Elektra's Revenge: Chapter Four

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At last, Elektra wearily approached her home and bottle. She tried to distract herself with the ornate beauty of the Gracchi Bridge as she crossed into New Tiber but as she neared the left bank, there was a splash: a thousand-year-old gargoyle had lost its grip on a roof and plunged into the dirty river, never to be seen again.

To see the beauty in Tiber these days, you really had to squint. 

And where was the Government while the rot slowly spread? They could drag a woman off to Syd for clapping too loudly at a play—Elektra had never forgotten that sight—but they could do nothing about the overcrowding but drum up vague bigotry against breeders. Which only made heterosex seem more glamorous! 

… ugh! Talk about unnatural. Unbelievable. That! Glamorous! She snorted and tried not to think anything good about Hipparchus.

But trying to turn her thoughts away from the not-unpleasant pressure he had left behind only made her feet hurt more. A dirty mortal like me should have never been born… and now my stupid instincts want me to breed. Like a useless rat. Fat lot of good my beautiful life does me. 

She shook her head; that was the Lyfe withdrawal thinking for her. By now, she thought she almost had the hang of sorting out sincere thoughts from chemical ones. If any mortals deserved to be up here in Heaven, it was, after all, Elektra and her family; the real problem came when the Government lowered the standards and started letting practically anyone in who could sing a line and wasn’t already a Lyfe addict.

Granted, most mortals were addicts before the age of reason—but there were so many people swarming around down there, a few exceptions were still a flood. And Elektra felt her dreams had been drowned in it.

Stuck in the bottleneck of opportunistic no-talents … Not that the Gods would let any of us have a real chance anyway. Then she cocked her head to the side: Well, come on, Elektra… if you were really that good, wouldn’t they have made an exception?...  They made an exception for Grampa, and you failed to push it further. Failed, failed, failed … 

Her mind ground along to the rhythm of her feet on the flagstones, repeating “failed” and another phrase that came to mind—“beauty in decay”— trying to cling to a glimpse of an otherworldly vision superimposed on New Tiber. She was supposed to be an actress—a master of fantasy—so she ought to be sentimental enough to love her family’s crappy neighborhood and embrace her suffering like an old friend.

She suspected the crap had been a little less smelly in her dad’s day, however. And most of her old friends were buildings.

The bricks harbored the ghosts of the pioneers, from back when Gods were brave, before they devolved into smug heirs, delusional on wine. Back when they fought Anihils with their bare hands and ate their meat and acorns raw! 

Well, something like that. She had never seen a real acorn, only carvings, but they sounded manly. 

“Hullo, Haunted Warehouse,” she said to a familiar landmark. Its windows had been missing since she was a child. “Manly? Why can’t I stop thinking about men?! Gross.”

She stepped off the bridge into the Tiber Commercial District, and immediately the smell and the noise blew back her ears. Most of the whores in New Tiber serviced mortals and closet heteros, so the average Immortal had no reason to venture into the piss smells. Tiber had been rough enough when Elektra was a kid, but at least there had once been a couple of hours’ peace in the wee hours. Now, as she cut through a hidden tunnel toward her own street, it was so late it was early, but the brawls that poured from the cut-rate brothels were only now finding their stride.

The smog from the chimneys that heated the bars and bordellos was suddenly stirred by a cold breeze; fall was on its way. Again. On this sphere, fall came about once every six Old Earth months.

Elektra put her hood up, then realized she should have been wearing it anyhow. It was no good to be obviously female in the wee hours here. You never knew when the brothels were short on women; in the shadows, an embarrassing number of respectable gay Gods were to be glimpsed sunglass-wearing, ready to swim in the vaginal sewer. But from the shadow of her hood, she felt safe to watch the lurching parade of mortal suffering. 

A male whore with one shoe, the other foot bleeding, high and limping, showed the stumps of his teeth as he snickered in pain. Could you make Art from this? In front of every turbo-brothel there crawled a slight variation on the same track-marked buffoon, useless paw held out and harassing a God as he waited for a taxi. It was a repeating nightmare: all the Gods wore the same stupid fashions; all the bums were the same shade of sunburn, with the same grating, whining voice. 

And the turbo-brothels all scared the Lyfe out of Elektra. The Burgundy family apartment was cozy enough. But Elektra’s bedroom window overlooked the alley where the bedraggled turbo-whores took their breaks, quick-fire chain smoking and shooting up. She had been slowly figuring out what these strange women were about since she was a little girlAqqq. Like most things in her childhood world, the turbo-hookers had been neither concealed from her nor explained; they began in her mind as “the sad ladies,” and they never got much of a promotion.

She had never been inside the turbo-brothel, but once, when he was particularly high, Bartleby let eight-year-old Elektra know that he knew they were set up like a factory line. A chain of workers knelt for hours in the variously tattered set of guinea-linen crotchless bloomers as a mark of her trade. Each faceless hole (or hole-less face, depending on her field of expertise) performed one link in the sex act over and over as a never-ending snake of clients crawled down the line of whores. 

It was the cheap way to get serviced, hardly worth even what one paid for it, although some people were into that kind of thing; from the workers’ point of view the boredom had to be even worse than the taste. The one good thing about sordid things is that they are usually somewhat exciting, but this was degradation on an assembly line.

Looking back, Elektra was pretty sure Bartleby had told her about it to scare her.

The last few bookstores left over from the student era had been converted into Lyfe dens; as she passed, Elektra could hear an argument over a drug deal blaring from the building where she had shoplifted her first copy of Twelfth Night.

She felt a pang of guilt at this small complicity in the bookstore’s eventual bankruptcy. They all went out of business… it’s just one book… I don’t control the world...

The nattering in her head was stale and depressive. The load of Lyfe in her blood was well past its half-life. As Elektra neared her building, the cramps beneath her rib cage were mild, but she was familiar enough with the way these things accelerated to feel an anticipatory nausea.

The anticipation would be less sharp if she could look forward to coming down in privacy—if her mule-headed father would ever obey the pro bono doctor and go to bed early. If only she could writhe and claw her hair and drink vodka and swear at the Gods in privacy. Alone, when the worst of it had passed, she might even be able to sleep in peace before she had to go to work.  But no. The fetid air that loafed in grey currents down their street already brought her ill vibes from the dregs of her father’s consciousness. She knew that he would be awake and waiting. 

His impersonal, possessive love made her sick. He didn’t know who she was—these days, sometimes literally—but he wanted the shell of her to cling to and howl at—the shell she’d left standing beside her to be blamed and abused, the clone-self she presented to his ever-degrading consciousness.

She had hidden behind this shell for so long, it would be only fair if it could take on a life of its own and be sent to deal with Bartleby without her tagging along, like a doll in a coma—but as Bartleby himself always said, life’s not fair. 

Just as she almost made it to the porte-cochère of their once-chic building, a God came grinning and staggering round the corner, as drunk as the lowest scum. Probably fresh from the turbo-brothel; he glowed like a ten-year-old boy, and he giggled like a dirty old man, and he would feel fresh as a daisy by early afternoon.

He didn’t seem at all annoyed by the needling panhandler who materialized from nowhere to pester him.

“C’mon maaaan, can you spare a quarter-gram? I got six kids an’ I don’t wanta hafta go home an’ beat ’em to death, you know what I mean, buh huh huh...”

Panhandling for drugs? That’s a new one, she thought. Elektra would have kicked the leech. Somewhere there was a mother who had finally got sick of this guy and tossed him out of the house.

But the God gave the animal a magnanimous sneer.

“Oh, certainly. Here you are, my dear child. Take a half gram. Bless you. Haw haw haw!”Fuck, he’s wasted, thought Elektra. Bastard… wow, half a gram?! She had a fleeting fantasy of asking him for Lyfe herself, then blushed in shame. Am I that bad? She clung to her stupid pride and wrestled her building’s rusty front lock open as fast as she could with her shaking hands. 

She climbed the dank, food-smelling spiral to their apartment, her shoulders hunched forward in anticipation of Bartleby’s incoherent rage. From the customers to the panhandler to her father, something was always attacking her, always grinding her down, there was never a rest except in the distant, gentle arms of Lyfe… anger choked her. She opened the door in no hurry; why did she ever hurry anywhere?

Their apartment smelled like old man, damp plaster, Loona-Likker Brand vodka cans that needed to be taken out, and moldy sachets of instant peprikorn soup. The great Bartleby Burgundy was slouched snuffling in his wheelchair, predictably ready to pounce. By the time the door had closed behind her he was as animated as he ever got, with something like a light in his eyes, mouth drooping open; he windmilled his arms toward his sunken chest to demand a hug, unselfconsciously greedy for the filial love he had never, in her opinion, earned.

She hugged him gingerly, fighting her gag reflex. The sweet stench of foot rot hit her, somehow overpowering the unchanged diaper.

Bartleby stared up at her over his emaciated cheeks. “LATE!” he growled.

“Hi, Dad.” Jesus, if I wanted to wipe somebody’s ass I would have had a child myself…  Every day now, she had to decide in a dozen small ways whether to repay him for his unkindness back when she was small and helpless. Her lip curled. He probably thinks it’s terribly unfair to get out what he put in.

She tried to distract herself from the smell with the thought of her vodka bottle, stashed in the freezer where he couldn’t reach. I should bash his skull in with it. 

“Dirty!” he remarked.

“You sure are, Dad. Go change.”

He ignored that.

“Go change clothes, if you don’t wan‘t to be dirty. You probably itch….”

“You! YOU dirty!”

She sighed and began the nightly ritual of trying to get around him. He looked nothing like the man she had been proud of.

After the night of infamy when he went onstage too high for pants, his career had been a joke—a theater in-joke. He got by. For as long as he could still walk, whenever a drunk or a drug addict was needed to stumble about in the background of a comical romp, directors would call upon Bartleby Burgundy to add a delightful sprinkle of meta-humor.

But as a serious person he was done; the only spoken line he was ever given again was “I’m hiiiiiigh!” And he got it dozens of times. It always got a laugh—a humiliating laugh. But he needed the money.

The performances grew more excruciating for his daughter to watch with each passing year. He would climb onstage, head down. The head would go up for his big line, accompanied by a broad doltish grin; the head would hang again the moment he got off the stage.

He knew he had ruined his life. And how badly had he damaged other mortals’ career possibilities? Elektra could never forgive him that. After his own father opened the way for everyone, Bartleby had stuck his incredibly lucky chance in a needle and dumped it in a vein. He was the only son of the first mortal to ever be allowed into the City of Heaven, and talented too… but there were no second chances for social climbers.

Granted, during his entire career, it had been overtly illegal for a mortal to play a major role in a theatrical production. But perhaps he could have changed that, if he hadn’t tripped over his own appendage so spectacularly. 

Instead, his daughter is even more screwed than he was, Elektra thought bitterly. 

“Drunk!” he croaked from his wheelchair.

“Go to bed, Dad. Did you eat dinner? Have you slept at all?”

“Dirty!”

“Dirty”—for the reader who is darkly curious—was Dad-ese for “high on Lyfe.” He was not so much a human being to her anymore as a blast shadow left by drugs, so she was dully unsurprised when hypocrisy as a concept didn’t register. Lyfe was “dirty” because he felt bad about it, so she was going to eat another guilt-wrath sandwich, and that was that. That was Dad-logic. A year after he quit drugs, he forgot he was ever on them. Thence his self-important, household-wide anti-drug campaign—which, due to advancing motor function breakdown and dementia, he could only propagandize through irritating screams. 

This made a lonely family life for Elektra. To see her grandfather, she now had to walk her the bridge to the laundry district. His care had come to require a professional, as much as Elektra wished she could have him around.

He had been taken in by a recently-founded charity home for mortals who somehow lived to old age. The Goddesses who ran it were grateful to have something to do. He still shot a bit of Lyfe when he could get it, but money was low. Which was a good thing for Elektra: he was reduced to a brain on a stick, but the brain hadn’t rotted much since she was a child. Part of her suspected he was part Immortal, but it was more likely that the freakish hardiness of mortals who had evolved on the carcinogenic slave planet looming in the sky was more extreme in his case than usual despite the drug abuse.

As for the distaff, Elektra’s mother had not deigned to contact the Burgundy family since the girl’s birth. Elektra was pretty sure her mother was called Dejanera, but her name had been rarely spoken. 

Dejanera was a half-blooded Goddess, which was not as lucky as it sounds. Her status was barely better than her daughter’s. Any mortal blood was an embarrassment to begin with.

At least Dejanera was technically Immortal; anything less than 50 percent God meant that unless you married upward you would one day die. (Why marriage made a difference made no sense to Elektra; and yet look at Miranda!— the bitch was still physically a teenager.)

Being under-fifty also meant that legally and socially, you stood precious little higher than a purebred mortal. Elektra never bothered to mention her own 25 percent to people, as she would only open herself to ridicule for her pretense. And she was enough of a pretentious little bitch on the face of it; or so it seemed that people thought, however unfairly.

In fact she found all of this DNA math ridiculous.

Like mother, like daughter; Dejanera might have been amused by her own slumming if she were more than a point away from being worm food herself. As it was, she dumped day-old Elektra in Bartleby’s arms in shame.

Bartleby had more talent than a thousand years of Dejanera’s bloodline combined, or so he said. This may have been mostly an attempt to intimidate his daughter; unlike Lemon, Bartleby felt sick at the prospect of Elektra climbing over his corpse to glory. But on the other hand, there were a lot of starring Gods who couldn’t sing. Elektra therefore decided that talent wasn’t genetic. You had to try hard, that was it.

The rest of her bloodline were in the Lyfe mines back on Earth Two—although for all Elektra knew, they could have been wiped out in a mine-shaft collapse. She wasn’t going to bring any kids into this mess, so that would be it for the Burgundies. As awful as it would be to have a child in New Tiber, this still made her feel melancholy: billions of generations of terran creatures, all fighting valiantly to survive, then the trek to Alpha Centauri, and then… the end of the line. But it was better than having a brat with no future.

No future… A set of evil thoughts opened out to her over the space of a moment, like a poisoned fan unfolding slowly: she had always been treated unfairly. 

Oh, Elektra, shut up… there must be good things in her life that she was ignoring out of ingratitude. But the facts that kept nagging her were painful. Her father didn’t seem to love her, no matter what she did. Equal arts law or not, theater was the same: she could do what she liked, work infinitely hard, but a bad Goddess was always better than you.

Then true love had given her a taste of happiness… before Miranda married for immortality while cheating her of her youth. 

“Elektra, you know I love you more than I could ever love him! He treats me so terribly! It’s just… it’s just… oh, just hold me, baby-gorgeous!”

Elektra ground her teeth at the memory. Those scraps of affection were a million times worse than a clean break—just as that goddamn lying equal arts law had robbed her of all the other paths she could have taken, Miranda had ripped six, eight, ten years out of her life—how many years would it be till she could start again, could feel anything again?!—without a moment’s care. While every other young love she could have enjoyed slipped unseen past her blinkered eyes.

Worst of all, no matter what she did, she would die. And everyone who had robbed her would live forever.

Yes, she was a self-pitying bitch. Her character flaws were real, but they did not protect her from real suffering.

“Bad!” her father was shouting. “Bad future!” She came back from the awful past to land in the depressing present with a sigh. Well, at least he’s going to die, the prick. 

Elektra burned with thirst for even a glass of water, but the animal had strategically parked his damned wheelchair in front of the refrigerator and cupboard.

The kitchen was so small that this could be a coincidence, but that was unlikely. It was always like this when she came home late. He seemed devoted not to stopping her self-destruction—would he try more sincerely if it seemed possible?—but to stripping it of all remaining pleasure.

Does he not want me to go to work tomorrow? Does he want to eat meat this week? Or ever again?! Retarded Tiber-trash worm food. Gravewarmer piece of shit. Lucky pig. I’ll bet they’ll arrest me if I thrash him like he used to thrash me. Pig. Pig. Pig.

She put her head in her hands and shook all over—the withdrawal prodrome was getting really bad. Growling, the stepped over and slammed his wheelchair out of her way. He squealed like a toddler. She gritted her teeth and got the water. 

After pounding the glass she poured another half for a mixer, then reached over him for the bottle in the freezer. He emitted a high-pitched stream of obscenities. 

“Yes, Dad.”

Suddenly he changed his mind and wanted affection: She was barely able to take a sip and place the glass of precious vodka safely on the counter before he reached up to her waist and wrapped his arms around her like a snuffling vine.

The smell was too much. She wrenched herself out of his skeletal embrace and smiled coldly, shivering, as she watched his face contort again in rage. She began to stir her drink properly, slowly, smiling harder: “It’s legal. So go fuck yourself,” she said.  

He grunted angrily.

“Don’t forget you made me this way. You and your fucking screaming. ‘You ruined my life you little shit, why were you born, blah blah blah blah blah.’ And then the hypocrisy. Don’t you know child abuse causes addiction? That was your excuse, as I recall. Grandpa was mean to you. Woe is you!”

He glared at her loathsomely. Another minute of her privacy, the enjoyment of a drink, a small pleasure, greedily stolen.

“You passive-aggressive old puke,” she said, and turned away.

The apartment was so small, turning her back to him might as well be walking into another room; he couldn’t maneuver his chair around to face her. So she knocked back her drink and sighed in an instant’s pleasure, unlocking her muscles one by one in the close, dusty, familiar air. 

Home at last. Even if she wanted to choke her father sixty percent of the time, once his greed for the illusion of family love was appeased—once he was put in his fucking place and she had something warm in her veins—she felt better inside this little private world than she felt anywhere else. Which wasn’t saying much. 

She fixed another drink and trod the two footsteps from the kitchenette to the living room. She thought of Miranda and her mind spasmed again. She drank profoundly from her glass and looked at the familiar things for reassurance.

Nothing had changed since she was a teenager. Same smelly brown sofa. Same depressing brown armchair. Same same same, from the bare grassmoss-tile floor—the varnish worn away and never renewed, the tile now quickly decaying down to fibrous floorboards—to the scrap-plank shelves full of masculine knickknacks: wrought iron fixtures collected from abandoned buildings, ceramic statues of hoverball players with their eyes painted on crooked; the stupid and nonetheless profound sadness of the souvenir trinkets from father-daughter outings, back when he had a mind and she was an innocent prisoner.

A prize ribbon from her junior academy play. Gods, there had been moments when she loved him so much. At least he wasn’t the ragged, humiliating hole she had where a mother should be… She scoffed at her sentimentality.

The bookshelves bore a respectable if small library of paperback books, by authors going all the way back to Earth I, collected mostly by Lemon, that both of them had read multiple times; their spines were blocked from view by gelatin-print photos of Elektra as a fresh little choirgirl, in guinea-bone frames. He loved her as an extension of his lair, which they kept graciously static, sealed away, where time could only creep in as decay.

After Elektra dusted, she put each knick-knack back each time precisely where it had always been; each one matched the spot on the furniture which it had protected from photo-fading, like blocking marks on a stage. The spots slowly grew sharper.

If she did not replace a photo precisely where it belonged, he would sneak up and smack the side of her head with his reaching stick.

That made him laugh, but he was nonetheless angry. Those trinkets, those moments, were sacred, more sacred than the living daughter before him, and certainly more important than wiping off dust in honour of guests who would never arrive.

The redbrick building was full of mildew that stained the tasteless, ancient flower-print paper on the walls. But Bartleby had covered as much of the ugliness as he could with his old theater show posters. Bright images of legendary show-biz Gods looked down on them like Catholic saints. Most of them were dead by murder or suicide by now. It was funny that Bartleby should have outlived them.

The mouths on the posters were either open in song, showing their dumb lips and teeth; or grinning with too much confidence and charm for the characters they were supposed to have portrayed. A screen-print of Hipparchus’s uncle as a cleft-chinned Hamlet, with his chest puffed out beyond his nose as he clutched poor Yorick, was particularly awful, if Elektra let herself think about it. The problem with starring as Hamlet was that Hamlet was not a star. If she made the mistake of stewing about the merry cunts who got to play Ophelia in her own generation, Elektra risked a stroke.

But when she didn’t think too much, the posters made the apartment look more friendly. Less like a cell for a worker bee in a crumbling wing of the hive; more like the ancestral home of a pivotal theater family. It was thanks to Lemon’s mortal exodus, after all, that the theater industry had bulldozed all the other arts. With infinite gravewarmers to play extras and paint scenery, the number of productions it was possible to mount had quadrupled in the first five years of the Great Migration, and the number was forever growing. 

Granted, theater had always been on top, albeit not by as much. Although the minor arts had their own fandom and a small dedicated district in the northeast, none of them quite fit the civilization’s personality.

Ballet was too abstract for most people, though sexy stars like Miranda had an exceptional coterie of fans. Books were laughable—thinking too hard was plebeian. Music was background noise, and a reproducible storytelling medium like film or television gave too few Gods too few chances to bask in the limelight. Anyway, the remaining televisions and film cameras were wearing out, and no one knew how to make more, so they were used only for important global news programs.

Since Lemon, the musical-theater industry had become a celebrity factory that obliterated all other pursuits in Heaven. Any God who wanted to put in a couple of years’ sincere effort could be a minor celebrity, at least amongst the other almost-rans.

But the loser mortal addicts who made this explosion possible didn’t appear on the posters. If you didn’t know the family history, you would think the bright show signs looking down on them had nothing to do with Bartleby, that he was a mere zealous fan. But the faces on the posters were the leads in the shows that Bartleby Burgundy or his father had amicably stolen. 

When Lemon first came up to Heaven, the Gods in the theater panicked; his talent was overpowering. But they couldn’t overtly hate the guy; his persona was too humble and appealing. 

Unless you were his son. 

From the outside, the family appeared seamlessly grateful to be in Heaven, so grateful that Lemon never got angry. He seemed to have an infinite capacity for taking a kick in the teeth with a smile; some people thought he was slow. But when he was alone with his helpless child, the poison was there, indeed.

Maybe the Gods sensed this menace; the day after he first appeared on a celestial stage, the Government published the Theater Casting Act—an apartheid law, passed shockingly few decades ago. It declared that to place an immortal, fated to die, in a major role constituted a “belittlement of the immortal power of artistic expression.” 

Bartleby’s generation of worm food had been perpetually disgruntled by this state of affairs. That got pretty itchy, on such a small planet.

Anyway, it was no fun for the Gods to win when they knew they were being handed the victory. If you want people to be happy you rigged the game for them, you have to hide the rigging. Otherwise they’ll be forever dissatisfied, little-minded psychos because they’re afraid to turn over any of the rocks in their own mind.

So with an eye to pre-emptively gruntling the likes of Elektra and making things look fair, the Government replaced the hated law with the Equal Arts Amendment just before she began theater school. The law did not really end discrimination; it made it a much funnier joke for the Gods to be in on. A mortal still had yet to be given a major role in a professional production, but now it wasn’t because of the law. It was—as casting directors and Immortal stars enjoyed pointing out—because not a single one of them happened to deserve success. 

A coincidence almost as odd as immortality itself. 

Nobody really believed the game wasn’t rigged now, but there was enough ambiguity for anyone who really wanted to fool themselves could credibly do so.

Back when the Equal Arts Amendment was meaningless till after Elektra had already thrown her life away on an embarrassing ambition. 

If she told herself the truth, though, she would have made that suicide run anyway. What else was she good for? Elektra was a hurricane of flaws, but at least she knew herself. A decent person must continually murder himself, each year, if not each moment. It is the only way to excise the lies. Flattery and viciousness alike; self-love and self-hate: each takes root and warps the mirror bit by bit, withers the mind.

This is why Heaven was so full of vice and dishonesty. It’s hard enough for a mortal man to kill the liar inside him for a million days. ‘rffBut to tell a Goddess that she must be this ruthlessly fair, that she must murder her ego each day—for a billion days? It had been a long time since Elektra had stopped being surprised that the Gods were such assholes. But it never stopped her from feeling bitterly angry about it.

 And though she knew she was not a good person, she also knew she tried her damnedest. She was good at self-murder; another of her talents that was ruthlessly wasted, as ruthlessly as self-murder itself—but being wasted hurt much more, because it was involuntary, all of it against her will, a violation, watching hog-tied as everything she was got tossed with a smirk like Lyfe down a shower drain. 

Her hope of one day writing a play for the stage was almost as cruel as the common fantasy that plagued pretty young gravewarmers: that of marrying an Immortal and getting eternal life. If only she had listened to her grandfather! But she never could have. Tales, words, and costumes were all that meant a damn to her; Lemon was the same, and his sorrow was awe-inspiring in its vicious depth. 

When she was younger and stupider, she had thought, like everybody else, that Lemon lacked ambition because he was an idiot savant. Lemon Burgundy had the most beautiful voice in living memory—and that was a lot of memory—but he pretended with all his might that he was addicted to Lyfe because he liked it, not because he was unhappy.

His backup harmonies back in the day could turn a pulp love song into Handel’s Messiah; his impromptu stage business could turn an incompetent tearjerker into Plautus. Though he refused to participate in the Movement that claimed to have triggered the Equal Arts Amendment (the Government, chuckling, had given that legal concession under its own counsel and on its own timeline), he was its unofficial poster child.

Even the Gods he upstaged quietly nodded to his qualities. He was invited to their cocktail parties as a brilliant curiosity—which was how he got addicted to Lyfe. But no one meant him any harm. He put the needle in his own arm, no? He married a kind but addle-pated mortal girl, who died of Lyfe six weeks after Bartleby was born.

Bartleby had been more ambitious, in his career and his bed. When he was young, he was handsome and famous enough to lure in Dejanera, and—he liked to hint, disgustingly—many others, Gods and -esses alike. (Elektra might even have siblings somewhere; most likely at the bottom of the Tiber.)

His conquests were catches to be seen with, even if they wouldn’t quite marry their bit of worm on the side or recognize their children; and thus Elektra had received the dubious gift of life as worm food, at the hands of a father who was moronically proud of her dumb physical existence. He deserved those posters on the wall, even if he wasn’t in them, as much as he deserved to hold in his arms the proof that his blood was mixed with eternity—even if his daughter was as doomed as he was. 

She heard his choking snore from the kitchen. She poured a third drink, briefly considered helping him get to bed, then snorted and retreated into her bedroom. If he wasn’t going to go to bed while he was still able, he could sleep in his damned chair.

While he slept she took advantage of the moment to finish enjoying her drink to the full; she turned her stiff, sore neck and it finally cracked in a spot which resisted every attempt to fix it unless she was right at this particular point on the road to being drunk again.

The vodka ended well before the road. She slipped briefly into his bedroom, where he kept his loose pocket change in a jar on the dresser. She helped herself to hippobus fare; at least she wouldn’t have to walk all the way back there on no food or Lyfe. She didn’t steal money from him for Lyfe, ever—well, not often—but she felt only moderate guilt at stealing his money to go make money to buy Lyfe… what would he rather she do, anyway, sell his dumb theater posters?

Elektra Burgundy had a bit of a chip on her shoulder.

Anyone who was a bit close to her would say the problem with Elektra was that she had been raised on false hope. She was spoiled for reality before she even got to theater school, the proof of which was the fact that she had dared go to theater school at all. It was all the fault of De-Integration; Elektra’s father Bartleby had been forced to go to school with his young Immortal superiors, which is how most of them (with important exceptions such as Bartleby)  managed to remain properly humble.

Not so Elektra’s generation. The Government saw to that. In retrospect, it seemed to have been a way of setting them up for a very amusing fall.

The excuse was that young mortals were being disproportionately beaten to death in the mixed junior academies, and that this was bound to cause unrest.

The beatings were a fact; Young Gods disliked the gravewarmers instinctively. They hated them like young mortals hate old ones: they could smell the stench of death, rising from their unclean pores like cumin. It was not till the age of reason that anyone could successfully explain to them that, since the Great Immigration, nobody had to drive their own guinea horses, and medicine had improved, and you could pay money to get a massage, even if your wife hated you—and that ergo they should treat the young reaper-snacks with less than deadly force. 

So the government ordered educational segregation until everyone had matured past the Lord of the Flies stage and the mortal students were either dumped in with the Gods at university or arts school or permanently tracked into the service industry.

This made adolescence easy for mediocre mortals. Your Elektra-types were more unfortunate. It was bad enough that the humble celebrity of her father’s house put her in danger of believing herself to be exceptional. But then she turned out to be “clever.” She memorized the role of Hamlet by seven, and performed it to a genuine standing ovation at her school’s arts fest, normally a good place to take a nap; somebody should have heckled her. 

 In her mind, she was going to be an exception. Why not? Her grandfather had punched through high enough to escape an entire planet. She only had to get through theater college fast enough to be the first mortal leading lady before an older girl beat her to it.

What this Equal Arts “amendment” was an addition to, no one could say; there was no constitution, the Government proclaimed things and that was the law. The Government used “Amendment” when they were trying to make you feel better about things. The word had undergone a semantic shift in response to the Government’s misuse; to “amend” someone was to soothe them, though in the finer shades of meaning there was a tinge of “false hope.”

 But whatever (or wherever) the Government and its “amendments” were, they apparently considered the EAA important: they put it on the television. 

Television was not quite a lost technology, but it was carefully husbanded, and only a very few private individuals owned a set. Mostly they got doled out to public institutions like schools and bars. They were kept in working order by the Fraternity of Antiquers, a minor family of Immortals, who passed down their eldritch secrets through traditional bloodlines. 

Elektra still remembered, now bitterly, how she had jumped out of her school desk with excitement when they dragged out the TV for the amendment’s announcement. It more than amended her! It filled her with the most poisonous substance in the universe: 

Hope.

As Bartleby watched his daughter get amended, he began to pummel her with frantic, selfish-sounding worry. He increased the whining pitch as he nagged at her to at least minor in laundry—to get a training, practice floor-buffing, Likker distillery, sales pitches, design, anything.

But he was weak and sick. She called him a nosey old addict, and how did his failure and addiction have anything to do with her? As he bowed his head in humble shame, she did as she pleased. This lasted until he forgot he was ashamed and went back to chasing her around screaming in his wheelchair. 

To the shockingly ugly but morally upstanding young gay mortals who lived downstairs, Bartleby’s paternal love was amusing; when they invited themselves upstairs to snoop and drink up the Burgundies’ tiny stock of fine tisanes gifted from Godly costars, they could trace the arguments they had recently heard in the new scars on the shit-brown cupboard paint. Elektra had heard what sounded like a body being launched across their living room more than once— but perhaps they thought sound only traveled downward. The Gods weren’t the only liars. 

Bartleby’s generation faded as the young mortals gained strength, and by the last years of secondary academy the bruise was on the other cheek, so to speak. Elektra’s father was forced to accept her vision of her destiny, even if he knew it could never be real: she had developed a mean right hook, and he and reality hadn’t spoken for a long time anyway.

These days, the Burgundies had come to a passive-aggressive equilibrium. She had enjoyed teaching him that violence cut both ways… but now she was camped out in his house on time borrowed from paying the rent, and she had no desire for the GOs to escort her away from his door. He needed her in order to have any social contact with anyone at all, and she needed him so she could spend most of her income on her drug habit. 

Dadedy-daughter deadlock.

It was too bad that her habit had grown so profound now that she could never get the solitude to properly appreciate a dose. So much maintenance, so precious little pleasure. And on nights like tonight, when she tried to get pleasure or at least numbness with a binge, she only made her tolerance worse. She poured the last of her vodka into the glass and went to huddle in her childhood bed, a mat on the floor.

She shuddered and flailed for something else to think about, and suddenly remembered the prescribed reality of the next day. She looked up at the clock … almost 7 bells. She had slumped down with her drink onto Bartleby’s kitchen floor, her back against the cupboards and her knees under her chin, joints stiff from the withdrawal tension, grinding bones together. She was working double shifts this week, and she had to be in at ten bells; she had spent eleven of the fourteen hours she had to herself on joyless adultery and bad memories. Well, no more of that. Her revenge on Miranda, she vowed, would be far more satisfying than their love had been.

Her plan to ruin the marriage was the vaguest bud—but not as vague as her plans to get back at the human race at large.

The faces on the posters laughed down at her. She finally trembled her way through a nap that felt stale and raw. It suited her.