Velvet Dogma About 3300 wds (15 page)

Some of the council members visited their neighbors and conferred. Others acted disinterested. Still others glared at her from the confines of her CONEXs. She couldn't see them all without getting up, but she imagined the ones behind her were doing the same.

She had to ask Andy.

Rebecca was about to whisper something to him when she heard a soft rumble coming from behind her. What the hell? She listened and heard it again. Snoring. Andy had fallen asleep! During what could possibly be a life and death situation, he'd managed to relax enough to find dreamland. She felt her anger rise.

A figure strode purposefully towards her. She could tell it was a woman by the kohl darkening the eyes and the curve of the hips. She wore greens and yellows with purple swathes. Glitter was sewn into the fabric covering her head. A small man followed her with a chair similar to the one on which Rebecca sat. He placed it on the ground a few feet in front of the woman, then retreated. The woman paused a moment as if waiting for an invitation.

Rebecca nodded.

The woman sat. She stared at Rebecca for several minutes, her eyes searching. Finally she smiled, the tell-tale wrinkles at the corners of her eyes banding together. "I am Maria. Welcome to our home."

She didn't extend a hand, but the greeting rang true.

"Thank you. I am Rebecca."
 
She felt foolish, but she didn't know what else to say.

"We know, but we had to be sure. Thank you for being patient."

They knew her? Impossible.

"There is but one test remaining."

God, but Rebecca hated tests. Why couldn't the universe just take her at face value? "Listen, I don't understand any of this."

"We know. And I apologize on behalf of my people. But this is our way. We do not trust anyone. We normally would not trust you. But then, you
are
Rebecca. You are Velvet Dogma."

There it was again. She'd heard Panchet mention this, and then the gravBoarder.
Velvet Dogma
. She searched her memory, but the words didn't hold any meaning for her. "I don't understand. I don't know what those words mean."
 
Sadness swept over Rebecca. "I've been in prison for twenty years. I don't even know the world."

"We know of your sacrifice. Now you shall know of ours."

Sacrifice?

"We are called the Day Eaters," the woman began, her voice shifting into an oratory, projecting without effort to the council members and beyond. "We do not like the light. We do not like the day. We are the creatures of the night."
 
Her voice grew even louder. "We protest the world. We do not like what we see. For too many, their bodies are not their own. Companies own them in bits and pieces."

"
Bits and pieces
," repeated children's voices in unison from somewhere beyond the circle of CONEXs.

"When they die they are harvested. If they live they are farmed. People aren't meant to be crops."

"
People not crops
," said the children.

"So we changed ourselves. We wear the mark of Miriam."

"
Oh, Miriam!
"
 
The children wailed.

"They cannot harvest us. Who would want to? They fear us. Do you blame them?"
 
The woman leapt to her feet and whirled around, the fabric catching the vortex currents her spin created. She held out her arms as if to embrace the world. "We cannot change it, so we are not a part of it. They do what they do, and we don't do it."

"
We don't do it!"
shouted the children.

"Nothing created by man do we wear. Nothing invented by whim do we care."

"
Don't wear! Don't care!"

"So we become one with our kind, exchanging blood and breed. We are dead together, but nothing do we need."

"
Nothing, no nothing
," they whispered.

"Together we live. Together we change. Together we break and die."

Maria froze in mid-spin, her arms disjointed like those of a scarecrow, her head canted all the way to a shoulder.

"
Break and die
!" screamed the children over and over, until finally they ran away laughing, their impish delight evident in the way they finished their game of recitation.

Rebecca sat stunned by the performance. She wasn't sure what it meant, but the beauty, anger and resolution were unmistakable. She especially liked the children as they chimed in, as they'd probably done in lessons a thousand times before. Whatever these people were into, they believed it totally.

Maria held her puppet stance for a moment longer, then returned to normal. She sat once again before Rebecca. With her kohl-shaded eyes she watched for a reaction as she unwrapped the fabric from her head. When the last piece had been removed, she offered an embarrassed smile. Beautiful in a matronly way, she shrugged slightly. "Thank you for allowing us to perform the telling. It is something we do. The children join in."
 
She laughed. "It is a game to them until they find out that ours is not the way of everyone."

"It was beautiful."

"Sometimes we forget why we do this, so it is important to remind ourselves."

Rebecca felt like she should know what the woman was talking about, but it was like being told an inside joke and then being asked to comment on it. She just didn't know what was going on.

"I'm sorry," she said, "Your performance was beautiful, but I still don't understand."

The woman stared at Rebecca for a long moment, then nodded. "Of course. Our movement became popular after you were imprisoned."
 
She shook her head. "Sometimes we get so involved in ritual that we forget that there are still a few who haven't heard of us."

Rebecca felt the need to take control. She was tired of being at the beck and call of everyone else. Most of it was because she didn't understand this new world in which she found herself. She stood, her movement causing several shouts from the CONEXs. She ignored them and helped Maria to her feet. "Let's walk," she said. And she began to circle the space where she'd just been sitting. The need to change the dynamics was an imperative. They needed to be equals for understanding to grow. She heard grumbling from several of the council members, but ignored them. She passed Andy and appreciated his grin of support. "You mentioned the Mark of Miriam. Is this from the Bible?"
 
She dredged her memory. "Was she the Prophetess who made fun of Moses?"

"Yes, that was her. Do you also remember what happened to her?"

Rebecca polled her memory once more. The amount of Biblical knowledge it held could be compared to the weight of fairies on the head of a pin. The only reason she'd known about Miriam was because of the Charlton Heston movie where he'd played Moses—one of her grandmother's favorites. Not that she was religious; she just loved the spectacle of epic movies, and, well, Charlton Heston too. Olive Deering had played the part of Miriam, Moses's sister, her Lana Turner looks turning against her as she became the sniping woman who was punished for her insolence. Rebecca tried to remember. How was she punished?

"Something that God did."
 
For the life of her, she couldn't remember.

Seeming to change the subject, Maria said, "They tell me that all of your organs have been levied."

Rebecca nodded. "I'm evidently quite a find for the organ vendors."

"How do you feel about this?"

"Like I've been violated. Like my body doesn't belong to me."

"Yes. This is the case."
 
Maria stopped and looked into Rebecca's eyes. "Do you know that not a single one of us has an organ levied?"

"How can that be?"
 
Rebecca looked around in astonishment. "Is it because you're in hiding?"

"No. The government knows where we are. They approve of it. For them this is the perfect place to keep us out of the way. They help us from time to time. No, it's not because we're in hiding."

"Then why?"

"What you can't remember, Rebecca, is that the Lord struck Miriam with leprosy for arguing with Moses. The Mark of Miriam is leprosy. We all wear the mark."

"All of you?"

"Yes."

"Even the children?"

"Especially the children."

"But why them?"

"The organ vendors, as you call them, don't care about age. The only thing they care about is quality. Mycobacterium leprae, or Hansen's Disease, is a horror that no one wants. After all, who'd want the heart of a leper?"

"But it's curable!"
Maria shook her head. "Not curable, but treatable with a multi-drug therapy. Like me, I don't show any of the outward signs. The children don't either. We don't allow them the choice until they reach the age of maturity."

Rebecca looked at the council members and the people who'd been watching the pair walk in a circle. Understanding filled her as she realized the true purpose of the fabrics in which they were swathed. With reverence, "Some of them choose not to have the therapy, don't they?"

"Yes. That is their way. They protest the organ levy through the willful destruction of their bodies."

"My god."
 
Rebecca's hand went to her mouth. "So all the people..."

All the Day Eaters; what they'd done to themselves made all of her own adolescent attempts to change the world so sophomoric they were beyond laughable. From the comfort of a bedroom, she'd chaos-hacked her way across international boundaries, frying, manipulating and reallocating information from the world's most secure servers. She'd been serious in her unquenchable desire for a change. She'd been serious about her remonstration against all she deemed wrong and unjust. But would she willingly have brought ruination upon her body? She remembered the image of a man with no fingers, no nose, no ears and slices of meat missing from his face from an old
National Geographic
magazine.

She stared into Maria's eyes, searching for...what? What made a woman like Maria do this? What made the idea of becoming a leper so inviting? Rebecca remembered her response to an earlier question. When asked how she'd felt when she'd learned her organs were levied she'd said
violated
and
that her body wasn't her own
. One thing that should be sacrosanct is a person's body, and as the ultimate rape, the government had decided that they could take what they needed, when they needed it, and sell it to the highest bidder.

And there it was, deep in the other woman's eyes.
Peace
. The Day Eaters had found peace with their decision. They no longer lived in fear of being harvested. They could live, grow old, and die without any dread of doctors, D-pens or the Global Allocation System.

"You're not afraid, are you?" Rebecca asked.

"Not at all."

Nice. Oh that she could feel so brave. "Thank you for sharing this with me."

But the woman grabbed her arm and wouldn't let go. "We didn't do this just because we thought you should know. There's much more than that."
 
She glanced at Andy. "You haven't told her, have you?"

"The time wasn't right."

"You should have told her! Now she had no context. Does she even know about Velvet Dogma?"

Rebecca looked back and forth between the two of them. "Tell me what? Andy, do you know this woman? Did you know about the Day Eaters?"
 

He held up his hands. "Now isn't the place, Rebecca."
 

"What?"

"I said now isn't the—"

Rebecca's glare stopped him in midsentence. She turned to Maria. "Can you please take me out of here? Do you have someplace I can clean up?"

M
aria lived in a stack of CONEXs nearest the Tsunami Wall. Cold poured from the great concrete wall, but within the steel of the CONEXs the temperature was much worse, as if each one was a box within which nothing occurred but the refinement of the cold into absolute frigidity. To combat this, stones were heated in large fires, then transferred to cloth-swaddled baskets to warm the interiors just enough to counteract the effects of the cold. Rebecca found that she liked to press her hands against the stones after they'd been in with her awhile, reveling in the comfort of heat rising through her hands, up her arms and into her chest.

She was in the third of five stacked CONEXs. The back wall held a bed, the left wall held a wardrobe and the wall in front of her held what she'd been told was a rarity in the underground city: an old-fashioned vanity.

Rebecca had cleaned herself before she'd entered, almost bathing in the bowl of warm water they'd provided, soaping away the dirt away that had accumulated during her escape into the alley and trek through the underground tunnels. Maria had taken her clothes to the wash and provided Rebecca with lengths of gaudily colored and patterned fabric with little to no instruction about how to wear them.

Looking in the mirror, Rebecca couldn't help feeling like a gypsy. She wore yellows and blues, with a hint of red, which she thought complimented her blue eyes and blonde hair. She'd figured out how to wrap her head so that only her eyes were uncovered, but preferred her head unfettered. She applied some of Maria's make-up. It'd been so long since she'd been able to sit like this. She applied too much rouge and had to wipe it away. When she was done, she sat back and appraised herself. To her surprise she didn't look entirely bad. She'd applied the kohl like Maria, the result making her eyes seem larger. She dabbed at the corners and smoothed an edge before she was satisfied. Once done, she liked the whole ensemble.