A Desolation Called Peace
Page 24
Yskandr said to her. He sounded as pissed off and frustrated as she felt. She wanted to throw something. Break something. Break something lovely, some gorgeous piece of Teixcalaanli décor she could knock off a table and shatter. Maybe there would be one inside the quarters. (How she was going to share a room with Three Seagrass, after what they had done to each other, she wasn’t thinking about right now. It wasn’t the current problem.)
On the touchpad-lock next to the door was a piece of sticky disposable plastifilm, which read your password is VOID: the Teixcalaanli glyph shaped like a giant hollow circle. For a moment, Mahit wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do if her door-unlocking code was already expired—and then she realized it was a preset. An easy glyph to draw, to unlock your room before you could change the code. She unpeeled the plastifilm and drew a VOID on the touchpad, and the door hissed open.
Silhouetted against the light from the room’s single lamp was a tall, narrow figure. It took a step toward Mahit—
She had dropped to her knees on the floor before she quite knew why, a flare of whiteout-panic—and then she was rolling, rolling toward the figure, getting her feet under her and throwing herself at the figure’s legs in a headlong tackling leap. They collided. Her shoulder spasmed like she’d hit it with a hammer—or a knee—and the person she’d hit fell heavily over her, grunting, their palms striking the floor in a slap. Where’s the needle? Mahit thought. I have to get away from the needle, it’s poison—
Whoever it was rolled down her shoulder and somersaulted to their feet, leaving Mahit in a heap on the floor, scrambling away, waiting for the sharp prick and the end of everything—
You’re not dying. How many times had she said that to him, in the middle of the night, when he’d woken them up from dreams of asphyxiation?
“—You do not take surprises well,” said the intruder, and Mahit shoved her hair out of her eyes and managed to look up, focusing.
She had just attacked Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise and come out rather the worse for it. The Fleet Captain looked entirely unperturbed, not a hair out of place. Mahit felt her face go dark with an embarrassed flush.
Just because I was ambushed in my apartment once shouldn’t mean I react like this every time I’m surprised by someone in a room, she thought miserably, and got nothing but Yskandr’s rueful and sympathetic acknowledgment in return.
“… No,” she managed. “I don’t. My apologies, I didn’t intend to—assault you. Fleet Captain.”
A slim pale gold hand appeared in front of her, offering, and Mahit took it. Sixteen Moonrise pulled her up to her feet. “It’s quite understandable,” she said. “I didn’t know you’d been in combat, Ambassador Dzmare. I ought to have left a note on the door. But I did want to talk to you alone.”
“I haven’t been in combat,” Mahit said. “I—oh, for fuck’s sake, I failed the physical combat aptitudes by eighteen points, I’ve never been near combat.”
“One hardly needs good aptitudes to have ended up in situations where combat happens,” Sixteen Moonrise said, dismissively, “and regardless, you have good instincts. Shall we sit down?”
Mahit’s mouth tasted of adrenaline, bitter and metallic, and she was shaking very slightly; there seemed to be no plausible way, barring another attempt at bodily force, to remove the Fleet Captain from the room. And the first attempt had been bad enough. She glanced around, looking for something to sit on, or at, and found that there was a small folding desk which had already been pulled down from the wall, and two stools, one on either side of it. Sixteen Moonrise must have been here for a while. She’d had time to prepare. Probably she hadn’t expected Mahit to get horribly lost in the ship and had gotten bored enough to investigate the furniture—Mahit was being hysterical, even in the privacy of her own mind. What limited privacy her own mind had, anyway.
She sat. Gestured at the other stool. Welcome to my office, such as it is. And folded her hands tightly together in her lap, willing them to stop shaking.
“I imagine you’re wondering why I’ve been waiting for you,” said Sixteen Moonrise, taking the opposite seat. Mahit nodded, a rueful bit of acquiescence. Sixteen Moonrise folded her hands—on the table, where Mahit could see them. Mirroring. Establishing rapport.
I can’t handle an interrogation, she thought, miserably, not now.
Mahit took a breath. Settled back on her pelvis, straightened her spine. She was of a height with Sixteen Moonrise, at least when they were both sitting down. “From your reaction to Special Envoy Three Seagrass and me,” she said, “I would expect nearly anything except you waiting for me, Fleet Captain. What was it you said—the spook and her pet?”
“I did say that,” Sixteen Moonrise agreed, easily enough, and didn’t apologize for it. “She is a spook, and you are—or you certainly were brought here as—her pet. I imagine she told you all sorts of things about how your presence could ensure a diplomatic voice for the Stations in whatever negotiations she ends up conducting with our enemies, yes?”
Not quite, Mahit thought. That would have been transparent. This is Three Seagrass. Transparency is beyond her. Beyond us both. She lifted one hand from her lap, tilted it back and forth—maybe yes, maybe no, go on.
“Mm,” Sixteen Moonrise said, an evaluating noise. “Why are you here, Ambassador Dzmare? I imagined you’d want to be shut of Teixcalaan, after being involved in that mess in the capital three months ago.”
“I like challenges,” Mahit said. “I’m a translator. Who wouldn’t want to be involved in a first-contact scenario?”
“Nearly everyone who has ever been near an alien,” said Sixteen Moonrise. “I don’t believe you, Ambassador Dzmare. Glory-seeking naïveté does not match up with the woman who started this war for us. Your broadcast before Six Direction’s death was masterful, by the way. You horrified me, and I don’t horrify easily.”
“With all due respect, Fleet Captain, it was the aliens who started this war. I alerted the Emperor to it. I considered it an act of good citizenship.”
“You’re a barbarian.”
“Barbarians,” Mahit said, imagining Three Seagrass’s face the whole time she was saying it, “are human beings; good citizenship in the face of existential threats extends beyond the boundaries of sovereignty. Or at least that is what we barbarians are taught, on my Station.”
It wasn’t. Mahit had never been taught anything of the kind. But it made Sixteen Moonrise’s electrum-colored eyes widen, not a smile and not a grimace—but a veritable hit. And it was a useful lie.
Sixteen Moonrise exhaled through her nose, as if in exasperation. “Let me put it this way, Ambassador,” she said. “I’ve watched your work on the newsfeeds during One Lightning’s idiotic little usurpation attempt, which the Fleet really could have done without, by the way. You’re too smart and too much of a politician to be here only as the envoy’s pet—and you’re already having difficulties with the envoy, aren’t you? I notice she isn’t here, and you aren’t on the bridge with the yaotlek. Not to mention that your precious Stations are right next to this sector, which is full of aliens with ship-dissolving spit. One jumpgate away. That’s not very far at all.”
“I’ve seen the holographs of Peloa-2,” Mahit said. “Is it so strange that I’d want to be part of stopping what is happening here? And yes, stopping it from reaching my home as well?” She wasn’t going to talk about Three Seagrass. It was bad enough that Sixteen Moonrise, who was clearly no friend to either of them, had noticed that there was something wrong between them, and noticed from only the evidence of an absence. She wasn’t going to confi
rm it. Not now, not ever.
“It’s not strange,” said Sixteen Moonrise, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “It’s merely—interesting. You show up in the most fascinating places, Ambassador. And you seem to be quite convinced by the envoy’s argument that talking to our enemies will deliver the halt to hostilities you so reasonably desire.”
“You think otherwise?”
“Oh, I reserve judgment until an attempt is made,” said Sixteen Moonrise, and for a moment Mahit could see how she would be as a commander: the sort of person who evaluated, and evaluated, and then struck, a flurry of orders and decisions, no hesitation. “But I have lost twenty-seven soldiers in the past week, and I am beginning to be sick of funeral hymns. I have what I would consider perfectly reasonable doubts about the envoy’s efficacy. And yours—at first-contact negotiations, at least. You may be a very skillful barbarian, Mahit Dzmare, and you may have wrapped the Information Ministry around your finger like a satellite caught in orbit, but you’re no Emperor Two Sunspot. And these things aren’t the Ebrekti.”
Mahit found it within herself to laugh—it wasn’t her laugh, exactly, it was some sort of self-mocking amusement that belonged mostly to the younger, half-dissolved Yskandr, his flashfire arrogance and bravado. “They’re worse than the Ebrekti, based merely on their noises—did you know those sounds function as a self-reinforcing amplifying sine wave when played from different directions, Fleet Captain? I thought not. And I am certainly much worse than Her Brilliance Two Sunspot. As a negotiator, and as a person with weight on the world. I would never compare myself to an Emperor of all Teixcalaan.”
It felt good to say. To be vicious in her own despair, to display the wound of her desire in full: No, I will not be Teixcalaanli, I am incapable, I know, let me hold the bleeding lips of this injury open for you to see the raw hurt inside. To say, I would never compare myself to one of you, with full consciousness that she would, and had, and could not stop.
Like a reflection, a shard of memory, hers or Yskandr’s, too blurred to discern: Nineteen Adze saying, It’s a shame you’re not one of us—you argue like a poet. Or had that been Three Seagrass? She couldn’t tell. She wished she could. It might mean something, if she could remember if that had been her or Yskandr, the now-Emperor or the asekreta, wishing for her—for them—to be otherwise than they were.
“Ah,” said Sixteen Moonrise. “And yet you have willingly tried to bring them to a negotiating table.”
“I use,” Mahit said, feeling very tired and very cold, “what skills I have available.”
“As does your Station, I see. What skills, and what people.”
And she doesn’t even know for certain that I’m a spy, Mahit thought. Here for herself, and her Station, surely—and here also for Darj Tarats, in payment for how he would spare her from Heritage’s scans and knives. Her eyes were only her own until she made her first report back to him. And once she did that—once she did that, she might have to choose whether or not she would be a saboteur as well as a spy, to keep being spared.
“Would you prefer we sent fighter ships rather than ambassadors?” Mahit asked the Fleet Captain. “We have a few. Not nearly so many as Teixcalaan, of course.”
Sixteen Moonrise looked at her, considering and expressionless. “There may be a time, Ambassador, that we need every ship we can find,” she said. “At that time, I’ll remind you of what you’ve said to me. And until then—well. Good luck, with the envoy and the aliens and the yaotlek. I assume Stationers believe in luck?”
“When we need it,” Mahit said.
“You’ll need it,” said Sixteen Moonrise, and left Mahit at the worktable alone, vanishing into the hallway as if she had never been lying in wait for her at all.
Mahit put her face in her numb hands, numb elbows on the table, and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes. The last thing she wanted to do was cry. She didn’t have time to cry. She had to think about why Sixteen Moonrise—a Fleet Captain, out of place, drifting through a flagship not her own, sneaking into the rooms of Information agents and barbarian ambassadors—would have wanted to challenge her, test her motivations, warn her—if it was a warning and not a threat—of how little the Fleet wanted to talk to these aliens. How much they wanted to kill them instead. How inconsequential the desires of Information agents, barbarian ambassadors, and even yaotlekim might be against the long weight of habitual violence that was the Teixcalaanli legions.
When she exhaled, hard through her nose, trying to expel all the spent air from her lungs and start again, her jacket rustled—like it was full of paper
(like the jacket she’d worn in the City had been full of ciphertext instructions for how best to start this war and prevent Lsel from being devoured by Teixcalaan)
(it had crackled the same way)
—and she reached into her inner jacket pocket and came up with The Perilous Frontier! A graphic story exactly the size of a political pamphlet. She’d forgotten she’d bought it.
Aknel Amnardbat was very distracting, Mahit told Yskandr. At the time. And then, finding herself hoping for a distraction that was neither tears nor Aknel Amnardbat, she opened it and began to read.
Graphic stories had never been of particular interest to Mahit as a literary form—they’d always seemed unnecessarily hybrid, not quite holoproj, not quite still art, not quite prose. And as a child—all right, as an adult as well, and continuously—most of what she read when she had time to read for pleasure was in Teixcalaanli. The Perilous Frontier! was in Stationer. Drawn by Stationers, and written by Stationers, for Stationers. How old had the kid at the kiosk been who sold it to her? Seventeen at most. Mahit hadn’t been any good at being seventeen. She wouldn’t have known what to do with an artist collective writing graphic stories if one had been tossed at her head, when she was seventeen.
Reading it—Volume One of an as-yet-incomplete cycle of at least ten—felt more like an anthropological exercise than anything else. The protagonist, Captain Cameron, a pilot from a long imago-line of pilots, was on the first spread in the midst of getting into nasty trouble trying to fly through an asteroid cluster, apparently aiming for an abandoned mine and some other character trapped in it. Mahit didn’t know if she was supposed to know what was going on, or if there was some sort of Volume Zero she’d missed. Yskandr was no help: graphic stories hadn’t been youth-culture fashion when he’d been young at all. Mahit found herself grasping for the background, the referentiality and citation, that she’d expect in a Teixcalaanli text, even an unfamiliar one—and didn’t find it.
What happened next was Captain Cameron dodged an ice-comet, flew in close to an asteroid large enough to have an atmosphere of its own, practically a planetoid, and searched grimly through the snow that atmosphere was producing for a person named Esharakir Lrut and the secret archive of ancient Lsel documents that she had apparently hidden in said abandoned mine. Lrut was drawn thin, attenuated, an exaggerated version of how someone might look if they were much younger than their imago, and also had eaten nothing but protein cakes for months. It was impressive art. Mahit couldn’t imagine sitting still for long enough to draw all of this, in ink, by hand—and make it look so evocative, without any colors at all.
Esha
rakir Lrut had been hiding documents to preserve them in their original forms. Cameron was there to rescue her, or the documents—and the majority of the middle of the story was Lrut arguing that yes, she would come back, and with the documents, but that Cameron had to promise to support her versions rather than the official, Heritage-sanctioned ones, when they got back to the Station. Otherwise she wasn’t going anywhere at all. She’d stay in a mine, on an asteroid, in the snow, and wait for someone else to agree to defend the memory of Lsel.
Wrote and drew, Mahit thought. I guess there’s a reason it’s the same size as a political pamphlet, after all.
I haven’t been home long enough to know why artist kids would be angry—
And even if Mahit had, she wouldn’t have ever been friends with these people, who made art out of ink and paper, about Stationer memory, Stationer art, Stationer politics. She’d always spent her time with the other Teixcalaan-obsessed students. Writing poetry. Imagining the City. The Perilous Frontier! was as alien to her as—oh, not quite as alien as the beings that had made the sickening noises she and Three Seagrass had been trying to work with, but almost. Or felt that way, at least.
Mahit winced, and shut the book. I don’t want to talk about Three Seagrass.
Mahit pictured Three Seagrass reading The Perilous Frontier! all despite herself, and wished her imago was less right about what she thought, and how it made her feel. But he felt it too. More and more all the time.
CHAPTER
TEN