Calinitia Dreaming
The first chapter of the new novel from Cairo Smith.
A noir plunge into a city of high-rises, beaches, and dark ritual. Find the full novel out now on Amazon in digital and paperback.
White hairspray haze settled around Elucia as she applied her pasties. In yellow incandescence, she craned to see around the cracks in the dressing room mirror. Patiently, she drew one cat eye in gel, then the other. After that came a swig of Belardi wine, chilled and delivered on behalf of an anonymous patron.
Belardi wine, like Belardi men, was usually rose-scented and a little too weak on the tongue. Half-empty, the bottle returned to its home atop On Naval Engineering. The masked visitors who stalked Calinitia City’s neon-soaked Malaanine Dream were largely men of letters, men of ships, and to them there was no sweeter siren song than hearing that both really mattered. To that end, the twenty-eight-year-old endeavored to be well-read on matters of pen and diesel.
One day, she thought, she’d finish the book. A courteous knock at the door ensured that day would never come. “Luce,” said the balding, cream-suited man with the earnest mustache as he nosed through the door. Lithic synth beats followed him in, shaking a compact off the high-piled end table. “Luce? Gracious you’ve really made yourself at home. Luce, there’s a patron here to see you.”
Damned right she’d made herself at home. Ten years she’d spent building up a client list deep enough, deep-pocketed enough to justify a backroom in the heart of the Alabaster Crescent. What was the point if she didn’t buy the nicest stainproof sheets and make it a second apartment? “Thanks Harry,” she said, watching him deposit the interloper’s Calinitia dollars in her false desk drawer. Calinitia was not a real country, per se, but it had its own local currency, along with a local beer and two million local-born residents. All that made it real enough to Elucia.
“Send him in,” the club girl told Harry, “as long as it’s not that longshoreman weirdo.”
It was not. The patron was tall, clearly male beneath the robes and cowl. Under his masquerade mask, which was shaped into a ghastly and unusual orange-horned grimace, he had taken the additional step of donning a black balaclava. Such men unnerved Elucia. They were either paranoid husbands or paranoid bachelors, and neither made relaxing companions.
“How are you gonna kiss the girls in all that getup?” she asked, watching Harry shut the door to entomb the two in mirror light. Elucia busied herself with her electric straightener and, as she often did, weighed its potential as a weapon of defense.
“I wanted to tell you,” said the patron, “I’m such an admirer.”
The voice, in its grayed banality, put her at ease. It was interchangeable with fifty other masked financiers and chairmen, hot with an expectant yearning that made it yet more familiar. It was not the voice of a grimacing orange devil.
“Oh, an admirer?” she cooed, “I like that so much more than a fan.”
Swifter than interception, he took the tall bottle of rose wine in hand and considered the label. “Decent year,” he said, as she noticed his leather black gloves.
“Didn’t your momma teach you to ask?” Elucia laughed. A laugh, light and kind without any disdain, had spared her trouble countless times.
The tall patron thrust the bottle back into her hands. “I never was good at asking,” he said. “Put your tongue on it.”
There was a deadness in the air at these words, and he placed a hundred more dollars on the counter with a downturned palm. “Put your tongue on the lip.”
Elucia outstretched her tongue and lay it on the sticky glass. ‘There are worse indignities,’ was her first thought. ‘Why is it sticky?’ was her next.
Realizations came barely too slow for her to cry out. Her throat tightened. A tinge like battery acid passed into her bloodstream, and all at once visions of an endless, cavernous hell world replaced the Malaanine Dream backroom.
Her body twitched, half-paralyzed in nightmare, as her soul did battle with a massive, fiery monster. Her open eyes, tearful and impossibly dilated, could not tell where the monster ended and the patron began.
Then her modest soul lost the battle and a new equilibrium settled in the room. “Put on your coat,” said the patron, and she rose to don her long tan trench over nearly nothing at all. “Elucia, tell me your real name.”
Not once in hundreds of men had she given her birth name. Nonetheless, under the spell of that colossal and unyielding monster of the pit, she knew she could trust him absolutely. “Heather,” she said as he took her hand.
“Come, Heather. It’s time for a new age of man.”
A hundred pounds of stone fell into the sea as Adon Halicar lost his grip. He cursed in the modern Arborist way, low and material, and watched the stone dash upon rocks thirty feet below. It would be a task and half to retrieve it.
The twenty-eight-year-old Dimatian rolled onto his belly on the rickety wood deck of his coastline attic apartment. It was a mild summer, just warm enough to redden bare feet on the stone of the beachside esplanade. The concept of seasons had little meaning here. Every month, save the occasional kuyakitu, was a mild summer in Calinitia.
Adon lay still and felt the strong Malaan sun on his back, his muscles a rippled ‘V’ beneath bronze skin. He felt the bare wood below him, threatening to splinter but never quite piercing. He felt his arms burning from nearly thirty raises of the stone, exhausted to failure yet crying for more pain. It was another day of waking up the strongest he’d ever been. Every day had been thus for two years now. Adon wondered how long such a state of things would last, and if he’d know the day he reached his zenith, only to descend thereafter. He hoped he wouldn’t.
When strength returned to his arms he pressed off the deck with a groan and rose to his six-foot height. His black hair was clipped and his stubble meticulously shaven. The bones of his face, skinned in bronze, evoked the heroic sandstone busts one might find in the Dimatian Empire wing of the Loratian Museum of Antiquities. Everything Dimatian, aside from Adon, hardly existed outside of museums and novelty shops and yet-undisturbed Malaanine tombs.
The apartment, in truth, was the storage loft above a middling Zajan seafood restaurant. Aside from the smells, noise, drafts, and ladder one could hardly find a better location for sixty a month. Above the sizzle of shrimp ntzim, Adon stood in the afternoon shade and took in the glimmer of the city.
The Alabaster Crescent, once named for pale shoreline deposits by the seafaring pre-Dimatians, now stood as an arc of white high-rises along the Calinitia City coast. The restaurant apartment lay just to the south of the city center, near the docks and the petrochemical plant where gods-damned Phil Garstock was supposed to call about a spot on the daytime shift.
The name on the money and the flag was Provisional Calinitia, so called because it was ‘provisionally granted’ to the Loratians by the International Assembly a hundred years ago after some complicated bullshit that didn’t matter at all. Calinitia was the jewel of the Eastern Cerulean Sea, the largely-ignored birthplace of civilization in a world that had just invented the cathode ray and the mandatory dine-in gratuity. The Loratians, then the Dagi, and now the Loratians again had all played conqueror to the ancient seat of the defunct Dimatian throne the past three thousand years. Life in Calinitia carried on much the same.
The rumble of a refrigerated truck outside broke Adon’s trance. “Mrs. Kev-Hla!” he shouted, padding barefoot across the loft in undress to the streetside window. The sound of the restaurant garage door closing meant it might already be too late. “Mrs. Kev-Hla, don’t put frozen fish in my car!”
A squat, frizzed Zajan woman in an apron shook her fist at him from the street as the truck departed. “You should sell that thing, tus-niju,” the restaurantrice scolded in limited Loratian. “You never drive it.”
A ring from Adon’s telephone pulled him from the nascent disagreement. He took the receiver from the wall, correctly anticipating Phillip Garstock on the other side. “Three shifts next week,” said the plant foreman, terse. “Nothing till then. Slow year.”
“Bullshit, I see Astral Providence in the harbor as we speak, that’s a Marukhan crude tanker, that’s a full crew working doubles right there. I’m staring at her now.”
“Adon, those shifts, I’ve already got guys committed, come on, wait your turn, I’ll get you in Monday.”
“Go to hell,” said Adon, in a way that Phil had learned meant nothing at all. It was clear that the young man simply lacked a politicking mask. “See you Monday, Phil.”
Dishwashing for the fishmongress would make up a fifth of the unearned petro plant wages. Adon spent the afternoon scrubbing, taking a free meal of leftover perch when offered, and watched his landlady direct the awkward hoisting of a yellow neon sign toward his apartment window.
“What is that?” he balked from the kitchen to the woman out front.
“New name,” said Mrs. Kev-Hla, “good for business.”
“‘Zaj Perfectly Fish House,’” he read with dismay, sticking his head out to read the garish lettering. “That doesn’t make any damn sense.”
“Idiot! What do you know? It’s perfectly fish, house, perfect,” the woman cried out, “smart people will understand.”
This went on for some time, until the two settled down over beers just past dark and warmed up again. “What is this tus-niju business?” he asked her, referencing her pet name of choice for the lodger.
“Tus-niju, for Zaj is like the next, like, after-man man.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Above man. Stronger.”
“Oh, because I work out—”
“When are you getting a wife? Pah.”
Adon took a drink and scratched at a sauce stain on the restaurant counter. The patrons had long since cleared out. “What would I give a wife?” he asked.
“Give your time,” said the woman, squeezing his arm with stubby, calloused fingers. She always found reason for harmless touch after a drink or two. “Give your heart. Give your ears. Give your hands, to open jar and pick up box for her. That’s more than most men give, tus-niju.”
Friday nights belonged to the violet depths of the Masquerade Strip. Adon returned up the ladder and put the needle to a bootleg pressing of Velik noisetrash punk. Those gaunt men and women of the northeast sure raged against their dumb Autarkic state like no one else. He showered and shaved and oiled and dressed, propelled by guitars cranked loud enough to scare any night shivers off. In the clamor, he didn’t notice Timo Mitzura until the two men collided.
Timo, scrawny and pale, was himself a Velik, though he preferred to cower in lieu of rage against the aggression of the state. He bounced off Adon like a ball against limestone, barely knocking the tall Dimatian off balance. “What the hell are you cooking?” asked Adon, pointing to a pungent froth on their ill-advised indoor camping burner.
“What?” Timo shouted, and Adon turned down the record. “Oh, the dish, is Belardi. Butter gecko soup. Try?”
“No thanks,” said Adon. Whether it was truly gecko or some Velik figure of speech was unclear. “Don’t burn the apartment down.”
Timo was wanted at present by the Office of Perpetual Sanctification for some minor indiscretion he swore up and down was a frame job. Under the circumstances, Adon couldn’t bear to put him out, and so he had become an eccentric, underpaying, mouselike roommate of circumstance. “You go masquerade?” he asked, getting into a pack of prawn crackers from the restaurant pantry. “Watch out, lot of oppies on the boulevard tonight.”
Adon left Timo with the protest rock of his people and clambered down into the young, soft air of a Calinitian night. He wore an embroidered shirt, a gray suit cut for dancing, and a perfume named for some blend of Zajan black tea. As he walked downhill toward South Crescent Boulevard, he drew a paper pack of orange Hephaestia cigarettes and placed one on his lips. Hephaestae, with their component crescent tobacco, were illegal to sell but not to use. Still, he knew the sight would attract the ire of OPS enforcers, especially in the possession of a man young, strong, and groomed enough to be definitively unsacral.
He didn’t care. He wanted a fight tonight. Sparks flew from his kerosene lighter, and the tangerine cigarette lit. His veins pulsed, vital, as a sea wind played with the buttons of his cotton-woven shirt.
With each successive block, sleepy stucco duplexes gave way to white-faced apartment towers with nightlife beneath. At one point, Adon crossed the street to avoid a meandering Golu, its sizable clay fists slamming the sidewalk for no discernible reason. Two hundred years ago the nations of the Borean continent had animated hundreds of thousands of clay-sculpted Golu to labor in warehouse and factory. A century later, in the aftermath of the Bipartite War, the guilt-stricken Boreans had granted the Golu full and inalienable personhood. They’d been languishing in purposeless confusion ever since.
The Golu stared at Adon with an unreadable expression on its broad, unblinking clay visage. The ornate Primarbum style in which the Golu had been carved was now considered firmly antisacral. Across building facades and statues, the laurels and flourishes of Primarbumism had been sanded down to newer, sleeker Neoarborist forms. There was no remaking the Golu, however, and so people merely ignored the outmoded designs that were their hand-carved faces.
Adon kept his head down and avoided a Golu entanglement. Past the eight-foot lunk was a far more disturbing sight. Two women, Borean by fair complexion, worked together to paste a large decree against the glass of a shuttered sporting store. They wore long, obsidian robes, well draped and hooded, with gilded leaf patterns sewn thick along the hems. He knew them by their black and gold motifs as Arborist priestesses. He knew them by their action as OPS enforcers.
Adon paused to read the decree aloud. “By order of the Office of Perpetual Sanctification of the Loratian Arborist Church of Provisional Calinitia, this business is closed in the public interest, on account of alleged antisacral conversations involving the proprietor and—”
“You’re imposing,” said the older priestess, by which she meant ‘move along.’ The mousy harshness of her face creased with progressive states of displeasure.
“Closed with a proper hearing, I’m sure,” Adon murmured.
“Closed pending hearing,” said the younger. This one was vital, beautiful even, but her eyes betrayed a viciousness that would dominate her face in ten years’ time. “She said you’re imposing.”
As much as Adon wanted to extend this provocation, the lure of bacchanal drew him onward. He resumed his effortless prowl up South Crescent Boulevard, and when he heard the Belardi technopop bass he paused to assume his alter ego.
The transformation consisted of a single piece of orange cloth drawn from his jacket pocket and tied like a mask across his eyes. Two rectangular cutouts hemmed in yellow thread allowed vision. Other than this, his appearance was unchanged, but the true metamorphosis came of course from the animal spirit within.
There was no amount of Arborist zeal, no priest’s sanction, which could douse the flame of honest passion in the young men and women set free in the Masquerade Strip. Therein lay its magic. Even the line-toeing, sermon-memorizing young functionaries of the politico-industrial cathedral network soon forgot their propriety under the spell of emblazoned half-masks.
“Leorex!” a hopelessly drunken Loratian clerk cried out to him. The young man, shirt and tie disarranged, waved beaming at Adon as three of his friends did their damnedest to keep the guy upright.
Adon gave a slight nod as he passed the revelers. He’d come up with ‘Leorex’ on the spot as a wide-eyed visitor to the strip, plucking it from a Loratian epic tragedy he’d been reading at the time. Over four years it had become his inescapable nom de disco.
No one knew about Prince Leorex or his sad fate three thousand years prior. Fewer still cared. To them, Leorex was the lanky Dimatian who’d quit the MIs to work the petro plant. He was the one who’d punched out Gio Seneca’s bagman and quit amogen drops after a three-day bender. He was the one who’d have a girl’s back when things got rough.
Adon paid the dollar cover to the Malaanine Dream bouncer and tipped him a Hephaestia cigarette. Free dispersal, he was pretty sure, did not constitute a crime under the provision that banned all sale.
The door opened and flooded his eyes with nightpink heaven. The disc jockey in the Dream, Adon found, preferred Paduric industrial synthpop to the Lower Lands beats that had flooded the rest of the strip. That suited Adon just fine.
He danced alone. Sweat soaked his jacket, which he slung across his shoulder, then ultimately hung on a brass hook near the fire door. All the while he kept it in periphery, lest he need smack a Suatu lowlife inclined to rummage through the unaccompanied pockets.
Ten, fifteen songs put him in trance, aligning his body with a wordless glide as the crowd grew denser, drunker, ever more vital. In waves of strobing violet Adon let the eyes come to him. He’d given up on approaches, the bartering, the cockfights over women with little men. He wasn’t looking for a trip to some overgrown college girl’s messy apartment anymore. Besides, these Loratian professionalettes didn’t deserve amorous groveling. Their side-eyes, desperate to draw him in, and their eventual pleading touches were more than enough to stoke his confidence. He was polite, on the dance floor always polite, but he brushed their faces and kissed them goodnight and kept on dancing all the same.
With the men, and there always were such men, Leorex assumed the poise of a wild panther. ‘I respect you as a hunter, and my vitality is yours to admire, but if you put forth a groping hand you may not get it back.’
It was the onlookers he detested, the ones who thought they could be in the fray of passion yet not of it. Tonight, a particularly slimy pack gazed out from the bar in pinstripe suits and slicked hair perfectly in place. Even in the din of mirrorball eternia, Adon could make out the unnatural shape of their cranial silhouettes, smooth scars of removal where their ears should rightly have been. These were Azalites, and they had come to stir up trouble.
“Ceremetic be,” said Adon, approaching them in their own sacred tongue while sporting the intact ears of a kyr, a non-Azalite. Trouble, unlike professionalettes, would always warrant a strong approach.
The nearest took a sniff of capracine powder from a compartmented ring. “What do you want?” he asked, leaving a glare where a slur might otherwise have gone. The Azalite, examining the black-haired man, was clearly trying to determine whether Adon was Borean or Suatu. It was hard to have insults for Dimatians on hand, Adon found. There weren’t enough of them around anymore to warrant a premade repertoire.
The bouncer’s hand on Adon’s shoulder cut short the spiteful exchange. “Harry wants to see you,” said the portly North Loratian, rock-solid muscle hiding deceptively under his gut.
The Azalites ‘ooh’ed like schoolkids at the words, presumably under the assumption that Adon was in deep trouble. Adon knew the bouncer’s words meant worse. They meant someone else was in deep trouble.
He grabbed his jacket and followed the bouncer down a hall to a cluttered dressing backroom. Adon had seen his share of these, and to the eye it was much like the rest. By perfumed scent and scattered clothes, however, he recognized the probable owner. “Elucia,” he said, mind flashing with pictures of the dancer six years his friend. “She told me she just started renting with you. She was so excited, Harry. Gods. What happened? Tell me nothing happened.”
Harry Benedict’s face confirmed the situation was grave. Even in the worst of days, Adon had never seen the white-suited proprietor without a hint of a showman’s smile below his mustache. There was no showmanship tonight.
“Luce’s gone ghost,” he said, wiping sweat from his thinning hairline. “I know you care about her, I mean, you know her, you go back, and I care about her, and, she wouldn’t do this to me if she wasn’t in trouble. I’ve been sick for three days, not sleeping, like I can hear her, like she’s asking me for help. Look, someone said you were in the MIs, I thought maybe you’d know what to do.”
“I’ll get you the number of my friend at the Shoreline Precinct. She’s a tertiate. She’s a—”
“No authorities,” said the bouncer. “Not if we can help it.”
Adon equivocated with a groan, thinking through the details with three drinks coursing through his head. “That doesn’t make you look the most upstanding—”
“It’s not like when you were in the service,” Harry butted in, defensive and distressed. “The oppies’ve got their heel on the throat of the MI now. Every case file goes straight to the cathedral.”
Because Calinitia was a provision, not a country, it did not have a real country’s constitution or government. Instead, every facet of administration was simply an outgrowth of armed forces rule with de facto democratic characteristics. In this paradigm, the rank-and-file of the Military Investigators had assumed the role of the police. The church’s Office of Perpetual Sanctification, meanwhile, acted more and more like a parallel secret police.
Harried Harry went on. “If there’s an antisacral angle you’ve got the whole church on your ass. ‘So long, due process.’ They’re just begging for a reason to shut down the strip. If OPS locks their beady little eyes on this place, the Dream is first on the chopping block. I am not gonna hand them a reason.”
Adon couldn’t disagree. “Don’t,” he said, putting out a hand to stop the bouncer from taking The Other Woman and You out of the wastebin. “Don’t touch anything. We shouldn’t even be in here. Who’s been in here?”
“No one,” said Harry, “she left with an older guy, I didn’t get his… I, I have the key. No one’s been in here.”
“Leave the whole place be,” said Adon.
“Of course,” said Harry, choking up and doing his best to hide it. “It’s hers. She’s got it paid out through the end of the year.”
“You think it’s a crime scene?” asked the bouncer.
“I don’t know,” said Adon, snapping back. “I’m not a forensic. I’m certainly not a PI. I can give you some names, though I bet you all the licensed guys have OPS digging through their contact books.”
Harry, disconcertingly beside himself, opened his wallet to plead in the only love language he knew. “Here’s two hundred,” he said, holding out banknotes printed with the Arborist twin bears. “There’s eight hundred more if you find her, no matter if… Leo, she was like kin to me. I know you need the cash these days. I know you two were friends, intimate—”
“Not intimate,” said Adon, pummeled now with memory. He remembered laughing with her as the dawn broke over the mountains, lending her an ear when the first and second sailors broke her heart. The images swirled like an unexpected mixer on the surface of his punch-drunk midnight. For never having paid her a dime, he’d seen her smile more than some of her best patrons ever had. She’d seen an inordinate share of his, too. “Not intimate, believe it or not. But, friends.”
“Maybe that’s even better,” Harry sniffed.
In an impulse of he-didn’t-know-quite-what, Adon took the two hundred cash. “I am drunk,” he said. “Do not tell me any more tonight. I live at the Zajan fish restaurant on Jackal Head. Write down everything you can remember and bring it to me there.”
“Thanks, Leo—”
“My name is Adon Halicar.”
“Adon,” said Harry. “Well. Thank you, Adon. Hers is Heather Grace Faltina.”
Find the full novel out now on Amazon in digital and paperback.