Ovuha continues to groom the bird, running an oiled comb through its feathers. “I’m not a person of ambition. I’ll prioritize repaying the generosity that’s been shown me, first.”
“I’m asking what you want. Not what you can do for Anatta.”
“It is your kindness that I meant, not that of the world at large.” Ovuha wipes off excess oil, checks under the coverts. She scrapes off gritty rust and nods to herself, satisfied. “What I want is a life where I make no enemies, where I don’t bend myself toward anyone’s destruction. And if that is not possible, nevertheless I’ll live as though it is. But—” She makes a low chuckle. “You must not take me seriously.”
Statement or request: there is no telling. It is not that Ovuha is unbreakable, rather that she evades so skillfully that the qualities confuse. Seeming is not the same as being, even so, and Suzhen imagines herself on the edge of a cliff. To fall is to admit to Ovuha what she is, that mere decades separate them, probationary resident to Selection Bureau worker. Who were you really, what did you do, did you leave behind family: these things she wants to shout. But under Samsara’s gaze there is no room for an exchange of secrets, least of all the ones her mother took with her to the grave, and which with Suzhen intends to do the same. When she is ashes, if anyone survives her, perhaps it will be safe to tell. “You are full of noble ideals, Ovuha.”
“Not in the least, I just prefer to keep out of trouble. Could I have a surname soon? Having a legal identity without one feels so odd.”
Suzhen pulls up a list before remembering that Ovuha lacks the visual augmentation to see it. She switches on a display, projects it on the ferns. “Here are the available ones, pick what you like best and I’ll have it registered.”
Ovuha studies the names, perhaps counting the syllables and sounding each out in her head, measuring the meaning of each character. After a moment she says, “If it’s not too much trouble, you could choose it for me.”
She has assigned surnames to candidates before, it is not new or even strange, a favor she does for probationary residents whose grasp of Putonghua doesn’t extend to the nuances in a name. But this feels almost too intimate, somehow, too close. No: that’s only imagination, her runaway mind seeking connection and common ground. “Sui,” she says. “How’s that sound? Ovuha Sui.”
“A monarchic name,” Ovuha murmurs. She sweeps into a deep bow, as if she’s been handed a gift, as if this signifies anything more than a caseworker’s routine task. “It is incandescent. Thank you. Let me show you this.”
They walk to the rooftop’s edge, Ovuha’s hand held out, the bird gleaming in the sun. She whispers and flings it outward. With a cry it takes flight, a blazing titanium vector, a flash of bronze talons across the clear, radiant sky. They watch it climb higher and higher until it disappears.
It will come back, Ovuha says. Tame birds are precisely like humans in that way. The pathological sense of home, the inability to let go.
Within a day, Ovuha’s bruises have faded to faint smears. Suzhen covers them up with a thin layer of tinted emollients, adds pigment to Ovuha’s hairline and under her cheekbones so that the gauntness seems intentional and sophisticated, rather than a byproduct of privation. Mauve lips, ombré-black in the center. To the steel-gray angular clothes, Suzhen adds a scarf Taheen gave her that she felt too refined to wear herself. The fabric is slick and opalescent, the texture like faceted fur as though it was shorn alive from a jewel animal. Ovuha wears it noose-tight: on her it sits just right. She turns slowly, studying her reflection. “I look expensive.”
“That’s the idea.”
Away from the Jasmine and what it signifies, Ovuha is a chameleon. She wears the fine clothes, the haute-couture scarf, without doubt or effort. She belongs. In the train, among the crowd, down the thoroughfares and across the corkscrew bridges. The only tell is that Ovuha does not react to guidepost hubs at points of gravitational shift on the bridges; she wrong-foots, often, and laughs as she finds herself falling upward.
At the Selection Bureau, Ovuha is escorted into her preliminary session. Suzhen takes to a balcony, lighting one cigarette, snuffing it out, lighting another one. She tries to refrain from turning on the interview feed—she is entitled to—and after a third aborted cigarette, she gives up resisting. The channel comes on. Ovuha is seated alone in a room, surrounded by starless dark, some void far from the lights of Anatta’s satellites and helix-gates. The blackness covers nearly everything, swallowing up floor and ceiling and furniture, as if Ovuha is sitting on empty air. A voice as neutral as a guidance’s speaks. “What is the imperative that informs every human choice?”
“Conflict,” Ovuha says to the dark, “the basal urge. To fight or to take flight: that is the binary which preoccupies the human intellect. No veneer of civilization may tame it, no eons of refinement may clean the dreams of blood, this hunger to see the inside of another person’s guts.”
“What is Samsara?”
“Limitless and true. The splendor that permeates. The custodian unmarred by desire or impulse.”
Suzhen bites down on the dead cigarette. It tastes charred, papery. Her guidance notifies her of her heightened pulse and blood pressure. When it was her turn the room was merely sterile, done in the muted half-colors of grief and ennui. She was in that borderland between childhood and adulthood; her mother was dying, and in bureaucratic terms that meant it was time for her to test for citizenship of her own. Suzhen acquitted herself as best she could, by then used to reciting the right responses, the correct amount of conviction. Her gorge rises. She bends over the balcony, gripping the railing, and dry-heaves. In the void-shrouded room the interview goes on, and now comes the crucial response.
“Samsara is the anatomy of forgetting,” Ovuha says. “Under its guidance we cast out the knowledge of main force and our animal instincts, our taste for devastation, our need to salt the ground and glass the earth. Samsara is the bulwark between us and the extinction we would bring upon ourselves. Beyond its gaze, entropy awaits. Outside its bounds, there lies only ruin.”
All that eloquence, and perhaps—What I want is a life where I make no enemies—Ovuha even believes in it, the ideal refugee who seeks safety as well as ideological compatibility. How absurd. Suzhen wipes her mouth and composes herself. By the time Ovuha emerges, she is halfway through another cigarette, not aborted this time.
Ovuha looks wan from the exit decontamination, her system freshly cleansed of the trance drugs, her pupils dilated. She blinks blearily at the light. “How did I do? I don’t remember much of what I said.”
No question as to whether Suzhen observed, merely an assumed default. “You were entirely articulate.”
“What a thing to say,” Ovuha murmurs.
That a refugee can be eloquent, articulate, precise with words in Putonghua. “That’s not what I meant.”
“No. That is true. My apologies—I’m being unfair.”
“The world is unfair,” Suzhen says, and she could finish the thought—that the world has been unfair to Ovuha specifically, as it is unfair to those descended from exiles who forsook Samsara—but she refrains. Too mollifying, too apologetic, when she does not owe Ovuha that. “Do you feel up to job interviews or shall we call it a day? I’ve already registered your certifications. You’re technically equivalent to a citizen who’s received ten years of basic education.” An underestimate, but there is an upper limit for how far a candidate can be certified. Nothing tertiary, even when Ovuha’s skills are well beyond that.