The Holocaust Piano
by Phaedra7veils
Chapter 14: The Abyss of Tenebrios
Entire days passed. Raoul and Katze tried every means they could think or dream of to leave the interface. Some efforts, like reinitializing and reprogramming the banks of Amoian computers or working with the Holocaust Piano, seemed more likely to have successful results. When reasonable ideas failed, others — wild shots in the dark, gambles at the possibility that the answer lay in chaos rather than order — were tried. They opened doors and windows throughout Eos in different sequences as though they were mathematical equations instead of entrances and exits, or took the underground shuttles to the end of each line to see where they led, or darted into random shops to see if there were actual products on the shelves. Nothing worked.
Raoul showed a patience for this sort of activity which left Katze sick with inadequacy, annoyance, and admiration, usually all at once. At each failure, his pulse would climb as though he had sucked back too many cups of coffee, something he hadn't experienced since his first days on the Black Market, whereas Raoul simply absorbed his frustrations, or shrugged them off and persevered, or moved onto the next plan. He frequently passed obstacles where Katze gave up, and he always carried the mongrel along with him.
Sometimes, it seemed as though they had succeeded: the place looked less sparkly and bright; smoke permeated the atmosphere, choking it with the sour smell of carbon; people wore the same expressions of stress and anxiety that had crossed their faces when Tanagura had first started falling apart. Then something would show up which was noticeably off-kilter: the doors did not require passkeys or iris scans, for example, or there were no vehicles on the streets, or a quiet hush like space outside of the Amoian atmosphere filled the air. It was the same otherworld, but with a new veneer, as though the consciousness which generated and ruled this place was adapting and creating a new false front to fit in with their sense of how Tanagura should appear.
Katze was learning to exist in constant uncertainty, disorientation and pervasive insecurity again. It was nothing new. The same conditions had dogged him all his life. If things weren't so clearly off, they would've seemed a lot like how things in Tanagura had always been.
"Do you think there will come a time when the computer gets everything right to the point where we are actually fooled?" He asked the Blondie after about their fifty-first attempt.
Raoul looked at him. "Will it matter?"
That stumped Katze. Of course reality was preferable to fantasy and illusion. He remembered, all too clearly, the stress he had experienced as Raoul insisted he try to pass himself off as a member of the Elite. But if his fake self was so thoroughly integrated into this illusory world that the fakery could never be detected, wouldn't that be an improvement?
The gulf between being and becoming had never seemed so wide or fraught with unseen hazards.
"Why can't they just let us go?" He thought of another question. "I thought you worked everything out with them at Jupiter's Tower."
"Ah, but you've forgotten," Raoul replied. "We aren't here because of the Cult. We're here because of the Kressellian leader's interface."
Katze's mouth snapped closed. He had forgotten.
Eventually, even Raoul reached a point where too many attempts failed, knowledge failed, even wild ideas failed. Urgency was constant and wore at them like a low-grade ear infection. They had to escape. They had to neutralize Lau and the Apheliotrophs. They had to disconnect the Tenebrians from the computer which governed Amoi. They had to send a geophysical team to read seismic graphs of the second moon. They had a plan for once they were freed. Actually Katze didn't, but Raoul did, presumably, and sitting around in this dreamy world where everything seemed so simple and flowed so smoothly wasn't going to help it come to pass, no matter how many times they had sex.
At least they were having sex. On a fairly constant basis, too, about four to six times a day.
Sadly, after years of gauging the most infinitesimal changes in other peoples' nuances in order to survive, after having his nose rubbed repeatedly in his lack of value to Tanagura, Katze was acutely sensitive to how wrong it felt.
Not his body. In spite of the Blondie's ridiculously exaggerated physiology, Katze's body felt no hurtful effects. Yet he clearly remembered how Riki limped around after a session with Iason, even after partnership with the Blondie had become a regular event. So he suspected there was something fake about the sex with Raoul on top of everything else. Not that Katze wanted his body to get torn up; the fact that it hadn't was just another sign that things weren't quite right.
Afterwards, Raoul would roll off without a word or sign of pleasure and leave. That should've been okay, too; Katze had never needed reassurance, expected not to receive it in fact.
Somehow, it wasn't.
Raoul would walk back to the computer banks to repeat an attempt that had failed before, looking for a new variation on the pattern, or to play the piano with the same mindless sense of pastime as their sex. It seemed as though sex was, for him, like a distraction from ever-present failure. It held no more meaning than taking a shower, trimming hair or nails — sloughing off dead cells, the only analogy that came to Katze, who didn't like being a dead cell receptacle.
To keep from dwelling on how creepy and strange this felt, Katze avoided Raoul. He looked for activities to fill his time. He cooked, cleaned and perused catalogues of products from the designers and craftsmen of Midas, just like he used to when he served Iason as Furniture.
"Thank you so much for using me," He muttered bitterly one day, slinging his forearms over his eyes after Raoul started to leave again.
"What?" Raoul turned, shocked. Katze silently cursed his own inbred hurtle toward self-destruction. What on earth compelled him to say that out loud?
They stared at each other for what seemed like hours, as though seeing each other for the first time. Then they pulled away, Raoul wandering off to wherever he wandered off to and Katze rocketing out of bed to take a shower.
Afterward, he decided to visit Hilarion Fyss' shop in Midas to scout through his reference library, searching for fresh clues, a new perception or thought-pattern.
Even that place had changed. The antiques and artwork were still there. Books, papers and objects that Katze couldn't recognize still lined the archives. The Sapphire was still on Von, but his Furniture, Kosai, was nowhere to be seen. Katze would've been surprised to find him there. He picked up the books again and poured through their pages, trying to locate the references that he had found before, but it seemed as though words would flicker and disappear as his eyes focused upon them.
All references to Tenebrios had vanished. There was no entry for the Priestess Cult. It was as though the memory of these things was slowly wiped from his mind, like he was being lulled into oblivion with the same effect as hypnosis carrying away an old habit. There was something he had to remember ... something about poetry, and flowers, and perfume! Desire! Desire webs! Traps!
It was too simple in this reflective world of Tanagura. Everything, from the handy way in which all their problems seemed about to be ironed out once they got back to the "real world" to the copious amounts of sex where Raoul and Katze strove to make up for lost years and opportunities. It was all too slick and unreal.
Suddenly another realization shocked Katze, that this unreality even applied to Raoul. The Raoul Am that Katze had known was not this man. Raoul would never accept a Furniture so easily into his bed, ever. It just wouldn't happen. Blondies were powerful and imperious, thoroughly invested in the hierarchical structure that Jupiter had imposed over Tanagura, in fact, genetically manufactured to support and sustain it. He would expect the best and get it, and Katze was far from the best.
Katze started to wonder at which point he had started being trapped in the desire webs, in the fulfilment of his wishes. He wondered if it began at the point when, after years of no interaction with the Blondie Syndicate, Raoul's face suddenly appeared on his computer monitor and commanded him to Hilarion's shop.
Right from the very start, it seemed.
There it was, his oldest, truest companion, that familiar feeling of despair.
Everything was pared back to the beginning; everything he experienced since walking out of his hole of a basement apartment could possibly be, most likely was an illusion. Still, he wondered, how did one interact with something that wasn't real? While knowing that it wasn't real?
He wasn't prepared for what faced him when he returned to Eos, in the main hall standing next to the bank of windows — tall, blond, icy, unreachable and beautiful, "Iason!"
Raoul stood just a small ways apart, his expression carefully neutral.
Neither of them paid the slightest attention to Katze.
Katze couldn't stop himself. He ran in and circled, scanning the luxurious room. Circling and scanning it for signs of Riki, who was nowhere to be seen.
"You've made some changes," Iason moved around the hall in the opposite direction, his coat swirling around after him. "You prefer gold to blue."
"Indeed," Raoul inclined his head.
"Paintings to natural stone."
Raoul kept quiet. Natural stone on Amoi did not come in the deep blue shade that Iason had favoured.
"Traditional furnishings to–"
"Was there something you wanted to tell me?"
"Aren't you happy to see me?" Iason whirled back, a slight smirk crooking up the corner of his mouth.
Raoul chose not to respond to this.
In a flash, Iason was at his side, leaning against his shoulder, sliding a gloved finger down the side of his jaw, the line of his neck, the lines of his torso, while murmuring in his ear. "You were always so pleased when we got together before."
Katze watched their interaction as though watching spacecraft collide, in a collision of his own with the past, with disenfranchisement and helplessness, unable even to voice his objections. His terror of Iason still had the power to affect him.
"Why so silent, dear friend?" Iason all but purred, the movements of his fingers changing from insinuation to outright proposition. He had slid behind Raoul, arms threading through to the front of his body. Slowly, with swaying, rocking movements, he turned him around so that they both faced Katze. He stared at the Furniture over Raoul's shoulder, eyes narrowing like a snake looking at its next meal. "Is he the reason?"
Katze started to back away.
"I always thought he was very pretty," Iason kept murmuring, "even after his looks were spoiled."
The hands had started to strum across the front of Raoul's stomach.
"If you like him so much, why don't we take him together? You could use his mouth while I do him from the back, or the other way around, or you could enjoy him, while I enjoy you. Which would you prefer?"
Raoul jerked away from the other figure's arms and leers. He walked over to the bar and poured himself a drink. He raised the glass to his lips and was about to sip when he froze.
Even Katze could follow his thoughts. Was it even alcohol? Why did he need to drink anything here to feel the effects of drinking? Wasn't it enough just to want to feel drunk?
Raoul handed the glass over to Iason who accepted it with a look of surprise, walked over to one of the chairs, and sat down. While Iason knocked the contents of that glass back, Raoul asked Katze, "Is this your secret fantasy?"
"What?"
"This arrangement with Iason, is it some secret daydream you've been keeping to yourself?"
Iason snorted. Katze's mouth worked silently. Iason, Raoul and him — together?
"Hell, no!" He finally forced past his shock.
"So you've never had a hankering to have a threesome with me and Iason?" Raoul double-checked. "Or me and another Blondie perhaps?"
Katze had enough terror and uncertainty with his attachment to Raoul.
"Too damned scary!" He almost wheezed in panic. Raoul had no idea what courage it took for him to admit this in that company. Iason had never dragged a skewer through Raoul's face.
Raoul's mouth twitched.
"Aren't you tired of this?" He looked straight at Iason. "When are you going stop messing with our heads?"
The paler Blondie tossed his head. The ends of his hair started to shimmer and disappear. The tone of his voice was completely sardonic.
"Probably never," he said as the room exploded. It was as though a glass ball full of bright water had shattered, releasing droplets of illusion everywhere. Everything shook and shimmered, and disappeared into darkness. The sensation of too little atmosphere seemed to make the liquid in Katze's veins boil along with everything else as it erupted and flew apart, like swarms of bees had decided to crawl through his arteries.
After a few moments, his vision grew accustomed to the darkness. He expected an Abyss, a void, a darkness like that of Tenebrios. Instead, he found himself in a place that was close enough: Raoul's apartment, for real. This time the apartment looked as it had during its occupation by Lau and the Apheliotrophs, a huge mess.
Raoul was there, as well. He turned on his heels as close to gaping at the devastation surrounding them as a Blondie ever would.
"No wonder you knew the place was fake," was all he had to say about it to Katze.
Iason was gone. In his place sat the Admiral, a droll expression twisting her mouth.
"So when you agreed to marry me and crown me Queen of Amoi–?" she started to ask.
"I fully intended to live up to my agreement," Raoul replied, without as much as a blink. Behind the half-crumbled bar, he found the decanter that had been duplicated in the illusory world, and poured himself a real drink.
"What about him?" Hahna pointed to Katze. "How does he factor in this?"
Raoul sighed, as though the question was too tedious even to contemplate.
"What about you, Katze?" He took a hefty swig. "Do you want to be the Queen of Amoi?"
"Not particularly," Katze answered weakly. Although he knew that was a misdirection, that Hahna was wondering about their relationship, he was more concerned at that moment about the Apheliotrophs that were probably lurking in the shadows around them. He stretched his neck in every direction, peering into corners, trying to pierce the darkness to see what nightmares emerged.
Raoul stared. He took a quick glance into the same corners that Katze was trying to see, and told him, "There's no one in this room except us."
"I wasn't thinking of people in particular."
"Ah! There's no other sentient being in this room except us."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive. Although I can hear movement in the other room."
Admiral Hahna pulled a gun from her holster and left to investigate.
Raoul reached over to a panel of buttons behind the bar. He pressed some keys and slid his fingers over different touch pads. Finally, he closed his fist and banged on the panel. A screen lit up, part of a closed-circuit monitor of the apartment. The entire tower had been wired for security.
"I'm surprised it works," Raoul admitted candidly. "I didn't think there was anything left that did."
The lens was focused on a Platinum, Serge Renaud. Katze watched as Hahna entered the room and started chatting with him.
"They know each other?" He turned to Raoul.
"I doubt it," Raoul replied. "They've met only twice: once on the spaceport tarmac for a minute, once in this apartment for even less than that."
"They seem awfully well acquainted," Katze had become accustomed to feeling suspicious of every encounter, especially those that seemed to be by chance.
Raoul shook his head.
"You intend to marry her," Katze began.
"It was necessary in order to secure her cooperation and access the interface." Raoul explained. "It was her price."
"Even now?"
"I see no reason why she would change her decision."
"She knows that you and I–that you and me–that we're–"
Raoul waited for Katze to finish. When silence fell, Raoul explained further, "She wants a position, a title, something that will give her more leverage than she had as the leader of a group of pirates."
"Just exchanging one group for another, is she?" For the first time ever, Katze made a joke. "Are you sure that's all she wants?"
"Ssshh, watch and see," Raoul pointed to the monitor where Hahna and Renaud had engaged in an animated conversation.
Katze heard Serge say, "I guess now that Raoul's phasing out the Pet trade, they're going to have to find another form of release."
"Raoul prefers men, anyway."
"A lot of Tanagurans do. A lot of Amoians do. There just aren't that many women around in case you haven't noticed. Amoi isn't too good to them."
"Raoul could have his pick." Hahna looked bored. "He just prefers men."
"Right, well, there's that also. Well, if it's any consolation, Blondies are completely sterile."
"They are?" She turned, picked up a strand of his long silver hair, and played with the wave at the end of it. "You are?"
He, in turn, tucked a finger under her chin and tilted it up so that they were looking straight at each other. "I'm not a Blondie."
His meaning was unmistakeable.
"Oh!" She said.
Then she shook off his finger, "Some mother I would make: jetting around the Outworld Sector, planning operations, commanding my fleet with a baby hanging off my breast. Not to mention what to do when the nappy needs changing in the middle of a raid."
"I'm getting ridiculously tired and bored of this Port Authority business anyway. It is getting time for a change of career."
"Is that so?" She parked a hand on her hip. "So you figure you can just take over the Kressellian fleet, is that it?"
"Actually I was thinking more of serious time in the childrearing business. I can't help out with the breast part, but I'm probably capable of changing a diaper. Or I would be with an appropriate demonstration or two."
"Renaud, you're a nice person but–"
"Oh, no! The kiss-off of death."
"Hunh? What I was going to say is that we hardly know each other."
"True enough, but I think we're off to a good start, don't you?"
"Besides, I'm a Tenebrian Priestess. You know what that means, don't you?"
"No," he pulled his hair out from between her fingers where she had started to worry and pick at it. "You're not."
"Yes, actually, I am. Raoul was a second away from putting a bullet in my brain when he found out."
"If it was true, he wouldn't have stopped himself from putting a bullet in your brain. Therefore, it can't be true."
"You have the most fascinating leaps of logic." She shrugged. "It isn't my job or my problem to convince you."
"You forget I've met a real Tenebrian Priestess ... was hailed and propositioned by her ... denied her ... fought her — or, well, launched fighter ships at her in our defense rather. You're not one of them!"
"No, I'm worse. I'm what Raoul calls "a Manchurian Candidate." It seems I'm carrying some sort of Priestess Creating time-bomb in my head that only needs the right trigger to set it off. Then — BOOM! — one full-scale Hive-Mind-connected Telepath gumming up the machine, right in the thick of things. So, not only am I a latent Priestess, a Priestess in the making, with no knowledge of what could set me off, but I'm a living threat to everyone I know and care about."
"Yes, Raoul did mention that to me," Serge admitted. "He also told me that he figures the threat was most likely curtailed when he refused to use the mind-wiping mechanism to restore your memories. The odds of anything else having the power to set that off are astronomical. Short of coming up against another Priestess with the hive-mind technology, that is."
"As someone trying for the first time in her life to be a nice person, I don't know that it's a risk I want to take."
"In that case, niceness is highly overrated and I assure you that the rumours of my own niceness are grossly exaggerated. I have only enough nice in me to do whatever it takes to win you all to myself, and the rest can just go screw themselves. I'm quite a selfish bastard, really."
"Are you asking me to–?"
"Yes."
"Oh."
She thought. She considered. She squirmed around a little.
"I suppose it's a possibility," she finally admitted. "A better one than before, anyway. You don't need a commitment right this very second, do you?"
He thought about that for a second. "Would you give me one if I said yes?"
"No."
"I didn't think so. How about a date then? Would that be stand-offish and noncommittal enough for you?"
"I think that would be a start."
"We can't drag it out too long, though. This planet is a bad place for women. Eventually, as in 'very soon' eventually, we would have to move off it."
"Oh, I see."
"How about your fiancé? Are you planning to let him know?"
"Do I have to?"
Serge gave a nervous laugh.
Raoul flipped the switch to turn off the monitor. He looked over at Katze who seemed a bit stunned over the pace at which everything had proceded.
"Sometimes things have a way of working themselves out," he shook out his mane, "without us having to take any action on our own behalf."
Katze wasn't quite ready to agree that things had been worked out. If anything, he was willing to set aside his issues with Raoul for the time being.
"Do you think we'll be that lucky with Jupiter and the Apheliotrophs?" He asked.
As Raoul started walking out of the ruins, he barked out a laugh.
The Holocaust Piano – chapter 13 << >> The Holocaust Piano – chapter 15