“Remember the 15th,” suggests the Copywriting Consigliere, and the Adamant Wordsmith shakes her head: they used that with the 7th parallel last week.
“Fifty-four died,” she says, “You remain.” She sketches out a poster on the table, indicating bold capitals in a sweeping, baroque font, copious amounts of blood spatter, one lone soldier standing against a tide of white-shelled enemies, but falters halfway and stops when she meets the Transcriber’s gaze.
The Jejune Advocator looks down at the floor, then up at the ceiling, suggesting, hesitantly, “For Derse?”
The Tenet Transcriber picks up a Confectionary Combatant (sweet dough dipped in white chocolate and draped with fondant to resemble a Prospitian soldier) and bites into the head. She does not make a comment about how, day in and day out, she is surrounded by absolute dullards.
"If four hours of overtime won't solve it, nothing will," she says, "How about 'Join For the Fifty-Four?'"
She waits for objections. There are none, and she gives a satisfied nod.
“Now,” she says, gathering up her bag, “If you’ll excuse me.”
She jogs to catch up with the ten o’ clock trolley to her neighborhood, wedging a knitting needle into the door and prying it open just as the trolley starts moving forward. Grasping at a handrail, she ignores the baleful looks of the passengers she bumped into. She checks the clock. Thirty minutes late.
It’s a masquerade, and she barely has time to put her costume together, but, if she’s late, she might as well make an entrance. She paints her dark chitin with lavender gouache, dipping her arms and legs directly into the pot, and struggles into a dark green dress and red headdress. She goes out through the fire escape, almost pressed against the neighboring building as she rushes to the shuttle station down the street.
Once on the shuttle, she relaxes, arranging her headdress and smoothing the folds of her skirt. She’s only seven minutes from Skaia. There is a costume party in an old house not one mile from the battlefield, and its guest list bears her name.
The Grandisonant Advertiser cuts through damask with a chainsaw, a swipe that cleaves the cloth into jagged edges, shreds of fiber caught on her blade. Wasteful, perhaps, but it gives her photographs a certain edge of verisimilitude useful for a department that only sees the actual battlefield once a year. There is something counter-intuitively clean about a chainsaw: the efficiency of a single slice, how she only ever needs one when she’s out on the Front—
But she hasn’t been on the Front, not really, not for a while now. The only reason she uses a chainsaw now is for patterns, and the only reason she goes down to Skaia is for parties.
Wait.
Skaia. Parties.
She runs to her window, cranes her neck up to look at the clock tower in the square, then, cursing, ducks back in. She was supposed to be at a masquerade twenty minutes ago, and she hasn’t even put on her costume.
She nearly trips over her skirt as she hops on one foot, attempting to put a boot on while simultaneously changing her shirt, and ends up knocking over the container of red paint balanced precariously on the ledge of the bathtub.
The Advertiser stares at it for a while, a scarlet puddle spreading across her floor, orange against the golden tiles, and then lets out a loud volley of enthusiastic curses.
…She really hopes her neighbors didn’t hear that.
It takes a while to mop up the paint, and even then, it’s completely unsalvageable. She substitutes jade green, and though the color clashes with her costume, her hand is steady enough to ensure an even application.
She takes a ferry over, a golden ship filled with farmers gone to market and soldiers on leave, staring resolutely out the window to avoid eye contact with her fellow passengers. She spends the trip watching flickers of the future in the Skaian clouds—not as much as a trained seer, but flashes of color, the glint of light on a carapace’s shell, traces of futures that are not her own.
The Tenet Transcriber is not accustomed to being a wallflower.
The Tenet Transcriber is not accustomed to being a wallflower, and yet. Here she is, on the outskirts of an uninteresting conversation, nodding and smiling and completely unable to make witty remarks about the distinct harmonics of the Prospitian harp. She excuses herself and makes her way outwards, weaving past conversational groups formed during icebreakers she was absent for, giving mysterious nods to people she thinks she might recognize. Perhaps she should leave. She could go browse through some of the new broadsheets or read one of the books on her nightstand, or to a jazz bar and listen to an amateur banging away on purple-painted piano keys.
She comes out into the garden, and sees another carapace alone, approaching the house hesitantly, glancing back and forth from the map on the back of the invitation to the façade of the house itself.
“Let me guess,” says the Tenet Transcriber, sauntering down the staircase, “Plant?”
The other carapace looks up with a start. She’s painted green, draped in black cloth, pincers attached to her gloves and some sort of mandible mouthpiece. Grotesque costume aside, her joints are well formed, and the tilt of her head suggests a certain elegance that the Tenet Transcriber finds not unattractive.
“Your costume,” says the Transcriber, “I’m assuming you’re some sort of plant.”
“Oh. Um. Not exactly. I spilled the—I had to use a different color of paint than what I was planning on.”
“Horrorterror, then? Genetic experiment? Marrow-sucking monster?”
“The third one. See, my pincers are for crushing the shells of young children.” She raises her claws for inspection, snaps them once, twice.
“Ah. For a moment there, I thought your costume was referencing the topiary.”
It’s not that funny of a quip, even though the hedges do look like that outfit, but this startles the unknown carapace into a laugh— a high, bright, surprised sound that peters off into self-consciousness midway through.
There’s a stack of nametags and pens on a plinth by the door. Guests are supposed to choose a moniker, and the unknown carapace hesitates for a moment before scribbling down “Kanaya”. The Transcriber’s own nametag reads only “Rose”. She lingers by a particularly fragrant bush, as if she’s admiring the garden, but, tilting her head to suggest complete nonchalance, walks indoors with Kanaya anyway.
“Do you know the host?”
“No. I don’t think anyone does. Do you?”
“No. I just… got an invitation in the mail. No return address. Is this how they usually do things on the Moon?”
Kanaya speaks with the slightest hint of an accent, something soft rounding out her vowels and clipping the ends of her sentences. The Tenet Transcriber, no linguist herself, finds herself straining to catch each difference, even though the acoustics of the ballroom carry Kanaya’s voice enough for the Transcriber to hear it with ease.
“That accent’s mainland, then. I knew there was something about the “o”s.”
“Oh. Is it very noticeable?”
The Tenet Transcriber shrugs, the cloth about her shoulders shifting with the movement in a way that she hopes is becoming.
“Not in a bad way,” she says, “And you could say that I make a habit of noticing.”
She’s being ambiguous on purpose, but it’s the truth. She likes Kanaya’s accent quite a lot. It’s rustic without being coarse, her enunciation careful enough to create the impression that she chooses every phrase with care even when the words are practically tripping out of her mouth. And even if the Transcriber hadn’t been late, she thinks she would’ve noticed the delicate tapering at the edges of Kanaya’s eyes, or the way Kanaya’s hands make an abortive stutter-stop movement just as she replies:
“I only moved eight months ago. I’ve been away long enough to start getting invited to parties, I suppose. It’s not like mainlanders have many, or, well, not many like this. Sometimes we get together to drink alcoholic beverages until we begin to fall down repeatedly and declare affection for strangers, but we don’t dress up in funny outfits and go to… places like this.”
“What were you back then?” asks the Transcriber, and, when Kanaya’s only response is a quizzical look, clarifies: “Soldier or farmer?” She punctuates her question with a light tug at Kanaya’s sleeve, steering her out of the way of a couple dressed as Skaian clouds guiltily stepping outside. It was about time they got out of the doorway, anyway: it felt nice enough to linger at the edge of the ballroom, noticed only by one another, but the Transcriber has never been rude enough to stand in the path of carapaces she does not dislike.
“A soldier,” Kanaya replies, “Except I was the kind who spent a lot of time in communal gardens, hacking apart bits of the local vegetation.”
“A soldier and a farmer! Have you seen the third army, then?”
“The third what? Is that some sort of touring company?” Another slight flutter of Kanaya’s hands, as if in an attempt to grasp something that wasn’t there.
“Third army. Rumor has it that somewhere out there, crazed Prospitians and Dersites fight together under a blood-red banner… It’s horror story material.”
“I can’t really imagine that. Who would they fight?”
The Transcriber shrugs.
“Everyone, I suppose.”
She decides to, quite daringly, lay her fingertips on Kanaya’s arm, and Kanaya does not object. She leads her to the middle of the dance floor, where they abruptly stop, forcing twirling dancers to navigate around them.
“Whoever owns this place has a ghastly taste in décor,” she says.
“Yes.”
“The appetizers, however, were practically ambrosial.”
“I think they’re all gone now.”
“Yes.”
She is acutely aware of her hand still on Kanaya’s arm, of their feet nearly touching, of the drape of cloth against Kanaya’s neck.
“Do you…”
She stops, blinks, and starts again.
“Do you want to dance?”
“Yes.”
“I came late, too,” says Rose, deftly bypassing a large decorative rock placed in the middle of the hallway, “Overtime. I’m afraid that’s the occupational hazard of choosing a field because you want to be the cleverest person in the room.”
They’re upstairs looking for a quiet place to sit and speak, music from the ballroom still seeping up through the floorboards. They’d danced for an hour, even through the songs neither of them knew. Rose had made a comment about the grand masquerade tradition of “making shit up” and shifted her hand on the Grandisonant Advertiser’s back, stepping almost close enough to make the Advertiser click her knees with nerves.
“What do you do?” she asks, “For work, I mean.” Abruptly, she has a grand vision of Rose as a—a reporter, perhaps, or a florist, of bumping into her at a market stall or a bus station and declaring grandly that, after that one magical night at the masquerade, the Grandisonant Advertiser can’t get her out of her mind—
No. This is stupid. They’re probably never going to see each other again—Rose probably has better things to do—they’ll meet and discover they have nothing in common—
“I thought the point of the masquerade was to keep your identity secret,” says Rose, lightly, “But, for you, I could make an exception. I work as a propagandist. I’m central district, government sanctioned. One of the best.”
The Grandisonant Advertiser stops cold.
“That’s funny,” she says, “Because I work there too, and I’ve never seen you around.”
She knows she should keep moving, but her feet are stuck to the floor, as if intangible glue has seeped out from the elaborately and tackily patterned carpet and onto the soles of her shoes. Rose spins around, smile finally faltering.
“You said you’ve been on the Moon for eight months,” she says, slowly.
The Advertiser nods once, a short, jerky movement, her posture relaxing back into military, going ramrod-straight. Somewhere near the roof, a clock begins to strike, loud enough to reverberate through the walls.
“You’ve been on the Moon for eight months,” says Rose, “Which one?”
It’s like she’s on the Front and a shadow’s fallen over her and she’s looked up to see a Bishop staring down. It’s like she’s turned around, chainsaw swinging, and realized she’s severed a compatriot’s arm. It’s like… she can’t speak. She opens her mouth, but she can’t speak. The clock strikes for the sixth time, and Rose leans closer, hands curled into abrupt fists at her sides.
“Which one?”
The clock strikes ten, eleven, twelve, and the sprinklers turn on, water making her clothes sodden and her eyes sting, mixing and dissolving the paint she so carefully applied. She wipes green-tinted water out of her eyes with the edge of her sleeve, and looks up.
Rose’s paint has been washed away, too. Underneath, her chitin is black. They stand there for one horrified moment, and then Rose begins to leave, scrambling backwards down the hall, pulling down her headscarf to hide her face.
“Wait,” calls the Advertiser, “Wait,” and, as Rose turns to give a furtive glance backwards, “I just wanted to say that… that poster you made, the one that listed the titles of the fallen, that one was… It was very well done.”
She doesn’t wait to see Rose’s reaction. She turns and runs in the opposite direction, and doesn’t stop running until she’s at the dock, leaving Skaia, on a golden ship headed home.
It is surprisingly easy to arrange for a letter to be delivered to, as it were, the other side. The Tenet Transcriber places a missive on the corpse of a Prospitian soldier minutes before a Parcel Mistress begins to make her rounds, and, after that, all she has to do is show up at an abandoned farmhouse at the appointed time and pace and wait.
She starts as the door creaks open, springing up from the floral-patterned armchair, smoothing down her skirt and glancing at a mirror to assess the relative glossiness of her carapace.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here,” she says, “It isn’t a war stratagem, nor is it an attempt to kidnap one of Prospit’s brightest thinkers. There isn’t a cadre of soldiers waiting outside to—“
The clack of her foot against the wooden floor sounded wrong even to her own ears. She hadn’t even realized she was moving until she heard the sound, and Kanaya, who she’d have expected to start, instead goes quiet and still, silhouetted against the door frame like a single streak of white paint. Kanaya used to be a soldier, the Transcriber remembers, not just a country bumpkin, and her fluid stance, her feet shoed and balanced right on the threshold, her fists unclenched but ready at her sides, everything reminds the Transcriber that it would take but a moment to make them enemies again. She coughs, and continues, pitching her voice lower as if soothing a hysterical coworker past deadline.
“That makes it sound like there’s a cadre of soldiers waiting outside, doesn’t it? Well, there isn’t, and I didn’t ask you here on a social call either. I’m not treasonous. I… I research Prospitian advertisements, and I noticed a significant uptick in quality over the past few months. As an opponent, you have been admi… You have been… not insufficient.”
You laugh at my jokes, she does not say. Your conversation is electrifying, she does not say. For a Prospitian, you act remarkably like somebody I’d like to get to know, she does not say.
Kanaya processes that for a moment, tilting her head slightly, and it takes palpable effort for the Tenet Transcriber to stand still.
“Is that it? Did you call me here just to give me a half-hearted semi-compliment?”
“No. I asked you here for research. We—both of us—are the respective best in our fields, and both of us have gotten to the point where we find no intellectual parallel within our respective nations. What I’m proposing is an exchange of ideas.”
“Between a Prospitian and a Dersite,” says Kanaya, and she sits down, slumping into the armchair the Transcriber just recently vacated, “This is wrong. Your idea goes against basically everything we were ever taught about, and any standard of decency or morality either of us even have, and—“
“—You’re right, this was a mistake. I should—“
“I’m not finished. I said this was wrong. I didn’t say no.”
Oh. The Tenet Transcriber settles down, perched on the edge of a chair, and folds her hands into her lap.
“I brought refreshments,” she says, indicating a forlorn basket tucked beside Kanaya’s chair. She avoids Kanaya’s eyes and barely keeps herself from tapping an irregular rhythm against the floor with her foot. She should’ve brought a list of questions. She should’ve left the food at home. This conversation went a lot differently when it was just her mapping it out in her own head.
“You never use the dreamers,” says Kanaya, suddenly, “Before you, Derse used to have scores of posters featuring the Rogue and Prince, but after…” She makes an abrupt cutting motion in the air.
“That’s because I don’t believe in the Game.”
“You what?” Kanaya asks, quite faintly, and the Transcriber thinks that she will never not be satisfied by the slight pause of disbelief between her words.
“The dreamers, for all we know, might be some great, galumphing, nonsentient animals. It’s never been completely proven that the Game exists, and we’ve gone thousands of years without the remotest indication that it does.”
“Are all Dersites like this?”
“Like what?”
“Shocking.”
“I like to think I’m original.”
Kanaya smiles, a real smile, and inches infinitesimally closer, leaning forward in her chair.
“You mentioned refreshments?”
First Month of the Rogue, Third Rotation, 3920
It is only now that I realize that we spent so much time speaking of theology and eating biscuits that I didn’t have the chance to ask you about our mutual work. Enclosed is a brief list of questions. I have a particular interest in the visual aspects of your work: do your recent posters feature real corpses, and, if so, are the shots candid or staged? I realize that it’s a bit difficult to contact each other, but placing a letter on a recent battlefield tends to do the trick…
Second Circumnavigation of the Maid, Fourth Rotation, 3822
…Second Meetings Tend To Be More Productive Than The First
Generally
And We Are No Different
I Have Had Time To Think About Your Earlier Inquiry
And I Can Say That My Opinion Has Always Been That The Main Objective of Propaganda Is Generally To Prevent Desertion Especially In The Face Of Predestination And It Is Usually Effective On That Part
On The Front Sometimes People Run From Battles And Back To Their Farms And Sometimes They Shoot Themselves But Mostly We Carry On
Second Month of the Rogue, Ninth Rotation, 3920
…a dinner party last week, and the host (whose title I shall not disclose, although suffice to say, he is important enough to have access to the rosters) began to regale us with a story of unexplained missing regiments. He attributed those disappearances to the fabled third army, and then proceeded in a rollicking, adventurous tale of adding up numbers alone in his house, and coming to the conclusion that there must either be a third army somewhere out there or numerous mathematically challenged clerks in the records office. I know you think it’s a myth, but the evidence does seem to be conclusive …
Second Circumnavigation of the Maid, Thirtieth Rotation, 3822
Sometimes I Read Your Missives And I Cant Tell Whether They Are Mocking Me Or Inviting Me To Mock A Third Party With You
This Is Not A Common Problem With Other People Of My Acquaintance
I Am Not Completely Certain Whether This Is A Profound Cultural Difference And Perhaps A Primary Conflict Between Our Two Moons Or Something Specific To You Alone.
However
You Are Not The Only One Who Can Play At That Game
Ha Ha
If All Goes Well You Will Find This Letter Outside Your Window And Have Absolutely No Idea How It Came To Be There
You May Ask Me For The Secret The Next Time We Meet And All I Will Respond With Is Cryptic Comments That Are Amusing Only To Myself And Possibly Other People
Other People Who Are Not You
First Month of the Prince, Nineteenth Rotation, 3921
But that’s what we’re attempting to do, isn’t it? Especially since, as our conversations have previously established, Prospitian and Dersite culture are intensely similar. Even The Tale of the Two Lovers is almost exactly the same mawkish story of forbidden love across both our moons. Our trade is the semi-heroic effort to distill the essence of our respective moons, take the complicated emotions and pragmatic calculation and pure, blind, unthinking stupidity that would cause someone to join the army, and spindle it into a pretty picture and a couple of words…
Second Circumnavigation of the Page, Last Rotation, 3822
I Enjoyed Our Latest Outing Even More Than I Usually Do
(Which Is A Lot Just So You Know)
Especially The Part Where You Fell Into The River
See I Dont Have To Take Special Pains To Pretend That What We Have Is A Completely Objective Exercise In Objectivity
Some People In This Arrangement Can Express Their Feelings Like Adult Grown Carapaces Generally Do
Anyway Continuing Our Conversation
The One We Were Having Prior To Your Falling In The River
Ive Always Felt Lucky That I Got Out I Guess
Since Prospit Is Destined To Fail Anyway The General Strategy We Received Was To Attack And Do As Much Damage As We Can And Then Nobly Die
Yes I Am Well Aware That This Is Stupid
Third Month of the Prince, Second Rotation, 3921
Do you ever stop and suddenly realize that you’re talking patriotism to the enemy? I am not a proponent of sentiment, but I received your last letter (you do tend to ramble; your missives are nearly twice as long as mine and I find myself scrambling to match your prodigious output) and I thought to myself, Rose, you have talked patriotism (and emotion, and everything) to the enemy and discovered that the enemy is the only one worth talking to. I don’t know why our moons insist on with the whole endless battle thing. Habit, I suppose.
She’s used to thinking of herself as Kanaya when she sees Rose. They meet, this time, near one of what used to be her old haunts. Now it’s a burned-out, cratered wreck of a place, but desolation suits their purposes just fine.
“I wasn’t aware you were so enamored with my visage,” says Rose, in lieu of a greeting. Her mouth bends in the smirk Kanaya has come to associate with satisfaction, but her spine curves slightly in the slouch that she has come to associate with uncertainty. It’s a curiously paradoxical combination, but one Kanaya has become accustomed to throughout the course of their acquaintance. Rose, after all, is nothing if not a paradox: Kanaya once caught herself thinking of her as her Dersite contradiction, and even though she thought she’d blocked out that memory out of sheer embarrassment, the description resurfaces now.
“I think you enjoy making me ask for explanations,” she replies, situating herself at the edge of a crater. She has to arrange her skirt to keep it from being stained from the dust, and she takes the opportunity to avoid looking at Rose. At her Dersi—at her—she can’t even think it without making her legs shudder against her knee joint. She has to say it. Today.
“Your newest poster,” Rose says, either blithely unaware of Kanaya’s sudden diffidence or, more likely, pretending not to notice for reasons of her own, “The Dersite of the Two Lovers looks uncannily similar to myself.”
“In yours, the Prospitian looks like me.”
Rose pauses, her hand in the air poised to make a rebuttal, then slumps, conceding the point. They sit there, for a moment, like a giant game of Who’s Going To Make This More Awkward, but, today, Kanaya doesn’t think she wants to win. She’s going to say it. She has to say it. She refuses to allow herself and Rose orbit each other like the moons around the sky. If this stalemate won’t end if not by her own action, then Kanaya is willing to act.
“I think I might have to say something,” says Kanaya, “To clear things up, or to say a thing that you’re not willing to say, or to express an emotion that I hitherto have found myself unwilling to express, because of. Reasons. I’m being sincere right now, in case you haven’t noticed, and I know that makes me sound sarcastic, but I—“
“I would not be opposed to the possibility of a romantic relationship with you.”
She beats her to it. Of course she does: she always has to get there first, that insufferable, incongruous, impossible woman. Rose, Kanaya thinks, with a rush of helpless sentiment, and collapses down next to her like a hanged traitor cut down from the noose.
“I was just going to say that I liked you. I was getting to it. I would’ve said it sometime in the next half hour.”
“Of course,” replies Rose, and with the nerve to be smug about it, too, “I was only anticipating your actions.”
Kanaya snorts, and (quite smoothly and discreetly, she might add) drops her hand to Rose’s. Their fingers entwine, clacking together, her thumb grazing the back of Rose’s hand. She shifts a little, and Rose shifts a little, and suddenly her hand is on Rose’s face, they are pressed flush against the wall, she is pushing back Rose’s scarf—
There is no night on the Skaian shore, but later, lying in the shade of a crater and looking up at the moons traversing the sky, Kanaya is hazy and half-asleep, almost expecting to see the morning mists of Prospit turned towards the Skaia-less side of the universe. If she didn’t feel Rose’s hand splayed on her stomach, or the hard texture of Rose’s shoulder against her head, she would have thought that this was a dream. She clacks her eyelids closed and presses closer to the crook of Rose’s neck, the sound of their voices soft and insubstantial in the darkness.
“Which one of us is going to defect?”
“Hmm?”
“Well, we can’t carry on like this. Sneaking around isn’t really the best way to conduct a relationship.” She sounds almost casual about it, matter-of-fact, but, then again, it has always been like Rose to be deceptively blithe.
“I’m not turning traitor.”
“Very well, then.”
“You’re not, either. They’d—you’d be miserable. It’d be miserable. The whole war is miserable and kind of pointless, and I. I don’t want us to be miserable and pointless, too.”
“Ah, welI.”
A pause, then:
“I was just going to say. There is a third option.”
“You mean the third army? It’s a myth for bored aristocrats and scared children.”
“No, Kanaya, look—it isn’t. Remember that party? The masquerade? Why would anyone throw a costume party and invite people from both nations? Why would anyone go through all that trouble unless they were trying to prove a point? I know you hear the same things about the third army that I do. Probably more. And, with the masquerade, we’ve already got our first lead.”
“So we, what, find a possibly-fictional covert army, join it, thereby casting away both our homelands, and end a war that’s been going on for millennia? I think that may perhaps be the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”
“Maybe it is.”
“It could work, though. It’s stupid, but it could work.”
“It will.”
