A Desolation Called Peace
Page 32
“… And Dzmare is one of them?” he managed to ask.
“You think about it. She comes here, she upsets the whole sugar-crystal-fragile peace between the Ministries, shows up in newsfeeds, writes a poem or two, and gets her patron made Emperor—not that Her Brilliance was a poor choice, Her Brilliance was a perfect choice, and I’d swear to that in a sun temple with blood from both wrists at once—and then she goes away again. But here she is, popping up on a battlefield, and immediately I have one Fleet Captain sending secret reports about a possible breach in the loyalties of another Fleet Captain? Of a yaotlek, no less? That Dzmare is a disruptive person. Whether she means to be or not.”
Eight Antidote said, without quite knowing why he said it, “How did you learn to recognize her? People—like her. I met her in the garden, when she was here—she liked the palace-hummers. She was drunk, I think. And sad.”
Three Azimuth nodded. “She might very well have been. Both drunk and sad. She was a barbarian at court. She doesn’t seem like a person who bears Teixcalaan ill will, not directly. It’s all right, kid, that you didn’t think about her this way. I only do because it’s been my job, for a long time, to notice those people and the situations they create.”
“Is that what the Minister of War is for?”
“Stars, no. The Minister of War is for making sure Teixcalaan’s military supremacy continues without end or interruption. Finding disruptive persons was what I did when I was the military governor of Nakhar System.”
Nakhar System, which Eight Antidote knew hadn’t rebelled even once while Three Azimuth had been its governor. Nakhar System, which usually rebelled every seven years or so, and always had, before Three Azimuth arrived.
Before Three Azimuth had noticed the disruptive people, and had made sure they couldn’t be disruptive any longer.
* * *
Mahit remembered this sensation—the feeling of being swept along from moment to moment in a bright haze of exhaustion, bravado, and culture shock: it was how she’d ended up feeling every time she’d been immersed entirely in Teixcalaan. It was as pervasive on a Fleet warship as it had been in the imperial palace, and as intoxicating; as if there was a contaminant in Teixcalaanli air as pervasive and mind-altering as the heat of Peloa-2. She felt like she was flying. Untethered. She had just negotiated, as much as it was possible to describe what she had done as negotiating, given the limitations of language, with incomprehensible beings—
Both, Mahit told him, as the door to the assigned quarters she shared with Three Seagrass hissed shut behind the two of them. Right now she was still vibrating, still gloriously triumphant and terrified at once. But alone in this room with her former cultural liaison, her partner-in-negotiation, who understood nothing and everything about her—she could see the approaching drop. The point where there would no longer be anything she had to do, and the silence and stillness of exhaustion would come down on her like the sudden hand of gravity.
Three Seagrass said, loud in the hush of a room where the only noises were the churning of Weight for the Wheel’s air-purification systems, “Thank you.”
Which wasn’t what Mahit had expected at all.
“For what?” she asked, turning toward her. Three Seagrass was still grey through the cheeks, hollow-eyed, all tension and suppressed giddy hysteria. Heatstruck and half drunk on success.
“You sang their own sounds back to them,” Three Seagrass said. “I wouldn’t have thought of it. Not that way. Not that fast. And look what we did. Think of it, Mahit. No human beings but us right here have ever spoken that language, ever before today. Just us.”
Am I human, then? Mahit thought, bitter-sharp, and shoved the question away, unwanted. Couldn’t she enjoy this? Couldn’t she feel the same victory that Three Seagrass was feeling?
“I still think we’re just picking up some kind of pidgin—they talk to each other, and we’re not hearing it—” She didn’t even know why she wasn’t agreeing with Three Seagrass. Why she had to keep qualifying their work. They weren’t in front of the yaotlek now. She didn’t need to justify a further round of negotiations, or report honestly on her failures, or—
“Mahit,” said Three Seagrass, quite intently.
“… Yes?”
“Hush.” She stepped close, close enough that Mahit was abruptly aware of the shape of her body, the space she took up in the air, the scent of her dried sweat. And then her hands were in Mahit’s hair, pulling her down in an arc to be kissed.
Mahit thought she made a sound—some noise that was a strangled word, half expressed—but Three Seagrass’s mouth was warm and open under hers, and she kissed like she meant it, not an offer or a question but a claim; all desire, not the coming-together of exhaustion and grief that their first and only prior kiss had been, deep under the City, waiting for Six Direction to die in a sun temple, sanctified in front of all of Teixcalaan. This was—
Her hands had found Three Seagrass’s shoulder blades, the curve of her waist, the ridge of her hipbone that fit exactly into Mahit’s palm. The precise way that Nineteen Adze’s larger hipbone had fit into Yskandr’s larger palm—the doubling was intense, almost violent, a surge of desire like a pulse or a punch between her thighs. Distantly, she wondered if sex would be different now that she had an imago with male-bodied memories—decided it didn’t matter, it was going to be good—and in deciding, realized that she’d already committed to whatever this was going to be. That she wasn’t offering or asking either, but saying yes. (Like Yskandr had said yes, first to the Emperor and then to Nineteen Adze—and look where that had gotten him—but oh—and it didn’t matter that they hadn’t talked about their argument, it didn’t matter at all, she wanted to never think of anything again, except for desire, except for triumph, except for being wanted—)
Distant, as desire-choked as she felt:
Yskandr was probably right, and Mahit didn’t care.
Three Seagrass broke the kiss with a slow sucking bite to Mahit’s lower lip, and Mahit caught her breath on a whine, all unintentional.
“I was going to ask if you actually liked people of my gender and sex,” Three Seagrass said, breathless, “but I don’t think I need to.”
Mahit shook her head. Her mouth was as dry as it had been on Peloa. She could feel her heartbeat between her legs, racing-hot.
“Good,” Three Seagrass said, and kissed her again—swarmed up against her, small breasts pressed into Mahit’s own, a thigh insinuated between her thighs. Mahit rocked against her, shifted, aligned her pelvis to shove her own hipbone against the seam of Three Seagrass’s trousers. Three Seagrass gasped and bit Mahit’s collarbone. She was hot through the fabric and Mahit was viciously, delightedly sure that when she got her hand between her legs she’d find her dripping wet.
“—Do you always get like this after you’ve won something?” she asked, and Three Seagrass bit her again, and laughed, and pushed against her hip in steady motions.
“Only when I’ve won something with someone like you,” she said.
Almost, Mahit asked, Only barbarians, then? Only sufficiently alien partners? Almost, but it was better—easier—to kiss her again, to feel the expanding, dizzying memory of Yskandr kissing someone as much smaller than him as Three Seagrass was to her, the Emperor who had opened up under his mouth like Three Seagrass was opening under hers—to feel that doubling and willingly allow it in. (Six Direction’s hair had been longer, and grey-silver, but the texture when M
ahit wound her fingers into Three Seagrass’s queue and disarrayed it was completely the same.)
“Come on,” she said, when the kiss dissolved from lack of available oxygen, “come on, I’m not going to fuck you standing up—”
“That bed’s tiny.” One of Three Seagrass’s hands had gotten under her shirt, cupped her breast, teased expertly and distractingly at the nipple. “There’s a perfectly good floor right here…”
“I’m not that kind of barbarian,” Mahit said, and found herself laughing, too, and pulling away long enough to squirm out of her jacket, pull her shirt over her head. The air of their quarters on bare skin raised shivery gooseflesh down her arms, over her ribs. The air, and Three Seagrass’s eyes on her.
“You’re not,” Three Seagrass said, dark and intent, “but I am.”
And then she had dropped to her knees in front of Mahit, fluid and easy motion. She pressed her open mouth between Mahit’s legs. Wet heat through fabric, her tongue already mobile and seeking—Mahit thought, Blood and starlight, said, “Fuck, yes, please,” didn’t care that she’d cursed in Teixcalaanli, that she was only thinking in Teixcalaanli, that she and Yskandr were both explosively, devastatingly lost—sank a hand into Three Seagrass’s hair and pulled her in, tight.
INTERLUDE
IN all the vast reach of Teixcalaan, it is an honor for a young person sworn to the Six Outreaching Palms to be selected as a medical cadet for the Fleet: the Fifth Palm, medicine coupled close with research and development, is the second-most difficult placement to achieve within the Ministry of War. And thus it is a greater honor still to serve on an active battlefront before the completion of one’s mandatory years of training, and perhaps a further honor yet to be allowed, under no supervision but the watching eyes of Weight for the Wheel’s security cameras and biohazard containment detection algorithm, to clean up the remains of an alien autopsy.
Six Rainfall, two and a half indictions old, young enough to still have acne at his temples that he judiciously scrubs at with astringents each morning before putting on his uniform, is—by his own intimation but also by the evaluations submitted quarterly by his superior officers—quite good at his assigned tasks. He is the sort of soldier-to-be that might be headed for command of a medical bay of his own, in sufficient time. A person who takes both scientific and health-conscious initiative, his last supervisor had written—and that, amongst other factors, had put him here, transferred from one of the Tenth Legion’s smaller ships to the flagship itself.
Currently, he has set his cloudhook to talk to his audiophonic augments and is playing his favorite new album quite loudly into the bone-conduction points in his skull while he cleans the lab and carefully packs away various alien parts in cryostorage. He’s three months out of date on the shatterharmonic music scene, which is what he gets for signing up for a two-year stint with the Fleet without any ground postings, but he’d snagged this album off of an entertainment vendor at the last big jumpgate station they’d stopped at between Kauraan and this back-of-beyond killing field. It’s the latest release from All Points Collapse, who are, in Six Rainfall’s opinion, the shattermost of shatterharmonicists, and next time he takes leave, he’s going to make sure it’s on a planet where they’re touring live. The harmonies sing in triplicate in his skull, and he hums along with them as he packs alien bits into appropriately labeled containers and carries them into the cryostorage unit. He’s wearing latex gloves, of course. And a breathing-mask filter. That’s standard for disposing of any autopsy remnants, and alien autopsy remnants obviously require strict protocol adherence.
Six Rainfall is good at protocol adherence, except for his tendency to play music when he’s working.
The alien is disturbing. It has had its rib cage opened up like deeply unpleasant bloody wings, and its head nearly disarticulated from its overlong neck, all the vocal folds exposed and dissected. Six Rainfall has never seen a dead alien before. Or a live alien before. He peers at it, half to feel the squirming atavistic fascination of being disturbed, and half because he’s quite genuinely interested in it. He tilts its heavy skull back to get a good view of the dentition; the lolling blue-black tongue splotched with pink; the sporelike structures in the oral cavity, white fungal tendrils extending down from the soft palate—
The sporelike structures in the oral cavity which definitely were not described in the autopsy report that Six Rainfall read with great and extremely specific attention before he came in here.
In his ears, the shatterharmonics are a glittering fall, and they do what they have always done for him: make him feel brilliant and fearless and serene in his curiosity.
It’s not exactly a bad idea, what he does next. It’s only a bad idea because he is so sure it was a good one, and because he moves so quickly. Of course he needs to take a sample of those spores—of course he needs to confirm that they are in fact fungal infiltrates, and if they are, immediately report them to his superior officer and from there on up to command, who need to know if the aliens-who-are-their-enemies are not mammals at all, but instead—and here Six Rainfall engages in a surprisingly accurate fantasy, though he will never know it—vessels of some sort of fungal intelligence.
His hand, appropriately gloved, in the maw of the enemy. His fingers encounter the spore-tendrils, and break them off. They’re friable. Easy to aerosolize. Fungal infiltrates are. Always have been. These especially, though Six Rainfall doesn’t know it. These hardly ever need to be as solid as they are now—to grow outward, questing unhappily for somewhere new to dwell within, for an end to silence and rot, for escape from the ruin of a home. Six Rainfall pulls his prize out of the alien’s mouth, thinking with a sick and excited worry that he is so very glad of his breathing mask, so very glad indeed, because these things are probably emitting spores all over the place now that he’s broken them off. He’s going to have to put the whole medbay under contaminant/containment protocol. Right after he gets this stuff under a microscope—
He doesn’t notice, pulling the spores out of the alien’s mouth, that the sharp cutting edge of its teeth—carnivore’s teeth, scavenger’s teeth—slices right through his glove, and right through the pad of flesh at the base of his thumb. It doesn’t hurt. It is too sharp to hurt—a tiny, perfect incision that Six Rainfall ignores entirely. He has a microscopic analysis to perform.
It is fungal, under microscopic analysis. Not a fungus Six Rainfall knows, but he’s hardly a mycologist. Mycologists are usually ixplanatlim, and what Fleet soldier has time for that kind of training? You have to write a thesis, and Six Rainfall would rather be patching up soldiers any day. But he thinks this is a fungus. It’s not anything else, at least, which means it is utterly worth transmitting up the command chain. He takes quick holoimages with his cloudhook connected to the microscopy scan, and composes a brief and breathless missive, the sort of thing that doesn’t even need an infofiche stick. It just says PRIORITY MEDICAL: ALIEN CORPSE IS GROWING ALIEN FUNGAL INFILTRATES, SEE ATTACHED and goes straight to the cloudhooks of everyone associated with medical on Weight for the Wheel, plus Twenty Cicada, who Six Rainfall thinks of only as the adjutant. Twenty Cicada has put himself on all of the ship’s priority message lists, which Six Rainfall does not know about but would find supremely annoying to imagine if he did: stars, so many interrupting messages all the time, it’d be distracting as anything.
Because Twenty Cicada is on all those message lists, he almost arrives to the medbay in time to change what happens next. Almost. But not quite.
Six Rainfall leans in to get a better look at the microscopy, spin the holo around, and see if he can get a more complex and clear idea of how the fungal spores grow; it looks like a fractal, like a neural net, and he’s really very curious. He lifts a hand to spin the holoimage in the air, and feels something hot and liquid drip down his wrist.
Red. Blood. His blood.
He stares at it. He thinks, I don’t remember being hurt.
It hurts now. His thumb. His wrist and fingers.
A kind of burning. Like noticing the blood has made it hurt.
He pulls the glove off. It is full of blood. His hand is thickly coated with red. It looks wrong. The blood looks wrong. Blood shouldn’t be as—thick as it is, like all of his clotting factors have gone wild. He’s horrified. He is pretty sure he’s in shock. His breath comes in tight wheezing gasps.
He turns his hand around. The cut is below his thumb, and it gapes wide open, the lips of it spread with white fungal structures. Just like those that he has put under the microscope. They’re growing out of him.
They’re growing. More of them bloom from the wound, fast enough that he can watch. His skin splits at the edges of the cut to make room. That hurts, too, inside the larger hurt. The low strange burning. How he can’t get a breath. There’s a nest of infiltrates, inside his thumb—he lifts his other hand to try to tear it out, try to get it out of him—
They break easily. But they keep blooming. There’s more. They go deeper. They’re in his veins, his arteries—choking them with white along with the red. That’d explain the clotting factor problem, he thinks. He gasps. He wonders if they’re in his lungs or if he’s just having an anaphylactic exposure reaction, and then he is on the floor, and then there is—
(a chorus, like distant screaming, like the music still playing on his audioplants is echoed and made strange, full of voices that no shatterharmonicist had ever sung, some reaching noise, singing we—)
—absolutely nothing.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
If the traveler has the opportunity to stop in the Neltoc System and sample the cuisine of the Neltoctlim, this guide recommends it with enormous enthusiasm. While the flavors of Neltoc cuisine may be milder than those found in other culinary destinations or in the best restaurants on the Jewel of the World, that mildness is misleading: it reveals an opportunity for appreciation of the deep complexity of balancing salt and sweet, bitter and earthy, which each individual bite of the Neltoc specialty meal-style allows—one tiny composed dish at a time. Leave at least three hours for your restaurant experience, and think (as does this author!) that maybe those homeostat-cultists have a point about balance …