Unwelcome Bodies (24 page)

He turned away, looking down at his scuffed shoes, and tried not to remember the best part, when Roland sank down next to him, guiding his head into the crook of his neck and clasping him in strong, ropy arms that smelled of soap and sweat and sex. And how he’d wanted to look up into Roland’s black-lined eyes and finally tell him his name, tell him that they were coworkers, tell him that the caste barrier could go fuck itself and they should find a way to have more than just these nightly semi-anonymous encounters in the alleys of the abandoned Masked Quarter of Old Town.

But Seph was Paintclad, and Roland was Adorned.

It could never happen.

Seph looked up at the sky canal, ever present above his head. The moonlight filtered through, blue and weak here at ground level. Seph could never go above the canal, never see the sun and the moons with his own eyes. But Roland could, and did. An accident of birth kept them separated by more than just this lens of water, but every night as he rode home from Old Town, the sky canal was the most visible symbol of the laws that kept them apart.

Damn the Takers. If they’d just left them all on Earth—

Order sent him a prompt through his earbug as the crawler scuttled into his neighborhood, reminding him that his fare only took him this far. He hopped off, tiptoed into his tiny ground-floor apartment so as not to wake his wife, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom so he could make his way through her ever-present minefield of clothes and collectibles and into the washroom. He ducked into the sonics, selecting an Italian aria to sing away his paint.

Then, bare-faced, he whistled down his sleep cloud, fed it a handful of sky puffs, then clambered in and had it ascend to the ceiling, sealing him in the only oasis of privacy his caste was allotted.

He stared at the ceiling in impotent rage for hours before sleep finally claimed him.

* * * *

Seph’s morning ritual began earlier than most. Bleary-eyed, he stumbled to the Wall, activated his earbug, and asked Order to print a vellum of his assigned pattern for the day. He took it into the cramped washroom, walking right past the Face Maker that every other Paintclad was content to use, and propped the vellum up next to the mirror and studied it intently as he covered his face, neck, and ears with white base. Then, he picked up his paintbrush and started painting the first crimson stroke on his cheek as he dutifully recited the Morning Prayer.

* * * *

“All praise to the Makers and the Takers.

“Praise to the Makers for creating us in their image.

“And praise to the Takers for bringing us here.

“For they saw the City was lonely, and led us here to tend to it,

“Dividing us into castes as we crossed the Prismatic Bridge:

“The Masked, to tend to the City’s roots;

“The Paintclad, to tend to its stalk;

“The Adorned, to tend to its branches;

“The Unadorned, to tend to its leaves and flowers;

“And the Skinless Empress, to shine light on us all from above.

“Praise to the Makers for making me.

“Praise to the Takers for putting me in my place.

“All praise, forever and ever.”

* * * *

Across the City, as the various castes awoke, they recited this same prayer, and every morning, Order recorded that they had done so.

Thankfully, Order didn’t recognize sarcasm. At least, not yet.

Damn the Takers. Damn this arbitrary caste system. Damn Order, and damn the Caste Police, and damn him for being too cowardly to—

Seph scowled and set his paintbrush down on the sink with a clatter.

He wasn’t a coward. He was a pragmatist. People only moved down the caste rungs, not up, and agitating would demote him to Masked status.

If only there were fewer pragmatists in the City.

He cleaned the brush, dipped it in the gold paint, and faithfully continued his reproduction of Order’s pattern. If he had to be a Paintclad, then he’d be damned if he’d let a machine paint him.

* * * *

Lenore had already descended from her sleep cloud by the time Seph was done in the washroom, and was lounging bare-faced on the sofa wall, surrounded by stuffed garden gnomes and wearing nothing but an oversized “Frankie Says Relax” T-shirt and her pet creeper draped around her neck. “Today’s a crimson and gold day? Well, that’ll go good with black.” She nudged a pile of work clothes with her toe and sighed. “Would it kill them to let us wear color?”

Seph reached into the closet and pulled out one of his many high-collared black jackets, sliding it on over his El Greco undershirt and Scenes of Earth trading card necklace. “Apparently.” He buttoned the jacket from neck to knees, turned up the collar, ran his fingers through his shoulder-length hair, and examined himself in the closet’s mirrored door to make sure that no unpainted skin was left visible.

As he was pulling on his long black gloves, Lenore tapped on his shoulder and pointed at the Wall. On-screen, a commentator was examining an incomplete video of one of the song and dance numbers from
Oliver!
and commenting on its relative calorie-burning effectiveness compared to Vaudeville, Bollywood, and Monty Python exercise programs. “I thought you’d cleaned that one up.”

“I had,” Seph said, wrinkling his painted brow. “I’ll have to tell the Sire when I get to work today.”

“Why bother?” Lenore said. “It’s his name in the credits, not yours.”

“I did the work,” Seph said. “I want it out there.”

“Whatever. Hold this.” She unwound her creeper from around her neck and handed it to Seph, who grimaced and set the leafy creature on a shelf. It promptly writhed around a miniature bust of Napoleon as if trying to strangle it. Lenore pulled a Steamboat Willie bustier and a pair of purple undershorts from her pile of clothes and stepped into the washroom. Seph ducked in after her just in time to see her shucking her T-shirt and wiggling into her undergarments. She raised an eyebrow. “For someone who doesn’t like looking at women—”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I’m just here to see what face you get.”

She gave him a playful shove. “Some husband you are.”

He helped her pull her hair back and then she tucked her head into the Face Maker.

There was a whoosh of base coat, a whisper of detail sprays, and she pulled out a perfectly painted face. “Oh look, I got red lips,” she said. “I like your gold ones better.”

“At least we both get fleur-de-lis.”

“They look better on you. So, did you tell him that you love him yet?”

Seph spat out a laugh. “Yeah. Right. He doesn’t even know my name.”

She shrugged. “It’s your tragic love life, not mine.”

He gave her a light peck on the top of her head, reminded her to say her prayer, and headed out the door before she had a chance to say anything more.

Tragic love life.

She had no idea.

By the Makers, he wished he could just tell Roland his name. But the unofficial rules of Old Town wouldn’t let him. In Old Town, once the Dark Night Bells sounded, Adorned and Paintclad could mix, so long as it was kept anonymous. The Caste Police couldn’t touch you so long as all you did was have nameless, semi-public, mostly-dressed sex.

At least, those were the unofficial rules. The Adorned were free to break them and sic the Caste Police on any Paintclad they liked.

Thankfully, that hadn’t happened in years.

But it could happen again. At any time. To any Paintclad who wasn’t careful.

Seph came out of his thoughts and realized that his feet were taking him straight toward Old Town.

He tapped his earbug and asked for the time.

Enough time for a quick Old Town breakfast.

So he kept walking, following the road that wound its way through the bases of the City’s gleaming white spires, with their wrap-around Walls exhorting him to watch the latest entertainment news mined from Earth’s ever-present broadcasts. Madonna! Osama! Obama! A caste-free planet shooting their programming into space for the benefit of the cousin world they didn’t know they had, so many hundreds of light-years away.

Seventy years ago, the City’s entire culture had been reorganized around these broadcasts at the order of the previous Skinless Empress. She’d claimed that the Takers had ordered her to do it, but anyone with a brain realized that She had simply taken advantage of the newly-discovered broadcasts to distract a grumbling populace that had been starting to question the wisdom of the caste system…and then had beefed up Order and the Caste Police while no one was paying attention.

He exited the jungle of clean, white spires and felt the rough cobbles of Old Town under his feet.

Now this, this was the real City. This was where the first settlers had been deposited by the Takers, where the buildings had actually been built, not extruded. This was where all the castes had lived together on the same level, back when their differences hadn’t been so great.

It was the only place Seph knew where their own crafts still flourished.

He passed a fire painter scorching images of the animals outside the City walls onto a stretched pilio hide, and stopped for a while to listen to a group of singers weaving their voices through an old traditional chant to the moons. But ever since the Earth broadcasts had been discovered, the offerings in Old Town had been growing slimmer and slimmer. More storefronts lay empty than full. Order no longer assigned people to work or live here, leaving the market to be staffed by volunteers, leaving the old habitations empty.

Discovering Earth had given them so much, but it had taken away so much more.

The lush scent of freshly-baked breadpods caught Seph’s attention, and he followed his nose to a cart parked in front of an abandoned music shop. “Tuleberry or nectar?” the vendor asked. The paint on her cheeks crinkled into a fan-pattern as she smiled up at him.

“Tuleberry.”

The vendor filled a vellum cone with the steaming hot pods, and Seph tapped on his earbug to pay. She stopped him. “They’re free.”

He gave the vendor a once-over, taking in her repeatedly-mended jacket, her threadbare gloves. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t understand—I
can’t
take payment. They’ve revoked my commerce license.”

“Then I’ll barter. I’ll bring you some berries next week.”

“That sounds more than fair.”

And he’d also bring her some new gloves. And if she were still here in a month, he’d bring her a jacket.

Damn Order. Damn the Takers.

Seph ate his breadpods carefully so as not to smear his lip paint, and stared up at the sky canals as he waited for the next crawler to the Business District. He imagined that he could see his boss coming to work in one of the many gondolas floating overhead. Such a different life up there. The crawler showed up minutes later. He paid his fare and took a seat next to a Paintclad woman holding a baby still too young to have to wear caste paint. Some day, Order would tell Seph and Lenore to have a baby. And they would obey, just like they’d obeyed when Order had married them and put them together in the apartment, and just like then, they would adjust.

He hated himself for adjusting.

Seph got off the crawler at the Colcourt Tower, a twisting, narwhal-horn of a building that jutted through the sky canal, through the cloud tops, nearly all the way to the troposphere—the domain of the Empress and her chosen few Unadorned companions. As he headed for the door, the Card Brigade showed up, and Seph crumpled his empty breadpod cone into his pocket and joined the crowd mobbing the two Paintclad handing out the latest Scenes of Earth cards. Ah, another one in the “Infamous Murders” series. This one was the Fatty Arbuckle scandal. He pulled out his necklace, clipped the card to it, and dropped it back down his jacket. If Lenore didn’t manage to get one of these today, maybe he could trade it for her Ziggy Stardust card. Once he got that and the Mudvayne one, he’d have a full set of the Paintclad Rockers series.

The lift cloud took him to the seventh floor, the highest floor allowed to his caste, where the water of the sky canal flowed past the windows in a steady stream. He wove his way through the petaled work pod clusters and stopped just outside the door to his boss’s crystal-walled office, where he stood with his gaze focused on his shoes and waited for the Sire to arrive and acknowledge him.

Slowly, the rest of his coworkers began trickling in. He saw black-clad feet enter his field of vision, and peered up to see one of his fellow Paintclad approaching. “Is everything all right?” Persis asked.

“Everything’s fine. I’ve just got a broadcast question.”

“I’ll let you know when the Work Bell’s about to ring,” she said. The light glittered off of her very obviously fake left eye. Her real one had been removed by the Caste Police when she was a teenager for failing to wait to be addressed before looking up at the Adorned headmaster of her school. When the Caste Police removed a body part, they always supplied a replacement—albeit a substandard, obvious one. It wouldn’t do to lessen the productivity of one of the lesser castes, just as it wouldn’t do to pass up an opportunity to remind everyone around them of the hazards of transgression.

Damn the Takers. Damn Order. Damn the Skinless Empress.

And then he saw white sandals and bare legs approaching. Persis dashed off to her pod, and Seph kept his eyes firmly downcast, his gloved hands clasped at his waist.

The white sandals stopped immediately in front of him. “Yes? You may look at me. What’s your name? What do you want?”

Seph looked up into the Adorned face of Sire Imprimatur. As was his caste’s obligation, his eyes were expertly outlined in black, his lips reddened, cheeks rouged, arms and legs bare. And just like all other Adorned, he’d never learned how to see the faces of his employees under the paint. “I’m Seph Allele. Sire, this morning I saw an incomplete version of one of our recovered movies being broadcast. It’s a scene that I personally mined. It was passed upstairs to the data artists a month ago. I believe there might be a distribution issue.”

Sire Imprimatur scowled and touched the jeweled earbug clipped to his left lobe. “Roland? Are you at your desk?”