Asimov's Science Fiction (19 page)

But the unmistakable laugh of the Marquesa d'Anon brayed from one of the boxes overhead, echoed in the tank as pink and puce. Leena lifted her head, looked up at the box and then around at the crowd. "Gods, is Frans here?" she asked.

"Well, he didn't say if..." Nadin said, but there was Frans d'Anon, Viscount, pale and blond and taller than Nadin if not as broad across the shoulders, coming toward them with a drink in each hand.

"Nadin, dear boy, it's been weeks, positively weeks." The Viscount set a glass in Nadin's free hand, cupped fingers damp and chill from the ice around his neck and shook him gently. "Honestly, how have you been keeping yourself?" He turned white teeth toward Leena. "Have you been keeping our Nadin here hidden away, you naughty thing? Viscount d'Anon at your service." He sketched a bow and slipped his arm across Nadin's shoulder.

"We've met," Leena said, "once or twice."

Nadin added, "Leena DiLarri. The mid-winter reception at the—"

"Of course, the
artist,"
d'Anon said. "Oh, you must think me terribly rude. Please, take the other, I insist."

Leena took the proffered drink and they wound a cautious path through conversation. The Viscount's fingers slowly undid Nadin's braid and Nadin leaned until his hair fell on the Viscount's shoulder. Their hands slipped down each other's backs. Leena pushed her shoulders against the tank and tried to think of artists they would all know who hadn't been arrested while behind her the cuttlefish took turns copying her tattoos.

Laughter spilled down from the box overhead, the Marquesa's voice raised with others in some shared punchline about tentacles and spilt ink. The Viscount gave a sigh that seemed at least somewhat sincere, and said, "Duty calls, must rescue mother from herself. Family honor and so forth. Nadin, you really must set an evening aside for me soon and we will catch up. Miss DiLarri, so lovely."

Leena bit her lip until the Viscount was out of earshot, his shape stretched by the tank into a scrolled golden line.

"He's not at his best in public," Nadin said, "especially not when the Marquesa has him out on display. And not with..." He frowned into his drink. "Not with competitors."

"For you, you mean? Don't got the dice to roll in that game, do I?"

"Leena," Nadin said with a bit of reproach his voice.

"Sorry, sorry. I'm not at my best in crowds either." She took a long sip, stared over the edge of her glass into the tank. "Not of people, anyway. I make do with bronze birds and yeasts and one friend at a time. Did you know the word
sepia
means cuttlefish? They used to catch them for their ink. And the cuttlebone is used to make molds for jewelry. I have some in my—"

Nadin put a finger to her lip and she stopped. "Sometimes I just need arms around me too strong to throw off, and someone to say 'Hush. It's okay.'"

Leena sighed and held up her hands in apology, or surrender. "If the Viscount d'Anon does that, I shall forgive him the failings of his class, not to mention his height and sex and hair.
Perhaps
his hair. But not his parentage; that's too much." And on cue the Marquesa let out a sort of hoot from the heights above them.

Nadin chuckled, somewhat ruefully, and said, "Nature works in mysterious ways, girl, but she provides. Somehow she provides."

Leena gave him a grin then and a sideways glance and said, "Ah, but art improves on nature." She leaned forward to put her spidery fingers onto the tank, and the cuttlefish rolled to reflect her in splayed bronze lines.

Nadin shut the studio door behind him and then realized why it had been open when he arrived; it was ferociously hot inside, and thick with steam and smoke and a sharp smell like vinegar. " 'Sblood, girl, what are you doing?"

Leena was squatting on top of the worktable, guiding a writhing stream of wax into a mold clamped between bare knees.

"Too many things at—ah!" The mold overflowed, a tracery down her shin and between her toes. "—Once," she finished, waited until the wax faded to matte and peeled it away whole; a long complex curve and a forking like claws. She growled and darted it at Nadin.

Who set a package at her feet and took the wax between fingertips and turned it downside up, flower-like.

Leena's grin flashed across her dark solemn face and slipped away again. She took the proffered bloom and dropped it into the melt bucket, tiptoed across the clutter on the table and dropped to the floor. She started toward the casting pit, stopped, returned to pick up Nadin's package. She shook it, and said, "Hmm, not wine. Or candy."

"Map coils," Nadin said. "I have an idea for secure messages: pairs of birds flying different routes. If only one shows up, you know the other was caught and you better start packing. I need a couple of birds to test them."

"In a minute," she said and handed them back to him, started for the casting pit again, stopped again, went back to the workbench.

"And I need more acid and resist for the next batch of coils," he said, turning in place to follow her.

"Mmm. Hold this down," she said, tapping a ceramic mold on the workbench. She worked a knife along the line between the two halves of the mold until it opened with a sighing sound to reveal the flattened shape of a bird's body. She handed it to Nadin. It was a sooty black with spots of mottled yellow and slightly spongy to the touch.

"I thought the wax melted out when you fired the mold in the kiln?" Nadin said.

"It does, and it did this morning when I made the mold. That there's not wax, it's yeast."

Nadin nodded with careful consideration and handed the thing back to her. "And you wonder why I don't bring you wine and candy," he said.

"Wait until you see what the yeast left us." She set the thing into a bowl and rinsed it, first with something out of a jar that caused it to bubble and collapse, and then with water. What was left was a smooth matte black and as Leena gently fished it out it rippled and hung like cloth.

"Hold out your hand," she said. Nadin made a face and she made one back at him until he relented and cupped his hands.

The thing flowed like velvet, almost weightless and neither warm or cool to the touch. "Like satin smoke," Nadin said, and Leena laughed, delighted.

"Pretty close, chemically," she said. "The process is a lot like biofoam, where the cultures deposit little shells of metal and carbon to make something strong but light. Only in this case, it's a shell instead of a solid, little curls of carbon that interlock like chain mail. Imagine a bird with this stuff as skin. Imagine a
shirt
of this."

"I'm guessing it only comes in black," Nadin said.

"That's a problem?" Leena asked. "Okay, there actually
is
a problem..." she said, taking it back and shifting it over her fingers until one slipped through and she wiggled the skin like a puppet. "Holes. And it's tricky to work with. Sobette has some ideas for cross-modifying the cultures, getting them to lay metal threads through the carbon, make it easier to combine with more traditional materials."

The little blob of a puppet spun on her finger and a long thin tube of the carbon cloth dangled down.

"Ah," Nadin said.

"Sprue hole in the mold," Leena explained. "Got to let the pressure out somehow."

"Don't we all," Nadin said.

Rakel staggered through the door of the Café Argile Rouge, face pink and shirt splotched with sweat. He dropped into the seat across from Nadin and gasped, "Sent Bird to your house, but... figured you'd be here. It's Leena."

A cold grey chill flushed through Nadin like the aftermath of the iced aquavit they served in the upper
divisiones;
there was no ice to spare on drinks down in the 4th. He bit down on a curse and flicked his eyes toward the corner table where Adler slouched over an abandoned game of eschequere with Rynsky, both known informers for the militia. "Rakel, drunk already in the afternoon?" he said, just loud enough to be overheard.

Rakel met his eye and replied in the same tone. "I seem to have lost my muse at the bottom of a bottle of excellent red, and have been looking for her."

"She'll be drowned by now," Nadin said, gathering his papers as fast as was seemly.

"Come help me reach the bottom, friend, and we shall give her the kiss of life," Rakel said, gathering books into Nadin's satchel. "With luck, she'll be thoroughly soused and thus for once open to my charms." He took Nadin by the arm with a thin smile for the house and hurried him through the door.

The sunlight sprawled flat and heavy in the street, summer reluctant to move aside for autumn, but Nadin still felt cold. "Have they taken her? The militia?" And when Rakel shook his head, added in a voice that sounded strange in his own ears,

"The
golethe?"

Rakel kept shaking his head, raised a hand as he gulped in a breath. "An accident. I don't know the details. I got a PneuPost from Sobette. She's at his workshop."

Nadin stopped in his steps. "A
post?
The militia will have read it before you did. That bastard."

"He was discreet. He didn't mention her by name. He quoted Tonneau, that line about the sculptress wind cut by the stony blah blah."

"The militia read plays as well."

"Yes, but they don't understand them. Come
on."

Sobette's workshop was a long low building of iron and red tile in the 5th
divisione
where it ran up against the river. The interior was dim, the air miasmatic with the yeasts and volatiles of his craft.

Leena was on a stool by a row of fermenting vats, slumped shoulder down on a table. Sobette sat opposite with his elbows on the table and his hands clenched in his hair. His assistant nervously rocked from leg to leg nearby. A woman in a starched white linen jacket crouched down by Leena, speaking softly. Sobette looked up as Nadin and Rakel approached, still gripping his handfuls of hair, and said, "It wasn't my fault."

Nadin ignored him and knelt next to the woman in white to look into Leena's face. Her skin was drawn and sallow, her lips white around the edges. Rakel stopped behind him and said something quiet and fervently profane.

Leena gave him a faltering smile that collapsed into a grimace. "Experimenting," she said. "Know me, always sticking my fingers where they shouldn't..." She touched his arm with her left hand; Nadin took it in his own and stood.

Leena's right arm was stretched out across the stained wood. The last three fingers of her hand were an ooze of soft bubbling bone and bright tangled silver nerves, in a larger pool of greasy yellow foam.

"We were working with a programmed culture," Sobette said. "Trans-yeasts. A new approach to bio-interfaces." He paled under Nadin's glare, but continued, "We've neutralized the culture spread but her... the nerves are still, ah, active."

"She should be in hospital," the woman in white said. Nadin recognized her now from the clinic on Burthen Street.

Sobette's eyebrows shot up in alarm, and his assistant stepped back from the table and eyed the rear door.

"No hospital," Leena said. "Just cut 'em."

The woman folded her arms. "There's a reason this sort of research is illegal."

"Tell that to the makers of the
golethem,"
Leena said. "Nadin, tell her—" She hissed as her hand slid against the wood.

Nadin squeezed the fingers of her whole hand and said in a gentle tone and one he thought thoroughly reasonable under the circumstances, "And your clinic is entirely licensed, yeah? What's legal and what's right are out of sync in the city."

The woman scowled and wouldn't meet Nadin's gaze; she dropped her chin and stared at Leena's hand as if it were less a challenge. "Her nerves are just... dangling."

Nadin looked across at Sobette. "Rot it, man, tell me you don't have a vat of painkillers somewhere in here."

The 'Chemist fumbled on the table, held out a palm with three small white pills, somewhat irregular in shape and unmarked. "She won't take them," he said.

Leena said,
"My
body." And to the woman in white, "You cut deeper nerves than these every day, woman with more to lose. Fingers are gone already, just need trimming. Hell with the pills, Sobette, get me scissors." And then her eyes focused elsewhere and Nadin had to hold her upright on the stool.

The woman puffed a breath through pursed lips. "I'm an obstetrician, not a surgeon," she grumbled, but she unfolded her arms. "We'll need water. And better light." She picked up a satchel from the floor and set it on the table, with a brittle clatter of glass and sharp metal.

Sobette waved his assistant into motion, and said, "We have antiseptics, and something that will put her right out. And cultures to seal the wound." That last with a defiant look for Nadin. "Leena, will you take the pills now?"

Leena nodded weakly. "Now I will," she said. "Just... another piercing," she said to Nadin with a twitch of her head that set the rings along ear and eyebrow jingling, but her grip on his hand tightened.

The last months of winter were not that cold but wet. The sun never stayed long enough to dry the streets and the bluff outside Nadin's flat dribbled and ran and threatened to tumble an entire row of 12th
divisione
shops down into the 4th. Nadin collected the cobbles that dropped onto his roof and used them as bookends. He was busy with a series of articles for the
Gazette,
a tour of the
divisiones
and the places in each where their history was most evident or most evolved. Three times a week he walked up the hill to tutor Frans in classical languages, sessions that often ran through dinner with the Marquesa—any topic more than a century old was safe—and ran later still after the Marquesa retired for the evening.

The rest of his time, the bulk of it, was spent organizing the Augur Birds into a network as pervasive as the PneuPost. The awkward alliance of those who shared the need for uncensored conversation—longshoremen and librarians, academics and street artists—had somehow become a movement, had somehow made his maps and knowledge of the city central and significant.