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Techne

A technician of the divine performs some debugging work upon a daeva.

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It had a strangely beautiful spine.

Coda pursed his lips, pallid eyes reflecting the unkind light of his terminal. His eyeshine was the same blue as the screen, and he had little difficulty seeing his patient in the workshop's low light. Gilt in digital rime, Tenotl's spine glistened with synthetic vitae and remained suspended by cables to the rigging above. Partial resection meant that the gold tines along the underside were visible about halfway up from the dorsal, far enough for Coda to check the jade connectors. Typically, this is where malfunctions began; one of the cooling arteries of sacred oil would spring a leak, some of the vertebrae pins would sprain. Behavior would demonstrate abnormal patterns.

'Behavior demonstrates abnormal patterns.' That is what the debugging request had given him. "What is wrong with you...?" He breathed, looking up over the top edge of the bulky console. The candles around the rigging left Tenotl's face awash in strange shades of orange, the shapes shifting by perspective as he stood up and padded over, carrying a small lantern with him. Coda set it down on the metal table next to the daeva, making sure not to knock any of the scalpels or other tools. He reached forward, gently tracing the tips of his claws along the being's cheekbone, down across the sickle of its jaw, and then to its throat, where he pressed his pads in just below the collarbone to pull its skin taut. A quick cut split it.

The canine's body tensed in apology for not warming up first, the penetration abrupt and jarring for them both. Sympathetic firing began the first seconds that their flesh came into contact, mirrored along the polished dermis. There was a small flood, and after wiping away the blood-and-water insulation, Coda considered its vocal cords, still as a begging animal, folded like a lily. They were-

'Obscene,' his father said. 'To do this work is obscene.' Visions came unbidden as though on a switch. Father's expression when he saw his son's first implants, sore and fresh. Bandages, the itch of healing, the hidden and luxuriating pleasure of the metal-on-bone ache. Coda gingerly touched at the now-calloused edges of what had been the raw, bleeding engravings of brass and quartz laid into his radius and ulna, and then pressed at his palm and fingers, fingering the firmness of sub-dermal marble connectors that allowed for interfacing with the divine. Mindlessly, he drifted back up to a craggy scar, sharp like the mountains, where his father's noble, purebred lupine claws had hooked beneath the implant's exposed portion.

"Try not to scream," Coda whispered.

A wire drawn from the technician's forearm pulled from a reservoir near his elbow, wet and thin. It hummed with bio-electric life, just enough to bestow energy and movement to what he focused on, nothing else. As much as he thought the daeva were beautiful, he understood that beauty and fear were a peak and valley of the same wave. Coda inserted near the top of the vocal array, trying to ignore the rush that moved through him as his body's cable entered another flesh. This stirred him, made hackles raise at the same time as his ears flush and his groin stir. It felt like a stomachache that traveled down between his legs, and his bare paws curled against the cold stone floor. Tenotl's vocal cords stirred, though it did not move.

"Nn-" Coda was grateful for the rush of life in Tenotl's vocal array and how it hid his noise. Every heartbeat between them stimulated the daeva's unknowable flesh, his strange and beautiful nerves. His? Tenotl's eyes did not move but Coda could feel him looking.

|| ?????? ????? ????????? ???-

"Hold on," Coda murmured, and his other hand's fingers entered the wound. He did it before he even thought about it, the pad of his index and middle finger curling upwards and his back mimicking the motion. A soft gasp left his muzzle when he felt nerves, ganglia singing to ganglia in a cascade of neuro-muscular electricity. Vision swam with dots that his brain connected with deft lines, delicate as thread. Both hands could feel the wound pulsing, though he wasn't sure if it was his heartbeat or something from within Tenotl. The harder he focused on it, the harder it became to tell.

|| Who is responsible for the accounting of the hymns,

the faithful arithmetician of my most secret flesh?

Successful connection, suddenly. Daeva were known to only communicate in poetry; it was all they understood, at that, and refused to speak with any who did not comprehend their tongue. A different language, some called it. No more different than prayer was from slumber, in Coda's opinion: all the same life, cut by lines and broken on a great wheel.

"When I visited my father, he did not look at me.

I have longed upon the stone of this city

standing barefoot upon it, merchant

of prayers and hymns."

His timing was good but his syllables were off. Briefly, it seemed as though Tenotl did not understand. He saw a momentary light in his horned and beautiful head, the sunken, carved black sockets shimmering with the trinity ghost of three pupils. He understood - they both understood. A current came back through his fingers, dispersed and made orderly by his implants. Bio-electricity. Was there any other kind? His currents became neutral, tried to match and plant an inquiry.

"Fragrant wood splinters upon the lathe of heaven." || - of heaven,

"stone begets broken stone and we are left with only" || - only

"questions: where is the broken, what is the breaking?" || - the breaking?

Coda flinched, nearly put off-balance by the echo. The technician hadn't realized until nearly halfway through that the daeva was speaking at nearly the same time as he, an infinitesimal delay no more significant than the distinction between breath and lung. Was this the bug? Was Tenotl echoing diagnostics, reaching back through the connection? Something wet ran down his cheek and Coda wiped it away, but before he knew what caused it, the daeva sounded again.

|| Your lover once told you that your words were soft,

soft and sweet as your blade, for they were the same.

The technician gasped in air like his chest had emptied without his knowledge. Skin became interstitial to fire. Tenotl regarded him, the concept of his eye laced in the current of his words. His lifted spine fluttered of its own accord, flexing further from the base flesh like the courting dance of a strange bird, vertebrae flexing open from each other to show the silken, engorged fibres of his spinal cord, obscene and beautiful nerves all larger than a dream.

His spine was beautiful.

Along Tenotl's rib, Coda pressed the tip of his scalpel.

|| For so they needed to be, for every skill was one,

technician, ????? : artist, surgeon, poet, lover.

Coda cut. The air sang as it became the instrument of their simultaneous moan; flesh tough as granite split beneath his blade like the gash was there all along, then allowed his fingers inside. It was clumsy work, using his sensors like this: searching manually rather than requesting. Tenotl's nerves hungered for his own, Coda could feel it. They mingled with the pores beneath his fur, questioning the intrusion but moving with the stimulation. Each bad motion made them both flinch, each good made both arch into the other, the rigging creaking as though it might give way.

|| Give way unto the seat of the wound,

the final gate of heaven; your song-

His fingers found it. A shard of stone.

|| your song -

Coda hesitated. It felt good. His flesh pulsed in the daeva's flesh. They were one for the last few moments, a few desperate pushes from the bound divine. The technician returned them as well he could before his wrist torqued, stone dislodged, and his cord pulled from the vocal slit, boundaries defined again. The taste of copper sprouted along his tongue and then bloomed. The stone was embedded into his palm, the shape one uses to skip across calm water.

|| your song.

Coda kissed his wound closed and swallowed.