Red Rising(28)

He sits beside me on my worst nights telling me stories. It’s only then that I like him, only then that I think he is not some monster cooked up by this perverted Society.

“My profession is to create, little bird,” he says one night as we sit together in the darkness. The blue light dances over my body, bathing his face in queer shadows. “When I was young, I lived in a place they call the Grove. It was what you might think of as a circus culture. We had spectacles every night. Celebrations of color and sound and dance.”

“Sounds terrible,” I mutter sarcastically. “Just like the mines.”

He smiles softly and his eyes find that distant place. “I suppose it may seem a plush life to you. Yet there was a madness to the Grove. They made us take candies. Candies that would take us on journeys to hell, on pilgrimages to heaven. Pills that could make us fly between the planets on wings of dust to visit the faerie kings of Jupiter and the deep mermaids of Europa. There was no escape to the journeys, no end to the trips of childhood, my darling. There I drooled on the grass as the festivals swung about. My mind always separate from body. No peace to it. No end to the madness.” He clapped his hands then. “And now I Carve the things I saw in my fever dreams, just as they always wished. I dreamed of you, I think. In they end, I suppose they’ll wish I hadn’t dreamed at all.”

“Was it a good dream?” I ask.

“What?”

“The one with me.”

“No. No, it was a nightmare. One of a man from hell, lover of fire.” He’s slient for a spell.

“Why is it so horrible?” I ask him. “Life. All this. Why do they need to make us do this? Why do they treat us like we’re their slaves?”

“Power.”

“Power isn’t real. It’s just a word.”

Mickey ponders silently. Then he shrugs his thin shoulders. “Mankind was always enslaved, they’ll say. Freedom enslaves us to lust, to greed. Take freedom away, and they give me a life of dreaming. They gave you a life of sacrifice, family, community. And society is stable. There is no famine. No genocide. No great wars. And when the Golds fight, they obey rules. They are … noble about it when the great houses bicker.”

“Noble? They lied to me. Said I was a pioneer.”

“And would you have been happier if you knew you were a slave?” Mickey asks. “No. None of the billion lowReds beneath Mars would be happy if they knew what the highReds knew—that they are slaves. So is it not better to lie?”

“It is better to not make slaves.”

When I am ready, he inserts a forceGenerator into my sleeping tube to simulate increased gravity on my frame. I’ve never known pain like this. My body aches. My bones and skin and muscles scream against the pressure and the change till I’m on medication that turns the scream into a dull forever-moan. Before my skeleton is finished, Mickey replaces my teeth with straight ones taken from some lab or corpse; I don’t know. My tongue plays over them. They are so slippery. Like cold tiles in my mouth.

I sleep for days. I dream of home and family. Every night I wake after seeing Eo hang yet again. She sways across my mind. I miss her warmth in bed beside me, even though they give me an HC immersion mask for distraction.

Gradually, I am weaned from the pain medication. My muscles still aren’t used to the density of my bones, so my existence becomes a melodic ache. They begin to feed me real food. Mickey sits on the edge of my cot stroking my hair well into the nights. I don’t care that his fingers feel like spider legs. I don’t care that he thinks I am some piece of art, his art. He gives me something called a hamburger. I love it. Red meats and thick creams and breads and fruits and vegetables make my diet. I have never eaten so well.

“You need the calories,” Mickey coos. “You have been so strong for me; eat well. You deserve this food.”

“How am I doing?” I ask.

“Oh, the hard parts are over, my darling. You are a brilliant boy, you know. They have shown me the tapes from the other procedures where other Carvers tried this. Oh, how clumsy the other Carvers were, how weak the other subjects. But you are strong and I am briliant.” He taps my chest. “Your heart is like that of a stallion’s. I’ve never glimpsed one like it before. You may not know this, but its so large because you were bitten by a pitviper when you were young, I assume?”

“I was. Yes.”

“I thought so. Your heart had to adjust to counteract the effects of the poison.”

“My uncle sucked most of the poison out when I was bitten,” I say.

“No,” Mickey laughs. “That’s a myth. The poison cannot be sucked out. It still runs through your veins, forcing your heart to be strong if you want to continue to live. You are something special, just like me.”

“Then I will not die in here?” I manage.

Mickey laughs. “No! No! We are beyond that now. There will be pain. But we are past the threat of mortality. Soon we will have made man into god. Red into Gold. Even your wife would not recognize you.”

That is all I’ve ever feared.

When they take my eyes and give me ones of gold, I feel dead inside. It’s a simple matter of reconnecting the optic nerve to the “donor’s” eyes, Mickey says. A simple thing he’s done a dozen times for cosmetic purposes; the hard part was the frontal lobe surgery, he says. I disagree. There is the pain, yes. But with the new eyes, I see things I once could not. Elements are clearer, sharper, and more painful to bear. I hate this process. All it is is a confirmation of the superiority of the Golds. It takes all this to make me their physical equal, all this to correct what nature got wrong. Perhaps we should serve them.