He never stood a chance: Chapter 16.
In which Deimos beguiles and manipulates his nemesis's horny, easily-manipulated son.
Previously, on Jupiter Ruins Everything: Deimos Zaragoza has returned home to Ganymede to put a complex bloody revenge plot into motion. Part of that involves seducing his nemesis’s terminally-horny son. What is definitely not part of it is getting involved in local resistance to the xenophobic fascist Unity Corps, or helping do outreach for a protest with his unstrategic crush Nephthys Phobos.
The last chapter is right here. Remember that you can always consult the Cast of Characters or The Lore document if you need a refresher, or start the story at Chapter One!
Chapter 16: He never stood a chance.
“Nice job, comrade,” I said, when the outreach was done. Nephthys and I walked west, but slow—like we had two different destinations, and neither one of us was in any particular hurry to get there.
“Thanks, brother,” he said, clapping a hand on my shoulder, his voice taut with adrenaline, the comedown giddiness after a stressful moment. “I was scared shitless.”
“Me, too.”
And I really had been. And I guess the adrenaline was strong with me too, because next I said:
“What does a handsome activist such as yourself do with his evenings?”
He smiled, then frowned. His ears were way too big, and absolutely perfect. “Hang out with my boyfriends, mostly.”
“Boyfriends,” I said. “What fun.”
“It is, mostly,” he said, rubbing a hand through red-blonde hair, and like the human cinnamon bun that he was he utterly failed to keep me from seeing in his face how ambivalent he was about the relationship.
“I apologize,” I said. “I would not have asked you out if I had known you were partnered.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “We’re open. Was that what that was? You asking me out?”
His grin was boyish, mischievous, and made me feel a little feral.
“Yes, asshole. Should I be more formal about it?” And I switched to the educated Callistoan accent I’d painstakingly pieced together from damaged prison learning modules. “Wouldst thou, Nephthys Phobos, do me the honor of accompanying me on a crepuscular activity at the time and place of your choosing?”
He laughed, and shoved me. And gave me his ident.
“I should get home,” he said. “But ping me sometime and let’s choose a crepuscular activity and time and place.”
#
LAD TIDINGS was the name of the gallery: an ancient neon sign salvaged from a centuries-ago dumpster hung in the window with a broken letter G in front of LAD.
That was the vibe of Tabriz’s art space: tawdry, tattered, tongue-in-cheek. Lewd. It was also the vibe of most of the art in there. All very butch and focused on the permutations of masculinity across millennia, as invoked by artists of all sorts of genders.
Also an awful lot of it was utter shit.
Surprise surprise, my nemesis Thyone Ullapool’s son had more money than skill for spotting and supporting and profiting from artistic talent. The place smelled of leather and oranges and mold.
A day and a half had passed, since I asked Nephthys out for a date. But that was for fun, and this erotic entanglement was work.
I’d been in the gallery for ten minutes before he came out of the back room, face flushed like he was probably back there looking at skin cinematics or carrying on a heated conversation with strangers on the sex feeds.
“Stars!” he said, seeing me there. Recognizing me at once from his mother’s birthday party. His eyes were wide, startled, pale, blue. “Sorry—I didn’t realize anyone was here.”
I had used nano-miasma to block the magnetic contact sensors on the front door, for just this moment of surprise.
“What was I interrupting?”
He laughed. “Just documentation. The small business owner’s curse.”
“Pulse looks pretty elevated for paperwork,” I said.
“Paperwork,” he said, trying to assert the cockiness that was his primary personality trait and defense mechanism. “What year are you from?”
“You have no idea.”
Tabriz was engaged to marry Arkalyk Barnumbirr, the wealthy heir of a metals middleman. Thyone had spent years masterminding it: the union of their family fortunes would enable her to make major moves toward expanding her personal empire.
Unfortunately for her, Tabriz was a horndog with poor self control. And Arkalayk was the jealous sort.
“Most of my mom’s business associates aren’t interested in art,” he said.
“I’m not interested in art,” I said, leveling a long hard look at him. “Or, I am. But that’s not why I’m here.”
He actually squirmed. It was charming to see. He was a player, like hot rich boys across the thirty thousand system settlements—but he didn’t know how to handle me. I wondered why. “Why are you here, then?”
I broke off the look, turned to inspect the wall. Gestured to a broken screen where a loop played: fragments of what looked an antique skin cinematic, but might have been shot a week ago and gummed up in the processing. Two shirtless men moving through an abandoned mansion while a rainstorm raged outside. “A little pedestrian, don’t you think?”
He laughed. “Ouch. But yeah, yes. Honestly, Mr. Zaragoza, this is what people want. Pedestrian, borderline pornographic. Giving the appearance of being edgy and provocative while actually being neither. This is what sells.”
“Mr. Zaragoza,” I said. “You make me sound like a teacher.”
“Are you?”
“Do you want me to be your teacher, Tabriz?”
Here he had the presence of mind to back away from the brink he was teetering on. Actual flirting was dangerous ground for someone with poor self-control. “What kind of art do you like, then? If not this?”
“Call me Deimos,” I said. “For now.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, leering. Thinking he’d found his footing. “What kind of art do you like, Deimos?”
“Something that makes me feel something. Something that shows me something I’ve never seen.”
“You got thirty minutes?”
“For what, little boy?”
“For art,” he said, and ran to get a jacket.
#
The wind was sharp and the way was long, but I wasn’t about to complain. Or even ask where we were going. If Tabriz wanted to play Mister Mysterious, he should know he was not in the amateurs anymore.
“Tell me something about yourself,” he said, veering off of the street grid and into a gnarled old food forest, sweet with the rot-smell of fallen fruit.
“What do you want to know?” I asked, plucking an apple off a tree. It was tiny and partially shriveled and tart and delicious.
“No, no, no, I want you to tell me something you want me to know, not the other way. It’s not hard—but I can go first if you’re slow to catch on. I want you to know that I grew up poor, out-side.”
“Yes,” I said. “You said that the first time we met. And I knew it before then.”
He stopped, turned. Smiled, but uncertainly. “How did you know that?”
“I make it my business to know everything about the people I invest my money in. Their assets, their histories. Their families.”
“You’re up to something,” he said. I kept walking in the direction he’d been going. “What are you up to, Deimos Zaragoza?”
“I’m thinking of making an acquisition.”
He followed. “What are you thinking of acquiring?”
“A boy who thinks he’s very clever. Who wants everyone to know he used to be broke.”
“I’m hardly a boy,” he said. “I’m thirty years old.”
Abruptly, I turned and put my hand around his neck. It fit way too well. “Who said I was talking about you?”
He shut his eyes with pleasure at my firm grip, melted into my control.
“You want to be acquired, Tabriz?” I asked, grabbing him by the crotch and finding him erect. “Owned? Controlled?”
He opened lovely pale eyes, locked them onto mine.
“Answer me.”
He nodded.
“What would your fiance say?”
“Why would he need to know?”
Both of my hands let go of him. “Weren’t you taking me somewhere?”
#
The purple lupine fell away, and myco-concrete walls rose up on either side of us. Approaching the eastern edge of Ganymede Prime. Entering one of the service tunnels that led underground, for maintenance of the artificial gravity grid. But an abandoned one, or it’d have been heavily guarded. The passageway smelled of rancid tobacco, stale urine, moldy clothes abandoned when someone was ejected from their temporary shelter here.
Dense layers of glyphs and tags covered the walls, a palimpsest stretching back ages. Lots I recognized. Most I didn’t.
And. Yes. Of course. It was there. Partially covered; paint faded.
iji
Three dotted letters, all lower-case. The dots looped together; the stems splayed out in a quarter circle.
It stopped me short. I couldn’t stop my fingers from grazing it.
“Somebody you know?” Tabriz asked.
I almost said Yes. I almost said Harbin.
But either one would have given a key that could potentially help him access my actual identity. Which meant so could his mom. My momentary weakness had probably given away too much already.
“I thought so, but no—I knew the girl behind the tag Pijije. It kind of looked like this.”
“What happened to her?”
“Only the stars know.”
We were fully underground now, the walls having risen and arched to meet overhead.
“I spent a disturbing amount of my adolescence in spaces like this,” I said, and put my hand on his shoulder. Squeezed. “What’s a good boy like you doing down here? And don’t tell me you used to come here when you were broke, because I know that’s not it.”
“Great art thrives in unsafe spaces,” he said. “"You wanted to see something that makes you feel something? You won’t find that in a gallery.” He leaned into me as we walked. Tamed already.
Mostly.
I put my arm around him. “Good boy.”
#
“Welcome to the Forbidden Gate Hub,” he said, as the space opened up around us: a massive antechamber, where dozens of bricked-shut doors once led down different hallways to service different parts of the grid.
Overhead, a convincing facsimile of the Ganymede Prime municipal signage: right font, right colors, kerning, degree of rust and disrepair. But the words were wrong. Impossible. ALL GATES TO PLANET ZERO.
“What,” I said, my breath taken away.
In a ring inside the circular space, the squat standard rectangles of everyday wormholes. But. This. Could not be real. The name emblazoned on each was a place irretrievably lost.
New York. London. Tokyo. Ho Chi Minh.
Places I knew only from the names of friends, describing a city or state or province where their ancestors once lived. Places that came from the fabled planet we all came from, thousands of years ago, places that had been swallowed by the sea or burned by the nuclear hellfires of war.
The last known working gate to Planet Zero had been destroyed fifteen hundred years before. So of course this can’t be real, said one of the voices in my head, but the rest of them stayed slackjawed and silent with idiot hope.
“What,” I said. “Is this?”
“Walk through one,” he said.
And I did, because I wanted to believe, even though I could not.
New York. I’d seen a cinematic set there, once. An edgy, underground thing. Planet Zero was a topic most people didn’t want to think too much about. It reflected too poorly on all of us, that we were given a beautiful home unique in all the known universe and utterly destroyed it.
As soon as I passed through, the nano-miasma came alive around me. Visuals and audio springing into action: squat heavy loud vehicles, impossibly dense crowds of hurrying humans wearing weird minimalist clothing, buildings looming up bigger than you’d have thought buildings could get. Hot real sun on my face.
I felt something.
“Is this real? I mean, are these—sounds, sights… authentic?”
Tabriz shrugged, but his eyes were blue neon fire. “I think so? I don’t actually know the artist. A friend of a friend brought me here. It’s very word of mouth. You’ve got to know someone.”
“Wow, Tabriz,” I said, genuinely moved. “This is really special. Thank you. Maybe you’re not a complete write-off.”
He bowed his head and blushed quite beautifully.
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[ Like all the imagery for Jupiter Ruins Everything, this image is a collage made from old posters that are in the public domain, NASA imagery from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes (hence, also in the public domain), and sometimes my own photos. I’ve made these collages myself. Which is why they are not good. But hopefully establish a vibe? ]