Elektra's Revenge: Chapter One
Grudge
Nineteen long years later, the new Earth crept up to haunt the evening sky: blood-red and horrible, like a hole punched in your skin. The shadow it cast on the surface of its moon was tinged with bile.
In the stand of artificial trees that separated a garish mansion from the grandest boulevard in the City of Heaven, a figure skulked in the shadow of a magnolia made of platinum. On the midsize moon where the City was founded, the natural vegetation was low to the ground. But the Sol-based primates who crash-landed there craved tall plants to look at—even if no one had seen a living tree in thousands of years—so they built them from whatever came to hand.
This pricey, chic specimen of metal tree was hand-coated in green enamel, with ever-pink and grey magnolia flowers in the shape of folded hands; it was highly stylized, since the design had been handed down through the ages, generation to generation of craftsmen who had never seen the real thing. Five years’ display outdoors had left its articulated leaves slightly chipped where they rustled against one another—although it hadn’t fared as badly as the unpainted iron oaks did in the public parks, where they accumulated an artificial underbrush of junk-food bags and syringes.
The intruder’s hands parted two low branches slightly. The arms were barely long enough to help the hands emerge from a floor-length cape with swirling sleeves. The cape was the wrong size because it had been picked out of the dumpster behind a theater.
The figure was tall enough to be a man, short enough to be a woman, with long thin limbs and a slouching, awkwardly graceful profile. The intruder wanted to feel dramatic and dangerous, but had shot up far too much Lyfe before the mission. The cape trembled like platinum leaves in a stiff breeze.
The costume shook harder as the front doors of the mansion slowly parted.
The doors were three meters tall and as thick as a Government Officer’s shoulders, carved from solid blocks of tiger’s-eye stone. Oil torches, tended hourly by a servant, cast a theatrical light on the long flight of steps that led up to the massive doors. They would have given the hilltop mansion the look of a stately Ancient Earth castle, if only it weren’t for the rest of the place.
It was rich garbage, of an architectural style that was briefly popular amongst the top tier of theater stars five years prior—in 5097, in the year of Our Lord Some Ancient Earth Godson about whom no one knew much anymore. An egg-shaped hexagon of high walls was afflicted at random intervals with echoing eggy turrets and pointy baldachins. It was meant to have a jaunty feel, but the sight of it made most people feel like they were coming down with influenza (which was still very popular).
The roof was covered in purplestone leaf, and brightly painted statues of the Muses perched wherever they seemed to have gotten tired. Tin foliage sprouted from the silver planters hanging at every window, and the front of the house was draped with hard, cascading waves made of gilt aluminum tulle. The tiger’s-eye doors alone lent it an incongruous touch of dignitas, although they hardly matched all the silver and purple.
The unwanted character felt its envy becoming tempered by contempt for the inhabitants’ bad taste, and it chuckled: the portals’ pneumatic machinery now drew them far enough apart to let the lady of the house emit one moonsilk-slippered little foot.
The foot pulled back inside the door again briefly. The Lady Miranda was, the intruder knew, pausing to check her bag for forgotten keys and lipsticks. It was nonsense behavior now, caked-on habit. Miranda didn’t need keys; her faithful servants opened all doors for her, and the chauffeur of her guinea-horse carriage had known her since her marriage. She was too healthy-looking to need lipstick, and she was too rich to worry if a bit of paper fell from her purse. But Miranda’s character was richly veined with obsession. It was what had made her good enough at the art of dance to be a star.
Well, marrying an Immortal theater honcho didn’t hurt, thought the intruder.
The sight of the familiar behavior was jarring in the doorway of a mansion; it tugged at the figure’s throat, attacked the nerves with old images of the girl Miranda had once been: gracefully blocking scenes in her dorm room; intently practicing ballet steps, hundreds of repetitions at a time; re-applying lipstick after they kissed one warm and youthful afternoon, a hundred million moments ago...
Finally, in one graceful chassée, the rest of the famous dancer came out, tucking the bag under her arm.
She also wore a cape, but it was an open-weave dinner-party number. Its pink moonsilk warp was stiffened with a woof of gleaming bronze thread, and the brooch that held it at her smooth throat was carved from her signature tiger’s-eye stone. It kept its shape but flowed along with her leonine spine as she trickled down the front staircase. Each gilt-rimmed stair had been inlaid with mother-of-moon-pearl and more large, perfect, round tiger’s eyes.
The combs in Miranda’s black hair were tiger’s eye as well. The stones accentuated her smooth, deep golden skin and set off the roses in her cheeks. Though she was only three-eighths Immortal by birth, her marriage to a full God seemed to have agreed with her; her taut, wholesome cheeks and the free play of her liquid joints reminded the intruder of a soap advertisement from a long-ago century. Smaller stones coated the bodice of her side-slit gown like an all-seeing, tawny-gold coat of armor; though her favorite stone was only semiprecious, Miranda had remained faithful to it through the years.
The stones weren’t the only objects of Miranda’s faithfulness, in her off-handed way. It was a strange way, but the intruder who had crept out to meet her clung to it nonetheless. Miranda de Beaulieu had not married for love; she had married to become Immortal. But she had kept this lover clinging in the shadows.
The air of the Olympic District was perfumed with synthetic gardenia. Earth II was now rising high in the evening sky; its diseased-looking surface—the red rock pockmarked with Lyfe mines and asteroid strikes—cast a gory, rusty pall over the neighborhood, graceful old mansions and ostentatious new terrors alike. The big planet cleared the roof of Miranda’s unhappy home, and the dancer lent both objects a mildly dissatisfied glance over her shoulder. She had only been allowed to choose the doors and stairs. The concentric rings of golden minerals below her feet seemed to blink at the ugly glare as her lithe shadow flickered over them.
Miranda rapped on the door of a small lean-to that was hidden in another copse, up the drive from the intruder; this summoned the faithful coachman who awaited her there. With a deferential bow, the man marched to the parking pulley at the curbside. He began to crank the machinery, thin guinea-skin gloves protecting his hands from the work. A few good turns, and the street in front of the house vibrated slightly. At a leisurely pace, a large block of cobblestones detached itself from the surrounding stones and sank six inches into the earth, then changed direction and began to slide under the street, a panel that revealed a dark hole, twice the size of a grave.
A platform slowly rose up from below ground, bearing a light phaeton hitched to a patient guinea horse who looked only mildly surprised. He was still chewing some straw.
At her habitual swift canter, the lady Miranda flew at the carriage and disappeared within, like a minnow flitting under a yacht.
Parking on the street’s surface was illegal in the City of Heaven; the habitable portion of the moon was too small to waste space on wide streets. In the merchant and entertainment districts, each business found room for a handful of underground parking spaces, and they rented them out per hour for about what a mortal wage-earner took home in a month; Miranda was headed out on a shopping trip which would require the use of such a parking space for several hours.
Well, that’s what she had told her husband she was going to do. What she forgot to mention to him was that she would first pick up that slight figure lurking in the magnolia, and that the carriage would make a stop for privacy on the way to the shops.
Or… at least, that was what she had told that person.
The faithful driver was supposed to pull the carriage up to the tin magnolia grove and open the door just long enough to let the new passenger aboard.
Instead, the carriage drove rapidly past the rendezvous point and took off down the street. Miranda’s heart-shaped face, moon-pale, appeared in the window for half a second, and gave the magnolias only a single vague glance—of warning? Of rejection? Of sadness or contempt?—before continuing toward the theater district.
Keep calm, Elektra, said the caped figure to herself. But a shock of anger ran up and down her spine. She’s probably got the place wrong—she misunderstood my note. She’s not picking me up here, she’s meeting me in Sophton. Or Caneston? Oh, shit...
Elektra had sent Miranda the message via a drama-loving dressmaker—a ditzy but talented mortal girl who often made house calls at the Beaulieu residence. She had been entrusted with a slip of cloth stitched with the two girls’ secret code. She certainly could have lost or forgotten it. Or “Pick me up at your place” could have been mis-read as “Meet me at our bar,” couldn’t it? Maybe “Meet me at our cafe by the Pallas Theater”?
On the other hand, no. . . Elektra was rationalizing.
She did that a lot. Especially with Miranda. But at least this time she had noticed what she was doing.
Fat lot of good noticing me does me, Elektra snarled to herself; Great, I’m thinking rationally. That and a fiver will get me some stenchleaf tea. Now I have to wonder what she’s ditching me for. Or “who”? NO! No, she wouldn’t do that to me... she couldn’t, could she?
Elektra could already feel the burning sexual desire in her body go bitter and painful with disappointment, like a shock to the chest. Miranda stood her up too often. And the bitterness made it difficult to figure out whether her own thoughts were indeed rational at all: was Miranda being cruel, or was she herself unreasonable? You could only expect the wife of an Immortal to sneak away from her situation a limited number of times per month, but these days it seemed like Miranda had second thoughts more often than not.
She never thought of how Elektra felt, how she might suffer without her touch. Or was that only Elektra’s mind, selfishly grinding its gears? She could interpret a look, a note, a thousand different ways, depending on her mood. Oh, those clouding chemicals. Oh, that head she was trapped in. Before puberty, Elektra had possessed a halfway decent brain, or so she recalled. But now, sex hormones aside, she was usually full of a flickering mix of Lyfe, lunavodka, and bitterness.
For one glamorous moment while they were both at theater college, Miranda had been all hers. They were the most admired couple in school, even drawing attention away from the Immortal girls.
Then Hippolyte Beaulieu and his stupid immortality had come along and swept the dancer into his golden guinea carriage. Now Miranda had everything: social standing, eternal life, fame, and money.
The only fly in her ointment was the fact that she was in a heterosexual marriage. This would have been quite risqué amongst the mortal caste to which she was born, and whose fertility the Government was quietly trying to limit. It was a small world, after all. You could walk around the moon. Fully a quarter of the population never died of disease or age—and the other 75 percent, as the Immortals liked to say, “bred like rats.”
Even amongst the Gods, marrying a man had added nothing to Miranda’s éclat—which, despite that fact and her parentage, remained great, owing to both of their star powers. Everyone remembered her dance career, and producers still begged her to return to the stage. She didn’t need to, however. Hippolyte was the best-paid leading man on the moon.
The fact that the marriage was childless helped their case: they were heterosexuals, but they weren’t that kind of heterosexuals.
This was no doubt carefully planned; among Miranda’s flaws, the most striking was her weakness for status. Despite the heterosexuality of the whole arrangement, Hipparchus had offered her not only status and wealth but eternity, or however many years of life she could tolerate: one of the puzzling things about homo centauri was the fact that if you married a God, you became Immortal, too.
This was part of the reason young mortals were reckless with drugs, particularly the pretty girls. There was always a hope in the back of their heads that one day some handsome stranger could repair all the damage. And if no one did, they didn’t have much to live for anyway.
For Miranda, a bit of snooting from the elegant lesbians in the next chateau was a minor fly in the ointment of eternal life—so long as she wrestled Hipparchus into a guinea-skin sheath, or let him relieve himself on the more irrelevant zones of her anatomy.
Well, there was also that other, smaller fly.
She had been required to give up Elektra, along with all of her platonic female friends. Hippolyte only trusted her in the company of his many male pals, all of whom had convinced themselves that they were stodgily gay. His ego enjoyed their flirting with him as much as he was reassured by their loud disdain for his wife.
But as much as she wanted to live forever in this glorious power couple, Miranda couldn’t quite give up the glamour of her old power couple—the prettier one. The edgy one. So she had decided to have her cake and eat it too.
Elektra was far too willing to let her; she had loved no other since—and Miranda had been married six years.*
Six years of stolen kisses, knees in thin stockings touching under cafe tables, and endless sneaking around, all in the most theatrical fashion they could confect. Elektra sometimes thought she was absolutely mad to keep doing this—pressing the back of her hand to her brow; she absolutely meant “mad” as a compliment to herself. Oh, my, my.
In her mind it was a monumental love, a star-crossed holy tragedy, even more daring and genius as rebellion than falling pregnant to some penniless mortal boy. Had it been anyone else but herself, she would have laughed at the stagecraft. She wasn’t quite consciously aware of the fact that it was the drama itself that got her excited… Miranda was kind of a drip.
But Elektra needed the starry-eyed madness. Because the rest of her life had not turned out to be full of starring roles. It was full of waiting tables, lunavodka, Lyfe cut with ground-up Anihil antennae, and a dwindling number of gigs as a theater extra.
Despite her father’s battles, and her grandfather’s battles, and all the mortal flies who had flung themselves at the hippobus windscreen since, Immortals still got all the leading roles in theater. Sure, the Government had passed that stupid “Equal Arts Amendment,” which theoretically gave mortals the right to play leads.
Leads, my ass, was Elektra’s eventual and unfortunate conclusion. The EAA was passed when Elektra was a teenager, right at the moment when she had to choose a path for study and career; her typical awful timing. On the wings of false hope, she had trash-canned her life. False hope—now, there’s a redundancy. Hope is all false, she thought. Hope is Hell-on-Moon.
There were open auditions now, but there were two separate lines to get in. One for worm food, one for serious candidates. By chance, the mortals were always found to be not quite good enough—the directors outlined the reasons they concocted for rejecting them through the most humiliating verbal stunts they could invent. Elektra was quickly disabused of her hopes; early on, she was told she was too pretty and too ugly for the same role by the same director in the same month.
Most mortals shrugged this off fairly easily; it’s as rare to have a genuine, burning vocation as as it is common to vaguely want to be a famous artist. People want to be known, to be thought of as important. The theater happened to make one important in that place and time. When this painted and powdered wellspring of the ego turned out to be a mirage, most « artists » deopped off and happily found other ways to let you know that they were better than you.
But for Elektra, there was no substitute. Her sacrifices felt lost. Art was the way she thought; acting was her conscience and her consciousness. It was a professional loss, but it was more than that: they had ripped off her antennae like she was an insect.
After the EAA failed, she went into each audition angrier than the last—so the directors felt surly resentment rise from her like sweat. She had grown up to be, if anything, even more adept at entertaining than her grandfather. None of the directors ever sincerely considered her for lead roles—it would have been too much—so her talent should have made them nervous about finding an excuse to reject her. Yet she found a way to make it too easy on them: “You’re fine onstage, Elektra, but otherwise you seem so bitter. We can’t have a bitter Ophelia, now, can we?”
On paper, though, she had every chance. They pointed to that proudly. She loathed the hypocritical Arts Amendment more than anything else on the moon. ‘The EAA ruined my life,” she told people. “I should have gone into laundry.” (She woulddcfC »hcfc’t never, given the choice a million times, have gone into laundry.)
As her rage and addictions progressed, Elektra spent less and less time less standing onstage dressed as a potted plant and singing high harmonies, and more time waiting tables and seething. She wasn’t sure which one was more humiliating, but the restaurant got her more money, and life was expensive. She hadn’t outdone her loser grandfather—if anything, she had done worse. My gods, he had started a mass immigration before becoming a junkie. She lacked the self-effacement that pleased the Gods. Well, that, and she was usually very, very drunk.
The gentle noise of guinea feet died slowly, ploppity pad, plupty plp. They died as slowly as Elektra’s anger subsided and then rose again and fell as the thoughts came and went; her anger was like breathing, she realized, and she giggled, and only then did it subside.
Miranda’s stood me up, alright. I’m starting to think she has other girlfriends. —Oh, you think so, genius? What was your first clue?
She laughed again and all emotion suddenly died. It all left only the street around her: the soft rattle of the metal trees, the hum of an ancient —very ancient—opera ringing from an open window. It seemed too quiet to be a city street. But it wound through the city’s prestigious residential heart, the Olympian district, on a gently sloped hill overlooking Valhalla.
In front of her own family apartment in the Tiber district, turbo-brothel workers would be fighting for baggies of Lyfe in the middle of the muddy thoroughfare at this hour. The opera dribbling through Miranda’s neighborhood was… nice.
Elektra put her hands on her hips and sighed, blowing the oversize hood up away from her eyes; it fell back down with a flop and a puff. Well… I guess that’s that. Didn’t bother to cancel. She’s so busy with whoever-it-is, she forgot we were even meeting.
Well, sweetie, till next week… or whenever. She’ll still be rich, and I’ll still be lonely. Not that being with Hipparchus can be any better. I don’t see how she can bear to have that creature mount her whenever he feels the urge… especially when she could have me…
The intruder shook her head and chuckled at herself: Don’t flatter yourself too much, Elektra.
She gathered herself to begin the march home; she needed more Lyfe, or at least sleep. But moments later, the tiger’s-eye door creaked open again. Elektra shrank back into the magnolias.
In one incongruously light step, the heavily muscular—he could easily become paunchy—master of the premises was out and bounding down the staircase, looking left and right intently. His cuff links were undone. His sandy hair gleamed in the torchlight. His clear skin was a color you rarely saw, a greyish pink—curiously like the Anglo-Saxons you could see in ancient films and photographs.
After thousands of years of the mortal-immortal caste system, hardly anybody looked like they could be pinned to any particular ancient Earth ethnic group. Prior to Lemon, you either married fellow Gods, or rutted with other mortals in a mineshaft. Life and death was where the social rift now lay, and everyone had long forgotten where the lines on the map of Ancient Earth were drawn.
People who obviously belonged to any one or two ancient Earth ethnicities were usually inbred Gods. And they were inbred because they weren't desirable to the other Immortal bloodlines: minor families of the aristocracy. She imagined her rival suffered all the bizarre fluctuations of the ego you would expect from his on-the-brink status and the braided branches of his family tree. As Elektra watched, he pawed the ground, almost like a guinea horse, and snorted with a rugged impatience. He looked ridiculous—but then again his wife had just run off to scissor with who-knows. Elektra was hardly thrilled herself.
She hadn’t seen Hipparchus this close up in some time. But he secreted suspicion like a leaky faucet drips water; suspicion with an undercurrent of resignation. The fairytale couple wasn’t so shiny at this distance. She crouched lower.
Hipparchus’ usual slack-jawed smugness—well, that’s how Elektra interpreted his slight underbite—gave way to rage, and the intruder’s disappointment congealed into mild fear. How could this dolt have figured out that his wife was up to something? Elektra hoped he was mad about some dumb household argument instead. Her cloak was, she realized, more of a stage prop than a camouflage device.
His head turned back and forth, back and forth, like a GO’s visored face scanning a crowd for derelicts. Elektra felt like an edible moon rodent. But as he sneered out into the night, she still sneered back. Fortunately, he looked schnockered on wine.
He reached into his overly snug trousers and pulled out a portable two-way radio. The species had lost the wherewithal to set up a cell phone infrastructure, but they still had a grip on radio, more or less. Hipparchus could only call one person, but she was the only person whose whereabouts he needed to know. Theater directors came to him, not the other way around. He pressed a button and immediately began to shout.
“I know you’re going to see that Medusa woman! I know what you dykes get up to!” he howled.
Elektra’s blood ran cold. “Medusa woman”? How many other women is she cheating on us with?! Gods!
The only Medusa she could think of was an old Immortal classmate… the one who always got the lead in student productions because her father was a theater producer. The only thing that made her angrier than the thought of Miranda with that girl was the fact that she had just used the word “us” to lump herself in with Hipparchus. She had to stifle a choking sound.
“Don’t tell me you’re just friends!” he howled. His voice shook the very air of Valhalla. Elektra’s hair stood on end, expecting a swarm of tin-can Government Officers coming in to keep Valhalla’s decorum… then it occurred to her that the locals were probably allowed to shout when they liked.
It was the mortal servants who had to keep up pretenses—make the nice parts of Heaven nice, while the Gods acted like trash. Even when they’re not onstage, I’m still their bleeding extra, Elektra seethed. The night went silent again, except for Hipparchus muttering angrily into the radio. She couldn’t hear what he was saying now, but his handsome, dimpled face was going beet red.
“Come home NOW!” he howled finally. “If you aren’t back here in twenty minutes, don’t bother ever to return!” Although Miranda couldn’t see him—and as far as he knew, nobody could see him—he delivered the last line in an heroic posture, fist in the air and hips jutting forward. It briefly occurred to Elektra that Miranda might have a fetish for angry people. Medusa was a bitch. Elektra certainly was angry. Then again, did Miranda even like her?... the world unfocused.
Hipparchus turned purple. “YOU WHAT?! You WHAT?!!? Well, you can SLEEP THERE THEN! Fucking whore!” He hurled his radio into the bushes, then looked about wild-eyed and, finally, crashed to a seat on the golden tiger’s-eye staircase, looking oddly like a homeless man at a hippobus station. The radio gave an ungainly squeal from the tin shrubbery and went silent.
Then he jumped up, turned and stormed back up the stairs, opened the tiger’s-eye door, and then thought better of it yet again: he bounded down the stairs four at a time, halted suddenly, turned to go up, halted again, hauled himself back around to face the street, crossed his arms, and scanned the horizon, squinting like a tawny lunalion and panting, as though Miranda were some stupid prey animal who couldn’t help but circle back to the watering hole.
Elektra sighed and adjusted her slouched spine to make her crouch somewhat more comfortable; not only was she not going to enjoy a night of passion—not only was her only lover apparently cheating on her with another woman plus her dumb, muscular husband—but she was going to be stuck in the tin magnolias, suffering through whatever scene Hipparchus would now decide to stage. She felt ridiculously, humiliatingly hurt to think they weren’t even fighting over her.
Miranda did not come back.
Hipparchus did not go inside.
*One Luna II year = Approximately 1.16 Earth I years