of the
golethem.

"So," Leena said, standing in front of the thing like one condemned to be taken. And angry as he was, he could not help but marvel at its strange, sensual beauty. "Some of it, the face and the lines... it's you. As if you were grown into one of your Birds."

"
Our
Birds," Leena said. "There's a lot of you in there, as well. It's no wonder you recognized that thigh."

And though he had been ready to accept some responsibility for the thing, that was too much. "So you finally just
take
my body, after I say 'no'? There's a word for that, isn't there?" And when she flinched, the way she never had flinched when she'd lost her fingers, he went on because he could hurt her worse with his words than his hands,
"Two
words in this city for that sort of violation, and the worse of the two is
golethe."

"Oh Nadin, no, no, please, this is what you need to see," she said, dragging him by his grip on her shoulder.

The rear of the thing, the not
-golethe,
was splayed open, the yeast-grown skin draped over the supporting stands, cables and pistons and vats exposed, clusters of delicate gears like seashells on rocks. Hinged ribs were spread wide, and from the inside of the metal skull the needle points of tiny wires and tubes glittered. Nadin had the strange sense of having seen it before, an engraving, a book on the history of the Fort Majore it was, torture devices locked around bodies like masks or cloaks. He shuddered and shook his head and stalked back to the stool and sat with his head in his hands, speechless and blind between fury and fear.

"The difference between our birds and the
golethem,"
Leena said, "is that the
golethem
act on their own and the birds follow the routes that
you
set, that you lay out with your own hands." She interlaced her fingers, flesh and otherwise, with his. "The 'Chemists say that by making the
golethem
autonomous they have made them beyond corruption or doubt. But so are the sea and the winds and the sun. They hang criminals in cages and let nature do their work for them, Nadin,
look
at me." He let her pull his hands away and looked up into her face with her rows of little gold rings and her spiraled tattoo and her anguished desire for his understanding; it was her face because she had made it so, more so than anyone else he had ever met.

"Nadin, look," she said, "they might as well fling them from the bluffs and say 'let nature determine their guilt,' like they did in the old days if you were accused of being a heretic or a witch or a 'Chemist. Nadin, whatever this thing becomes, at least it will be because I make it so."

And that echo of his own thought was what he needed, not to end his anger but to lay it where it belonged, on the streets of the city.