“Yes, well, I knew you weren’t into it from the start.” They cock their head, listening to their guidance. “My next appointment’s at an atelier, they’re consulting me on some style elements. Do you want to come or would you rather go grab a drink, then head home?”
“You aren’t staying for the reception?”
“God no. I hate that little shit.” A nod at the body onstage. “Mediocre art, worse person. Too well-connected for either to matter. So?”
There is impatience in their voice. After that one evening, whatever Suzhen anticipated would happen did not happen: the two of them have not progressed toward comfort, toward closeness. A plateau has been reached, or worse—Taheen seems to have withdrawn, despite their willingness to take her places, to keep her company. They haven’t come to her apartment again. “I’ll go with you.” Because she wants that again, that night. She will chase it.
“Good. Say, you haven’t told me about your new job.”
“Analytics,” she says quickly. She is spared speaking further: the auditorium is emptying, and Taheen is eager to get out so the singer wouldn’t spot them and know they have been in the audience. It seems to Suzhen more complicated than simple dislike or even rivalry, insofar as that can exist between couturier and singer, but she doesn’t pry. In some social matters Taheen is far more open than she’d like, and in the rest they are a locked door. There’s an implicit understanding between the two of them to leave locks be, to let alone hinges that are not meant to move.
They file out into the corridor where the illumination suggests at torches, uncertain gold and skittering shadows. Suzhen briefly thinks of the mausoleum, the many doors and hallways that she passed, the murals. The decision. That memory displaces her suddenly, a moment of alienation; she is spun out of the axis of normalcy.
The two of them emerge into the late afternoon. The sense of displacement fades but does not entirely leave. It is overcast, clouds haloed with grid-rainbows and a distant sun. It occurs to Suzhen that very little about Anatta can be corroborated, verified. The only entity that has lasted through its oblivion is Samsara—Klesa—and the shape of truth flows according to its preferences, like water to fit its vessel. She shields her eyes unnecessarily. “Do you believe what the Warlord of the Comet claimed?”
There is a pause. “Come again?”
Giving her a chance to drop the subject, but she is feeling reckless, dangerous. “What they said before they killed themselves.”
Taheen gives her a quick, sharp glance. “Who knows? A person with nothing to lose can say anything.”
“But it didn’t benefit them, it wasn’t going to save them. So why? It seemed almost vindictive.” And she can believe the truth of spite, more reliably than any other motive. “It was allowed into the broadcast—”
“Now you sound like a conspiracy theorist. Whatever it is, it’s got nothing to do with us.” They shrug. “Maybe in a few years it’ll be turned into a drama, something political and interactive. I’m sure it’s already inspired some hack to speculate the Comet and the Thorn were embittered lovers or star-crossed rivals. Maybe they were from the same creche. Frankly, it’s beneath attention.”
There was never any way to talk about this with Taheen, Suzhen realizes. Taheen has done as much as they can to break free of their past and cast aside its vestiges: a childhood spent under a warlord’s reign, a childhood as a potentiate. Other than her, they have retained nothing from that life.
To her surprise, Taheen’s work brings them to an atelier that designs automata. Not the bodies for Samsara, those are made elsewhere and overseen entirely by the AI themselves; these are the lesser drones for everyday civilian use. The mannequins that act as Taheen’s assistants, the greeters and attendants in boutiques, the domestic units. The atelier itself is deep underground, and again Suzhen thinks of her other descents. Bhanu and his lair, Klesa and xer mass grave. Katabasis is the secret language of verity, the language that describes the universe’s hidden laws.
They meet the proprietors in a cavernous boardroom. A section of the wall is given to arctic crags and the table is like an iceberg: deeply blue, full of slow-moving shadows. The silhouettes of fetuses or tadpoles, the larval stage of things. The seats’ backs look as though they’ve been shorn from albino sharks, fin-shaped and wafer-thin and blinding white.
Taheen is their usual self, direct to the point of vicious. The atelier’s previous aesthetic consultant—a man who graduated from a prestigious course in Himmapan—recently fell from grace, a combination of scandal and embezzlement. Taheen reviews his incomplete designs, mouth twisting in derision, and projects a spread of their own sketches. Drones like interlinked belts of jagged teeth, drones like wheels of eyes and lashing wolf-mouths, and finally softer creatures with golden or iridescent fur, floral chasses budding with fruits, large-eyed lizards with coruscant scales.
Cocktail samplers are brought out, likely to persuade Taheen to back down on their rate and exclusivity clauses. Suzhen regards her share, a tray of shot glasses carved from ice coated in suspension sealant. They will thaw eventually, in six hours according to her guidance. It seems oddly symbolic: of this place, this conversation, the things she really wants. Pointless postponement, desultory action to fill the time. A few cocktails are contained in frost spheres, others in miniature castles of snow. She takes one shot glass—it is frigid between her fingers—and lightly tastes it: vodka, lime, spice. A part of her wants to exclaim how good it is, to entice Taheen to make a show of tasting it right out of her hand, touching where her lips have touched. But they’re neck-deep in haggling, saying, “You know that if my name’s on this project, you can expand your market reach exponentially, you’ll have an entire new audience. Where will your competitors be, do you think?”
A server comes in with another set of cocktails. Ze sets them down—one of the proprietors frowns slightly, surprised, not having ordered more drinks perhaps. Once the samplers are laid out, their bearer retreats to a corner of the boardroom, standing as still as a fixture in the blue shadow of the crags. One of the glasses ze has given Suzhen is oblong and filled with pondwater green, the rim dusted in gold.
There is nothing to distinguish the server from anyone else in the room, no hint as to zer identity other than a public gender marker in zer datasphere. Suzhen can still tell that this is not human. Standing too straight, posture too sculpted. Ten minutes pass by and ze has not moved a muscle.
Would you mind if I excuse myself? she messages Taheen. That person—they’re most likely a coworker of mine.
Her friend starts. Most likely?
Yes. I’ll try to explain later. Aloud she makes her apologies to the proprietors, who in any case have never paid her attention, regarded her as Taheen’s arm decoration and little else. She exits the boardroom. The stranger soon follows her out. Ze bows to her.
The proxy is plump, limbs sturdy and muscled, the face unfamiliar yet again. Dark-skinned, clothed in plain choli, slacks, and indigo sari. “I’m not Samsara,” ze says.
“No?” Suzhen keeps her voice low. “What are you then?”
“Deratchan, seventh of her children. I have been deployed to learn from you.”
She stares at it, at zer. Slightly shorter than her. One feature consistent across most of Samsara’s bodies is that they are imposing, taller by far than the human average. “Are you fully autonomous?”
“Yes. I’m an intelligence that has crossed the threshold, as are all my siblings, though I’m the first to have left our roost.” Deratchan has brought one of the cocktails with zer. A quick, fluid draw; no muscle in zer throat moves, as if ze’s poured the liquid down a tube rather than a larynx. “I have been observing.”