Defy the Worlds (Constellation #2)(27)
But Abel doesn’t understand subtlety either. The direct emotions of the Kahlo appeal to him. In this picture, Kahlo had painted two self-portraits stranded on a parched and barren landscape, one self in day and one in night. One lies on a hospital gurney, face hidden, bandages askew to reveal the still-bleeding cuts in her side; the other sits upright, brilliant in a red dress with flowers in her hair, holding the brace Kahlo was forced to wear after her spinal injury. This one stares at the viewers, challenging them to understand.
What’s most interesting about the painting, in Abel’s opinion, is that the self who is prone and bloody is the one in the daytime. The prouder Kahlo, the stronger one, sits in the night. Even then, she clutches her brace to her, so part of her can be seen only through its lattices.
Most humans choose to hide their pain and weakness. Kahlo acknowledged that everyone saw hers. It was her power that was hidden by darkness, and the proof of her injury is part of that power.
(This is his interpretation alone. Although scholarly writing about the painting is stored deep within his memory, he’s never consciously accessed it. He wants his opinions to remain his own.)
Abel likes the brace especially. Primarily made of metal, it was nonetheless a part of Kahlo, a part she acknowledged to the whole world. He doesn’t have to call on Freudian texts to know why that element would speak to him. Sometimes, during his earliest days, when Mansfield was busy with other things, Abel would sit in this room for hours, studying every facet of the painting, trying to connect with the spirit of a centuries-dead human who nonetheless understood what it meant to be part living, part machine.
Mansfield has packed up most of his other valuables, but he left this here to rot. Abel’s beginning to wonder whether his creator ever really appreciated any of his treasures. He takes the painting from the wall, tucks it under one arm, and braces himself to search the place he least wants to go to: the basement.
This was Abel’s birthplace, for lack of a better word. Originally it was the basement of a Victorian-era house that stood here centuries ago. Mansfield refitted it as a modern laboratory for his most advanced experiments. So while old brick lines the walls and a few stained-glass windows edge the small area just above ground level, the room is filled with tanks for growing mechs—
—and a force field generator standing starkly in the center of the room, an empty cage with sharp points. This was where Noemi was kept, in the dark of the basement, unable to touch anyone or anything without pain.
The feeling Abel’s having now is one he hasn’t experienced often. It’s one he finds difficult to reach, because it’s so utterly forbidden to mechs, so alien to the core programming of his nature. But he knows it instantly, from the way it twists and burns in his mind.
This is anger. This is fury.
His emotions don’t change what Abel has to do. He shifts his vision to infrared so he won’t have to turn on any lights. (Probably no one is watching the house, but no point in running the risk when he has other ways of seeing.) The long rectangular tanks are empty of mechs, though a few are still filled with the milky-pink fluid that helps nascent mechs grow. A few smaller tanks had been added since Abel was here last; Mansfield had explained that people longed for child-size mechs to take the place of the offspring they couldn’t afford to have. Organic mechs might make that unnecessary, giving birth to babies for humans to cuddle—until they get old enough to be discarded, sent off to be other people’s machines.
On one table, abandoned, sits a cybernetic brain stem with its receptor cord, the seed of any mech. If Mansfield had ever coated it with the right amino acids and synthetic DNA, and then lowered it all into one of these tanks, it would have grown into a mech. It would have had the power to walk, talk, and even think, to a degree. Instead it sits here forgotten.
Abel picks it up and stares at the metal box. What is it that makes this something and him someone? There is a difference—Abel has seen that for himself—but no one understands exactly what it is, not even Mansfield.
Then he sees the extra memory device clipped onto the brain stem, its metal newer and shinier than that around it. Of course this is where Mansfield hid the message. He realized exactly where Abel would look.
It’s disturbing to be known so well by someone who means you harm.
He goes to the chair where his creator used to sit, with its small workstation, and activates it. As the room is illuminated by the faint blue glow of the screen and its workings, he plugs in the memory device. When he sees the extraordinarily high encryption level, he wonders whether Mansfield really meant for him to decode this at all.
Frowning, Abel gets to work. This could take him hours to crack, and deciphering this message is his only hope of saving Noemi.
After thirty-two minutes and four seconds, his intense concentration is broken by the chiming of the disposable comm unit he purchased at the public-access info station. Mansfield had demanded Abel wait two hours before coming here, no doubt because he felt his party would be more vulnerable to attack in transit. Abel had put those two hours to good use, searching through various Earth archives of medical personnel. Most people don’t hide their secrets as well as Burton Mansfield hides his.
He pulls out the disposable comm with its old-fashioned flat screen and activates it to see the face of Ephraim Dunaway.
“Abel.” Ephraim’s unease is obvious. “How the hell did you find me?”
“I cross-referenced people in medical fields who had taken new jobs on Earth approximately five months ago against names that had never appeared in previous records before that same time. Your new identity was then fairly easy to determine from demographic information.” Abel realizes that’s not exactly what Ephraim was asking. “I strongly doubt any human would be able to find you as easily, if at all.”