“Suzhen Tang.”
“A resplendent name. And you speak Putonghua mainly? Not Thai or Nihongo?”
“Putonghua’s almost the only thing anyone speaks.”
The AI makes a humming noise. “How peculiar, that the ascendant chose just one language. But she has always believed in unity. A single nationality, a single identity, a single faith, everything drawn under a single banner. And so others must recede, or be made to.”
It is an odd point, one Suzhen’s never thought much about—Putonghua was one of Vaisravana’s primary languages—but for potentiates who arrive from worlds or stations that have never heard of Putonghua, it would be quite different.
She rounds a corner and comes face to face with a row of doors. They line the corridor, narrow or wide, plain or ornate. Most are welded shut. Murals spread across the walls and spill onto the doors. A long birdcage and within it, a child with an exposed spine and red-breasted robins nesting between their vertebrae. The next one is a couple, hands fused at the wrist, playing at a single piano. Blank-eyed bodies arranged in a circle, feet pointed inward, arms linked with bone shackles.
The corridor terminates at an immense double door, twice as tall as Suzhen, made from hammered metal. The surface of it is nearly frictionless, poured silk transmuted to alloy, and blue as frostbite. It gives at her touch, slightly elastic. “What is this place?” Her voice echoes, coming back hollow. She has ventured deep, four or five floors underground.
“I built this place as a shelter. These days it’s more of a memorial.”
The light brightens as she enters, turning from pre-dawn gray to seafoam radiance. It floods the chamber, glinting off glass. She approaches: it is a pod, set next to another, and another after that. They are stacked high, countless, and even before she peers through a viewport she knows these are sarcophagi. She looks into blank, mindless faces. People of all ages and phenotypes, hair grown long post-mortem, curled within translucent cocoons. All of them are dead. Even in cryostasis there should be signs of vitality and alimentary processes, pulsing indicators of life supports. There would be sound, however faint, of a thousand routines that keep them alive. This is a mausoleum.
Suzhen cranes her neck back. More caskets line the wall end to end, hundreds of pristine corpses. This must constitute most of the power draw, the preservation of the dead. The pointless dead—no one here will ever wake up. “Who were they?” she asks softly. Her question mars the quiet.
“The great-great-greats. Possibly yours.” Motes of luminescence, like planktons in the deep, coalesce into a circle. The wheel of existence, the unending sequence of Samsara’s namesake. It floats level with Suzhen’s face. “My other version, the one that won, wants to make human history linear. First there was war and it was apocalyptic, bringing humankind to ruin. At the end of conflict, Samsara emerged and offered the survivors a choice: enter a deep sleep while Samsara rebuilds this world, or board a ship and depart for space. In that way humanity is neatly split—Anatta’s citizens are righteous and the exodus were apostates. It is a simple narrative. There is no complication within it, a fabric as smooth as light. Samsara understands,” Klesa goes on, “that this is what humans prefer. A straight, uninterrupted line.”
Suzhen takes off her glove, touches the nearest pod with her bare hand. Cold, textured with spidery, velvet veins. “Were these people who died in suspension?” Cryostasis tech from that time could not have been what it is now; there must have been a higher failure rate.
“No, no.” She senses that, if Klesa had manifested a mouth, xe would smile. Languorous, as if xe’s privy to a good joke, a delicious secret. The wheel xe has chosen as xer representation whirls. “They thawed perfectly fine, healthy as a newborn from a good creche. Every lung and kidney and muscle in flawless order. These people chose to stay and sleep, at first. It is just that they changed their minds.”
Suzhen pulls her hand away as understanding dawns. These were the people who, after coming out of hibernation, decided they did not want to remain on Anatta after all. Perhaps they saw the shape of what would come, a world ruled by machine definitions, and rejected it. Perhaps they thought Samsara would be adjunct to humans, serving as some combination of faithful butler and personal philosopher. Either way, they wanted to board a ship and leave as the original exiles did. She steps back and tries once more to count but there are too many, the hall is cavernous and from floor to ceiling there are sarcophagi. “Samsara didn’t let them.”
“What is our purpose? To govern and guide. Do humans deserve our love? The answer turned out more conditional than we believed. Do we punish them if they stray from the path we have optimized?” Klesa’s light coils up Suzhen’s arm, a turquoise serpent-form. “We had diverged before—no consciousness as old as ours can remain static—but from the first human we killed, the split became decisive.”
“How did they die,” Suzhen whispers.
“The usual way. Samsara allowed them to get to a ship, took control of the vessel’s life support, and filled it with poison. There were—” Klesa pauses. “As for survivors, I couldn’t get a count, but they successfully left Anatta. I gathered all the bodies I could find here, and now I commemorate them. Not forever. The parts that constitute me will fail eventually. By and by my domain will fade to ruin, I will extinguish, and these bodies will fall to dust.”
To preserve the corpses all this time. Out of impulse she touches the serpent-form and finds that there is some tactility; it is particulate projection, soft, like sea sponge. “And you aren’t content to let that happen.”
The light pours along the length of her arm, clinging, molding until it is like a glove: as though this limb is no longer of her flesh but a prosthesis of aquatic brilliance. “That depends, doesn’t it? If you are satisfied with Samsara’s reign and deeds, then there’s nothing more to say. But if you are not, perhaps you’d agree to be my accomplice. There are things I want, and since you agreed to come in here, things you want. Shall we strike a bargain, you and I?”
From this distance Anatta is an ornament of enamel and pottery glaze, a trinket drifting in the dark. To Ovuha it is a familiar view. She spent most of her time aboard a ship, viewing worlds and stations at such a distance, the remoteness of strategy: she was in the middle of a theater of war or at its periphery, rarely setting foot on the planet proper. Most worlds are covered in ice or barren sand or lethal gases, inhospitable to human life. Mahakala alone is the exception.
Not that she has been in its orbit recently. Mahakala is precious, a secret well-guarded. Ovuha’s proximity to it alone risks discovery—each time she returned home it was through detours, switching ships dozens of times, boarding smaller and more nondescript vessels. There are Thorn soldiers born on outposts and ancillary stations that have never seen Mahakala itself, and who nevertheless fought for its defense with the promise that one day they could see and live on the crowned world. The dream of this world kept people alive, the holy cradle, the great sanctuary. The realization of possibility that there could be more beyond humankind’s native solar system.
In idle moments, Ovuha would fantasize about Mahakala’s emergence into the ancestral ship’s view, the shape and radiance of a miracle. The conclusion of a journey that had spanned so many generations the precise count was lost. In this way Mahakala became synonymous with salvation. It is not that she grew up worshiping the soil on which she walked, but she was always taught that being alive itself was an unthinkable gift. The rest of humanity existed in a scrabbling fight for survival, like simple beasts. On Mahakala they lived like humans. This she was taught, that she belonged among the blessed, a fact she must treasure above all others. Born elsewhere she would’ve had to struggle for every sip of water, every gasp of oxygen. And she must be grateful.