13: Show Business
“This plan might be stupid,” Stella said.
“It’ll be fine,” Lissa said. “Taira doesn’t talk about her Bee sister at work. Madame didn’t know who I was until I started hanging out with some of her progeny and she noticed our physical resemblance; there’s no way that Holland knows me.”
“And when he goes to your sister tomorrow and says, ‘oh, about that thing we discussed last night – ’”
“Then she’ll cover for me. Taira’s making a lot of reckless decisions, but the one thing I know for rock solid certain is that she’d do anything to keep me out of danger, much as I would for her. If it got out that I was impersonating a government official to manipulate corporate decisions? That would be a big problem for me. If it didn’t get me arrested immediately – and it probably would, even if Herron Industries didn’t decide to make an example of me themselves for making a fool out of them – then it’d be more ammunition for the other Abbies to use against me in order to control Taira. She won’t let that happen. The moment he acts and brings up why, it’ll be obvious to her what’s happened, and she’ll have to pretend it was all her, to protect me.”
Stella paused in styling my hair. “Right. So your logic here is that this is super safe because of how dangerous it is?”
“Exactly!”
“See, this is why I never do politics.” She got back to brushing.
“I have to do something,” Lissa said. “I have to curb Taira’s insane gambit without letting the elders do it, and I’d prefer to do it without publicly embarrassing and incriminating her ’Pay allies and burning those bridges for her, much as I’d like to see them embarrassed.”
“Or you could just let her crash and burn on her own and burn whatever bridges her actions have set alight.”
“No. I won’t do that.”
“Yeah,” Stella sighed. “I know.” She put the hairbrush down and opened a makeup kit, looking between Lissa’s face and an image of Taira paused on her television. “It’s lucky, I suppose, that you’re identical twins. So you can pass for her so easily.”
“We’re not identical twins,” Lissa pointed out. “Identical twins would have the same blood type.”
“Oh, that’s a good point.” She smeared some foundation onto Lissa’s face; Lissa tried not to move. “I don’t mean to pry,” she said in the tone of someone who’s absolutely about to pry, “but did you look identical as humans?”
“Ah, no. Not even close.”
“Ah.” She applied some more makeup in silence for a while, before saying, “It does make sense. I mean, your sister’s very admirable. Many people would want to look like her.”
Lissa didn’t respond, concentrating on not messing up Stella’s work.
“You know,” Stella continued, “I wasn’t blonde, as a human. My hair used to be almost your brown, in fact. But the singers I admired at the time all had blonde hair and blue eyes, and with how the Progenitors’ gift works…”
“I can’t believe that never came up when we were dating,” Lissa mumbled, moving her lips as little as possible as Stella’s lip pencil approached them like a sunrise creeping threateningly over the horizon. “The blonde of blondes, not originally blonde.”
“Well, I can’t believe your identical sister not being an identical twin never came up.”
“It never had anything to do with anything!”
“Neither did my human hair colour!” Stella laughed. “But we all change over time. Very temporarily, I mean. We all change with time very briefly, and then we stop changing forever.” She frowned. “That sounds less inspirational.”
“You should turn it into song lyrics. I’m sure it’d be a hit. ‘A last shot of brief vitality, into eternal stagnation…’”
“You never used to be so depressing.”
“You’re the one who said the thing about not changing! Oh my god, your sister’s lipstick choice is terrible. This does not match your skin tone.”
“I think she goes for the whole ‘blood on the lips’ look.”
“Abbies are so weird.” Stella stepped back and admired her work. “I don’t know if it’d pass, like, a side-by-side detailed inspection, but going in alone…”
Lissa looked into the mirror. Her sister stared back at her. She reached up to brush back her unfamiliarly short her; in the mirror, Taira did the same. “It’s perfect.”
“Mmm. It’ll do. Are you sure about this?”
“No. But we’re running out of options.”
“You could do nothing. Ignoring politics has gotten me so, so far in life. Do you know how many of my peers end up between the teeth of some political group or another? The secret is to not get involved in the first place.”
“Which is exactly why you’re the only person I could talk about with this. You won’t sell me out to anyone for a good distribution deal because no distribution deal is worth setting that precedent, to you.”
“And also because we’re, you know, friends.”
“That too, yeah.”
“I’m just saying, are you sure you’re doing this for the right reasons?”
“Stella, one side it recklessly trying to upend our entire society via large scale demographic shifting, and the other one is openly using me as a hostage. Is there a wrong reason?”
“Come on, Liss. I know you’re clever. You’ve seen the most likely scenario. Not if your sister succeeds or fails, but succeeds halfway. She’s promised you an aggressive Taipay increase that should force an aggressive Bee increase and throw the Abby population enough out of proportion to give the other bloods real political influence, but you must have realised right away that there’s a real possibility of succeeding in the first step and being stopped before the second. In which case – ”
“She should have started with the Bees!” Lissa snapped. “Not the fucking ’Pays! She says she’ll protect me, but if she paid one goddamned bit of attention to anything happening below the oh-so-lofty concerns of her fellow fucking Abbies, she would’ve noticed that flaw right away.”
“And your fragile little Bee heart can’t risk that, can it? You don’t think she’ll succeed all the way, so you’ve got to stop it now.”
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. You’ve got a ‘fragile little Bee heart’, too.”
“I drowned any such tenderness out of my heart when I entered the music industry, love. This business is too ruthless to be weighed down by blood. If you can’t work with other bloods as your own, you get left behind.”
“I’ll believe that when I see Zeroes succeeding on the same level as other musicians, among audience demographics that aren’t just other Zeroes.”
Stella laughed. “Good point, good point. That would certainly be an attention-grabber, wouldn’t it? Audiences love a bit of daring and drama. Actually, with a good backer… and with…” she trailed off, thoughtful.
“You can’t do it,” Lissa said. “If someone’s going to manage a Zero band and pull them to success, it can’t be you.” She pointed at the Yunor pendant hanging around Stella’s neck. “Taja.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Stella sighed, brushing the pendant with her fingertips. “It would be taken as… inherently political.”
“Bucking the system by throwing your weight behind an all-Zero band to try to get them to dominate the music industry wouldn’t be inherently political?”
“No, darling; that would be show business.” She kissed Lissa’s cheeks. “Good luck, and please, please don’t get yourself killed.”
“I’m not in any danger, except the possibility of going to jail, and with Taira’s shenanigans I don’t think anything I could get up to is going to affect that very much either way. Thanks for your help.”
“Any time. We really should get together more often. Not Thursdays, though; I have church on Thursdays.”
Lissa rolled her eyes where Stella couldn’t see, and left. She’d never really understood the Yunor. Like most such groups, their logic started with something that made sense, then veered out well into left field.
Female supremacy was hardly unusual in Scarlet City – the idea that women were naturally more dominant, more driven, and possibly even more intelligent while men made better assistants and helpmates was something that permeated the general unconsciousness of their culture. But most people at least tried for equality, or claimed to. The Yunor thought that a stable society should rely on an inherent gender hierarchy as much as an inherent blood hierarchy, and that had made people uncomfortable even before the founder’s fall from grace.
The logic was fairly simple. To engulf, to surround, to pull the essence of another into yourself, is the most blatant and foundational expression of dominance there is. There is no vampire who would deny the inherent truth of this statement. To bite is t dominate; to put your teeth and lips around somebody else’s flesh, to scrape the skin away and to draw the blood into your own body is to use your power to take theirs. It’s a truth that’s reflected in every level of society, from the blood hierarchy determined by who can and cannot drink whose blood, to the design of buildings, to the style of handshakes. To engulf is power; to be engulfed is submission.
And men, the Yunor claim are far more likely to have the physiology and desire to be engulfed during sexual relations, whereas women are natural engulfers. Therefore femininity is dominant and masculinity is submissive. The Yunor claim that this sexual difference is both a reflection of and an influence on one’s psyche, that what somebody likes in the bedroom is somehow an important reflection on who they are as a person. That what they yearn for in sex is what they yearn for in life. The undeniable difference between male and female sexuality, the engulfed and the engulfer, is a clear demonstration of the difference between the sexes; and isn’t that very difference borne out in society as a whole? Just look at how many leaders and managers and intellectuals in vampire society are women, and how few men attain the same skills and the same influence. The natural hierarchy is clear, to the Yunor.
Lissa had always found this reasoning fairly silly. For one thing, the inherent assumption of preferred sexual preferences was flawed. While, yes, men were on average more likely to have penises and also more likely to want those penises engulfed during sexual acts, it was hardly a clear line. Bask when Lissa had done that sort of fooling around, she’d run into plenty of women who preferred a more submissive engulfee role and plenty of men who’d preferred to do the engulfing. It was also, in her opinion, an extremely limited view of sex to assume that any engulfing had to take place at all. Some of the best sex in her life hadn’t included it.
The second somewhat silly assumption, in Lissa’s opinion, was that tastes in the bedroom said anything about tastes elsewhere. One of Lissa’s boyfriends couldn’t get enough of being pegged, an inherently very dominant position to take over the pegger, but outside the bedroom was so meek and unwilling to assert himself on anything that she’d eventually broken up with him over it. She’d never observed any particular relationship between her partners’ sexual proclivities and their personalities, skills or general success, and the connection drawn by the Yunor, she suspected, was a false one.
She’d always thought that the reasoning was backwards. People expected women to be more competent and favoured their opinions and put them in leadership positions over equally qualified men. Oh, look, people said, look at how much more successful women are; there must be a reason for it, clearly we were right about how much more competent they are. Then they back-rationalise a logical reason for things to be that way. Lissa sometimes wondered about an alternate fantasy world where the opposite were true, and men were assumed to be more dominant – what sorts of back-rationalisation would take place in that kind of world, to explain the natural superiority of men?
The Yunor had been popular for a while, a long time ago, until their founder, Taja, had utterly destroyed her reputation with a single statement. She had said openly in a public speech that the difference between men and women was such that an Abby man was the equivalent of a ’Pay or Bee woman, and that a ’Pay or Bee man was the equivalent of a Zero woman. It was a statement that had not been well received. Yunor left the movement in droves in a rush to distance themselves from her, and even those that stayed hastened to amend the statement, claiming that she’d meant that the difference was as clear and obvious as the difference between the bloods, not as large as the difference. It hadn’t been enough, and Taja had rushed to emigrate to a different city before somebody could kill her. There were still rumours that she’d failed; that she’d turned up dead in an alley somewhere and the Yunor had spread the word that she’d actually just left.
The movement had never regained its popularity. To openly claim to be a Yunor was political suicide, which probably had more to do with why Stella had joined them than any actual ideological belief on Stella’s part.
But Lissa didn’t have time to muse on such things right now. She was nearly in ’Pay territory. That shouldn’t be too dangerous on its own, so long as she kept herself to herself and didn’t go looking for a fight, but her destination, Holland’s office in Herron Studios, was another matter. She needed to get in there, spread some doubt that her sister would be forced to back up to protect her, and get out again as quickly as possible. Getting caught by a high profile Taipay trying to trick him by impersonating an Abby, in the middle of his own territory and surrounded by his Taipay cronies? That wasn’t a situation that bore thinking about.
Lissa hesitated. She could still back out. Let things play out as they might. Let her sister win, and change the city forever. Let the elders win, proving they could use her as a hostage to keep her sister under their thumb – a trick they’d go back to again and again, as needed. Let Taira half-win and then fail, resulting in a permanent, intolerable population imbalance where Taipays would outnumber Bees to a dangerous degree. Let someone slip up and push things too far, and risk a war.
No. She couldn’t back out.
Lissa stepped resolutely forward, into enemy territory.
Derin Edala 