Chapter 37
Eight times eight
One night two quads past the equinox, Iriset dreams of Singix, of being Singix and being herself sitting beside Singix, all at the same time, in the way of dreams. And in the way of Iriset mé Isidor, it is a sex dream, all peach-blossom flushes and arched necks, perfect lines of jaw and chin, soft cries, so tiny and sweet and desperate.
Iriset wakes up as she comes, her legs pressed tight together, wretchedly alone, but so very warm as the orgasm ripples throughout her body. Even her cheeks are on fire.
She drifts back to sleep, wiping tears from her eyes because she misses Singix; she’d do anything to have saved her.
In the morning Iriset washes perfunctorily and heads for the communal dining hall. She feels languid, lost in thoughts about redirecting blowback.
“Ah, what a beauty! How could this one not know such a beauty?” someone says. Iriset continues on, skirting around a boulder marking the edge of one courtyard to the next.
“Lovely thing is a Rivermouth refugee?”
It’s Roc Aliel, sounding suspicious. Iriset looks over to see what the commotion is.
The leader of the Cult of Hopeful Design is a boulder-like man in his early fifties, with a not unattractively craggy facial structure (though of course Iriset’s bar for attraction is low) and Sarian coloring, with a light silvering of his hair and deep laugh lines at his bright black eyes.
He has no human architecture as far as Iriset can discern.
And right now his attention is directly on her.
The thing is, Iriset and Roc have met several times.
They’ve engaged in lively debates about the hope potentials in the Holy Design, and whether Roc should join Aharté’s priesthood when it appears.
(“It seems like the Silent Chapel are the ones deciding what people are allowed to hope for,” he’d mused, to which Iriset said, “Don’t make that sound like a good thing. ”)
“Roc?” Iriset says.
Roc frowns dramatically. “This man is known to the lady?”
Iriset actually looks behind her. There’s no one else. She glances back at him, and his intelligent eyes are taking in all the details about her, and something about the set of his mouth and shoulders puts Iriset’s hackles up. “Roc Aliel, what is happening?” she demands.
Something odd ripples his expression, and he cocks his head. “That eye… is the opal eye of Iriset Sunderer.”
“Because that’s who I am!” she cries.
Roc stares at her, not quite comprehending her mirané words. But he looks her up and down, and Iriset feels offended and, yes, fine, turned on. She had a lot of sexy dreams last night!
The cultist grabs her elbow in a big hand and pulls her with him, wearing a scowl. She hurries along as Roc takes her to the nearest bathing chamber.
He thrusts her before a mirror, and Iriset almost chokes on a gasp.
She’s looking at Singix.
She flings her hands up to her cheeks; the reflection does the same.
She touches her eyebrow—Singix’s eyebrow!
—and her wide, smooth cheek, the corner of her perfect soft mouth.
Tiny chin, big eyes flat on the bottom, rounded over the top with thick but short lashes.
Perfect white skin, smooth and pearly. One eye is deep brown, the other is glaring green-blue opal. Singix.
Iriset blinks, and tears fall in perfect straight lines down the center of her cheeks.
Singix. She dreamed of her, longed for her, and in her sleep Iriset changed her face, her—oh fuck, the ghost writing is there, too. Iriset lifts her hands and sees the glitter of silvery Ceres sigils.
She laughs, sinking down to her knees. Everything but the opal eye!
“Iriset Sunderer is capable indeed,” Roc Aliel murmurs.
“Genius,” she corrects, sniffing.
Roc takes her out like that, into the city for breakfast at a café on the southern border of Rivermouth, where the spider bombs didn’t reach.
He stares at her, and Iriset can’t blame him.
She knows how perfectly symmetrical Singix is.
“A beloved woman from the Ceres Remnants,” she says, when he asks who she looks like.
He’s never heard of the Ceres Remnants, which makes Iriset intensely sad. But she says, “The chain of seven islands in the southern sea. It may be that the Ceres have not established there yet, in this time.”
“Are all Ceres so beautiful?” Roc asks.
“Ceres are just people, too,” she answers, sliding thin slices of raw river fish through the spicy sauce on her plate. They go well with the savory porridge Roc recommended.
Roc stabs his fork into roasted purple potatoes. “Is the beautiful woman a follower of Aharté?”
“No,” Iriset says softly, the way Singix would.
“This old cultist thought there was no other way to be in the empire of the future.”
“How is Roc Aliel so knowledgeable of Aharté’s ways and the future?”
“Lyric Aharté spent weeks recovering in Rivermouth,” Roc reminds her.
“Roc liked what Lyric Aharté had to say. Likes combat formations, though Lyric’s steps are not the same schools as what this old man is familiar with.
Interesting, though, and relaxing.” Roc takes a bite of his food and chews thoughtfully before continuing.
“Silence sounds like a good philosophy to bring the small kings together. This cultist has spent years convincing others of the way of Hopeful Design, and can recognize a unifying philosophy.”
“The world under the Vertex Seal is not more hopeful,” Iriset grouses.
“For whom?” Roc shrugs. “The world must change, and when the moon is trapped and the Moon-Eater unraveled, a story will need to be told for it all to make sense to the people. Silence is different enough to be a counterpoint to the Moon-Eater, a revolutionary ideology that can be sold.” He huffs a laugh.
“Roc Aliel can sell it. This old cultist looks forward to doing so!”
“I hate that,” Iriset murmurs in mirané. She peers at him, thinking he looks nothing like a mirané prince. Not in bone structure or symmetry, not in skin color or hair texture. But if all the political rulers of the future crater city are mirané, the same can’t be said for the Silent Chapel.
The café seating is outside, because Roc likes to people watch and is well known enough they’ve been interrupted several times as passersby call out greetings or bring flowers over to the cultist’s pretty friend.
Iriset asks, “Why isn’t everyone here perfectly beautiful like this face?
Why does Roc have a crooked nose and why does that gardener in the fort have the scar across the mouth? ”
Roc shrugs. “This face is good, and scars aren’t always flaws. If everyone was so perfectly designed as Iriset’s current form, wouldn’t it be boring?”
“That can’t be it. And don’t tell me it’s money.”
“It’s trends. A while ago, before this one’s time, there was a phase when human aesthetics leaned toward symmetry and perceived perfections, but then someone picked a mesh to turn their hair into brilliant emerald feathers or their teeth sharp, and a new trend was born.
Roc’s grandmother spoke of elongated necks being especially popular during Grandmother’s childhood, and eventually nobody could hold a head up without a harness, and another time there was a surge in chimeras with extra fingers or fewer fingers or two thumbs while everyone figured out what was the most efficient and attractive.
Roc’s uncle had six fingers and said it would have been more interesting to have an extra penis—but Uncle Femori’s spouse said no. ”
Iriset sputters a laugh. “A lot of human redesign aesthetics must be about sex.”
Roc nods. “But people find very different things attractive or tolerable, and not just body parts or gender affectation. What is the most beautiful hair texture? What is the most beautiful eye color? Skin tone? Gender design? Each is a stupid question because it’s impossible to reach agreement.”
“Without oppression,” Iriset says, thinking again of the miran.
“This one supposes if Aharté’s Silence dictates balance and symmetry necessary for beauty but forbids redesign, there must be a lot of conflict about sex and superiority.
Does Iriset truly find symmetry, perfection such an ideal in beauty?
If so, this Roc will let go of any dreams of seducing Iriset.
” He taps a finger to his crooked—probably broken more than once—nose.
Iriset smiles, thinking of Lyric’s freckles. But they’re gone now, stripped away by scars and violence. Her face falls. “Roc is welcome to keep trying,” she says, caught between flirting and grieving.
As they walk back to the fort, Roc confesses his right arm is a prosthetic, that he lost use of this birth arm during the Renovation War.
The prosthetic is designed, but unless she dug in she’d never know—and Roc requested a scar at the location of attachment, so he would never lose track.
Never forget. Because he could forget. His prosthetic arm feels exactly the way his remaining birth arm feels.
So he is not against aesthetic redesign, he is against extravagance and injury and depravity.
Iriset asks what is the line, to him, between exploration and depravity, but the earthquake warning chimes sing out, and they pause to locate a safe zone. Roc sighs, complaining if they hadn’t had their second coffees, they might have made it back through Rivermouth fortress shields.
But Iriset is glad to be out for the earthquake.
They’re every day, once a day now, and soon to be twice, then thrice, until by the quad before the solstice, the quakes will be nearly constant.
Each earthquake is both a danger to the mitigation dome and an opportunity to improve it.
Iriset loves improving other people’s work.