Our Lady of the Ice (9 page)

“One of the cullers tripped, the idiot. Started bleeding. You know how it is.”

Sofia nodded. Inéz’s programming had condemned her to offer assistance. But it would not always. Soon. Soon, they would have the supplies. Soon, they would cut all that programming out. Sofia first, then the rest of them. Luciano, Inéz, those few broken-down androids she could repair only once she had her independence.

“Their weapons are the same,” Inéz said. “Still weak.”

“Well, they don’t capture many of us anymore, do they?” Sofia smiled. “I doubt that’s high on the list of priorities.”

Luciano smiled back at her, but Araceli and Inéz did not.

“The Scala model,” Sofia said. “We can get him back.”

Silence. They all knew rescue was unlikely. But Sofia had been programmed to lie, once upon a time, to tell people what they wanted to hear.

Araceli, Inéz, and Luciano sat pressed against each other on the bench, huddling together as if they needed one another’s touch. But
Sofia had stripped that weakness out of herself long ago. She knew how touches could be toxic.

She left them there without explaining herself, walking off to the center of the Sugar Garden, where she could have privacy.

The cullings had started as soon as the amusement park had closed. Hope City needed robots to survive, and so Autômatos Teixeira had simply left them there when the company had gone bankrupt, the way it had abandoned the factories in Brazil. And while most of the amusement park robots were useless—performers, or caretakers, or pleasure givers—their parts were not. Long ago, Sofia had taught the others how to hide, how to survive. She had built and installed blockers that made it impossible for anyone to scan for robots inside the park, hoping that would discourage the cullings.

She could not say where she had learned all this herself. It certainly hadn’t been programmed into her. This was before Araceli arrived ten years ago, before the city fired Araceli from her job as a Hope City engineer for showing kindness and decency to robots and she sought refuge in the closed-down park, the one place, she said, she’d ever been happy. The knowledge had simply appeared in Sofia. A human would call it magic. Sofia was not a human.

When Sofia arrived at the garden’s center, overflowing with flowers and thick green vines, a maintenance drone was waiting for her in a pool of yellow lamplight. It would have registered her entering the park, and now it came to her, awaiting instructions.

The maintenance drones couldn’t speak in human voices, but Sofia didn’t need them to. She knelt beside the robot and pressed her palm against its sensor. She transferred an image of Yellow-8, boxy and long-limbed. And then she flooded the drone with instructions. Find Yellow-8. Bring him back. She knew how improbable her instructions were. But she needed to try.

The maintenance drone responded. The drones had tried to retrieve Yellow-8, when they’d learned who had been taken. But it was too late.

Too late.

Sofia slid her hand off the sensor. She was empty.

“Thank you,” she whispered, reverting back to her old ways, her facsimile of humanity. She stood up. The maintenance drone blinked at her for a moment longer, then zipped up into the air, disappearing into the night.

Sofia was alone.

CHAPTER EIGHT

MARIANELLA

Marianella sat
at her vanity, a lipstick in one hand. She didn’t move to apply it, only stared at her reflection. The last few days showed on her face: dark half-moons below her eyes, thin lines radiating out from the corners of her lips. She sighed and dropped the lipstick and leaned back on her stool. The party was to start in a little over an hour. Luciano had agreed again to play at being her butler, even though the circumstances weren’t so dire this time around. Still, with his help, she’d managed to set up everything for her guests. But
she
wasn’t ready.

Everything had been too much this week. Losing her documents, learning that some man knew what she was. She’d seen the news of Pablo Sala’s death in the evening newspaper three days ago and the relief had been sweet and sudden and then swallowed up by guilt. It was a sin to celebrate the death of a human being like that. But he had known what she was, and if this stranger could know, then she had to assume there were others.

And she was certain that if there were others, they would be tied to Ignacio Cabrera. Hector must have told him somehow, sent word along before his death that Marianella kept a painful truth locked away in the safe in the library. The thought made her sick
to her stomach. But Hector was one of only three humans she had ever told her secret, and she trusted the other two more than she had trusted her late husband.

At least she was certain that Ignacio didn’t know what her documents revealed, not if he’d sent someone to steal them. Because if he knew what she was, he wouldn’t need the proof of her documents. It was a secret strong enough that even a rumor started by a gangster could be enough to undo her.

“Marianella?” Luciano appeared in the vanity’s mirror, holding a vase of flowers. “These were sitting in the kitchen. I presume you want them in the main room?”

Marianella plastered on a cheerful smile, then twisted around in her stool. “Yes, that would be lovely, thank you.”

But Luciano didn’t move away. He studied her for a moment, then said, “You don’t have to pretend with me. I know how upsetting this last week has been.”

“I have to pretend with everyone else. I might as well start now.” Marianella turned back to her mirror and picked up her lipstick. Luciano moved out of sight of the reflection and walked silently to her side. He set the flowers down on the vanity. She glanced up at him, turned her gaze back to her reflection, applied her lipstick.

He knelt beside her. “If you ever need help,” he said, “Sofia would be happy to send it.”

“Sofia’s gone mad.”

“No, she hasn’t.”

Marianella dropped her lipstick and smoothed the flyways that had escaped from her curls. “Maybe you’ve gone mad right along with her. Inéz, too.”

Luciano laughed. He was programmed to do that, she knew, if anyone said something that sounded like teasing.

“I haven’t gone mad. I meant about Ignacio Cabrera. I’m sure Sofia would set aside your differences if you needed help.”

“We don’t have differences. We just—” Marianella couldn’t put it into words, not in a way that Luciano would understand. She was neither human nor robot, but something in between, and she had chosen to live as a human, however dangerous and precarious
that might be. It was easier. “Besides, what does Sofia know about Ignacio Cabrera? I’m shocked either of you have even heard of him.”

She stood up with a swish of her skirt and checked the time—a little under an hour now.

“I merely meant we could provide protection, if you needed it.” Luciano offered an arm and Marianella took it without thinking. They left the bedroom together. “At the very least, Sofia has maintenance drones at her disposal, and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind lending them to you.”

“That’s not necessary.” They descended the stairs. All the lights were switched on, the chandelier sparkling. “I’ve already programmed mine to watch out for Ignacio’s men. Besides, I’m a television star now. I doubt he’s brave enough to try anything too drastic.” Marianella wasn’t entirely convinced of that herself, but she didn’t want to worry Luciano.

“Well, if you suspect he knows of your nature—” Luciano detached from Marianella’s arm and gave a bow. “I’m sure we could be of service.”

Luciano would do all sorts of things for her—help her with a party, pretend he’d been the one to hear the scratching the night of the break-in. He would always be of service. Sofia wouldn’t.

“I doubt he knows,” Marianella said. “If he even suspected, he would simply inform the authorities of those suspicions and that would be enough to launch an investigation.” And he hadn’t done that. Not yet. “At any rate, I’ve moved the documents for the time being. They are the key, I think.”

Luciano nodded as they walked into the main room, the largest in the house. One wall was a window that looked out over the wheat field, and Marianella kept the theremin and record player there. Right now the main room was frozen in time, poised and waiting for the party to start. Flowers dotted the furniture, bottles of liquor sat at the wet bar. The scene was incomplete without people.

“Oh!” said Marianella. “You forgot the flowers upstairs.”

“I never forget things,” Luciano said. “I merely thought you required my attention more than the vase. I’ll fetch it now.”

Marianella laughed, even though she didn’t know if it was really funny. Luciano smiled at her and disappeared into the hallway. Marianella collapsed onto the sofa. She hadn’t thrown a party since Hector died, but she knew she couldn’t stay withdrawn from society for much longer. The winter gala season would be starting soon, and those galas, as silly and frivolous as they were on the surface, were the best ways to raise money for the agricultural domes. The wealthy were always more generous during the winter—a way of showing off. Already Alejo Ortiz had telephoned about the Midwinter Ball, which had been the most successful fund-raiser last year. He expected her to attend, and this little party was Marianella’s way of stepping back out into the world.

And so she had Alejo to thank for her reemergence. Alejo and his
project
. That’s what he’d called it when he’d asked her to his office nearly two and a half years ago. Behind those closed doors he’d seduced her with the idea of Antarctican independence. “There’s a reason this place is called Hope City,” he’d said. “Sixty years ago we lived in one of the wonders of the world. Why shouldn’t it be a wonder again?”

Her father had called her a wonder of the world, after the surgery that had changed her. He had been wrong. But she saw in Alejo’s idealism a chance to create a real wonder, a place where human beings could live in the frozen desert. A chance to prove her own humanity.

At the time, Alejo had only wanted her money and her influence. He’d already told her about the funding he’d received from the Antarctican Freedom Fighters, despite the risk it posed to his career—a shocking bit of information that appalled Marianella and excited her as well, at least at the time. Back then she liked to think of herself as the respectable alternative to money from terrorists, a group the chief of police called Hope City’s number one enemy.

She and Alejo became lovers not long after, a dalliance designed to alleviate boredom more than anything else. Certainly Hector didn’t mind; he had his own affairs. Even after Hector was confined to his bed, she and Alejo kept it up, those clandestine meetings in
shabby motel rooms on the edge of the dome, her wine-colored lipstick smeared on his shirt collar. More like a film than anything real.

Afterward, Alejo would always talk about the ag domes. Engineers from the mainland he’d spoken to, permits he’d acquired through contacts at the city offices. They’d raised almost enough to build one dome at that point, although Alejo wanted to keep it a secret. “It’ll be great political theater, don’t you think? To announce that we’re building
more
domes, instead of just the first one.”

Marianella could only agree.

“I want to time it to coincide with the mayoral election.”

There were problems, of course. The engineers insisted the work couldn’t be done in secret, that they didn’t have the capacity to program enough robots to do what Alejo wanted. Marianella remembered sitting on the floor in a white slip, smoking a cigarette while Alejo paced back and forth, his hair wild, ranting about the inefficiency of mainland engineers. “If only we had more engineers who’d grown up here,” he said. “They’d understand. They’d have a reason to find a way. Why should they waste all their intelligence on power for the mainland?”

Marianella had hardly been listening. Her thoughts had been with the domes. With the robots Alejo needed.

I could do that.

Her nature made it easy to speak with robots. She could slip inside their programming and twist it around to suit her purposes. That was why full humans hated her nature so much—because ultimately, they feared her. She had all the abilities of a robot but remained completely unprogrammable.

Up until that point robotics had been a hobby, one Hector had tolerated only because she programmed their private maintenance drones. But as Alejo paced back and forth, the muscles in his neck tightening with anxiety, she thought back to the day Alejo had first told her of the domes. This was an opportunity, a chance for her nature to be something other than a failed scientific experiment.

And then Hector had died.

It wasn’t a shock, not really; he’d been bedridden so long. Still Marianella mourned him, not because she’d loved him or because he
had loved her, but because he had known. As she watched his smoke and ashes drift up through the transparent chimney, into the open Antarctic air, she wondered if she and Araceli could bear the weight of that secret, after so long with Hector to take on part of the burden.

In that way, the pieces fell together. Alejo was at the funeral too, standing across the room with his assistant, and in that moment, surrounded by the cold air and her husband’s ashes, she made a decision. It was the most dangerous thing she’d ever done.

She waited until their next afternoon together. As Alejo touched her, she felt like a glint of mainland sunlight bouncing across a hardwood floor. Afterward they lay stretched out on the bare mattress, the sheets and blanket kicked to the floor. She stared up at the light in the ceiling as she spoke.

“I can build the dome for you,” she said.

And Alejo had turned to her, his eyes glittering. He didn’t laugh, like she’d expected. He took her seriously. And so she told him, her heart beating so fast, she thought she might break herself.

She wasn’t human. She had machine parts embedded in her body. She was illegal.

There followed eleven and a half seconds of silence, just enough for her to recite the Hail Mary inside her head.

“You can go outside in the cold?” Alejo asked. That was his first response. His arm was around her shoulder, and he didn’t take it away.

“For a few hours, yes,” Marianella said. “And I can program your robots better than any engineer in the city or on the mainland.”

It was enough. Alejo kept her secret, and a month later she had programmed an army of Vaz models to build the dome on the southern side of the city, hidden away among the other private domes. She and Alejo planted the first seeds by hand—wheat, the same sort that grew around Southstar. And then they appeared on television and continued to sell the lie that they planned to build an agricultural dome, not that they already had.

“Where would you like this?” Luciano was back, peering around the fan of fuchsia blossoms from the hothouse she kept on the estate. Such flowers were an extravagance in a place like Hope City.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Marianella stood up and swept around the room. “Where do you think they should go?”

“They’d look lovely at the bar, I think. It’s a bit empty at the moment.”

“At the bar, wonderful.” Marianella smiled. “You can watch to make sure no one knocks them over.”

“Of course.” Luciano walked across the room and arranged the vase behind the rows of liquor bottles. He’d started coming over after Hector had died, offering his services as a butler. They’d met at the same time that she had met Sofia, shortly after Marianella had moved to Hope City. They’d become friends, although his friendship always seemed strangely subservient to her. And so she’d refused at first, not wanting to trap him back into servitude, but he’d looked her straight in the eye and said, “It’s not slavery with you, Marianella. It’s friendship.”

Sofia would have called it slavery. But Sofia and Luciano had always been different, for as long as Marianella had known them.

Marianella joined Luciano at the bar as he fiddled with the fuchsias’ leaves. He seemed content, she thought, like the way she felt when she was programming Southstar’s maintenance drones, or walking through the rows of crops in the agricultural dome.

“It looks fine,” she said. “You can stop messing with it.”

Luciano glanced at her and took a step back. “I want everything to be perfect.”

“I know you do.” Marianella looped her arm around his and squeezed him in a half hug. He smiled at her, that halfhearted robot smile she found so comforting.

The doorbell rang.

“They’re early,” Luciano remarked.

“I bet it’s the Mendezes. They’re notorious for it.” She took a deep breath. “I guess I have to be ready, don’t I?”

“You look beautiful.”

Another bit of programming. Marianella didn’t care. “Thank you, Luciano.”

He took his place behind the bar, where all her guests would see him not as a friend but as a quirky throwback to the city’s heyday.
She checked her hair and makeup in the window’s reflection one last time.

Back in society again,
she thought, and then she glided down the hallway to answer the door.

*  *  *  *

Two hours later, the house was alive with people. Night had fallen completely, and the bright golden lights inside turned the window into a dark mirror that reflected Marianella’s party guests as if they were ghosts. Luciano served behind the wet bar, demurring if anyone offered him a tip. Marianella flitted from person to person, a glass of red wine in one hand. She only drank from it occasionally, and Marianella was relieved to find how easily she slipped back into this role. She laughed and pressed her hand to her chest and conjured up small talk with hardly any concentration.