Elektra's Revenge: Prologue
A Space Opera for Jovial Cynics
PROLOGUE
Sing, I dare you, bastard muse!
Sing to this deep, black hole.
--Elektra Burgundy, Daughter of Bartleby Burgundy, Son of Lemon Burgundy, of the First Family of Mortals
Ismene
When Ismene Senzanombre was seven years old, she was as small as a toddler. This was convenient. Her mother could still strap the child to her back when she crawled into the mine to dig for Lyfe; it was safer than leaving her in the den. You couldn’t find a babysitter on Earth II. Most young women were already pregnant. Most of them died young.
Ismene’s first memories were snapshots of gloved hands working through thick tunnel air, red and powdery, lit by the burning dung of Madolphs and other night-monsters, clods they found by day. There was something nice in being granted vision by a thing that wanted to eat you. On the day that the tunnel caved in, Ismene was drifting toward sleep, rocked by the gentle sway of her mother’s back as she dug, an animal illusion of safety. A gurgling scream was the last she heard from her mom.
When Ismene awoke, she was being pulled from the dead woman’s back by her howling father. The girl didn’t speak again for six years—but when she finally made a sound, she sang like an angel in Heaven
Elektra
“Elektra Ophelia Burgundy!” the old man snapped.
The little girl nervously whipped her gaze up from the floor.
Elektra had folded a cocktail napkin into a vague suggestion of a man and was making it do battle with her home-sewn Anihil monster doll. She was also making a racket like a brat, she now realized. Yelling and giggling. So stupid. She was seven years old and already afraid of the sound of her name.
“How can such a little mousebear be so fucking loud, you little....?”
Grampa Burgundy’s voice was rough with menace, but the ghost of a smile at one corner of his mouth encouraged her to turn on her babyish charm. Then again, he might have merely realized they were out at the theater and people knew them. In the City of Heaven, adults were moody like the weather, but this was one of their good evenings. So far. And Grampa was never nearly as bad as her father. Then again, he was no longer as admirable, either. Elektra never knew him in his golden prime. These days, he got points off for being in a wheelchair, and for being mean. “I ought to whip you good.”
“How, Grampa?”
“Shut up, Elektra, the play is about to begin,” Lemon growled. “Get up in your chair. Your daddy can see you from the stage. So stop acting like a little shit-animal. He can tan your hide all right.”
Grampa Burgundy—the famous Lemon Burgundy—suppressed a grin as the clever child widened her eyes in half-mock fear. She put her thumb in her smirk to complete the effect and cocked her head. She had not yet been on a stage, had no idea how the bright lights made your heart race till you were higher than a watercat on Lyfe ore. But Lemon Burgundy dearly hoped his heart-faced, raven-haired, pain-in-the-ass little granddaughter would come to know the spotlight better than he had.
He closed his eyes briefly and saw Elektra as a musical theater star, all the petals on the moon called Heaven falling at her feet; then his mouth tensed as though something inside him had curdled. His hands clenched on the arm of his wheelchair.
Elektra didn’t notice. She tossed herself lightly into her plush theater seat and settled in with her toys, the real and the makeshift, bubbling and ready to watch her father in what was going to be his greatest-ever theatrical role. He had four lines of dialogue in one scene! For most of the production he would sing in the chorus as usual, but he was the first mortal ever to have more than two spoken lines in a major musical theater production.
And musical theater was the most important art form in the city. Well, Elektra would have thought “in the world.” To the little girl, “City of Heaven” and “eternity” were still synonymous, unless you counted the slave planet below—vague wellspring of her blessed and cursed bloodline—or the Syd District, where real-life Anihils would snap you in their jaws like a splinter. Anywhere life mattered and was held dear, theater was everything.
And her father was about to speak onstage! She had so much to be proud of.
Had she been a bit older, she might have noticed the fingernails of beautiful 100-year-old women jabbing in her direction, pointing her out, the daughter of the low-born star, déclassée but so unfairly talented; their faces were ratlike with condescending envy, but this tiny, poor, nobody-girl couldn’t imagine she was the villain who had made them so. Elektra sensed only the energy, the power in the air. She smiled bright at her grandfather.
But the smile faded as it bloomed. Surreptitiously, seen by no one else—or at least they were pretending not to notice—the old man had slipped both his arms under the poncho draped across the arms of his wheelchair, making a tent over his lap. She could see a slight ripple beneath the poncho as one hand approached the elbow of the opposite arm in a practiced gesture. She was a naturally happy, good-natured seven-year-old; but she was observant too, and she knew there was a syringe under the blanket. She made a superstitious gesture (middle and forefingers each pressing an eyebrow) and prayed to Malavika Billingsworth—her favorite actress—that it would still be a good night after the play.
Tonight’s show was another rehash of The Taming of the Shrew. There had been so many in human history that no one bothered to credit Shakespeare anymore; they wore allusive costumes and everyone knew what it meant. Malavika Billingsworth was playing the Kate-type, so Elektra supposed her prayer would be lucky. Praying to theater stars wasn’t the shtick of an organized religion; it wasn’t even a time-honored tradition, as mortals had only been allowed into Heaven for two generations now. But it spread like syphilis amongst their caste, and it gave comfort to children in particular. As Elektra finished her prayer, the curtains parted, the whirling lights brushed the audience, and a cunning melody arose from the orchestra pit; the dance was on and she forgot the grown-ups’ foggy troubles.
When Malavika came onstage for her first solo, Elektra blushed with a, a religious feeling wrapped in a fantasy of being mothered; her real mother, a half-caste Goddess, had long abandoned the family, and it was wonderful to imagine this luscious, full-blooded Immortal holding her in her arms and saying her name.
But there was also real family pride to enjoy. Elektra’s father, Bartleby Burgundy, was about to take the stage. Bartleby, following in Lemon’s footsteps, was even more clever than Malavika—even if Bartleby spent most of his time in the chorus. Despite his inferiority, he was the brightest spot on the stage, just as her grandfather was in his day.
When the clunker who played the male lead walked on, the crowd cheered dutifully—but Bartleby Burgundy’s lithe antics and powerful tenor made an unavoidable whirlpool within the spectacle. He and Malavika ensured the show’s success, despite its flimsy plot; all plots were so thin and simple nowadays they didn’t figure in public opinion. You couldn’t say it aloud, but the system of casting by caste had stripped the structure of the art form down to a twig, through a strange but logically inevitable mechanism: the background performers always stole the show. So the playscripts had to keep getting simpler to stop the viewers from losing the plot as they watched the narrative get aped from behind.
Tonight, in the isolation of their silence, dozens of mortal spectators half-hoped it was all about to change. Popular mortals had been speaking a line or two now and then for years; it was easy to mistake them for the edge of some glorious wedge. Tonight, Bartleby’s two separate sets of four lines each would make theater history. Or at least that was the plan.
Before his little daughter knew it, his time arrived. Her breath caught in her throat as he stepped forward, singing: “Tis for music you lust? Then twenty stormbirds shall be caged, thy guinea horse adorned!”
There was a murmur of appreciation at the sound of his voice—so rich, so clear in contrast to the lead actor’s muddy warbling. This was genteel enough. But when he moved toward the high note (“Thou hast a girlfriend far more beautiful than any other on our waning moon!”), a drunk mortal forgot herself, and clapped and cheered as loud she would for a real star, and more wildly. “Yeesssss!” she shrieked. “Right oooooon!” Her twisted joyful face was hideous.
The performers charged professionally on, but everybody felt the chill.
One did not do that. And who let that ugly mortal’s family into the City, anyway?
There was a slight disturbance as the crowd parted to let the Government Officers who had materialized from the wings filter in and surround the unfortunate woman.
“Back up! It’s the GOs!” someone yelped. The Government Officers were all composed of light-sucking angles in their blackened body armor and dark-visored helmets—a jarring contrast to the softly pretty costumes onstage. The designers had done their best to reproduce what they thought Elizabethan clothing looked like back on Ancient Earth. Malavika was a fairy in a dream in a peach-colored gown of moonsilk, spun from the spittle of a rare water bug that lived only at the bottom of the New Tiber River. Her skirts floated on the stage, jittering only a bit, high above the foolish mortal on the floor.
The GOs in the foreground looked like insects or garbage cans, depending on whether they were tall or short, but nothing else about them was funny to anyone. Armored head to foot in recycled titanium panels from the Terrans’ defunct interstellar cruiser, they also hefted antique subatomic cannons, crafted from technologies mankind had long ago lost, and which the populace understood only as mysterious death. Their unseen eyes were covered by dark bulletproof screens, impervious to lasers and subatomic weapons-- not that anyone else had any bullets, lasers, or ’Tommies.
A ’Tommie’s muzzle passed over little Elektra and she felt a fear she would never forget. Though she was only seven, and innocent save for playing war with a napkin, guilt washed over her body when one of the blank, black visors turned her way, the weapon following like an alien appendage. She couldn’t breathe till the invisible gaze moved on. The Government of the City of Heaven didn’t like to make its presence seen, but when it did, it was usually too late for the criminal element to say their goodbyes.
The woman disappeared, along with the Government—the GOs melting into air, dissolving her like white blood cells—and the play went on. No one discussed it, but the room was dead; Bartleby’s last line was sucked into a void. When the Government and its Officers appeared from behind the curtain, you didn’t say anything. It was another one of those things that weren’t quite… polite.
Everybody was ready for intermission.
Intermission was buzz time for all: it was a middlebrow play, with a mixed crowd of mortals and Immortals, and use of the popular euphoric drug Lyfe was acceptable for Immortals in any social setting—although, at the moment, most of the Gods who were present were more interested in buying shots of bitter, salty Lunar Likker at the bar than in shooting up. It didn’t matter; they could renew their doses while they watched the play, if they felt like it.
Many mortals wanted a hit of the stuff, too, but they had to scuttle into the alleys and toilet stalls with their syringes. Their joy in Lyfe was a severe legal offense. And everybody knew the GOs were hovering near. They would not chase down mere mortals, if they wanted to ruin themselves with drugs; the Government had better things to do. But if they waved their defiant addiction in anyone’s face, the GOs would find time. The best mortal was a quiet mortal.
To an observer from another time and place, this double standard would appear comically unfair. But it was for the mortals’ own good. Unlike the Gods, they would be better off without Lyfe.
The drug was strange stuff. It double-underlined the oddness of homo sapiens centauri.
The Lyfe powder they wetted and injected was refined from a silky, reddish ore that had been discovered in the otherwise nasty soil of Earth II many centuries ago.
The City of Heaven was not on Earth Two. It was perched on the lovely moon. Luna II was temperate in the inhabited zone, its mineral core dense enough to nearly match the gravitational pull of Ancient Earth. The planet itself could support terran life too, sort of — in great discomfort, with crushing gravity and carcinogenic air. Only mortals lived and mined in its fetid bowels. That had been the fate of all worm food, till a mere lifetime ago, when Grampa Lemon changed everything with his legendary voice.
That voice, now a croak, had been so stunning that the heavenly ore prospector who stumbled on him as a boy had brought him up to the City as a novelty; his popularity had triggered a fad, and before they knew it the Gods were swimming in theater extras and cheap servants. What a delight!
But before the legend of Lemon, a hundred generations had lived and died hopelessly on Earth II, crawling heavily through tunnels like rats, drunk on gravity and poisoning themselves with Lyfe ore. Which must sound like another injustice—till one is versed in the inexplicable but obvious differences between mortals and their Gods.
The discovery of Lyfe and the establishment of the castes were lost in the sands of time, though there were legends. But the story of why they were all on a sphere orbiting Alpha Centauri instead of Sol had been well preserved: their forebears had stupidly triggered a nuclear holocaust on Earth One. (They were no longer entirely sure what a nuclear holocaust was, but it sounded very bad. Legend held that the chain of events began with an unpaid drinks bill and a lost earring during a state visit in a place called “Belgium.”)
The four thousand worldwide survivors took a deep breath and filed solemnly onto an untested Chinese prototype of an interstellar cruiser. They were frankly surprised when they managed to limp to the nearest star, circled by Earth II and its temperate moon. They crash-landed on Luna II, but many small shuttle craft survived, and the Immortals’ hardy ancestors discovered Lyfe on the red planet and built the Old Town. Then the power struggles began, and they ended in a completely justifiable caste system, if you considered the two castes’ absurdly different physical reactions to Lyfe.
When anyone first did the drug, they were hit between the eyes by a good feeling which diminished all pleasures formerly known to the great apes. It granted both energy and restful sleep, wit and inhibition, sexual desire and potency too, even if you also got drunk; a feeling of being loved and loveable, and a luxuriant degree of self-confidence. The first dose made everybody feel like a child rolling in a pile of candy and toys. Best of all, it made life feel like it meant something, even if you worked ten hours a day in a Lyfe refinery. There was no hangover, and it was hard to overdose; if you took too much, you nodded off and woke up ready for more.
Psychological addiction gripped you in a single day, with physical need for the junk hot on its heels. And it was there that the mortals were separated from the Gods. Threshed like chaff from wheat... Well, more violently than that.
Lyfe was gentle on the Immortals—more than gentle, it was what made them immortal. It preserved their bodies and brains like flies in amber, if flies could sing out of tune in high-budget theater productions. Through bio-mechanisms mysterious and generally unpondered, being junkies brought their caste eternal youth and health, and infinite chances to grab at wealth and power.
Some of them still failed and quit trying. People still weren’t built for life on an endless pile of regret. But there was always suicide: they weren’t immune to violence. Immortality and vulnerability together multiplied the stakes of depression and crime so high that no one knew what the hell to think about it. (This was convenient for the Government, whose prisons were hidden somewhere in the fearsome Syd district on the bleak side of the moon, away from sight and thought; these mysterious bowels were where the lady who had cheered for Bartleby was now headed. Little Elektra had a vague thought about the woman’s fate, and shivered. The night was becoming impossible to forget… but it wasn’t over yet.)
The Gods were easy prey for poisoned spirals. Along with their medieval backslide from technology, almost Vaticanlike levels of leisure and money had been stacked in piles, along with luxury’s handmaidens: so much fucking and lying and murder.
They made marriage vows and broke them with no internal debate. This was supposed to be a precious person, a sacred bond; yeah, whatever. They had no civic responsibility. The Government was out there, battling the Anihils for you, whether you thought about it or not.
The only thing they had to look up to, the thing that was bigger than themselves, was the mindless and unfathomable vastness of time and space that lay between their bejeweled front door and the next inhabitable solar system. Nobody knew how to get there, and who cared?
Especially since Elektra’s grandfather, with his virtuous voice, had earned his way into Heaven and triggered the Great Migration. There was always worm food to go across the moon for you and fetch any vice that might beat off the demons for an hour, from young boys to old junkies to the corpse of a freshly-’Tommied Anihil to “drugs yet undiscovered,” as an ancient addict once prophesied.
But though they liked a variety of sins, Immortals became creatures of habit, more fiercely so as their decades began to crawl. They still flocked to see Shakespeare over anything new, though this was partly because even their finest playwrights had, at best, minds that were cramped in a bizarre, selfish new way. No doubt there were mortals who could write an explosive tragedy—but were a couple hours of enjoying a play worth letting worm food get their worthless paws on the best toys?
No, equilibrium was more appealing, even if it killed them. Each God who hit the stage was therefore perfect; each new play, award-winning; every mortal a laughable no-talent; each play-goer high enough to be entertained by the gorgeous costumery alone. There was a reason why mortal launderers were well-paid: they made the play. Everybody had what they deserved.
There was nothing to achieve or chance. Indefinitely.
Each young God bragged that he would be the one to live in joy forever. But veterans of life became—behind the youthful mask of flesh—dark and strange animals. Their eyes flitted uncomfortably. They had no memory of not being high. Even those who were immune to the cumulative self-disgust were bored enough to prank each other cruelly for relief; after a few centuries, suicide or murder slammed the curtain down on all of their personal dramas.
For mortals, the long-term consequence was the opposite. They got the good feelings, followed by furious drug abuse and a physical addiction of gory intensity. Withdrawals more painful than heroin and more deadly than alcohol, horrifying hallucinations, unstoppable diarrhea; but since medicine had regressed with all the other sciences, they were all on their own if they wanted to quit. Most who tried ripped out their vital organs with their bare hands for one imaginary reason or another—or because of the pain—if they didn’t run through a high window first. Even if they made it out alive, long after the drug cleared their system, the victims were left with a six-ton sense of doom that made them wish the shakes had killed them.
So most of them stayed on Lyfe once they were hooked. Instead of immortality, addicts of the mortal class got a wheelchair — if they were hardy. Lemon Burgundy, with his fierce constitution, had been wheeling around so long he outlived many of his son’s generation. He was a tough old bird, and unusually kind for an addict at his stage of the game; tough as he was, he maintained the forgiving innocence that had so charmed his original Immortal patrons (all of whom now happened to be dead). Usually mortal Lyfers were goners well before the age of fifty—but not before losing their faculties in a humiliating free-fall. “Icarus” was an ironically popular boys’ name.
When the mortals were all miners on Earth Two, being crippled had been a small price to pay for the short-lived joy of Lyfe; their deaths were already accelerated. The raw ore they handled every day caused cancer, and it was rare for a miner to live past thirty in any case. This was not a universally kind way to live, but someone had to crawl around the mines in order for anyone to live forever; no one had thought to make a robot digger. They thought robots were ancient legends. Though a few families preserved the secrets of moon-shuttle maintenance, most of Heaven’s industry barely equaled a Henry Ford assembly line. There was endless indentured labor—the mortals never got tired of intoxicated sex, no matter their misery—so why bother? If they could have figured out a way to make mortals fly naked between a planet and its moon, carrying a basket of Lyfe between their teeth, they would have given up mechanized flight as well.
Little Elektra was still innocent, and she would not taste Lyfe till her late adolescence. Nor would she taste any ordinary adolescent pleasures: Bartleby was determined to preserve her childish purity. He would be damned if anyone would call him a bad parent on top of being an addict. So aside from a brief stint when he was unable to enforce his will, he kept her locked in their tiny apartment, always as punishment for one made-up misbehavior or another. Whenever she asked why she was grounded again, he would scream: You know why!” (She didn’t.)
This meant she had no friendships that extended outside of school; and so, soon, she had none in school either. But at least she was safe. Bartleby usually kept her away from the theater, too, as it was an unwholesome place, full of… well, full of people like himself. But once the little girl had grasped the momentousness of her daddy’s role in this particular play, she had used all her charm to work her way into a theater seat.
Little did he know, this was her second play in as many weeks.
While Bartleby was away at late rehearsals and sordid parties, Grampa Lemon treated the child to every kind of theatrical production she liked. She may have been grounded, but no one was going to tell the legendary Lemon Burgundy—the first mortal ever to immigrate to the City of Heaven!—that he couldn’t take his granddaughter out when he liked. (Well, except for his son, who was still able-bodied, but if he was going to use that ability to go carousing, then he could hardly be everywhere at once.)
It was their little secret; and if Dad was going to be gone so long every night drinking—and talking to those strange ladies—then who was he to tell Elektra that she couldn’t indulge in a little magic of her own? He had no idea.
And during intermission, he also failed to see her as she crept toward the wing where he was hiding. He had his secret too: she didn’t know that he was addicted to something worse than moon rum.
Elektra had gone into the ladies’ room with pure intentions. However, the long line of twitchy mortals waiting to sneak into the stalls for a fix scared her, so she went for her usual solution: she would slip out down a quiet back hall and make water outside in the alley. The child knew it wasn’t considered quite clean to do that, but she wasn’t sure why. In fact, it seemed nicer to do her business out where all those grown-up ladies with their strange smells hadn’t been sitting there doing whatever their business was.
On the way down the hall, she discovered the open backstage door.
It was a low door. The building was ancient, built back when even Gods were short, because they hadn’t figured out how to cultivate moonbeans, domesticate the wild Yueliangrou, or extract the non-poisonous kind of protein from dead Anihils; so the low door spoke of antiquity and mystery and the legends you heard about at your xiao-xue teacher’s knee. How did they ever survive? No wonder they are better than my dad.
She ducked her head inside and a different world opened up beyond the threshold. The lights were soft and multicolored, and scrims hung from the rigging, red and shimmering, ready to transform the stage for a new scene. It was a pathway into something. Something you couldn’t know till you burrowed in, and then it would still glow with a teasing mystery. Costumes were draped on soft chairs, still warm from the Goddesses’ hips and shoulders. Someone had dropped a pot of greasepaint, still rolling back and forth on the rainbow-smeared floor. It was too inviting.
Elektra gave in and entered a room whose walls were scrims and curtains, cut off from the rest of the backstage only by cloth. She imagined the back of the building as an infinite space, a maze, a fantastical labyrinth full of Gods and taffeta and dance shoes and wine o’ yueliang. She could hear the director giving the cast a pep talk somewhere, halls of cloth away, in another world. It was warm and perfumed. Such a trespass was dangerous, but somehow she felt safe; she found the place where one curtain met another, where she could break into the rest of the maze; she peered through cautiously.
It was a short rosy corridor that turned right and out of her vision.
At the end of it, her father was crouched with a syringe.
She pulled her head back through the curtain and sucked in her breath sharply. Dad wasn’t just drinking when he went out with those ladies! She froze. Feeling safe isn’t real.
He didn’t notice her. His needle was full. He stared at it intently, trying not to think too many steps ahead. All he had to do was finish up without dropping it on the ground (don’t think about that!, he thought frantically) and then catch the end of the pep talk before the second act. It’ll be good to be high before that bullshit, he thought. He had put a little more Lyfe into the mixture than was probably smart, but he needed it. That incident with the GOs had shook him up. Yeah, and he was nervous to begin with; this show was such a big deal, and what was wrong with a little extra boost before the finale? Yeah, tomorrow would be difficult, right? And his tolerance was getting expensively high. But he promised himself he would go easy on the Lyfe when he got to the cast party. Tomorrow wouldn’t be too bad.
Who was going to take Elektra home, though? Could the old man bundle her onto a guinea carriage himself? Well, they should probably go cheap and take the hippobus… They would probably have to ask for a stranger’s help in hefting the wheelchair aboard the vehicle… ahhh well. What a man doesn’t do for his art… hehe, this is good shit…
He didn’t yet suspect that the dose was thrice what he was used to. His dealer usually stretched the expensive powder out with guinea-horse tranquilizer, but today the guy had a hangover of his own, and had felt too sick to go out and buy the filler.
Elektra, transfixed, watched the needle slide into her father’s abscessed arm, into a thick welter of scabs and sores and ruined veins.
His mind was pulsating with beautiful lights. And the awful suspicion that he was way, way too high to be a star.
Something else was happening as well, deep in his blood. Something was fusing, something was changing. He could feel something dark and final rumbling in his heart.
But even so, if he had known his little girl was watching, he might have tried to control the look on his face: it was teaching Elektra to think a lot of dangerous things about ecstasy. He looked like he was biting into a sugar cookie. Like he was watching the finale of the greatest play. It was the happiest face she had ever seen. And his arm looked like a medical display of rotting flesh. He’s dying. He’s leaving me. And he’s glad!
She stifled a sob and fled the labyrinth.
Back in the big bright room, her grandfather patted her seat. “Are you OK, Elektra? Sit down.” She stared angrily at him, at his guilty arm, there under the blanket, thin and probably covered in bloody horrors. She realized she had never seen his arms; they were always covered in fancy but worn velvet pajama sleeves. “Hello? Young lady?”
“I’m here,” she said flatly, and flumped into her seat with her arms crossed. She was shaking, but she certainly didn’t want to talk to him about it. Her father blamed his father for all of his own misdeeds, and she was still young enough to believe him. If Dad was on drugs, then it was Grampa’s fault.
The second half of the play began as stiffly as any play the little girl had ever seen; she was old enough to wonder if everyone in the room was still thinking about the Government. As far as she knew, you were supposed to think about the Government as seldom as possible. She tried to apply that principle to the images of veins and abscesses that were now flooding her mind, but she couldn’t stop them; whenever she managed not to think about the Government she thought about infected veins, and whenever she managed not to think about veins, she saw the garbage-can GOs storming the stage. She blinked and tried to concentrate on Malavika’s lovely voice. Nope. She tried to guess how long it would be until her father appeared. He would do OK, wouldn’t he? From his arm, it looked like he did drugs all the time.
She had heard her father practicing the lines together with her grandfather, and she knew what was coming: Malavika would sing:
“Is this moon a sun? Or is that sun our moon?”
And then Bartleby would spin onstage and reply:
“My name is call'd Vincentio; my dwelling Heaven;
And bound I am to Earth; there to visit
A daughter fair, which long I have not seen.”
But at the end of his cue line, no Bartleby appeared onstage. The orchestra then stumbled into the next measure; Malavika grinned foolishly and marked time with her feet, pawing the ground, having forgotten her next line in the unaccustomed confusion. A few beats later, a foot finally appeared from the wings.
Most of the leg appeared next, but then the foot-leg unit froze midair, sticking out horizontally at waist height. The crowd could hear maniacal giggling in the wing, where the foot-owner’s head would presumably be, but Bartleby let things get very awkward, particularly for the musicians and Malavika, before the rest of him lurched onto the stage.
His pants were, for some reason, absent. His underwear was worn thin and grey.
“Dirty!” he croaked. “Rotten!” he elaborated, and then fell into a pile. He lay still for a moment, then poked his head up, looked around him suspiciously, and ran offstage. The crowd tittered with appreciative laughter; they had heard Bartleby Burgundy was going to have a spectacular showing tonight, but they didn’t realize it would be such an important role as Falstaff.
In the wings, he collapsed into a fetal position. The stage manager kicked him in annoyance. The director rolled his eyes. “Well, he’s done, then. Fucking mortals. This is why they’re always playing potted plants.”
In the crowd, Lemon Burgundy closed his eyes. “Oh, no,” he whispered. His querulous voice sounded sicker than ever; under the best of circumstances, his quaking rasp annoyed Elektra slightly, as though his weakness were exposing the young child to the thin edge of mortality, nagging at her to begin a lifetime of staring at its awful face. But now, his tone positively scared her. “He’s done it. It’s coming.”
“What is, Grandpa?” said Elektra, her breath stopping in her chest. His vagueness was more frightening than anything real he could have said.
He pointed at his wheelchair. “Lyfe.” He leaned toward her. “Don’t you ever touch that shit, young lady,” he hissed. “If I catch you high, I’ll beat you to within an inch of your life.”
Elektra shrugged, sticking her bottom jaw out. She tended to get beaten about that badly on a weekly basis anyway. What was the difference?
“I mean it!”
“OK, Grandpa,” she said insincerely. She owed her family more sullen irony than obedience, according to her internal calculus. Anyway, the gods looked happy when they did Lyfe. The mortals, too—till they got sick.
Was being sick some of the time as bad as being unhappy all of the time? It was too bad that you had to guess at the answer before you found out how bad the sickness was. Before you knew the values in the pain equation. Her family’s life wasn’t as terrible as some, but even at her tender age, she could imagine wanting an escape. The same way she wanted to watch Malavika. Mixing her imagination into the train of her fluffy pink dress, peering into somewhere you couldn’t quite enter, but you could feel it…
Lemon was thinking out loud: “He’ll be in jail for a while. At least overnight getting booked . . . then probably a year or two down in the Syd District, once they give him his kangaroo trial.” He looked over at his granddaughter, who appeared at once absent and sullen. “Looks like we’re going to have to learn to take care of each other for a little while, kid.”
Elektra looked up at him, trying not to grunt out loud. She had a pretty good idea of who would be taking care of whom.
“Shame he should go to jail. Your dad is such a holy innocent.” He shook his head. “Can’t believe he ever thought for a minute that your mother would stay with the two of you! You know, your dad wasn’t such a mess before you came along. Well, to be fair, before your mother came along. But taking care of a handful like you sure hasn’t been easy on him, you little shit.”
Elektra blinked numbly, smiling as though he had told a good joke. She had taught herself to disappear a little inside of herself, to contain the liquid in her eyes; when the adults were like this, tears were only blood in the water.
“Ahhh, I’m only joking. You could stand to be less of a little pain in the butt, though.”
“Ha ha! Oh, Grandpa.”
“So we had better get out of here before the rest of the theaters let out. And no, I’m not paying for a damn carriage! I don’t know how we’re going to pay for anything from here on out. So you might as well learn to push my chair right now. Get around behind me—can you reach the handles? Well, I told your father you should have the high-heeled shoes so you can learn to be a little more useful…”
Elektra sighed and made her body do the things he wanted. He was a nice old man sometimes, and he did take her to the theater when her father said no.
Suddenly her eyes lit up: Her father wasn’t going to be around to say no for a whole year! She straightened and steered the old man’s chair toward the exit with a vigor sudden enough to frighten him.
After they nearly mowed down a crowd of deathless juveniles shooting up in the foyer, Elektra pushed the wheelchair into the cobblestone street, panting with effort and fear and freedom and joy. As the theater emptied, the street filled with the Gods’ carriages. They were drawn by teams of sweet, native, rodent-like creatures the size of ponies.
Guinea horses, as these animals were called, were normally a delight to the child. They had appealing faces and a gentle, patient nature. But they weren’t terrific at quick maneuvers, and nor was she. The curb was too high for the girl to push the heavy chair up onto the tiny sidewalk, so she clung to the side of the street, wading in guinea droppings and smashed bits of beer bottle. A shard of glass poked up into her shoe and grazed the arch of her foot; she could feel her sock go damp with blood. It also dampened her mood. But she kept quiet, grimly rolling toward home. She wanted to ask her grandfather for hippobus fare, but decided the argument wasn’t worth it.
Thankfully, the carriages were slow. Motorized vehicles were owned only by the Government. The denizens of Heaven hadn’t gotten quite so lazy as to forget how to put together a steam engine—yet—but fuel extraction technologies had slid back to about where they’d been in 1850, so most of the juice went to shuttling Lyfe up from the mining planet. Maintaining youth and health was more important than speeding across a small moon; the inhabitable quarter of the globe could be crossed in a couple of days by carriage anyway. Animal power also made it far safer for small and ill-nourished girls to push their sick and raving relations down a main thoroughfare.
“I tell, you, girl, if you touch that stuff, you’ll be beaten! Beaten!” the old man kept saying. You could tell how badly he needed a dose of Lyfe by how bitterly he ranted about Lyfe.
“You’re welcome, Grandpa,” Elektra said. “We’ll be home soon. Faster if you stop shouting.”
“Why, you little…”
A Goddess, in a carriage whose driver was attempting to swerve around them, heard this and covered her giggling mouth with a white glove. The glove looked eerie in the evening light, disembodied, floating up to a powdered, oval face on the darkness inside the carriage. To Elektra the woman’s laughing mouth looked evil and strange. But it was a pleasurable, dramatic evil and strangeness, a lingering effect of being immersed in the play; Elektra’s eyes lit up again.
The drug of art can crystalize misery into something exalted.
She would always remember thinking this that night. She glanced up at the theater marquees lining the thoroughfare and smiled. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad evening, all things considered.
“It’s sick and dirty,” Lemon Burgundy continued. “Dirty and sick and bad. I can tell you’re thinking about it! DIRTY!”
Elektra glared down at his gnarled form. If Lyfe was sick and wrong, then what was a crippled old junkie? Ah, well; she was becoming numb to the hypocrisy of grown-ups, or at least cagey enough to not mention it. And what did it matter? She was pushing his stupid heavy wheelchair, she was hungry, and her handsome, talented father was being sent away; even the latter seemed too abstract to worry about. She could hear the spongy squish of blood about her toes.
“And your father is right!” he was ranting. “Stay out of the theater! Make something of yourself! Work in a laundry!” OK, that was too much for a small child to be philosophical about. How could he say such things with a straight face? She was too young to understand that experience is a more violent teacher than an old hypocrite. Or that people bitterly disagree with their past selves.
“Yes, grandfather,” she said. Under her breath, she added: Me and the theater will get along just fine. Not my fault you couldn’t handle it. Weak old no-talent. Mortal trash.
She was going to do better. No matter what. She limped angrily toward home.
Lemon Burgundy looked at the set of her jaw and smiled:
Wheelchair Lemon might disagree with Young and Hopeful Lemon, but he had not vanquished him.