A Desolation Called Peace
Page 38
The soundless communication passed between Third and Fourth, that impenetrable language again. They opened their mouths and sang, together, a bone-rattling noise, a wave of nausea. Mahit recognized something of the sound pattern she and Three Seagrass had identified as victory. But shifted. Made otherwise. She was so lost. She couldn’t talk to these things—these people, they were people, she had to keep thinking of them as people even as she tried not to vomit up everything in her stomach—without language. If she was a poet
(you should have been Teixcalaanli, what a poet you would have made)
a poet like Three Seagrass, then all of the vast weight of Teixcalaan had sent the wrong sort of storytellers here. What good was poetry now?
One of the escorts was talking to Three Seagrass, rapid and hushed. In Teixcalaanli, and for one terrifying moment, Mahit didn’t know language at all—all syllables were useless sounds.
Three Seagrass touched her, her fingers on the underside of Mahit’s wrist. “We have to leave,” she said, and Mahit had to work to parse it. To hear words in Teixcalaanli that weren’t all narrative, all implication. We have to become absent, we have to excise ourselves from here.
“What?” she managed, again, useless interrogative particle.
“Her Brilliance. The Emperor. Nineteen Adze, She wants us to send her a message. Both of us. Now. On Weight for the Wheel. The courier’s waiting.”
“We can’t,” Mahit said. “We’re—they’re not—”
Behind her, Third and Fourth were approaching Twenty Cicada. Circling him. He stood perfectly still, holding his box of fungal death. Perfectly calm. Mahit wondered if that was what being a homeostat-cultist meant. Not minding being about to die via enormous predatory enemies.
A claw tapped the box, once. The click of keratin on plastic.
“Go on,” said Twenty Cicada, strange and distant. “Take the shuttle and our escorts. I’ll be all right here, I think.”
“What are you going to do?” Mahit said.
“I’m going to bring them back a little piece of their dead,” said Twenty Cicada, still not moving at all. “And then see if they understand anything about why I did. Go.”
Third was drawing in the light again. A fractal shape, like the fungus. A shape that it laid over the image Mahit had made of an eviscerated human body.
“I don’t know what’s right,” said Three Seagrass. “But Nineteen Adze sent me here—or at least she didn’t stop me, and—she’s the Emperor.”
And Yskandr echoed:
“Don’t—die?” Mahit said, uselessly. She didn’t even like Twenty Cicada.
“Everyone dies eventually,” Twenty Cicada said, Fourth’s maw inches from his face.
Mahit thought, Everyone dies, except memory—and then turned to follow Three Seagrass back to the shuttle, and the Fleet, and Teixcalaan, waiting.
* * *
They’d left Twenty Cicada down in the desert with the enemy. Nine Hibiscus hated it, hated it viscerally, and she couldn’t exactly argue with the decision. Especially since the envoy and Dzmare (the spook and her pet, and oh, sometimes she’d really like to excise all of Sixteen Moonrise’s turns of phrase from her mind) had brought back with them the sworn promise that it had been Swarm himself who demanded to stay.
It was so exactly like him she believed it. It was precisely the same kind of deliberate use of the self in possible sacrifice as he’d done behind the sealed doors of the medbay, waiting to see if he’d die of breathing fungal spores.
She hated it anyway. She could wish her adjutant—her dearest friend, her longest friend—was less interested in keeping the whole world—the whole empire, the universe—in balance and more interested in selfishly saving his own skin. For her sake, if nothing else.
While the envoy and Dzmare went to answer their urgent imperial communiqué, supervised by Two Foam, Nine Hibiscus took an hour of leave from the bridge. (She was owed nine, but who needed nine hours of sleep?) She didn’t go back to her quarters. She went to Twenty Cicada’s, straightaway, and—he still hadn’t changed the password, of course. The door let her in.
There was an autoplay message rotating in holo above the work terminal he usually kept tucked away in a corner. It read, in the perfectly neat glyph-style that Twenty Cicada wrote in: Mallow, if I’m not here, water the plants and feed the star-cursed Kauraanian kitten.
She was not going to burst into tears. That was a fail-safe message, not a goodbye.
Nevertheless, she watered the plants. And when watering the plants revealed said star-cursed Kauraanian kitten, who had been sleeping in one of the plant pots like a strange void-black root vegetable—a root vegetable that yowled at her when she poured water on it by accident—she fed it, too. There were small bits of vat-meat for it, which it seemed to enjoy.
She was still feeding it—it had come to sit on her knee, and purr, and eat vat-meat from her fingers, which was unfairly cute—when her cloudhook alerted her to a priority message, sent on the command-only broadcast band. She played it, without thinking. All messages on that band needed to be heard.
This one resolved into Sixteen Moonrise, her image flooding one half of Nine Hibiscus’s vision while the other half stayed clear. She wasn’t on Weight for the Wheel any longer. She was on her own bridge, on the Parabolic Compression. Nine Hibiscus knew she should feel relieved, but she didn’t. Not in the slightest. She petted the Kauraanian kitten so it would stop yowling for meat (which only partially worked), and listened.
Yaotlek, said Sixteen Moonrise, on her distant flagship. I feel it is incumbent upon me—considering that you are my superior officer, however much we disagree with one another, and also considering that you are aware of the terrible capabilities of our enemies, both in their ships and in their bodies—to inform you that I have learned what I am sure you already know: one of your scouts has found one of the enemy’s home systems. Don’t blame your officers. They were entirely closed-mouthed. But the Twenty-Fourth Legion is just as clever as the Tenth, and when the Gravity Rose altered its trajectory and search pattern to fly home right through my legion—it became obvious that they had found what we are all looking for. I have confirmed, with my own scouts, what the Gravity Rose found.
I am preparing a strike force. I am willing, if you are willing to offer me the command, to lead it: the Parabolic Compression beside Weight for the Wheel, cutting through our enemy so that we might get close enough to burn them all out of the sky. Sanitize what might infect us; what will, undoubtedly, eat us.
I understand that you may wish to wait for your negotiators to return from their negotiation. I too, will wait. For a time.
My yaotlek, I would rather die ending this war before it leaches Teixcalaan of vitality than live through a long siege of attrition. I think you would, too. And besides, you are the hero of Kauraan: perhaps we’ll all make it through alive.
The message ended. The other half of Nine Hibiscus’s vision resolved to Twenty Cicada’s garden of a suite.
“Ah, bleeding fucking stars,” she said. The Kauraanian kitten looked at her, offended, and leapt off of her lap.
* * *
When the Emperor’s ezuazuacat sent a message on fast-courier, it went even more quickly than when the Fleet sent one. Five and a half hours, Five Agate ha
d said. Five and a half to get the request and Eight Antidote’s list of questions to the flagship Weight for the Wheel, and then however long it took to record an answer, and five and a half hours back. She’d sent him to bed while they waited. He’d resented that, but he’d also guessed he’d deserved it: he’d gone out into the City, and had to be rescued, and there was the ever-present wondering of signal problem or incendiary device running through his head. He’d asked Five Agate if she’d heard from the Judiciary, and she’d told him to go to bed more firmly instead of answering, which either meant she hadn’t or she had and it was the bad answer. The incendiary device answer.
But Eight Antidote had gone, and slept, was glad he didn’t dream at all. He was sure he’d have dreamed of train derailments, if he had.
The message to the envoy was supposed to come back to Palace-Earth by noon the next day, but it didn’t. It didn’t come back by dinner, either, and Eight Antidote picked desultorily at his spiced livers-and-cheese in their lily-blossom wraps, even though he loved fried flowers normally. He was too nervous to eat. Everything seemed to be spinning just fractionally faster than he could keep track of. No one would tell him about the subway, and he didn’t know how to get his cloudhook to give him more useful information than what anybody could find out on the newsfeeds.
He had to stop watching the newsfeeds, after a while. Seeing the smoke come out of the subway tunnel was making him feel sick.
It wasn’t until just after sunset that Five Agate sent him an infofiche stick in the internal palace mail, asking him to come and see the answers to the questions he had asked. To see, apparently, not only Special Envoy Three Seagrass, but also Mahit Dzmare. Eight Antidote wondered if the fact that the message had both of them was a sign that Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise’s message of warning had been correct—Information was compromised by the Ambassador from Lsel Station. Or if Three Azimuth had been correct: Mahit Dzmare disrupted protocol and the right functioning of the world wherever she was, whether she meant to or not.
When he got to the Emperor’s suite, Five Agate was waiting for him on one of those white velvet couches. She wasn’t alone. She patted the seat beside her, which meant Eight Antidote was going to watch this holo with the Emperor Herself sitting on his left and Five Agate on his right. Five Agate’s child, Two Cartograph, who had made it very clear to Eight Antidote that he was seven years old, a whole indiction, and wasn’t going to go to bed until he wanted to, was reading a mathematics textbook, sprawled out on his belly on the Emperor’s tile floor. Eight Antidote didn’t think he’d ever done that, when his ancestor-the-Emperor had lived here. He didn’t think he’d ever been that comfortable doing it.
Five Agate asked him—or asked Her Brilliance, it was hard to tell—“Shall we hear what Three Seagrass has to say for herself?” and played the holo before she got an answer from either of them.
It wasn’t just Envoy Three Seagrass. It was her, and Mahit Dzmare right beside her.
On the holo, both of them looked very tired, and sweaty, and not happy at all. They were in a small room with metal walls and a window. The holo didn’t pick up much of the starfield that should have been outside that window, but Eight Antidote could guess what it looked like. He couldn’t see if there was anyone else there, listening to them make this recording, but from where they’d both put their eyes—Dzmare kept glancing to her left, and Three Seagrass was very deliberately not looking left at all—he thought there was probably someone. Someone who made at least Dzmare nervous.
What he’d asked, in his message to the Fleet, was simple: Why do you believe, Envoy Three Seagrass, that negotiating with our enemies will succeed? And why did you choose to go, instead of anyone else from Information? Only those two questions. He just wanted to hear her justification. To try to understand her, at all, and see if he believed what she was doing.
Envoy Three Seagrass had a clear alto voice run ragged. She sounded like someone who had gone to a very loud concert and sung along with the band, or a person who had been really enthusiastic at an amalitzli game the night before. She looked straight at the recording-cloudhook, so now Eight Antidote felt like she was looking straight into his eyes. Direct eye contact. He wanted to look away, and she wasn’t even here to look away from.
“Your Excellency,” she said, in exquisitely formal tense. “Ezuazuacat. Your Brilliance. My most esteemed greetings to you on the Jewel of the World, from the flagship of the Tenth Legion, Weight for the Wheel. I apologize for the brevity of this message, but we are, as you might imagine, somewhat busy.”
There was a pause. An emotion rippled across Dzmare’s holoimage face, and Eight Antidote thought it might be stifled laughter. The laughing that adults did when they were horrified and didn’t want children to know.
“You ask very complicated questions in small and simple packages, Your Excellency,” Three Seagrass went on. “Ambassador Dzmare and I will not be able to give you the sort of response you deserve, considering time and—other factors. But she—Mahit, here”—she gestured at the Ambassador—“is of the opinion that you deserve answers when you ask for them, especially at such a remove.”
Beside him, Nineteen Adze murmured, “… She would think that, wouldn’t she.”
“And you don’t?” Five Agate said, as if Eight Antidote wasn’t right here and they weren’t all talking about him.
“Oh, on this the Ambassador and I have tended to agree quite profoundly,” said Nineteen Adze, and Eight Antidote remembered, harsh and abrupt, what she’d said to him when she’d given him the spearpoint: You’re not Six Direction, no matter what your face looks like. I made sure you didn’t have to be. He wondered again what exactly she had done. For him, or to him—but the envoy was speaking again, the holo going on without respect for a conversation happening five and a half hours in its future.
“You want to know why I took this job. Instead of anyone else from Information. That’s the simple question, Your Excellency. I wanted to. The request came in, and I—wanted to, wanted to do something more than sit in my office and not sleep very much and fail at writing poetry.”
Next to her, Dzmare murmured, “Reed—” Soft and sympathetic. That must be the envoy’s use-name. It was strange that the Ambassador knew it. Stranger that she’d use it. Three Seagrass waved her off, a little falling gesture of one hand that seemed to mean later.
“Ask Her Brilliance about wanting to do something, if you don’t understand it, Your Excellency. I’m sure she’s watching this with you. And if you still think you don’t know why me and not anyone else from Information, ask her why she didn’t stop me, or send someone else with me.”
Nineteen Adze laughed, when the envoy said that. Laughed, and nodded. Eight Antidote was very sure he was being manipulated, over more than six jumpgates and five and a half hours of time—but it was so strange and refreshing to be manipulated by being earnestly told the truth. He needed to learn that one.
In the holo, the envoy sighed. “Your other question is harder. That’s why I’m sitting here with Ambassador Dzmare. She understands languages better than I do, even if I’m a much better diplomat than she is— It’s not her fault, she’s—” Three Seagrass looked as if she’d eaten the first word she’d meant to say, swallowed it back quickly, and replaced it with “—out of practice. Why do I believe that negotiating with our enemies might succeed? Because they talk, Your Excellency. Because when we figured out how to make communicative sounds that they knew were communicative, they talked back. Because—oh, because I grew up reading Eleven Lathe. Get Five Agate to get you a copy of Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier, you’re a ninety-percent clone of His Brilliance Six Direction, you’re old enough to understand it.”
Dzmare interrupted her, carefully. Like a swimmer diving into water without a splash. “Because, Your Excellency, the envoy likes aliens. Likes human aliens, at least—she told me so when she met me the first time—because she, unlike some Teixcalaanlitzlim, thinks humans who aren’t Teixcalaanli might b
e a kind of human. It’s easy to get from there to thinking that aliens might be a kind of—person. Even if they aren’t human persons.”
“Mahit,” said Three Seagrass, like she was shocked.
But the Ambassador went on. “I don’t know how they talk. I know they have more languages than the ones we’ve learned how to say words to them in, and that at least one of those languages isn’t one a human can hear. I know they don’t care about death the way we do, but that they do understand death. I know that they came back to the negotiating table, after the first meeting. And that they haven’t stopped attacking the Fleet, even during the negotiations. I know all that, and not much more. But I think they might be a kind of person. And if they are…”
“If they are, Your Excellency,” said Three Seagrass firmly, “there is the possibility of a brokered peace before we lose too many more Fleet ships. That’s all.”
A murmur in the background. Whoever else was with them, saying something inaudible. Dzmare looked frightened, or nauseated, or just annoyed. Stationers had too many expressions, and it was hard to tell what they meant. The envoy looked serene. “That is all. End recording.”
And then the holo vanished, and there was only the Emperor’s living-room suite, and Two Cartograph looking up from his homework on the floor, saying “Mama, does Eight Antidote do matrix algebra, because I can, and I solved all the problems while you were watching holo.”
Eight Antidote missed being seven years old, he decided. Being seven was so much simpler than being eleven.
He got up off the couch. He wanted to think about what he had just seen, and not talk about it, not with the Emperor Herself or Five Agate or anyone. “I can do some matrix algebra,” he said, and sat down next to Two Cartograph. “You want to show me?”