The woman’s file says she came from a world called Gurudah, held by the Warlord of the Comet. She has incurred no infraction—not even one—either in the camps or in Penumbra, having answered neither provocation from wardens or other inmates. Her physical condition is exceptional, apparently from hard labor: her interviews indicate she used to work as a colony technician and agricultural supervisor. Evaluations show that her knowledge bases, specialized and general, match that assertion. This is a star candidate. “Warden,” Suzhen says, “would you mind leaving her to me?”
They are left alone, if monitored. Suzhen’s guidance is providing her with interview routines, the questions she could ask to break the ice and begin the interrogation—why do you want to be here, what do you see yourself giving to Anatta, why do you want to become part of this world, do you know the prime directive of Samsara. Cicatrices pock Ovuha’s collarbones and throat, sites of implants that have long since been removed and left to badly scar. Scans have detected no neural links or augmentations left on Ovuha, who likely bargained those away for covert passage on a series of ships. First material belongings, then body parts. Many arrive here missing kidneys, lungs, limbs.
“Tell me something.” This is not part of the Bureau-mandated script; Suzhen rarely follows those. “Pretend we are strangers at a chance meeting, waiting for the same train. It’s running late. That doesn’t happen much, and we’ve got time to kill.”
Ovuha regards her for a few seconds, the corners of her mouth lifting. “In a bid to be interesting, I’d ask, Do you know anything about hawks? I might show you this scar on my wrist—” She lifts her wrist, turns it. There is a scar, one among many on her body, that looks to have been the result of deep laceration. “Then I’d tell you a story of how I was too stubborn to let my mentor handle this one bird. I was determined to walk it that day, even though the poor animal was too new, too nervous, and it kept digging and digging in. Talons can do a lot of damage to human skin.”
The refugee’s voice has a smooth cadence, her Putonghua melodious. It’s not an accent Suzhen has ever heard and it is effortless, as though Ovuha often spoke it in her place of nativity. “You’re getting ahead of yourself, you were going to start with what hawks are like, the basics.”
“Of course. They’re some of the most difficult creatures to tame—a little like people. My first was the bitterest animal I’d ever seen; it hated me so viscerally, like my existence was this terrible injury, this mortal insult. When you look into its eyes, it’s easy to forget you’re both bigger and stronger. All that evolution as predator works in a hawk’s favor. The inside of their mouths! Such monsters. They almost don’t have any concept of fear. In that, nothing like people.”
She wonders if Ovuha has rehearsed this, though she can’t imagine any refugee planning to entertain a selection agent with anecdotes and factoids about hawks. “Are you more like a hawk, or like a person?”
“I would point to my shoes to show that I haven’t any talons. No wings or beaks. Yes, I believe I’m most like a person, if I am like anything.”
What a surprise, Suzhen thinks, that Ovuha has such a pristine record. It’s not that she is sarcastic or insolent, but Suzhen would have thought someone like this would anger a warden almost at first sight. The natural comportment, the lack of submission. This is a person who acts as if she’s not gone through the camps, a person whose dignity is preternaturally intact. The strength of feeling that seizes Suzhen jolts her. It is not admiration; it is fury that freezes her blood and thickens her gullet, irrational and cardiac. “And how is a hawk tamed?” How calm she can make her voice.
Ovuha tilts her head. “When it is captured, the hawk catastrophizes and prepares for the worst. In this moment of terror its brain resets, becomes a blank state on which the trainer may etch new neural connections, new associations. The hawk is exposed to sensory overload. It is starved and deprived of rest. It is shocked into obedience, and it learns to fear something as innocuous as a glove. After, you’ll have a beast of a time flying the bird, and every occasion you let it off the creance is a gamble. Will it return in submission, or will it overcome the terror you’ve taught it at last and flee? But for the most part this method works, and it is favored for speed. It is true: there’s much more alike between hawk and human than I made it out, and I haven’t been consistent. And so you, a stranger I’ve met at a train platform and whose bench I’m sharing, have caught me out on falconry.”
Is this true submission, Suzhen wonders, or just a gesture at contrition. Ovuha knows she’s displeased the selection agent but she is, still, not obeisant. As quickly as it came, Suzhen’s rage dissipates. In its place, a nebulous thing that’s nearly like relief. Her breath evens. Something inside her loosens. “You’re very odd, Ovuha. But I’ll sponsor you. For the next six months I will be your caseworker and you a probationary resident. I trust you will work hard and not let me down. Welcome to Anatta.”
Finally, to say that.
Chapter Two
“Good morning, citizen. Today you have scheduled an orientation with Potentiate Ovuha at ten thirty. She has been chipped and awaits you at House Penumbra, and her assigned residence is at the Jasmine. For the next seven days you are released from your duties at the Bureau, and you may request more time as required to optimize your potentiate.”
Suzhen lies in her bed, staring up at the soothing waveforms that run across her ceiling, their dawn-gray lightening to match the morning. Silver transmuting to faded bruise. She browses through the guidelines of what she is supposed to do with a potentiate, not that she hasn’t perused them many times to the point of fixation. There is always that fantasy she’s harbored, of showing compassion as she has been—only no, that is wrong; when it was their turn the agent gave them nothing and it was her mother who wrung survival out of stone, who carved so much out of so vanishingly little. “I’m going to arrange her finances,” she says aloud, though the rest of her wishes nothing more than to stay in bed. “Then I’m taking her to shop for clothes and toiletries.”
At home her guidance manifests as a dollish creature the size of her hand. Its fox face, an inverted isosceles, regards her with cool patience. “The potentiate will need to prepare for her first test, citizen.”
“I’ll drill her on civic duties soon enough.” Toiletries, clothes, accessories, the essentials of personhood. To own things—the frivolities most of all—is to feel human. Especially after that long in detainment, though Ovuha’s file does indicate she’s been in the camp for only a couple months, in Penumbra for one. Three months in total, the fastest she’s ever seen any candidate get out and permitted into civilization. Even then, three months in limbo, stripped of name and belongings and wants. She thinks of what Ovuha said about the taming of a hawk.
She has her guidance and house drone to prepare an outfit, instructing it for semi-formal, slightly showy. When she’s done eating breakfast, she comes back to her room to see a high-necked dress, the upper half a complex honeycomb, the lower half a narrow skirt that stops at her knee on one side and drapes over her ankle on the other. It suffices. She turns to her cosmetics and animated tattoos, and has the wall project her face. Bronze glaze for her eyelids, a fluttering rose-gold flower on her right cheek, foiled-platinum eyelash extensions. She continues until her cheeks are nearly as sculpted as her guidance’s, her nose as sharp as a blade.