Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 103

by Robert Reed

  The Petals Abide

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  In the womb-tank coded with thought and memory, Twoseret learned three things: that her life will be full of peace, that she will never die, and that she will know precisely one tragedy. These facts are absolute, untarnished by chance and impregnable to intervention.

  After that, petals started blooming in her mouth.

  They come at dawn at a regulated hour; she knows to be awake with her mouth empty so she does not choke. A tickle in her throat, a pressure against tonsil, and they emerge fluttering: the shape of hands with spindly digits, the color of unlit space that demarcates empires. She likes to speculate whose hands they might be modeled on, or whether they are the quintessence of hands, a mannequin standard.

  They are pristine and velvet, untouched by teeth and untainted by saliva: like no part of the body at all, no effort to resemble tissue or keratin.

  Here Twoseret finds her orders, in the capillaries that call to the light of accretion disks and press against her nerves in synesthetic licks. The petals are the flowers of prophecy, the blooms of destiny. As long as she follows their instructions, like any memorialist Twoseret stands deathless.

  She arranges the petals, four, radiant—fingers pointing out, fluttering in the low salted wind, the heels of their palms held down by mosaic stones. A murmur of sun slants across unlighted velvet. She bends to read, sibyl to her own fate.

  The city ground is a canvas, the avenues brushstrokes, history a palette. An avian view yields faces gone to carcass and archive, some self-portraits, others celebrating personal affection and past deeds—the war heroes, the founding scholars, the beloved siblings. Within these walls, nothing is forgotten. Outside them, everything is.

  Twoseret walks through parabola gates of porphyry and persimmons heavy on the bough, down bridges whose curves follow theta-rhythms. The petals have given her a course, a target.

  It will be a channel, she expects, through which she may monitor a life and from that material suture together a new person. Broad edits are crude: a wholesale revision of a planet’s chronology, a rearrangement of civil wars and epidemics and sundry. The work she does, however, requires more finesse. In identity reassignment the subject must feel at home in their new path, natural to a strange career and family and spouse as though they have always lived this life. The more moving pieces there are, the more skilled a memorialist has to be. Twoseret counts herself one of the best in the city, if not the very best.

  The only one to whom she conceded supremacy was Umaiyal, but ey is long gone.

  She stops at the basin of faces, where bone dunes in a hundred twenty-seven colors—most visible, a few not—rotate hourly, resolving into the faces of the first memorialists. There, at the border of grinding femurs and fibulae, she finds a casket.

  The edges of it are sharp as invasion, its casing radiant as war-beads, its lid heavy as regret. Around this a homunculus of encryption hovers, epidermis full of paradoxes clenched shut. She coaxes them open, by intuition and determination. Her routines grant her a surplus of leisure, and she’s spent it on dead languages, ciphers, puzzle-solving.

  She expects a soldier, a spy, a politician of high standing. Those are ever the first to develop a taste for sedition. But once the homunculus has been whispered and peeled off, she finds instead a foreign assassin.

  Beneath a canopy of chameleon fish and isometry rosettes, she thaws the body. Their face is blunt, singed at temple and jawline by ecclesiastic tattoos. Their neck looks as though branded by bird beaks, their biceps abraded by bird claws. The marks of the Cotillion and the divine Song under which they march.

  The assassin is armed too, but Twoseret is unconcerned, for the petals did not forecast that she will die today. When the fluids have been drained and the cryogenic phase deactivated, the assassin wakes: all at once, without the transitional stage between occluded cognition and full alertness. The gaze that latches onto Twoseret’s is clear and iridescent with corneal implants.

  They jackknife and heave. A splat of saliva and bile, so black, so blue. Waking up this way is never pleasant, no more than being decanted from a tank. Twoseret has vivid recall of her own birth, her first breath and emergence, of volition beyond the crèche-parents.

  She reads their name and gender as they come online. “Sujatha Sindh.” The name susurrates like parched leaves, from a language spoken on several Hegemonic constituents. Not entirely foreign, but the two empires have regular exchanges; citizens of one flee and become refugees in another, diasporic. Their descendants repeat the cycle.

  The assassin gains their composure in turns, gray and shuddering, on their back then on their knees. Twoseret offers a hand; they take it. Long fingers, velvet where synthetic dermis has replaced fingerprints.

  “You have been sent to abduct or kill one of us,” Twoseret murmurs, off the dossier. “Did you choose a specific target or would any of us have done?”

  “My instructions were not discriminating.” Sujatha’s voice is a blasted echo, its wealth and timbre gouged out. Cotillion personnel wield their voices for sacred music, better than any weapon. Without that the assassin’s bite is much blunted.

  Because they do not ask what their fate will be, Twoseret does not provide. Perhaps they already know, as surely as if they had read the same petals Twoseret did. She gives them her shoulder, her arm around the heft of a torso honed to swift retribution, limbs trained to kinetic poetry. Those too have been weakened, ligament augmens snipped off, bone enhancement ripped out. Where once there was puissance, now there is brittle mortality.

  Muscles spasm in Sujatha’s cheeks as they walk. It’s not the only part of them that trembles in withdrawal from the destruction of their voice. Twoseret imagines how it was done. An operation, painless. An appointment with precise instruments during which Sujatha was awake for every minute, nerves primed to open wounds. Dilated time.

  Sujatha’s prison is a palimpsest of deep-sea salt and abyssal cold. Its frictive patterns convert to musical notations, echoing the voice of a deceased memorialist. The assassin gazes at the water. Their mouth parts, habit, but they press it shut.

  “It isn’t really a song,” Twoseret says.

  “All ordered sound is part of the eternal symphony. The birth of universes. The end of them. Entropic culmination and singularities.” Sujatha touches their throat. “I will not sully any of it with the voice I have now.”

  Twoseret does not present a secular objection—that sound is merely sound, can be synthesized and reproduced; that sound has no purchase without air, and what is a deific verity that cannot cross stars? She helps Sujatha settle into their bed of solid-state husks and slaughtered engine cores. Battle salvage is material for art. It speaks of Hegemonic peace spreading abroad, a reminder of the army’s might. What are memorialists and their city without the commanders and the troops, their strategies and victories?

  That thought dogs the heel of another. “Who captured you?” For someone must have, an act of heroism and advancement.

  Sujatha takes a cracked breath, perhaps weighing their tactics: to tell, to withhold. “A soldier. Oridel Nehetis.”

  Twoseret’s expression must have spoken louder than her silence. She corrects that. “I see,” she says, and seals the oceanic palimpsest between them.

  “Do you remember,” she asks one of her age-mates, “Umaiyal?”

  His answer is interrupted by a trio of petals. He catches them as they fall, fans them like a spread of cards on the game board between him and Twoseret. “Yeah,” Riam says, reading his instructions, not disclosing them. “How goes it for em? The exception.”

  The exception to have punctured the city’s skin from the inside. The exception to have left. Twoseret will never know how this was done, what deal was brokered, what Umaiyal’s petals spoke; whether this was mandate or Umaiyal’s volition. She only knew—knows—the loss like a suppurating hurt. Out there ey goes by Oridel, a good elegant name. Ey wears eir face differently too, sharp-bon
ed and pearl-pale, chased in nacre that traces and wraps eir skull in place of a scalp. A short clip that Twoseret plays, over and over, with Umaiyal caught mid-chuckle. Wry and polished in dress uniform, eir throat a choker of respiratory implants for work in toxic battlefields. She wonders how many deaths ey has logged.

  Umaiyal once asked her what name she would take, out there, if she could leave. On a whim she picked Nehetis.

  Twoseret moves her piece, desultory, not much caring for the game’s result. “Ey’s as well as can be expected. Alive, certainly.”

  “So you don’t know either?” Riam flicks his head, apologetic. “Uncharitable of me. Not as if they would have let you keep in touch. I always thought if anyone got out, it’d be Umaiyal. And ey would take you with em.”

  Umaiyal never asked. One day ey was there, the next gone. Even eir clothes, eir jewelry: the nexus-choker of corneal opals, the eigenvector jacket she gave em.

  “I’m content here,” says Twoseret. “Aren’t we all?”

  The petals yoke her to the prisoner’s cycles. She comes to know the palimpsest’s smell as well as that of her own bed, and Sujatha’s face as well as her own reflection. The questions she puts to the assassin are broad and she’s rarely interested in the answers, so much so it provokes Sujatha to say, “You aren’t what I would call an adequate interrogator.”

  Twoseret sinks her hand into the water, warm and viscous as gestation plasma. She imagines pulling Sujatha through it and the assassin coming out her side reborn, a blank canvas numinous with possibility. “I’m no interrogator. Would you like to talk about something else? Tell me secrets. Not state matters, just little things.”

  Sujatha sits cross-legged, and despite the palimpsest distortion they look much better: they’ll never have their old strength back, nor their voice, but their colors are healthier. Umber rather than jaundiced sepia. “Why would I do that?”

  There is an acid-edge of animus that Twoseret finds strangely personal. “To pass the time, as I can’t persuade you to sing and you wouldn’t learn origami or any of the games I’ve brought you.”

  “I play nothing well behind a prison cell, and I’m not a graceful loser.” The assassin cranes their neck back, looking up. From their perspective the world entire is sunlight filtered through depth, exegesis by fiber-optic sharks and hydrogen anemones. “There’s a dessert of egg yolk shaped like gilded drops that I indulge in to a fault. From each of my bed-partners I’ve collected a necklace, a scarf, a collar; as long as it’s been close to them like a garrote. In all my life I’ve fallen in love only once.”

  “Yes?” The barrier is permeable up to a point. Twoseret encounters soft resistance once her hands have sunk through to the wrist. “Tell me about love.”

  They laugh, a stutter-bark of actuators guttering out. “You’ve never been happy. No species of love would be known to you.”

  “If happiness is freedom from deprivation and pain, then I’ve never known anything but.”

  “Happiness,” Sujatha says, “is more than that. You haven’t seen—”

  “Beyond this circle of existence,” Twoseret says, drawing up her knees and resting her chin on them, “the calculus of being distills to this: rule or be ruled. Under Hegemonic peace your past is robbed; under the Cotillion your future is sealed. There are only so many places for power, and most will never rise to them nor even see the path.”

  The assassin blinks, a play of lamplight on black pearl in their irises. “You aren’t what I expected.”

  “Mindless, you mean? As long as I follow the petals, nothing is forbidden. The province of my mind belongs to me alone, and in that I have what most outside this city never will.”

  Perhaps some of that turns a key in Sujatha’s heart. For the assassin says, “I’ll tell you of my love. Much you won’t comprehend and have no basis with which to compare, but I’ll tell you.”

  “And I’ll tell you of mine.” Twoseret leans forward, her nose almost nuzzling the vertical tide. “We may surprise each other.”

  “The person I love is absolute, untarnished by loneliness and unsullied by lust. They require no justification to exist; they are beholden to no outer forces or obligations. Like the drive of a warship, but those require guidance and crew, hull and superstructure. Like a sun, but those has a finite age and obey greater forces. So,” Sujatha says, softly, “they are like the Song, given human body, human visage. And to think that is to blaspheme beyond absolution.”

  “Today, the person I love is shaped like a hole. But once upon a time that they had arms like polished teak, cheeks like bathyal amber, and eyes like lodestars.” Twoseret unrolls permutative paper in her lap, tears out a precise square. “When they couldn’t sleep they liked to keep their hands busy, and they’d fold this into animals neither of us has ever seen. Lava alligators and polar butterflies, thunder wasps and aquatic bees. They kept their hair very long, dipped in an attar of comets. I’d try to braid those paper things in it, but the hair was difficult of temper, just like their owner.”

  Sujatha has flinched as though each of Twoseret’s sentences have pierced them, needle by needle under the nails. “That isn’t a person,” they say, voice tight. “That’s a childhood.”

  “Childhood is formative; no person springs into being fully-formed, like a sun or warship or holy music. Everyone has a past. That’s the definition of personhood.”

  “The larval stage of it, perhaps. The person someone becomes is honed by time, tempered by experience, the true shape.” The assassin frowns. “Do you fence, wrestle, or box? I feel the need to test you in combat.”

  Twoseret laughs and gazes with interest at the hard lines of Sujatha’s body. Umaiyal was built like a willow, but out there ey would have received combat augmens, and assiduous training would have changed em. “I don’t do any of that, and in your state you wouldn’t be able to defeat a child. I’ll play you any sort of game, conquer you in any sort of puzzle.”

  “You’re trying to offend me.”

  “Yes. No. But tell me more about your personal blasphemy.”

  The assassin’s mouth curves then, tracing the arc of a blade. “The person I love has far more in common with me than you, than this city, than anything you know.”

  It is, perhaps, not wrong. Twoseret puts two calligraphic avenues between them before she allows her hand to press against her sternum as though to staunch a wound. But her palms come away clean.

  In her room, roofed by silver beaten chiffon-thin, she composes. On the malleable walls that submit to her nails, on the permutative paper that yields to her thumbs. She sketches the same figure again and again, an outline of slender limbs and rounded narrow shoulders. Then it becomes more sinuous and muscle-dense, shedding the eigenvector jacket and robe for something more martial. Close-cut uniform that gloves the body, a long coat with severe hem. Twoseret leaves out the sidearm.

  A visualization is not required, but she has always found it helpful. The petals give instruction and goal, but the means to achieve them are her own. She begins scanning her own memory segments. A person is gestalt. There is past, present, and the potential for the future.

  Now that Umaiyal is gone, of the entire city she is the best memorialist alive.

  Twoseret gazes through Sujatha’s eyes. She is almost Sujatha, for a while. Total immersion has its risks, but the best of her compositions often arise from that.

  Sujatha’s meetings with Oridel-Umaiyal began at a distance, observing a figure limned in pale light through a corridor of spiral glass. A figure tall and compactly made, unrecognizable to Twoseret. Over weeks the assassin observed, followed.

  Was noticed, one day.

  An eel-twist of the street where Umaiyal disappeared. The assassin sidestepped, turned in time to catch Umaiyal’s knife on an armguard. The blade locked; Sujatha pulled. Fell with Umaiyal as ey went down, hand on throat—precise pressure—and knees straddling arms.

  Both held still: aortae marching to the same adrenal tempo, muscles stretched taut. Th
en Umaiyal smiled. “You’re very good,” ey said. “Galling as it is to admit, I’m no match for a Cotillion assassin. Had you wanted me dead, I would have been cremated a week ago. So what is it?”

  Sujatha drew back slightly, caught by frankness. “Captain.”

  “Shall we get a drink? My treat.”

  They did, and more than once. An uneasy negotiation, tenser for Sujatha than for Umaiyal. By their fifth meeting in a club of enameled ice, Umaiyal leaned forward and pulled the trigger on a question both of them had always circled around. “You targeted me for my background, didn’t you?”

  In that club, at a table laden with conch-shell bowls, Sujatha stopped eating. Curved a hand around a glass, took a long, deliberate sip.

  “I can give you a way into that place. Only you’ll have to trust me.” Umaiyal drew closer. “That will be my gift to you.”

  It takes Twoseret two heartbeats to realize that had been spoken to her. Meant for her ear, not Sujatha’s. It is not the only instance—many other times Umaiyal couched eir messages in conversations with the assassin. There’s a childhood place I miss, where the bones resolve into faces or Have you ever seen upside-down gardens?

  Where I was born, Umaiyal said as ey stood watching the breaking of Sujatha’s voice, there’s a palimpsest that sings.

  As Umaiyal put a stunned Sujatha in the casket, ey held the assassin’s hand, saying, “This is the closest I can get to going back.” A harsh breath inhaled. “This is the closest I can get to talking to you.” The lid clipped. “I’ll never be able to go back. I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye. And I can’t explain. There are no petals here, but even so some things are forbidden. Some things are prophecy, and to disobey them is to accept death.”

  The casket slipped shut.

  For hours after, Twoseret is not herself. She remembers being in a stronger body; she remembers parts of the surgery that took her—their—voice. An immersive link to the subject’s memory doesn’t give her the subject’s feelings.