Philippine Speculative Fiction (18 page)

A storm was spewing large, angry raindrops outside when Maren broached the subject.

“Oh, Hustino. The embajadors are silly inconveniences, are they not? But we may wish to travel to their lands someday
,
to see their sun, to see the way their stars glisten in
their skies, to feel their winds that make their features so,” Maren said, punctuating her words with feather-light kisses down Hustino’s neck. “What harm can a courtesy call
do?”

It had been an exhausting day for all of us, and the night had almost yielded us nothing in terms of gratification, as our usual foreplay did little to whet our appetites. Eventually, however,
like tightly-coiled spring that was suddenly unwound, we found a release so intense we were left bone-weary and empty. Collapsed as we were in our last configuration—with me and Maren draped
over the torsos of the men—it was easy for us to sense Hustino’s immediate resistance.

“Do not say no without considering the resources we may not have access to,” Cristan, always the serious one, said. “The best ebony cannot, unfortunately, be found in the
colonia
.
”

I stated my case by letting my palm glide down from Hustino’s chest to his hip bone and up again, a torturously slow
caricia
that tells him that he was free to do as he would, but
there were consequences he had to be aware of.

Hustino drew a deep breath, then slowly exhaled it. “Anything for the Cuadro Amoroso,” he said, smiling tenderly as he brushed a wayward wisp of hair away from Maren’s face.
When he settled his weight more deeply into the bed, I knew that he had already forgiven us for our meddling.

And so it was that Hustino took time away from projecting the undertone blend of key musical sequences to meet with the each of the embajadors in their marbled palaces. When he came back from
his forced tour of the houses of Tsina, Hindustan, Inglatera and Mejico, he was deeply troubled.

“Weapons,” Hustino said, almost tonelessly. “They want to make a weapon out of the Cancion. They did not believe me when I said—and will say—no to all of them. They
are thinking of nothing but war.”

Hustino turned further inward, eschewing company that was not absolutely necessary for his work, completing his transformation into an irritable recluse who cared little for the complaints
sounded by local and foreign merchants, or for the palpable animosity between the students of Certeza and Ciencia. His mental anguish inevitably rippled its effect outward to us, but where his
creative endeavors suffered, ours thrived.

Cristan used his refashioned ash-furnaces to distill the
quintaesencia
of gold, which he further laced with the calx of wine, letting the precious metal’s subtle tones elevate the
addictive qualities of the alcohol, even as Hustino reverted to previously mastered scales. Maren constructed a
galleon de cielo
large enough to carry four, a steamless beast made of wood
and metal, powered by dynamos and an apparatus of coils that transmitted blue pulses from one end to the other, even as Hustino wrote and rewrote rudimentary harmonic equations. I began performing
the choreography Hustino inspired, my movements harsh one moment, smooth and languid the next, and pained, always, always pained, because creativity was an agonizing exercise of loneliness, even as
Hustino diminished in mass and in spirit, becoming a frail approximation of the man he once was.

We did our best to bring joy back to our Hustino, but despite tasting Cristan’s blissful concoctions sprinkled with gilded wine, despite riding on Maren’s steamless
galleon
,
despite seeing so many weep at my depiction of his artistry, the pianist remained inconsolable.

We were converged in our secret retreat, letting the cool breeze tinted with hymns and carols do what it could to soothe the red slashes on our skins, when I finally articulated my thoughts.

Hustino,
I said by caressing the pianist’s waist with my leg, a simple
piernazo
to call his attention and to prepare him for the rest of what I had to say
.
The Gobernador-General herself will ask something from you. You will not like it.
I execute a
gancho
by hooking my leg around his thigh, then slowly letting it slide in a graceful
lustrada
, expressing through the trap and release motion the truth of our situation.

Say yes,
I begged by pulling him into a closer embrace,
or, if you are truly unwilling, let us escape. Let us find a new beginning away from here.

Hustino had not been Hustino for weeks, and the tenor of our nightly carnal pursuits had changed in the absence of the man we knew. It had become more violent, his expression of the act almost
cruel, often brutal, sometimes unbearably vicious. But there was still sexual satisfaction, even a painful variant of pleasure. But perhaps the most important reward occurred afterward, when the
ropes had been untied, when the whips had been set aside, when the gags had been thrown away, and Hustino returned to being Hustino, all the anger drained out of him, leaving only a pensive type of
tenderness. It was the unguarded look in his face, along with the loving way he caressed the welts on my wrists, that gave me courage to speak.

But Hustino’s answer was as adamant, as immovable, as unyielding as the grave, and it was immediate.

“No,” Hustino said, as he turned away from me.

“Hustino, perhaps you do not completely understand—” Cristan began.

“I understand.” Hustino stood up. “I understand perfectly.”

“My love, please—”

“In this, the Cuadro Amoroso has no say.” And then, he left.

The guardia sibil came for Hustino the next day. Dangerous-looking, heavy-coated men with their elaborate swords and oversized pistols, they knocked on Hustino’s door, parroted the command
of the Gobernador-General, and asked him to accompany them to an undisclosed location. Hustino did not struggle; instead, he relented with the grace of a doomed man. And we, purportedly the ones
who loved him the most, could only watch from our respective windows, unable to help, unable to stop them, unable to do anything but wish things had gone differently.

Hustino was gone for seven days; when he was returned, he was barely alive.

We did our best to medicate him, but though Cristan distilled the healing essences of herbs; though Maren revived his heart numerous times with sparked coils; though I added mechanical joints
and replaced broken bone with sturdy metal, there was not much improvement in Hustino’s condition. We were scientists, not doctors, and the sum of our brilliance could not equal the healing
arts practiced by the faithful. And if there were lore in the neighboring powers that could have helped in Hustino’s recuperation, those doors were closed to us as well.

In the end, all we could do was stand vigil.

How I wished Hustino could have spoken; how I re-imagined those times to be filled with tender goodbyes or sunset-tinged rememberings instead of mournful quietude. But Hustino was unable to
express anything in words, and his fingers were too irreparably broken to express his horrors in music. Whatever the Gobernador-General had the guardia sibil do to him, it was, in many ways, worse
than immediate death. It was as if Hustino had gone through the antithesis of an alma parpadear where, instead of being united into a greater thought and a grander dream, he was instead
disassembled and methodically dismantled, until his heart was just a cluster of malfunctioning valves, his mind a maze of shadows and nightmares, and his soul a tattered assembly of memories. Near
the end of his days, Hustino became increasingly silent, worryingly still, as if his core had drifted into a vacuum where no sound could exist, terribly alone, terribly beyond our reach.

When he died, Cristan, Maren and I began to plan.

THE FIRST PART of the scheme was all about me, because I needed both their expertise, because I was unsure as to how to go about it, because for all my self-surgeries, I had
never attempted to change any vital organs with artificial ones and was thus less confident of my recovery rate.

The second part was Cristan, partly because he was impatient, and partly because his was the easiest to execute. Poison required only the most basic alchemy. The real challenge was in being able
to outwit the doctors of faith, for once symptoms started to show, it would just be a simple exercise of their arts to heal themselves.

Instead of crafting fast-acting venom, as other deviants had done in the past with varying degrees of success, Cristan chose to go slow. The quintaesencia of lead tasted sweet, or so Cristan
told us. It was only detectable when it was too late, when the metal had rooted itself deeply into the bones, when the abdominal pains had already gone past excruciating, when the dementia had
taken hold.

And so it was that during the celebration of Eostre, Cristan delivered several boxes of fragrant rice cakes to the good doctors as an offering to the Arquitecto Sagrado.

Then, he waited.

We were not fools enough to believe that we would not be caught, for certainly if we were geniuses in our fields, there must be corresponding intellects of the same degree working as
guardias
or as doctors or as detectives. But Cristan had wanted to see if his mad plan would work; he wanted to revel in the chaos it would cause. And so it was not until three weeks
later, just hours before the detectives had solved the mystery of the dancing demented doctors, that he took his own life using the most traditional of poisons: arsenic.

As a parting gift, Cristan created a sumptuous feast for the detectives who would barge into his
casa
to arrest him. Survivors would later inadequately describe the majesty of the
assembled towers, made of spun sugar, marzipan and confectioner’s paste, generously gilded with silver and gold and lead and powdered wine; they would use ill-fitting words to articulate the
tantalizing scents of the ornately plated cakes and tarts and pies, mysteriously still warm as if Cristan had just taken them out of the ovens moments before they arrived; they would ineptly
recount their despair at taking one bite, then another, and another, unable to stop, unable to deny the orgasmic glory that came with tasting each perfectly crafted gastronomical delight.

Only those of the weakest constitutions died; many survived the ordeal, only to be haunted by a craving Cristan alone could satisfy.

The detectives were persuaded, with the help of a carefully crafted letter echoing the sentiment of heretics, that radical thought served as motivation for Cristan’s crimes. Thus, the
Cucinero Peligroso, as Cristan would later be called, enjoyed the reputation of being a deviant in the eyes of the
colonia
and a martyr among revolutionaries.

THE THIRD PART of the plan was Maren.

Her challenge was to be able to gather the embajadors in one area, when the resulting economic bullying had forced these officials to be at odds with not only the colonia, but each other. To
accomplish this nearly impossible feat, she took her small galleon to the road.

At first, only a few of our peers, mostly catedraticos who thought kindly of her and her flirtatious smiles, came and listened. But as her invention took flight, as more people saw the flow of
currents inside Maren’s metallic beast, as more of the citizenry began to experience firsthand how it was to ride a ship without steam, more important members of society began to take
notice.

It was during the monsoon season that she was finally able to attract the attention of the embajadors
,
who all came en masse because of their fear of being outdone by the other. By
then, Maren had mastered the art of presentation, adding exciting flourishes and embellishments to what should have been a simple, scientific lecture. The most awaited moment of her demonstration
had ceased to be the
galleon de cielo
itself, but rather Maren, beautifully attired with long flowing hair, entering a metal cage which was then subsequently charged with large volts of
lightning from her coiled constructions.

“Esteemed guests, see how the bolts arc outside this metal compartment but leave me, inside it, unharmed? Earlier, I showed you how a small amount of current was sufficient to fry an egg.
Yet here I am, perfectly well, and conversing with the distinguished gentlemen and beauteous ladies with nary a burn,” Maren would say, as she manipulated her inventions from within.
“This is why, despite the metal casings of my galleon
,
despite the massive amounts of current it will need, it can and will carry its passengers safely to their destinations. It will
be different matter, however, if my device was not used. Why, it is more dangerous than any known weapons la Madre Patria has been able to develop.” At this point, Maren would extend a hand
to her captivated audience. “Now please, come closer, see for yourselves how harmless it is.”

I was not at her last presentation, but I have often imagined how silly the embajadors must have looked as they approached the lightning cage; how their eyes must have widened with greed being
so close to something so powerful; how exquisite Maren’s smile must have been as she switched off the mechanism that controlled the electrical charges; how chaotically beautiful everyone must
have appeared, limned in metal-tinged blue, stripped of their artifice and their false etiquette and their elegant veneers, unable to flee, unable to find respite, unable to go beyond the reach of
arcing volts and coruscating electricity and instead, were redeemed, and at the same time, reduced through Maren’s act to being a mere component of an all-consuming force.

The detectives concluded, not convincingly, that it was an accident; an unfortunate accident that took the lives of the ambassadors of Tsina, Hindustan, Inglatera and Mejico, their babel of
translators, and the promising machinist who would go down in history as Senora el Relampago, the Lightning Lady.

I AM THE LAST bolt to slide in place, the last piece on the puzzle of revenge. It took me months to recover; a year to rebuild my reputation as a dancer of note; a couple more
pass before I finally piqued the interest of my target.