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Hasan-Kaar, Enuma, Tiamat System

       Zoë worked quietly in her room, toweling herself dry in front of her vanity. She pressed the cloth down gently on to the supple skin of her legs, warm and darkened from soaking in the lush rays of Enuma’s double-sun. The scaled tattoo of a two-headed serpent snaked down her back and ended at her muscled left calf. Often, when she danced, the Living Ink would coil and uncoil, seeming to wrap itself around her chest to hold her statue-like body in a tight, constricting grip.

             It was late at evening, and the Second of Tiamat’s Heads shone brightly through the columns around Zoë where she sat, filling the room with bright, warm sunshine.

             Elsewhere in Enuma, others had already drawn their heavy curtains closed and climbed into bed for a night’s sleep. But for Zoë, her day was just beginning. All dry and now oiled, she worked to apply her eyeliner and accent her lips. Her muscles tensed and untensed as she rehearsed her dance in her head over and over again to perfection.

             Unlike any of the other dancers at the Hasan-Kaar Pleasurehouse, Zoë had not a single Replacement. Every tooth in her mouth, every hair on her head, and each one of the ten fingers and ten toes on her four dusky limbs was that with which she was born. Apart from the tattoos that covered her shoulders, back, and forearms, she bore no Modifications. Not a gram of plasteel or nu-metal, no chips or wires, or even a replacement lung. The overcrowded cities of Enuma produced thousands of children every year with missing arms or legs, hearts, or stomachs. Even among those born with every part, the harsh, dead air outside the Roofed Cities of Enuma made breathing impossible for all but the mutant Sukh out in the desert lowlands. By fifteen, even the most Whole of the Enumites had gone under the Knife at least once out of pure necessity.

       The Unmodified like her were very rare indeed- one in a million if even that. Many on Enuma could go a lifetime without knowingly catching sight of an Unmodified, often hoarded as wives or husbands for kings or trade-lords. The stories of an Unmodified Dancer at Hasan-Kaar spread for miles and drew in masses of travelers who came to salivate and marvel over the vitality that pulsed through her limbs.

       Even her name- Zoë- came from some ancient word for “life”. A beautiful word, she thought. The Pleasurehouse matrons had told her long ago that it came from a long-dead people many billions of miles away when humankind ruled the stars. She herself had seen drawings in the collections of some of the lords she’d danced for. Loose pages showing an olive-skinned people resting in the shade of marble columns, draped in bedsheets.

       Sometimes when she looked deeply at her own features: the dark, sparkling eyes, the cascading brown hair, and the straight nose, set above the Cupid’s bow of her lips, she thought that maybe she could have been one of these people in another age: eating fruits, drinking wine, and worshipping their lusty gods in their fallen temples.

       In the last seven years, there had only been one other dancer like her at the Pleasurehouse: Aaiaa, a raven-haired girl two years Zoë’s senior, with ashen skin and fierce red eyes that Zoë had never again seen in any of the millions who passed through Hasan-Kaar. Much like Zoë, she’d come to Pleasurehouse as a slave-girl, not even nine. The Sukh slavers who had sold her had said that she came from the Gray Wastes many thousands of miles away. It was a dark and desolate place, they said, at the bottom of the world where Night lived. There, a race of faceless women lived in caves beneath the desert and emerged whenever darkness fell, consorting with the spirits of the dead and producing all kinds of monstrous abominations. The Sukh had called her Aaiaa, their word for “demoness”, but to the Custodian, the feral child had seemed human enough to raise as one of his dancers.

       All the other girls feared her. Even as she learned to speak and act like a human, something dark and animal still dwelled inside her. She could easily fly off the handle, staring emptily in one moment and biting and scratching her “sisters” in fits of violent rage the next. She kept her distance from everyone and was often assigned to do her menial work alone. The cold, often vacant stare of the scrawny serving girl could shake even the Custodian when he saw her in the Pleasurehouse backrooms.

       Zoë remembered a time when she had to have been thirteen. Returning to her bunk early from a day in the cellars, she saw Aaiaa, wet hair dripping with groundwater, slavering over a squirming sewer rat in her hands, her mouth red with its blood. More than that even, she remembered the furious stare that the girl had given her, red eyes burning in their sockets.

       But for all the cold and deadness that surrounded Aaiaa, her passionate dancing had let her rule over the Pleasurehouse’s First Stage for almost seven years. Thousands would come, packed shoulder to shoulder to watch as the gray-skinned girl leapt across the stage, her movements fast, violent, even animal. The girl from the Gray Wastes kept Zoë at Second Stage for five years, as she tried desperately to match the gray girl’s talents. She’d practice again and again, twisting and rolling through the studio until her stomach burned and her feet bled. Until everything around her began to spin and blur.

       “There’s no competing with a demoness.” Ravan had warned when he helped Zoë up off the floor, two, maybe three years ago. “She isn’t even human!”

       Zoë had shaken her head and climbed back up to her feet. “That’s only what she wants us all the think, Ravan.” Assuring her lover that she was fine, she exhaled and closed her eyes again, beginning her movements again from the start.

       Each year, she still tried to throw Aaiaa off her throne and each year she’d find herself shaking on the ground, limbs burning and cramped, chest heaving as Aaiaa threw her long black hair behind her shoulder and smirked, leaving Zoë breathless as thousands chanted her own name.

       “Maybe next year, you’ll find a grain of talent.” She’d smiled as she raised both of her well-muscled arms. The crowds roared.

       Aaiaa didn’t deserve that stage, Zoë thought every day, as she stretched and practiced again and again. No first-stage dancer had held the honor more than two years. Either they were dethroned by someone younger, more beautiful, or more talented, or they very quickly married themselves off the noble families of Enuma. But for seven years, Aaiaa had held the stage, bitterly humiliating every challenger and ruling over the backrooms of the Hasan-Kaar Pleasurehouse like her own little kingdom.

       Ravan had suggested almost every day that they elope. What was the point in dethroning Aaiaa if it was only to marry him as a First Stage dancer? Why not just skip the formalities and marry? Sure, he might have been disinherited, but there was no way Father would leave his son and his illicit bride to fend for themselves.

       “He’ll come around in time.” Ravan winked. Zoë was, after all, one of the Unmodified.

       He was impatient. In love. His father saw him as a wastrel, spending all his days in Hasan-Kaar, hundreds of miles from home, fawning over a second-rate Pleasurehouse dancer. But for Zoë, her beloved had never missed an act. Every day that she crawled out from under Aaiaa’s thumb, Zoë was out in the Markets only hours later, arm in synthetic-arm with the short, bearded princeling from Kor-Nab.

       There was no way that Aaiaa could stay much longer. Seven years of holding First Stage was unheard of, even for Modified Dancers. The style of Hasan-Kaar was rough and exhausting. At seven years, even synthetic joints would start to grind and crack from the strain. At some point, even the “immortal demoness” who commanded the stage would have to slip up or fall.

            Ravan had promised Zoë that he’d marry her that very day. He’d hire a team of horses and ride back to Kor-Nab with her in his arms as his wife.

            “Zoë, you’ll have two dozen handmaidens to wait on you. You can enjoy everything all of Tiamat has to offer and grow fat and happy.” He’d said, kissing her on the shoulder time and time again.

            Each day, she’d return from her dance, sore and tired, dripping with sweat, and Ravan, her Rav, would be there to keep her company while she soaked in cool groundwater.

            Then, two years ago, he came back into her room not to find Ravan , but the Custodian of the Pleasurehouse waiting.

            “Zoë,” he huffed, in his usual unimpressed manner. He kept both eyes on Zoë, both organic and metal. His voice had the slight grind of an ancient speech synthesizer, with a sligh glug after every sentence as his throat clamped back shut. “Aaiaa vanished without notice yesterday, so you have First Stage.” He gurgled, tapping to the printed commission on the table. Rising, he lumbered towards the exit, heavy metal boots clunking against the chiseled tile. “Gone. Her room cleaned out and her week’s allowance withdrawn. Isa will take Second in your stead, not that it matters to you.”

            Zoë’s heart raced. She had to find Rav, her Ravan and tell him. She tried to reach him through the Ether, find him in the corridors, in the studios, or in the emptying grounds in front of the Second Stage, but her Ravan was nowhere to be found. Nor was he to be for the next two years that Zoë held the First Stage at Hasan-Kaar, dancing as she had before.

             Make up, and then paint. Then her bracelets and rings. At last draping herself in a filmy, pink garment and a painted mask, she left the room, and paced down the corridor, one foot in front of the other. It was a night just like any other. As the First Stage came into to her view she could already hear the roar of thousands of travelers, like an ocean about to crash against the surf. She didn’t even think of her routine, it was seared into her muscles, first by the matrons with their extendable batons, and then by dance after dance after dance.

       She raised both her arms, draped with ribbons as the crowd’s roar crescendoed. She felt as if she were still the servant-girl being struck for spilling water, forced to watched herself bow and move across the stage. Her own motions became stronger, more intense, and as the music grew faster, she shed the mask to great gasps and cheers from the masses. She thought of Aaiaa, who they said was living with Rav, her Rav at Kor-Nab, but she continued, twisting and tumbling across the floor, letting her garment fly loose as she bared herself for the thousands. She had nothing else to live for, she thought, invisible sweat dripping down her forehead. She glistened in the stagelight. If Aaiaa could hold First Stage for seven years, then she could for eight, or nine.

       Her joints strained, her body aching, her toes likely crushed from her movements, Zoë took an impassioned bow as the crowd burst into thunderous applause. It had been several hours already and the world was starting to spin around her.

            She breathed, gulping down air as much as her chest could handle. She stared through the fog and incense out at the cheering crowd as things seemed to slow.

            She blinked, squinting through the bright lights to see one man not clapping in the second row of packed bodies. He stood, unmoved, staring straight into her eyes with his grey, mechanical ones, sky blue at the center and sunken all around. He seemed gaunt and haggard, his long beard already streaked with gray, right arm detached from its shoulder.

            He mouthed Zoë’s name as she stepped back, her stomach twisting into a knot. Without taking a second bow, she turned and ran backstage, feeling ready to vomit, pushing past the matrons and stagehands who waited to congratulate her on another flawless performance.

One of the stagehands turned to the next as they watched Zoë vanish deep into the Pleasurehouse backrooms.
            “What’s wrong with her?” he asked, darkening the lights on the stage into a hologram of stars.

            His companion shrugged, scratching his head, “I don’t know.”

            “She looks like she saw a ghost.”

Description
body div#devskin0 hr { }

Hasan-Kaar, Enuma, Tiamat System

       Zoë worked quietly in her room, toweling herself dry in front of her vanity. She pressed the cloth down gently on to the supple skin of her legs, warm and darkened from soaking in the lush rays of Enuma’s double-sun. The scaled tattoo of a two-headed serpent snaked down her back and ended at her muscled left calf. Often, when she danced, the Living Ink would coil and uncoil, seeming to wrap itself around her chest to hold her statue-like body in a tight, constricting grip.

             It was late at evening, and the Second of Tiamat’s Heads shone brightly through the columns around Zoë where she sat, filling the room with bright, warm sunshine.

             Elsewhere in Enuma, others had already drawn their heavy curtains closed and climbed into bed for a night’s sleep. But for Zoë, her day was just beginning. All dry and now oiled, she worked to apply her eyeliner and accent her lips. Her muscles tensed and untensed as she rehearsed her dance in her head over and over again to perfection.

             Unlike any of the other dancers at the Hasan-Kaar Pleasurehouse, Zoë had not a single Replacement. Every tooth in her mouth, every hair on her head, and each one of the ten fingers and ten toes on her four dusky limbs was that with which she was born. Apart from the tattoos that covered her shoulders, back, and forearms, she bore no Modifications. Not a gram of plasteel or nu-metal, no chips or wires, or even a replacement lung. The overcrowded cities of Enuma produced thousands of children every year with missing arms or legs, hearts, or stomachs. Even among those born with every part, the harsh, dead air outside the Roofed Cities of Enuma made breathing impossible for all but the mutant Sukh out in the desert lowlands. By fifteen, even the most Whole of the Enumites had gone under the Knife at least once out of pure necessity.

       The Unmodified like her were very rare indeed- one in a million if even that. Many on Enuma could go a lifetime without knowingly catching sight of an Unmodified, often hoarded as wives or husbands for kings or trade-lords. The stories of an Unmodified Dancer at Hasan-Kaar spread for miles and drew in masses of travelers who came to salivate and marvel over the vitality that pulsed through her limbs.

       Even her name- Zoë- came from some ancient word for “life”. A beautiful word, she thought. The Pleasurehouse matrons had told her long ago that it came from a long-dead people many billions of miles away when humankind ruled the stars. She herself had seen drawings in the collections of some of the lords she’d danced for. Loose pages showing an olive-skinned people resting in the shade of marble columns, draped in bedsheets.

       Sometimes when she looked deeply at her own features: the dark, sparkling eyes, the cascading brown hair, and the straight nose, set above the Cupid’s bow of her lips, she thought that maybe she could have been one of these people in another age: eating fruits, drinking wine, and worshipping their lusty gods in their fallen temples.

       In the last seven years, there had only been one other dancer like her at the Pleasurehouse: Aaiaa, a raven-haired girl two years Zoë’s senior, with ashen skin and fierce red eyes that Zoë had never again seen in any of the millions who passed through Hasan-Kaar. Much like Zoë, she’d come to Pleasurehouse as a slave-girl, not even nine. The Sukh slavers who had sold her had said that she came from the Gray Wastes many thousands of miles away. It was a dark and desolate place, they said, at the bottom of the world where Night lived. There, a race of faceless women lived in caves beneath the desert and emerged whenever darkness fell, consorting with the spirits of the dead and producing all kinds of monstrous abominations. The Sukh had called her Aaiaa, their word for “demoness”, but to the Custodian, the feral child had seemed human enough to raise as one of his dancers.

       All the other girls feared her. Even as she learned to speak and act like a human, something dark and animal still dwelled inside her. She could easily fly off the handle, staring emptily in one moment and biting and scratching her “sisters” in fits of violent rage the next. She kept her distance from everyone and was often assigned to do her menial work alone. The cold, often vacant stare of the scrawny serving girl could shake even the Custodian when he saw her in the Pleasurehouse backrooms.

       Zoë remembered a time when she had to have been thirteen. Returning to her bunk early from a day in the cellars, she saw Aaiaa, wet hair dripping with groundwater, slavering over a squirming sewer rat in her hands, her mouth red with its blood. More than that even, she remembered the furious stare that the girl had given her, red eyes burning in their sockets.

       But for all the cold and deadness that surrounded Aaiaa, her passionate dancing had let her rule over the Pleasurehouse’s First Stage for almost seven years. Thousands would come, packed shoulder to shoulder to watch as the gray-skinned girl leapt across the stage, her movements fast, violent, even animal. The girl from the Gray Wastes kept Zoë at Second Stage for five years, as she tried desperately to match the gray girl’s talents. She’d practice again and again, twisting and rolling through the studio until her stomach burned and her feet bled. Until everything around her began to spin and blur.

       “There’s no competing with a demoness.” Ravan had warned when he helped Zoë up off the floor, two, maybe three years ago. “She isn’t even human!”

       Zoë had shaken her head and climbed back up to her feet. “That’s only what she wants us all the think, Ravan.” Assuring her lover that she was fine, she exhaled and closed her eyes again, beginning her movements again from the start.

       Each year, she still tried to throw Aaiaa off her throne and each year she’d find herself shaking on the ground, limbs burning and cramped, chest heaving as Aaiaa threw her long black hair behind her shoulder and smirked, leaving Zoë breathless as thousands chanted her own name.

       “Maybe next year, you’ll find a grain of talent.” She’d smiled as she raised both of her well-muscled arms. The crowds roared.

       Aaiaa didn’t deserve that stage, Zoë thought every day, as she stretched and practiced again and again. No first-stage dancer had held the honor more than two years. Either they were dethroned by someone younger, more beautiful, or more talented, or they very quickly married themselves off the noble families of Enuma. But for seven years, Aaiaa had held the stage, bitterly humiliating every challenger and ruling over the backrooms of the Hasan-Kaar Pleasurehouse like her own little kingdom.

       Ravan had suggested almost every day that they elope. What was the point in dethroning Aaiaa if it was only to marry him as a First Stage dancer? Why not just skip the formalities and marry? Sure, he might have been disinherited, but there was no way Father would leave his son and his illicit bride to fend for themselves.

       “He’ll come around in time.” Ravan winked. Zoë was, after all, one of the Unmodified.

       He was impatient. In love. His father saw him as a wastrel, spending all his days in Hasan-Kaar, hundreds of miles from home, fawning over a second-rate Pleasurehouse dancer. But for Zoë, her beloved had never missed an act. Every day that she crawled out from under Aaiaa’s thumb, Zoë was out in the Markets only hours later, arm in synthetic-arm with the short, bearded princeling from Kor-Nab.

       There was no way that Aaiaa could stay much longer. Seven years of holding First Stage was unheard of, even for Modified Dancers. The style of Hasan-Kaar was rough and exhausting. At seven years, even synthetic joints would start to grind and crack from the strain. At some point, even the “immortal demoness” who commanded the stage would have to slip up or fall.

            Ravan had promised Zoë that he’d marry her that very day. He’d hire a team of horses and ride back to Kor-Nab with her in his arms as his wife.

            “Zoë, you’ll have two dozen handmaidens to wait on you. You can enjoy everything all of Tiamat has to offer and grow fat and happy.” He’d said, kissing her on the shoulder time and time again.

            Each day, she’d return from her dance, sore and tired, dripping with sweat, and Ravan, her Rav, would be there to keep her company while she soaked in cool groundwater.

            Then, two years ago, he came back into her room not to find Ravan , but the Custodian of the Pleasurehouse waiting.

            “Zoë,” he huffed, in his usual unimpressed manner. He kept both eyes on Zoë, both organic and metal. His voice had the slight grind of an ancient speech synthesizer, with a sligh glug after every sentence as his throat clamped back shut. “Aaiaa vanished without notice yesterday, so you have First Stage.” He gurgled, tapping to the printed commission on the table. Rising, he lumbered towards the exit, heavy metal boots clunking against the chiseled tile. “Gone. Her room cleaned out and her week’s allowance withdrawn. Isa will take Second in your stead, not that it matters to you.”

            Zoë’s heart raced. She had to find Rav, her Ravan and tell him. She tried to reach him through the Ether, find him in the corridors, in the studios, or in the emptying grounds in front of the Second Stage, but her Ravan was nowhere to be found. Nor was he to be for the next two years that Zoë held the First Stage at Hasan-Kaar, dancing as she had before.

             Make up, and then paint. Then her bracelets and rings. At last draping herself in a filmy, pink garment and a painted mask, she left the room, and paced down the corridor, one foot in front of the other. It was a night just like any other. As the First Stage came into to her view she could already hear the roar of thousands of travelers, like an ocean about to crash against the surf. She didn’t even think of her routine, it was seared into her muscles, first by the matrons with their extendable batons, and then by dance after dance after dance.

       She raised both her arms, draped with ribbons as the crowd’s roar crescendoed. She felt as if she were still the servant-girl being struck for spilling water, forced to watched herself bow and move across the stage. Her own motions became stronger, more intense, and as the music grew faster, she shed the mask to great gasps and cheers from the masses. She thought of Aaiaa, who they said was living with Rav, her Rav at Kor-Nab, but she continued, twisting and tumbling across the floor, letting her garment fly loose as she bared herself for the thousands. She had nothing else to live for, she thought, invisible sweat dripping down her forehead. She glistened in the stagelight. If Aaiaa could hold First Stage for seven years, then she could for eight, or nine.

       Her joints strained, her body aching, her toes likely crushed from her movements, Zoë took an impassioned bow as the crowd burst into thunderous applause. It had been several hours already and the world was starting to spin around her.

            She breathed, gulping down air as much as her chest could handle. She stared through the fog and incense out at the cheering crowd as things seemed to slow.

            She blinked, squinting through the bright lights to see one man not clapping in the second row of packed bodies. He stood, unmoved, staring straight into her eyes with his grey, mechanical ones, sky blue at the center and sunken all around. He seemed gaunt and haggard, his long beard already streaked with gray, right arm detached from its shoulder.

            He mouthed Zoë’s name as she stepped back, her stomach twisting into a knot. Without taking a second bow, she turned and ran backstage, feeling ready to vomit, pushing past the matrons and stagehands who waited to congratulate her on another flawless performance.

One of the stagehands turned to the next as they watched Zoë vanish deep into the Pleasurehouse backrooms.
            “What’s wrong with her?” he asked, darkening the lights on the stage into a hologram of stars.

            His companion shrugged, scratching his head, “I don’t know.”

            “She looks like she saw a ghost.”