“I see you intend on inhabiting the role of miscreant,” says Jean de Men. “Very well then. Shall we take a walk? There’s something I’d like to show you.” The lack of affect in his voice disturbs her. The look on Jean de Men’s face perverted a smile.
The next place that comes into view Christine never knew existed. For the life of her, she cannot imagine where this place would be in CIEL. The entire room is lined in a sort of black-lacquered tile, which makes it difficult to discern even outlines, so she projects the images onto one of the walls of her quarters—and what she then sees keeps her from swallowing, as if a bone sticks in her throat. In the black room are women. On tables. Anesthetized, by the looks of it: eyes closed, faces loose, mild grafts glowing here and there at the edges of their bodies. Each is strapped down and splayed. There look to be six. Maybe seven. Various ages, but none older than twenty-five, no one of exceptional wealth, judging from their meager grafts. In a circle. They look like human spokes of a deranged prehistoric wheel.
“Magnify,” Christine says, something wrong in her gut.
Between each woman’s spread legs, she sees something she remembers and desires, and at the same time, she is haunted, like in a nightmare: the color red. There is blood. And a kind of surgical apparatus, at work on every one of them. There is no other way to say this. Between the legs of each of these poor creatures is a gash, each undergoing some stage of . . . what? Experimentation? Mutation? Torture?
Dizziness. She grips the back of a chair, in an attempt to keep watching. Then Jean de Men speaks.
“What. You don’t like the view?”
“Maggot,” Trinculo spits back.
Then Jean de Men reaches into the bloody cleft of the girl nearest to him, pulls out a palm-size wad of flesh, and throws it against the wall. Splat.
Christine vomits.
“This one’s no good,” he mutters to Trinculo, reaching back into the body and pulling out a putrid mass with strands of red, blue, and gray matter. “Something went wrong with our attempts at ovaries. Who knew the stupid little orbs could be so fucking complicated?” He holds the colorful and glistening innards in Trinculo’s face, so close Christine thinks she can smell them.
“The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, which hurts, and is desired,” Trinculo whispers.
“Have you had time to rethink my offer?” Jean de Men drops the blob to the floor with a plop.
In the beginning, when Trinculo and I first lived on CIEL, when we first entered adulthood, Trinculo fell in love with an older man who had been the leading doctor in the field of biochemistry. Trinculo’s emerging intellectual force made a helix with this man of comparable intelligence and creative verve. In spite of their age difference, and though they could not enter one another in the gnashing way that a man desires a man, they intwined with one another by mind and hands and mouths and legs, by act of imagination and devotion to what was left of body. Their heat approaching spontaneous combustion in spite of things. When they were discovered, Jean de Men beheaded the doctor, the most gifted medical mind in human history, in front of Trinculo, who was restrained in a chair. The doctor’s head was set in his lap and left there all night under the surveillance of a sentry with orders to kill Trinculo if he moved. He did not move. It was this image that kept Trinculo on task for the rest of his life.
“Let me see. Would I rather join you in your twisted quest to reinvent human reproduction, in other words, your quest to become god of a new asexually reproducing race of impotent and sexless wax figures, or would I rather suffer ten thousand moronic and unimaginative tortures just to watch the drama of disappointment play out on your face?”
“You’ve no idea what pain can become . . .”
Trinculo spits on the ground. “And you’ve no idea what the attempt to control organized breeding yields.”
Whatever curses Jean de Men hurled at Trinculo next, Christine couldn’t hear them. Trinculo’s cackle drowns them out. Her room shakes with his laughter, the kind of sound one summons at the gates of hell. The laughter one spits out at a mortal enemy. But as the sound disperses, Christine’s room takes on the bodily sensations of Trinculo himself, and what she feels most acutely is a cold and stark awareness. Not fear, but a rage-filled consciousness. Trinculo turns his shoulder enough that she can see more clearly what is in his line of sight. The bodies are of women, barely women at all—no doubt Earth survivors—somewhere between adolescent and young adult.
All but one.
One of the bodies is older and has no grafts at all. Her face is rough, as from weather. Her jaw has a cast unlike any of theirs, as if she works it differently, as if her life is held fast in the muscles and tendons leading to her face. Her body is muscular and worn; her hands look as if they have aged ahead of her. Her skin is not white, but of a color that could only have come from climate and extremity. And her head. Her beautiful, terrible, human head. Where folds of grafts or at least their beginnings should be, her entire head is covered in a great filigree of carefully tattooed hair, midnight blue and gold. It cascades down her shoulders, so that her entire hued body shines like an illuminated manuscript. One of her ears appears to be mostly gone.
She is not of CIEL. She is from Earth, but she is no ordinary capture.
When Trinculo carefully takes in a huge breath of air and holds it, Christine’s entire room feels as if it might burst.
“Ah, you’ve noticed our newest arrival,” crows de Men, regaining his composure. “I’d introduce you, but you are already aware of her, yes? Though she has yet to become aware of you. Don’t try to deny it. Did you really think your execution was merely the result of your petty toys and social disruptions? Come now. We are not children here. There are no children here.” He steps close to Trinculo’s face. Close enough to kiss. “You see? I have arranged for Joan to come to us.” His smile slits horizontally across his face.