A Desolation Called Peace
Page 28
“Did you bring this from the City?” she asked Three Seagrass, gesturing at the cloth.
“I wish I had,” said Three Seagrass, “it’s rather brilliant. No, I got it from Twenty Cicada.”
Mahit wondered when that had happened. At what point during the long night they’d spent apart, not sleeping—was she doomed to sleep deprivation every time she spent more than a day surrounded by Teixcalaanlitzlim?—had Three Seagrass been given a piece of Teixcalaanli propaganda encoded in a beautiful tapestry? Here is water, even in the desert. We are a people who bring flowers.
Not in Teixcalaan they don’t, Mahit thought, and got electric laughter spiking up and down her ulnar nerves in response.
“It’s good,” she said to Three Seagrass. “Whether it was his idea or yours, I think it’s going to be effective, at least if they come from systems with plant life…”
She trailed off. There was something coming up the other side of the plateau.
They moved in a hunting lope, a stride that covered ground, even when the ground was the uncertain footing of sand. Their shoulders rocked forward with each step; powerful, heavily muscled. There were two. They had not come with an escort. Mahit’s first impression was of black-keratin claws on their hands, of terribly long and flexible necks that ended in muzzled heads, round ears that were faintly furred. Their skins were spotted, variegated patterns, and they towered two feet above human heads—three feet over the smaller Teixcalaanlitzlim, like Three Seagrass. They wore pale grey tactical uniforms, built for deserts, and no visible weaponry. They looked like nothing she’d ever seen. They looked like people. They looked like those claws were all the weapons they’d need.
Every opening word Mahit could think of dried up in her mouth, as if the heat had stolen not only her saliva but her speech.
Beside her, Three Seagrass straightened her shoulders and set her jaw as if she was about to speak oratory in front of the Emperor. Mahit knew the shape of her like this, the focus that meant performance, and wondered when she’d learned to recognize it so well, how she knew this about Three Seagrass and not much else. Not enough else.
“Play the hello noise, Mahit,” she said. “You’ll know when.”
And then, as if she was meeting a functionary from some other Ministry, and not a foreign creature that stood shoulders and many-toothed head above her, Three Seagrass walked to the edge of the shade canopy, barely five feet from the aliens, pressed her fingertips together, and bowed over them. Mahit reached for the control-datapad for their audio projector—hoped it would work, that it hadn’t been fried in the smothering heat, or impregnated with gumming sand. Her fingertips ghosted over the pad’s surface, summoning up the right terrible noise. She didn’t press hard. It was like holding the trigger of an energy weapon; the slightest motion was all that was necessary—
“I am Envoy Three Seagrass of the Teixcalaanli Empire,” said Three Seagrass to the aliens, one hand pressed first to her chest—I am—and then flying up in an encompassing gesture to take in the canopy behind her, laden with its woven flowers. And this is mine, this is what I represent. “I negotiate on behalf of Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze, the Edgeshine of a Knife, whose reign shatters all darkness.”
Nothing Three Seagrass was saying would be understandable to the aliens. That was what Mahit was for, right now. She pressed her fingers to the datapad, and played hello, all of the sickening static scream of it.
The aliens went very still. One of them glanced at Three Seagrass, and then pointed with its chin at the projector setup. The other one looked there, too. Mahit wished she could read anything about their body language. They hadn’t moved forward or back. Were they puzzled, intrigued, angry? It was worse than trying to understand the understated delicacy of Teixcalaanli facial expressions. Worse by a lot. She knew they were communicating, but she couldn’t tell how. Not audibly. Maybe they did communicate by scent, or by ear positioning, or something else she’d never imagined. She was a linguist at best (more like a diplomat-poet with pretensions, she’d never taken a xenolinguistics specialty, she’d had all of Teixcalaanli language to play with and back then she hadn’t thought she’d ever need anything else), and if the aliens didn’t have words to decipher …
The second one opened its mouth and made the hello noise, without any benefit of amplification or audio processing. The first alien, the one which had pointed at the audio equipment, joined it. The same noise, reverberating. On Weight for the Wheel, Mahit and Three Seagrass and all of their escorts had been stuffed full of antiemetics, the best that the medical bay could locate, and she still felt twistingly nauseated. The vibrations. The static noise of them, in her bones. It really was infrasound, with all of infrasound’s physical horrors. But all right, all right, they heard hello and they said hello back, two sharp-toothed maws wide open. Their tongues were as spotted as their skins.
Mahit looked at Three Seagrass and shrugged as if to say, Now what?
Three Seagrass caught her eyes. Held them with her own: a wild intensity, a semihysteric giddiness. Mahit remembered it from how she’d looked right after the first time someone tried to kill Mahit in front of her, back in the Ambassadorial apartment in Palace-East, so very far away. A sense of watch me—here we go.
Three Seagrass took a breath, the kind that expanded all of her narrow chest and belly: breathed not only for oratory but for something even louder. And, exhaling, began to sing.
“Within each cell is a bloom of chemical fire,” she sang, bell-clear alto, a voice for calling lost people home, a carrying voice, meant for distance. “Committed to the earth, we shall burst into a thousand flowers—as many as our breaths in life—and we shall recall our names—our names and the names of our ancestors—and in those names blood blooms also from our palms…”
It was the Teixcalaanli funeral poem. The one Mahit had heard arranged in a hundred different ways, spoken or sung—the one she’d read the first time in a textbook in a classroom on the Station, marveling at chemical fire and the idea of flowers made of blood. But she’d never heard it like this. Three Seagrass had made it sound like a war chant. A promise. You spilled our blood, and we will rise.
Also it was fucking clever. Not the alien sort of resonant vibrations, but a very human version.
Three Seagrass was gesturing with one hand, beckoning Mahit forward. She went, as if pulled—the heat still made her dizzy, and she wondered if the aliens felt it, or cared, and what their home planet was like climatewise—and took up the position that still felt exactly correct: Three Seagrass at her left. The two of them arrayed in front of an insolvable political problem. (The two of them, and the ghost of Twelve Azalea like an echo, an imago who would never exist. That thought was like a fishhook through her lip, a sudden and capturing pain.)
“You know the song?” Three Seagrass murmured. Mahit nodded. She knew it well enough. “Good,” said Three Seagrass. “Let’s see if we make them get sick when we make resonant sound waves, too.”
Mahit hadn’t sung with another person in years. Poetry was different. She could recite, she could declaim—but singing wasn’t something she did, by habit or inclination. It had a strange intimacy to it that she hadn’t expected. They had to breathe together. They had to pitch together. And all the while the aliens stared at them, blank and evaluating, with their killing claws peacefully at their sides. They didn’t vomit. Mahit was glad; she didn’t want to get possibly toxic alien on her skin, and she was so close to them. They smelled like—animal, and something else, a dry herbal scent she’d never smelled before.
It wasn’t a long song, the funeral poem. Mahit was still gasping after it was finished. The heat lived inside her lungs now, and her throat felt raw. She swallowed, but
there was no saliva to wet her mouth with.
The left-side alien made a low, crooning noise that Mahit had never heard before. The sound was metallic, machine-liquid like a synthesizer, but clearly, clearly organic. It made her ache just behind her sternum, as if her heart was racing out of control. The right-side alien came two loping steps closer, and now she knew her heart was racing, familiar adrenaline-spike of visceral fear. She was going to faint, or scream. Three Seagrass’s shoulder brushed her shoulder. They were both shaking.
The alien pressed one of its claws to its chest, as Three Seagrass had done. And it gestured behind itself, even though there was nothing behind it to gesture at, no canopy and no escort of soldiers. And then it made sounds. Almost reasonable sounds. Almost, Mahit thought, words. A spitting, consonant-heavy, pitched syllable sequence, but one she thought she could imitate. Even though she was going to have to sing to do it.
I should have taken lessons in holding pitch, she thought. And tried, like she’d tried the very first time she’d been in a Teixcalaanli language class, to make the unfamiliar sounds she’d heard with her own mouth.
* * *
Nine Hibiscus had never been very good at waiting. It was why she’d been a Shard pilot, back at the beginning of her service in the Fleet: Shard pilots tumbled out of warships like glittering knife-sharp glass, unhesitant, and most of the time they didn’t know they were going to be deployed until right before it happened. No delays, no effort to make herself hold still, to stay in calculating abeyance until the right moment to strike. That skill, she’d had to learn. She’d learned it well enough to be captain, then Fleet Captain, and now yaotlek—but that didn’t mean she liked it.
Down on Peloa-2, four of her people—plus an Information agent and a barbarian diplomat, but four of her people, first and foremost—were either being dismembered by aliens (worst case) or being subject to heatstroke-inducing temperatures while waiting for negotiations to proceed (best case). And she could do nothing but wait—wait, like she was waiting for her scout-ships to find some base the aliens were using, off to the left where Forty Oxide’s people were being picked off, little by little, death after death and funeral after funeral; wait, like a just-graduated cadet expecting word about their first posting in the mail—wait and watch the larger of the two three-ringed ships spin menacingly at the very limits of her visual field on the bridge. The smaller had gone into the Peloa System, just like her own shuttle had. They were experimenting with parity, as if this was a negotiation between two groups of humans and not an attempt at communicating with a species which seemed to be driven only to devour or despoil, one or the other … but which still had technological capabilities as good as or better than any Teixcalaanli warship.
Nine Hibiscus hated waiting, in situations like this. So she did exactly what she’d always done, from the time when she’d been a cadet: she made sure that there was nothing on fire on the bridge, literally or metaphorically, and likely wouldn’t be during the next two hours—and went to invade Swarm’s personal space, so that they could wait together.
On Weight for the Wheel his personal space was the adjutant’s suite, two rooms on the exact opposite side of the ship from her own: the idea being that, if some enemy weapon took out the captain in her quarters, her adjutant might survive to act in her stead. Nine Hibiscus knew the way there as well as she knew the way to any place in the galaxy. Furthermore, she had the door codes, unless Twenty Cicada had changed them again—
He hadn’t. His door opened up for her like he and she were precisely the same person, and Nine Hibiscus was hit in the sinuses with the scent of green. That very particular smell: the richness of plant life, alienated from flowers: vines and succulents and anything else Twenty Cicada could convince to grow with next to no help from water. He used his own water-ration for his garden. That, too, he’d been doing since they were cadets together. No waste; no excess. Not for her Swarm.
So said his religion, anyhow, and she suspected he’d do it anyway, even if homeostasis didn’t request it of him. That was the difficulty of Twenty Cicada: determining where the devotion to an entirely minority religious practice stopped and the person began. If there was a space between the two concepts at all.
He was sitting in the middle of the floor, cross-legged, a halo of holograph analyses arced around his head, transparent enough to show all the green creeping up the walls through each image. Most of them were views of ship systems she knew, instant familiarity even seen backward: the readout of energy consumption and life support systems from the entirety of Weight for the Wheel was pinned in its usual place about a foot above his forehead, so that everything else he wanted to look at could spin around it. A still point like a crown.
Also, curled in his lap like a puddle of space without stars, was one of the pets from Kauraan. It seemed to be asleep. He was petting it.
“I thought you hated them,” Nine Hibiscus said, dryly. “Was all of that complaining about ecosystem disruption for show, then?”
Twenty Cicada looked up at her, and dismissed most of his work holos with the hand that wasn’t petting the small void on his knee. “I do hate them,” he said, smiling. “But this one likes me, and what am I going to do with the things, space them? It’s not their fault they exist.”
She came to sit next to him, knee to knee. There always seemed to be more oxygen in one of Twenty Cicada’s garden rooms. (Not seemed: there was. Plant respiration. She’d checked the readouts once. It was a fractional difference, but real.) The Kauraanian pet lifted its head and opened yellow eyes. It made a noise like a badly tuned stringed instrument, stood, paced in a tight circle on Twenty Cicada’s lap, and settled down again. “I didn’t think you’d space them, Swarm,” she said. “But this is cuddling.”
“It yowls if I don’t,” Twenty Cicada said, perfectly bland, and Nine Hibiscus laughed. For a moment she felt very young: transported more than a decade back. To some ship where she’d been of use, and so had he, and she had never thought of not sleeping for the sake of her Fleet.
“Ah, well, then I assume you’ll have to keep it,” she said, and stroked its fur herself. It was very soft.
“Nothing from Peloa-2 yet?” Twenty Cicada asked, just as neutrally as he’d explained his sudden affection for the pet.
“If there was anything, I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
“I know you wouldn’t,” he said, and waved off the insinuation with a falling gesture of one hand. “Better question, yaotlek: how many hours until we go down to pick up their corpses and the doubtless ruined remains of my favorite wall hanging?”
Nine Hibiscus blinked. “Why do the envoy and the Stationer have any of your wall hangings, let alone your favorite?” The object in question was a tapestry of pink and blue-gold lotus flowers, in the highest City style. It usually hung in Twenty Cicada’s bedroom, which meant Nine Hibiscus hadn’t seen it since he’d bought it and shown it off to her. There were other, presumably less-favorite wall hangings all over his quarters: everywhere there wasn’t a plant. For someone who hardly ate and who divested his own personal self of all but the most severely correct trappings of his job and his authority—just the uniform, no hair and no skin-pigments, the essence of a Teixcalaanli Fleet officer distilled—Twenty Cicada surrounded himself with a riot of color and aesthetic luxury. He’d explained it once: it was one of those balances that the homeostasis-worshippers could practice. Excess and asceticism at once.
“I thought the envoy would need something lush to stand in all that desert with. If she doesn’t get herself eviscerated before the enemy has time to notice symbolism.”
&n
bsp; “… If the enemy is capable of noticing symbolism,” Nine Hibiscus muttered.
Twenty Cicada shrugged. “I’m sure they have some. But I doubt they care for ours.”
“Why give the envoy your flower tapestry, then? If you’re just expecting us to go down and retrieve partial envoys and partial tapestries in another three hours.”
“Three hours. Longer than I’d wait, yaotlek, but you’re the one who gets to make decisions.” There was something in his expression, in the shape of that phrase, that made Nine Hibiscus want to wince. Yes—she was the one who made decisions, and she didn’t much like it when her adjutant disagreed with them, especially when he went along with her anyway. When he placed so very much weight on his trust in her.
“There are other luxuries on our ship we could have given the envoy that weren’t your favorite tapestry, Swarm,” she said. “If you wanted to set her up to use symbolic valence provided she could get these aliens to recognize what a flower is.”
He scratched the Kauraanian pet behind its ears. It emitted a purr like a very small starship engine. “I could have,” he said, “but why would I send anyone out on one of your missions, Mallow, without the sharpest knives and the most beautiful examples of our culture I have to give? If we are trying to talk to these—things—then we’re trying. Entirely.”
Which was precisely what made her want to flinch. He didn’t want to talk to them, or even make the attempt to, but she had set their course and here he was devoting their resources to that course, no matter what sacrifices were required. She wanted to apologize, but that wasn’t something she did. It undermined both that trust and the authority it gave her. Instead she nodded. “If we go down there to fetch the envoy and our people back and there’s nothing but rent tapestry pieces and entrails, I will give you an absurd service bonus next time we’re on leave in the Western Arc and you can go buy a larger one, with more thread count.”