Ymir, page 6
As soon as he’s back in the sanctuary of his hotel room, he tells the smartglass to call Dam Gausta. He is drenched in sweat from scaling the stairs, and his heart is pounding at his ribs. His hands shake. He tears off his boots and hurls one at the wall while the call loads. When Gausta’s marbled face appears on the smartglass, he hurls the other.
“Hello, Oxo,” she says, unperturbed. “You look unwell.”
“There is no one for whom it is well,” Yorick says, by rote, then snarls. “What do you expect? Bringing me to Ymir, sending me to the bottom of a mine with an untagged grendel and a giant clanner who wants to snap my neck. Without any of my shit. Without even a fucking graft-knife. Do you want me dead?”
“Of course I don’t want you dead,” Gausta says. “The company values you very highly.”
“What was that all about, then?” Yorick breathes. “Was that for Fen? She’s hiding something, yeah?”
Gausta only blinks. “We can discuss this later, Yorick. Get some sleep.”
Yorick eyes the smartglass. He unclenches his fists. “You’re not really there, are you?”
“Very perceptive,” Gausta’s avatar says. “I’m attending to other concerns. If there’s anything else you’d like to add, please be brief.”
Yorick considers all sorts of brief additions, none of them polite. “Nothing else,” he says. “No.”
He blanks the smartglass, then climbs onto the bed. He draws his knees to his chest and wraps his arms tight around them, curled in on himself like a fetus.
Outside, he keeps the chin of his mandible higher than the chin of whoever’s across from him. He slouches and spreads. He takes his space like a gas giant, making his body as big as he can. All of those habits were gouged into him here on Ymir when he was still a child. Inside, when nobody can see him, he always makes himself small.
Exhaustion catches him up and shuts him down. Too many hours wandering through the mine with his nerves knife-edged. Too many hours doing whatever he was doing last night. Too many hours in the land of the living. He falls asleep like falling off a cliff.
CHAPTER **#>`
They are building a human skull in orbit, an enormous orb of nanotube and alloy slowly gaining the crude dimensions of forehead, cheekbone, jaw. Yorick watches it grow in the sky, with the knowledge that he has watched it for years. He sits at the top of a wind-pummeled hill. Gnarled bushes curl back against the gale; red-and-gray lichen swatches the boulders. Someone is sitting beside him, but he doesn’t turn to see who.
“Let’s play the grendel game,” says a child’s voice.
Yorick feels the warm weight of a needlegun in his hand. When he looks down he finds the weapon is made of flesh and teeth. Its skin is joined to his skin and he can’t ungrip it.
“Not like that,” the boy says, because now Yorick has the needlegun pressed up against his small forehead. Yorick explains that he doesn’t know any other way to play the grendel game, and he pulls the trigger.
Up in the sky, they are giving the skull a face. Buildbots crawl across the surface, sheathing the alloy with swathes of pale plastic, installing pitch-black chunks of carbon in the eye sockets. It’s not Yorick’s face, but it’s close. He starts to clap.
CHAPTER 17
He wakes up with strains of an old dirge growing through him like vines, tethering him in memories. The time display on the smartglass shows late evening. His head is muddled but one thought comes clear: he needs to get off this world. Every second he spends here erodes him, and the past is forcing its way through the cracks.
He pushes away the dream, the face in the sky, the needlegun, and tries to focus on current problems. Gausta is yanking him around. The grendel’s whereabouts are unknown. His equipment hasn’t been printed. A giant red wants to murder him for some reason. Another red, much smaller, wants to murder him for taking her jammer.
He rubs his eyes and unfurls himself. He takes his immunos, then a double dose of phedrine, liquid sunshine to help insulate him from his paranoia.
A few drinks will help even more. Yorick puts on his boots and heads for the stairs, not bothering to ask if the lift has been fixed in the six hours he’s been asleep. The ascent and descent has become its own comfortable kind of hell. He knows he is helping to balance the Ledger of Universal Suffering.
He’s winded by the time he’s on the ground floor. He walks across the lobby with his hands on his head, wheezing. Entering the hotel bar kicks off cell division in his cerebellum. Scant memories of the prior night start to multiply. He recognizes the tangle of pneumatic arms behind the bar, stools that screech when dragged, a holomural that he no longer loves. For a moment he superimposes a pair of fat-hunters at the end of the bar, one with revolving hair.
But apart from him and a black-clad man at a corner table, the place is empty. Yorick picks a stool. Yellow script is scrolling across the bartop: HUMAN OPERATOR, HUMAN OPERATOR, HUMAN OPERATOR. He feels an echo of shame, distant through his phedrine high, but can’t quite remember why.
“What do you want?” asks an electronic voice.
“Something to drink.” He looks over the logos, picks a stylized black hole. “That one. Half tank.”
“Eating?”
“Anything spicy,” he says. “I got standard enzymes. Cook for standard.”
“Yeah, I know,” the voice says. “Dumbsick.”
Yorick feels a prickle of familiarity. “We met last night.”
“Yeah. Obviously.” An arm picks a metal cup from the hanging rack, flips it, and fills it with what looks like bacterial beer. “When do you go fat-hunting?”
“I told you I was a fat-hunter?”
“You did. Te didn’t believe it, though. Said you didn’t know shit about the industry.”
Te. He remembers Te crushing doxy onto the bartop, adjusting their hair in the bathroom. He takes a drink; the bacterial beer is bitter and somewhat watery. His eyes slide around the bar and come to rest on the man in the corner. He has a flash of the man’s leg unfolding, bone replaced with fluted black carbon.
“Did I talk to that man?” he asks.
“What man?”
“The person in the corner.”
A sensor behind the bar gives an exaggerated swivel. “Nobody there.”
The phedrine keeps him steady, but Yorick is suddenly worried that the black-clad man and his wide sealie eyes are a hallucination. He finishes the watery beer in a few gulps. It’s awful, but he orders a full pitcher and another cup. The pneumatic arms dance and weave behind the bar. Linka. Her name is Linka, and she’s not a droid. She’s just debodied.
“How long have you been running this place?” Yorick asks.
“Two years.”
“Before that?”
“Before that I was incarcerated. Company prison. Very fun. Drink your fucking drink.”
Yorick drinks his fucking drink. A few minutes later she sets a steaming plate onto the bartop, stringy peppers and hashed vatmeat. He thanks her and carries everything over to the corner table, slopping beer on one hand and scorching his fingertips on the other. His hallucination looks up.
“I won’t have more doxy for another couple days,” he says.
“I don’t do that shit anymore,” Yorick says. He offloads his plate, sets the pitcher in the middle of the table, and juggles the two cups down beside it. The musician watches him. Yorick remembers that now, that he’s a musician. He remembers the beautifully haunted voice and a stridulating instrument built surgically into the man’s lanky leg.
“She grows those peppers,” the musician says, nodding at his plate. “She has a hydroponic garden in the back. I helped her plant.”
“You sure you exist?” Yorick asks.
The musician shakes his head.
“The bartender said she can’t see you,” Yorick clarifies.
The musician’s dark eyes flick toward the bar. His half smile is pained. “When we’re having an argument, she pretends I’m not here.”
“Very fun.” Yorick pours a beer and slides it over. “I’m Oxo. I’m not really a fat-hunter.”
The musician slides the beer back with two long pale fingers. “No. You’re a company man. Probably you’re here for the grendel.”
“Probably.” He lifts the cup. “You don’t drink with company men?”
“I don’t drink.” The musician taps the side of his neck. “You’re smart to cover that tattoo. People have a long memory up here. Longer than the rest of Ymir. They remember Subjugation. They remember killers with tattoos on their necks.”
“I wasn’t here for that,” Yorick lies, so easily.
The musician’s eyes narrow. “But you know the dirge for dead children.”
Yorick drinks, wipes a trickle off his mandible. “I heard it before, yeah.”
The musician’s eyes are obsidian shards now, sharp enough to pierce Yorick’s phedrine insulation. “You could pass for old blood here,” he says slowly. “Old blood. Cold-blood. You could be part sealie. Maybe that’s why the company picked you.”
Yorick doesn’t answer. He starts to eat, peeling the peppers apart with his hands until orange grease stains his fingertips. When he chews, the mandible makes a faint clicking. He didn’t notice it last night, but now it’s only a matter of time before the sound drives him out of his mind. He points to the musician’s leg.
“You get that biomod here in the Cut?” he asks.
The musician strokes his own kneecap. “There’s a woman in the recycling district. She custom prints, does bio-installations. Nobody better on the whole world.”
“Maybe you could put me in touch,” Yorick says. “I might want to get a new prosthesis.”
“Give me the blueprint, I can run it to her for a fee,” the musician says. “Just not tonight.”
Yorick looks around at the empty bar. He waves an encompassing arm. “Is it always like this? Just you and Linka?”
The musician gives a delicate shrug. “The bar and hotel are company-sponsored. People don’t like that lately.” He pulls up the time display on the table’s surface. “And today, the miners are busy.” He gives him a pointed look. “It’s the ninth day.”
Yorick keeps his expression blank. “Of what?”
“The wake.” The musician’s smile grows, stretching across his pale face like a wound. “The Cut will be a little strange tonight. A little wild. I’ll be in high demand.”
“So it’s a party?” Yorick asks.
“Yes,” the musician says. “A death party.”
Yorick knows that now is the time to stay put. To stay safe. He can drink himself into a stupor in the furnished oblivion of his hotel room, order the host droid to bring an endless parade of bottles up the endless staircase. He can gorge himself until his shrunken stomach is screaming, then throw it all up in the toilet. Those are a few of his many pastimes.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
The musician blinks. “Nocti. We’ve been introduced before, Oxo.”
“You think I can pass for colonist geneprint, right?” Yorick says. “Old blood, cold-blood?”
“I think so. Yes.”
He should stay in the hotel room until Gausta contacts him to tell him what’s really going on. He has every reason to hide. Ymir is not his world anymore, if it ever really was, and he is not wanted here. The tattoo on his neck, the things he did twenty years ago, make him the enemy.
But he knows better than to be alone with his memories. The alcohol is already blending into his double dose of phedrine, bright and warm, and if the musician is out of doxy, it means the doxy is elsewhere. The Cut will be a little wild tonight, and Yorick never could turn down a death party.
CHAPTER 18
Nocti is reluctant, even after Yorick offers him the rest of his phedrine—company-grade is still good enough to be cut with something more potent and resold. Yorick understands his reticence. Bringing a company man to a miners’ wake is a stupid thing to do.
“Keep that tattoo covered well,” Nocti says, watching the bar. “And cover up your face, too, if you can. Some people already been speaking about you.” His eyes aren’t on Linka’s pneumatic arms; instead they drift farther back, to the black biotank set into the wall. The northern lilt in his voice is growing more pronounced. “Get you a mask on the way, maybe.”
Yorick nods, still coaxing the last dregs of bacteria beer out of the pitcher and directly to his mouth. He carries the empties back to Linka while Nocti packs up the phedrine vials in his bag.
“They don’t like warm-bloods at this sort of thing,” the bartender says, taking the dishes out of his arms. “Don’t like offworlders. The performance isn’t for you.”
For an instant Yorick wants to tell her he was born on ice, that he’s as much a cold-blood as anyone else on Ymir. But it’s true in all the worst ways, and the fewer people who know it the better. He is Oxo Bellica for a reason.
“I’ll be careful,” he says.
“I don’t care about you.” A pneumatic arm jabs in Nocti’s direction. “I don’t want you to get in the shit and drag him down into it with you.”
“Do you love each other?” The question comes out of him unexpectedly, and Linka doesn’t answer it. He waits for a beat. “If I get in the shit, I don’t know him,” he says. “I’ll pretend he’s invisible.”
Nocti is already motioning for him at the exit, so he licks his thumb and pushes it against the bar’s gene scanner. Linka doesn’t say goodnight, but one of her sensors turns to watch them leave. They go through the lobby, where the host droid scampers forward to ask Yorick how it can improve his lived experience, and continue out the glass doors.
The Cut’s temperature drops in the evening, to maintain the illusion of a day/night cycle. Yorick’s breath tumbles out into the cold air as a frosty cloud. He looks down the street, sees a cacophony of neon in the vapor murk. Some of the polyp structures have their own bioluminescence, glowing ghostly blue. The artificial sky is dark and seething with static.
Distant music, a harsh electric drum, drifts on the air. He hears shouting. Singing. He suspects he’ll recognize the songs when they get close enough.
“The Cut always looks better at night,” Nocti says. “It becomes a different animal.” He pulls his coat shut and it mollybonds, giving off tiny tendrils of steam as they start down the steps. He has a rolling limp. Yorick wonders if it came before the instrument or after it.
“You grew up here?” he asks, knowing the answer.
Nocti nods. “Snow-eater. I grew here, I shrank here, I loved here, I died here.”
“You look really healthy for a corpse,” Yorick says, and it makes him recall the bodies in the tunnel with a buzzed detachment. “Did you ever work in the mines?”
“No. Linka did. Before.” Nocti pauses and turns. His pallid face is twisted. “She’s not voluntary,” he says. “She’s not one of those Baldr technomonks. I don’t want anyone to go around thinking that.”
“She told me. Prison.”
Nocti gives an eyeless smile. “Prison,” he says. “But I’m going to get the money for a transplant. I’m saving, saving. Get her out of that biotank and into whatever body she wants, and then everything will be how it was. Or close enough.”
He starts walking again, and Yorick falls in beside him. They plunge down one of the Cut’s winding side streets, an artifact of early colony construction, pre-grid. He smells something acrid. The electric drum is getting stronger, and now there’s a metallic rattling, too. People are wailing. People are laughing. People are making guttural animal sounds.
The street twists one last time, and they find themselves in a crush. Mourners and revelers are the same thing here, and they’re packed shoulder-to-shoulder, shouting, singing. Some of them are wearing masks—not filter masks, but funeral masks, the blank white kind with slitted eyeholes that Yorick remembers so well. Almost everyone is holding a drink or a vapor pipe or both. He looks around for sources and sees a huge dirty vat set up down the way, probably holding rotgut brewed from the dregs of dregs of dregs.
Nocti pushes a funeral mask into his chest. “Wear this,” the musician shouts in his ear. “The wake is farther up.”
Yorick doesn’t bother explaining that he’ll have to take the mask right off again in order to drink. He puts it on, feeling the plastic rasp against his mandible. He remembers the first time he wore a funeral mask, back when he was small, and how the anonymity made his blood rush. That feeling of disappearing was the first thing to ever intoxicate him.
He picks a discarded cup off the ground. It was mistaken for an edible—the brim is chewed. He holds it as a prop as he follows Nocti up the street, away from the vat. When a drunken woman spills her drink, he slips the cup into the parabola and catches a few milliliters. He lifts his mask to sample the vatbrew. His artificial tongue burns and puckers.
Up ahead, the performers are in their frenzy. The scene is lit with reddish biolamps, maybe taken from the same mine that claimed tonight’s dead. Ragged cloaks of synthetic fur, holomasks of empty eye sockets and snapping jaws, hoods crowned with skeletal branches: the grotesques. They stomp and howl, clanking their chains in time to the drum.
The shades dance around them, mostly women, some men, some nons, all their graceful bodies netted in pulsing white lights. It is ethereal and hideous and beautiful, and it makes him a child again.
Nocti is shouting in his ear; Yorick retreats back into the crowd with him so he can hear. “I’ll show you the ghosts,” the musician says. “After that, you should go back. I can lead you to the mainstreet.”
Yorick nods, follows Nocti down a narrow alley decorated with moving graffiti. At the end of it, the dead miners, each one cobbled from a hundred old holorecords. They are standing in a circle of printed lanterns, dried dark flowers, food offerings. They look around, cross their arms, fidget, and blink. They don’t speak.
