Which was long enough ago by now that Nine Hibiscus didn’t particularly feel like counting the years.
“Swarm,” she said—the nickname he’d gotten back on that deployment, the one she had mostly given up calling him for the sake of officer hierarchy—“spit it out. What’s going on?”
“Sir,” he said, still staring out at the black, gentle corrective for the cameras, even if the recordings of this room would never be seen by anyone but her: who outranked a yaotlek? But he was so correctly a Fleet officer, a Teixcalaanlitzlim’s Teixcalaanlitzlim, seamless in the role of ikantlos-prime and adjutant, a man who could have walked out of The Expansion History or Opening Frontier Poems, except that the system his people had come from hadn’t even been absorbed into Teixcalaan when either of those works had been written. (Except that he still kept up some of that system’s peculiar cultural-religious practices—but hesitance wasn’t one of those, either. At least not one she knew about.)
“Yes, ikantlos? Report.”
Finally he turned, widened his eyes in wry and resigned amusement, and said, “In about two hours, sir, you’re going to get an official communiqué, addressed to you specifically as yaotlek in charge of this combined Fleet, from Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise on the Parabolic Compression of the Twenty-Fourth Legion, demanding to know what the delay in action is. It will be countersigned by Fleet Captain Forty Oxide of the Seventeenth and Fleet Captain Two Canal of the Sixth. We have a problem.”
“The Seventeenth and the Sixth?” Nine Hibiscus asked. “They hate each other. That rivalry is two hundred years old. How did Sixteen Moonrise get them both to sign?”
They absolutely had a problem. Her combined Fleet was six legions strong: her own Tenth and five more, each with its own Fleet Captain newly subordinate to her authority. The traditional yaotlek’s six, both tactically effective and symbolically sound—if a somewhat limited amount of manpower to win a war with. Enough, though, to start a war, which Nine Hibiscus understood her purpose here to be. To start, and then to win with whatever resources she would need to call up from the core of Teixcalaan, if such resources were necessary.
But if three of her initial yaotlek’s six were already willing to sign an opening salvo against her authority as yaotlek … She didn’t need to say it; both she and Twenty Cicada knew what a letter like this one meant. It was a test, a press to check for weak spots: a light barrage to find the best point to concentrate a wedge attack. It was bad enough that she’d been given both the Sixth and the Seventeenth Legions as part of her Fleet, but she’d expected any ensuing conflict to be between them, something to carefully manage by doling out the best assignments equally. Not this surprising show of political unity through displeasure.
“From what information I’ve received from my associates on their ships,” said Twenty Cicada, “Sixteen Moonrise appealed on the one side to Forty Oxide’s long experience compared to yours, and on the other to Two Canal’s vehement wish that she had been made yaotlek instead of you, and neither of them knew the other one had agreed until right before they agreed to send the message.”
There were reasons that Twenty Cicada was nicknamed Swarm, and it wasn’t just his peculiar name: a name with a living creature in it instead of a proper object or color or plant. Swarm was Swarm because he was everywhere at once: he knew someone on every ship in the Fleet, and those someones tended to keep him well-informed. Nine Hibiscus clicked her teeth together, considering. “Politics,” she said. “All right. We’ve had politics before.”
Nine Hibiscus had had politics come after her more than once. Anyone who made Fleet Captain did. Anyone who made Fleet Captain and meant to keep the position and win victories for her legion—well, that sort of Teixcalaanlitzlim made enemies. Jealous ones.
(Every time there’d been politics before, though, Nine Hibiscus had also had Nine Propulsion in the Ministry as a threat of last resort. The new Minister of War, Three Azimuth, was no one’s friend in particular—or at least she wasn’t Nine Hibiscus’s friend.)
“Two Canal and Forty Oxide aren’t the point anyhow,” said Twenty Cicada. “Sixteen Moonrise is. She’s the instigator—she’s the one you’re going to have to defuse.”
“Perhaps she’d like the point position when we do make our approach.”
Twenty Cicada said, dry as processed ship’s air, “So direct, sir.”
She couldn’t help grinning: teeth-bared like a barbarian, a savage expression. It felt good on her face. Felt like getting ready to act, instead of waiting and waiting and waiting. “They are insinuating I’m overhesitant.”
“I can have that order composed. The Twenty-Fourth will be cast shouting into whatever void is eating our planets by shift-change, if you like.” One of the problems with Twenty Cicada was that he offered her exactly what she wanted, for precisely long enough for her to remember that it was a bad idea. It was the kind of problem that ended up being one of a thousand reasons Nine Hibiscus had never thought of replacing him with a soldier who came from a more assimilated world.
“No,” she said. “Let’s do one better. The glory of dying first for the Empire is too good for Sixteen Moonrise, don’t you think? Invite her to dinner instead. Treat her like a favored colleague, a prospective co-commander. A new yaotlek like me needs allies, doesn’t she?”
Twenty Cicada’s expression had become unreadable, like he was adjusting some value in a vast calculation of a complex system. Nine Hibiscus figured that if he was going to object, he would go ahead and object, and went on, assuming he wouldn’t.
“Fourth shift—that’ll give her the travel time to get over to Wheel. Her and her adjutant. We’ll have a strategy discussion, the four of us.”
“As soon as the letter officially arrives, sir, I’ll send that invitation back—and alert the galley that we’re expecting guests.” Twenty Cicada paused. “I don’t like this. For the record. It’s too early for anyone to be pushing you like this. I didn’t expect it.”
“I don’t like it either,” Nine Hibiscus said. “But since when has that made a difference? We persevere, Swarm. We win.”
“We do tend to.” A flicker, again, of that dry amusement. “But the wheel goes around—”
Nine Hibiscus said, “That’s why we’re the weight,” like she was one of her soldiers in the mess, ship-phrase slogan, and smiled. Game on, she thought. Sixteen Moonrise, whatever it is you want from me—come play.
Over the comm, then, Two Foam’s disembodied voice: “Yaotlek, I have visual on Knifepoint. Three hours early. Coming in fast. Coming in—hot.”
“Bleeding stars,” Nine Hibiscus spat, a quick, instinctive curse, just for her and Twenty Cicada to hear, and then signaled her cloudhook to patch her into the comm frequency. “On my way. Don’t fire on anything until we know we have to.”
* * *
Lsel Station was a sort of city, if one thought of cities as animate machines, organisms made of interlocking parts and people, too close-packed to be any other form of life. Thirty thousand Stationers on Lsel, all in motion, spinning in the dark in their gravitational well, safe inside the thin envelope of metal which was Station-skin. And like any other city, Lsel Station was—if you knew where to go, and where to avoid—a decent place to take a long enough walk to exhaust yourself out of overthinking.
said Yskandr,
Mahit Dzmare, by certain technicalities still the Ambassador to Teixcalaan from Lsel, even after two months spent returning from her post and one month more since she’d returned to Lsel in quasi-disgrace, had perfected the art of thinking the sensation of rolling her eyes. I haven’t walked far enough yet, she said to her imago—to both her imagos, the old Yskandr and the fragmentary remains of the young one. Give me time.
uency in Teixcalaanli manners and politics. The Yskandr-version she’d mostly lost to the sabotage of the imago-machine which had brought him to her in the first place, nestled at the base of her skull, full up with live memory and the experience she’d needed to be a good Ambassador from Lsel, on the glittering City-planet heart of Teixcalaan. Sabotage executed—possibly, she remained unsure—by the very Councilor she was due to have dinner with in twenty minutes.
There was another life, Mahit thought, where she and Yskandr would have been in the City still, and integrated already into a single continuous self.
Mahit was too many people, since she’d overlaid her damaged imago with the imago of the same man twenty years further on down the line. She’d had a while to think about it. She was almost used to how it felt, the fault lines between the three of them grinding together like planetary tectonics. Her boots made soft familiar noise on the metal floor of the Station corridors. She was out near the edge of this deck—she could just barely see the curvature of the floor, here, stretching up. Walking endless loops around the Station had started as a refamiliarization tactic and turned into a habit. Yskandr didn’t know the geography of the Station any longer—in the City he’d been either fifteen years or three dead months out of date, but here at home he was just a long-exiled stranger. In fifteen years the interior, nonstructural walls moved around, the decks were repurposed, little shops opened and shut. Someone in Heritage had changed all the fonts on the navigational signs, a shift Mahit hardly recalled—she’d been eight—but she found herself staring at them, a perfectly innocuous MEDICAL SECTOR: LEFTWARD sign suddenly compulsively fascinating.
We’re both exiles, she’d thought, right then, and had hated herself for thinking it. She’d been gone a few months. She had no right to the name. She was home.
She wasn’t, and she knew it. (There was no such place any longer.) But the walking was a semblance, and she did remember where some things were, the shape and rhythm of the Station, alive and full of people—and she and Yskandr both had the same joy in discovering new places. On that, the aptitudes had gotten them entirely dead to rights.
This deck—which contained Heritage offices, if a person kept walking through the residential section Mahit was traversing, everyone’s individual pods hanging in warm bone-colored rows, interspersed with common areas—wasn’t one she knew well at all. It was full of kids, older ones, three-quarters of the way to their imago-aptitude tests, sitting easily on top of bulkheads and clustered in chattering groups around shop kiosks. Most of them ignored Mahit entirely, which was comforting. One month back on the Station, and half the time she ran into old friends, her crèchesibs or classmates, and all of them wanted her to tell them about Teixcalaan. And what could she say? I love it; it almost ate me and all of you together; I can’t tell you a single thing?
You died there rather than coming back to share your plans with our Station, and you’d like to lecture me on silence? Mahit snapped, and felt her smallest fingers go to fizzing sparkles: neurological afterimages of sabotage. That side effect hadn’t stopped. It was more obvious when she stumbled into one of the places she and Yskandr hadn’t managed to integrate yet, at all. But her sense of his presence withdrew to a banked and observant simmer. She’d ended up next to one of the kiosks while she was too busy talking to her imago to notice where she was going. (Probably she should mind those slips more than she did. The slips where she wasn’t quite her, in her body.) Ended up next to a kiosk, and in a line for what it was selling.
Which seemed to be—handbound literature. The kiosk was labeled ADVENTURE/BLEAK PUBLISHING. Its display was full of graphic stories, drawn not on ever-changeable infofiche but on paper, made from flattened rag pulp. Mahit reached out and touched the cover of the nearest. It was rough under her fingertips.
“Hey,” said the kiosk manager. “You like that one? The Perilous Frontier!”
“The what?” Mahit asked her, suddenly feeling as adrift as she had the first time anyone had asked her a question in Teixcalaanli. Context failure: What frontier? Aren’t they all perilous?
“We’ve got all five volumes, if you’re into first-contact stuff; I love it, the artist on volume three draws Captain Cameron’s imago like Chadra Mav’s, only visible in reflective surfaces, and the linework—”
The manager couldn’t be more than seventeen, Mahit thought. Short tight-curled hair over a bright-toothed grin, eight hooped earrings up the side of one ear. That was new fashion. When Mahit was that age, everyone had been into long earrings. I’m old, she thought, with a peculiar delight.
I’m old, and I have no idea what kids on Lsel like to read. Even when I was a kid on Lsel, I didn’t know, really. It hadn’t seemed important, before her aptitudes—why bother, when there was so much Teixcalaanli literature to drown herself in? To learn to speak in poetry for?
“I haven’t read them yet,” Mahit told the manager. “Can I have the first one?”
“Sure,” she replied—ducked down underneath the counter and produced one. Mahit handed over her credit chip, and the manager swiped it. “They’re drawn right here on this deck,” she said. “If you like it, come back on second-shift two days from now and you can meet the artist, we’re having a signing.”
“Thanks. If I have time—”
“Yeah.” The manager grinned, as if to say, Adults, seriously, what can you do. “If you have time.”
Mahit waved, went on. Walked a little faster. The Perilous Frontier! fit in her inside jacket pocket like it was a political pamphlet. Exactly the same size. That was interesting, in and of itself. Even if it turned out to be a horribly dull story, that was interesting.
The Heritage offices were a neatly labeled warren, seven or so doors on either side of the deck corridor, which had narrowed from the wide residential space to something more like a road. Behind those doors, all the extra space would be full of the offices of people assigned to jobs in Heritage: analysts, mostly. Analysts of historical precedent, of the health of art production and education, of the number of imago-matches in one sector of the population or another. Analysts and propaganda writers.
How Teixcalaan had changed her, and how quickly. The last time Mahit had come to the Heritage offices, for her final confirmation interview before she received both her imago and her assignment as ambassador, she’d have never thought about Heritage as being in the business of propaganda. But what else were they doing, when they adjusted educational materials for one age group or another, trying to have the aptitudes in five years spit out more pilots or more medical personnel? Changing how children wanted to be.
She was hesitating, poised outside the middlemost door with its neatly signed (in the new font, and when will I get to stop noticing the fucking new font, Yskandr, it isn’t actually a new font, it’s only a new font for you) nameplate reading AKNEL AMNARDBAT, COUNCILOR FOR HERITAGE. Hesitating because she hadn’t seen Councilor Amnardbat since that last confirmation interview, and hesitating because she still couldn’t understand why the woman she’d met then would have wanted to sabotage Mahit’s imago-machine. Ruin her before she could even attempt to do right by the imago-line she was part of. If Amnardbat had even been responsible—Mahit only had the word of a different Councilor, Dekakel Onchu, Councilor for the Pilots, on that. And Mahit had that word because she’d received letters, while embedded in the Teixcalaanli court, which Onchu had meant for Yskandr.
She missed, w
ith an ugly and sudden abrupt spike of feeling, Three Seagrass, her former cultural liaison, the woman who was supposed to make incongruous experiences make more sense to the poor barbarian in her charge. Three Seagrass would have just opened the door.
Mahit lifted her hand, and knocked. Called out her own name—“Mahit Dzmare!”—a Lsel-style appointment-keeping: no cloudhooks here, to open doors with micromovements of an eye. Just herself, announcing herself.
No, I’m not. And Amnardbat doesn’t know there are two of you—three of us—which is its own problem—
The door opened, so Mahit stopped thinking about dangerous lies she had told. Not thinking about them made them easier to hide. She’d learned that somewhere in the Empire, too.
Councilor Amnardbat was still slim and middle-aged, her hair worn in a spacer’s cut of silvering ringlets, narrow and long grey eyes in a wide-cheekboned face that always looked like she’d been exposed to too much solar radiation—chapped, but in a rugged sort of way. She smiled when Mahit came in, and that smile was welcoming and warm. If she’d been working with her staff before Mahit’s arrival, they weren’t immediately visible. Heritage was a small operation, anyway. Councilor Amnardbat had a secretary, who wrote her correspondence—he’d been the one to send Mahit this invitation through the intra-Station electronic mail—but Mahit saw no one in the office at all. Just chairs, and a desk with infopaper piled all over it, and a screen on the wall showing some camera’s view of what was outside Lsel just now. A slow rotation of stars.
“Welcome home,” said Councilor Amnardbat.
It’s a gambit, Mahit thought. She felt Yskandr subside into a watchful, attentive hum. More awake than he’d been in a long time. She felt that way, too. More awake, more present. Having a dangerous conversation with a powerful person in their office. Just like she was supposed to do, on Teixcalaan.
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