Elektra's Revenge, Chapter Three

Stuck

Nausea crept up on Elektra as her little shard of humanity tried to melt back into the hushed streets of the Olympic District. It wasn’t easy, as she was the only soul creeping, and also she looked like a burglar.

Close!

She tried to merge with the shadows, but she had no idea where she was going. She was still blotto, and the bus stop signs here were few and hidden. People only used the hippobus in Valhalla when their spouses locked them out without their wallets and then dismissed the valet. Hundreds of years of marital grudges generated lots of these incidents, but they kept the signs discreet anyway; in an unnaturally long life, losing one night wandering around drunk doesn’t mean much, outside of having a terrific hard-knock story for brunch tomorrow.

Elektra, on the other hand, was nearly crying.

By the time she found the north branch of the New Tiber River, there were maybe three hours for sleep before she had to get up to work the lunch shift. It was three miles to walk north from Miranda’s chateau to the river, another two miles northwest through the New Tiber district to her father’s apartment, where her own bed and vodka were waiting.

She had suffered, in her affair with Miranda, through hundreds of work shifts with a hangover and no sleep, because they met on Miranda’s schedule, never Elektra’s. Miranda had forgotten what it was like to have a job. She seemed to believe other people were magic, that they could function eternally with no food or sleep—or, more likely, that they were dolls who came off the shelf when it was time for her to play. 

Stupid. Hate myself, so fucking STUPID…

Elektra began to lose hope that she would find the north branch anytime soon. It was entirely possible she had gone the wrong way, that she was wandering south, toward the main branch of the river and the Syd District beyond—a wasteland full of prisons and garbage pits, where the Anihils clanked and glowered over what was left of their territory.

The Anihils had ruled in Heaven before the simians got there; they rarely escaped the Syd District, but when they did, what they lacked in cleverness they made up for with the strength and unnerving speed of giant insects…

I swear on my grandmother’s grave back down on Earth II, I did not touch this image; this is exactly how I found it. The fake customer in the bottom corner is a masterful touch, but there’s a translator who either needs a raise or a replacement.

Elektra chuckled morbidly. When an Anihil escaped from the Syd District and clanked north, it was the one time in life that you were better off being mortal, a thought which greatly cheered her.

Well, unless your trade was cleaning theater costumes.

The most vulnerable bridge over the south branch of the Tiber—the one with the straightest shot to the Anthill hot-spots in Syd—was the one to South Sophocles, which was the laundry district. It was the only southern district that was mostly mortals; the south was the warmest, but the Immortals needed filler bodies on the front lines.

The launderers were there to absorb as much Anihil rage as they could before the rest of the city got hit. Laundry was dangerous, carcinogenic work to begin with, and not very glamorous. But it had to be done. The show must go on.

Launderers didn’t only sacrifice for their city in extremis; they sacrificed for their children every day. Only the most shrewd, most family-minded and courageous mortals turned their backs on trying to break into the sprawling beast of the theater industry and chose laundry. If their children survived to use the wealth they built up, perhaps they could be stars one day.

The parents were mostly first-generation newcomers to Heaven, too pleased and amazed by the improvement in their condition to resent personal obscurity. They didn’t dream of strutting onstage—they dreamed of watching their children take a bow. That was their humility’s reward. (Barring death by juvenile leukaemia, which had once again become incurable.)

The best-guarded bridges in the city were, surprisingly, the one between South Sophocles and Syd, followed by the one between South Sophocles and the bars and brothels of Caneston.

The launderers were granted that much, and the Gods quietly failed to complain. None of them wanted to end their days on the end of an Anihil’s fang because they were seeing a Caneston prostitute; how embarrassing.

As the drugs began to fade, thinking about the Anihil made Elektra sweat as she walked; these days she could swear the more Lyfe she shot the faster she came back down. Between her ragged breaths, she imagined she heard the slow clanking of an exoskeleton from the south. No Bloodbugs or Anihil had escaped Syd for months and months, though. 

Or was it years? …. In fact, Elektra realized, she had never heard that clanking live, only on recordings in school, when they learned to do safety drills; New Tiber was usually buffered despite touching the river, and who wanted to hang out in So-Soph?

It would make more sense to worry about work tomorrow, if her mind was determined to chew her up. But why worry at this point? The most sleep I can get now is… not even three hours, if that’s actually the river ahead. If not… Hades, I might as well sleep right here.

Yeah, and wake up dead from hypothermia. She stomped as she walked and fumed. The impotence of her fuming stung her like papercuts. I guess that’s the karma I get for cheating on my girlfriend with the husband she’s cheating on with me while she cheats on me, she thought philosophically.

It might have occurred to her that they were all terrible people, if it weren’t for the fact that perhaps a half-million instances of cheating went on per night in the City of Heaven, and there were only four million people on the entire small moon (and, as far as she knew, in all of creation).

Immortality was boring, or so she gathered. She wouldn’t know; she had never cheated in her life before tonight. She had done a lot of illegal drugs, but she had never spat on the sacred nature of love. Even if everyone else and their watercat did it.

Well, so much for that. 

She could still feel a not-unpleasant pressure where Hipparchus had been.

Suddenly she paused in her intense study of her marching feet and noticed she was in front of a multi-story, modest-but-respectable apartment building. She looked up and around. This was a good sign, wasn’t it? At least she wasn’t going in circles in Valhalla. She picked up the pace again and walked around the high-rise and suddenly behind it the brick and concrete parted like a curtain and there was the New Tiber River.

The waters spread before her in their shining majesty. The riverwater was literally shining, day or night, not reflecting: Out of all the fluid bodies in the Universe, only the New Tiber was home to the hardy and brilliant species of micro-organism called the glittermite.

A two-celled pseudo-bacterium, the glittermite filled its small niche by the trillions. The riverbed was rich in deposits of phyllosilicates from which the creatures wove the sparkling chips that gave them both an endoskeleton of sorts and their name. 

Both of their names, actually. Back when someone cared about such things, the last human scientists had decided that these odd little beasts had been the first relatively complex life form on Luna II; their ancestors were also the ancestors of the guinea horses and the Anihils.

As the eventual kings and queens of Heaven were off on their home planet learning to stand on their hind paws and stab each other, the glittermite—also known as the micarite—was turning its tiny glitterchip into the ten-foot burnished exoskeleton of the Anihil. (Why they also decided to evolve into guinea horses was a question the scientific community didn’t get around to before dying out, under suspicious circumstances.)

The scientists had named the creatures Micarites, to make use of what was left of their knowledge of Latin. But as the last French and Spanish speakers were absorbed into the various proto-Sino-Anglo dialects, the living found they cared as little for dead languages as they cared for scientific inquiry. 

Why bother?  The Gods had found the solutions to the fearful questions which, as it turned out, had been powering most of their curiosity in the first place.

How to live forever, how to make someone else do all the work for you without sounding like a monster... history and science no longer had the same pull. And using fancy names like Micarites seemed silly when everyone could see that they were glittermites.

They made the river uniquely beautiful in the universe. But Elektra had never seen a plain river, so glittering was what she thought rivers did. And yet tonight, in her state, the river full of glittermites gave just enough moody silver light to balance out the bloody red of Earth II above, lending a cool glow of romance to her self-inflicted suffering—even calm. She noticed its beauty. It certainly outdid the dish sink at work.

Speaking of which… she had to figure out where in the Gods’ creation she was. It was getting crucial. The Tiber was narrow here—it was the north branch, all right. But nowhere near grimy enough; if the New Tiber neighborhood were across the way, there would be a few derelicts and turbo-brothel escapees camped out on the banks, abusing the water with the products of their troubled digestions. Ohhhh shit, she thought; have I been walking east? 

She looked to her right and swore: theater marquees lined the river going east. Aaaaaand there’s the Caneston Bridge. FUCKOLA.

She had indeed gone north to the river, but she had also tacked east toward the Sophton District. 

Sophton was the jewel of the world—it was where you found the theaters, and the famous restaurants where the Gods dined before the show.

It was silent at this obscene hour, illuminating candles darkened in their pools of congealed white wax, surrounding Hipparchus’ giant face on a poster. It seemed she had subconsciously turned the lie she told him about where she was going into truth.

She was also about five blocks from the Skull and Platter, where she worked, but she couldn’t sleep in the street. Dressed for her date, in the sweeping cape and dress she’d stolen, she would be mistaken for a Goddess, mugged, and then pistol-whipped for not having any money. That usual small corner of her lip, the one that lived for irony, curled up, now accompanied by a pained creasing of the eyes: What I wasn’t willing to do for you, Miranda...

A pain in her stomach reminded her that she was riding along in a sentient ship, and as captain, she had failed.

Am I going to stand here feeling guilty so I don’t get any sleep? She thought. That won’t extend my lifespan. She angrily lurched back the way she had come.

She had her bearings now; twice a week or so she walked home from here, when she needed to save her tips for Lyfe instead of taking the hippobus. Instead of crossing the bridge and walking through West Caneston, however—a death sentence at this hour—she backtracked glumly along the river into Valhalla, taking in the view of the new Earth going down over East Caneston as she headed toward the Gracchi Bridge.

Even in Caneston, in the wee hours of a Wednesday, most of the cathouses and pansexual bars were closed; but a few figures still lurked round the sidewalks, their revelry suspended outside time. 

Caneston was a seedy-trendy entertainment district slapped on top of the historical district: its nightclubs and cathouses were built into old guinea horse stables and the first few manufacturing buildings on the moon, more workshop than factory, left over from the pioneer days. The heavy stone constructions were built both for function and for the eyes of posterity. Those antique Terrans had been proud to escape their disasters alive.

The Government encouraged the brothels to set up shop in the landmarks because they did the old structures more good than harm: after the theater, the whorehouse business was the best racket in Heaven, with all that mortal ‘talent.’ If the buildings had been left as historical museums that no one wanted to go to Caneston to see, they wouldn’t have the budget to keep the bricks together.

Elektra knew this because there was a single historical museum in Caneston—more of a junk shop, really—whose roof tiles were continually shedding off and hitting passers-by. Elektra liked to go there, but even she was much more philosophical than most of the Gods.

After an eternity of walking, the brothels and neon and candelight and brightly painted liquor signs of East Caneston gave way to New Tiber, her home.

New Tiber was like a low-budget yet slightly more respectable Caneston, depressing in what Elektra still managed to think was an arty way; well, it gave her a feeling, anyway. An exalted comfort.

Or, she thought, looking detachedly across the river at her neighborhood, it gives me a feeling like me and my family and everyone like me behaves like a plague of insects that ruins things. 

She had never had that thought before, and it startled her. That was the way she usually thought of Gods. But the Gods had built New Tiber, and now, well… New Tiber was tearing itself to the ground.

Sturdy pioneer facades, carved with mythical dragons from Ancient Earth, peered out over the river through the rotted wood nailed over their broken windows. Up till two generations ago, before the influx of mortal immigrants from Earth Two, the left bank area had been the ‘student ghetto’ for Immortal theater-college kids. “Ghetto” was a ridiculous drama-student exaggeration back then; it was merely less fancy than Valhalla.

But no one really knew what such words meant, anyway, outside of stage directions, and anyway now it was true. Over the past half-century the graceful old bookshops and comfortable dorms and studios had melted down into decrepit cages for theatrical mortals, street prostitutes, Lyfe dealers, and general failures. 

The better sorts of mortals lived on the eastern and southern outskirts of the Sophocles District; aside from the laundry district, there were costume makers, like Ismene would become; grocery distributors, hydroponic produce specialists, grinnenbiter feedlots and riversmut slaughterhouses. And, alas, Lunar Likker distilleries making booze from (what else?) dead Anihils, along with manufacturing outfits that had reinvented various levels of automation.

Though Elektra’s grandfather had been the first mortal allowed into Heaven, he had mistaken this for good luck that would continue, so he had failed to enter a profitable trade as his main source of income. All mortals who were this foolish wound up as foolish people do, their dreams curdling into nightmares. 

Elektra’s father had tried to warn her not to follow in his and Lemon’s footsteps, but parents are often  bad at conveying the sincerity of their regrets, particularly when they come out in a torrent of rage. Anyway, he lied about everything else… leave it to Dad to bury some useful advice in the bullshit, just so he could say ‘I told you so’ after letting her ruin her life!

Elektra had thought she could overcome whatever had tripped up her elders—but she had failed to calculate for the black chasm at the back of the skull.

In any case, it appeared she was stuck with a lifetime of restaurant work—which hadn’t seemed as bad when she was very young, and in love. (She had been much younger when the night began.) There was a jaunty romance to it. Once part of her accepted that she would never go anywhere in the theater, she had slowly, without admitting it, turned Miranda into the meaning of her life instead. Reaching for the next fix of sentiment had stopped her eyes from ever focusing on the dark of the future for very long.

Suddenly, with those chemicals cleared away, the stupidity of the things she’d done and the bleak awfulness that lay in store for her smacked Elektra between the eyes. She should have made laundry her life’s mission. Love, intoxication, and artistic ambition were not for people like her.  

She needed to do something sensible before it got too late.

But instead of thinking of a solution, she began to think of the vodka bottle stashed in Dad’s apartment. She was practically thirty ancient Earth years old—that’s a century in Earth II years!—and she still had no idea what a solved problem felt like; all she knew were temporary patches of chemical plaster.

But… there was still time, right? She could sort out her regrets and think of a fresh new plan once she got through her shift tomorrow—preferably under the influence of a good dose of Lyfe.