A Desolation Called Peace
Page 45
“It’s like a kaleidoscope,” Four Crocus murmured. “You might throw up at first. People do. I did. But you’ll see. You’ll see what’s happening to us. Ready?”
He nodded. He realized, for the first time in his life, that he had no idea what was about to happen to him.
“Wake up the ship, then,” Four Crocus said, “and when the programming comes up, say yes to everything.”
She got out of her Shard, and the shipglass hood of the pilot’s chamber clicked shut behind her. Eight Antidote was alone. His hands on the controls—
He executed the sequence. Felt the ship come awake under him, a thrum, an impatience. Half his vision went black with starfields—the cloudhook coming online, some version of Shard-sight—there was a flicker of a prompt in the corner of that field, a yes? And he said yes, one blink—
And fell into the void, tumbling, thrown from himself as far as he had ever been. Into the void, and into how it was screaming.
* * *
“What good would that do?” asked Nine Hibiscus. “Even if you lived through it, which fuck knows if you would—”
“It’s a system,” said the static-distorted voice of Twenty Cicada. “It’s a distributed system, and it’s out of balance because they don’t understand how we can be people and not be part of it. It’d do—a lot of good, Mallow. To have a—foreign graft.”
Mahit watched the yaotlek’s face as she grappled with the basic Teixcalaanli horror of artificial augmentation of the mind. It was the one thing she never had quite understood—the depth of their cultural taboo, the central reason behind why Yskandr-the-man had died: he’d offered Emperor Six Direction the imago-technology, and neither the Ministry of Science nor Nineteen Adze could countenance what they seemed to understand as a fundamental corruption of the self.
Isn’t that what they say about us? she asked him. That we aren’t human, really, us barbarians with our mind-sharing technology—
Nine Hibiscus said, “Swarm. Your religion doesn’t require you to balance the entire starfucked universe all by yourself.”
“Who else would try?” said Twenty Cicada, and Mahit shivered, a violent little shudder of the muscles in her back.
“Do you think he’s right?” Three Seagrass said to her, almost too low to hear. “They’re a collective? Is it like—you?”
“Stationers are chains,” Mahit said, “lines, not—he’s describing a fractal web of minds, that’s nothing like—yes, I think he could be right, it would make sense with how they always seem to know where their other ships are, with no lag over time. He could be.”
Three Seagrass reached for Mahit’s hand, caught it in hers. Mahit hadn’t expected it—hadn’t expected Three Seagrass to touch her at all, in public. But she didn’t pull away. No one was paying attention to them right now. Not when they could be listening to the yaotlek and her adjutant argue about whether he should functionally join the enemy forces, biochemically, mentally, entirely, in hopes of being able to stop a war. And Three Seagrass’s fingers were warm and tight on hers, like an anchor in a spinning world.
“If he does it,” Three Seagrass said, “and he’s right, and he lives—then he’ll have achieved a kind of first-contact negotiation no Teixcalaanlitzlim has ever managed.”
“… Are you jealous?” Mahit found herself asking.
“I’m not brave enough to be jealous,” said Three Seagrass, and looked away.
* * *
He died twice before he learned to talk. The worst experiences were the loudest, the strongest: they drew Shard-pilot minds like a black hole draws mass. A Shard dissolving from outside in, all of its shipglass coated with black squirming oil, liquid, thick, the ship-AI alarms all screaming at once and then silenced, and then the pilot himself screaming and screaming and silenced—and even before Eight Antidote could think, could stop tumbling end over end, made of a thousand minds and two thousand eyes, gyroscopic, ever-shifting
(how did anyone survive this, how did anyone learn to be this kind of pilot, to feel everyone near them—)
before he could find himself in the midst of the cacophony, he was spinning in a rictus of fear, engines cut, some other Shard-pilot’s blanked-out panic in his throat as her Shard was struck by the edge of a three-ringed, slick-grey spinning wheel of a ship and she saw the flat pockmarked side of the asteroid coming up fast and faster and faster and I love you I’ve always loved you remember me and nothing. An afterimage of fire.
Two deaths, and almost a third—the spiral-caught tug of horror, a near miss of energy cannon, friendly fire in all its blue death right in front of his face—but that one wasn’t a death, and Eight Antidote somehow found enough of himself to scream in words.
To weep and scream and say, Stop, stop, whoever is carrying a courier message from Three Azimuth, stop, please, wait.
And from a thousand minds and two thousand eyes: What? Who are…? Where? Some attention, a scattering. Not all of them were falling apart. Not all of them were dying: some of them were just—flying, or fighting, or being together, and the nearer ones to him—in his own sector of space, he thought, snatch of coherency, It’s only the worst things that go all the way through accidentally—heard him, and knew he wasn’t Four Crocus, and wanted to know why.
Please, he said. He didn’t know if he was speaking out loud or if he was thinking. I’m Eight Antidote—the old Emperor’s ninety-percent clone—I need to stop that message. It’s wrong. It’s false.
And he tried, as hard as he could, not to think, But you’re dying, and it’s horrible, and what if Three Azimuth and Nineteen Adze were right, and that genocide order is the only way to stop it?
Because if he thought that, they’d never believe him.
* * *
Nine Hibiscus was pacing the bridge, back and forth, as if some internal mechanism inside the massive curves of her could not be still and talk to her adjutant at the same time. Mahit couldn’t quite believe the degree to which the conversation they were having was public, where she and Three Seagrass and half the officers on the bridge could all hear how it flitted back and forth through the long shape of friendship, trust, arguments they’d clearly had a hundred times before, but were no longer theoretical, no longer abstract. But how could it be private, when Twenty Cicada was down in a killing-desert and Nine Hibiscus was where she belonged, on the bridge of the ship he had kept running for her? Mahit imagined him with the tendrils of white fungus in their plastic cube, balanced on his palm. The sun would be finally beginning to set on Peloa-2 by now. She wondered if the aliens had claws to his throat or if they’d gone back to their own ship to wait, or retreat, or be smug (if they were capable of smugness) at having convinced a Teixcalaanlitzlim to ingest a poison deliberately.
She imagined how he would open the box, and put the fungus on his tongue, and be prepared to die, or to solve the problem, exactly as he had in the medbay of Weight for the Wheel. Imagined that, and found that Yskandr was thinking of Six Direction—or she was thinking of Six Direction—fever-flushed, worn to bones and eyes by age and illness. Prepared to die, or solve the problem, even if it meant he was not himself any longer by making use of a Lsel imago-machine.
Is it good to know that he wasn’t the only Teixcalaanlitzlim who would make an attempt like this? she asked, forming the question deliberately in the empty mirrored room of their mind.
Yskandr told her, which was a sideways answer. The rush of grief and longing and pride was clearer—Yes, he was saying, but he never would have been in a situation like this one, so who knows.
Nine Hibiscus was a shadow passing in front of the shipglass forward viewports, her silhouette hiding a
nd revealing the still-present shape of that alien ship that had brought the negotiators down to Peloa-2. It hovered and spun, and she paced. Argued.
When Darj Tarats emerged from the little room he’d been taken off to, accompanied by one of the other bridge officers—Mahit thought that was the navigation officer, but she couldn’t remember his name or what exactly he did—she was almost as surprised as she’d been by his presence at all. It was so much easier to not think of him. To not feel Yskandr recoil—to recoil herself, ashamed and angry and afraid.
“Councilor,” she said, trying to let everyone know he was present. All of the Teixcalaanlitzlim on the bridge turned to look at him, and at her—all except Nine Hibiscus. She had better things to think about, clearly.
“Dzmare,” he said to her, and approached. She found that she was standing up, as if she was going to back away—found that her hand was still in Three Seagrass’s hand and saw Tarats’s eyes go to that link, a diving glance that seemed to fundamentally satisfy him; his mouth curved into a brittle and vicious smile. In their own language, he said, “I see, now, what you have been doing. Why you were so willing to go with this woman—she offered you more than just a respite from Aknel Amnardbat and her covetousness of your imago-machine, didn’t she? Something nicer.”
“And how many times,” she said—Yskandr said, the faint drawl to his voice, the flattened Stationer consonants that came from utter confidence and too long speaking Teixcalaanli—“did you tell my predecessor that the seduction of empire could go both ways?”
Oh, she hoped no one else on this ship spoke enough Stationer to notice her playing games with Tarats—throwing all that long epistolary history between him and Yskandr back at him, to see if he’d flinch—and making herself seem like a spy with no loyalties to anyone at all, not Lsel and not Teixcalaan, while she did it. (She hoped Three Seagrass knew as little Stationer as she claimed to. That was the core of it. She didn’t want to break whatever it was that they had managed to salvage between them. Not for Darj Tarats.)
“Look where it got him,” spat Tarats, and gestured at Mahit as if she was the affront to all his sensibilities. “Look where it’s getting you.”
“And where is that?” Yskandr said, with her mouth. “Where exactly are we, that you are not? Dependent on the actions of Teixcalaan to save or destroy us—how has anything changed?”
She’d never had the continuation of an argument that she’d not been present for, before. Her hands ached, prickled. Burned. Careful, she thought, but she didn’t exactly want him to be careful. Didn’t want, herself, to be careful. Only to win. She wished she knew what winning would look like—
“All of your line,” said Tarats, vicious, “have no core of loyalty to rely on—if one of you ever did, the rest of the line would expose it to vacuum and wither it. Perhaps Amnardbat had the right idea after all.”
Mahit—her, not Yskandr, Yskandr was a glimmer of horror and fascination—lifted her burning, insensible hand to slap him across the face.
* * *
Shard-sight was a cacophony; it was the chaos and movement and noise of Inmost Province Spaceport magnified by orders of magnitude, and Eight Antidote barely felt like he existed in the huge flow of it. The single point of him—where he was, his body, his life and what he knew—he kept losing track. He died again, caught in someone’s firefight with a spinning ship, a burst of savage triumph as that pilot threw themselves into the enemy, becoming a spear, a piece of shrapnel caught in the heart of those whirling rings, an explosion. It hurt. It hurt every time.
And he kept saying, Please. Listen to me. I need you to stop that message. One of you has it—one of you is carrying it through a jumpgate, one of you is about to carry it—and it’s worse. It’s worse than this. It’s false and wrong and I am the heir to Teixcalaan and I am telling you if you let that message reach the battlefront all of this death will be a prelude—
It wasn’t words, exactly. It was feeling. Thinking at, or through, the whirl of eyes.
And at last, coming back to him: a singular voice, a person, his Shard on direct vector toward a jumpgate discontinuity, far (Still far! Still perhaps far enough!) from the dying of his fellow pilots. A voice unused to hesitance, and hesitant now, asking him, If you’re Eight Antidote, if you’re that kid from the holovids and the newsfeeds, if you’re the kid who was covered in our Emperor’s blood when he died for us, then promise me you mean it. Promise me that if I lose this message, the way we are dying will stop.
A silence, in the kaleidoscope. Another scream, stifled; Eight Antidote couldn’t think of where his eyes were, or what eyes really were, if they did not feel everything at once. A waiting silence.
I promise, he said, meaning it, and not knowing if his promise was a lie.
* * *
Tarats’s cheek was a stinging red where Mahit had slapped it. He lunged for her, a forward motion that seemed to be all teeth, his hands still restrained at the wrist. She darted backward, and Three Seagrass—amazed and horrified and utterly delighted, all at once, which was pretty much how Mahit doing anything made her feel, really—stepped in front of her. The Councilor from Lsel towered over her by a foot and a half. His chest was very narrow. Three Seagrass was narrow herself, but she was also a good forty years younger than Darj Tarats, and she figured if she had to, she could probably knock him over. It would be an enormous diplomatic faux pas, but what wasn’t, currently? Everything about this bridge right now was a complete mess. All protocol dissolved! There wasn’t an iota of Information Ministry training that covered tripartite negotiations from the bridge of a Fleet flagship, where one of the negotiating parties wasn’t even human and one of the others wasn’t Teixcalaanli, and none of the parties were Information agents except the negotiator. She should write a procedure manual.
If she lived long enough to be that bored.
Tarats backed off. Ah, so he was willing to attack Mahit, but not some Teixcalaanlitzlim. That was useful to know.
“Yaotlek,” said Two Foam—the comms officer sounded agonized, having to interrupt her commander again, especially while she was still talking to Twenty Cicada down on Peloa-2. Three Seagrass turned to see what had caught Two Foam’s attention now, and was entirely surprised by the person who had entered the bridge: a soldier with the bright pointed triangle of a Shard pilot on his sleeve, who was openly weeping.
She’d wept, of course. In public, even. And been embarrassed and horrified by it, or else felt entirely appropriate, because she’d been in mourning. But she’d never once wept like this man was weeping, endlessly and continuously, and come to report to her superior while she was doing it.
Nine Hibiscus turned to see the soldier, and Three Seagrass watched her face go grey under the space-kissed bronze of her cheeks. “Hold on,” she said, still to Twenty Cicada. “Don’t do anything while I’m not paying attention, Swarm, that’s an order—Pilot. Pilot, what’s your name? What’s wrong?”
She came toward him, and he turned his face up to her like he was a flower planted too deep in the shade, reaching for sunlight. “Shard Pilot Fifteen Calcite, yaotlek,” he said, without ceasing to cry. It seemed to be something that was happening to him, an autonomic process which did not deter him from attempting to report to his superior. The degree of loyalty Nine Hibiscus commanded was intense. Radiant.
He went on: “Shard-sight is—corrupted, or too intense, or—we don’t know what’s happening to us exactly, yaotlek, but it’s not like Shard-sight was when you were a Shard pilot, it’s the new programming, the collective proprioception—we keep feeling each other die, and there are so many, and I’ve turned off all my programming but I
can’t stop thinking about it. You need to know that there’s a threshold—a threshold for trauma experience, I think—where the proprioception starts a feedback loop. I’m not the only one who can’t stop crying, yaotlek. I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to insult you like this.”
Nine Hibiscus shook her head. “I am the farthest thing from insulted, Pilot Fifteen Calcite. Tell me a little more, if you can. I know about the—afterimages, in Shard-sight. I was one of you, not so long ago. But this—when did this start? Are the Shards still operational?”
“—When more than three or four of us died near each other, and all of the casualties were running the Shard trick—I mean, the proprioception upgrade.”
Three Seagrass knew she shouldn’t interrupt this—but she wasn’t Fleet, bound by protocol, and she had never heard about this technology. “The Shard trick?” she asked, loud enough to cut through the heavy silence surrounding Nine Hibiscus and her soldier, the rest of the bridge quiet save for the static of the open channel down to Peloa-2, and Twenty Cicada listening.
Every head turned to look at her. She repeated herself. “The Shard trick?”
Two Foam, behind and to her left, murmuring in what Three Seagrass suspected was the hope of getting her to shut up, “New technology from the Ministry of Science—it lets Shard pilots feel where each of the others are in space, and eliminates a lot of navigational lag—it’s based off the algorithm for the Sunlit—”
Three Seagrass was absolutely sure she—and all of the Information Ministry—were not supposed to know about this particular technology. War and Science again, working together and not letting Information in on the game—let alone the Emperor and her staff—just like it had been during the near-insurrection two months ago. The same pattern of influence. She said, much louder than Two Foam had, “The Fleet is using a mind-sharing technology for navigational purposes?”