She enters the kind of shop that she used to know well, where a little of everything may be found, cheaper than elsewhere. Dried foods heavy on starch, packets of synthetic flavoring, raw ingredients for communal meal fabricators. It is closer to rations on starved territories—the ones unclaimed by warlords and therefore fair game for all—than it is to food, but it stretches further than real meat. Diluted protean, thinned liquor, mass-produced academic uniforms that don’t quite fit and would have to be altered at home. Hairpins, combs, soap that will clean well enough but smell of wax. Cheap animated one-use cosmetics, bits and bobs for repairing household appliances. A miscellany for those who lack, who can’t afford any better, and who want to acquire what they can afford in one place because it is convenient and most days they don’t have the energy to trawl a hundred boutiques. Suzhen browses the shelf of software modules: bootleg navigation and assistive algorithms, month-to-month access to entertainment. These niceties, excluded from a theta-class citizen’s guidance, are manufactured scarcity even more so than the food.
The other shoppers give her wide berth, a reminder that she should’ve gone home to change before setting foot here. The clothes Taheen made her wear—their design, an affair of periwinkle-gray shards and ember fragments—give her away at a glance. A slumming voyeur, smelling of expensive theaters and debonair actors and absurd cocktails. She used to hate those misery tourists, the sight and scent of them filling her with rage; even young it was fully-formed rage and she imagined their flesh bursting like ripe papaya, citizenship spilling out of them like rotten seeds.
She rubs her hands together, fingers tingling with nervous energy, with remembered anger. She meets no one’s gaze as she exits, knowing she won’t remember their faces; that like the Bureau has trained her to, she will abstract them to category tags and then forget about them entirely. Citizen class theta, citizen class theta, citizen class theta. She will not wish to recall them.
“You should not enter this area again, citizen,” her guidance murmurs. “It causes you undue distress.”
That one thing she misses from her time as probationary resident. The blessed, total silence. The freedom from this vapid nagging voice, this panoptic chaperoning presence.
Sunset strikes the roof. The arachno-floral hybrids are in a frenzy, their web thick and shivering. Nocturnal insects have emerged, moths and mosquitoes and fireflies. They swarm the flowerbed, a feast that serves itself, drawn by scent and sweetness and color. Ovuha watches and compares real insects to replicant ones, the actual to the artificial—she has always found real insects difficult to tolerate, faintly repulsive. The lymphatic fluids they hide, purulent despite the sleekness of carapace, of wings. She watches them fall into the web and sink, thrashing, trapped. There is a metaphor. She refrains from thinking on it; too obvious, too elementary, and she would be the bugs rather than the web.
She goes to the replicant cardinal, tending to it as she ever does. As yet, it hasn’t yielded its secrets. She touches its flanks, looking for a feather that doesn’t seat quite right, an activation mechanism. None has evinced so far, and knowing her predecessor—the one who set all this into motion—it would fall upon her to find the right phrase, the right code. Only she does not have the luxury to stand there and whisper scraps of poetry one after another until the correct one occurs, this chasing of a riddle whose shape she does not even recognize. And, always, she is watched.
Ovuha returns the replicant to its cage. Unnecessary, when all’s said and done; it is not equipped with free will, an instinct for the skies, and will stay where it is put. The cage is salve to human insecurity. Birds belong in cages, that is the assumed default. A city crow flits by, basalt against the deepening blue, against the limned clouds. Perhaps it sees her, perhaps not. There is no telling which animal is true and which a replicant slaved to Samsara’s awareness, eyes and ears for the vast intelligence. Even the ground on which she stands may collaborate. By all accounts, the AI controls every square centimeter of every city.
But even that is not impenetrable or infallible, and there are parts of Anatta sealed to Samsara’s sight. This she knows for a fact.
The Luo children are emerging onto the rooftop. She counts two. The other two are absent today, the ones least interested in getting along with her, whatever their parents’ instructions. Their parents, who were most likely paid and given passage in exchange for carrying out a small, specific task. Bringing this bird all the way and handing it to the person who offers to give their children language lessons. Ovuha was surprised they held up their end at all, but perhaps her presence—that she proved to be real—brings with it an implicit threat. A debt must be repaid, or else.
She asks them, in slow careful Putonghua, how they are coming along with their conversational language. “The important thing,” she tells them, “is to pick up vocabulary through context clues. You don’t need to understand the whole sentence, just three words—or even two—out of five.”
“Good day, uncle,” the youngest says. They’re seven or ten, she judges, inexact; she is not good at children’s ages, is far more accustomed to ones who are well-fed and well-provided for. Malnourishment makes them look younger than they are.
“Auntie,” she corrects. It does not always matter, but to an Anatta native any linguistic error from a potentiate’s child is cause enough to be petty, and maliciously so.
“Younger-sibling Natelia didn’t come today.” The child, whose name she never quite remembers, looks up at her with large eyes the color of faded radium. “Couldn’t come. He was brought away yesterday.”
This surprises Ovuha. Even the Bureau is usually not so remorseless as to separate a child from their family, as far as she’s aware. Perhaps she is not aware enough, having not had to concern herself with such ancillary attachments. “To where?”
“To a new Papa and Mama.” The child does not sound as though they entirely comprehend the concept. “They said we can visit and Natelia will have lots of sugar to eat.”
Sweets, she presumes that means, a malapropism. “He was adopted out?” Some citizens are denied a parental license—Ovuha suspects the reason is psychological incompatibility, an aspect of character or personality that makes them unfit for child-rearing. But if they want to adopt a potentiate’s offspring, the barrier might be lower, if at all extant. She tries to remember. Natelia is probably five, young enough for the new parents to see as malleable. One less mouth to feed for the Luo spouses.
“We can visit,” the child insists.
Ovuha does not dispute—there is no point—and simply moves on to a vocabulary quiz. By her judgment most of the children are as well-equipped as they can be, they will pick up Putonghua in time, they’re young enough and their language centers still plastic. None of them received in utero cognitive stacks, cerebral links that would teach them language in the womb and enhance memory: Wyomere is not that kind of place. All things there are unregulated and the Luos were able to have as many offspring as they wanted. To poor results, she would judge, but such is not her business. Wyomere was a wild territory, outside the control of any warlord not because it was good at defending itself, but because it had nothing to offer. Sawdust and cinders.