Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 71

"I died of an OD in 1978," he said. "Heroin. It was after that concert at Hammersmith. Do you remember?"

"Jesus Christ, Graham," Em said. "Don't tell me the c.o.ke paranoia finally got you."

He laughed, though, big and brash, and put his palm against her cheek. It was cool, room-temperature. He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. "Feel anything?"

And of course, she did not. Not even the rise and fall of his breathing.

Nothing at all.

She tried to say his name. Failed. Would jerk her hand away, if he would let it go, but he didn't and so she stood shaking with her palm pressed to his cold self.

He shrugged and let her hand drop, finally. "Ange said she told you that you should take the cure. And me, I'm here telling you that you don't have to-"

"Die?"

"No." A dismissive snort turned into a much less dramatic laugh. He was half-yelling to be heard over the stacks. It didn't matter; n.o.body who wasn't standing right behind her would ever overhear them. "You have no choice about dying. But what happens after death-for most people, it's just a candle snuffed out. All those pretty stories amount to nothing."

"How do you know?"

He smiled.

He knew.

And while she was processing that-the OD, the idea that maybe you didn't even need to put the ring on before you died-he shucked off his flannel, leaving the s.h.i.+rt slumped on the boards like a discarded skin. Em looked away from his withered pecs. He cleared his throat and said, "You don't have to stop existing, is what I mean. Actually, all in all, I expected undeath to be a bigger deal."

"Jesus, Graham."

But he was holding out a hand, and she reached out and lifted hers up underneath it, open, flat, and expectant.

He laid a silver ring across her palm. It was cool to the touch.

"When you put it on," he said, "You'll seize. It's pretty awful. You'll want to be someplace safe and easy to clean. You'll heal damage after, better than before, but it still takes a while. Give yourself a few hours for the transformation."

"Uhm." She stared at the ring, and it stared back, unwinking. "Ange too?"

"1981," he said. "Sorry. We would have told you-"

"No," Em said. "It's all right." She weighed the ring on her palm. "What's it cost?"

Oh, that grin, and all the lines on his face rearranging themselves. "You lose weight," he said. "Mostly desiccation. It's not great for your facial tone." With one hand, he rubbed slack cheeks. "Ange has had her face pinned a couple of times."

"That's not a cost."

He shrugged. "Life isn't Hollywood. Everything doesn't come with a price. Hey, I gotta get my hair fixed. See you onstage?"

"See you onstage," she said, and held out the hand with the ring in it. But he brushed past her, making a dismissive gesture with one long hand. Keep it.

So she slipped it into her pocket and did, pausing to congratulate Objekt 775 as they came off.

Sanya beamed at her, and gave her a quick, sweaty, distracted, euphoric hug. She ran her palm across Em's scalp and laughed, but the noise from the audience was too loud for talking. The hug was sincere, and she leaned in and shouted "That was for you, Em!" and kissed Em on the cheek.

A pretty girl kissed me, Em thought. She blinked back the sting of tears, but the embrace made it easier to contemplate the blood blisters from the Strat. That hour warming up didn't make calluses miraculously grow back. Neither would lubing the fretboard and her left hand from an aerosol can of Finger-Ease.

Those new Trial songs just weren't getting any better, no matter how many times she listened to them. And it was Graham, all Graham. His playing was technically great, better than ever.

But he might as well have been dead up there. She thought about that as she heard her name, and strode out to a roar, swinging the strap of the borrowed guitar over her head.

She might be out of practice, but she still had her ear. When she jammed with the band, they took fire.

When Em got back to the house in Carlsbad, the dogs were waiting on the cool marble of the entryway. She scratched chins and fondled ears, and they pushed one another out of the way to lean against her thighs. She picked her way through them, moved to the living room, and raised a hand toward the dimmer switch.

The silence in the big house stopped her. The whole place was sealed up and alarmed; she couldn't hear the swish of the sea, far below. And suddenly, she needed to.

So she was outside on the deck that cantilevered out above the cliffs when Ange found her, tossing stones over the rail into the hissing ocean forty feet below.

Ange had the key and the codes, of course, because somebody other than Em and her business manager had to. In truth, Em would have been surprised if Ange hadn't followed her home.

Ange sat down on a cedar recliner beside Em, and put her feet up. "Did you put on the ring?"

"Can't you see in the dark?"

"Not that well," Ange said, and reached out to take Em's wrist. Her touch was as chill as the night air, and Em bit her lip, forcing herself not to pull free. Instead, she reached out and folded Ange's hand in her other one, her sister's silver ring like a cool nugget against her palm. "And I'm not tired either," she said. "I don't sleep any more, before you ask."

"It's a mug's game, Ange."

Ange shuffled her chair closer, near enough that Em would have felt her warmth at hip and shoulder if Ange had any to give. "You live forever."

"And cut the same old f.u.c.king alb.u.ms."

"Oh, yeah," Ange said. "At least Graham's cutting alb.u.ms."

"And at least you had the integrity to put down your axe when you figured out you couldn't play worth s.h.i.+t any more. Isn't that right? When was the last time you picked up a guitar?"

Ange stared at her. And then she sat back in her chair, released Em's wrist, and swung her feet up. "Not since I broke up the Sisters. You figured that out?"

Em nodded. Far below, the sea fluoresced. The sky behind them was graying; they were facing the wrong way for sunrise. She tossed another pebble. "You died, and that broke up the Shock Sisters. And I'm sitting on my a.s.s and drinking myself to death because Seth broke my f.u.c.king heart and I never got over it. You could just say it."

"Do you want me to say things you already know?"

"h.e.l.l. n.o.body could ever tell me s.h.i.+t. Why should anything change now?"

"It's because you already know everything," Ange said.

Em laughed.

Family. d.a.m.ned if they didn't know you.

Ange sighed and plucked a stone from Em's pile. The first one she selected glistened silver; she placed it back atop the pyramid. The second she kept, rolling it between her fingers. "h.e.l.l, Robert Plant made a comeback."

"Yeah, but it's easier to live off your f.u.c.king royalties forever."

And that got Ange to laugh. "You don't want to be the girl who sang 'Rose Madder' forever, do you?"

"No," Em said. "I don't. And that's pretty much it. And if I die now that's all I'll ever be."

"You have a legacy. So does Graham. It's more than me."

The ring had found its way into Em's hand, this time. And Em held it up to the light. "f.u.c.k me. Do you make art or do you make life?"

"You opted out of both already. Which is more important?"

"Art," Em said. Then she shook her head. "Life. It's not an easy f.u.c.king question."

"If it was," Ange said, "somebody would have answered it by now." She tossed another rock. "You only get asked once, Em. I don't want to lose you."

"I don't want to lose me either," Em said. "Look, there's always chemo."

Ange snaked a long arm out and stroked Em's shaven head. "Well, then the hard part's done already."

Em wandered down the long hallway to the music room, accompanied by toenail-clicking dogs. The door was keypad-locked; it took a minute to remember that the code was Seth's birthday, then a longer minute to remember what that birthday was.

Dim gray light, filtered through the June gloom, soaked through big windows. To Em's dark-adapted eyes it was enough. She found the old maple and mahogany Gibson Black Beauty by touch and let her fingers curl around the neck, lifting it into her arms like a sleeping child. Slowly, she ducked over the guitar, smelling skin oil soaked into the fingerboard, and lay her cheek against the glossy black-lacquered surface.

She had strings, somewhere. She'd probably need to turn on a light to find them. She closed her eyes, imagining she inhaled the acetone and cherry scent of Finger-Ease. The blood blisters on her left hand throbbed. She was hungry.

Her oncologist's office didn't open until nine. She had time before she called.

It would take at least a month to grow her calluses back.

Inellastic Collisions Too easy by half, but a girl had to eat.

Tamara genuflected before the glistening white sphere, a black one peeking over its top. She bent over the felted slate table like a sacrifice-a metaphor more ironic than prophetic-letting her s.h.i.+rt hike up her nubby spine. The b.a.l.l.s were round, outside her domain, but that was a detail too insignificant to affect Tamara's understanding of the geometry involved.

All that mattered were the vectors.

bored, Gretchen murmured, as the cue stick slipped curveless through Tamara's fingers. bored bored bored bored bored.

The cue stick struck the cue ball. The cue ball jolted forward, skipping into the eight ball and stopping precisely as its momentum was transferred. An inelastic collision. Thump. Click. The eight ball glided into the corner pocket, and Tamara lifted her head away from the table, shaking razor-cut hair from her neck. She showed her teeth. To her sister, not to the human she'd beaten.

Gretchen leaned her elbows on the pool table, pale bones stretching her skin gorgeously. Tendons popped as she flexed her fingers. The shape she wore was dough pale, sticky and soft, but hunger made it leaner. Not enough leaner.

"You lose," Gretchen said to Tamara's prey.

The male put a gold ring on the edge of the table, still slick inside with fat from his greasy human skin. Gretchen slipped a fingernail through the loop and sc.r.a.ped it up, handling it by the edges. She was dirty herself, of course, dirty in a dirty human body. It didn't make human grease any nicer to touch.

Gretchen tucked the ring into her pocket. She nagged. hungry.

Tamara, reaching for the chalk, stopped-and sighed, though she could not get used to the noises made by the meat-and let the blunt end of her cue stick b.u.mp the floor. "Play again?" the human asked. "I'd like a chance to win that back." He pointed with his chin at Gretchen's pocket.

He was dark-haired, his meat firm and muscular under the greasy toffee-colored skin. Disgusting, and looking at him didn't help Tamara forget that she too was trapped in an oleaginous human carca.s.s, with a greasy human tongue and greasy human bones and a greasy human name.

But a girl had to eat.

"Actually," she said-and showed her teeth to the human, willing him to snarl back. No. Smile back-"how do you feel about dinner?"

Gretchen was furious. Tamara felt it as from twitching tail-tip to s.h.i.+vering p.r.i.c.ked ears. Her human cage had neither, but she still remembered what it was to be a Hound. Gretchen's flesh-clotted legs scissored to crisp ninety degree angles. Her razor-cut hair snapped in separate tendrils behind her.

you're angry, Tamara said, finally, desperately. It was wrong to have to ask why, wrong to have to ask anything. Between sisters, between terrible angels, there should be consensus.

Gretchen did not answer.

The May night was balmy. Tamara wrapped her fingers around her shoulders and pressed them against the ridge of bone she could feel through cloying meat. She set her heels.

Gretchen stalked ten steps further and halted as sharply as if someone had popped her leash. An inelastic collision. Her heeled shoes skittered on parking lot gravel.

Tamara waited.

you knew I was hungry, Gretchen said. you let him get away.

i didn't!

But Gretchen turned toward her, luminous green-brown eyes unblinking above the angles of her cheekbones, and Tamara looked down. Wrong, wrong, that she could not hear what her sister was thinking. i didn't, she insisted.

you showed your teeth.

i smiled at him.

sister, Gretchen said sadly, they can tell the difference.

They sold the ring at a p.a.w.nshop and took the money to another bar. While Gretchen thumbed quarters into the pool table, Tamara worried. Worry was a new thing, like distance from her sister. Exile on this round spinning world in its round spinning orbit was changing them; Tamara had learned to count its revolutions and orbits, as the humans did, and call them time now that she could no longer sense the real time, the Master's time, inexorable consumption and entropy.

She had been its warden, once. The warden of the real time, immaculate and perfect, as unlike the messy, improvisational sidereal time of the meat puppets as a diamond crystal was unlike a blown gla.s.s bauble. But she and her sister had failed to bring to justice a sorcerer who had upset the true time, and unless they could regain the Master's favor, they would not rejoin their sisters in Heaven.

All the painful curves of this world-the filthy, rotting, organic bodies that stayed fleshy and slack no matter how thin the sisters starved them; the knotted curves of roots and veins and flower petals-were slow poison.

Tamara had lost her home. Exile was costing her her sister, as well.

She hunched on the barstool-her gin and tonic cradled in her right hand, gnawing the rind of the lime-and watched Gretchen rack the b.a.l.l.s. The second bar was a smoky little place with canned music and not much of a crowd. Some male humans sat at the bar nursing beers or boilermakers, and a female whose male companion wasn't drinking fiddled with a plate of hot wings and a cosmopolitan in a booth on the wall. Gretchen rattled the rack one last time and lifted it with her fingertips. A human female's hands would have trembled slightly. Gretchen's stayed steady as if carved.

She turned away to hang the rack up, and when she looked back, she bared her teeth.

She didn't care what Gretchen said; Tamara couldn't tell the difference. She shredded the rind of the lime between her teeth and washed its bitterness down with the different bitterness of the gin and tonic. When she got up to go to Gretchen, she left her gla.s.s on the bar so somebody might offer to buy her another one.

It was hard, playing badly. Hard to miss once in a while. Hard to look like she was really trying, poking a sharp triangle of tongue between taut lips, narrowed eyes wrinkling the bridge of her nose. Gretchen, walking past, patted her on the haunches.

Tamara sucked her tongue back into her mouth, smiled against the cue stick, and broke.

She had to let Gretchen win two games before they attracted any interest. The squeak of rubber on the wood floor caught her ear, but she didn't raise her head until the human cleared his throat. She straightened and turned, already alerted by her sister's posture that something unusual was happening.