“No. Well. Of course not. But it’s not as though we’re… I mean, I hired you. It’s not as though I earned you by wooing and seducing.”
Ovuha leans against the wall. Most elevators in this city are like pieces of a beehive, hexagons in dark quartz and lava stone. “Am I something to be earned?”
Xie flushes. “That’s not what I meant, that you’re a commodity, an object. But it’s different. You know it is. I didn’t fairly engage your interest, I didn’t convince you I was a good prospect in bed. If our places were switched at the studio, me the one modeling nude and you the one clothed, you wouldn’t have paid me any attention.”
For a fleeting instant, she visualizes what that would be like, if Suzhen had been the one stripped, plumage glued onto her a little at a time. “You underestimate your own charms. There’s an inviting softness to you, you’re like an instrument that begs to be played.”
“It’s so unfair,” Atam says. “You’re superhumanly comfortable in your skin and you’re stunning. And you’re so good at flattery. Debonair, that’s the adjective for you.”
She thinks back to the surgery. Her face is a work of art, but like Zurun’s portraits, it is a demonstration of technique and skill; the subject—the canvas—is secondary. “I suppose so.” She smiles then. “We should make another appointment. I would arrange it between the two of us, but I expect that would offend the people in charge of this. It must be a specialized job, matchmaking us.”
“Matchmaking!” Xie tosses xer pastel hair, locks of blue and white and pink flying. “Oh, why not, we can think of it that way. You’re far too romantic. But I’ve never met or talked to any of them, either, though they aren’t from the Selection Bureau—I don’t think? I used to think this was overseen by Samsara, but…”
The elevator stops. They have reached the streets. “Let me see if I can woo you in turn,” Ovuha says. She might glean something about the connection, might weave it into what she’s learned of Bhanu. “Is there a café or bistro nearby that you like?”
Xie raises an eyebrow, but does not look displeased. “Sure. There’s a place.”
It has just rained; every surface refracts. Under this glaze everything is of surpassing beauty, newly made. The broad avenues, the overhead thoroughfares, the gleaming shells of lifts. Outside the camps and the selection waiting rooms, Anatta is never busy or crowded—footpaths are never congested, commercial districts and hospitals are never too full. The world housed so many more once, Ovuha knows; today’s population is only a fraction of a fraction. Humanity quartered and then quartered again—down to what proportion is a fact lost to time, or a figure Samsara has chosen not to preserve. Ovuha thinks about the AI often, cannot avoid doing so.
Beside her, Atam has stopped walking, has gone inert altogether, as if gripped by premonition. “Oh,” xie breathes.
“Yes?”
“Samsara. Samsara’s descending. We get a whole day—”
And it is as though the rain was mandated to set the stage. The light turns gold, liquid, pouring down the length of street. In the sky, Samsara. It looms giant, making a crown jewel of the sun, a mantle of the fibrous clouds, a grid-brocade of the horizon. This is not the aspect of war shown to prisoners and defeated armies, the one with incandescent briars. This one is soft, with gentle eyes and a mouth of endless magnanimity. The aspect of gift.
A multitude of Samsara proxies, then, these more human-sized—though still tall, each body well over two meters. They drop down from the air, emerge from between buildings, rise from the citrine tide. Countless seeds of faith blooming to sudden divine flowers. Each proxy separates from the mass, citizen-seeking. A face like sweet dreams and childhood memories, a voice lifted in song.
One approaches, holding its gleam-gloved hands out to Atam. Xie goes without looking back.
Chapter Nine
Suzhen comes home to the aromas of cooking, of domesticity. This is what her apartment has become, to return and be greeted and welcomed and fed, a beautiful stranger and the illusion of a perfect life. She smells garlic and scallions; she smells the temptation of claiming this life as her own.
Ovuha does not look up from her work, her hands gloved in flour, moving and kneading. “Did you have a good trip out of the city?”
“I went to wage battle for your soul.” She says this dryly.
“Thank you.” A faint smile. “I understand hyperbole. But you’ve been doing so much for me. And I understand battle.”
Suzhen studies those hands, though much is hidden by the white. She pictures those long fingers wrapped around the grip of a gun. Incongruity should not surprise her; after all, the Warlord of the Mirror stepped out of her armor and put a child on her lap, and might have even chopped vegetables. She can’t remember. “What kind of battles do you understand?” She meant to ask what is for dinner, but there it is instead.
“The same ones everyone else does. The wear and tear of life. Paperwork. Standing in line. Ah. I must wash my hands.”
She stands there and thinks of soaping up her hands, scraping off the dough from beneath Ovuha’s nails. Their fingers under the water together. It is the most mundane thing imaginable, the most absurdly intimate. She would not do that with Vipada. How ludicrous she is being, to want not even Ovuha’s mouth but this chaste gesture. Maybe this was the secret, the fulcrum on which her conception turned, a warlord’s wish for closeness and a place to come home to. Banal. Human.
“It’s occurred to me,” Ovuha says, wiping her hands dry, “that you don’t say much about yourself, or even at all.”
“I don’t.”
“I barely have any idea what you like to eat.”
“All your cooking is good.”
“Or what you like to wear, or what you enjoy doing as a hobby.”
“I have no hobby to speak of. Taheen found you a second patron, I heard.”
Ovuha bends her head, reaching up as if to touch her hair. It has grown quickly, grazing her shoulders. In the camps hair is shorn until it sits close to the skull, stubbly. “A painter named Zurun. I have no complaint—ey’s already paid me for the first session, even. I owe Taheen no small amount. They’re an exemplary person, despite their pretense to the contrary.”
An angle from which Suzhen can push the conversation away from herself. “You aren’t wrong. They’re more compassionate than they let on, and usually better to me than I deserve.”
“And so? Is that a thing we measure, the quality of deserving? You have been more than good to me; do I not deserve your kindness?”
“That isn’t the same.” Suzhen checks, and there have indeed been a couple transfers to Ovuha’s account. She authenticates, freeing the sum up for Ovuha to spend. She does this automatically, without thinking. There it is, the reminder of bureaucracy and of what she is; so much for the fantasy. “At any rate it’s good your second patron is decent.” She falters, alarmed at her puckered vocabulary. This is good, that is good. There is no reason for her to be this tense and this fraught. She has made her decision and declared it before Bhanu, and that is almost as absolute as declaring her intention before a god. “Let’s be fair. You haven’t talked about yourself all that much.”
“I’d have thought I did that too much as it is, to the point of narcissism. What else have I talked about?” She does touch her hair now, finger-combing it, as if not entirely sure of its texture or length. Like everything about her it is well-made, fine and straight. “Kindness catches me by surprise. Yours, Taheen’s. Would you like dinner now or would you rather freshen up first?”