Nike screamed. The corpse flopped onto its side but otherwise did not move. Its flabby white limbs sprawled across the grates. Its head faced Nike; its eyes remained open, staring blindly at her. A tiny pink delta of flesh, like a kitten’s tongue, protruded from one corner of its mouth. Nike turned and fled, shouting at a startled biotech in the hallway to seal the laboratory until she gave further orders. It was not until she reached the Seraphim’s gravator that she stopped, panting, and tipped the contents of a morpha tube between her trembling lips.
Originally, the Lahatiel Gate was to serve in emergencies only. In the event of holocaust or direct attack by the Commonwealth, the entire population of Araboth could be funneled through the immense steel mouth and evacuated onto the shore outside. An intricate system of gravators fed onto the eastern rim of Archangels where the Gate loomed, arching up and up into the darkness, its ribs and spikes entwined with bas-relief images of ancient janissaries and war machinery, flames and floodwaters, and above all of it the Ascendants’ motto picked out in letters of bronze and jet. When the Gate was open, one could see immediately outside of it a sweeping promenade that led down to the beach, copper pilasters and brazen steps long since tarnished to a moldering green and swept with sand. The sand itself was a different color here than that just a few yards away—dark, almost blackish. It always felt damp, and stained one’s bare feet a rusty color, and it did not glitter in the sun as the sand did elsewhere. It might have been as the moujiks said, that the earth could not swallow so much blood.
From where she stood on the Orsinate’s viewing platform, Âziz would in a few hours be able to look through that gate and down those sweeping steps to the beach, to the pale turquoise water swelling beyond. She would never have admitted it to her sisters or brother, but sometimes she wished she just could open the Gate and gaze out at that calm expanse of white and green and gold. It was a terrible weakness on her part, Âziz knew that. It distracted her, kept her from focusing on the business of ruling the city and dispatching the Aviators on their endless missions against the Balkhash Commonwealth and the Håbilis Emirate. Instead, over the years she had grown increasingly obsessed with her climatic chambers, the engines and programs that allowed her to create rain within the Four Hundredth Room, snow and sleet and even, by means of a series of brilliant lamps, a modest simulation of sunlight. And it was this obsession that had become the chink in her consciousness whereby the dream of the Green Country had burrowed, to haunt her restive nights and now stalk her even during Araboth’s false daylight.
She thought of all of these things as she watched the moujik crews finish polishing the Lahatiel Gate’s elaborate finials and hydrolically charged hinges. In a few hours they would gather here, all the levels of Araboth. As she was each Æstival Tide, she would be struck by how few of them there were, really. Perhaps ten thousand living humans in a city that had been designed to hold a million. And how many of that ten thousand were moujiks, tainted blood? Or sterile marabous like the morphodites? Add another thousand or so rasas , and the more intelligent of the geneslaves, and it still was not enough of a population to warrant the effort and energy expended by the Architects to maintain the Quincunx Domes.
Not to mention the energies of the woman who ruled it. Âziz drew one cool white hand across her brow, and sighed. Each year there were the usual complaints from the cabinets, overeducated anthropologists and demographers who claimed the hecatombs of Æstival Tide were no longer justified. What had begun in the years following the Third Shining as a method of population control, combining elements of both circus and sacristy, had over the centuries degenerated into the timoria, the Feast of Fear. Even with the rasas toiling in the infernal flames and darkness of the refineries, there was scarcely enough of a human work force left to perform those services that were beyond the nearly omniscient powers of the Architects. And so learned persons suggested that it would be better for the city, Better For The People, if the feast was annulled, or its nature altered. There was even talk of doing away with the Redeemer—its terrible appetite could scarcely afford to be whetted on those rare occasions when it was roused from its nearly endless slumber. It was a grotesque pet, really, nothing more; the margravines themselves loathed it and always had, but it belonged to the Orsinate, had been their charge through the centuries like the city itself, and Âziz could not truly imagine destroying it, no more than she could imagine a ten-year cycle without its Æstival Tide.
Because the Feast of Fear was more than an occasion for mere torment and bloodshed, sacral madness and terror. Without the overwhelming anxieties engendered by this brief glimpse of the world Outside, combined with the threat of the Compassionate Redeemer, what was there to keep the people of Araboth from rioting, even from attempting to flee the domes? The Orsinate had very carefully created the machinery of superstition and sacrifice, twisted scientific faith and religious belief in their powers to rule the city. They knew that the Architects were the true powers behind Araboth. Without them the air processors would fail. The tiny but deadly storms that sometimes erupted in the uppermost reaches of the domes would not be dispersed; the water filters would rust and decay. The surgical interventions that provided safe if unnatural childbirth and the rasas’ morbid nativities would become impossible. The Redeemer in its carefully monitored hibernation would wake and sing its demented aria; the geneslaves would turn upon their creators. And finally the domes themselves would crumble and collapse, exposing the city’s vulnerable heart to the firestorms and viral rains that raged Outside.
It was unthinkable, of course. Since the First Ascension there had been how many celebrations—forty? forty-three?—a small number, really. If each feast had been an individual, why there would scarcely be enough of them to fill a room! But they were precious individuals, like the margravines themselves, and their fates were not to be decided by monkish social scientists and religious fanatics.
Âziz gripped the edge of the balustrade in front of her. Far below the viewing platform she could sense a rumbling, not another tremor but the Redeemer turning in its waning sleep. Already the smell of singed roses sweetened the medifac’s noisome air, and Âziz fought the urge to go down to the creature’s cell. Soon enough, soon enough its scent would change, when, hunger appeased at last, it crept back into its cell, and the odor of burning roses faded into that of lilies (said to be the favorite of the Ascendant who had created the monster).
But Âziz’s concerns were not with the Redeemer. She was thinking of what Sajur Panggang had said before he died: that he had programmed the destruction of the city. That, like their Imperator, the Architects had at last turned against the Orsinate; and—like his—that betrayal would be their last.
It did not seem possible. For nearly five centuries the city had stood, impervious to the buffets of gales and waves Outside. Why, not even a drop of rain had ever made its way beneath the Quincunx Domes—
Though it seemed perhaps that was to change. From the floor far beneath her echoed the crash of something falling. A moujik cried out; the viewing balcony shook, and flakes of metal drifted past her. In the uneven light spilling from lanterns high overhead the flakes looked green. They fell in a slow unbroken rain upon Âziz’s head.
Sudden tears seared the margravine’s eyes. She bowed, pressed her head against her hands. It could happen, of course. Sajur was certainly dead, and frightful events had shaken them all in the last few days. There were precedents for this sort of thing— Pompeii choked by Vesuvius, Hiroshima a cindery shadow against the distant mountains, San Francisco swallowed by the no-longer pacific ocean. Cries echoed from far below her, and she clutched the balustrade as it swung, as beneath her feet the flooring whipped as though it were a carpet being shaken. After a moment it subsided, only to tremble again; and at this Âziz wept.