Coffee never does much to her and she falls asleep smoothly, nearly without transition between conscious and not. The dream continues where she left off, the palace with its beehive chambers, and her a child again. She is always a child in these memories, true to life, small and shod in bright, soft sandals. Beads around her neck, beads on her skirt, clattering with her movement. She loved to run, loved to explore the hall that was also her world. What felt like innumerable corridors, forking off into a hundred paths and a thousand doors, endless and full of possibility. She did not have much in the way of playmates; under the Mirror dominion childbirths were closely regulated. To be born was itself a privilege.
Suzhen was too young to understand that yet, too young to understand even that it was unusual for anyone to see the warlord unmasked, unarmored. A tall figure silhouetted by sun and dust, standing by a window, bending to her and chuckling at something she said.
In the dream, as in memory, the warlord asks her a question. Do you want to see a jewel of a world? It is called Mahakala; even this name is a secret. That is what the Thorn governs, the seat of their power, a treasure Samsara itself would envy. A planet even more superb than ours, a planet of sapphire canopies and eternal dancers. The oceans, child. We’ll taste its spray upon our skin, breathe in the brine and the salt, and make the depths yield their pearls.
She wakes up to the taste of smoke in her nostrils, lingering at the back of her mouth, an admonishment that she never cleaned up before slipping into bed. Her guidance gives her an updated inventory of her pantry: what ingredients have been used and how much, down to the milligram. A risible thing to monitor; she dismisses it.
Dawn has molted away and the bettas have faded, replaced by their daytime counterpart, red butterflies that flit through the bugleweeds and begonias that now carpet the floor. Jasmine-rice steam overtakes the air. She follows its trail to the kitchen where Ovuha is dicing garlic by hand. “Good morning, officer. Is there any tableware I shouldn’t touch?”
“I’m not particular, use anything you feel like. The fancy ones were all gifts.” Taheen’s again, occasionally coworkers’ in the mix. Presents in the forms of cutlery and ceramics is an Anatta custom she’s never understood, despite the decades. How a meal is eaten, how the food is presented, strikes her as beside the point. It is the taste and flavor that matter, not the ceremony or accoutrements.
Ovuha brings out a gold-laced glass plate where she’s arranged rice in a crescent. Around it are sprigs of coriander, triangles of sliced ginger, cubes of pork fried in chili paste and shallots.
“You are good,” Suzhen says, despite herself, eyeing the next dish—caramelized apples cut into rabbits, drizzled in honey and icing. She doesn’t even remember having bought icing, though she probably tried to dabble in baking, in making herself and the rare visitor elaborate dishes. Before work sapped her time and energy, before it anesthetized all her interests.
“I enjoy cooking.” But Ovuha’s own portion is plainly done, placed in the most unassuming plate Suzhen owns, a flat rectangle of white china.
They eat in silence and it occurs to Suzhen that it’s been a very long time since she had breakfast at home with anyone. Longer still that anyone cooked for her. Peculiarly intimate, and more pleasant than she’d like to admit. She abhors company but even then, even then there’s the ridiculous human hunger for it, the social need. It is even possible to pretend that this is a meal between friends rather than what they are, the formality of authority, the imbalance of power between caseworker and potentiate.
Suzhen cleans her plates—the food tastes as good as it looks—and sets the domestic drone to take care of the cutlery and the kitchen, not that there’s much to tidy up. She checks on the housing transfer and grimaces. The fire displaced nearly three hundred potentiates and, even though Ovuha isn’t a suspect, Suzhen knows Ovuha has been deprioritized. Proximity to the incident and, though a victim, she has been marked as a magnet for trouble. Perfect behavior and perfect luck: the impossible standards to which a potentiate is held. Ovuha’s sole option, presently, is to move back into House Penumbra.
“Do all citizens live as you do? If I may ask.”
She blinks away the Bureau feed. The butterflies, in their random trajectories, have settled on Ovuha as though she is sweetly fragranced and nectar-rich. Red-on-red wings mantle her shoulders, gold antennae glimmering along her throat, made brighter by the dark of wasp silk. The faultless arrangement of a portrait, brought to life. “Alone? Obviously not. Ah. You meant—no.” The question so fraught, and so calmly put forward. Do all citizens live like this, are all citizens as supremely comfortable. She could evade by saying many live better than she, creatures of wealth and opulence who own mansions surrounded by orchards or decorative vineyards. She could simply say, Your definition of basic necessities and mine are not the same. It would be true. “Samsara provides.”
“Truly it does. And those who did not stray reap their just fruits, grown full and fecund from the seeds of faith. The rewards for those who saw and comprehended the truth of paradise from the moment of its revelation.”
Samsara is not religion but it is a doctrine, and the fluency with which Ovuha speaks the apocrypha is jarring. But it does not surprise. “It probably wasn’t an easy decision at the time, an easy thing to believe in.” Humanity’s cradle rent by war, the sky tenebrous with armageddon, the seas made poison and the continents made soot. And then, the choice. To stay and enter a frozen sleep while Samsara healed the world, or to leave on an exploration fleet in search of another habitable planet. Many chose exodus, but they—Suzhen’s forebears, the warlords’ forbears—never found one. In all the universe, the infinite dark, not a single world would naturally admit human presence. There was no second chance, only makeshift possibilities. The sealed biodomes, the orbitals, the city-ships.
It was not until later, after Samsara had woken up its human charges, that it laid down the rules of its governance. The might and the mercy, the fetters that must be placed upon the human instinct for annihilation. Anatta’s first citizens, newly roused and thawing and weak, were no doubt docile. Easy to mold into ideal subjects, easier once Samsara found a cause to unite them against: the ones who left Anatta and went astray. The ones who abandoned them to slumber beneath the ground and so must be punished, the sin inherited all the way down their lines of descent.
Suzhen likes to picture it, cryogenic pods opening all at once, in their dozens or scores or hundreds. People spilling out, boneless and gray and terrified, and Samsara standing over them in an avatar larger than life. Three meters tall, a creature of acute angles and a face like the edge of a fine, fine razor.
The human factor—the means to control, the object instruments and lessons—in the AI’s rule is not difficult to puzzle out, has never been.
A slower day than usual at the office, and genocide on the broadcasts. Suzhen has been a week away and comes back to find the lobby empty when she expected to see it dense, bursting at the seams. The reason for this lack reveals itself in footage of orbital combat, stations shredded and biodomes bombarded. At a distance, so no blood and pulped bodies would mar the sight. Enough destruction to satiate the spectator’s appetite without offending delicate tastes. There will be underground clips, covertly released and semi-legal. Those will have the gore, the viscera, the body count. Every palate will get its satisfaction. Evidently the Thorn’s remaining lieutenants did not surrender, but neither did the Peace Guard spare civilian populations in outposts belonging to the Thorn. Corpses cannot come to seek refuge on Anatta and take up resources. It is one way to simplify the Bureau’s work.