Several of these faces turned to stare at Reive as she entered the hall.
“You heard that?” one called, her voice high and childish.
“We heard it,” Reive admitted. “You did too?”
“We all did,” Drusilla, the other gynander replied. She stood in a small knot of six or seven, some in kimonos, one half-dressed in scarves and thin gold-colored chains. Two of them, like Reive herself, were naked except for filmy pantaloons and wore no cosmetics. She stepped gingerly from her doorway and tiptoed down the hall to join them.
“What was it?”
“We don’t know, Numatina said a bomb—”
“!”
“—but Charlless said it is the storms—”
“That’s what we thought,” Reive murmured triumphantly.
“There was another last night on Cherubim! The domes moved, we saw the walls shake—”
“Well, we think it is Ucalegon,” Drusilla finished, her lips tight. The others whispered urgently, crossing their hands across their small bud-breasts. The ones who wore no makeup looked alike: white, heart-shaped faces with almond eyes, thin mouths and high rounded cheekbones. All had the same spare build, the same black hair, the same fluting voices; the same tiny breasts and the same small bulge between their legs where they hid their twin sexes. If you were to scrub their faces clean and line them up in a room, it would be difficult to tell any difference between them at all. That was the curse of their common origins within the crucibles of Dominations.
But the hermaphrodites were too vain to spend their short lives being mistaken for each other. Thus their reliance on colored kohl wands and pots of red and silver rouge, their pride in a finely drawn mouth or eye, and also their dislike of Reive.
The first gynander gazed at Reive through slitted eyes. Drusilla had already painted herself, the periwinkle powder deepening to lavender where she had highlighted her cheekbones, her eyes drawn into elaborate wings with a stippling of scarlet dots beneath them, a full scarlet mouth pouting over her narrow lips.
“We heard you were dead, Reive,” she pronounced.
“We heard that too,” another gynander chimed in. Over her pale blue mask she had drawn a series of stark curves in black, outlining her eyes and mouth. “We heard your patron killed you.”
Reive drew herself up stiffly. She was taller than the other gynanders, and without makeup she looked different from them too—her face sharper, almost copper-colored where theirs were milk-white; her hair black but thin where the others had thick curling plaits; her eyes round and, worst of all, the forbidden color, where the others’ were black. She stared coldly at Drusilla.
“We are alive. We have a new patron,” she lied, “an aristocrat troubled by nightmares. A member of the Reception Committee,” she added grandly, and glanced to see if the others looked frightened.
“Oooh, Reive,” whispered a pallid creature shivering in a thin kimono. “Really, Reive?”
“You liar,” Drusilla spat; but Reive only tossed her hair.
“We must go to meet her now,” she said airily, and turned and walked back to her chambers, ignoring the whispers behind her.
“Ucalegon will take you,” Drusilla hissed, and as Reive slammed her door she heard the others giggling.
“Damn,” she muttered. She kicked her cosmetic box, sending it spinning across the floor. When she heard it crack against the wall she swore again, more loudly, then got onto her knees and gathered up the kohl wands and little tubes of rouge and mascara and powder. She settled on the floor, balancing a small broken triangle of mirror on her knees, and began to paint her face.
When she was finished a simple mask peered at her from the shard of mirror, her cheeks a pale copper, her mouth demurely small and golden, her eyebrows raised to give her a look of innocent surprise. Reive drew the mirror up to her face and tilted her head so that her eyes caught the dim blue light. For years she had planned to get tinted lenses to disguise the true color of her eyes. But there was always something else to buy with her meager earnings, decent food for one thing, anything besides krill paste; and of course she always needed more kohl and opium sugar, though fortunately she wasn’t as dependent on that as some. And, she had to admit, green was an unusual color, forbidden or not; and sometimes patrons liked that. Although now it seemed they wouldn’t like anything to do with Reive.
The gynander sighed and shook her head, her long uneven black plaits flying. She stood and rummaged under the bedcovers until she found a new pair of orange pantaloons of pleated false silk. She pulled them out, smoothing the fabric through which the outline of her penis could barely be seen, a small shadow against one pale thigh. Three thin rings of steel and rubicore pierced each of her nipples, and she wore a tiny pouch slung around her narrow waist. Last of all, she sat cross-legged on the floor and carefully drew two wards, one upon each tiny breast: the ward against Ucalegon, the Prince of Storms, and the one against Baratdaja, the Healing Wind.
Before she left she flopped onto her bed and leaned down to peer at the glass globe. The mysid floated tranquilly, hardly moving even when she gently prodded it with a finger.
“Goodbye, Gato,” she whispered. “We’re leaving now.”
She went out shirtless, shivering a little in the hallway. She was relieved to see that the others had gone, no doubt to gossip about her in Drusilla’s chambers. For a minute she leaned against the wall, deciding where to go. It was too early to look for inquisitors. She didn’t want to seem desperate. Fortunes changed with mercurial speed in Araboth, especially among hermaphrodites and the Orsinate’s pleasure cabinet. By evening she might find herself with a new patron, a new chamber on a higher level. Abruptly she turned and headed down the corridor toward the Virtues Level gravator. It was two hours at least until patrons would start filling the corridors, looking for dream-mantics. For now she would slip up to the vivarium and visit Zalophus.
“Ceryl! Is that you?”
Ceryl started, hastily wiped the tears from her face. From around the curve of the avenue an aardman stalked toward the rickshaw, carrying a small woman in a long, pleated white skirt, a fez perched unsteadily on her head. Tatsun Frizer, a taster in the Toxins Cabal and like Ceryl a member of the Orsinate’s pleasure cabinet. She wore absurdly ornamented yellow vinyl shoes that curled under so that she could not walk in them. In her arms she cradled a puppet, one of the newly fashionable and more odious geneslaves designed by the legendary puppeteer, Rudyard Planck. It licked its thin gray lips and glared at Ceryl with swinish red-rimmed eyes.
“Don’t stop,” it hissed loudly into Tatsun’s ear. Rudyard Planck despised the Orsinate. He had mocked them first with a series of bioengineered urangutangs that strutted about imperiously and, when asked their names, grunted “Âziz,” or “Nike” or “Shiyung” in reply. Then there had been an argala, a sexslave with Shiyung’s delicate features that bellowed like a man during coition. And now these hideous puppets, all of them possessing Âziz Orsina’s nasal voice. It was one of the imponderables of Araboth that Planck’s escalating burlesques of the ruling family had only earned him their favor.
“Go on, baggage. Eat spit. Faaugh.” The puppet drooled and gibbered at Ceryl until she had to look away. Tatsun gently cuffed the puppet’s hairless skull and commanded the aardman to halt.