A Memory Called Empire
Page 29
She was carrying the encrypted paper communiqué from Lsel under her freshly laundered shirt, attached to her ribs by virtue of an elastic sports bandage that Twelve Azalea had found in the back of one of his drawers, before they’d left him to find someone to perform back-alley neurosurgery and headed back toward the palace complex. Twelve Azalea had it because he’d twisted his ankle while playing some form of team sport with a ball and net, the same sort of thing which had been advertised on the flyer they’d been given in the garden. Twelve Azalea had been more willing to enthuse about it—apparently he played in an intramural team once a week—than Mahit had been willing to listen, but it hadn’t mattered: the bandage was conscripted into use, and now she felt like she was smuggling secrets across enemy lines. Even if they were her secrets to begin with, legally and morally.
“Think we’re going to get arrested?” Mahit asked.
Over-cheerful and under her breath, Three Seagrass said, “Not yet.” In her clean Information Ministry suit, she looked like a very fine, very precise edged weapon, and Mahit was not in fact sure what she would do without her.
“If not now, when?” she said, with a certain bleak amusement of her own, and then they had come up to the wall of gold-mirrored helmets. Three Seagrass presented herself and Mahit easily, unaffectedly—the very picture of a cultural liaison supervising the movement of her charge through closed doors. The Sunlit asked her for her cloudhook—she handed it over. The Sunlit asked her where they’d been—she explained, without deception or guilt, that they had spent the night at the house of her former classmate and good friend.
Mahit wondered again if the Sunlit shared one enormous mind with the City—whether this one was right at this moment considering the work of its fellows, in her apartment. It certainly was taking its time. It looked up, and behind Mahit and Three Seagrass—another of those flashes of mist-grey, a reflection in the smooth gold faceplate, something behind Mahit for the Sunlit to look at for too long, an endless little stretch—and down again. Perhaps it was consulting through its fellows with the Six Outreaching Palms. Conspiracy on conspiracy. She was being paranoid. No one was following them and Science wasn’t colluding with War to unseat the Emperor and there weren’t protests in the streets and the bomb in Plaza Central Nine had been an accident of circumstance, not for her at all, for something unrelated to her, a representative gesture for the people of Odile—surely.
The Sunlit waved her and Three Seagrass through, so abruptly she was actually surprised: adrenaline-drop prickles, hot and cold, slipping down her spine. Walking through the door opened in the City’s internal wall felt like climbing into the mouth of an animal. It shut behind them and Mahit thought of the circular teeth on the maws of some station-dwelling parasites, the kind which lived in crawlspaces and battened on to power cable insulation.
The palace complex was, in daylight, much more serene than anywhere else. Walls did that. Walls kept out the visible signifiers of unrest. The walk to the Science Ministry was easy, and the air smelled of the ever-present Teixcalaanli flowers, pepper-sharp and rich white musk, and there was a chilly sort of sunlight, and yet Mahit could not get her heart rate to come down to something lower than a thrum.
“I’d vastly prefer it if we came out of this one without declaring war, allegiance, or getting you kidnapped by Ten Pearl’s best ixplanatlim for experiments on your brain,” Three Seagrass said.
“I can promise you a lack of declarations of war,” Mahit told her, looking up at the silver-steel bloom of the Science Ministry, its pearl-inlaid relief decorations showing the tracks of subatomic particles, the shapes of proteins. “I don’t have that authority.”
“Wonderful. We’ll be fine.”
Inside, there was an episode of the now-familiar dance of high-court Teixcalaanli protocol. Three Seagrass made introductions and confirmed their appointment with Ten Pearl; Mahit bowed over her fingertips; inclined her body to a degree that felt right, and whether that was her own instinct or the leftover flickering presence of Yskandr didn’t really matter.
She and Three Seagrass were escorted to a windowless conference room, bland pale chairs around a bland pale table, no decoration except for an unobtrusive stripe of that same pearl-inlaid relief circumnavigating the walls right underneath the light switch panels. There they waited.
Three Seagrass tapped her fingernails on the table, a nervous gesture Mahit hadn’t noticed her making before. For her own part, Mahit had taken to fiddling with Yskandr’s imago-machine inside the pocket of her jacket, unconsciously, and had to make herself stop more than once, and she kept thinking that the communiqué bound under her shirt would crackle if she breathed too deeply, even though it wasn’t making any noise at all. The advent of Ten Pearl through the conference room door was a relief. She could do something, now that he was here to talk to. Waiting was … not working, right now. It wasn’t working at all.
“Minister,” she said, standing to greet him.
“Ambassador. A pleasure. I’d heard you were missing!”
Ah. So this was how they were going to play this out. Fair enough—the last time she’d seen Ten Pearl she’d played him for the benefit of the newsfeeds at the Emperor’s oration-contest banquet. She probably deserved having to fence her way through whatever interpretation of her absence from the palace Nineteen Adze had concocted.
“I’ve known where I was the whole time,” she said, and realized as she said it that she was going to abandon her previous pose as a barbarian and a rube; there was no point to that smokescreen now, and it hadn’t worked anyway. Two people at least had tried to kill her, once with a poison flower and once by ambush in her apartments. Being a barbarian—performatively, like a shield—hadn’t made her any less vulnerable than being a political operator would. She might as well be honest now. A clever barbarian, like Nineteen Adze had called her.
Ten Pearl laughed politely. “I’m sure you have! What a charming way of putting it. How can I help you, Ambassador?”
When Mahit had set up this meeting, she had intended to try to figure out if Yskandr had really been so obvious about his intention to sell imago technology to Teixcalaan as to run afoul of Science—a question which hardly mattered now. Yskandr was dead, and the person he’d sold the imago tech to was the Emperor. What she needed to know now was far more along the lines of who Ten Pearl supported for succession, so that she could figure out if he wanted anything to do with the annexation of Lsel, and if he could be manipulated in her favor to stop it.
“I don’t want to linger on unpleasant subjects,” she began, using just as many tenses as she wanted, no pretense of ignorance between her and the Minister now, “but I would like very much to know—for the sake of my own interests and health, you understand—what it was that you and my predecessor discussed on the night of his death.” She could feel how Three Seagrass sat up straighter next to her; the careful focus she had acquired.
Ten Pearl interlaced his hands. All his rings glinted, even under this bland fluorescent lighting. “Are you concerned you might make a similar mistake, Ambassador?” he asked. “Your predecessor ate something unpleasant, that’s all. Unfortunate. Our conversation was on very different topics than his eating habits. I’m sure you could avoid consuming such things, if you were careful.”
Mahit smiled, with all her teeth. Barbarian. But persistent. “No one will be specific as to what he ate,” she said. “It’s a fascinating omission.”
“Ambassador,” Ten Pearl said, the word drawn out slow, like he was coaxing her. “Have you perhaps considered that there is a reason for that omission? There are all sorts of other subjects we could profitably spend our time on right now. Perhaps we might discuss hydroponic nutrition factors, compared between small and large populations? We have so much to learn from each other, Lsel and Teixcalaan.”
It was inconvenient, Mahit thought, being furious. It dulled the edges of her vocabulary. And yet, here she was. Just as furious as she’d been in Eight Loop’s office.
Ten Pearl sighed, a little resigned exhalation as if he was preparing to do something unpleasant and necessary, like disposing of rotten food. “Ambassador Aghavn’s activities and proposals were unsuitable; he implied, over an entirely civilized meal in which he was given multiple opportunities to renege, that he was prepared at any moment to flood the Teixcalaanli markets with technology which would upset the functioning of our very society, and that he seemed to have suborned or influenced our Glorious and Brilliant Imperial Majesty—it was my responsibility, as Minister for Science, to deal with the threat he represented.”
“So you killed him,” Three Seagrass said, fascinated.
Ten Pearl regarded Three Seagrass evenly. “Given the current situation,” he said with an encompassing little gesture toward Mahit, as if to include and circumscribe her in the general state of Teixcalaanli diplomatic affairs, and then to dismiss her with them, “I see little reason to deny that, while he was dying, I did not intervene medically. If Ambassador Dzmare would like to bring that up during an inquiry into medical malpractice, I am sure she could begin such an inquiry at the Judiciary.”
Had her influence fallen so far, in two days of unrest in the City and the government, that Ten Pearl could not only blithely admit to disposing of his political opponent—“did not intervene medically” was for Three Seagrass’s legalistic ears and nothing else, Mahit knew what he meant when he said it—but also be assured that Mahit had no pull with anyone at court who would be willing to punish him for doing so? Clearly Ten Pearl believed that the Science Ministry was beyond the reproach of whoever was going to inherit the imperial throne—
—and just as clearly, he believed that Six Direction was no longer, without Yskandr Aghavn and his promised technology, willing to defend Lsel Station, or any of its citizens. And thus he had no use for Mahit, if she wasn’t going to try to flood the market with immortality machines—no use except the use he’d have for any ambassador from a small satellite-state on the edges of Teixcalaan.
The deal, as Thirty Larkspur had said at the oration contest, meaning—as she hadn’t understood then—the deal between the Emperor and Yskandr, is off.
She managed to keep her voice even, her vocabulary pristine, and launched a test satellite into the orbit of the conversation: “I wouldn’t begin at the Judiciary, Minister; I’d begin with the Emperor’s own ezuazuacatlim, if I needed advice. I’ve found such safety there.”
“Have you?” Ten Pearl said. “I am glad; that’s a change.”
“Is it?” Mahit asked, and waited for it: she was beginning to suspect that Ten Pearl wanted to talk, wanted to make her feel powerless with his talking. Three Seagrass’s fingers were going to bruise her thigh, they were gripping so hard.
“Your vaunted hostess, Her Excellency Nineteen Adze, stood by precisely as I did,” Ten Pearl said. “At that dinner I may have defended the interests of my ministry, and thereby all of the Empire, but she let me do it.”
Mahit felt an icy clarity. She remembered Nineteen Adze saying he was my friend to her over tea—remembered the visceral, neurochemical familiarity of Mahit’s reaction to her, how what of her was Yskandr wanted to be near her and have a good time and feel challenged and safe at once—remembered how Nineteen Adze had watched her in the hallway of her office complex, watched her pick up the poison flower, bend her head to it as if to breathe. She could have so easily remained in the archway, still and silent in her white suit, and not intervening at all.
But she had. She had, for whatever reason, saved Mahit’s life. Even if she had not saved Yskandr’s.
“I do appreciate the warning,” Mahit managed to say. She was lying through her teeth. She could lie a little more. She aimed for tremulous, confused, upset. (She was upset.) “There have been certain unpleasant incidents—a flower given to me with toxic effects—do you think—”
“I,” Ten Pearl said, cutting her off, “am not about to be framed for floral assassination. I am a modern man, and the Science Ministry is not merely botanical.”
“We were not about to suggest,” said Three Seagrass, “that the Science Ministry was merely botanical.”
The resulting pause dragged on endlessly, and Mahit wondered which of the three of them was going to break first, either into shouting or into hysterical laughter.
“Is there anything you would like to suggest, Ambassador? Considering that I have not sent anyone with a flower to do away with you,” Ten Pearl said at last.
“You’ve made my position quite clear,” Mahit told him. “I’ll be in touch when things have calmed down, if we do end up having something to say to one another. Hydroponics. I’ll remember that.”
* * *
In the aftermath of their summary exit from the Science Ministry, Three Seagrass took Mahit to a restaurant. Mahit let her do it with only a token protest—Last time we tried this there was an act of domestic terrorism—and got Last time I made reservations; no one knows where we are, we’ll be fine as a response. It was nice to sit in the dim cavernous space, tucked in close to the wall of a booth, and have strangers bring her and Three Seagrass food.
She only thought about being poisoned briefly, when her soup arrived, and decided she didn’t care just this moment.
“Really, I thought you did very well,” Three Seagrass said, carving off a thin piece of meat from her meal, which seemed to be a side of an entire animal. Mahit was horribly tempted by the smell of it, and a little horrified at the same time: that had too much blood in it to have been grown in a laboratory. That had been a living thing, which breathed, and now Three Seagrass was eating it.
“I’m not sure what else I could have done, while he simultaneously confessed to Yskandr’s murder and informed me that absolutely no one cares about it,” Mahit said.
Three Seagrass wrapped the meat in a large purple-white flower petal. She’d ordered a stack of them, and was treating them like thin little breads—a conveyance for the flesh from the plate to her mouth. “Wept,” she said. “Swore revenge. Attempted immediate violence.”
“I’m not a hero in an epic, Three Seagrass.” Mahit resented how saying so made her feel ashamed, inadequate: she shouldn’t still want to want to be Teixcalaanli, emulating, a re-creation of literature. Not after this week.
The petal-wrap got smeared with a deep green sauce that seemed to be both condiment and structural glue, and then bitten into with gusto. Around her mouthful, Three Seagrass said, “I said you did well, all right? You did. I don’t know what you’re planning to do next, but you managed that meeting like someone born to the palace, or at the very least like a trained asekreta.”
Mahit felt color rise in her cheeks. “I do appreciate that.”
The pause between them—Three Seagrass smiling, eyes wide and warm and sympathetic, Mahit exquisitely aware of how her cheeks were red, red like flower petals or the meat Three Seagrass was eating—felt charged. Mahit swallowed. Found something to say.
“All aside from the murder confession,” she began, and was gratified when Three Seagrass sat up a little straighter, paid a little more attention—there’s work to be done here—“Ten Pearl’s overly interested in hydroponics. Ours are good, but they’re not the sort of thing that feeds a planet. I can’t think of why he’d want to talk to me about them, unless something has gone peculiarly off with the City’s food-growth algorithm…”
And found that what she’d found to say was interesting, now that she was saying it. “As off as the City’s security algorithm is.”
“You mean City-strikes. Like what happened to me in Plaza Central Nine. And … whatever is going on with the Sunlit. If something is going on with the Sunlit.”
Mahit nodded. “Ten Pearl became Minister because of his perfect algorithms.
First the subway, when he integrated all the disparate lines into one algorithmic AI-controlled system, and then the City’s security apparatus. Yes?”
“Yes,” Three Seagrass said. “How did you learn that, anyway? It happened … oh, I wasn’t even out of the crèche yet.”
Mahit shrugged. “If I say imago-technology, but not functioning as I expected, will you be surprised?”
“Not anymore.” Another one of those strange, warm smiles.
Mahit couldn’t quite keep eye contact when she was doing that. “You said that there’d been eight City-strikes in the past year. When we were walking back, two nights ago. How many more is that than the year before?”
Three Seagrass tilted her head slightly to the side. “Seven more. Are you suggesting that the algorithm is faulty?”
“Or it’s being used faultily. An algorithm’s only as perfect as the person designing it.”
“Oh, that’s clever, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said, delighted. “If you want revenge on Science for a murder, murder Science’s reputation of impartiality.”
It was so utterly satisfying when Three Seagrass understood what she meant, without Mahit having to laboriously explain. “Ten Pearl’s reputation specifically,” she said, agreeing, “since it won him the Ministry, designing this algorithm, which is now hurting perfectly normal citizens of the Empire.”
“I like it,” Three Seagrass said. “We’ll need some data science people—an ixplanatl to make the statement look good—and someone to release the report widely—especially if it is connected to War, that’ll be an interesting needle to thread…”
“We’ll thread it. After I’m allowed back into my apartment. After this all is—quieter.”
Three Seagrass winced, and reached out to pat the back of Mahit’s hand. “What do you want to do right now? Still … what we talked about before? With the machine? I got a message from Twelve Azalea, while we were ordering, he’s come up with some medical person half a province away.”