More Than Utopia Read online

  More Than Utopia

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Copyright © 2022 by Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

  Cover art by Rashed AlAkroka.

  Cover design by Inspiral Design.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-555-0

  Prime Books

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact: [email protected]

  Arrival

  The day the aliens take the earth, Jirayu’s wife vanishes. The act of disappearing is abrupt and comprehensive. She leaves no trace. There is no plume of smoke, no flash of brilliance, no distortion of physics. There is not even, as per convention, a spent bullet and its splattered aftermath. Simply she is gone, and she takes her evidence with her. The couple photos. The belongings. The touches she has left on Jirayu’s base and office—stationery, potted plants, suits. All those hundred-thousand things that one never misses until they’re gone. A perfect crime.

  Jirayu does not know any of this yet in the morning, and for a time she won’t hear of the aliens either: it is a quiet thing, this invasion, this conquest that washes over the world like petals of dawn. Even she, with her reach and resources, will learn of it only slightly in advance of the public. In this she has no privileged information, no levers to pull in anticipation of what’s to come.

  But, first:

  She sits in a chamber of blue shadows and gloaming panes. Despite the dim illumination and lack of sunlight, the furniture is expensive, all hand-carved oak and redwood, animal heads mounted and their antlers gilded on the walls. Five floors underground, a secure bunker, but the décor is as staid as any executive’s office. It amuses her, because such evil as occurs in her work is not so indistinguishable from the evil dispensed from high-rise corporate towers. Blood money, either way. The sole difference is one of legality, not morality. The law is made and dictated by society’s victors, those who rise to the top through inherited fortune and ruthlessness. It is not made to protect those beneath.

  Her fingers splay over the samples, the smoothness of gunmetal, the gleam where it catches and holds the light. Unloaded, though she carries a loaded one on her person, as do the two bodyguards behind her. She prefers to do her business on neutral ground, or on her own territory, but not all clients are amenable. Some, like this, are paranoid and rarely leave their base of operations, their secure oubliettes. It is where they will die, entombed.

  The client is a man in his late fifties. Watery eyes, hair the color of blanched wheat, skin like the belly of a fish; not one for sunlight. American, as many of her recent clients are: civil war over usable resources, over freshwater, in a land gone to barren dust and polluted springs.

  “You can do better,” he says in accented English, gravel drawl and pebble vowels. He means the price.

  Jirayu smiles. Her mouth, she knows, will seem to him like lacquered porphyry, the rest of her like a statue. A thing that moves but does not feel, and does not sympathize. “Do I have competition?”

  For several seconds, silence. Few arms-dealers come this far into the heart of this state, an especially vicious conflict zone: the supply chain is fraught and brittle. Jirayu commands one of the handful that can make it here, can deliver to the petty tyrants that wage war on each other in a slice of the country that used to be called either Maine or Vermont—she hasn’t cared to find out which. The names are over half a century old, in any case, and have been changed since.

  Roughly a quarter of the country has been returned to indigenous nations, not always pacifically (she would know, having supplied firearms and the rare armored vehicles to them). The process of balkanization was fast and brutal, leaving parts of the once-empire easy pickings for its competitors—there are Russian colonies on this soil, now. The undesirable, barren parts remain to be carved out between all sorts, like this man. A little despot surviving on thin gruel. He will use her goods to take out his rivals, and then be taken out in turn. She is agnostic: as long as they pay well.

  In the end he agrees to her price, without grace. The deal concludes brusquely, but she doesn’t expect more—Americans have no sense of decorum. Money changes hands, and she will move on. Mostly ammunition this time; to be expected. She likes selling that. It is exhaustible. In a way it is like selling them freshwater.

  Jirayu walks out of the bunker satisfied with the deal, with the power she wields over clients in this region, with the knowledge that for all intents and purposes it is her fingers on the strings of their skirmishes, their civil wars. Soon she’ll be on a private plane, and by evening she will return to the real world in Krungthep, a place of plenty. Where her wife abides, currently holding down the fort and running domestic operations. They are rarely apart, but Yvette does not like to set foot on American soil.

  She does not know, then, that soon her power will end and her network of contacts will lose nearly all its meaning. Her reach will be cut short; her wealth will wane, and she shall be forced to take on a different shape. This will be her final gunrunning deal.

  The flight home is without incident. Planes are a compromise between speed and fatality—they provide a convenient target to assassins: hangar, landing strip, the aircraft itself. Each has a hundred crevices that can host sufficient explosives to wipe out an entire battalion, let alone Jirayu and her compact retinue. Today her team has to defuse a couple bombs and nothing more. She is lucky; she will live to see her tomorrow, and more importantly to see her wife. The latter thought lets her, almost, relax. Their marriage has been unorthodox—few dealers marry their own bodyguards. Too much potential for treachery, for intimate murder motivated by avarice, for the bodyguard to turn out to be a plant, a spy. But she trusts her wife. She has found in Yvette something that is, if not quite peace, then equilibrium.

  (Is she happy? Despite her profession, she still has friends—or allies—who would ask her that, perhaps to needle her. She would look them in the eye and say that happiness is not for the likes of them, and that she will find it at last when she dies at a time and circumstance of her choosing. She tells them that this, too, is her kindest wish for them. In private, she may concede that Yvette satisfies her in every way, and is satisfaction not the same thing as happiness? One does not need to live in a wedding commercial or view the world through glasses tinted by delusion.)

  Home is several floors to herself in a secure apartment building that she owns, middling enough to get a good view of the city but not so high as to touch the roof—too many security holes up there, the same as near the ground. Most of her kind are perpetually on the move, rotating from hotel to hotel, from armory to armory. Jirayu likes permanence; she likes comfort. Every decision is a compromise between risk and reward, and sometimes she tends toward reasonable risk. In any case she belongs to several consortiums too powerful to cross, and her choice to mostly supply North America means she has few competitors. Lucrative, but it is the most fraught conflict zone in the world. There are greener, safer pastures in which to mine human terror for revenue.

  Yvette is not in the apartment when she arrives, which is an aberration: her wife likes to be there to welcome Jirayu home, to take over from her security detail, in a manner that is nearly territorial and which Jirayu enjoys. She walks the two bedrooms, the kitchen—beautiful countertops, futuristic appliances for every possible need—and then the indoor garden which Yvette has annexed as her personal domain.

  She stops. The potted hydrangeas Yvette just bought last week are missing.

  Gone, too, are the stone foxes and miniature bamboo groves. The white plaster lynx that Yvette said reminded her of Jirayu and which she purchased on impulse last year. The
brass birdcages. All have disappeared.

  Jirayu darts to the fridge, where usually there’s some concoction Yvette has created in the gelato maker—sorbet rich with liquor, hazelnut ice cream swirled through with the darkest chocolate—but the freezer is empty. Last she goes to the wardrobe to find it halved: none of the suits she’s had tailored for Yvette, the bespoke jackets and trousers in hadopelagic shades, the dress shirts in icy blue and pale green. What remains belongs to Jirayu alone, all her silks and satins, in precise pleats and soft folds.

  Her first thought is that Yvette has left her, but it’d make no sense to take the garden fixtures. Her second thought pierces, all the sharper for its irrationality: that Yvette has experienced a psychotic break and run off to America, the land of her despised nativity and where they first met. Both of them bloodied, Yvette a soldier in one of the many wasteland armies, a stranger who saved Jirayu from a sale gone wrong. The motive was obvious, at that point—Yvette wanted out of America, and Jirayu provided not just the route but the employment, the comforts of wealth.

  Jirayu accepted the deal to show appreciation, and because she knew she could secure absolute loyalty this way, through the offer of salvation both monetary and spiritual. Even her body she used to bind Yvette; she became the first female lover Yvette ever had, and that too delighted her. Jirayu did not anticipate being caught in turn, being drawn into the trap. She did not expect to miss Yvette when they were apart, to cherish the sliding-earth sound of Yvette’s laugh.

  Eventually she took this by the horns and, in a fit of madness, proposed. To her surprise, Yvette accepted. She eagerly donned Jirayu’s surname and became Yvette Vihokratana.

  And now she is gone.

  Jirayu calls her operations chief, Noor, who answers on the first ring.

  “Where is my wife?”

  “Boss?” The word tautens, on Noor’s end. “You don’t drink, last I checked, and you don’t take funny pharmaceuticals. Did you marry in . . . America? A strapping farmgirl, maybe? I mean, there’s no accounting for taste, Americans tend to come pretty ragged and with no manners but—”

  Noor loves eir jokes. Jirayu finds herself presently less enamored than usual. “Where is Yvette?”

  “Who?”

  She draws in a gust of air. In this line of work, a mountain’s patience is necessary. She does not have much of it; she attempts. “My bodyguard. Your second-in-command. That Yvette. This isn’t a good time for humor, Noor.”

  Quiet goes on a little too long on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, I don’t know anyone named Yvette. Sounds French. Look, boss, you just came off a flight, you’re tired. Sleep it off.”

  Jirayu cuts the call. The problem with smartphones is that one cannot have the satisfaction of slamming down the receiver—she has seen the ancient artifacts in museums, in eccentrics’ collections, plastic and wood and copper.

  She tries to refrain, and then begins pacing anyway. Her mind wheels in place, trying to make sense of this. There has been no indication Yvette is unsatisfied, with either their marriage or the terms of employment. Their sex is passionate, devouring; their domestic life is luxurious; their communication is excellent, nearly telepathic. She has never sensed the waning of Yvette’s interest or loyalty, and Jirayu has honed herself all her life to divine the most minute of moods—the faintest fault lines of emotion—in those closest to her, because to do otherwise is to hand herself on a silver platter to an assassin or a defector.

  Not a change of heart, then. She knows her wife with the utmost intimacy, the way a hand knows a glove, and she has worn Yvette until her wife has become her second skin: inextricably bound.

  In her life, Jirayu prides herself on the excellence of her work, and the prowess with which she possesses people she wants to keep. She has rarely been wrong; few ties have been broken that she did not herself discard. Her marriage is her masterpiece. It has been made to last, tempered and reinforced.

  She reaches out to information brokers giving them an exact description, promising triple their usual rates. Report any sighting of this woman and Jirayu will make their year. False positives will be inevitable, but Yvette’s looks are distinct. Caucasian, dark brown hair with ruby-red highlights, a hundred eighty-three centimeters tall. Broad in the shoulders and broad in the hips. This type of clothing as her wont, this type of shoes and sidearm. The portrait Jirayu gives is comprehensive.

  When she is done with the encrypted calls and messages, she turns to her bedroom. Sits down on the precisely made bed. Often Yvette and she share it, but both of them sometimes want to sleep alone, to have their own spaces; to not wake each other up when their schedules don’t align. It was her wife’s suggestion, and she was a little affronted, at first. Over time she came to appreciate it. There is a door between the bedrooms, just in case—Yvette is her ultimate line of defense, the body between her and a bullet.

  (She has not thought of Yvette that way for a long time. Her ownership of Yvette has persisted; the idea that Yvette is a tool—a piece of meat that exists to shield her—has not. She doesn’t know when it began to fade, when it began to transmute into this other thing, this sensation that life without her wife would be unbearable. This approximation of tenderness. Getting soft in her old age, for all that she’s not even forty yet. What will she be like at fifty, if she survives to be so old? All spun sugar, all collapsed scaffolding.)

  Little tremors pass through Jirayu, as though she is the earth under tectonic stress. A tide of ice builds in her stomach. Her eyes burn. She rarely weeps; she is not going to start now. But she does sleep for a long time.

  Over the week, none of her informants contact her with anything useful. Noor comes to her home to cook for her and to make sure she eats. Jirayu does—she survives, that is one of her talents, no matter what. She keeps her operations running, remotely taking hold of logistics puzzles, solving them one by one. Noor, though quietly concerned, does not broach the possibility that Jirayu has imagined a wife that never existed. Jirayu does not ask the rest of her staff about Yvette. No one stays with a boss who’s losing her grip on reality, and she knows she’s never been thought of as entirely sane.

  Nevertheless she searches every corner of her home for traces of Yvette, the toiletries particular to her wife, the hand-blown glass collection, the gunmetal-dark ear cuffs. When that proves futile she searches her armories, her safehouses, her temporary offices. Then her devices, even though most of her communications self-destruct within the month; a few logs are kept on a secure hosting. No message from Yvette, or any mentioning her. None of them suggests that Jirayu’s recall has ever matched actuality.

  (What she does find: a short clip of a state function from a few years back where she had to make nice with Krungthep’s governor. Yvette was there and prevented an assassination attempt on some politician—spilled drinks, spilled food, shrapnel; it was a vivid encounter. But in the clip, none of that happens. Yvette is not in it. No incident occurs. Jirayu attends with Noor.)

  Except she remembers. Yvette’s cologne and the scent of her skin. Yvette’s voice and accented, faltering Thai shaped by American consonants. One does not invent an entire person and all those minutiae. Jirayu’s never had an imaginary friend, even as a child. She is, first and foremost, a creature rooted in the most material of reality.

  Two weeks later, a cream envelope appears at her windowsill in the indoor garden, neatly placed atop a miniature gazebo. Inside it is a letter in precise handwriting, the most flawless Thai script she’s ever seen. Deep green ink, as though emeralds have been crushed and grounded to fine powder to construct these sentences. The letter offers two things: the promise of an explanation, and an invitation to become a cognate, whatever that means. It names Yvette Vihokratana, acknowledging that she exists, or existed at one point; it acknowledges that Jirayu is—or was—married.

  It says, We are sorry to hear of your wife’s circumstances. But we can give her back to you, or begin your path to finding her again. Come meet us: this is
for your ears alone. Here is the address.

  Jirayu has never seen a more obvious trap. But it is so blatant that none of her enemies would actually try it—too stupid: they might as well send her a death warrant and ask her to sign her name. And she does her research: she sends a square of the envelope and the paper inside, a corner with no script—no one will see the actual message—to a forensics lab. What comes back is confusing. The ink does not resemble any ink and contains trace materials of unidentifiable compounds, though none are toxic, and a trace amount of rare metals found in meteors. The paper is not made of wood pulp but from a material whose composition is closer to fabric polymers.

  If it is a trap, then her enemies have managed to either send her materials that don’t exist, or falsify the lab report.

  She gives the address to Noor, who does not ask questions and drives her in one of her armored cars—none of what she owns is the mass commercial sort. The window, made dark by the encroaching dusk, reflects a dilapidated image of her. Deep shadows under her eyes, as though she’s been bruised by the cosmos. A flat pallor that comes from sleep deprivation and not hydrating or eating enough. Her efforts to survive have gotten her by, but she does not look like she thrives. What she resembles is an animal licking its wounds.

  “Stop here,” she tells Noor as they near the address. “I’m getting out alone.”

  “Boss,” her operations chief begins.

  “Part of the deal. Don’t worry about it. When have I ever been careless?”

  Noor cranes around to look at her. “During the entirety of these last couple weeks? Look—you’re a good employer. Sensible, fair, honorable. I like being on your payroll. Let’s not change that.”

  Jirayu gives em something like a smile. “No need to fret, Noor. In my will there’s a profuse recommendation letter for you and some of my assets will become yours. You’ll find perfectly good employment elsewhere or retire rich, whichever you like.”

  “If you don’t come back or call me within the next couple hours, I’m summoning reinforcements. All right?”