Daria could see that this was making her anxious. “I can get you some holin,” she said. “It’s probably better that we don’t meet at the university, though. I’m giving a public lecture in the Variety Hall three nights from tonight; if you want to come along we can meet afterward.”
“Thank you.”
“The young lady’s had a shock,” Tullia said, “and I’m tutoring the laziest of my merchants’ sons tomorrow, so we should probably call it a night.”
They left Lidia and Daria still talking. Tullia walked with Yalda to the edge of the markets. “You really sleep down there? You should get an apartment.”
“I like sleeping in the ground,” Yalda replied. “And I don’t care about privacy; no one ever bothers me.”
“Fair enough,” Tullia conceded. “But you have something new to consider now.”
“What’s that?”
“Where exactly are you going to hide your holin?”
4
Yalda met Tullia outside the Variety Hall. Daria’s lecture, entitled “The Anatomy of the Beast”, was advertised with garishly colored posters showing a fearsome creature standing on a tree branch, one hand clasped around a hapless lizard, another outstretched toward a second, unsuccessfully fleeing meal. Infant care of the western shrub vole might not have been quite so enticing a subject to Zeugma’s moneyed classes.
Tullia harangued the ticket-seller into checking for a list of free admissions, and both their names turned out to be on it. “I should hope so!” she told Yalda as they moved from the ticket queue to the equally crowded one leading to the entrance. “I’ve paid for enough of Daria’s meals at the Solo to keep her in scalpels for the rest of her life.”
Once they’d entered the hall, Yalda saw that the stage had been decorated with a number of small but authentic-looking trees, augmented with a scaffolding of branches and twigs that served to heighten the impression of a dense forest canopy. As stagehands moved through the hall extinguishing the wall lamps, the crowd buzzed with anticipation, as if they expected a whole menagerie of nocturnal wildlife to reveal itself in this motley imitation jungle.
A few sickly buds on the trees did open in the gloom, but they soon closed again as brighter lights were trained on the stage from above. Yalda looked up and caught a glimpse of a girl perched on a narrow railing, struggling to maneuver an unwieldy contraption of burning sunstone behind a clearstone lens.
The impresario walked onto the stage and delivered a spiel about the perilous expedition that had been mounted to the Shining Valley to capture the subject of the night’s demonstration. “In its natural state, this creature is too ferocious to be allowed into the city at all; the Council would never permit it! However—after feeding the beast stupefying drugs for six days, in a holding pen a safe distance beyond the city limits, we are able to present, for the first time ever in Zeugma, our wild, uncultured cousin: the arborine!”
A cart was wheeled on, bearing a thick branch suspended between two supports. The arborine’s hands and feet were bound to the branch with ropes; it was in no state to grip anything itself. Its head hung limply, and though its eyes were open they were dull and fixed. Yalda thought it was a male, but she wasn’t sure; she’d only ever seen sketches of the animal before. Certainly it was smaller than she was.
“I hope it’s already dead,” she whispered.
Tullia said, “Ah, a sentimentalist.”
“Why should it feel pain for our entertainment?”
“Do you think it lived a life of comfort in the trees?”
Yalda was annoyed. “No, but that’s beside the point. Nature wants to split
A man in front of them turned and hushed her.
“Only a woman,” the impresario was saying, “could possess the physical strength to handle such a beast. But we are lucky to have found a woman with both the strength
As the crowd erupted with the sound of acclaim, Tullia whispered, “Don’t worry, fashions change. One day we’ll be up there with our prisms and lenses, raking in just as much cash.”
Yalda said, “Only if there are other-worldly arborines in your forests in the sky.”
Daria strode into a waiting spotlight, a third arm sprouting from the middle of her chest. She was carrying a circular saw connected to a long tube that stretched all the way back into the wings.
“Rest assured,” she said, “we will all be safe tonight.” She held up the saw for their inspection. “This instrument is powered by compressed air, and makes a dozen gross revolutions every flicker. Should the arborine somehow escape from its stupor, I can sever its head in an instant.” She squeezed a trigger and the blade became a blur of screeching stone.
“Now, though, it’s time to feed our wild cousin his very last meal.” An assistant brought a bucket onto the stage; Daria took it and approached the arborine. With a scoop that was sitting in the bucket, she lifted out some of its contents—which resembled coarsely milled grain, but had somehow been rendered a startlingly vivid red—and poured it into the arborine’s slack mouth.
Yalda watched with revolted fascination as the muscles around the arborine’s throat began to move. It was alive, and, drugged or not, still able to swallow.
“You might be wondering at the unusual hue of our unfortunate guest’s repast,” Daria noted. “In fact, over the past six days his food has been mixed with a different dye for every meal.” As she spoke, the arborine kept gulping mechanically at the trickle of grain.
When the creature would take no more food, Daria put the bucket aside and set her blade spinning. With the audience cheering her on, she stepped up to the arborine and began carving into its flank.
If her victim made a sound, the machine was more than loud enough to conceal it. Yalda could see the arborine twitching pitifully for a while, but by the time Daria stood aside to reveal her handiwork its convulsions had ceased.
The saw had removed a wide rectangular slab of skin and muscle that stretched almost the full length of the arborine’s body. Yalda was sickened by the needless cruelty of the methodology, but she did not look away.
The red-dyed food had penetrated a surprising distance already—perhaps four or five spans from the creature’s throat—but it was the evidence of past meals that was truly revelatory. The six bands of color painted a veritable history of digestion and excretion: the previous day’s orange meal had been squeezed from the esophagus into dozens of smaller tubes that branched out from that central passage, while the yellow had progressed into a multitude of vastly finer tubules. The green dye occupied a convoluted surface that curled around within the arborine’s flesh, like some huge tarpaulin that had been folded and re-folded on several different scales in order to pack it down to the smallest possible volume; Yalda suspected that it, too, had been carried by a system of tubes that were simply too fine for her to resolve from this distance. The green layer, Daria explained, was food that had finally come within reach of virtually every muscle in the body.
For the still-earlier meals, a similar process could be seen in reverse: fine vessels gathered up the unused portions of the food, along with a cargo of metabolic wastes, and brought them together in ever-larger conduits. At
