The Golden Maiden
A Novel by Gaetana Pipia
Chapter 1
Odelle had been traveling for a day, his flask nearly empty, when the animal alerted him to
the small town just beyond the edge of the cliff. He wiped the sweat from his brow, drank what
was left of his water and whistled for the creature, whom he called Misfit, to come perch on his arm.
Should the townsfolk prove unfriendly, his weapons were readied—twin pistols in holsters on each
hip, a trench knife tucked into his pants.
An odorous yellow fungus covered much of the landscape, suffocating the sparse grass, the
low-lying shrubs and the haggard trees. The stuff squished under his boots and soured the air, which
was heavy and dry and stiller than it ought to be. He kept his nostrils clenched and breathed in
through his mouth—but even so, he could taste the stench.
The town lay within a deep valley about two miles in diameter. The buildings were small,
three stories high at the most, but sturdily made out of yellow brick.
Misfit howled into the vast twilight that had settled upon the town, spreading her
wide, silver-tipped wings. Odelle searched the lavender sky, the low, rust-colored clouds and
the three pale faces of the planet’s moons. He had business to attend to on Eudora. But today,
his mission was information, something to eat—and finding a way off this rock.
***
Only yesterday, Odelle had been steadily en route to his destination and dreaming of a
strange, veiled girl in red. He’d been awakened with a jolt and to the sound of a young woman’s
voice.
“Rise and shine. We’ll be arriving on Harper-9 in seven minutes. Landing may be a speck
rough.”
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That can’t be right, he thought, his mind foggy from the deep sleep and his joints still locked in
paralysis. “Min,” he muttered. “Eudora . . . Min.”
When his senses came to, Odelle unstrapped himself and slid the chamber door open, his
weakened body collapsing onto the floor.
“Min,” he said, gasping. “What in the Way happened? Why’s it we’re off-road?”
The beautiful girl knelt beside him. “I’ll explain in a lick. Here, drink up,” she said, pressing a
flask to his lips.
“Water?”
“Bourbon.” She paused. “Sir, your… your parts are showing.”
Odelle grinned, realizing he was stark naked, his skin sticky with the pink slime which
had nourished his cells for the duration of the journey. “Mon cher, I didn’t know you could blush.”
“Course I can,” she replied. “I was made to do all that a woman can do—only
exponentially better so.”
According to Min, this is how it happened. En route to Eudora, while Odelle slept, an
unknown object had suddenly come hurtling toward the ship out of the darkness, seemingly out
of nowhere, lodging itself into the main engine.
“Dit mon la verite! Nothing come from nothing, cher.”
“Cross my heart.”
Odelle frowned. Stray debris. Maybe from a nearby waste field. It seemed unlikely. “Set her down,
no? Junker’s falling to pieces on us.”
“Yessir.”
The ship came screaming across the sky in a cloud of smoke, landing clumsily but safely
and about 30 miles north of whatever civilization the Finder had detected. When they’d come to
a full stop, Min lit some ashweed. It was a peculiar habit for a girl of her kind, but then again, she
was a peculiar kind of girl.
“Pure luck this place was nearby,” she said. “You know, I wasn’t gonna wake you from that
nice dream you were having—not until I was certain we weren’t likely to fry.”
“Min, you’ve been diving me again, no?”
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She smiled. “It was a long trip. And you have such interesting dreams.”
Odelle grunted. “So what you think, cher? The ship beyond repair?”
“This death trap? I’m shocked we’ve even made it this far.”
The vehicle hadn’t been built to withstand much of anything. A collector may have polished
the antique spacecraft to display as a conversation piece, but it was hardly something to trek between
star systems in. It was, as Odelle put it, “a most beautiful morceau de merde.” Still, it was only a
temporary necessity and had nearly gotten him to his destination. Just finish this job, he reminded
himself. Then you can get yourself the prettiest vessel this side of The Way.
Odelle ordered Min to tend to the damaged ship while he went out in search of
alternative transport, taking along Misfit to serve as his eyes above. Upon completing the day-long
journey without incident, he now found himself on the outskirts of some odd, little town on some
odd, little sphere. A diner sat at the edge of the settlement, and so Odelle headed down into
the valley toward it, passing along the way a small, hand-painted sign: Welcome to
Heaven. Population, 182.
I need to get off this stinking rock. He was so close to Eudora he could almost taste it. There it
was, hanging high in the sky above him, small and blue and ripe, waiting to be plucked like fruit.
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Chapter 2
The two fishermen were careful to avoid the violent thrashing of her tail as they pulled
her into the boat and pinned her to the deck. She’d been skewered diagonally, the harpoon
having entered her lower left abdomen, protruding through the right side of her upper back.
“A beauty, ain’t she,” Jed said as he admired their catch. The creature possessed
translucent white scales, a circular black marking above the caudal fin, flaring red gills above
each breast and the delicate facial features of a human girl–except for the large, lidless eyes, which
were black in the center and orange where the whites would be.
“Yup,” Newt responded. “Ten-footer, I reckon.”
Jed, the strongest of the pair, proceeded to stomp on her stomach with his boot to gain
leverage as he yanked out the harpoon. Together, the men lifted her up and tossed her into the
icebox. As they made their way back toward the shore, they could hear her writhing and banging
against the inside of it, although the noise eventually grew quieter and quieter still until they
heard nothing more than an occasional thud amid the hum of the boat and the sea and the calm
Eudoran wind.
Upon arriving on the beach, they planned to lay her out on the sand, to scrape the scales
from her fish parts and scoop the innards from her belly. Then, they’d slice her up from tail to chin.
Times were hard for simple fishermen like themselves–and Nereid flesh, bone and blood fetched
top dollar in seedier parts of The Way.
After the men had done what they’d set out to do, they set up camp near the shore and
roasted some of the creature’s less valuable parts over the fire.
“See there?” Jed said, motioning toward the sea.
“The ruins on the rock?”
They looked out toward the water, their gaze settling on the oddly-shaped stone
structure located about a mile from shore. It stood at well over 500 feet tall and was built upon a
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rocky island just large enough to support its foundations. The structure jutted out of the sea like
a jagged, black hand, scraping open the belly of the heavens. Sometimes, it aligned with the night sky
in such a way that its four curved towers seemed to grasp the moon like fingers pinching a grape.
“I seen strange things lurking about night ‘fore last,” Jed said. “Green lights coming
from inside, flickering on and off on and off.”
“No one goes near those ruins. Cursed,” Newt said.
“Hogwash! My cousin Dirk been there on a dare once, and he ain’t cursed.”
“Didn’t his leg get blown off?”
“Shit, half the miners on this rock got missing appendages and only half their manhood
too,” Jed said, spitting a fingernail into the fire. “Don’t mean nothin. Cursed or not, I saw
them lights. Swear it on my mother’s soul.”
“Your ma’s dead?”
“Nearly so. Caught the craving. Reckon we’ll put her down come the weekend.”
“Well, shit.”
“This whole rock’s gone to hell lately. Gods be damned,” Jed said as he slurped the last bit
of flesh off the finger he’d been snacking on, cracked a bone with his teeth and sucked out
the marrow.
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Chapter 3
“I’ll take some protein, cher. Glass of water too,” Odelle said.
“What flavor?” asked the woman, who stank as bad as the rest of the town, and may have
been beautiful if not for the lack of meat on her bones and teeth in her gums.
“Country fried steak, if you have it.”
“Sure you don’t want a slice of pie with that, sugar?” The waitress leaned over the counter.
Her blouse bared a waifish midriff and the bony protrusions of narrow, whittled in hips.
Odelle imagined she was rotting on the inside and may, at any moment, with the proper gust of
wind, crack and disintegrate into dust.
“Nope, that’ll do.”
“I tell ya, the pie here is to die for. Best pie in Harper. Heck, best pie in all the boroughs.”
“Just the steak, cher.”
“That’s a slick accent, sugar. Never met no one from the Swamps before.”
Odelle clearly wasn’t from the city, nor did he possess the rural twang of the outer
systems. His natural tongue was of the Swampland–the words guttural yet lyrical, low-class yet
oddly dignified. He’d spent his youth fishing and hunting gator in the marsh. But under the cover of
night, and with a flashlight beneath the sheets, he’d studied texts on superluminal propulsion,
metalwork, epic poetry and the histories of the great, fallen civilizations.
He was, as Min put it, “a Renaissance man born of mud and shit.”
Suddenly, the waitress leaned in close, her breath festering on Odelle’s face. “I’d love to
see the Swamps,” she purred. “Ain’t never seen nothin really. Bet you could learn me a thing
or two.”
Pretty thing, she thought. Odelle was hazel-eyed and thick-browed with a shaved head
and bearded chin. He wore a sleeveless, tan duster, ostrich-skin boots and a shoulder-length elk
hide glove over his right arm. As he tap-tap-tapped his fingers on the table, the waitress noticed the
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strange ring on his left thumb. It was fashioned from the skull of a small animal, a rodent perhaps,
and had rubies resting where the eyes had been.
“Just passing through?” she asked.
“Always,” Odelle said. “Came into trouble en route to Eudora. Not a shuttle I can catch
round here, no?”
“Oh, no. Nobody ever goes off-planet. Reckon you could hitch a ride with the delivery
boy, though. Due to come in with a shipment day after next. Unloads bright and early just south of
town.”
The girl’s face grew tense. She motioned toward Misfit, who was contentedly purring
beneath the table.
“That ain’t Metal, is it?” she asked.
“She’s a Chimmy. Got a beating heart just like you and me,” Odelle said as he stroked
the animal’s back feathers.
“Well, alright then. But so you know, Metal ain’t welcome here. Got a town ordinance that
says so.”
The girl’s expression brightened, and a wet, toothless grin crawled across her face. “In
any case, tis a fine creature you got there, sugar. Whatever she is. Nice and fat, too.”
***
Min didn’t much like the captain going off without her, but she knew it was the wise thing
to do. Wounds of the war still festered in hell holes like these, breeding hate and fear like so many
worms.
She was, after all, Metal. Mechanically-engineered. Thought-producing. Artificial life.
Created in the physical likeness of a 19-year-old girl, she possessed dark, olive skin, a small but
purposeful nose and a heart-shaped mouth painted on like a doll’s. Large, half-moon eyes rested on
the horizon of high cheekbones. The irises changed in nebulae of color—gaseous bursts of
blue, green and violet swirling together, and flecks of light floating like dust. It was a sleek touch
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added by the artist, who had resolved to give her “eyes that captured the mystery and grandiosity of
the universe.”
For the last six months of this particular mission, Min had navigated the ship,
monitored Odelle’s vitals and tended to the oxygen garden. To pass the time, she uploaded obscure
vestiges of human knowledge into her memory banks—battle plans from the Unforgotten War,
the complete works of Flannery O’Connor and the ancient pillars of alchemy.
Min had grown fond of the captain over the past twenty years. She felt a certain affection
toward him, akin to the way a young girl treasures her favorite toy—secure in its presence, lost in its
absence but not above throwing it against the wall in a tantrum.
On long trips, she spent hours diving him—watching him sleep, skimming the channels of
his memories and projecting his dreams into movies in the air. Beautiful women, she learned, were
often the objects of men’s fantasies.
Once, as Odelle was fast asleep having such a dream, she disrobed and let down her long,
black hair, which she almost always kept in a tightly wound bun. She pressed herself against
the chamber, a thin layer of glass separating her body from his. Min could hear him
breathing, moaning through it. She touched herself, slowly, imagining what it meant to feel like one
of the women in the captain’s dreams. She felt nothing.
Awful design flaw, she thought.
She could feel simulated pain–a burn, a bruise, a rupturing of flesh–but human pleasure
could only be feigned. Still, she often felt a deep, abstract yearning for it, like longing for something
from a memory or a dream with too much time gone by to know the difference. Bored, Min walked
to the front of the ship. She sighed, looked out the window and hummed to herself quietly, her
perfect, naked body lit against a billion suns and the dark infinitude of space.
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Chapter 4
Odelle looked down at his plate. The meat was of dubious origin. As he cut into the stuff,
its steak-like shape imploded into a brown, formless, gelatinous sludge. He shrugged, relinquished
his fork and knife and reached for a spoon.
“I wouldn’t eat that.”
Odelle looked toward the voice. A tall, curious man dressed in a green suede suit was
grinning at him from the open entrance of the diner. How long’s he been watching me?
The stranger jerked his head suddenly and whistled toward something outside, his long,
silver braid whipping across his back like a pendulum. Moments later, two girls stepped into the
restaurant to join him. They too had silver hair worn in thick, loose braids; they looked about 14 in
age and were identical to one another in face and in form except that the skin of one’s lower
abdomen had been peeled back, revealing the meticulous, inner workings of a smooth, metallic
exoskeleton.
“You best get out.” The waitress stood up from behind the counter, revealing a shotgun
aimed at the unwelcome patrons. “Town ordinance say…it say you can’t be here,” she said, her
voice faltering.
“Can we play with her, Daddy?” chirped one of the twins.
“Yes, can we?” echoed the other.
“Later.” The man frowned. He’d designed the girls to be veritable killing machines. But
their violent tendencies, and love for torture in its most depraved forms, were things
they’d seemingly developed on their own. Android personalities, not unlike those of their
human counterparts, were shaped not only by their programming–but by environment,
individual experience and unexplained quirks in development. The girls had been made to kill. That
they enjoyed doing it with such enthusiasm was a quirk of their own design.
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The man removed an object from his coat pocket, pressed it to his lips and whistled
(haloo-haloo!). With that, the waitress went limp, falling silently to the floor except for the thud of her
head hitting the edge of the counter on the way down.
Odelle reached for his pistol.
“You can put it down," the man said, annoyed. "I didn’t kill her. Got no intention of killing
you neither, Mr. Odelle. On the contrary, I'm here to discuss business."
Odelle's brow rose with a mixture of contempt, curiosity and deep, uncomfortable concern
that he'd just been identified by name. "And who, exactly, might I be dealing with?"
The man took the bar seat next to Odelle’s while the androids stood guard at the door.
"Lovely, aren't they?" he said. "Mean, little things—my best work by far."
"You're an artist?"
"I am." The man reached across the table to extend a handshake. Odelle promptly
declined, owing to the fact that he still had a gun firmly fixated on the spot between the stranger’s
eyes.
"Not the friendliest sort, are we?" the man continued. "Heph Titus. I run a small but
lucrative shop specializing in custom metalwork for, well, a more discreet breed of clientele."
Heph Titus. Yes, Odelle had heard of him—nearly been killed once by one of his
designs, actually—but this man looked to be in his early to mid-30s. Heph Titus, the renowned
black metal artist he'd so often heard of, had been in business for decades. Did he have a son?
Odelle grunted in the gruff, impatient way he so often did. "I've got no interest in
purchasing metal from you."
"I don't aim to sell you a thing, Mr. Odelle. Here as a buyer in fact. I understand you're on
your way to Eudora to make a delivery. Whatever you've been offered for your cargo, I'll match
right now and save you the trouble of an extended journey. What would be your preferred method
of payment?"
Odelle's forehead wrinkled into an incredulous scowl. "It was you, wasn't it?"
"Come again?"
"Don't know how you got past Min... but it was you."
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"Min?" Heph contemplated the name. "You're not traveling alone, then? But yes, admittedly,
I did arrange for our little rendezvous."
"How?"
A smile stretched across the sharp contours of Heph's bird-like face, which was for the most
part attractive except for the dark circles beneath his eyes and the slightly off-kilter mouth. "Details."
"You ruined my ship."
"I'd hardly call it a ship, Mr. Odelle—and I took special care that you’d be unharmed.
A face-to-face meeting was of the utmost importance."
Odelle cocked his gun. “I'm fixing to blow your face off in about five seconds."
"Oh hell, I haven't the time," said Heph, and just as before, he lifted the strange object to his
lips and whistled.
At that very moment, Odelle fired his gun, or tried to at least, yet the weight of his body had
become inexplicably unbearable—the very act of squeezing a trigger a most impossible task. Odelle's
legs fell from under him, his musculature seemingly as formless as the protein sludge that still sat
untouched on his plate. He hit the floor, and the world went dark.
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Chapter 5
Each evening, without fail, Madame Raeh would eat a pomegranate at sundown. A woman
of both habit and superstition, she believed the pomegranate seeds helped retain her youth, vitality
and beauty. She was, indeed, a striking woman with her red, serpentine curls, sylphlike figure and
corpse-like complexion. Only the filmy blue cataracts in her eyes betrayed her true age and the
blindness that had set in many, many years ago.
Tonight, she felt uncharacteristically anxious. She’d been expecting a shipment and feared
the worst—that perhaps someone had intercepted the delivery, or that her contractor had become
enlightened to the true value of his cargo.
She’d met Jae Odelle on only one occasion, but he’d made a lasting impression—something
people rarely did anymore. Humans, for the most part, bored her to tears. She’d hired Odelle three
years ago, largely due to his reputation for completing seemingly impossible tasks. Even more
importantly, he’d come recommended as a man who stayed the course of a job and nearly always
kept his word—a hard-found quality in his particular line of work.
Madame was not a patient woman. Rather than continue worrying about the late shipment,
she decided a distraction was in order. She addressed her handmaiden with sudden enthusiasm.
“Sugar, fetch me those boys we picked up. I’d like some entertainment tonight. Music, too.”
Eudora was located on the farthest outskirts of the Way, a last stop of sorts between
civilized space and the lawless darkness that lay beyond. The world was unique in that large
populations of genetically-rendered chimera roamed its lands and seas freely. The human-animal
hybrids known as the Nereids, long ago wiped out in other parts of the galaxy, were particularly
prized by poachers and other unscrupulous sorts.
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Only three nights ago, Madame’s guards had seized two fishermen on the nearby shore. She
was a great admirer of animals (in all their natural and unnatural forms) and had a special distaste for
anyone who would do them harm. While she’d been born human, she’d taken special liberties with
her own anatomy and no longer identified as one—not that she truly ever had.
As the guards brought in the poachers, Madame felt a sudden lift in her spirits. Why, tonight,
she wouldn’t worry her pretty head about Odelle or the shipment or anything at all. Tonight, she’d
have herself a regular, good time. She deserved to, didn’t she?
“Tell me your names,” she said, addressing the men.
Strained silence lingered before the larger of the two spoke up. “Jed,” he managed weakly, a
trickle of blood and drool winding its way down his mouth and settling in the fold of his double
chin.
“Manners,” Madame snapped. “Address me properly.”
Jed, still delirious from a harsh beating, chuckled quietly, his ribs aching as he did so. He
paused for a moment before settling on the proper words he’d been searching for.
“Suck my cock.”
Madame Raeh did not flinch at the insult. While her face was angled toward Jed’s general
direction, her eyes remained fixated slightly above him. This was partly due to the blindness but
more so due to the deep disgust she harbored toward Jed and his kind. She had quietly ruled Eudora
for years—so quietly, in fact, that most of its inhabitants remained ignorant of her existence and the
secret ways she controlled their stupid lives. She believed humans (in their non-trans forms) were
basic, revolting creatures largely beneath her, undeserving of acknowledgement and even less
deserving of mercy.
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Madame frowned. Jed smelled awful—a mixture of salt and piss and lingering, old sweat.
She imagined he possessed the kind of soft, inbred face that just begged to be punched.
“I asked for music, didn’t I?” she said to no one in particular. The jukebox immediately
switched on. The device was one of her favorite possessions—a gift from an old friend who’d had it
specially programmed to her preferences and moods so that it always selected the perfect song for
any given moment. If no such song existed, it composed one of its own accord. In all the years it
had been hers, the thing never failed to properly read her, nor did it ever play the same song twice.
Tonight, the box played an old tune in a strange style of music Madame had never heard before.
She immediately took a liking to it.
There’s a call that rings for the one who sings
To those now gone astray
Saying ‘Come ye men and your load of sin
There at the altar lay’
You don’t seem to heed at the chain of greed
Your conscience never tires
Be assured my friend if you still offend
He will set your fields on fire
The music was upbeat and joyful in contrast to its message of hellfire and damnation. Still,
the song had a calming effect on Madame and put her in a much more agreeable mood. “Don’t kill
him,” she said decidedly. “Take the tongue, then the hands, then bring him to my quarters.”
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She turned toward the second man, who had remained silent until now, his eyes firmly cast
toward the floor. “And your name?” she asked.
“N-n-newt, miss. I mean, ma’am. Err, what’s it you prefer?”
“Madame will do. You’ll be a good pet, now won’t you, my slimy, little Newt? Not like your
friend here?”
“Y-y-yes, Madame. Not like him. I aint, I ain’t like him.”
“Good.”
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