“Beatification is open to anyone,” she reminds you. “Anyone who can pay a Surgeon’s fees.”
She looks at the Clatterpox Flux again, and he seems to smile, though his iron jaw will not permit such an action.
“You did this for him…” you say it for her, accepting the preposterousness of it. “You wish to Beatify him…so you two can be together.”
“You are wise, Honore,” she says.
“It is…abominable,” you say.
“According to whom?” she asks. “Once Flux’s living brain rests inside a Beatific body, he will be no different than you or I. We really cannot thank you enough, Sir Honore.”
She turns to walk away with her Clatterpox lover and your stolen brilliants, and you want to say something. A last comment or condemnation…but your mind is blank. You squeeze the brass key in your hand, taking comfort from its firmness.
The Doxie’s head erupts like a burst lantern. A shower of porcelain shards, silver fragments, and brain tissue assaults your waistcoat and shirt. The Clatterpox drops the chest and it cracks open, spilling brilliants across the muddy ground.
You stand there numb, paralyzed by shock and confusion, as the black-coated gendarmes rush into the plaza, leaping from walls and gates. Bone-divers scamper from their illegal habitations and climb the walls like pale spiders. The gendarmes carry pistols and rifles, one of which has ended the Doxie’s life.
The enforcers turn their clustered opticals toward the Clatterpox. The rusted monstrosity falls to its knees before the dead Doxie, cradling her headless corpse. Inside the open hollow of her neck, gears and springs pop and grind into stillness. The Clatterpox pulls something from his side…a key that he inserts between her sculpted breasts. The gendarmes believe it a weapon and begin firing. You leap to the ground to avoid the hail of bullets. Lying there, so close to the Doxie and her lover, you watch him turning her heart-key, trying to restart her life. But her head is ruined, her brain — the center of all life functions — spread across the ground, a litter of shredded blue flesh. Yet why is there is no blood or cranial fluid? Her Beatific brain wasn’t alive at all. The organ was dried…congealed…preserved.
Is every Beatific brain like hers — nothing but dead, decayed flesh?
The implications of this question run through your mind yet refuse to take root.
The gendarmes’ bullets bounce off the Clatterpox’s iron body, or create holes like ruptured pustules. He turns the heart-key again and again, heedless of their assault. Eventually, they stop shooting and approach him on foot. The vapors from his vents and exhaust pipes flow black and heavy now. They tear him away from the Doxie’s corpse and secure his arms with titanium shackles.
You start to rise, but two tall gendarmes lift you sharply to your feet. One of them stares at you with his cluster of opticals, nine blue-green lenses bright with the caress of dawn.
“Sir René Honore?” the gendarme asks through some mouth aperture hidden below his high collar.
You nod, still too stunned to speak.
“By order of the Tribune, you are under arrest.”
“What? I have done nothing. I was blackmailed…”
“We understand,” says the gendarme, his anterior opticals already scouring the rest of the plaza. “To blackmail a Beatific is a High Crime. As is the paying of any funds to blackmailers. You broke the law. You will face justice.”
You watch as they gather up the body and assorted remains of the Doxie and cast her into the Well of Bones. You know she will fall for several minutes before she reaches the bottom. There she will lie among the antediluvian bones, until perhaps some bone-diver gathers up her parts to sell as scrap. All that is left of her are the shards of an exquisite face, a few slivers of porcelain lying in the mud.
The Clatterpox Flux wheezes and coughs as they drag him away.
The gendarmes leave the brilliants lying trampled in the muck. Mere bits of colored glass beneath their notice.
You remember what the elder stone face said about the jewels, and you laugh as they lead you out of the plaza and into the rust.
You’re still laughing when they haul you before the veiled Tribune on his high bench, and later when they drag you across the stone bridge and deep beneath the walls of the crumbling palace. In the endless dark of the labyrinth, your laughter draws nameless things closer.
Soon you will join your ancestors on the wall of the sunken vault.
A laughing face of stone.
Flesh of the City, Bones of the World
The Surgeon’s hands are his most delicate instruments.
From the slim silver bones of the ten fingers to the minute arrays of gears, cogs, and springs set for agility and precision, to the pale elastic skin that stretches over the whole array, his hands are marvels of science. The rest of his body is no less amazing, no less detailed in its construction, a silver skeletal scaffold filled with organs of bronze and copper sheathed in that same supple skin without blotch or blemish.
His patients take these things for granted, ignorant of the miracles of design that sustain their existence. But he is a Surgeon and he knows the secrets of human biology as intimately as he knows the body and mind of his own wife.
While prepping for the operation, he recalls her silver skull laid bare and glimmering as she removed the demure porcelain mask that is her public face. The memory is from last night. They had danced in the courtyard of glass sculptures, baring body and soul beneath a canopy of stars. Tonight they will celebrate the return of their son from five years at the Ministère de Education. In a few days the boy will enter this chamber and at last become a man.
The Surgeon’s opticals blink and he returns to the present as his attendants wheel a youth into the Conversion Room. The Surgeon turns his porcelain visage to greet the nervous patient. It is the face he always wears for operations: lean and handsome with a strong chin and wide, warm smile. It was painted by one of the Urbille’s finest maskers.
“Are you nervous?” he asks the young man. Fifteen years old, just like his own son. So much like Alain that it frightens the Surgeon, though he doesn’t know why it should.
The youth nods, tears flowing from his soft opticals. He is a weak thing of flesh and blood, hair and bone…an outdated Organic construct. It is almost a miracle he has survived fifteen years in the Urbille…a miracle that any youth survives so long. The flesh is so vulnerable, so prone to injury, disease, and entropy.
“Will it hurt?” the youth asks.
“No,” says the Surgeon. “You will never hurt again. No pain, no bleeding…no hunger, no sickness. Won’t that be wonderful?”
The youth nods and trembles. They are always this way before Conversion.
“Relax,” he tells the boy. “It will soon be over, and your new life will begin.”
The Attendant administers a sedative and after a few moments the Surgeon begins his work. Fluorescent lights gleam blue-white as he makes his incision at the center of the forehead then carves his way about the cranium with a scalpel of sterilized steel. He peels back the shaven skin that covers the dome of the skull. Now the bone-saw, following the same track as the scalpel.
He removes cranial roof and the living brain glistens before him, a thing of beauty. A marvel that exceeds even the finest mechanisms of scientific design. Here lies the secret to immortality, creativity, humanity…the fleshy bottle that contains the very Soul of Man. He applies the topical solution and speaks the Incantation of Transferral, pronouncing each syllable with ingrained accuracy as he removes the brain from its bisected shell. He smoothly clips free the Organic opticals and carries the brain to a second table. There lies the youth’s new body: a perfect example of Beatific aesthetics, a collection of ingenious machinery wrapped in a smooth elastic sheathe exactly like his own. The silver skull wears no porcelain face yet…the youth will choose one when he awakes.