We Were Born With Blue Eyes

The gibbous moon waxes like a silkworm spinning out its thread of protein, casting its reflected light onto Montreal by night and onto me, perched atop the Lunar War Monument some three hundred meters off the ground.

Stray thoughts weave in and out of my portrait like lovers in the night. Up here, doing what I do, I tend to think too much.

Like right now, I'm thinking how looking through a rifle scope is like soul projection. Not only are you peering into the magnified mirror-world of a telescope, but you're also directing your gaze to what you'd like dead, honing in on a heart, a head, a spine. This will be my last target, my last projection through the scope, and my last connection to this life. Once I take the shot and meet up with Sister Magritte, I will be redeemed.

My target leaves the Heptogram, and I pivot the anima rifle in a graceful arc on tripod hinges. Quartered in crosshairs, Gamboge's head looks so ugly and ripe.

General Gamboge is the pride of the Confederated North American Military. Decorated war hero, certified genius, and visionary. Or so they say. He's surrounded by suits, jogging down the steps of the Heptogram intelligence agency to his motorcade. The prick's wearing designer bioweave threads, like some fashionista who happens to have seven stars on his sleeve.

Gamboge won't even see it coming. And why should he? Since Jade went cipher, I'd been given two months leave. As far as Gamboge knows, I'm in some flesh bar on a beach in Brazil, slamming cachaça and doing lines of coke off beautiful men and women's six-packs, or God and genetics willing, eight packs. Not here, ready to turn his face into a Picasso.

General Gamboge is halfway down the steps now, and a fractal of light spills out from the Heptogram entranceway, but I won't need it to make the shot. The gun is an anima rifle--it still holds a piece of Cyan's portrait, a piece of his soul. The way the grip contours to my hand, the way the guidance bacteria whisper to my portrait, it almost feels like Cyan is right here to guide my shot, just like I used to guide his.

Gamboge reaches the bottom step, and one of his men opens the door of a black limousine for him. Before he gets in, he pauses and looks up like a stag in the woods, scanning rooftops as if, in his last seconds of life, he senses that I'm out here somewhere on the tattered skyline on the edge of Montreal, in the ghost capital of the C.N.A, the whittled-away fringe of nowhere, ready to end it.

There is the faint sound of the gun. Then, a ribbon of blood shoots out from the back of his skull like a streamer on New Year's Eve. Before the body even slumps to the icy curb, I'm breaking down the gun.

I open the roof's service door and leap down the stairs twelve at a time, landing to landing, back and forth, my gun case lighter than it's ever felt. It's over. After fifteen years, the killing is over.

It's a naïve thought because when I'm ten flights from the bottom, muzzle flashes blaze in the stairwell. From below, soldiers pin me on the stairs with machine guns that drop shells onto the concrete like titanium rain. Even in death, it seems Gamboge commands a formidable cult.

Now I'm trapped in the tower, and Sister Magritte will wait through the night, staring out synthetic stained glass windows of saints and martyrs, hoping that--come morning--she won't have to scrape up the pulp of a stranger's body that had housed a demon's soul.

When Cyan, Jade, and I worked for Gamboge, possessing the souls of demons was a requirement. But back then, we were just doing our jobs: sniper, spotter, and flanker for every major assassination leading up to and during the Lunar War.

Our last job was only a few weeks ago. Long enough for me to dwell on it all.

We arrived in Tranquility Park with forged Brazilian citizenship papers and a caffeinated case of shuttle lag. The Lunar Skin was in absorption phase, so the Lunans who blanketed the park were dressed in transparent UV ponchos and sunshades. Birds soared above Rio Novo, and the air smelled like papaya and plastic.

Our mission: assassinate the Lunar Prime Minister's daughter, Elizabeth. It would be clean and simple.

Jade landed on the balcony of the Penumbra Hotel where we were stationed. She preened her feathers, maybe because she needed a bath or maybe because she wanted to be dramatic--I had no way of knowing since I'd never painted into an animal golem. But Jade considered herself cutting-edge, a real porreiro shapeshifter. Starling, she said, suited her best.

Both Cyan and I were encased in human male golems that bore features of every Terran ethnicity, a perfect disguise amongst the Lunans. I was in tea-colored skin. Cyan, coconut shell. Both tall and lean. We may have been raised to ignore the physical, but we enjoyed the bodies we were in, and fine craftsmanship is fine craftsmanship.

"What's the news, Mom?" Cyan asked. Though we called Jade "Mom" on account of her nurturing instinct, we didn't know what her original gender was. Neither did she. She always said it didn't matter anyway.

"We got four counter snipers, but the getaway's clean."

"Good, now get outta here and make sure it stays that way."

Cyan swatted her away and laughed, the irises of his aquamarine eyes sparkling around the event horizon of their pupils' edge--an abyss into which light would enter but never leave. I could stare at his eyes forever.

Jade took flight until she was a speck against the gentle parabola of the Lunadome, and was finally consumed by the sunlight. She was off to maintain overwatch on the counter-snipers, and I returned my focus to the Prime Minister and the crowd. This was it. The war could be ended right here, right now.

I felt Cyan's breathing slow against my shoulder. Out of habit I never talked on missions and I found the shared silence to be soothing. I was always the quiet one. Agreeable. Calculations of milliradians and minutes-of-arc were ticking off in Cyan's brain, his surroundings breaking down into points and lines, considering compensations for gravity, wind, and range, all of this dialing into his symbiotic anima rifle. The material melted away. He closed his eyes, and long eyelashes fanned against his cheeks. I knew, without words, that Cyan was ready to take the shot.

But he didn't.

"Take the shot, Major."

Gamboge was right behind us--he wanted to be front and center for the big hit. When I whirled around, he was right in my face, all shiny boots and brass skin.

His golem always disgusted me--a vision of ego. He kept the same body over the years, but made minor alterations to it so he could keep up with the trends. First the square jaw, the aquiline nose, and the two-to-one shoulders-to-waist ratio. Then the metallic skin. The rest of Project Mercury--we lower ranking members--simply painted in and out of golems, using each body to fit the situation we were in. It was a kind of utilitarian koinophilia.

"Take the shot! Those are orders from your General."

Gamboge had a habit of referring to himself in the third person, but never by name, always by rank.

"I won't do it," Cyan muttered.

Gamboge grabbed the barrel of the rifle and yanked it upward.

"Shoot her!"

We'd been trained to kill, trained not to think of human lives in terms of "value" or "worth." People are either targets or collateral damage. But something inside Cyan's portrait came into focus, something Gamboge thought he'd gotten rid of when he plucked us off the streets and wiped our memories clean like a turpentine-soaked rag wiping an oil painting.

The orders weren't a problem during the briefing; though we'd never shot an innocent child before, it didn't matter. Cyan was a sniper doing a job. But now, she was right through Cyan's scope, and his soul had had enough. Killing Elizabeth wouldn't end the war. It would only escalate it.

Killing the Prime Minister wouldn't end the war either; Gamboge explained this to us. The Lunans would just elect a new P. M. to take over their slow and embittered war for independence. However, an emotional loss like the assassination of Elizabeth would whip them into such a frenzy, that they'd retaliate. They'd break the Biological Mass Extinction Protocol Agreement, and by the time they dropped one pathetic anthrax bomb onto the C.N.A., our government would be poised to strike back. The poor moonies would be covered in smallpox and syphilis before the bombs even hit the ground.

It'd be tit for tat. Eye for an eye. A game of chess where only the kings were left standing. That's how it was meant to be.

"No," Cyan said.

Cyan carefully sat the rifle on the balcony like an heirloom. He stared up at Gamboge.

Gamboge smoothed his eyebrows with spit, and sighed.

"I'll give you one last chance. Pick up your rifle and shoot the target. Everything's been leading up to this."

"I won't help you engineer your war anymore."

"Then it's a good thing you're expendable."

As Jade glided onto the balcony railing to update us on our counter-snipers, Gamboge pulled his sidearm from his suit jacket and fired one shot into Cyan's right eye. I remember turning away. There was a lump in my throat, and I was suddenly filled with emotions that felt big and weird--emotions I had no experience dealing with. These emotions were like dark strangers at a bar, alluring yet threatening. I was a killer, and death was my constant companion. But now, my best friend and lover was dead.

The Lunar War Monument was built to commemorate the millions lost during the Lunar struggle for independence. But the war's still going on, so "Monument" is a bit of a misnomer.

"Grave" might be a better word, given my current situation.

Gamboge's grunts are newbies. Probably shaking even more than their guns, they've adopted a "spray and pray" strategy, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm trapped inside a glass spire. I could hurl myself out a window, but I'm too high up. I'll have to race to the bottom as Gamboge's men race to the top, and hope to hell that by the time we meet up, I'm far enough down to withstand a fall. My neurons fire down from memories of the past--the image of Cyan's eye socket smoking--and I hoist myself over the stairs' railing. For a moment, I'm weightless.

The human form is a fragile thing. But it's still entrusted with the important task of carrying our consciousness. If only the soul could thrive within a hard-tech container, I wouldn't be in this predicament right now. If cyborgs existed, I could vault on piston-strong legs; I could destroy these men with my fire-breathing eyes or rocket-launching fists; I could absorb bullets. I'd be like a character in a Japanese comic, laughing wide-mouthed and close-eyed with streaks of colored light zooming behind me to give the illusion of speed and power. But staying alive isn't so easy.

I reach out, and I feel my left shoulder dislocate. In the gap between the criss-cross of the staircase, my legs dangle, still a good four stories up. Somehow I manage to wrench myself over the railing and roll back onto the stairs.

The din of gunfire winds down until only the dropping of the last shells can be heard echoing through the tower. The soldiers two levels below me now, but they won't be for long. I could blast through with my auto pistol, but that would be suicide in six seconds.

I inhale deeply. I've got one shot at this, and it's still a Hail Mary.

Righting myself up, I remove the pistol from my chest holster and climb the two remaining steps to the next landing above me. The primal roar of adrenaline rushes through my body, but I can hear hushed orders being issued to the men.

I bolt through the archway and into the darkened ring of the fourth floor. The moon is right in front of me, beyond the thick windows, so I know St. Tutilo's Cathedral is out there as well. And inside, Sister Magritte.

I run past the food court signs: Pompeii Pizza, Lady Nguyen Express, Natural Way, all of them cheap synth foods, and I snake between tables whose chairs rest upside-down on top of them. Surveillance cameras watch my escape like silent sentinels, their violet eyes winking as I cut across their gazes. I hear the hammering of boots coming from the stairwell. But I'm almost free.

I can see my reflection in the curved glass--the skin of the Monument--as I quicken my pace like a cheetah in the last second before the fatal pounce.

My left hand tightens the straps of the rifle case, securing it to my back. My right hand extends my pistol.

In a neat line of metal and conviction, my gunfire punches holes through the safety glass, turning it white in ring patterns like diseased tick bites on flesh. It won't give. But I'm not slowing. Only quickening.

Finally, the glass buckles for a nanosecond--imperceptible to a normal human's eyes--before it shatters, announcing my descent into the night.

And I'm weightless once again, flying amidst shards of glass.

I could've run on Luna, after Gamboge executed Cyan. But Gamboge would've shot me down, a bullet in the back of my skull with an exit wound through my eye. So I just crouched there, turned away with the taste of hatred on my tongue.

"What...a...waste," Gamboge said as he tucked his gun into his suit jacket. He adjusted a button that had a loose thread. Frowned. "You've fired an FM-107 before, haven't you, Grey?" Not even looking at me.

I wanted to claw his eyes out, I wanted to scream, blow our cover. I wanted to use every fiber of muscle, every ounce of hormonal rage in my body to explode in a cocktail of wrath that I could direct entirely on Gamboge.

"Yes," I said instead.

"Of course it's got Cyan's imprint on the guidance bacteria node, but you two were close, emotionally, weren't you?" he asked, turning up one side of his mouth. "So I suppose it will be fine."

"You don't have to do this, Grey," Jade said. Since her bird golem lacked vocal chords, she'd been softwired with cultured ones. Her voice in this form sounded like one of those museum headphone tours, larger than it should. Assertive, but somehow soothing.

"Don't you be a failure as well! Let history praise you, Grey!"

Gamboge removed his gun from his suit jacket again and pointed it at my temple.

With a trembling hand, I picked up Cyan's anima rifle and re-mounted it on the tripod. As I got level with the scope, I felt Gamboge remove the business end of his pistol from my head. Before I focused through the scope's far-reaching mirror world, however, I took one last glance at Jade in the hope that she could somehow remedy the situation.

She was staring right at me, her jade-blue eyes huge and judging and helpless.

If she had arms, she would have grabbed the rifle and turned it on Gamboge in an instant, not fearing the consequences of being a millisecond slower than our General and foster father.

Through the scope, I could see the target: Elizabeth Craven. She was sitting on the stage, behind the podium where her father was rousing the crowd with his wartime address.

Elizabeth was a cherub. Missing front teeth, chunky pigtails like eggplants, and a face of porcelain. A nanny sat beside her, holding her hand. To her other side was a Lunar flag, planted on the stage, flapping in the man-made air.

I pulled the trigger, and the top of Elizabeth's head bloomed like a flower, revealing the red wetness inside. The spray speckled her nanny's face like cinnamon splashed over milk. I know because I watched.

I'd been on countless assignments, had my portrait painted countless times, possessed countless golems, but Gamboge always let us keep our original eyes. I thought it a blessing, allowing me to hold onto something of my former selves, like a memento. But later, I learned that he used our eyes to keep tabs on us--a fail-safe tracking mechanism he could use in case we disappeared. I hated seeing those gray-blue eyes the color of C.N.A. nerve gas staring back at me in the mirror every morning after that, and beyond them, the bare bedroom with nothing but a metal-frame twin bed and weapons propped against the wall. My eyes were the memento of a killer. A curse.

Hell broke loose in Tranquility Park within seconds of the shot. But our escape was simple--piggyback our equipment on an outbound trade cruiser, where a double-agent of ours would launder our goods (and our bodies). We'd paint into cockroach golems and smuggle ourselves in cargo bound for Brazil, and then, Montreal where we'd be home free.

But sometime during transit, we lost Jade. Gone. Into thin air. Biological prestidigitation. Did she keep her cockroach form and blend in with the hundreds of other cockroaches on the shuttle, only to hitch a ride in a passenger's luggage? However she did it, she'd gone cipher, and Gamboge and I didn't know it until we were back in Brazil, preparing for our return to Montreal.

I shake off pellets of glass like how a dog sheds droplets of water after being left out in the rain. It's cold on the street. January doesn't want to end.

I glance behind me, and the gently curving silver monolith looks like it's missing a tooth with its one blown-out window. Four stories. My ankle has to be broken. I struggle to my feet, and a pain shoots up my leg like a railroad spike, so I collapse onto the glass-covered pavement and take an inventory of my injuries. Ankle: broken, definitely. Face, hands, and torso: sliced to hell. Dislocated shoulder: still dangling.

I have a syringe of Flush in my gun case. My happy needle, I call it.

The Flush feels hot as it rushes through me, awakening me to the network of veins reaching out through my body like a spider web. I test out my ankle. No pain.

And soon my body is moving, pushed forward by the Flush and the sight of the Cathedral of St. Tutilo.

The streets are abandoned. Even the lingering corpses of meningococcal BAC victims have been swept up tonight. The diseases hit harder than anyone could have imagined--curable, but only after they each claimed thousands, like volleys from a line of archers aimed at a castle balustrade. The streets have been abandoned a lot lately.

When I get to it, I knock on the Cathedral's side door. An old woman wearing a black habit opens it. She stares up at me with honey-colored eyes. These aren't the familiar jade-blue eyes I know--those huge starling's eyes.

"I'm looking for a Sister Magritte," I say.

The nun inhales silently and tilts her head up at me, as if smelling my intent.

"I am she."

But how would I know? And how would she know I was me?

"Jade?" I ask.

She stretches her lips into a thin smile, and wrinkles reveal themselves on her leathery skin.

"I go by 'Sister Magritte' now. I'm glad you made it, Grey...but from the sound of it, you've brought company."

She nods her head, indicating the faint clomping of boots in the distance, out of sight. "Let's get inside."

"So you opted for 'Sister Magritte' instead of 'Father Martin.' Always a female, eh, Jade?"

"Personal preference. You always painted male."

"Touché." She points to my forehead, and I wipe blood away with the back of my hand. "Do you find it odd? Our habits? I mean, we don't even know anything about ourselves, who we are."

"We were born with blue eyes."

"And that means...?" I ask, wondering if she's just being cheeky, or if--like me--she hated the cursed eyes that stared back at her from the mirror every morning. Hated everything they'd seen.

"Nothing. Just genetics." She laughs and motions for me to lie down on the steel table in front of her.

Jade injects my forehead with a dose of Transfer Inhibitor. It's a wonderful blend of drugs that instantly breaks down the boundaries between "me" and "everything else."

Jade slides a body out of an orgsteel womb and onto a gurney next to my table. There are about a dozen more golems, lined up along the wall inside their veiny, egg-shaped, vaguely organic containers, glowing pink and orange like the first light of sunrise.

"You know what I'm thinking of, Jade?" I'm already out of it, drowning in the Transfer Inhibitor.

"Hm?" She's working diligently now, shaving a patch of my hair from my head.

"We're fruit flies. Fruit flies lost in a swarm of fruit flies fighting for an overripe melon."

"Save that thought till after the transfer, babe. Maybe you won't be so bleak."

Sister Magritte--Jade--guardian babe--angel pushes in the plunger of a new syringe she's stuck into the canvas brain, giving it a fresh coat of gesso. She bites her lower lip as she draws the needle out of my future golem's head. The cold metal underneath me feels like liquid. It's nuzzling my back. There's a throbbing sound in my ears, like tribal drums. It's her secret revolution.

"I don't remember that drumming noise. Is that a side-effect of the Transfer Inhibitor?" I sit up, but Jade gently guides me back down onto the table and attaches neuro-umbilicals to my softnodes.

"That noise," she states calmly, "is Gamboge's men breaking down the front door."

"Oh." I turn my head to look at the body I'm being painted into. It's a nice one. Clean-cut looking guy, sort of a friendly-neighbor type. "I wonder what my--"

Jade tethers the other end of the neuro-umbilicals to the blank golem, and I feel my portrait being pulled through, like an inside-out shirt sleeve being turned right-side-out.

First my beta waves go, then the alpha. Then, my vision goes, my hearing goes, and I know that my theta waves are passing through the fleshy tightrope into my new body. Finally, as I have a dream about a blue raven flying over a city in the trees that lasts only a nanosecond, my delta waves make the transfer.

"--name should be."

I don't recognize my voice. But there's no time to get acquainted with it. Gamboge's men are breaking into the Cathedral.

My mind's in panic-mode; the Transfer Inhibitor is no longer in my brain, clouding my judgment.

"Grey, calm down. Answer me something."

Sister Magritte glances up at the ceiling with her mouth agape.

"What?"

"How long have Gamboge's men been tailing you?"

"Since I shot him."

She winces. "Don't you find that a bit odd? That they were so ready to pounce? So quickly?"

It hits me, what Jade is getting at. It should have been obvious earlier, but I was too elated to care:

If Gamboge's men were at the ready, that meant he knew I was coming. And if he knew I was coming, why did he let himself be shot so easily?

"Because Gamboge wasn't Gamboge at all."

He was onto my plot, so he duplicated a golem, stuffed it with some helpless vagrant's portrait, and then prodded it down the steps to the motorcade so that I'd think I killed him. "Then, where's the real Gamboge?"

"Wherever he is, he's at least one step ahead of you."

I stand at attention. The tiny nun reaches up and puts her hand on my shoulder. "Now let's get you out of here."

"But what about you?" I ask.

"I can talk my way out of a confrontation."

"But what about the long run? Gamboge will find you sooner or later."

"I built this chopshop in a couple weeks. I can pack up and move again. I'll go where the wind takes me." Jade winks, and crow's feet fan out to her temple.

I rip the guidance bacteria node from Cyan's rifle, and we walk up the narrow staircase. I take one last look at the golem I had worn. It was Cyan's favorite.

Cyan even wore it once. Not for an assignment, just off-duty. I thought it was strange that he wanted to paint into one of my old bodies, to occupy a space where I'd existed. When we were making love, he told me that he could still feel my presence lingering inside. He said he could feel me on the edges--in the fingers, the toes, the roots of the hair, the eyelashes.

In romance novels, the characters always say things in the heat of the moment like, "I want to take you." "I want to have you." "I want to be inside you." But never,

"I want to be you."

Cyan knew me intimately, they way love must feel to the naked soul. He was a far better man than I.

The hatch closes--it disappears into marble stonework--and the body is sealed away.

Jade ushers me to the postern gate of the drafty Cathedral. Nuns scatter as an explosive charge shakes the front door.

"What will you do now? Bury Cyan's bacteria node?"

"I still have to kill Gamboge."

Jade bites her lip.

"What happens when you actually kill him? When they just replace him with someone else? Another warmonger. What then?"

"Then I'll bury Cyan."

"Grey," she says, squinting as she studies my face. "You have choices. We always do."

"I've already made mine."

She leans closer to me, standing almost on tip-toes. I realize what she's studying on my face.

My face is wet with tears that have been dredged from my eyes like jewels.

These eyes, it seems, are cursed as well, and I know now that redemption is far more difficult than a snake shedding its skin.

Jade nods. She pulls a gargoyle's wing, and the secret door slides open, revealing the Montreal streets just as I'd left them. I turn toward the darkness and flick up my left hand, bidding Jade adieu. My right hand remains clasped around Cyan's bacteria node.

"What should I do with your old golem?"

I think for a moment as dust settles around bits of broken statues.

"Burn it," I say. I tuck my burden into my pocket, still holding it tightly, and I walk into the winter again, into the night again.

Nick Poniatowski currently lives and writes in Florida. His fiction is appearing next year in several e-zines including Mirror Dance and The Future Fire's feminist sf issue. He was born with brown eyes that he carries from golem to golem.