“You really don’t like artists. Categorically.”
“No.” Suzhen summons the drone. It wheels over and starts collecting the plates and cutlery. Left alone Ovuha might well take over that task, and Ovuha is too close to a domestic helper for Suzhen’s comfort as it is. “We should try to enjoy ourselves. Vipada assured me we’ll experience culinary rapture.”
Ovuha gives her a quick smile. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For finally talking about you. The things you like. The things you don’t. Those are a start.”
Ovuha’s hand brushes across Suzhen’s. Her nerves pull taut. Then relax. The small touches, the transience of what might have been. But that is all they are. That is all they could ever be.
The Tianzi Peninsula, out in the empty ruinscape, the wild parts of the earth that might one day be recouped and repopulated. But not yet. For now there are cities enough.
From above, a vision of absence, the ruins left as they were. Most structures have long fallen to decay but what remains seems to Suzhen artificial, the product of an obsessed imagination—too perfectly luminous to be carved by chance and nature. Pale ocean light suffuses; a lone corrugated tower stands, made of red iron and stark lines and tapered finials. Bell-shaped cages depend from its exterior like earrings, empty, their bars trembling in the wind. To the side, an anonymous coast where a line of rotted houses shudder and heave with the waves, their roofs gone to nests and spotted eggs, feathers emerging from cracked shell.
It is this emptiness that is prized, the appearance of virgin land dating back, a snapshot of geography in the process of restoration after humanity had fallen asleep. No wonder the betrothed couple would choose this as their matrimonial site, for the clean beginning it signifies. An expensive choice.
The vineyard is a floating isle that patrols above the peninsula in sedate, scenic circuits. When Suzhen was younger she thought it was a meteor, most of it lost to atmospheric entry, cut down to this one fragment adrift and held captive by Anatta’s sky. She would look at it and think of this as her second self, and as long as she could imagine she was kin to a piece of meteor it could—for a time—hold sadness at bay.
She glances at Ovuha, who has dressed in one of Taheen’s prototypes. A qipao of waterfall silk and fired chitin, azure on basalt. Plating over breasts and shoulders like thin armor, a white-gold mandible at each ear. On Taheen’s recommendation Suzhen lined Ovuha’s eyes in platinum and black, her mouth with the color of unoxygenated blood. The effect is severe, forbidding.
“This outfit is something else again.” Ovuha holds up her hands; what sheathes them—up to her elbows—are more gauntlets than gloves, jointed and dark. “For a Taheen Sahl design, though, it’s so plain I feel underdressed. What do you think?”
Ovuha’s Putonghua, already impeccable, has gained a mellifluous enunciation that she must have learned from Zurun and Taheen. The fine register of the highly educated, the well-off. “It’s very intimidating, very elegant. Perfect on you.”
“The insect motif is novel. I was concerned a moment that Taheen was going to suggest sticking a couple antennae on my forehead.”
Suzhen imagines that; snorts. “I’m sure they will miraculously look good on you regardless.”
“And you look wonderful, of course.”
“Of course?”
“I think you always look good,” Ovuha says. Her qipao rustles like dry paper. One of her knees touches Suzhen’s, but it is the merest contact. “Exceptionally wonderful, then, even more so than usual.”
How easy it would be to believe. She wonders at the rapid-moving parts of that mind, behind that incomparable face. It may simply be a survival tactic, it may simply be ingratiation. In the interview room new arrivals would promise her anything, offer her whatever she asks. No matter the amount of familiarity, it is impossible to discern the brushstrokes of someone else’s thoughts: that was one of her mother’s favorite proverbs.
They are early. Vipada is at the gate, resplendent—overdressed, Suzhen thinks uncharitably—in her gown of interlinked serpents, bronze and gold. “You brought a guest!” she says, bright, the perfect host. “Introductions, please.”
“Ovuha. I’m a friend of Suzhen’s. You must be Vipada, she’s told me about you.”
The actor quirks her mouth, turns on one of her lunar smiles: charming, secretive. “Anything good at all?”
“Oh,” Ovuha murmurs, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “she is very honest.”
Vipada bursts into laughter, throaty, a little scandalized. “You’re terrible for someone with so lovely a name. Have I met you before, by any chance?”
Ovuha links arms with Suzhen and somehow makes the gesture look insolent. “No, not at all. I am sure you are often told you’re memorable—if I’d met you before, I would have remembered it without question. Naturally I mean that in the best way possible.”
To this Vipada shakes her head, slighted but also entertained, in the way of someone encountering avant-garde art that she isn’t entirely sure she likes. “I must get to know you at all costs. But let’s introduce you to the couple, shall we?”
The betrothed are in bridal red—even their irises are rimmed in the color, wedding lenses—flanked by their extant spouses. A teenager stands to the side, sullen, none too happy with new guardians or however the parental arrangement falls legally and domestically. It is not easy, Suzhen supposes, for a child of this world. Used as they are to closed-circuit families, narrow and private. On Vaisravana most children were raised in creches, communal, everyone a parent. She was an exception, though she did attend classes with the others.
One of the betrothed thanks her for coming, adding, “I’m so sorry Vipada conscripted you. It’s her idea that we should have a massive reception, and she likes hosting so we had to let her. We hope you’ll have a half-decent time.”
“There’s nothing onerous,” Ovuha says, bowing slightly. “Romance exerts a glorious magnetism. Even if we’re strangers, I’m happy for you. Thank you for letting us share in your day.”
The couple looks at each other and laughs, blushing. Ovuha seems to have been the first to congratulate them so earnestly, out of the strangers Vipada invited. The reception proper is twenty-five minutes away; they are free, evidently, to tour the vineyard until then.
“You’re incapable of culture shock,” she says as they veer away from the square demarcated for festivities.
“It’s more that wealthy people are the same everywhere. People in love as well. But they look radiant, I’m glad for them.”
“Next you’ll say you admire their youth and that it makes you wistful.”
“No such thing. I don’t miss my youth.” Ovuha flicks her head; the mandibles ring as they cut through the air. “When I was young, I was quite stupid. Too hungry, too grasping.”
They reach one of the exhibits; a few other guests have come to look as well, pairs or groups in polynomial suits, terraced bodices, termite waistlines. Spread out enough that everyone can claim their pocket of quiet. The trellises stand tall overhead, jeweled with grapes in glass-green and beetle-blue, roofed with wide punctuational leaves. Looking up it is difficult not to be snared, enchanted. They are only fruits, a mesh of plant organs and neural pathways, without complication or mystery. But perfect in what they are, effortless, offering themselves up to the world.
There are tasters under trellises, little obelisks that dispense wine and grape juice made from different strains. Some saccharine, some nearly bitter. There are cultivars that taste faintly of pandan, citrus, sake. They go from obelisk to obelisk, their mouths turning sticky. Suzhen keeps her sampling of the wine slight and notices that Ovuha does the same. Even so her feet turn a little lighter and the weight of her body recedes.