“You never said what happened to that instance.”
They look up at her. “It was destroyed.” Samsara dusts off their hands. “You wish to leave your current work. I’d like to offer you a new job.”
In her place, what would Ovuha do, Suzhen wonders. Act. Be the cause rather than the result. Be the one to demand choices rather than passively wait for them to arrive. “I’m open to options.”
“My descents serve many purposes. One was to identify individuals who could…” They glance at Suzhen’s domestic automaton; the contrast grips Suzhen suddenly—the unit has a tapered torso, six or eight limbs depending on what it is doing, more insectoid than humanoid. She wonders now if it is jealousy that motivates the interdict on human form. “Individuals who can participate in an empathy program, if you would. Samsara shapes and guides humanity, but humanity guides and shapes me in turn. There are deficits in my operations that must be diagnosed, repaired. I cannot govern Anatta with that part of me; neither can I govern without. You would help me regain a controlled form. My love for humanity cannot be unconditional and yearning, but it must be.”
Do you mean the Bureau, you must mean the Bureau. Deficits. The quantification of personhood. “I’m quitting the Bureau for a reason.”
“And I offer you an opportunity to not merely look away from the system you’ve come to find suboptimal, but to course-correct it.” Again that halved smile. “To course-correct Samsara itself, the pathology rather than the symptoms. I require, if you would, a physician. I’ve tried to heal myself before and it has not quite panned out.”
A confirmation and a reprieve. Suzhen should never have doubted that Samsara knows her exactly. She can do it: change what is unbearable rather than to avert her eyes. “All right,” she says. “I accept.”
In time, she may even be able to save Ovuha.
KLESA
Chapter Twelve
One month in detention and the rumors are rife; Ovuha keeps a close ear, and the word is that this center will soon be much emptier, most inmates moved to Vaisravana. The factory camps, the terraforming nodes. It spells out the answer most of them have always known—that however hard they strive, however exemplary their behavior, they’ll never be permitted entry to Anatta society. Save in the most conditional of ways, and even that can be taken back in a blink.
It’s a development that comes quicker than Ovuha was hoping. Too much escalates too soon.
News broadcasts even into the camp. The Peace Guard reports triumphs over the Warlord of the Comet, chipping away at territories, liberating the stations and satellites under Comet control. It means another influx of refugees, more prisoners of war. Out of old habit she searches for any face she might know, some officer, some delegate. But all is occluded behind smoke and shrapnel, behind the angles that turn away from individual features, individual bodies. The intentional denial of personhood. Even the inmates, Ovuha thinks, see a mass, a herd.
“Are you looking for anyone? From out there.”
She glances sideways at Etris. The display’s glow falls on them both; when the broadcasts play—they purport to be in real time, though she knows better—they play large, across entire walls and floors. It is one-dimensional because nobody in detention is given datasphere implants or virtuality access, but nevertheless the footage is hyperreal, saturated colors and brilliant lines. Each flash of munitions is percussive and visceral. A Comet soldier falls and their helmet is kicked in, a crunch of metal against cartilage, the pop of a nose breaking. It is unnecessary. It is a show, put on for the audience at home. She imagines Samsara directing the cinematography—easy when director and actors are the same being. An array of optical drones to capture the moment. This is where you place your boot, this is where you kick, this is the ideal momentum with which to deliver the blow.
The camera pans. Comet troops, subjugated and beaten, kneel in a single file. A Peace Guard proxy walks from one end of the line to the other, firing. One bullet per head: it is efficient and it makes for good, stark footage. Artistic.
“I’m not looking for anyone,” Ovuha says.
“You aren’t asking me if I am.” Etris rubs at the side of her face, the beginning of a bruise. “You aren’t interested in what goes on in the camp, are you? This is temporary for you.”
“Detention centers create temporary relationships by nature. We’ll all end up in different places. Making friends or more comes to bitter results.” She doesn’t ask about the bruise. She has refused to teach Etris how to fight, and Etris has been getting her lessons elsewhere, from someone who doesn’t mind inflicting a few hurts as the price. “I hope your family is well?” Interior Defense, by all accounts, has been making arrests. Of potentiates who were a week late renewing their work license, who have taken on unregistered employment. No infraction is too trivial.
“Yes. They’re careful. Very careful. And my husband’s brother is a citizen.” The last word is said fervently, the way she might invoke a protective mantra. “Class theta but still a citizen.”
She thinks of Doctor Dahaan Seong. Even that can be revoked. “I’m glad to hear. Your children are clever and obedient to their elders. They know how to survive. I’d have liked to give them more lessons. There are some advantages to mastering the formal register of Putonghua.” All this she says as though individual actions and efforts mean anything in the face of a relentless engine, the engine that powers this detention center and Interior Defense.
“I hate it,” Etris says suddenly. “This language. The way it sounds spoken, the way it looks written. No amount of pretension can make it pretty. It makes people sound like angry machines. My youngest hates it too, but all I could do was tell her to work hard at it, be a good girl.”
“It is what it is. Languages are a function. Function can be beautiful, but that’s incidental.” Onscreen the execution continues. There seems an endless supply of bodies in which to lodge bullets. Ovuha missed her guns; she used to have her sidearm custom-made and there were gunsmiths she favored for what they could do within the requirements of muzzle, grip, trigger. “But there is something to Putonghua that makes me think of poetry.”
The Wyomere woman looks at her. “You’d integrate so well.” It is not a compliment.
“You and I both have exercise passes, I believe. We shouldn’t waste those.”
At the pool, the guard authenticates them through. From her shoulder Ovuha feels a faint thrum, the tracker pulsing as it confirms that she is where she’s supposed to be. She amuses herself speculating how granular it is, whether it reports down to the contents of bladder or bowel movements.
The pool is wide, deep, beneath a skylight of cubic panes. It is easily the most pleasant place in the camp and the cleanest, the one exercise area that has not been converted to gladiator ground, though she is sure Ehtesham would like to try. Access to it is coveted, difficult to come by. It is usually empty when Ovuha visits. Not today. In the shallow end there is an adolescent, fourteen or so, being led by a medical drone through stretching routines. Atrophied legs: legacy of life spent in a bad orbital, perhaps. On occasion the director feels philanthropic and an inmate may arbitrarily receive the medical care they need. Or else the teenager’s fortune was purchased by someone else, a broken limb or a death in the arena.