Too Like the Lightning (38 page)

“This sensayer is Carlyle Foster.”

“Checking up on Dominic for the Conclave?” Chagatai offered friendly, too-firm handshakes. “Who suggested this address? I didn't get any notice that you were coming. Usually I should.”

Thisbe had her lie ready before Carlyle could flinch. “Mycroft.”

“Mycroft Guildbreaker?”

“No, Mycroft…”—she glanced at sweet, oblivious Carlyle—“who is a Servicer.”

“Ah,
that
Mycroft. You're being very thorough. Why don't you come in? You can check me off your list, and, if we're lucky, Dominic may turn up within an hour or so. Fingers crossed.”

Pride glowed in Thisbe's smile. “Thank you.”

“Hold,” Chagatai commanded as Thisbe's boot threatened the lintel. “I have to check your credentials first. Could you both send them over?”

Carlyle hesitated before giving the ‘send' command, but trusted Thisbe's promise that she had cleared all during their flight.

Chagatai's face softened as the data flickered across their lenses. “Excellent. Come in. You can—oops!”

It was the chirp of a kitchen timer that cut the Blacklaw off, and she rushed back toward an inner doorway and the scent of meat beyond. “Please come through. You're welcome to the bathroom if you need it, and to look at the collection. Just be careful touching anything that looks more than a few hundred years old.”

Her invitation left little they could touch. The hall was practically a museum, its walls lined with low bookcases filled with books whose spines of aged leather long predated printed titles. On the waist-high tops of the bookcases crowded a mass of tiny statues: Buddhas, Madonnas, Anubis jackals, Venus figures, a thousand votive figurines in bronze, jade, clay, porcelain, silver, even dream-bright gold. The walls above the shelves were crowded too, even more dazzlingly. Icons. Hundreds of them, saints, angels, brilliant in paint and gold leaf, crowded edge to edge, an endless stream of flat, stylized faces. It is hard to believe the world produced so many, though these were just the tiniest fraction even of what survives. Most of them were ugly, crude at least, too rough to be objects of aesthetics in our modern age, the kind of icon poured out thousand upon thousand in that desperate Middle Age when images were objects of utility more than art. Objects of hope, and desperation, remedies against despair and plague before we had our great salvation, Science. There is judgment in their painted stares, but also something pitiable, these things, almost beings, that had been worshipped, loved, brought offerings, sweet burnt incense, that had been the most precious things in their first owners' world, yet today it was hard to believe anyone cared enough to dust them all.

“This used to be a church, didn't it?” Carlyle called toward the kitchen.

“Yes,” Chagatai called back, her deep bass rumble easily drowning the kitchen's sizzle. “It was a ruin ten years ago, but T.M. was sad seeing the state of the place, so Chief Director Andō gave it to them as a birthday present.”

“T.M.” Carlyle repeated. “You mean Tribune Mason?”

“Sorry, yes. I know they have too many nicknames.”

“This collection is magnificent.”

“Yes. I think T.M. owns something like sixty former churches now, all fixed up and turned into hospices or Servicers' dorms or other useful things. Can't stand to see old churches rot. But they do insist on cramming them all with this collection.”

Thisbe gaped. “You mean they have sixty times this many?”

“What, the icons? They're all President Ganymede's, things they dredged up from collection basements. The Art Situation program is fine at finding homes for Greek pots and Ming vases, but nobody wants a hundred thousand identical Madonnas anymore. Nobody but T.M., anyway.”

Tempting as this strange gallery was, the smell was stronger, and lured both to the kitchen like a honey trap. It was a magnificent kitchen, six counters each a different temperature, three fridges, four different ovens from the most modern to real brick with firelight within. The kitchen tree which hugged the greenhouse windows was programmed, not for standard snacking fruits and crepe-edged lettuces, but a chef's array, branches of savory and bay and allspice berries crowded between fiery peppers, currants, young pumpkins, tomatillos, with shallots and radishes bulbous among the tree's fat roots. Carlyle says every burner was going, pots of steel and clay smelling of garlic, biting oregano, onion, salt, and infinite butter.

“I don't think I've smelled anything so tempting in my life.” Thisbe could offer no truer compliment. “Are you having a belated party?”

Chagatai had taken from the meatmaker a sheet of rosy flesh two centimeters thick, as wide as a dinner plate and long like an unrolled scroll. She had already massaged in the spices, and now, with her larding needle, was injecting slivers of garlic and pancetta. “No, this is just one dish. My own recipe, Carnivore Roll. It's Dominic Seneschal's favorite food. T.M.'s idea. You know when your dog's missing so you get some of their favorite treats and leave them on the doorstep and hope they'll come back?”

“With an aroma like this you're going to attract every stray dog in the neighborhood.”

Chagatai's silvered stubble glistened as she smiled. “I know it's cruel to make you smell this and not offer any, but what you're smelling is just the preparatory sauces. The real thing takes hours. Would you like something else in the meantime? I have pear strudel.”

“Sounds fabulous!”

Chagatai picked a fridge and started rustling.

“So, Hiveless Chagatai,” Thisbe began, twitching her hands as if taking tracker notes, “are you a cook? Or is this just a job?”

Such a refreshing question. In our cast of leaders and vocateurs one would almost think we had regressed to the olden days when people were their jobs. Mr. Smith is a banker, Mrs. Christian is a nurse, as if those twenty or forty or sixty hours made the other hundred of each week nothing. How do you introduce yourself at parties, reader? Are you a cook? A hiker? A reader? A moviegoer?

“Oh, I'm a cook,” she answered. “I've published a couple recipe books, banquet dishes mostly, menus for big parties. Never worked restaurants, though. I used to be a smuggler and general thug.”

Carlyle says they suddenly felt an ominousness in Chagatai's shoulders and the thickness of her hands.

“Yes,” Thisbe bluffed, “the file I got on you was as confusing as it was incomplete. It's one of the things I'm supposed to check out. How did you transition?”

“I messed up a job, then messed up worse trying to fix it, and before I knew it I owed my enemies more money than my life was worth. It was my own fault, and I'd burned too many bridges, so I wasn't going to get any help unless I ran to the Cousins or turned Graylaw, and that was right out.” She set the strudel to heat. “I had my pride.”

That she did, reader, and does still when she visits Blacklaw country on her days off, the wildernesses urban and natural which we cede to the bold minority who, on passing the Adulthood Competency Exam, would rather invite their fellows to prey on them like lions than accept a law that deprives them of any freedom, even murder. The Universal Laws still make it criminal for them to prey on children, take trackers away, or jeopardize the world with toxic chemicals, or fire, or religion, but they feel in their hearts that humans are a predator, and predators need the right to tear out each other's throats. You must not think they rape and murder daily. Most rarely more than duel, and it is a strong deterrent knowing you have no armor in this wide world but the goodwill of peers who could kill you where you stand. It is liberty's pride that puts the swagger in Chagatai's steps, not bloodthirst, and had our Master not rescued her from vendetta's execution, Chagatai would have accepted her end with grace—combat, but grace. She has a sister, Cutter Chagatai, who once fell pregnant, and lived with Gibraltar here in Avignon the nine months that the Prenatal Safety Act made her upgrade to Graylaw for the child's sake. A caged eagle is not more desperate to see the key turned in the lock than she was to cut the cord, and drape the black again around her hips.

“So, instead of running to the law, you ran to Tribune Mason?” Thisbe prompted.

“I didn't run. I was in a bar trying to plan my last stand when this twelve-year-old in a strange costume came out of nowhere and offered to pay off my enemies and give me room and board for life if I'd come be their chef and housekeeper.”

“You'd already worked as a housekeeper somewhere?”

“Never.” Chagatai finished with the larding needle, and gazed with pride over their meaty canvas. “I'd been in a couple cooking contests, nothing else. I didn't recognize the kid, and this was a lot,
a lot,
of money, plus … You've met T.M., yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know how off-putting they are the first time or twenty you meet them. So there I was, thinking: is this a space alien? Is this kid insane? It wasn't until they said they'd call their banker to prepare the money and called the Imperial Treasury that I realized who it was.”

Carlyle smiled. “They saved your life.”

“Yes. But it was also a business arrangement. The contract specifies that, if I ever quit, I have to pay the money back in full.”

“That's exploitation!” the Cousin cried.

The Blacklaw laughed the word away. “Believe me, this is a better, longer life than I expected. I was both ambitious and stupid in my youth, you realize. Not a good combination.”

Thisbe smiled. “True. So you've known Tribune Mason … nine years?”

“Yes.”

“And has this always been the residence?”

“A residence, yes. They rarely manage to stay here more than once a week, with all the late nights in Tōgenkyō and wherever. Plus they're enrolled at the Romanovan Campus and Brill's Institute, and I think they have dorm residences at both. And they often spend nights back at their birth bash', though that's an area where you'll need Dominic or one of the Mycrofts for your background check. I'm not allowed near the birth bash'.”

Thisbe raised an eyebrow. “Not allowed?”

“I think I'm T.M.'s separate sphere.” She took a bowl of butter, flecked with nuts and spices, and painted it across the meat like plaster. “T.M. works for every Hive, right? So they can't live in any capital, it would be a declaration of allegiance. I'm neutral. Not even in any political strats. They need that break.”

“Twelve is a very young age to set up a separate residence. I've heard of it with kids who take on the Adult Competency Exam really early, but Tribune Mason hasn't taken it yet, right?”

“And this will be the place to duck the firestorm when they do. Savvy kid, T.M., even age twelve. Plus here they can have guests stay without worrying about clearing umpteen security.”

Thisbe jumped on that one. “What kinds of guests?”

“Worried about the security dodge? It all gets filed, it's just not as draconian here as at the
Domus Masonicus.
”

“What kinds of guests?” she pressed.

“Oh, all sorts. At the moment we have two art history students using the collection, and Mycroft dropped off a pretty battered young thing they said they rescued from somewhere. Servicer Mycroft, not the Mason, Servicer business as I understand, somebody's ba'sib. They're in the back now, watching a movie. Movie…” She dropped her knife into the butter, spinning on the pair with the enthusiasm of epiphany. “Thisbe Saneer! Oscar winner, 2451, Best Smelltrack for
Blue like Thursday
! I knew I knew that name. And you won it another year for that one about the three sets of kids in different time periods who all tried to build a boat and sail around the world, what was it called?”

“
The Horizoners,
” Thisbe supplied, beaming. “I didn't think anyone but my ba'sibs sat through that part of the Oscars anymore.”

“I never miss them.” Chagatai was all smiles now, her warm, narrow-eyed suave. “You've won more than twice, haven't you? How many times?”

“Four.”

Carlyle probably gaped. “Thisbe, you do the smelltracks for movies?”

Thisbe smirked. “I do have a life outside the bash', you know. I'm not a voker like Ockham and Lesley, I'm only on duty twenty hours a week.”

Certainly you too, reader, like Carlyle, had formed a portrait of Thisbe who existed only in that bedroom, drinking tea and waiting for the active cast to come to her. But let me ask you this: would you have labeled her a stay-at-home so easily had I not been reminding you with every phrase that she is a woman?

Then stop, Mycroft. Drop these insidious pronouns which force me to prejudge in ways I would not in the natural world. At times I think thou makest a hypocrite of me simply for the pleasure of calling me one. Had thou not saddled Carlyle and Thisbe with ‘he' and ‘she' I would not remember now which sex each was, and my thoughts would be the clearer for it.

No, reader, I cannot release you from this spell. I am not its source. Until that great witch, greater than Thisbe, the one who cast this hex over the Earth, is overthrown, the truth can be told only in her terms.

Thou hadst best be prepared to prove that claim in time, Mycroft. Meanwhile, since thou insistest on thy ‘he's and ‘she's, be clear at least. I cannot even tell whether this Chagatai is a deep-voiced woman or a man whom thou mislabelest, obeying that ancient prejudice that housekeepers must be female.

Apologies, reader. And I know it is confusing too that I must call this Cousin Carlyle ‘he.' With Chagatai, however, your guess is wrong. It is not her job which makes me give her the feminine pronoun, despite her testicles and chromosomes. I saw her once when someone threatened her little nephew, and the primal savagery with which those thick hands shattered the offender was unmistakably that legendary strength which lionesses, she-wolves, she-bats, she-doves, and all other ‘she's obtain when motherhood berserks them. That strength wins her ‘she.'