by Robert Reed
Nevertheless Sujatha’s want is plain, blazing gold across the fabric of their recall. “The person I love is absolute,” she says softly, startling herself when what comes out is not in Sujatha’s voice. The original voice brimming with Song, one with the code of existence.
The next time she visits the assassin, she brings a small drawer of perfumes captured in vials of chameleon jade. One takes on the texture of Twoseret’s palm as she handles it. “Do you know the scent?” she asks, opening a window through the prison-tide. “I’ve no idea if this is available outside. Probably it is. Some of us have hobbies but I don’t think anyone distills perfumes, so this must have come with a supply drop.”
Sujatha edges forward. Stiffens in recognition. “What of it?”
“The person I love—” The euphemism, still. “Left this behind, even though they were some of eir favorites. No time to pack it, I suppose, and these bottles are so fragile. I don’t wear perfume, though. Do you?”
No answer.
“It’ll spoil eventually, go rancid.” Twoseret pulls more vials out of their slots, idly rotating one between her fingers. “I could have the containers recycled. The perfume though, that’s a bit of a waste.”
“Then I might as well accept them.”
“There are other things, too.” Talking around and keeping up the pretense, like Umaiyal is the forbidden secret: profane or else too pure and wondrous a word to utter. “I’ll bring them. Clothes that don’t fit me, jewelry, and so on.”
Two sets of petal later, Sujatha smells and dresses a little like Umaiyal. They must know this, but do not object and seem content simply to have Umaiyal’s belongings next to their skin, scenting their clavicles. When Twoseret brings them a lattice necklace, their breath hitches: an object that’s lived next to Umaiyal’s throat.
She cannot claim to understand their terrible longing for Umaiyal; it seems so much, and burns so bright, for such distance and so little return. But it is there, their shared knot, and she makes use of it.
Desire complicates, between to love and to want to be. A certain affinity between those two, she thinks, a bridge that can be built and directed. She makes more sketches of Sujatha, of Umaiyal as she remembers em. She compares and finds herself not dissatisfied. That will be my gift to you.
One day she lets down the prison, which after all was for effect rather than any real intent to cage. As the water cascades away and the kaleidoscope of sharks evaporates, the petals come. Twoseret cups her hands for them, spends half a minute absorbing their directives; when she looks up she finds the assassin staring at her, appalled. “It’s nothing,” she tries to explain. “It doesn’t hurt. This is only an artist’s whim made real by a biotech.”
“It’s not all right,” Sujatha says, then surrenders to silence, as though even that thread of anger exhausts.
“It’s more interesting than receiving messages the conventional way.” She folds her petals into her dress. By nighttime she will have to dispose of them properly, a ritual.
Sujatha tires easily, has to be eased down onto benches and soft grass. Twoseret eventually lets them rest at a fountain that gurgles gossamer pennants, translucent kites, streamers in soft copper and gold.
Eyes shut, the assassin says, “You don’t feel the limits of your world? You don’t find it confined, claustrophobic even? This place isn’t even large enough for fifty million. What’s up there isn’t a sky. This is all you will ever see, all the air you’ll ever breathe. What you do, how you live, it’s all bound up in those fucking flowers. Doesn’t it chafe? Doesn’t it choke?”
“You are very angry,” Twoseret observes, “on behalf of someone you don’t know and hardly like. I have no illusions that you’d choose my society, given other choices. How can it matter if I live a constricted life, or one whose limits of liberty you disapprove?”
“The person you love—” The words come out like retched poison. “Did they live like this?”
She catches a twist of streamer; it convulses around her wrist, prehensile, rose-touched platinum. “To that you already know the answer or you wouldn’t have asked. It’s a life. For most of mine, I never lacked for anything. I still don’t see why you were sent here, though; you obviously can’t get out.”
The assassin smiles a rictus. “As I came, I was transmitting my location. That stopped at a point, but the approximation is sufficient.”
“This entire city can be moved.”
“Very slowly. With considerable difficulty. It’d be a feat of years. Our ships are much faster, inescapable, will not be outraced. Of course negotiating the gravity snarl that protects this place would be a trick and a half, but the same maze that safeguards you also makes relocating the city . . . vexing.”
Twoseret strokes Sujatha’s head the way she might soothe a distressed animal. The assassin’s hair used to be shoulder-length, in those memories, but it’s been growing since. Someday it will be long, serpentine, and she will find an attar of comets to anoint it full of light. “Will they attack?”
A short laugh, that same noise of failing machines. “No. We only wanted some idea of where this might be, just in case. For that I gave my life, without regret. Acquiring this information for the cost of a single person is an extravagant bargain.”
“Patriotism is very nice.” Twoseret has never experienced such a concept, but she means it. Belief—faith—in some vast, grand ideal must be reassuring. The notion that after one has passed, one’s contribution will live on as part of that ideal or, in this case, system of brutal oppression. Still, it’s certainly a greater thing than a single human being or even a billion.
“You’re mocking me.” But this too is said listlessly, the annoyance perfunctory.
“No, I think fervor is admirable. Passion is its own virtue. It animates. It can give an otherwise ordinary thing a terrible magnetism, an ensnaring brilliance . . . ” She unties the streamer and casts it forward, where it catches on an updraft, snapping toward the sky-that-is-not. “Oh, that’s why. All this time, you’ve been so weakened but there’s been this—fire? This gravity, this pull. I think that’s why ey decided on you.”
Sujatha’s head rises a fraction. “Decided like a calculation, the way you say it.”
“It probably was. But not an exact thing, no, eir variables were more organic than numbers. Perhaps it had to do with how you moved, the way you sang, how your face was limned in profile at sunset. And always the fire that burns within you, visible between your teeth, behind your eyes.” She helps them to their feet. “Do you want to see the gardens? Ey loved those.”
Twoseret continues sketching in her head, drawing points of like and unlike. A framework of contrast and potential markers for synaptic joints. In the swaying garden with its inverted field, she picks clusters of edible hydrangea, mangosteens the size of her thumb, syrup oranges with thin ripe peel about to burst. These and more she puts in Sujatha’s lap, absent the assassin’s interest. As the pile grows they pick at it, a bite here, a lick there. Inevitably they have juices running down their fingers, their chin, sticky and fragrant.
She thinks of kissing them away, drop by drop. In the end she unthinks it. Not the right person, not the right time. As of now they are both in love with an idea.
Twoseret stirs to the city quaking and Sujatha’s shadow laying across her like whip-scars. “I know you’re awake,” the assassin says in that fractured, devoured voice. “We’re under attack.”
She peers up at them through her eyelashes. “From whom?”
“Must you ask?”
“But they’ll kill you too,” she points out calmly as she pushes to her elbows, dislodging sheets, baring shoulders and breasts. Baring, too, the places on her ribcage and waist where the incisions were made and implants seeded so she would be able to receive the petals each morning.
Sujatha’s gaze snags on those places and the cartography of their features shifts, sideways, to that region between disgust and fascination. It makes Twoseret want to say that the
scars are quite all right: she chose to keep them when they could have been operated away to smoothness, leaving skin unmarred. Of course their horror is really for Umaiyal’s sake, the thought that Umaiyal once lived like this, bore these same scars. Still Sujatha is nearly tender, as though she’s a small child prone to spooking. “Are you in shock?”
“Oh, no.” Her bed trembles as though a beast shaking itself from hibernation, sloughing off sleep and matted grass, or whatever it is that animals coming out of hibernation do. Paper moths flutter from their shelves. “I’m in full command of myself.” She doesn’t say that the petals came early today, and they did not instruct either Twoseret or the city to die. No doubt pointing that out will only distress the assassin.
Twoseret stands all the way up, knows as she turns her back that Sujatha stares at the tiger-stripes up her spine that culminate at the top—below her nape—in a dainty port, flourished in nacre and tiny citrines. “You believed I’m incapable of love because I have never experienced its prerequisites. Is it so hard to believe I’m not panicking because I’ve had no experience of terror, of illness or fear of dying?”
“Even a creature like you must retain her survival instinct.”
“How wrong you are.” Twoseret shrugs into her dress of suede cuffs and amethyst whorls, the fabric whispering like origami in fire as it molds to her. “Umaiyal used to help me dress, pick my clothes. Ey had—still has, I should think—these long fingers, with calluses from the wood-carving ey used to do as a hobby. Ey wasn’t much good at it, though ey tried to make me birds.” The calluses would be different now. Imprints from wielding a chisel and from wielding a gun are nothing alike, she imagines.
“Who?”
“The person you and I love. Pretending further is obscene, isn’t it? I don’t know if ey ever gave you eir birth name.” She slides her shoes on, lavender gray, texture almost petal-like.
Sujatha presses their lips into a hard line and leads her by the hand. Twoseret is startled at the force of their grip, the limber grace of their stride, their familiarity with the puzzle-paths. An assassin would of course be able to map a place from memory, with speed and attention. Even so the unerring way with which they negotiate the city fills her heart, and their recovered strength makes her glad.
“My superiors have given me up for dead,” Sujatha says as they emerge into artificial morning under the sky that is not. “So have I. For all intents and purposes I’m no longer alive; my presence makes no difference.”
“But we’re running somewhere rubble can’t fall on us. A corpse doesn’t run.” Though ultimately the city’s swarm-bounds can shatter; the ceiling of Twoseret’s world is an unbearable weight, upheld by a thread of synaptic aegis. If it falls there will be no escaping it.
“My sense of self-preservation hasn’t deserted me. Flight or fight.” But their expression creases as though they’d said something different, a thing of ache and thorn cupped on their tongue.
A sudden ruthlessness seizes Twoseret. “This city holds the memory of the only person you’ve ever loved. While you breathe you won’t permit its destruction.”
Sujatha doesn’t meet her eyes. “I need a node I can broadcast from. This isn’t a full assault—a veilship or two, not much more. Just scouts.”
Other memorialists have poured into the streets, as calm as Twoseret, intrigued by this new development. A few crèche-parents lead their charges by the hand, clear-eyed children from five to nine in various stages of wiring. By twelve they will be tested, and on success granted the petals. The sight of them draws a smile from her, reflexive and uncomplicated.
“There are consoles we use for supply drops.” Routine communications for assigning and dividing up the items. There’s always abundance and most memorialists can have their pick, tools and luxuries and raw material with which to feed fabricators: steel for hair-ribbons, glass for skirts, a hundred types of gemstones for belts and bedspreads. Everyone wears jewels, is sheathed in it until skin and facets are one.
Twin shadows press against the unsky, each the shape of a hornbill’s head. Another tremor sweeps through like a racking cough, or so Twoseret imagines, never having seen hypothermia in action. There are defenses, but she supposes absently that those must have been breached: they are automated, and while some memorialists know them well—Umaiyal did—most of them never train themselves to battle. The nearest military outpost is too far to make it in time. The city’s greatest protection has always been in its secrecy and location rather than firepower. She finds a wall and activates the console, feeding it a cluster of authentications like grapes, and steps aside.
Sujatha bends close, their breath fogging the obsidian curlicues that frame the console. Twoseret watches with avid interest as they connect to the Cotillion channel with a lover’s intimacy. “Veilship couplet, identify yourselves.”
The shaking pauses. From the console comes a low note, strain of music made by sighing woods and running currents.
“Remotely piloted,” Sujatha murmurs, “as I thought. That’ll be easier.”
“Yes?”
The assassin straightens and inhales. More affectation than any real need for oxygen, Twoseret expects. And they sing.
Sujatha’s voice makes a dirge for extinguished suns and singularistic contractions that kill worlds, for defeat in empty reaches that will go unknown and uncommemorated. It jolts Twoseret’s nerves, constricts her throat, pries at the seams of her flesh.
When it ends Sujatha turns away, trembling slightly. “They will leave. It’s the only command override I can access now, with my voice the way it—in any case it won’t work a second time.”
“It was exquisite.”
“It was nothing of the sort.” The assassin sags, as though the song has leeched their arteries dry and drained their limbs of strength.
Up above the shadows have disappeared. Twoseret catches the assassin. “You’re exhausted. Let’s get you somewhere to rest.”
Sujatha doesn’t resist or push her away. “I’ve been sleeping on grass, under trees.”
“Then come to my bed. I’ll tuck you in.”
In the street, the crowd thins, memorialists returning to their duties and routines now that the excitement is past. Riam nods to Twoseret, perhaps guessing at her intent, giving tacit approval or merely mute indifference.
She frees the assassin from their shoes and vest, and eases them down between the sheets. She holds them until they fall limp and asleep, and very gently kisses their brow, their eyelids, the tip of their nose. Sujatha smells so right.
When she is sure they are deep in dreams, she gathers up her composition and resumes her work. Making a person—an identity—is delicate labor, but it is a labor of love. She thinks she will keep the singing, to retain the best of both worlds, and sends out a request for the casket.
Twoseret watches the sky for silhouettes of insects, vast, their wings enveloping half the city, their antennae slashing the horizon to segments. The outpost has become more attentive and sent them guardians since the attack. She never sees any of the soldiers, though she can imagine them helmeted and carapaced, animated statues of lustrous absence. Faceless, voiceless, nameless. She wonders if, far away, there is a war going on. A real one, sparked off by the assault here. On that the petals are silent.
The weather is getting warm, though never humid or uncomfortable. She’s taken to seed-pearl sandals and lighter dresses with skirts that snap like prayer flags in an assassin’s memory.
She kneels. A casket on the pavement, surrounded by mosaic pieces. The person in it has been sleeping a long time, nested in dreams of being reared by crèche-parents and of being wired; of pride when the first petals came. The casket is like the tank, incubating, preparing a sacred genesis.
Twoseret begins to unlatch the lid. A fetus must push through eventually or be stillborn. That is rare, but she’s seen it happen. The locks and puzzles fall away quickly this time, decorative more than protective.
Eir hair has grown to
eir waist. Thick frosted lashes twitch in sleep. A curl of cool breath, body temperature artificially lowered, rises to meet the thick air. Crossed wrists coiled in origami vipers. She runs her palm over eir forehead; she imagines to em the contact must feel like a flame tickling candle wax. In this way she thaws her dreamer, waking em with her own warmth. No fluid to drain, no instrument to detach—this was, almost, a simple and natural sleep.
Ey turns on eir side as though wishing to rest a little longer. Twoseret brushes eir hair, her fingertips grazing the side of eir neck. When eir eyes open, they are terribly clear: irises deeply brown, circumference gilded in amber. The scent of eir favorite perfume wafts, the angular folds of eir favorite vest rises and falls to eir breathing.
“You always slept so heavily.” Twoseret takes em into her arms, helping them out of the casket. “Do I call you Oridel now? Captain Oridel Nehetis. It sounds all grand.”
Ey rubs at eir eyes, groggy, one of those slightly childish gestures—she’s never been able to break eir habit. “No, of course not. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? When did we have hornet fliers guarding our sky? God, I miss piloting those.”
“Recent addition. I find their silhouette very charming. There’s so much to tell you.” She pecks em on the lips. “Welcome back, Umaiyal.”
And Umaiyal laughs, in what is nearly eir voice, straightening to eir feet and taking her hand in that light-firm way that belongs to Umaiyal alone. “I’m home.”
At the moment of her birth, 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.
As she walks arm in arm with Umaiyal up the puzzle-paths, her tragedy falls away like pale chrysalis, dissipating on the mosaic tiles and dispersing in the low salted wind.
When her next petals come she reads them and smiles, and casts them aside.
About the Author
Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Phantasm Japan, The Dark, and year’s bests. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.