Glass shatters. Daji crashes through in a hail of windowpane and mortar-dust, her blade leading: its serrated edges as black as superionic ice, its length as red as a star’s nucleus. She pins Ostrich’s regalia with precision, blade-tip entering plumage and armor. I watch this act of penetration, a knife coring a fruit, a lover descending upon her betrothed. Violence is about branding and being branded: you own your opponent and they own you, until the moment that decides who shall rise in supremacy.
Daji wrenches at the enemy regalia’s antlers, her fingers gouging into where its optics must reside. It thrashes. One of its arms detaches and lunges at her; her fox proxy pounces on that, shredding the limb as if it is nothing more than rotten wood and wet paper. Methodically it moves on to the rest of the enemy regalia, teeth bared and darkened by lubricant.
“Your regalia isn’t going to overcome mine,” I say calmly. “From the looks of it I’d even suggest you can give me all of your overrides. No need to squander any to destroy your partner. What’s its name anyway?”
His mouth is a thin pale line. Sweat gathers on his brow and upper lip. “Maugris upon the Lake.”
“Pretty. I’m not familiar with the etymology.” I press the gun a little harder, so that when he breathes his pulse pushes against the muzzle. It’ll leave a bruise. “How long have you been doing this, exploiting your position? Except you’ve never won, have you. No matter how many rounds someone was always your better, and even though you survived—through a deal with the overseer, I’m guessing—you never got your wish.”
Ostrich doesn’t answer.
“It can’t be entry into Shenzhen—all your work here would’ve earned you admission already. So it’s something more. A guaranteed haruspex integration? Revenge against Catania?” Daji is providing me with a visual feed of her battle: she has the upper hand, is toying with her opponent almost. She’s collapsed one of its legs, ribboned one of its arms, and torn off handfuls of feathers that she flings, laughing, into the air. Showing off for my benefit, and the benefit of the audience in Shenzhen. Destroy it, Daji, I tell her. Better to leave Ostrich without options.
Tears well up in his eyes. “Take my overrides.”
They appear in my overlays as a constellation, five stars, five sets of commands. The count of regalia has changed once more—three, now. I let go of Ostrich. He crumples to the ground, though I haven’t inflicted any real damage.
“One last time.” Ostrich is crying in earnest. “There was a man I loved—he’s still on Catania—I wanted to see him one last time. That’s all I wanted.”
Love plucks at the seams of you and undoes it one by one—it can become such an obsession, such sickness. Passion and the poison it secretes. Would you bleed for love, Eurydice once asked me, and I had scoffed. In the end I’m not proof against it, against the foolishness it can impel you to commit. This basal force moves me, now, when it might not even matter anymore and I may never have Eurydice back in any concrete way.
“Sorry about that,” I say at length. “Better luck next round.”
Recadat makes sure, this time.
A bar in Libretto, suffocated by smoke and liquor. The ceiling is low to the point of being claustrophobic; the scuffed floorboards smell like calcified hope. A hiding place, though far from the best. Were she an unarmed duelist, deprived of her regalia, she might have run into the wasteland and found a cave in which to hole up until this is all over.
But she is not that. She lost Gwalchmei and then she was found.
And so she is here, hunting. Old techniques serve her well: keeping to her little corner and eavesdropping on conversations. People will say anything when they think they’re safe, even though there’s no privacy filter here, even though they could be struck down any time. She tries not to think of the pair in the dining orchard. More than their faces she remembers the meal, the aroma of it swallowed by blood. What a waste it was.
No one has prosecuted her, but then no one was ever going to. Strip a world of law and what remains is human nature, peeled back to throbbing nerves and twitching tendons and ravenous guts. Recadat rubs her fingers together and visualizes herself as a thing of long teeth and legs made for loping on all fours. Her lover would hold her leash, a length of black iron joined to a jeweled collar whose radiance sinks muted into her fur.
Thannarat used to call her a tiger.
She raises her head. An older man hunches over the bar, continuing to disclose to no one in particular that his life is in danger, that coming here was a grave mistake, and he would get out on the first available ship. Yes, not long now, it can’t be far off, he’s not going to hold on for much longer—the state of his heart, his dwindling funds . . .
In a way it eases her conscience that he is advanced in age, banal in concerns. His motives are opaque to her but it is difficult to imagine a person like this with true interiority, with grand ideas and ambitions. Of course saving Ayothaya is loftier than anything a man like this could desire. Perhaps his cause is as ordinary as escaping debt or he already has plenty and is greedy for more, fantasizing about endless wealth. She does not imagine for him a set of loved ones. Simpler to reduce people to their surfaces—killing becomes, then, almost guiltless. You shoot an empty box, not a being of flesh and sapience.
Recadat has made that compartmentalization many times in public security. The pursuit of justice meant accepting collateral damage as part of the equation.
The man exits. She follows. In the corner of her vision the Divide’s tallies slowly blink. One aspirant remains, and she is almost absolute it is this man. Aspirants are not worth the hunt, not really. But she must make sure. There should be as few variables as possible; hers is not a prize that she can give up.
He moves unsteadily: one drink too many in him. No real awareness that he’s being followed as he makes his way to one of the anonymous tenements. There is no art or finesse necessary to cornering him. She simply strides up behind him and puts her gun to the back of his skull.
She thinks of kicking his legs out, of shattering the bridges that the human body has carefully constructed within itself. A dislocated patella, a fractured tibia. Disabling a person is so simple. She considers interrogating him, but then he would deny that he’s a participant in the Court of Divide, there’s no gain for him in telling the truth. And she does not have time to torture an old man. She pulls the trigger, waits, and this time the Divide module does oblige. Aspirant count down to zero.
Sweat trickles down the back of her knees, down her sternum. Libretto is like the inside of pyrexia even as night approaches, and when Recadat comes to a fountain she climbs into it without thinking. She stands there and lets it drench her, discovering that the water is much cleaner than she thought, potable even. As if the Mandate has decided on planetary deprivation but doesn’t quite know what that looks like. Those residents bedecked in finery, the impeccable tuxedo and qipao.
After a time she feels cleansed. She gets out, dripping, and thinks of what to do next. When she returns to her suite, her lover will congratulate her and reward her lushly in bed. The only space they will not invade is anywhere with Thannarat.
She doesn’t go to her own floor when she returns to the Vimana. Thannarat has given her access and the lift takes her to her old partner’s corridor. For a moment she stands there, damp and cold, not even sure that Thannarat might be in.
The door opens. Her old partner stands on the other side, warmly backlit. For several seconds Recadat can only stare at her, the solidity of this woman, the color of salvation. She realizes she has been silent for too long when Thannarat says, “Come in. You look terrible.”
The private lounge is illuminated in gold—she doesn’t remember seeing that when she last visited. Vases full of roses, basins full of lotuses. Fruits dangle from the ceiling, pomegranates and crimson grapes—particulate projection, but especially well-made. Thannarat herself is lightly dressed, unbelted trousers and loose shirt. Recadat thinks of the images her lover spun, the broad strength of
Thannarat’s long, muscled back—she’s struck by the thought of what that would look like glistening with sweat, and quickly throttles the idea back.
“What happened?” Thannarat is steering her to the lounge bathroom.
“Fountain,” Recadat says. Black marble walls, exquisite symmetry. An expansive mirror. The reflections tantalize her, the verge of what could be in this close and intimate space. “It’s a hot night.”
“Every night in this forsaken city is hot.” Thannarat studies her, searching her expression. “Do you need help?”
Delayed response, coming in drenched when normally her habit is to look immaculate. It dawns on Recadat that to Thannarat she must look stricken, shell-shocked. The thought almost wrings a laugh out of her. “Yes. Please.”
Thannarat pulls off her jacket, blunt fingers skimming over the sodden material of her shirt. She stands as still as possible, hardly breathing as the shirt too is taken off. Her bare skin is cold. Her cheeks are hot. “Thannarat,” she says. “What would you do if you found out I did something terrible?”
Her old partner pauses. “Depends. Did you drown an infant? Torch an orphanage? Blow up an entire station?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Then we’ll continue to get along. I’m not exactly a saint so I’m not going to judge. Your moral compass is better-made than mine, in any case.” Thannarat drapes a towel over her. “My clothes will sit on you like a sack, but the bathrobe should do you right. There’s plenty of space. Do you want to stay the night?”
Recadat tries to track the direction of Thannarat’s gaze, to divine whether it ever lingered on her. The towel is loose and she wants. For more than a decade she has wanted. In Thannarat’s absence it was a daydream, fondly thought of but safely inert. In her presence it is a tide and now it overflows. “Did you ever . . . ” She grabs Thannarat’s shirt, clenching tight, imagining the hard flesh underneath, the scaffolding of augments. Imagining this pillar of potency rising and falling above her. “Did you ever love anyone but Eurydice? Even a little? Even for a minute, a second, a passing fancy?”
Thannarat’s eyes widen and Recadat thinks that finally this is the moment, the point of mutual realization; that their history will fall into place and then they’ll open a path into the future together. She can see it in the deep umber of Thannarat’s irises, the slight parting of her mouth.
“I’ve always—” Cowardice blunts her. She tries again. “Thannarat, I’ve always . . . ”
The bathroom door swishes open. A woman leans in, her lavish mouth curved. “Detective, have we a guest? So rude that you didn’t introduce us. Please call me Daji, lovely stranger. I am Thannarat’s regalia.”
Recadat stares, rooted to the spot. The woman is voluptuous and short, her skin the flushed gold of sunrise roses, so perfect that it is at once evident she is artifice—that she cannot possibly be anything but an AI’s proxy. Hair like the tail of a black comet, threaded through with spheres of gold, a pointed vixen’s chin and small nose and enormous limpid eyes. Exactly the kind of woman Thannarat likes, tailor-made to her tastes. It dawns on Recadat that the lounge has been decorated around the regalia. An entire room, and the rest of the suite likely, configured to adorn Daji.
Her guts twist. Outwardly she returns the woman’s—the AI’s—pleasantries. But it is autopilot, and the way Daji and Thannarat touch each other confirm the truth. Thannarat’s hand on the regalia’s waist. Daji’s thumb stroking Thannarat’s bicep.
There’s never been a promise between Thannarat and Recadat, never a seed that did not fruit because the soil was fallow. There has only ever been false hope, a foolish delusion on her part.
Don’t you want her? Her lover’s voice pours into her ear like cool water. Don’t you want her, Recadat, like you want a beautiful butterfly? A specimen pinned under glass for your pleasure and perusal. All yours, always.
Chapter Five
Recadat leaves for her own room toward midnight. I almost ask her to stay, and know she would if I do. In the end I stop myself from saying anything, from indicating at all that I understood her. Instead I acted oblivious until she was gone; what else was there to do. Perhaps if I pretend I did not notice. Perhaps if I pretend that ten years ago I felt nothing for her. This way the cracks can be papered over.
To Daji I say, “I’m surprised you showed yourself to Recadat.”
“I like to mark my territory—it’s important for other women to know what is mine, and that I have the teeth to defend the fact. You know why she’s upset, don’t you?”
“I couldn’t possibly imagine why.”
She plays with one of the particulate grapes, pinching it between her fingers; juices run down her palm then disappear into nothing. “Oh, Detective, how did ever you survive without feminine intuition?”
“I’m a woman,” I say mildly, though I know what she means. There are women like me and Recadat, and there are women like Daji. The hard and the soft, the steel and the satin. “So what, according to your honed feminine intuition, got under Recadat’s skin?”
Her smirk is vulpine. “Haven’t you known her a long time? You should be able to answer that question.”
“We were colleagues and field partners, yes.”
“Tell me,” Daji says, “how you really felt about her all those years ago.”
I’ve never been in a position to feel interrogated; I do now. It’s not my habit to unburden myself, voluntarily or not. Thannarat, I’ve always . . . “Is it truly pertinent?”
“I’m particular. And I don’t share.”
So yielding in bed; so aggressive out of it. Were she any other woman, I’d have rebuked her, reminded her that I do not need her as much as she does me—that is the case for most of my casual relationships. “I was attracted to Recadat. I hid it well—I was not going to hurt my wife that way—and Recadat never noticed how I felt or pretended not to.”
“Or she returned your feelings.” Daji’s tone is carefully neutral. “But kept it to herself out of respect for your marriage.”
I know that, now; I can still feel Recadat’s fingers digging into my shirt. Holding on the way she’d hold onto a lifeline. Holding on the same way she did when I carried her out of that basement. I want to protect this, I remember thinking, because she was the only one I could save that terrible night.
“If you choose her,” my regalia goes on, “then I’ll not stand in the way of it. She’s important to you and now you have the liberty to pursue her. I’ll still fulfill my duties to you in the Divide.”
Here is a little piece of fiction I told myself: after Eurydice divorced me, I didn’t reach out to Recadat because by then, I’d taken on one client too many that belonged on the wrong side of the law. Contact with me—at that point a private investigator who consorted with criminals—would have jeopardized Recadat’s career. When I’m more honest with myself I know the truth is far less practical, far less altruistic. I didn’t want to come to her weak and broken by grief. I am the shield. I am the fortress. It is not in me to seek refuge in others. Pride stopped me from having what I had wanted for so long.
Ten years against a single second. Long nights at stakeouts and pre-dawn drinks in disreputable bars, against a woman who appeared to me as an exquisite corpse and upended my imagination.
“I’m not throwing you away.” Air passes into me like knives, but that soon eases. Decisions cannot be postponed forever. In the field it is reached on the brink of microseconds, the difference between being behind cover and having your skull riddled with bullets. “I won’t exchange you for what might be, when I already have what is.”
Daji takes my hand, holding it tight. “I’ll strive to be worthy of you. I’ll be your utmost, your lodestar, your weapon. Always I’ll submit to you, yield to you in all things.”
It sounds like an oath or a marriage vow. I gather her to me and imagine what it’d be like, to be wedded to an AI. “There’s something I’d like to see.”
She must have read my inten
t, for her face turns still. “It’s not classified, no. But why would you want to?”
“I want to look, up close, at what’s in store if I falter. Reminders are useful. They give you discipline.”
“Fine.” Daji purses her lips. “Before we go, I want to give you extra protection.”
Her fox proxy climbs into my lap and begins to stretch and flatten, malleable as mercury. It is slightly unnerving to watch, though it happens fast, fluvial nanites twisting and reshaping until the proxy splits in perfect mitosis. When it is done, the fox has turned into a pair of gloves, matte black with subtle redshift whorls.
“They’re better than military-grade,” she says. “And they’re less conspicuous than carrying a little fox around.”
I pick one glove up, bending a finger, feeling the texture. It makes me think of carbyne, though far more supple; I try not to think about where the fox’s fangs and claws went, or how this transmutation appears to defy the conservation of mass. “You want me to wear you so my hands are inside you at all times?”
“That proxy doesn’t have that sort of sensory receptors, I’m not doing this to fulfill a fetish.” Daji taps her chin. “Although now that you mention it, I could implement some arrays . . . ”
The gloves, of course, are a perfect fit.
The place I want to see is located in Libretto’s center, part of the complex that holds the Cenotaph: sacrosanct to attacks, accessible only to duelists. Fifth floor, the exterior of it clad in fractal glass so that when I look at it all I can see is an infinity of reflections. The door is unguarded. Deceptive—anyone who should not be here would have been removed long before they reach this corridor. Holographic letters mark the facility simply as The Gallery.
Entering it is like stepping inside a glacier. A hall that appears to outsize its exterior, though I know that’s illusory—even the Mandate must obey the laws of physics. The illumination is mentholated and relentless. To the left of me is a door marked Domestic Life, to the right is Competitive Spirit, and ahead are Engaging in Art and Human Gaze. They are plain labels, nonthreatening, the same as one might see at any corporate office.
Shall Machines Divide the Earth Page 9
