Ymir, page 27
“Yorick.” No holo, just her disembodied voice. “What the fuck are you doing on my lake?”
This time his mandible manages an electric whisper. “Fat-hunting,” he says.
“I doubt that very much,” Gausta says. “And I remind you that your freighter launches in a shade under six hours.” She pauses. “Come in, then.”
The drone crabs closer. The heat of its motor trickles life back into his muscles. One last push, and he will be warm. He forces himself upright, and when he does he sees the grendel’s detached limb lying in the snow.
It remembers the plan. Yorick tucks it under his armpit and staggers after the drone. He sees a slink of steam and light, then the hidden door opens all the way, carving through the dark. He imagines a bonfire on the other side, grotesques dancing all around.
“I have so much love to give,” Yorick says, and the grendel’s arm twitches.
He steps inside.
CHAPTER 82
The antechamber warms him in stages, cautious of shock. Yorick suspects it’s scanning for weapons at the same time. He peels away his frost-rimed thermal gear, then stands vitruvian while one medroid checks his darkened fingers for tissue damage, another massages his chest with its rubbery cilia. Neither of them know what to do with the grendel limb. It lies on the floor, perfectly still, caked in a layer of frost.
“Came all this way to thank me for the parting gift, did you?” Gausta asks.
Yorick pinches his fingertips together one at a time, waiting for the pins and needles to stop. “I remembered I don’t like objects,” he says. “You should have it. Put it on your wall or something.”
One of the medroids inspects the limb, then spraybags it. The one on his chest readies a microneedle kiss. Yorick shakes it off before Gausta can check his bloodwork.
“I have to assume you’ve been imbibing,” she says. “The usual ritual of drink and drug and descent. Stealing tomorrow’s happiness.”
There won’t be a tomorrow. Yorick knows that in his bones. But the medroids let him scoop up the grendel’s frozen limb and cradle it as the second door folds open. Warm air gushes out. Temperature swing prickles his skin, squeezes his bladder. His olfactories taste rotting and flowering, death and birth, pungent smells that don’t belong to Ymir.
He follows the droids into a nocturnal jungle. The corridor is swathed in vines, or maybe composed of them. Branches twist overhead, gnarled fingers interlocked, and the floor is soft springy dirt. An insect with glowing violet wings flits through the humid gloom. He wonders how much is real, grown from modded geneprints, nursed by hydroponics, and how much is artificial.
Maybe half and half, like his rebuilt face.
A snatch of children’s laughter comes from the end of the corridor, incongruous in a way that pebbles his skin. He steps into a room with a starry holo for a ceiling. He sees small dark bodies moving between the trees. Their bare feet make no sound—avatars, then, a little family of holos. His cold-bruised brain tells him one must be Thello.
Gausta’s avatar is waiting up ahead, arms folded, blinking her reflective silver eyes. “Good morning, Yorick,” she says, in a voice that’s strangely muffled, strangely textured. “Welcome to a small slice of old memories.”
She digs gound from the corner of her eye, and Yorick realizes, with a start, that she has body heat, a smell. She occupies air.
“It’s modeled after a forest on Anubis,” Gausta continues. “A cloudy valley, near the amoebic sea, where I was born.” She plucks at a frond over her shoulder. “I grew up in less than idyllic circumstances—we have that in common—but the flora still makes for a pleasant backdrop. More pleasant than this endless fucking blizzard.”
“Never been to Anubis,” Yorick says.
“No grendels were ever found there.” Gausta waves her hand; spindly chairs and a table flex up from the floor. “All the monsters on Anubis were human, as is so often the case. The company had its work cut out for it. Subjugation was long.” She grins her wolfish grin. “But in the end they saved Anubis from devouring itself.”
There are blue stains on her perfect teeth. It gives him a reflexive shiver, a cellular craving. Gausta’s been amusing herself while she waits out the storm. For a moment all Yorick wants to do is find the doxy. Instead he picks a chair and sits, gripping the grendel’s limb more tightly.
Gausta sits down across from him. One of the children, the holos, darts by. He sees the face this time. Swirled skin, silver eyes. Gausta’s face. It’s too gaunt and aged for the body; the holorig only made a perfunctory attempt to neotenize her features.
“Me,” Gausta agrees, tracking his gaze. “And the playmates I made for her. A simulated alternative to the misery she endured during the famine years.” She smiles eyelessly. “You understand, don’t you, Yorick? We accumulate the deep wounds when our bodies are small. The ones that come after are only extensions and variations.”
Yorick traces Fen’s fingerprints on his neck, then moves higher, to the gelflesh where his wound meets the mandible. “You know why I’m here, then.”
“I know you must have slipped my drones in the Cut and stolen a skid,” Gausta says. “I suspect you drove it to the temporary interrogation site, only to be informed that your brother was no longer being held there, at which point you traversed the storm to—”
“I came here to put Thello’s head under the saw.”
Gausta straightens in her chair.
“He takes my jaw, I take everything below it,” Yorick says, his heart pumping acid now, burning through him. “I want him to watch. I want him to know.”
Gausta’s head tilts. “Is that so.”
“It’s the only way to end things,” Yorick says. “The only way that makes sense.”
Gausta leans back and the chair reads her body language, starts massaging her sharp shoulders. She swats it still. “The biotank will suit Thello,” she says. “He always was a parasite. Even when the pair of you were children, he was the weak thing hanging off you. Dragging you down. Hiding behind you, right up until he slipped the metaphorical graft-knife into your back.”
Yorick touches his mandible, keeping his strong hand where Gausta can watch it. His other hand works slowly at the spraybag, clawing through the membrane. He told the grendel about graft-knives while they were in the skid. It remembered the one he tried to use in the bubblefab.
“I want you to end this miserable cycle, Yorick,” Gausta says. “I truly do. But I’m afraid I can’t grant your request.”
Yorick’s heart pounds. He slips his hidden hand inside the spraybag and feels the grendel’s limb respond, cold tendrils unfurling. “Why not?” he rasps.
She doesn’t answer, but he follows the angle of her chin and sees one of the medroids has followed him inside. He sees the distended curve of its underbelly. Bile rushes up his throat. Too late. Always too late, and time can’t run in reverse.
“I did him in the flyer,” Gausta says. “For efficiency’s sake. The company conducts all interrogations in sims now, so there’s really no need to keep the body.”
The medroid pads over. Gausta gropes underneath it for a manual release. The trigger depresses with a soft click, and a translucent pink nutrient sac slides out. Thello’s head hits the floor, with a sound like a meaty palm slapping a wet bartop, and rolls slightly.
CHAPTER 83
Every part of Yorick seems to scream at once, mirror neuron anguish at seeing his brother bodiless. His thawed hands go numb again. His heart stops, stutters. The grendel limb has wrapped around his arm now, hidden down by his knee. Filaments are hooking into his skin. It gives a questioning pulse.
“You’re lying to me, Yorick,” Gausta says. “I can see it on what Thello left you of your face.” She shakes her head. “You came here to ask for clemency. Again. Twenty years later, and we’re taking the same roles in the same tired holoplay.”
Yorick has forgotten the plan. He doesn’t know if the rest of the grendel has taken Gausta’s house sensors yet, seized her security. All he knows is fury, boiling in every cell of his body, and fear, chasing ice through after it. Thello should be in a biotank by now. He needs to be hooked to an organoid, a neural construct, before his synapses start to collapse.
The grendel’s ready, enveloping his hand like a biomechanical cestus. Yorick clenches his fist inside. Uses his other to mime a needlegun in the air beside his head, to draw Gausta’s eyes. “That never happened,” he says. “You lied to me in the clinic. Thello didn’t pull the trigger.”
Her forehead creases. “I never needed to lie. You built your own delusions.”
Yorick remembers the conversations in the clinic, the hours spent bobbing through a phedrine sea. He remembers the therapy algorithms, the soft questions, the mantra, all the things he thought were aids for the psychotrauma of severe injury.
“The needlegun’s trigger was genelocked, Yorick,” Gausta says. “All company firearms are genelocked.” Her silver eyes are soft now. Her voice is layered with pity. “You know that in every part of your mind but one.”
“You let me think it,” he says. “You let me hate him for years and years.”
“The algorithm decided that was for the best,” Gausta says. “Your attempt on your life was judged to be contextual. You remained an effective employee.”
Yorick hurls his fist. The grendel’s limb splits and scissors for her neck; Gausta’s silver eyes go wide. Its sharp spines stop a quivering millimeter from her skin. Confusion becomes rage becomes something else, an expression Yorick has never seen on Gausta’s marbled face but recognizes from a dozen others. She is afraid to die.
The children stop playing. They stare, their luminous eyes solemn and unblinking.
“Don’t move,” Yorick says.
“I see your feelings toward this grendel have changed.” Gausta looks down at the cracked lava, the blended flesh and xenocarbon, melded to his arm. “Did that happen in the cave? When it sodomized your eye socket?”
“Don’t move,” Yorick repeats. “Or there’s going to be a spectacular rendering of flesh.”
Gausta’s eyes narrow. Her throat shudders, maybe sending subvocal orders to her house security. If the rest of the grendel has done its work, she’ll get nothing but static back. He crouches, clumsily, to grab hold of the nutrient sac. The grendel’s limb spindles out to keep contact with Gausta.
Yorick feels the shape of his brother’s skull with his hand. Maybe there was a recycler in the flyer, or maybe they jettisoned the body somewhere over the ice, for the blizzard to swallow whole. But he’s still alive. He’s still alive, and once the rest of the grendel is here they will put him in a biotank, and—
Gausta moves. She falls away from the stretched tendril and her swinging leg catches Yorick in the thigh. Meat crunches meat. His leg buckles under him. The grendel’s limb whips forward on its own, but it’s sluggish so far away from its reactor and Gausta’s nerves are wired. She’s gone, twisting in the air, and when she comes back around her hand is glinting with razors.
Yorick has the pain-thick thought that she’s a grendel herself, that she’s grown serrations, as she closes the gap. He ducks, drives an elbow into her on the way by, but he can’t take his hand off Thello’s nutrient sac. She whirls, and the next kick sends blood spraying from his thigh. There are blades on her feet, too. She always did like to watch the jigs. Yorick can’t feel the grendel’s limb so he uses his own, feints—overreaches.
She swats his arm. Pins it. He feels her knee coming up for his ribs; he twists to protect the incision, takes it on his hip instead. Bone rattles bone. Gausta flits past him. He cranes his neck, trying to track. A callused heel crunches down on his foot, and when he jerks away from the pain he opens himself. She plants her razor hand in his belly.
He sees a burst of seething purple behind his eyeballs as his repaired abdomen explodes back open. The pain incinerates his whole body.
Then, mercifully, he dies. Yorick feels himself gliding through the dark, disconnected from the agony in his nerve endings. The jig is over. Fen would have done better. Now he is skimming across the ice, flying toward the warm welcoming tunnel that will take him to the underworld.
Death only lasts a moment. Gausta doesn’t talk, but he hears her moving. Breathing. Switching a gun to manual, because she saw the cave raid. The familiar click-clack echoes in his skull. He feels the grendel, or the node of the grendel that agreed to be his graft-knife, abandon him. Its filaments tug and release, delicate as spiderwebs. It squirms down his arm.
The needlegun goes off in Yorick’s ear. He feels it like a furious swarm, pictures it enveloping the grendel’s weakened limb in a cloud of fléchettes. Clods of dirt and chunks of xenocarbon rain down, then rise again as she fires a second time. A third. The holo of the night sky is tranquil overhead, stars winking in the firmament.
Yorick crawls one hand to his abdomen, where the real flesh and gelflesh have split and blood is pumping out of him. He reaches for the nutrient sac with the other. His fingers find a cheekbone under squelching pink fluid.
Gausta wrenches the sac out of his grip. She stands over him, eyes burning, skin smeared in dark blood that must be his. Yorick sees their audience in his peripheral. The children have come to watch, some crouching, some standing, all silent.
“You’re the reason my camp is unresponsive, then,” she says. “Not the blizzard.” She shakes her head. “All this for him. It’s wasteful. It’s fucking wasteful.” Her voice is shaking, scalding. “Your choice of ally is fitting, at least. A brutish machine mind that turned on its creators. Where’s the rest of it, Yorick?”
Yorick doesn’t know, but he opens his mouth to lie. To tell her anything she wants.
She lobs the nutrient sac away from herself, raises the needlegun, and blows it apart. Blood and amniotic fluid bloom against the starry sky. One of the children claps her hands in delight.
Yorick’s scream is a droid-thing, inhuman. He struggles up off the ground; Gausta hooks his leg and sends him back down. When he tries again she digs her heel into his ruptured wound and grinds deep. Her throat is still quivering, sending subvocals. She is in multiple places, trying to reach her avatars, but it doesn’t matter.
The jig is over, so the gasoline scorching through his veins is meaningless. The anger is vestigial. Performative. An inevitable reflex.
A child laughs in the gap between two trees.
“Where’s the grendel?” Gausta demands, maybe to him, maybe to her house. “Where are the prisoners from the camp?”
To him, then. He still can’t answer. His tongue feels fused to his mandible, a single useless lump of machinery embedded in his flesh.
“It wasn’t him,” Gausta says, impatient. “I have multiple guests in interrogation. That one was a sealie woman from Sants.” She stalks to a particular spot and digs down into the floor, uncovering a metal lever. “This pathology of yours is saddening to me, Yorick. Increasingly so.”
Yorick’s breath is hooked in his lungs. He searches the ground and glistening shrubs, trying to distinguish the viscera and bone shards. The children are back to their games. Before he can find even a shred of skin to confirm or condemn, Gausta hauls the lever. The stars blink out. The children dissolve. The omnipresent hum of electronics cuts away.
Nothing for the grendel to hack and jack.
“We’ll break you of it,” she says. “While we wait out your grendel. The blizzard won’t last forever. The algorithm will see what’s happened.” Her luminous eyes dart through the dark. “They’ll requisition soldiers from the ansible,” she says. “And send a fresh squad from the garrison. Perhaps two.” Her voice is distant. “I’m a very valuable employee.”
Yorick’s head is still shattered, caught between truths and lies, when she opens a hatch in the mossy wall and hauls him over to it. She uses her foot to push him down the stairs.
CHAPTER 84
One flight, not seven, but more painful than any descent he made in Southern Urbanite Memory, and long enough for him to catalog his errors. Long enough for him to see how dumbsick he was to let Gausta distract him, to think she was only a voyeur now and not a soldier. He should have used the grendel’s spiny jaws to at least break her legs.
Now, his fall finally over, his body curled fetal at the concrete base of the stairs, it feels like he has broken everything. All his bones ache. His sliced-open stomach has become a gaping mouth. His bruised neurons flash a jumble of images: he crests a snow dune, a sand dune, a wind-raked hill, sees a grendel unfurling its body across the artificial sky.
“You smell of piss,” Gausta says, and he feels her step carefully over him.
Biolamps are coming on, a seep of blurry orange illumination from the corners. Yorick’s mandible splintered on the edge of a step and his skull is still ringing from the impact. He tries to focus his eyes. He sees concrete walls lined with antibacterial yolk, like a clinic or thaw facility. A humming black biotank hooked to its own generator, not Gausta’s shut-down grid. A teledoc with a gleaming saw.
A triptych of cells:
The left holds a clanner from the cave, not yet debodied, squinting in the gloom. The flesh of her wrists has grown over the bioplastic, swollen from repeated stings. Now she holds them immaculately still.
The center is empty, the smartglass blotted with gore.
The right holds his brother. He’s wearing an antisensory hood, but Yorick recognizes the shape of him, the shade of him. He recognizes the injuries: an exoskel splint on one leg, gelflesh coating one hand. Thello’s cuffs are magnetized to the wall above his head, and his wrists are bloated purple.
“There are some things a sim never gets quite right,” Gausta says. “You know that. Scents, mostly.” She taps a finger on Thello’s one-way glass. “Your brother is even more pungent than you are. I’ve barely touched him, and his sweat already reeks from fright.”
Yorick eyes the needlegun dangling from her hand. He remembers the click-clack. Manual now, no genelock.
“I wish I could trust you with it,” Gausta says, reading him so easily. “It would give me great peace of mind, to see you rectify your past error.” She casts a look up the stairwell, to the door she sealed behind them at the top. “I think I hear your grendel.”
