by John Kessel
“We trust you slept well,” Kayvon said. He spread jam on a piece of lavash, his eyes not meeting hers.
“Very well, thank you, brother,” Amestris said.
Leila and her husband, Dariush, entered, holding hands. Dariush was a former bicycle racer, two-time winner of the Lunar Tour de Apennines. Stunning Leila, the youngest of the three sisters, was an actress; she and Dariush were the focus of much media gossip. Was she pregnant? Would she end her career in order to raise a family? Was Dariush considering unretiring to enter the 2149 race? Was he jealous of Leila’s association with leading man Zal Bayzai? Yet despite the fact that her career made her a focus for the desire of myriad strangers, Leila was never criticized for her public profile, her work, her income.
At twenty-three, Amestris had been on the path to becoming famous herself, an accomplished concert pianist. She had drawn the attention of every man, and enjoyed that attention. But at that time her father had needed an heir to the business more than he needed a celebrity. He explained to Amestris how if she should enter the water corporation and let herself be schooled to take over once he was gone, she could become the most influential woman in the history of Persepolis. Always the dutiful daughter, instead of pursuing a musical career, she consented. By doing so, she told herself, she would escape the trap of marriage and its stifling restrictions.
Amestris had enjoyed wielding power, but she soon came to realize that any she had was only on loan from her father. She was an Eskander. Perhaps her beauty had gained her some influence independent of family, but beauty was transitory.
Recently she had overheard one of her subordinates at the office talking with a visiting businessman from Tycho. The visitor had remarked on Amestris’s beauty. The man said, “Ah, you should have seen her when she was twenty!”
Her father entered the breakfast room and greeted all of them. He leaned over and kissed Amestris on the top of her head. “My dutiful Amestris.”
“Good morning, Father.”
Cyrus was impeccably dressed in a pearl gray suit that exactly matched his hair. His fingernails were manicured, the long, slender fingers of a man who had never done manual labor. The cuffs of his blinding white shirt protruded a centimeter past the sleeve of his jacket. “How lucky I am still to have one virgin among my daughters. Do not ever marry, my dear.”
“Where could I find a man to compare with my father?”
Cyrus sat and unfolded his serviette. “My dear, today I must meet with some scientists visiting from Earth. In my absence I need you to take charge of the operation in the Aitkin basin. The ice retrieved there in the last months has increased in the percentage of heavy metals.”
“Yes.”
“There has been more wear and tear on the remote devices. I would like you to open a new seam in the western quarter of de Gerlache. We will still, of course, pursue the current operation.”
“Yes, Father.” The fact that he would bring this up at breakfast was intended only to humiliate her in the presence of her sisters. He could as easily have mentioned it on the way to work, or in the office. He was commenting on her absence last night.
Amestris could do nothing about it. “I shall have to go into the office immediately then, to make the preparations,” she said. She bowed her head, kissed her mother, and left the table.
The station was now busy with people chatting with each other or muttering to their Aides. Among the businessmen and the well-dressed wives heading to the colony center for shopping, she saw a turbaned Sikh with his daughter. The girl, scarfless, her shiny black hair braided into an intricate coil atop her head, wore an athletic tunic over pants. She carried an orange football. Amestris had loved to play football. Cyrus had come to all of her games, had praised and encouraged her.
“Remember, always, Ajooni,” the father, on one knee beside the girl, said, “you must keep your head up, yes? See the whole field, not look down at the ball. Yes, my infinite one?”
Thirty minutes ahead of her regular schedule, Amestris arrived at the company’s offices off Anahita Square. Her work day started badly. In her box was a note from Saman Kazedi asking if she would join him for the midday meal on Wednesday. She hadn’t spoken with Saman in a month, and the emotional baggage that came with seeing him was not something she needed right now. She put off answering. She met with the purchasing agent for the Sabine Water Authority, who had come halfway across the moon to discuss the renewal of the colony contract. It did not help that he was a dark, urbane Frenchman who resembled Arsalan, and that as they talked water prices for six-month delivery he treated her as if she were a child.
The negotiations were not helped when the lunar commodities market opened at 0930 and water futures fell thirty-two points. Prices for June through August delivery declined steadily throughout the morning, on rumors that Eskander was about to open a new deposit in the de Gerlache crater. Had her father known this information was out when he spoke with her? Amestris did not know how it had leaked, but she knew her father would hold her responsible. As soon as she could escape the Sabine representative, Amestris ordered her traders to hedge their positions on the August delivery contracts, and she spoke with several managers about delaying the mining of the new ice deposit. But even if that led to an eventual turnaround, the damage was already done in the prices they were seeing right now, and there was no hoping for a favorable deal on the Sabine contract.
She met for the midday meal with Sima Mozaffari. Sima was one of Amestris’s inspirations and confidants. Of her generation, Sima was one of the few who had blazed a trail into business, following a career rather than a family. She was active in the Persepolis Professional Women’s Organization and had served two terms in the legislature. Although she was seventy-five years old, through careful anti-aging treatments her skin was supple and her eyes clear.
They embraced and kissed. After some small talk, Amestris found herself unable to uphold her end of the conversation.
“You look tired,” Sima said, breaking a piece of nan to go with her eggplant.
“I was out late last night.”
“So I surmised.”
Amestris did not want to recount her experience. In the light of day it seemed not dangerous but pathetic. “Do you ever wish you had left Persepolis when you were young?” she asked Sima.
Sima regarded her with her large brown eyes. She had not indulged in any extreme cosmetic alterations; she wore the face that Allah had given her. “If I had left, it would not have been for some other lunar colony. Mars, maybe. We make choices, and live with them.”
“I don’t think I’ve had an unencumbered choice in my life,” Amestris said.
“Unencumbered choices do not exist.” Sima touched Amestris’s wrist. “What’s wrong, my dear?”
“I don’t—you know what’s wrong. I’ve told it all to you a hundred times. My father, my mother, my work. I should never have given up performing.”
“I did not know you then, but you’ve complained since of how constrained your life was at that time.”
Amestris picked at her adas polow. “Sam Kazedi asked me out again.”
“Does he still want to marry you?”
“Yes.” Amestris laughed. “You see, nothing changes, no matter what choice I make.”
“Send him around and I’ll marry him. I would make him a good wife.”
“Sam doesn’t want what he can have. Only what he can’t.”
“In that respect you are well matched.”
“Don’t tease me, Sima.”
“I don’t mean to. What you say is true. Maybe we should emigrate to the Society of Cousins, you and I.”
“Yes, we’ll be Matrons, with many boy lovers. We’ll cut our hair and wear terrible clothes.”
They ate in silence for a moment.
“Sometimes I feel like such a failure, Sima.”
“You know what I think. You should stop working for your father. Live alone, do nothing for a while. Travel. Figure out what you can do that will give you some satisf
action.”
Amestris had heard this before, and it was good advice. Not that she had ever managed to act on it. She looked at Sima and asked herself if that was who she wanted to be in thirty years—and then felt bad for judging her friend.
After lunch she returned to the office, where Ali from the production staff wished to speak with her.
“I must pray,” she told him. She ignored his faint look of surprise and retired to her office. In her bathroom she washed her face, hands, feet, and mouth. She wet her head and took the seldom-used prayer rug and turbah from the cabinet opposite her desk. She knelt toward the pixwall, on which she called up an image of the Ka’bah—the closest approximation, given the position of the Earth in the lunar sky from the south pole, of Mecca—and performed the afternoon prayer.
“In the name of Allah most merciful and mercy giving. Celebrate the praise of you, Lord, and seek His pardon. He is ever disposed to mercy,” she said aloud. She tried to find peace in pressing her forehead against the turbah, in abasing herself before God. She felt some seconds of clarity, but her mind could not be still, slipping to images of Arsalan, her father, the Sikh man and daughter on the train.
“Peace and the mercy of Allah be on you,” she concluded, on her knees, facing to the right and to the left. She rolled up her rug and put it away, feeling no more centered than she had before she had begun.
She summoned Ali. “What is it you wished to tell me?”
“There’s been an accident in the south cutting.”
• • • • •
A mining team had lost two Remote Operating Devices in an avalanche, and two of the team had gone out in hard suits to try to retrieve them. They had caused a second avalanche. One of the two had severe frostbite. The other, a guest worker, had lost his hand and almost died.
The officious shift manager Buyid sent the worker who had instigated this foolishness directly from the clinic to Amestris’s office. To her surprise, his records revealed that he had been raised in the Society of Cousins, from which he had been exiled over ten years earlier. Amestris had met only a handful of Cousins before, none of them male, and certainly none who had been exiled.
Ali ushered the man into her office, then withdrew. His file said he was only twenty-eight, but he looked older. Dirty blond hair too long, his cheeks chapped from freezing. He stood in the doorway wearing a fresh corporate jumpsuit. His left arm, by his side, ended in a bandaged stump.
“May I be your sacrifice?” the man said. She was a little surprised he knew the archaic greeting. Under the circumstances it was only too appropriate.
“I don’t know,” she said. “May you?”
He stood looking square in her eyes, unblinking. His own were very blue. “I don’t think I have much choice in the matter.”
“Your accent is good, Mr.”—she glanced at his records on her screen—“Pamelasson.”
“I go by Pamson.”
“Mr. Pamson, then. How long have you known Persian?”
“Not long. I have been taking language drugs and studying.”
That could explain the accident. The same drugs that lengthened attention span and increased auditory sensitivity reduced awareness of other sensory inputs. His reflexes had probably been compromised.
“Have a seat,” Amestris said.
There was something familiar about him. He sat in one of the two steel and fabric chairs opposite her desk. She took the other. If he was intimidated by being brought to her office, he did not show it. He let the bandaged stump of his left wrist rest on the arm of the chair.
She made him describe the sequence of events from his shift. “Your hand was frozen beyond repair while you were trapped in the ice,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry that your contract does not cover such injuries. You’ll need to have another hand grown and grafted. If you don’t have the money, perhaps the Red Crescent will take you on as a charity case.”
“I have resources,” Pamson said.
That should be it, then. Fire him and send him on his way. She was about to dismiss him when she realized where she had seen him before. “You were in Dorud last night. I saw you thrown out of some tavern.”
For the first time the man seemed nonplussed, as if he were more embarrassed at being caught drunk than to have wrecked valuable equipment, lost his hand, be on the point of losing his job, and likely evicted from the colony.
He said, “What were you doing in Dorud?”
That was it: Out the door with him. Instead, Amestris found herself curious.
“How long have you been working here, Pamson?”
“Call me Erno. You must already know that I’ve been here seven months.”
“And how have you been treated?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, we don’t have many people of your—background here. Your cultural background.” Her father, on the few occasions they had done business with the Society, had warned her not to think of Cousins as “a people,” since they did not originate from a single ethnicity.
“I’m not a Cousin anymore.”
“That’s one of the things I’m interested in. Why did you leave the Society of Cousins?”
“I was exiled. You should have that in my records, too. It’s no secret.”
“But the circumstances? One cannot make a judgment without knowing the circumstances.”
“What kind of judgment? The authorities here knew my background when they gave me a guest worker visa.”
“And your visa, though it might be revoked at any moment, is not in jeopardy from me,” Amestris said. “You shouldn’t worry yourself about that.”
She waited.
“I killed my mother.”
Was he trying to unnerve her? She was not in the mood to be toyed with. “My understanding is that the Cousins are nonviolent. I thought you spent all your time making love.”
“No. We take time out for murder.”
Exile from a pariah colony, guest worker, violator of company rules, street brawler, murderer—he was the poster child for a restrictive immigration policy. He seemed to want her to fire him. Well, he would get his wish soon enough. Still, this was not the behavior she had expected. She looked into his pale face, his blue eyes. It was worth one more question before the door. “I don’t think you murdered anyone. So why do you tell me that you did?”
He looked at her without speaking, then shifted his eyes away. He muttered something, but Amestris caught it: “Fate has a thousand turns of ill, and never a tremor of good will.”
Now she was genuinely astonished. “You know Hafêz?”
He met her gaze again. “I write poetry.”
“You have felt that your fate is ill?” She sat back in her chair and contemplated him. He was a well enough made young man who had seen some hard use. The guarded look on his face was a veil over—over what? Anger? Despair? Critical intelligence?
“I’ve had bad luck.”
“That’s no wonder, if you take risks like you did today.”
“I have to take risks. My skills are unrecognized here, my education useless.”
“Skills? What skills have you?”
“Back home I was a biotechnologist, working with Lemmy Odillesson.”
“Who’s Lemmy Odillesson?”
“He’s the most renowned ecological designer in the Society,” Erno said. “That makes him the best designer in the solar system. Lemmy repaired the ecology when the system collapsed at Clavius. He designed the environment for the Chinese Mars colony. I worked with him for four years. I know more than most of the e-designers on the moon.”
Amestris considered. “You’re not a citizen. We didn’t let you into Persepolis to take good jobs away from our people.”
He held up his bandaged arm. “I suppose I could take up embroidery.”
Despite the fact that nothing that had happened to him was her problem, she was taken aback. She got up from her chair and went to the window that overloo
ked the city square. Cool light poured down on the vast space, crowded with men, women, and children. Across the way the minarets of the grand mosque stretched up three levels of the atrium.
Without turning to see him, she asked, “Does it hurt much? Your hand?”
“They gave me a pain blocker.”
She kept her back to him. “It’s a waste having somebody like you—Cousins trained—mining ice.”
“I’m honored to hear you say that, khanom.”
Khanom. An honorable matron. She turned to him. She walked over to his chair, leaned down, and kissed him on the lips.
He kissed her back, reaching up to put his good hand on the back of her neck, pulling her gently down toward him. He was not rough. With his bandaged arm he coaxed her over the side of the chair into his lap. His lips parted from hers for a breath, then came back, slightly open. He smelled a little of some disinfectant the clinic had used. She felt his chest rise and fall.
Amestris drew back, opening her eyes. His own, centimeters away, looked into hers. The blue of his irises, she saw, was mixed with green around his pupils. She saw the slightest tension of the lines at the corners of his eyes. She did not believe that he felt no pain.
“What do you want?” he whispered. “Tell me what you want.”
Could he make the world disappear? This drifter, this exile? She doubted it, and besides, she was tired of oblivion. What she wanted was to take the world into her hands and bend it to her will. She studied him.
“Are you going to fire me now?” he asked.
“Yes, I am. And if you really are the environmental engineer you claim to be, I will marry you. Then, you and I will start a business.”
CHAPTER
FOUR
A LARGE, SUNLIT CLASSROOM IN the Fowler Glass Institute. Along one wall stood three pot furnaces, one with its door open blasting heat into the room. In the neatly organized workspace stood a steel-topped table, another with a series of hand tools—diamond shears, jacks, scoring knives—and within arm’s reach of this, a bench. A bucket of water and several block molds rested on the floor. Valentin Green Rozsson, fifteen, was about to take his test to become a master glassblower.