by Neil Clarke
Surreptitiously, Heilui searches the faces around them for a trace of the foreign, perhaps a declaration of suspicious intent etched into the downturn of a mouth, sewn into the hem of a skirt or sleeve, a glimpse of the butterflies emblem. But she finds nothing, sighting no set of features that is not everyday and ordinary to her, no complexion as startling as Kerttu’s or a nose so angular. She does not find the man who slaughtered countries, the man who once owned her wife.
“Something’s making you uncomfortable.” Heilui loops her arm through Kerttu’s. “What is wrong?”
“I’m the only foreigner here.” Kerttu has switched to Dakman, harsh and rolling.
“Oh, you don’t need to worry—the staff here is perfectly used to foreigners. There are expatriates all over Kowloon, of every nationality you can imagine. I’ll put you in touch with them, if you like.”
“By law I’m forbidden from making contact with those from the shattered continent, just as I’m forbidden from pursuing my previous specialty. I’m wearing certain implants to ensure my compliance. I appreciate your thought, Doctor.”
At the tailor, Kerttu is imaged by a dozen mannequins that revolve slowly on their feet, laughing and animated as they flicker from style to style, season to season. In the end she chooses a postmodern keipou, unpatterned black sheathing her like carapace. Sleeveless, high crescent collars, unrelieved contrast between fabric and complexion making a monochrome print of Kerttu. “I lost much and there was never a funeral,” she explains the color. “I need to mourn. I expect I’ll always be mourning.”
But this, like everything else, is said with distance as though discussing someone else’s grief.
Their next stop is the Shau Kei Wan Temple, where Tinhau presides. Not the most traditional choice when it comes to matrimony, but Heilui has a special fondness for the sea goddess, and this temple is one of the few where Kwunyam is depicted in her male aspect while the war god Kwantai is presented as a woman: green-robed and armored, puissant with restrained fury. Heilui shows Kerttu the correct paper offerings to make, the right number of virtual incenses to ignite. They shake kaucim cups side by side, have the cast of their fortune read by streamed oracles.
It belatedly occurs to Heilui, on their way back, to ask Kerttu if she is a monotheist. Her wife shrugs, a peculiarly foreign gesture. “My faith rests in the belief that the human capability for innovation and malice is infinite. I admit no other gods, pray to no other pantheon. I’ve never been disappointed.”
Back at the Lan house they are ambushed at the gate, a gaggle of nieces and nephews swarming over Kerttu. Heilui presses a sheaf of red envelopes into her wife’s hand, each filled with account chips. “One per head,” she says, grinning. Under the shade of a butterfly tree, one of her mothers is waiting; she knows what that look means. “Don’t let them get greedy. Make them say the magic phrase first.”
Kerttu holds the envelopes loosely and stares in bemusement, to a high-pitched chorus of gong hei fat choi. Heilui draws aside to join Mother Meitin under the fluttering, winged canopy. “We need to talk.” Meitin does not quite glance sidelong at Kerttu. “About . . . that.”
“She’s not a that, Mother.”
“Are you going to have children with her?” Meitin frowns. “They’d turn out looking rather dead. And her table manners! I thought the Institute had the foreign ones trained well?”
“She will adapt.” Equivocating. “And she is unique. I don’t think I could have found anyone like her at the university or through any of your friends, or . . . ”
Her mother sniffs. “An acquired taste, I’m sure. Well, your choices are your own and you’re a woman grown. At least she’s educated, I suppose.”
Heilui refrains from pointing out that as a biochemist, Kerttu’s credentials are more impressive than most. Instead she watches her wife keep the envelopes out of the children’s reach in one hand, distributing them with the other to the niece or nephew who has approximated a correct pronunciation of Aunt Kerttu.
Over the next weeks Kerttu drifts uneasily within the family home, colliding with or grazing past elders. She does not succeed in endearing herself to them, though Heilui notes with relief that the children have taken a liking to Kerttu, for her occidental novelty if nothing else. Any time she has a free moment, Kerttu would obsessively spend it on the simulation.
Heilui monitors Kerttu’s progress, trying to use the map of her wife’s virtual wanderings to create an image that would pierce the inscrutable, remote shell. A crucial piece that would make the Kerttu she is seeing cohere with the Kerttu the mass murderer who created weapons that destroyed the shattered continent, the war criminal. Often she thinks of asking, Did you understand what you were doing? At the beginning, she mustn’t have, a prodigy whose supple intelligence was exploited, whose mind was slowly conditioned to regard her work as normal.
Even then it is difficult to be afraid of Kerttu, who inhabits Heilui’s life with the soft focus of a ghost. Difficult to connect her with those atrocities, the solidity of statistics and the hard industrial edges of war. But then it is difficult to connect the shattered continent—smooth and pretty while it lived—with its history of dialects born and annexed, its first contacts negotiated through a language of exploitation and expansion.
“You’ve been distant. Am I boring you?” Kerttu asks one evening as they share a dinner out in the city.
“Certainly not,” Heilui says, laughing. “You have been nothing but delightful.”
Kerttu cuts her pasta into fine, thin slices, scraping off the layer of plum sauce. The restaurant purports to serve the cuisines of the shattered continent, though perhaps less authentically than Kerttu is used to. “I don’t think your family would agree, though I’ve made efforts.”
“My family is your family too.” Heilui rests her chin on her hand. “Some of them you’ll never win over, it’s just how they are. There have been feuds where siblings couldn’t forgive each other on their deathbeds. Lan elders are hard to please, no doubt about that.”
“Except you are harder still. You haven’t . . . ” A frown. “You haven’t asked anything of me. Yet you must have bought me to fulfill a function, and I don’t think it’s to satisfy the fantasy of possessing a person whole and entire. You haven’t done anything to exert your ownership.”
“I like you just the way you are. Is that so hard to believe?” She glances at her shell, taking a sip of honeyed lime. Expecting to hear her interrogator’s voice again. Even today she remains ignorant of the woman’s name or rank. Black ops. Counter-terrorism. “Would you like to try the simulation in immersive mode, Kerttu? You need a headset and will have to plug into the server I’ve got at home. Not perfect, but perhaps . . . ?”
Kerttu’s breath hitches, audibly, as though that idea has shocked her pulse to a halt. “I would love nothing more. You do me too much kindness.”
“Not at all—we’ll immerse together, yes? You can grade me on the simulation.”
Several nights later, she starts awake to a hand over hers, long-fingered and tentative. Blearily she sits up to find Kerttu kneeling by her bed, a shadow dressed in gossamer lace. “Doctor.” Kerttu’s voice comes petal-soft. “Will you invite me in?”
Wide awake now, Heilui rubs at her eyes and stares at her wife, then at the bed on the other end of their shared room. “I think you misunderstand. I’m not—what’s between us doesn’t have to be a transaction, not like that.”
Kerttu’s hand withdraws. “I should earn my keep, my care. I have said before that it’s no ordeal—unless I hold so little appeal?”
“It’s not that.” Heilui scoots inward, making room. “Come in. We can sleep together, in the most literal sense.”
“Like sisters?” A trick of filtered moonlight makes it seem as though ice crystals have caught on Kerttu’s eyelashes. A snow-woman of Jatbun myth, visiting in the night to drink her lover’s spirit.
“Like wife and wife. Not all marriages need to be heat and desire. Or at least that’s
not what I want. If it’s what you . . . you can find others for that. I wouldn’t mind. But for me—”
“Oh.” Exhaled surprise. “I see, I think.”
Kerttu climbs in beside her, awkward, hesitating. A sigh loosens from her lips as she settles in against Heilui’s warmth and her arm snakes over, one hand splayed on Heilui’s stomach. “Is this all right, Doctor?” Asked as though she fears she might singe Heilui with that much contact, that much closeness.
She laces her fingers through Kerttu’s. “It’s lovely.”
They spend the night like that, entwined. They spend the next likewise, and the next after, learning the rhythm of each other’s breath, the curve of each other’s spine and the width of each other’s waist. A nascent dialect of touch, a first contact negotiated through comfort. A slow formation of matrimony like the founding of a country, while Heilui swallows back the secret code of guilt.
The first time they stand in front of the server together is a clear morning where icicles crackle on the window like chimes. The simulator box is built of blueshift alloy, radiant with cold, an artifact of the world’s ruin and its eternal winter. With a command Heilui logs in and draws out two headsets. One she turns over to Kerttu, the other she slips around her own temple, a mesh with the texture of satin.
“Anything particular you’d like to see?” she asks.
“The city.” Kerttu touches the headset’s lattice. “The club.”
Within the offspring of Heilui’s thought, cities throng the shattered continent like firmaments lit up in their thousands. But she knows from watching her wife which one Kerttu means—the city of her birth, the capital of her native land.
The program pushes under their skin, flares across their senses, a susurration of colors and ice. Then they are side by side in the Tavastia, backstage. Darkened interior, hexagon walls dressed in facets and prism coins. Overhead, mannequins sway gently, many-jointed arachnid limbs painted in patterns of cracked granite.
Kerttu pushes at the mannequins, making them clack. At her height they are in easy reach; she strokes their bald heads and thumbs their ovoid eye sockets. “My mother always longed to sing here. I don’t remember her face, her voice, even her name. At six she sold me to the syndicate. I fetched a good price—a mind such as I own doesn’t come by every day—and I wonder if she ever got her wish, to perform on a Tavastia stage. The first ten years I was kept entirely in the citadel to be imprinted for loyalty. By the time I was allowed to leave, she was gone. Or didn’t want to be found.”
“I’m sorry,” Heilui says before she can stop herself.
“No need, Doctor. My mother, she wasn’t an educated or well-off woman. The syndicate gave me a life of ease and refinement, my intelligence nurtured and honed to its utter best. Had my mother raised me according to her means, today I’d be just another refugee in the camps, if I even survived.” Kerttu clasps her hands behind her back—in the virtuality she wears not her grieving black but a peridot shirt and gray trousers, an overcoat in duochrome indigo. “There are no people here.”
She follows her wife to the stage. It is full of unmanned instruments made from jagged blades and razorglass tendons. The floor is strobe-lit but empty of dancers; puppets sit by the side, prim and inanimate. “Anything I populate this world with would just be automatons—as complex a set of heuristics as I can buy, but they wouldn’t emulate human behavior with any degree of verisimilitude. I’ve thought of modeling you, actually.”
“I hope you’ll agree that it is not hubris but fact that makes me point out I’m not exactly a population average. Not culturally, not in disposition, not in politics. Modeling those from the camps would likely yield better results.”
“A population comprised entirely of averages would be terribly unrealistic, but I take your point.”
Kerttu tugs at her sleeve as though to test whether the physics engine holds up to scrutiny. “I have a request to make of you, Doctor. You may believe me ungrateful—”
“Please,” Heilui says. “I’ve no reason to think that.”
“May I go into the city on my own? I wish to familiarize myself with its ligatures and arteries, to find my own path climbing its ribs and vertebrae all sharp with salt. I wish to know this island where I will spend the rest of my life as your wife.”
Heilui’s pulse picks up. “You hardly need my permission. Your shell should be loaded with guidance routines, but if you run into any trouble you only need to call me.”
“You are far more generous a client than I could ever dream of.” Kerttu makes again that ancient bow, as elegant as it is incongruous with her outfit. Heilui realizes with a start that no matter the correctness of her gesture, no matter her fluency in Gwongdungwa, Kerttu will never fit quite right.
On Kerttu’s initial excursions, Heilui refrains from trailing her. Her wife comes home late each time; Heilui never asks questions and simply waits in bed, her arms bangled in moonlight. When Kerttu has bathed and changed she would come to card her fingers through Heilui’s hair, root to tip, until they fall asleep.
It is on Kerttu’s fifth outing that Heilui tracks her—a bite of conscience, a twist of shame. She monitors her wife’s wanderings through markets that snake up pagodas, through secret streets behind amber pavilions, past the honeycombs of waterfront gardens where hybrid peacocks strut in sunset trails. Heilui tells herself Kerttu is monitored in any case, but she can’t get rid of the certainty that she’s committing a small betrayal.
When Heilui at last follows her wife in person, it is down the harbor where beaked ferries knife the waters to white ribbons. She sits on the mezzanine of a floating restaurant, watching the world through sea spray. Watching as Kerttu enters the planetarium in her black keipou. Soon a man in the same shade follows her. Tall like Kerttu and just as colorless, a creature of her race and nation, raised on snow nova-bright. Heilui studies him: he is gaunt to the point of starvation but well-dressed, hair a few shades darker than Kerttu’s, a skull of cadaverous planes. In the Institute, no doubt his caretakers would have warmed his features with cosmetics to make him less startling to prospective clients.
The two do not leave together; the man lingers behind, his gaze intent on Kerttu as she exits. From this far Heilui cannot appraise his expression—those harsh angles make him, like Kerttu, difficult to read—but she thinks he seems painfully lost. As much as a dangerous terrorist can seem lost. She tries to imagine him as the shadow behind assassinations of heads of state, the shadow behind the sales of private armies and weaponry and untold destruction. But as with Kerttu, she can only see an ordinary man. Foreign, but merely mortal. He doesn’t even sport the corpse-butterfly tattoo anywhere that she can glimpse.
A wanted man who surfaces, exposing himself, just to retrieve Heilui’s wife.
The second time he comes for Kerttu, it is on a rooftop maze.
An art installment writ large, the maze is composed—syllabaric symphony—of elemental strands: wood and metal, fire and earth, and water to complete the quintet. Batik lions move against jade tortoises on a steam tapestry. Patchwork topiaries flourish on inked wires and luminous nesting dolls. Guidance materializes as a calligraphic girl, torso and limbs all made of brushstrokes, shedding proverbs and verses to give Heilui directions. She waits for the creature to begin whispering in a mild human contralto, but it remains only rote and routes. Overhead, starlings flit from candle-roof to platinum bough.
By the time Heilui reaches Kerttu, the girl is down to quartered ink and halved characters.
She takes cover behind a spread of bronze longma and marble rabbits. And there they are, a tableau like theater-dolls awaiting an audience: he a statue in black from neck to ankle, elongated limbs sheathed in crisp, expensive tailoring. Kerttu is seated on a bench of braided rime and gridded kites, her hair a pale corona. As if given life by Heilui’s spectating gaze, Kerttu stirs to motion and turns away from him. On her lap she holds the kintsugi bowl. “Yes,” she is saying, “I imagine the bowl holds enough genetic mat
erial with which to forge identity templates and authenticate my release from Institute trackers.”
“Good.” His voice is a scratch of stone chipping at wood. He runs a knuckle down his lapel, smoothing the impeccable fabric, a nervous tic. “That should suffice. I’ll contact you again when I’ve made the necessary arrangements.”
“No.”
The man’s hand slows then goes still, as of an automaton winding down. “Are you afraid, Kerttu? I’ve never known you for a coward.”
She looks up, her gaze ensnaring his, the gravity of a pyre drawing in moths. Heilui has learned her wife’s moods and in that moment she knows there’s no hesitation. Kerttu’s corneas seem like lamp-glass to a flame, small but absolute. “I’ve never been afraid. I’m just not leaving with you.”
A gunshot like a soldier’s final breath. An eruption of starlings, crying out.
The man falls, too fast for someone who should be bird-light, for a body that ought to float like gossamer or shredded ghosts. Where his blood touches Kerttu’s clothes it does not show; where it lands on Kerttu’s head it beads ruby-vivid against the snowdrift of her hair, the white slope of her brow.
Bursts of communication, armored men and women spilling from between the maze’s strands: a rush of black, acid tides. They collect the man’s body, quick and efficient, folding him into a casket. A puppet returning to its box.
Between all this, Kerttu’s expression never changes, as though his death belongs to someone else.
A day later, Heilui receives a copy of her dossier. It has been wiped clean as if nothing has ever happened, as though she’s never been made to sit shivering in a metal chair, to answer question after question. To single out faces for betrayal. The copy deletes itself after one read. She doesn’t hear from her interrogator; she doesn’t expect she ever will. A vulgar touch—several sums transferred into her account, absurdly large, acrimoniously transactional. She doesn’t return them, knowing she can’t afford the luxury of pride.
