The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 6

Ruiz woke. At first he was blind, but gradually a low red glow illuminated his surroundings.

He sat in a cold metal chair, still naked. An armored cable connected the chair to a steel band welded around his waist. The band was so tight it cut into his ribs if he slumped even slightly. He straightened up and looked about.

The chair sat on a platform, perhaps three meters square, with a double railing on three sides. At the open end of the platform, a conveyor rail passed at waist height.

He could see nothing else. The conveyor came from darkness and disappeared into a deeper darkness.

A horrible smell hung in the silent air — fresh blood and old decay and excrement — a hideous abattoir stink.

He stood and went to the conveyor rail, pulling his cable behind him. It gave him just enough slack that he could stand beside the rail. A metal pier supported the rail at the platform; to this pier was riveted a box, from which the handle of a knife protruded. Ruiz jerked it out, examined it. The blade was thin and displayed the fine glitter of a monomol edge — a well-equipped butcher might own such a knife. The lid of the box had a catch; he turned it.

Inside was a curved piece of plastic, to which was attached a length of clear tubing. He drew it forth. Where had he seen a similar thing recently? He began to have a very bad feeling.

“Can you guess what it is, Ruiz Aw?” Gejas spoke from someplace close, startling Ruiz so that he almost dropped the knife.

Gejas clicked on his floater’s lights, revealing his presence only a few meters away. He wore a mirrorsuit, causing Ruiz to suppress his first wild impulse, which was to fling the knife.

Gejas seemed to sense his impulse; a throaty chuckle came from the faceless mask of the mirrorsuit. “Can you guess?” he asked again.

Ruiz looked at the plastic thing and a memory suddenly returned to him — Gejas cutting the throat of the cabin boy Svin and saving the blood. “Yes… Master,” he said, feeling a cold stomach-turning dread.

“You needn’t be so formal with me,” said Gejas cheerfully. “We’re just submen together, eh? Still, I have all the power, so perhaps it’s wise for you to show me as much respect as you can stomach.”

Ruiz was too busy examining the implications of his situation to answer. What “job” had The Yellowleaf assigned him?

As if reading his mind, Gejas said, “You’re our new knacker, Ruiz Aw. I’ll explain the procedure. The cattle come down the conveyor and pause by your station. You cut their throats — I’ll show you precisely how it’s done — and then you apply the leech. That’s all there is to it. The blood, by the way, is jellied and sold to the Blades as a condiment. Strange folk, the Blades. We could do the knackery much more efficiently; we have one of the finest automation systems in the pangalac worlds. But the cannibals want bled-out meat, done the old-fashioned way — and the customer’s always right. Right? Besides, they sometimes send inspectors.”

Ruiz couldn’t speak. He stood there clutching the knife in suddenly nerveless hands, mouth hanging open in horror. How could they make him do it?

The answer came swiftly. Pain flowed into him, beginning at his waist, under the metal band. It exploded up and down his body, a pain compounded of every variety of agony, in every level of himself. His joints felt as if they were being torn apart; his internal organs felt distended by a terrible pressure, as though each were on the point of bursting. His skin seemed to be on fire.

Ruiz fell to his hands and knees, dropping the knife to the platform. The breath went out of him, but he hurt too much to scream; there wasn’t enough of him left for anything but feeling the pain.

“We also have good neurostimulators — pain is the basis of our business,” Gejas said, though Ruiz heard him only dimly.

The pain stopped, and Ruiz drew a great breath. For an instant he felt lighter than the heavy air, as if he could float up and away from everything. But then he felt the cold metal under his hands, sensed Gejas hovering closer. The tongue stepped onto the platform.

“Stand up, Ruiz Aw,” said Gejas.

And he did.

“Pick up the knife.”

He did.

“Here comes your first customer.”

A low rattle came out of the darkness, and a conveyor gurney slid into the dim light, bearing a fat middle-aged woman.

The gurney slid to a stop in front of Ruiz, its brakes squealing a little. The woman seemed only half-conscious. Her eyes were unfocused and appeared not to see Ruiz.

“They’re drugged, as you see,” said Gejas. “Otherwise the flesh would bear an unsavory bitterness — too much fear. The Yellowleaf wants you to learn a lesson — but not at the expense of our product quality, in which we take a certain pride.”

Ruiz looked down at the woman, wondered who she was, and what her dreams had once been. Certainly she had never expected to end her life in such a dreadful way, her significance reduced to her value as meat. To her dressed-out weight. “I’ll do the job you wanted me to do — I’ll consult the virtual. This isn’t necessary. It isn’t necessary.”

“You and I, we can’t be the judge of that, Ruiz Aw. Such decisions are for the hetmen,” said Gejas. “Give me the knife.” He extended his mirrorgloved hand.

Ruiz reluctantly laid the knife’s haft there.

“Watch, now,” said Gejas.

Moving at a deliberate pace, Gejas set the knife against the sagging skin under the woman’s ear. He cut carefully, made another cut on the other side. The woman stirred, and a little more awareness came into her eyes. No great amount of blood flowed yet, but then Gejas took the leech, applied it to her throat. He gave a strong downward push, and the arteries burst, filling the leech with bright blood.

The woman kicked briefly and expired.

“That is my technique, which I recommend to you, Ruiz Aw. If you cut all the way into the arteries with your first stroke, you’ll get a lot of blood on you, and waste a good bit, too.”

Gejas wiped the blade off on the woman’s short gray hair and handed it back to Ruiz.

“I cannot do this,” Ruiz said.

“You can’t? Well, I assure you, you must. You will. The pain will stay with you until you do your job. It will come if you perform with unsatisfactory efficiency. Yes, you will come to love your work. Oh, yes!” Gejas spoke with just a hint of anger, the first real emotion Ruiz had ever noticed in that smooth voice. Gejas boarded his floater. “You’re a brazen sort, I must tell you. You would have to work here for years before you would equal the number of murders you’ve already committed. We know your reputation and record, Ruiz Aw. You’ve spread death across the human galaxy for centuries, haven’t you?”

“That was different.”

“Was it?” Gejas turned out his lights and disappeared. Ruiz heard the whine of the floater’s drive fade away into the silence of the slaughterhouse.

The conveyor rail carried the corpse away, and nothing happened for a while.

Then Ruiz became aware of an ache in his middle, under the metal band that connected him to his chair. Minutes passed, and the ache grew worse until he had to sit down, huddled around the pain, sweating and grinding his teeth.

He began to look up the conveyor rail, and to listen for the rattle of the gurney.

When he realized what he was doing, a sob escaped his clenched teeth.

The pain invaded his body, a slow relentless conquest that eventually reduced him to a gasping mindless creature, empty of everything but pain. When the gurney finally brought him his first victim, he at first felt no emotion but a confused relief. He staggered to his feet as the gurney stopped at the platform’s edge.

The pain stopped. A dreadful buoyant joy possessed him. He strode across the platform, lifting the knife.

The child seemed not as heavily drugged as the woman had been, and smiled sleepily up at Ruiz. He had dark curly hair and blue eyes; he might have been eight or nine standard years old. The straps that held him to the gurney seemed much too large.

The joy evaporated, leaving only a weary horror. “No,” he said.

Pain returned, a tidal wave of agony. His legs turned to jelly and he fell to the steel, unable to do anything but twitch. He couldn’t breathe; if anything, the pain was worse than before. He tried to say something, but he had no breath. His vision darkened and he fell into blackness.

When he woke, he heard the little boy crying, a soft muffled sound that seemed to fill the slaughterhouse. The pain was gone, at least for the moment. He sat up carefully.

The box that held the leech whirred and extruded a small directional speaker. Gejas’s voice issued from it, a tinny whisper. “See what you have done? The child’s trank has worn off; now he must die in fear, and it’s your fault.”

“Please,” said Ruiz Aw.

Gejas laughed, a low soft sound, full of delighted amazement. “‘Please’? You astound me, Ruiz Aw. Begging the hetmen for mercy… even that boy would not be so foolish. No, you must do the deed. And continue, until The Yellowleaf deems you properly educated.”

“No, no…” Ruiz said. But he got to his feet and picked up the knife, hiding it behind him.

“No? The hetmen don’t understand that word, Ruiz Aw. And consider. If I give you pain again, the boy must lie here a while longer until you recover. You make frightening noises when you’re full of pain. Do you wish his suffering to continue?”

“No.” Ruiz stood over the boy, looking down at the small tear-stained face. The little boy had stopped crying, though his mouth trembled and his blue eyes were very wide.

“Go on,” said Gejas. “He is meat, whether by your hand or another’s. The pain will kill you eventually, and The Yellowleaf has instructed me to give you pain until you do her bidding.”

Ruiz didn’t answer. He laid the knife aside. He smoothed back the little boy’s hair as gently as his trembling hands would allow. The child spoke, asking him a question in a language he couldn’t understand. Somehow that seemed an insupportable brutality — that he couldn’t even offer the boy a word of intelligible comfort.

“Do it,” said Gejas impatiently. “Your next job will be here soon.”

“A moment,” said Ruiz. “Don’t be afraid,” he told the child in as soothing a tone as he could manage. He brushed away the tears, then held the small face between his hands.

The boy gave him a tentative smile, and Ruiz smiled back. He slipped his long assassin’s fingers up under the ears, pressed down on the arteries.

The blue eyes went dreamy; the lids flickered shut.

Ruiz held the pressure a moment longer — not long enough to stop the child’s heart — then picked up the knife and did the rest of the work.

“Don’t you feel better now, Ruiz Aw?” said Gejas, and laughed.

The gurney jolted into motion and took the meat away. Ruiz went to his chair and sat. Time seemed to have stopped. He succeeded in thinking about nothing at all.

A few minutes later his next job arrived and he did it.

After a few hours the faces blurred together, became the same hopeless nonhuman shape, nothing but a landmark for his knife.

The submarine scraped along the side of the stack, eight hundred meters under the surface. Corean nudged the controls, sweat glistening on her expensive face. Marmo played his endless games against his own processors, in a shadowed corner of the small chamber.

The sub came away from the stone, and Corean fed a tiny bit more power to the silent impellers. “Better,” she said.

Marmo looked up from his screen. “Will we survive, then?”

“Of course,” she answered. “Haven’t we always?”

Marmo glanced up at the steel deckhead, as if observing the carnage that raged at the surface, throughout the ancient marine city of SeaStack. “Thousands are even now saying the same thing. They’ll be dead soon.”

She gave him a glance compounded of vexation and impatience. “We’re smarter, stronger, luckier.”

“No one is as lucky as Ruiz Aw,” Marmo said heavily. “If by some miracle we get out of SeaStack, let’s run for the north launch rings, go back to the Blacktear Pens, collect our belongings, and leave Sook. Doesn’t that plan have a certain beautiful momentum? Don’t you want to live?”

“Not without Ruiz Aw to entertain me,” she said shortly.

She looked at the old cyborged pirate and saw in his half-mech face a look that she had detected with increasing frequency over the last weeks. You’re mad, it said.

But Marmo apparently knew better than to say such a thing out loud; he went back to his games.

Nisa’s worst expectations had proven prophetic. Again Ruiz Aw had taken her to a terrible place and left her alone.

The stockyard seemed the most dreadful place yet — suffused by such an atmosphere of hopeless brutality that she found it almost impossible to retain any shred of hope that Ruiz Aw would once again find a way for them to survive. His small miracles seemed insignificant beside the horror of the stockyard — the function of which she had gradually come to understand. At first she had refused to believe that people could be as depraved as the Roderigans appeared to be; after all, they seemed human.

Gunderd instructed her. “They’re not human, Nisa-the-princess. Oh, at any time in the history of the human race, creatures have walked among us that were nonhuman by any reasonable standard: joykillers, for example, who have been with us since we came down from the trees. But Roderigo is one of those places where inhumanity has been institutionalized. Venerated. It’s passed beyond aberration here.”

She could only shake her head, perplexed.

The day after they had taken Ruiz away, three hugely fat men had visited her little group.

They stood above her, staring down with small cruel eyes. “Yes,” said the largest. “You are still beautiful. You will come with us and entertain us in our last days. We are ripe.”

She felt somehow more naked under their cold stare. “No,” she said, drawing up her knees. She turned to Gunderd. “I thought you said there were no rapists here, that the hetmen medicated the air.”

Gunderd shrugged.

The fat men looked scornful. The largest one spoke again. “We would not so waste our precious remaining time. We will play more interesting games.” He reached down for her, and she scuttled away.

Abruptly Molnekh jumped up and moved in front of the fat man. “Go away. You can’t have her.”

The fat man chortled in mild amusement. “Don’t be foolish, stick man. Those who watch might punish us… but only if we break your bones badly enough to keep you from crawling to the hoppers, or injure your innards so that you can’t eat. Otherwise we can hurt you all we like, which we’ll do if you obstruct us in any way. We are ripe — ripeness has its privileges.”

Molnekh seemed serious to the point of grimness, quite unlike his usual genial self. “You can’t have her. She’s a famous slayer’s woman. If you annoy her, he’ll break your bones, and worse — without regard for the feelings of those who watch.” He turned to the others. “Think! What will Ruiz Aw do to us, if we allow her to be molested.”

Gunderd rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “A good point.” He stood and faced the fat men. “Go away,” he told them.

Dolmaero also rose, glowering and clenching his fists.

They slowly backed away, bewildered hurt on their great shiny faces. “This is incorrect,” said one, before he turned and shuffled off. “We are ripe….”

Somehow she found it impossible to feel any real gratitude toward the others, though she knew she owed it.

Gejas and the Yellowleaf watched the screen in her apartments, deep under Roderigo. The screen enhanced the dimness of the slaughterhouse, transmuting its grays and blacks into brilliant fluorescing colors.

Ruiz Aw filled the screen, moving in a slow jerky dance, as if to some unheard music. His body was an electric sapphire, and the blood that covered his arms and chest was a smoky crimson, the color of dying lava. In one hand he held his knife, a violet flame; this he used to draw complicated symbols in the air.

Gejas felt The Yellowleaf’s dissatisfaction, a cold wind on his mind. “Don’t worry, Master,” he said, with as much sincerity as he owned. “The indices remain stable — he’s not as mad as he seems.”

She turned and gave him a dark-eyed look, full of meaning. He heard her words as clearly as if she had whispered them in his ear: You must hope that you are correct. If he is broken, we lose a great opportunity.

“He has always been a murderer, Master. We force him to embrace his true identity. One day he will thank us for his liberation, and he will be a fine tool indeed.”

She nodded, a tiny inclination of her noble head, and he felt bathed in the watchful warmth of her confidence.

Ruiz Aw had hidden himself a long way away from the grotesque actions of his body, the carrion stench of the slaughterhouse, the blood. His hiding spot was warm and bright, full of sweet rich music, and had the clean vital scent of flowers, but otherwise his sanctuary had no physical attributes. He felt safe there, but he wasn’t entirely happy… he was alone. Occasionally he wondered why he couldn’t have company, and then his thoughts strayed into a darker place, where the face of a beautiful woman could be seen through a haze of uneasiness.

He always pulled himself away from that image, with as much shame as fear.

Now and again, he was forced to watch his body perform an awful act, and for a bit he couldn’t quite believe in his sanctuary — not while his victims groaned, not while their blood spattered over him.

But the jobs were soon finished and the evidence carried away into darkness, so that he could forget again.

Time passed slowly in the dim red light of the stockyard. Nisa slept, woke for a few endless hours, slept again. The others visited the feed hoppers, but she had no appetite. Dolmaero brought her a handful of pellets, but the food lay beside her on the plastic riser, untouched.

“At least have a drink of water,” Molnekh urged her. “When Ruiz Aw returns for us, we must be ready to act, not weak from moping.”

She looked at him with dull amazement. How could he be so foolish as to expect Ruiz Aw to return? “He’s dead or far away,” she said.

Molnekh frowned. “We don’t know that. How many times has Ruiz Aw surprised us?”

“I think the surprises are over,” she said. “We’ll never see Ruiz again.” But she got up and went to the nearest tap. The water was cold and sweet, with a slight resinous tang.

She felt a little better after she had drunk her fill, a little more alert.

She was the first to notice the return of the mirrorsuited Roderigans. The sound of their boots sent waves of silence spreading through the cattle.

They seemed to be coming straight toward her. She scuttled back to the others, but the guards changed course accordingly, closing the distance with quick strides.

She wanted to run, but what good would that do?

Ruiz Aw began to feel that familiar terrible impatience. The metal band around his waist sent a pang; it felt as though invisible fingers probed at an ancient unhealed wound. He began to listen for the rattle of the gurney.

When he heard it, he leaped to the edge of the platform, knife raised, anticipating the stroke that would free him from the ache of the band. He felt his face twist into an unnatural shape, halfway between a grin and a silent scream.

The next job slid into the dim illumination, and he bent over, touching a soft throat with trembling fingers.

The face was only a white blur through the tears which still came each time he did a job, for some reason he no longer understood.

“Ruiz?” The voice was softer than the throat, uncertain, slurred.

Other jobs had spoken to him, begged for mercy, cursed, raved. He had paid them no attention; what could he do but end their suffering? But this voice was different. Memory tugged at him, stayed the stroke of the knife for a moment.

He rubbed at his eyes until the tears cleared.

The woman was beautiful, with tangled black hair and dark eyes. Her face bore such an incongruous expression of dreamy horror that he had to look away from her.

The band sent him pain, and it forced the breath out of him, so that he bent over, pressing his arms to his stomach.

“Ruiz… it is you. What have they done to you?”

Her voice seemed almost as sweet as the pain was bitter. He looked up again, and some tiny degree of recognition filtered into his mind. Nisa? Was that her name? What was she to him?

Nisa regarded Ruiz Aw with unwilling recognition. He was naked but for a metal band around his waist, and was covered with dried blood, black in the dim red light, his hair a spiny snarl, as though he had rubbed the blood into it and then twisted it into spikes. He was surely mad; his eyes were very wide, white showing all around the pupils, and his lips were pulled back from his teeth in a straining rictus. He clenched a knife in one large hand, and both hand and knife were clotted with coagulated blood, so much blood that the shape of his hand was obscured.

No demon from Hell could have seemed more dreadful, and even in her sedated daze she was terrified.

“Ruiz,” she said again, less certainly. Could this monster really be Ruiz Aw? Surely not, she thought. Surely this was just a torment devised by her captors for their own mysterious reasons, some automaton made in the shape of Ruiz.

His face twisted even more, and he fell to his knees, making an odd grunting sound, his breath whistling as though he could barely catch it.

She heard a small tinny voice near at hand. “Do it!” it demanded.

The pain was eating him, devouring his substance. Soon there would be nothing left of Ruiz Aw but an empty skin. He wondered vaguely if that bag of skin would still stand and slash… but then he realized it didn’t matter, that he would be gone, safe from both pain and the knowledge of the deeds he had done. He felt a dull amazement that he hadn’t seen this escape before. How easy it was going to be… to let the pain drain him away into nothingness.

Another hand would take Nisa’s precious life, but not his. Not his.

He couldn’t understand why this was so important, but he knew that it was, and so he sank toward death, almost content.