GOODBYE, MA

1560 4D

In stat, whole days rattle past you like the buzz of a hagfly, tickling your metallized skin. You can’t see or hear. Your body is stone. To get from one thought to the next takes a day, if only you remember what a day was.

Nadienne. I still don’t know why she came back to me, why she lied about Georg when she never lies. She could never understand my lying, as if I didn’t need to do it.

Now, Essa understands me. She isn’t Kai Ren — she’s Gellin Coll, which isn’t bad, just slower and more social — but she always knows I’m going to lie, and she just gets this impatient look like, get it over with.

This terrible cracking sound jabs me in the spine. I want to move, and I start this real slow thought about the Argaz coming back to torture me, and then the metal skin starts ripping itself from me and I stop thinking and scream.

It’s just like when the gacks peeled bits of my face off, but all over me this time. My outer skin must have grown into the metal covering, and now the covering is gone, taking most of the skin with it.

Even my eyelids are in flames. I’m still screaming, and other screams mix with mine. My eyes open; looking at me is Armana, alive and fully dressed. He’s not screaming.

Free from the stiffening chemicals of the stat treatment, my limbs collapse, and I sprawl on a carpeted floor. The carpet pile claws at my exposed flesh. Tangled with me is Nadienne; we shriek together.

I stare up with burning eyes; here’s Ma with a ‘caine spray laying it on us. The ‘caine takes hold and we stop screaming.

I try to get up, and remember I’m naked. We’re in Ma’s sitting room, surrounded by voluptuous statuary of all sizes and shapes, mostly in plast. On the wall, animated panels undulate through erotic cycles.

I inspect the patches of intact skin where my body and Nadienne‘s were touching. “Ouch!” I say as I poke at a patch on my belly.

“Shut up,” Ma says, “after all that screaming, they’ll think I’m having one of those parties.”

I point at Armana. “Listen, Ma, what’s he doing here? And can’t we get something to cover us?”

“The spray only heals if the skin is exposed to air, or that’s what the procedure told us,” Ma says, looking us over. “It took Armana six months to worm that stat reversal process out of the City archive. Your friend Georg hid it very well. Warming you up took a day and a half.” She gestures at an infra heater. “As far as anything else is concerned, well, that’s a private matter between Armana Sorjiest and me.”

So. Another lover, and this one owes me a lot of metal. Thanks to Armana, I’m back to life, and depressed already. I catch him eyeing me.

“What’re you looking at, Squish?”

“You were good art,” he says in that gentle voice.

I try Ma’s own tactics on her, without much hope. “So you’re with him now? What about me?”

“It was necessary,” Ma says in that crisp tone. “You have the attention span of a streetrat. Without him, you’d be dead.” She shrugs and gives me her ‘You’ll never get it’ look.

Nadienne gasps, struggling to her feet. I stagger up, and stumble after her, both of us pink and red and brown and bleeding, into the shower room. Before we can close the door, she starts to sob. Just before the stat hit us, she was crying, and the tears left some wobbly intact strips of skin running down from her eyes. When she heals, she’ll probably have tear tracks forever.

“Georg?” I ask.

Nadienne nods and breaks down again.

“He wouldn’t have been good for you,” I start, on the wrong foot as usual.

“I know,” she says, “but he was a big step up from you.” She starts giggling and sobbing all at once. “Streetrat, that’s the word I could never find.”

“You lied to me about Georg.” I don’t need the pyro for this rush, it comes like an explosion. “Being a streetrat beats buttsucking the blues for a living.”

She gets this look like I kicked her breath away. “Georg died saving your life. It beats bee-essing your own ma.”

I draw back a hand, fast, and then I stop, because she loses the giggle and the sobs, and she faces me and doesn’t flinch.

“It’s all right. Go ahead. That’s your answer to me, once again, like always, and every time, I come back for you.” Her face is set, round and teary and blistered-looking, and her hair’s ratted and mangled from the stat, but the line of her lower lip curves just so, and she’s perfectly still. That stillness stops me colder than the stat.

“Nadienne. I’m sorry.” I turn around and walk out of the shower room, and I think, You’ve lost her forever, fool. On the way I grab a long thin towel from a rack on the stone wall and hold it up in front of me. I’m feeling nasty. I hate having a creep like Armana bring me back to life.

In the sitting room, with Armana standing behind her, Ma is waiting. “We’ve got to get you away before that Rask stops in here again.”

“Ma, why? Why did you bother?”

“Bother what?”

“Saving me.”

“What a question. I’m your mader, isn’t that--“

“So you put me and her on display in your place?”

“That’s a terrible thing to say! After I saved your life. Don’t you want to know--“

“Who did you save it for?”

She splutters for a second.

“Goodbye, Ma.” I walk over to the door.

“You can’t leave just like that!” She comes over to me. “They’ll find you, and then they’ll--“

“Come looking for you?”

She opens her mouth fast, then shuts it, and slowly nods. That’s the way she’s always been, deep down. Finally she’s admitting it.

In a recess closet I find a coverall that fits me. It sets my skin afire again. “I didn’t ask you for any of this, and I don’t want it. I’ll take my chances out there, and you can take your own. I’m not staying here. Just tell Nadienne I’ll be around.”

“Tomy--“

“Goodbye, Ma.” I open the door and look up and down the understreet. It’s dark — middle of the night-half — and I know where Jackie B will be, probably zagged that I still owe him the pyro, it was half a year ago, wasn’t it? So I’ll get it over in Rumchi, where Rask won’t go, and I’ll make Jackie B my own again. I need him.