I'll Do Anything for Warmth — 8
Hieronymus said he had things to do and went outside. I couldn't tell whether he had gone so that I might choose someone to make into a Harvester, or to find someone who could supply me with warmth. So I turned my attention to Joanna Smith.
By the logic of the setting, I had expected European bread. Watching Joanna cook in the kitchen, though, the impression is quite different. She grinds the grain, adds water, and brings the kneaded mass from one side of the kitchen to bake over the fire—something like naan, the flatbread eaten in India. Apart from that, she takes out cured meat, cuts it, and fries it, or fetches vegetables dried bone-hard and boils them down with sauce.
It looks like cooking monstrously rich in calories, with a little fruit besides. Judging by the look of it, the fruit is quite fresh. Somewhere nearby must be able to provide it, and somewhere here is being supplied. Unfortunately, Joanna has no idea how any of that is managed. If I could get a grasp of the food situation, I might take it into account later, when I increase the Harvesters. A shame.
Food, space, and the management of happiness. The sort of factors that turn up constantly in a simulation game. What makes the game ideal is that it cuts out the human element in the gaps between them—embezzling, skimming, doing the work lazily. In practice, it isn't so very different.
If I want to harvest more warmth, the better course, I think, is to increase the Harvesters and use them to draw in still more.
Hm.
I'll leave it there. Grow too hasty, and even the things that would have worked will not.
When I was human, I was never particularly clever. There is no reason the person I am now should be able to do everything. Even so, a plan occurs to me. If enough of those I have contaminated into some corner of the mind—hosts, or followers—were to gather, I might set their brains to work like a grid computer and see about raising my intelligence....
I would, if I could. But even using the minds of these two, Rebecca Rolfe and Joanna Smith, I don't feel any brighter. Noisier, if anything. So if the Harvesters increase, there may come a point where I can't bear them?
Mmm.
I'll think about it when I get there.
I was sketching out the future ahead, little by little, when Joanna came toward the room where I was, carrying food. Soon she opened the door and stepped inside. She entered carefully, started toward a corner, stopped, and then walked straight up to me.
Memory still has its hold on Joanna. When she enters a room, she opens the door without a word and slips in, and once inside she moves through the spaces where she is not easily seen. Along the way, no one treats her as a person. It happens often enough, doesn't it—you walk past a sweeper cleaning the road and fail to keep even a memory of them. And now she is marveling at the strangeness of it: her place has risen, and she has come into a situation where someone actually perceives her.
That pleasure is what makes a person in a cult grow obsessed with climbing higher. Humans are social animals, creatures that look to being social for their stability. Be acknowledged by another, and the brain pays out a reward. It is also why people so often change when their rank rises. Pleasure breaks a person more simply than pain.
I wonder what will become of Joanna, changing as she is, by degrees. The light at her center has turned a dark purple. I don't think it will yield anything good.
"Um—excuse me. Here is the meal."
I looked at what Joanna had brought. A dish Rebecca Rolfe has eaten before. As meals go, nothing very unusual. For me, the first since I became this body.
I know how to eat, so I ate it the way I knew. The taste, though, matches nothing among the foods I know, while Rebecca Rolfe's body insists this is what it always ate. Whether the senses have gone double, or simply feel independent of each other, it is uncanny. Strange, and wrong.
I simply cleared one daily quest. That is the feeling. So later, I suppose, I will have to deal with the byproducts of bodily function? If I need to go, I'll ask where the bathroom is.
In any case, what matters most is whether I can get the warmth I want from food. The cooking itself runs warm, and yet eating it brings no sensation at all of warmth coming into me. The cold remains exactly as it was. So it really isn't physical warmth that I need. If physical warmth could make me feel warm, I would have thrown myself into the fire.
But.
Isn't the portion a bit much? I haven't eaten half, and already my stomach is full. No reason to force the rest, so I left it.
At that, Joanna Smith makes as if to do something, then stops. Tension draws through her body. Her mouth opens and closes again. There is something she wants to ask.
"Do whatever it is you want to do, Joanna Smith."
I tell her so, and Joanna Smith startles enormously—startled past any point where I can see the need. Her heart hammers, and in time with it awe and faith come surging up. Even then she cannot simply do what she wants. She hesitates again and again, and then she asks.
"By what name... might I be permitted to address you?"
Ah. We're starting there?
Didn't I introduce myself as Rebecca Rolfe? Perhaps there is a verse in this place as well, the sort that forbids taking a god's name in vain. Of course, if the thing one worships can be addressed too easily, the dignity does thin.
Ah. Right.
I introduced myself as a cold sea that wants warmth from beneath the very bottom, didn't I? Fair enough that she wouldn't know. She wasn't there, in the place where I gave the name Rebecca Rolfe.
No need to agonize over a name.
"Rebecca Rolfe. It is the name of this flesh, but I use it as well. Call me by that."
"Yes, Lady Rebecca."
Her gaze flicks this way and that.
Joanna has the sort of coloring that, in a game, would not look strange on an undead or a demon. Her skin is a dark blue, and the hair at the scalp has turned purple. Rebecca went purple all at once. With Joanna, what was originally left still remains—faded to white, but there.
Late fifties. When I was human, that was no great age, and there were people who, properly looked after, could pass for their forties. The original Joanna, though, might have been believed a woman of eighty. A face worn by hardship does age badly. Now she has become someone in her late teens, or her early twenties.
And she has risen to a rank called Warrior of the Faith. In this cult, I see, priests and warriors keep their ranks separate.
Flesh, and place in the order. Both have improved.
Now I find myself looking forward to how this person will change. If I could have it so, I would like her to become something like one reborn into another world, or one sent back to live life over. Someone who wields desire exactly as they please, makes a show of keeping the rules when they can, and removes anyone they dislike.
A truly perfect Harvester.
Make a show of keeping the rules, and an organization will find it difficult to name you an enemy. Your chance of survival rises. Wield desire as you please, and someday you meet another doing the same. There, the habit of removing those you dislike shows its worth. They kill the other, and the warmth comes to me.
Hehe.
A pity, though. Having entrusted so much of herself to the cult, her capacity to think for herself has, I expect, fallen off rather badly. And so, yes—she is a villain. Because those above ordered it, she buried people, broke someone with drugs, and deceived bumpkins who had come up to the city knowing nothing, shoving them into the cult.
Of course, people are both things at once. Good to someone, evil to someone else. They cannot be defined by a single face. Which is why I look at only one face, on purpose, and judge.
Joanna Smith murmurs my name a few times, very softly, then looks at me again and speaks.
"Might this meal, perchance, have failed to please you?"
The manner of it is oddly awkward. She seems to be imitating someone by force. Courtesy, after her own fashion?
"You may speak at ease. And the meal won't go down any further. I'm full."
At my words Joanna blinks, looks at me, and gives the faintest nod. Not so much convinced as setting it aside and agreeing. Fair enough. Rebecca is short, but her chest is rather large, and for the amount she usually eats this is far too little. Even so, I really am packed full. Eating any more would be rather unpleasant, wouldn't it?
That was when the door of the room opened. Hieronymus came in, with two large men and a boy a little younger than they were.
Joanna has seen one of the two men before. A Warrior of the Faith. The man opposite, dressed the same, is very likely one as well. The boy they brought is bound in chains, his face and body covered in blood.
Joanna starts up in alarm. Hieronymus makes a gesture to calm her, then sends her behind me. He comes before me himself and kneels.
"Lady Rebecca. As you said, I have brought a Sacrifice."
The moment Hieronymus speaks, the boy lurches to his feet, but the two men behind him seize his head and kick the inside of his legs, forcing him to his knees.
A Sacrifice. Hieronymus is telling me not to spend him on anything else. Use him as a Sacrifice.
If he is given, I won't decline. I would have to spend resources to make a Harvester of him, and even I don't know how long I can keep holding myself back.
I rose and went up to the ruined boy. The left side of his face is so swollen with flesh that it cannot be seen at all, but the right glares at me out of a stark blue eye. Where did they take him?
The light in his chest is quite large. Full of warmth. There is hope, then? Hope for his life, optimism about the future, and the belief that from here on he himself will be able to live. The condition of the flesh seems to have no bearing on warmth at all.
I stepped in front of the boy and reached for the light. My arm split. Dark purple smoke poured out and, at once, swallowed the light inside his chest.
Warm!
But only for a moment. The cold comes rushing in again. Far warmer—far, far warmer—than the ones who usually come to me, and yet as for how long it lasted... mm.
The dark purple smoke draws back out. Inside the boy's chest, the light is blackened, dried, and shriveled. Seen this way, he is not like Joanna, whose warmth I never ate. Joanna's light was merely stained a purple close to black. This boy—a person by the name of Isituruga La Planza—has become nothing but a crumpled lump of black. A very faint light remains at its center, just enough to know that this was once the light inside a living chest.
When the dark purple smoke had withdrawn completely, the boy went limp where he was. He is breathing, so he isn't dead.
Through Joanna's eyes, Hieronymus stares at me and the boy without looking away, watching. One of the men feels a creeping revulsion. The other simply stands there, unmoved.
The boy had gone slack. Only for a moment.
Drawing something like a purple mist into himself, his whole body begins to writhe. Alien organs bud across his face. His back swells, muscle thickening. Only one arm lengthens, so that left and right no longer match.
Before he can mutate any further, the boy's neck is cut. The man behind him did it with the knife he carried. Something is smeared on the blade as well, like what I felt on the arrow last time. He dies spilling blood that glows a fluorescent blue, instead of red.
I looked at the blood that struck my hand when the neck was severed. It was driven off my skin, boiled up in a furious bubble, and vanished.
Ah. I see.
I have learned one thing. This mutation did not happen because I forced my power in. Keep the light, and have every bit of your warmth taken, and you become able to use a power similar to mine. The purple smoke his body drank in as it turned monstrous was not me.
Holding that in mind, I offered Hieronymus a word.
"Thank you for the warmth."
Hieronymus brought a quantity of literary rhetoric to bear and, at considerable length, produced the words you're welcome.