A Desolation Called Peace
Page 35
“—Probably, yes, and no, I’m not doubting my own capabilities, I’m—” She stopped. Her tongue felt like lead in her mouth. All of the neuropathic pain was back in her hands, a continuous sparkling flare, like being pricked by glass splinters. She didn’t know what to do, and Yskandr didn’t know what to do, and Three Seagrass was going to keep hurting her like she had yesterday, keep thinking of her as my clever barbarian and not as Mahit Dzmare, no matter how many times they kissed, and there was no such thing as safety and no such thing as going home.
“Mahit?” Three Seagrass asked, and cupped her cheek in a narrow palm. “I don’t like using interrogation techniques on gorgeous people I’ve just slept with, but you’re worrying me and also not providing me with much to go on, and eventually the training just kicks in.”
This was almost certainly a horrible, delicious, and representative example of Information Ministry humor. It was funny. And it was everything, absolutely everything, wrong with how the two of them were going to be together, and Mahit was tired. Tired of—
Only the sudden stop at the end?
Electric laughter, and more of that hideous, grief-stricken hollowness flooding her chest. Her hands hurt so badly.
“If I was,” she began, shutting her eyes and turning her head away from Three Seagrass so that there was nothing but that gentle touch and the hot darkness behind her eyelids, “if I was being the sort of agent of Lsel that I ought to be, considering how I managed to arrange to let you steal me at all, I should be trying very hard to not do well at talking to the aliens.”
Three Seagrass made a clicking noise with her tongue. “Lsel Station would prefer an endless war?”
Mahit sighed. “No,” she said. “Darj Tarats would like Teixcalaan to waste itself to exhaustion against … whoever these people are. What Lsel Station entire wants is a much more complicated political analysis, and we’re certainly not happy with all of these beautiful warships going over our heads in a continuous stream. But Darj Tarats is who I am supposed to be working for, when I’m not working for you.”
Honesty was awful, and it was an intense, full-body relief at the same time—a tension released. I guess we’re both compromised now, for good.
Three Seagrass kissed her cheek, a quick and sharp brush of lips. “You are fascinating, Mahit. Someday I want to know why you decided to tell me that. I’m good in bed, but I’m not that good.”
Mahit found herself laughing, despite all her better instincts. “Because, Three Seagrass, I don’t think I’m going to do what Darj Tarats wants me to. And—someone should know. That I thought about it first.”
“That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I’ll think about it,” Three Seagrass told her, and disentangled them enough to sit up. “Come on. Let’s get breakfast and get ready to go down to Peloa-2 again. Since you’ve apparently decided to not commit sabotage?”
“Apparently,” Mahit said, and reached for her discarded bra, which had ended up tangled in the springs of the upper bunk sometime in the previous evening’s scramble.
“Excellent,” said Three Seagrass. “Also, you’re really pretty naked. Just so you know, before you put your underwear on again.”
Mahit stared at her while she grinned a creditable Lsel-style grin, and then got up, stretching her hands above her head and arching her back, giving Mahit an excellent view of all of the muscles in her shoulders, the curve of her spine, the fall of her hair unbound. She was still staring when Three Seagrass picked up, with that same covetous curiosity that she’d had when stripping Mahit out of her clothes, the slim volume of The Perilous Frontier! that Mahit had left on the fold-out desk in her hurry to get dressed for their first trip down to Peloa-2.
“… It’s Lsel literature,” she found herself saying, and hated that she sounded apologetic about it.
Still naked, Three Seagrass sat down at the desk and opened it up. “Who drew it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Mahit said. She’d pulled the covers up over herself, wrapped her arms around her knees. She felt like she was preparing to be hit, and she didn’t even know why. She hadn’t drawn it. “A teenager. I bought it from a kiosk on one of our residential decks—”
“You have lots of kiosks,” Three Seagrass said, absently, turning the pages. She read fast. “One of them tried to sell me kelp beer. It was horrible.”
Kelp beer was horrible. “Some people like it,” Mahit said. When had Three Seagrass found time to be accosted by a kelp beer salesman? Before or after she’d run into Aknel Amnardbat?
“Mm. I’d rather this—the line art is really very well done, and this Esharakir character—”
“What about her?”
“She reminds me a little of you. I think. I have to read the rest, to decide.”
“We have time,” Mahit found herself saying. “It’s not long. Come back here, if you’re going to read it? The bed’s more comfortable than the chair.”
* * *
The dreams started with the twisted, melted flesh of the Minister of War’s ear, except it wasn’t the Minister of War, it was Mahit Dzmare in the gardens, and it was all of her face. All of her face, and the tiny beaks of the palace-hummers dipping into the wet, twisted ruin of it, drinking. Like a person who had been exposed to a nuclear shatterbomb strike and was melting of poison. Was poisoning everything she touched.
In the dream she said his own words back to him. He remembered that part. She said, They don’t even have to touch you to do it, and was covered with birds, and burnt and slippery with lymph, and then she wasn’t Mahit Dzmare at all but one of their enemy, one of the aliens, long neck and strange spotted skin and predator’s teeth—and not burnt. Not at all.
Not burnt, just very carefully holding one of the palace-hummers in its long-fingered hand, delicate except for the claws, and in the dream Eight Antidote remembered thinking that surely it would eat the bird, remembered being killing-afraid, panicked-afraid, and trying to ask it not to while it preened the tiny feathers with the crystalline-laced clawtip of its index finger.
There were worse things after that, but he couldn’t remember them right. Just the sense that he had done something terrible, and knowing it was something that he’d done in the dream.
He got up. Showered—facing away from the cameras, as usual—dressed. One of his spywork outfits: grey on grey. He almost looked like a normal kid. Almost. Kids maybe wore colors. He didn’t really know. He pulled his hair back, combed it straight and even, and tied it with a silver and leather cord. If he didn’t look like a kid, maybe he should just look like a spy. He had a grey jacket, a long one with layered lapels, a grown person’s jacket, and it matched well enough.
He was going somewhere. He realized that in the middle of pulling the jacket on, and decided to sit down and decide where, before he left. It wasn’t going to be the Ministry of War. He thought he might scream if he did that again, and that was both babyish and not helpful.
He knew a little bit about Mahit Dzmare. Not very much. But a little bit. And he had watched her speech on the newsfeeds, the one that happened right before his ancestor-the-Emperor had died, the one that had started the war. He’d watched that a lot of times. And he had—oh, he had disruptive person rattling around in his skull, making him feel strange and a little sick. (Was he a disruptive person? Could a person become an Emperor without being a disruptive person?)
But Mahit Dzmare wasn’t alone, when she’d been here in the City—and she wasn’t alone now, when she was out conducting first-contact negotiations on a Fleet warship. She was with the same person both places. And that person was the Third Undersecretary for Information, Three Seagrass. Or—Special Envoy Three Seagrass. Same person. And Eight Antidote didn’t know much about her, at all. And she was a lot easier
to think about than a planetary first strike.
The rumor was she’d written the song the rioters who were still loyal to Emperor Six Direction sang during the attempted usurpation. The one that went released, we are a spear in the hands of the sun. The one that got stuck in Eight Antidote’s head all the time, and probably in the heads of a lot of other people too.
She was a poet, Three Seagrass. Before she was a—whatever she was now.
He called up a public search on his cloudhook for her work. There was a lot of it. She hadn’t written anything—or at least anything public—in the past two and a half months, though, and he really didn’t want to sit around reading poetry all morning. He’d end up feeling like he’d have to write an essay about it afterward, and submit it to one of his tutors. And it wouldn’t explain much about her; it was all from—before.
There were other searches he could run. He was Eight Antidote, His Excellency, associate-heir to the sun-spear throne of Teixcalaan, after all. He was all of that, even if he was eleven, and his cloudhook had a lot of accesses. Probably more than he knew about. Probably more than he’d ever thought to use, or knew existed.
He queried the general records office for every public activity Three Seagrass had been recorded as doing in the last month. The general records office had a very annoying interface—it was part of the Judiciary Ministry, apparently, or at least it was a Judiciary glyph that spun in midair while the office’s AI decided whether or not he was allowed to know what Three Seagrass did in her free time. He wondered if the Sunlit used an interface like this. Probably not. They had their own ways of seeing.
Three Seagrass hadn’t done a lot of things, it turned out. Not in the past month. She spent money in restaurants. She had her uniforms dry-cleaned, which everybody did. She didn’t buy anything strange or big or connected to aliens, and she didn’t write any messages that went off-planet (or at least she didn’t write any personal messages that did—the General Records Office didn’t keep track of what Information sent in or out. Which was probably good. Probably. Even if Eight Antidote wished he could see into Information’s records of who Three Seagrass had been talking to). What she did do had happened all in an eighteen-hour period right before she left the City: she got reclassified as a special envoy, withdrew most of her savings and added them to an account that was definitely Information property, ordered a whole lot of new uniforms, and left from the Inmost Province Spaceport as supernumerary cargo on a medical transport called the Flower Weave.
And then she was gone. Gone, and vanished to the other side of all the jumpgates between here and the aliens she’d decided to talk to.
Eight Antidote knew where he was going now. The Flower Weave made a circuit of close-in jumpgates to the Jewel of the World—its captain was really weirdly meticulous about noting all of them—and it was back in Inmost Province Spaceport right now.
A medical transport captain would not have an agenda about the palace or inter-ministry competition. A medical transport captain wouldn’t know anything about aliens, or disruptive persons. A medical transport captain would just tell Eight Antidote what his impressions of the envoy had been. And that was what he needed. He needed to figure out if he thought it was a good idea that this envoy and Mahit Dzmare were talking to the aliens Three Azimuth had sent a whole yaotlek’s six of legions out to kill instead.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
QUARANTINE PROCEDURES FOR CONTAGIOUS DISEASE: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW! It is most important for Stationers to listen to the staff of the Councilor for Life Support Systems and to trust their judgment rather than your own during a quarantine event. However, it is very unlikely that you will ever need to! The last quarantine event on Lsel Station occurred five generations ago. Nevertheless the imago-lines of medical personnel who assisted in keeping almost every citizen of the Station safe have been carefully preserved and live amongst us now. Don’t be afraid! A minor illness like the common cold, or a fungal infection like ringworm, while contagious, is unnecessary to quarantine, and happens to everyone … even Life Support staff. If a more serious disease outbreak occurs, you will receive detailed instructions. A sample follows …
—pamphlet distributed by the Medical Safety and Health Board of Lsel Station, under the aegis of the Councilor for Life Support Systems
* * *
TRAVEL ADVISORY: There are currently no travel advisories for Teixcalaanlitzlim within the Empire. Please expect and plan for minor delays as military transport receives priority at jumpgate crossings.
—announcement on holoproj at Inmost Province Spaceport, rotating/repeating
WHEN Eight Antidote had been small, he’d had minders, like any child: people to keep him from falling into a water garden or eating an infofiche stick or something else very stupid that really little kids did all the time. But he hadn’t had minders for a while now. He had tutors, of course—though since his ancestor-the-Emperor had died, the tutors were more of something he went to when he wanted, rather than something that happened to him every day—and he had all of the camera-eyes of the City.
Camera-eyes couldn’t stop him from deciding to get on the subway and go to the spaceport. They’d keep track of him—and now that he was on his way, he found that kind of reassuring, because there were a lot of people in the Jewel of the World once you got on the subway, and they all seemed to know where they were going and weren’t distracted or overwhelmed by anything they saw, which felt absurd. He was distracted and overwhelmed. There was just so much. He knew the palace complex as well as he knew the shape of his own knees, and he’d mapped out warship trajectories for sectors six jumpgates away, and still the City felt very loud and very—well. Very much.
But he was going to the spaceport. And the City’s eyes would track him. That was, for the first time in a long time, nice.
The subway had signs, and Eight Antidote knew the map—who didn’t know the map?—and even if he didn’t, his cloudhook would. The subway, he decided, made sense. Loud, fast-moving, uncomfortable sense, but sense. If he waited on this platform or that one, the timetables would show when the next train would arrive, and where it was going, and it did arrive then, and went where it was supposed to. That was the subway algorithm doing its work. He switched lines twice—terrified the first time, gleeful the second. He could do this. He absolutely could. It was so much easier than being in Three Azimuth’s office that he didn’t even mind when people walked in front of him and almost tripped him because he was too short for them to have noticed.
And then he was in Inmost Province Spaceport, and he wasn’t sure he could do it after all. The subway was one thing. The spaceport was another thing altogether. There were even more people, and they were milling around looking at arrival and departure holos, clutching suitcases or pushing baggage carts taller than he was. The vaulted ceilings of the spaceport took all their conversations and made them into a wave of noise, a clattering that got itself mixed in with the cheerful holo jingles of food kiosks, all trying to get him to buy SNACK CAKES: LYCHEE FLAVOR! as well as SQUID STICKS: JUST IMPORTED! He felt sick to his stomach. He usually loved squid sticks, and right now he thought he was going to scream, or maybe cry, because everything was so loud, and he never really wanted to eat anything ever again, squid sticks included. How was he going to find the Flower Weave in all of this?
He ducked into a quieter side corridor, where people were moving in one direction or another instead of wandering around without any patterns at all, and sat down on a bench. He wanted to pull his knees up to his chest and hide behind them. But that was what a really little kid would do. He tried to think. He was the ninety-percent clone of the Emperor Six Direction, who was supposed to have been one of the most intelligent Emperors who ever started out as a soldier, so he should be able to think of something.
When he did think of it, it was so obvious he felt even stupider and more like a dumb kid than ever. He turned on his cloudhook’s navigation function, and cross-referenced the berth number t
he Flower Weave’s absurdly bureaucracy-happy captain had filed when he arrived. His cloudhook chimed, soft enough that only he could hear, and lit up a navigational path from his position (which was apparently in Auxiliary Spaceport Corridor B, Tulip Terminal) to the Flower Weave’s berth, all the way over in what his cloudhook was calling Nasturtium Terminal. The path in front of him glowed a comforting white, everything limned in the color right before dawn on a cloudy day. Eight Antidote struck out across the spaceport floor, trying to look confident and comforted and like a man on a mission.
Nasturtium Terminal was clearly for ships that were headed out-system, through jumpgates. The entire feeling of it was very different than Tulip Terminal: Tulip Terminal had been full of Teixcalaanlitzlim, going everywhere, short hops and long ones, on-planet or up to a satellite or on a cruise around the Jewel of the World’s local planetary systems. Nasturtium Terminal had tourists, sure, but it also had a lot of grown-ups looking very seriously at their travel manifests and visas for out-Teixcalaan trips, and businesspeople with crates of wares, and a few columns of Fleet soldiers in their perfect uniforms, new cadets heading out to their first postings. Looking at them made Eight Antidote straighten his spine and square his shoulders as he walked. His illuminated cloudhook path took him right by an Information Ministry mail kiosk, staffed by two asekretim who looked hardly older than the Fleet cadets. Operating interstellar jumpgate mail must be the sort of thing people got assigned to when they weren’t trained enough to be useful anywhere else.
Eight Antidote stopped and watched them work. It didn’t seem difficult, what they were doing. They took the infofiche sticks that were brought to them—they came in bins about the size of the wastebasket in his bathroom—sorted them (probably by destination, or at least by jumpgate they were supposed to go through first on the way to their destination) into different bins, and then handed off the bins to other Information Ministry workers who had pilots’ uniforms on, except in Information cream-and-orange. Boring. Eight Antidote would hate to have this job. It only got interesting when a non-Information person, someone in perfectly normal clothes except for the Judiciary-grey armband she wore, came and stood at the little window on the side of the kiosk and handed over what looked like a very official infofiche stick. That one didn’t go into a bin. That one made one of the asekretim leave the kiosk, special infofiche in hand, and vanish off to hand-deliver it to what Eight Antidote guessed was a very fast courier indeed. The other asekreta wrote out a receipt.