Dark Planet: And She Sang Like Lady Day

Ceri's fiction has appeared in Intertext and eSCENE. This story was originally published in the Welsh SF magazine Beyond the Boundaries.

I knew this mission would fail when I first saw the woman I was here to kill.

Collapsing the travel booth to fit in my handbag -- a tasteful number in crocodile skin, just the thing to complement my sleek flame-coloured dress and fur cape -- I headed into the dirty, crumbling redneck town of Purity Hill, following the dull resonances of disturbance that had led me here through a thousand parallel timestreams, coasting realities barely distinguishable one from another to the precise place where a careless traveller had left his mark upon history.

We Correctors are very well trained.

Purity Hill, huddled in the curve of a fast shallow river surrounded by fertile valley-bottom ground, neat and whitewashed and intoxicated with its own fragile successes. The Kinescope posters announced the arrival of the finest singing-pictures in Amoricis , and the tumbledown market was crowded with coloured rugs spread with rusty audio receivers and automatic vegetable dicers: "Solar-powered, lady," the hawkers yelped as I paused to stare, "latest modern convenience -- "

I was on the main street, gazing into shop windows and studying the tumbledown hotels, waiting for the one glaring psychic disturbance that would give me my bearings, when I heard them in the muddy alley to my right. Women in cheap cotton dresses and faded aprons, lingering nervously in their doorways to yell hoarse abuse at a woman shuffling down the dry cobbles forming the centre of the alley.

Disturbance surrounded her like white noise, unmistakable.

And she was beautiful.

Staring into the distance, she picked a haughty path towards the street, mud splashing her immaculate expensive shoes. A sudden flare of autumnal sunlight played across her skin -- the colour of beaten gold and just as fine, black hair tumbling loose across her shoulders -- and my head spun with desire.

"Damn whores shouldn't be allowed in this street." an old woman mumbled through a mouthful of rotten teeth. "Filthy coloureds -- "

"Shut your mouths, you cheap trash." I snapped, and though I kept my voice low they stopped their sullen, resentful murmuring and regarded me with puzzlement. Not understanding. Why I should take her part, when my skin was as dark as their own --

"Leave her be."

"She's a damn whore -- "

"What's it to you if she is? She stealing your customers?"

A instant's silence: the fat woman's mouth worked emptily, stupidly, and abruptly the others began to laugh - sharp, humourless laughter, eagerly seizing on a new target. The fat woman spat deliberately in my direction and slammed her door; smirking and nodding to themselves with some inner satisfaction, the other women returned, placated, to their darkened hallways and dirty windows.

The golden-skinned woman was looking curiously at me, as if unsure what was now expected of her. I nodded to her, said coolly, "You going far ?"

"To work."

"Let me walk you there."

She looked me over, and her expression said quite clearly that was the kind of offer she did understand.

We took our time in the deserted main street, under the passive, curious stares of children or shopkeepers in rocking chairs on their porches. Two or three men raised their hats, peculiar tri- cornered affairs in crimson and blue, and bowed as we passed. She shook her hair down her back, and -- awkward in the flesh the travel booth had disguised me with, dark and satin-sinewy and hard muscled, tight silver curls hugging my scalp, plump still and shy -- I envied her.

"Meriel." she offered, by way of introduction. "And I ain't no whore -- " her sudden smile made me dizzy, "leastways, not where a real lady is concerned.."

I smiled, and could not entirely hide my blushes. "Maybe I'll remember that."

"I think you should."

We passed under the dappled shade of a single rowan tree, beside the white-board chapel, where neon painted slogans declared HRISTERIOS SAVES: I asked her, "What is it you do, Meriel ?"

"I sing. In the nightclub. You should come and hear me. Tonight. I give your name to Tony, the doorman, he'll pass you in for nothing. What d'you say ?"

I said yes. Of course.

I found a good motel, which took some effort, and spent the afternoon wandering about the town, or sat in my room studying the newspaper headlines, wondering what else he could have disrupted without knowing it. Yes, and who he was, how he came here, all the other things we are not supposed to think.

It does not matter to a Corrector what twisted motives a commercial traveller had for interfering in the course of the reality he was plundering, why he would throw away the fortunes made buying a thing where it was accounted worthless and reselling in a timestream where it was priceless, for one foolish act of interference. Whom it was that he hated or loved or pitied, to give the object or speak the word that would shift the course of their destiny.

We train to sense such disturbances and eliminate them. Not to pity.

But invariably, I do.

When I arrived at the club, the golden-skinned doorman took my cape and told me Miss Meriel would see me in her dressing room, if I would do her the honour.

"Dressing room" were hardly the words I would have chosen. It was an old toilet cubicle, stoppered pipes still visible, and Meriel, her warm metallic nakedness hardly wrapped in a dirty gown, leant over a cluttered table applying heavy make-up by the light of a single bare bulb.

"How much do the rats pay to share with you ?" I asked her: and she laughed and tossed her head so the shimmering curve of her long neck gleamed in the harsh light, teasing me..

"Ain't no palace." she admitted ruefully, indicating for me to help her fasten the paste necklace about her throat, emeralds glittering like the eyes of cats. "But I earn good money. I'm leaving soon as I got the fare. Get a steam-barge east to New Paris. The big clubs there hold auditions each week, to anybody walking in off the streets. I can get a job there easy." She turned, adjusting the necklace, and regarded me archly. "I bet you ain't never heard no one sing the way I sing."

"No." I said slowly. "I'm sure I haven't."

The call-boy came then to give her a five-minute warning, and escorted me back out to a table beside the stage, where a bottle of genever and a pack of the thin coarse cigars generally smoked here had been provided. Along with a discretely crumpled, and probably extortionate, bill.

My role was that of rich dilettante, and I knew how to play it to perfection.

I folded a note back into the bill, and a waiter with dark skin oddly glazed gold, mulatto by their standards perhaps, slithered past and pocketed it as a chorus of whistles and foot-stamping greeted the announcement of the Divine Miss Meriel.

The trio -- a bass of sorts, a long tinny trumpet, and a metallic clavichord -- struck up, and Meriel slipped through the gold slash curtain, cast her cool easy gaze around the smoky bar, and sang.

And she sang like Lady Day, sweet languorous blues just a fraction behind the beat, and I trembled to hear it -- for I had not heard any music remotely like that of my timestream in any other, and this had to be the gift the traveller had given her --

And then I forgot that too, as her voice washed over me and I sipped genever and smiled dreamily at her through the smoke: her final number held within it the familiar ghostly strains of Don't Explain, and taking her lazy graceful bows, she looked at me with eyes full of triumph. Knowing I was hooked.

I knew who he was then.

I was with the detail awaiting his return -- five of us, standing watching him open the doors of the newly materialized booth, take the offered papers and mechanically inscribe his name, blinking in the harsh light of the warehouse: "All diamonds this time, Carl, but a decent haul. God, I'm tired."

Then the look on his face as he saw us: the foreman was already in the lift cubicle and vanishing up into the office floors overhead, he was alone in the vast open killing grounds of the empty storage space.

We have to hear and record their excuses, and that is the moment I hate.

That dull, stumbling whisper, choked by disbelief; "I didn't change anything, I swear, she overheard the recordings, it wasn't my fault, what harm can a song do -- ?"

They know they are about to die, and it sickens me to watch their terror. I squeezed the trigger, and the dart took him in the shoulder: though he tore it out at once, it did him no good. I stood over him as he twitched and fouled himself and finally, mercifully, asphyxiated as the distended tissues of his throat crushed his windpipe.

The dart usually finishes them quickly enough: if there is any doubt that they are beyond pain, we snap their necks before we carry them down to the incinerators. We are not by nature cruel. But we prefer not to spill blood on the warehouse floor. The stains are persistent, and it has an unpleasant effect upon the commercial travellers' morale.

Walking her home, I asked her "Where did you learn to sing like that, Meriel ?"

"This guy passed through town. He had recordings of some singer. Said she lived in some place I never heard of, and she was long dead anyway, and I liked her style, so ...." Her smile grew suddenly brittle. "Hell, you ain't no friend of hers come to put the law on me, are you ?"

"No." I tried to share the joke, but managed only a thin, almost hysterical giggle. My stomach heaved with anticipation. "I never knew her. Just heard the recordings."

"Damn one-street town; guess I must seem a real country gangrel to you, not knowing who she was."

"Not many people round here have heard of her." I admitted. "You must have been real good friends, for him to share that with you."

"Maybe he saw it that way, who knows. I wasn't with him long, he was crazy, just vanished one day ...." She caught my expression and added defensively. "I go with men too. Sometimes. I swing both ways."

I fingered the injector package in my pocket, my mouth dry with desire. Yes, and terror.

She would not even feel its touch, and the poison would lie dormant ten or twelve hours before stopping her heart, I would be long gone, desire and duty equally satisfied. The temptation. To possess and then to kill.

"Look." I husked, flashing her what I hoped was my most seductive smile, and felt more like the grin on a death's-head: "Why don't you come up to my room, maybe we can talk -- "

"Doorman wouldn't let me in. And my place ain't romantic." Her hand caressed my arm, very lightly, inviting. "Walk to the park with me, take a look at the yaksis blossom. It's a good place to, ah.. talk."

The injector slipped back down into my deep hidden pocket as I reached to take her hand.

The sun was hovering uncertainly about the horizon when we finally tired of each other, and the birds -- huge scarlet and mazarine brutes with heavy beaks and long ungainly wings, croaking like strangled frogs -- were tearing worms out of the blue-green turf. Bells tolled oddly chromatic celebrations at the religious retreat up on the hill.

"Slaughterhouse Day." Meriel said brightly, remembering. "The day farmers used to slaughter for the winter. Now they celebrate their full barns instead. Hell of a night in the club tonight."

The injector, still unused, pressed against my hip as I rolled over. But I let it fall back into my pocket and reached for my wallet instead. Perhaps I would not throw it away just yet. If -- or should that be when ? -- my fellow Correctors caught up with me, I might be glad of its bitter embrace.

Sprawled in the long grass, watching her fastidiously comb dead leaves out of her hair, I drew almost all the bills out of my wallet and held them out to her.

"I want you to take these. Gift, not payment. You have a rare talent, and you need to go to New ... Paris," just catching myself in time as I began to say the wrong name, "and be seen."

She stared at the wad of papers, mouth slack with surprise. "I'll pay you back -- "

"You won't be able to find me." I said softly, staring up at the dawn sky. "I'm going to be moving around a lot from now on."

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