A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  And heard Mahit laugh, a brittle fast noise. “… See, Three Seagrass?” she said, “it’s not so far a step from what Teixcalaan does already to what we Stationers have done with imago-lines for generations. Except we don’t let anyone go in unprepared, like this pilot has—”

  And cut herself off, realizing what she’d said.

  Realizing, almost certainly, that she’d admitted the existence of imago-machines without any of Yskandr Aghavn’s careful dance of secrecy.

  But it was too late. Councilor Tarats, all his teeth bared—she was never going to understand how Stationers smiled, and what the expression beyond smiling was, and where the edges could be—leaned right over Three Seagrass to snap something nasty and fast in Stationer. Three Seagrass caught imago-machine and could guess the rest: traitor, betrayer, exposer of our proprietary secret incredibly immoral technology, fuck you and everything you stand for. Obvious, really. Obvious, from how Mahit reacted, too—how she blanched and then shoved Three Seagrass gently out of the way to meet Tarats head-on. (Everyone on the bridge was looking at them now. Even the weeping Shard pilot, who had mostly devolved to sniffling.)

  Mahit started whatever she was saying in Stationer—one long sentence, a snarl of consonants—and then switched, fluid and easy, to Teixcalaanli. “And, Councilor—do you really think I am the first to trade our technology for our continued existence? Twenty years you wrote to Yskandr, and he fooled you the entire time.” Her voice was silk, slick, sliding in and out of the tonality Three Seagrass was familiar with, and she knew that she was listening in part to Yskandr Aghavn (who was—so very like Mahit, but not at all her, and—oh, there’d either be time for Three Seagrass to panic about which one of them she’d slept with and trusted or there wouldn’t be time for anything, so that didn’t matter now).

  Tarats said—in perfectly understandable language, he was capable, obviously—“If you are saying that Aghavn created some kind of—collective mind, that’s not imago-technology, Dzmare. That’s an aberration. A Teixcalaanli corruption, if it exists at all.”

  Mahit threw her head back and laughed. “Tarats. Oh, my friend, my predecessor’s friend, my patron and foil—no, why would we do that? When all we had to do was what you asked, and let Teixcalaan fall in love with us, and promise the Empire memory eternal in exchange for our freedom?”

  “What you’re doing is sick,” Darj Tarats said, “a perversion of imago-integration—you’re not Yskandr. The pretense is vulgar.”

  “No,” Mahit said. “I’m not Yskandr. I would never have offered the Emperor Six Direction an imago-machine, and I would never have died for it. I would have done something else you’d despise. Teixcalaan doesn’t let us stay clean. Not you, not me, not Yskandr. I’m him enough to be sure of that. I remember what I am. What you helped make him, and what he has made me.”

  The low static of the open channel that Twenty Cicada was listening through crackled. Hissed. Resolved into his voice, serene and strange. “Ah, Mallow,” he said, and Nine Hibiscus spun like she’d been stung, stared at the starfields outside the bridge like they would resolve into her adjutant’s face. “I won’t even be the first, it seems. Lsel is far ahead of us, aren’t they? But we’re catching up.”

  “Don’t,” said Nine Hibiscus. But she didn’t say I order you not to. Nor did she say please. Three Seagrass thought the two might have been equivalent.

  “It has been the deepest honor of my life to serve with you, my dear,” said Twenty Cicada. “Wish me luck.”

  And then that open-channel static cut off to silence. Circuit closed.

  Somewhere down on Peloa-2 a man who believed that waste was the worst thing that could happen to a society was letting himself be devoured.

  * * *

  Even after he’d promised, even after he knew he’d—succeeded, if success meant feeling some Shard pilot far distant from anywhere he’d ever been take a War Ministry–sealed infofiche stick and crush it, stamp it under his heel against the side of his cockpit—smash the battle-flag sigil, the sun all gone to spears, nothing left of illumination except the gold sealing wax—the splintered pieces floating up from around his boot, gravityless, sparkling—even after all of that, Eight Antidote couldn’t quite stop being in Shard-sight. He was spread out so far. There were so many Shards, and he didn’t know which way was up, or if up had meaning, or if he had meaning, really: he was only himself, and there wasn’t a lot of himself compared to dying and desperation and the endless shifting overwhelming beauty of stars and void and moving all together, like a murmuration of birds.

  He was scared, and proud. Those things were his, he was sure. But they were the Shard pilots’, too, and it wasn’t enough to be scared and proud. He felt like he was dissolving. Salt dropped in water.

  Death and pain drew Shard-sight, but so did a sufficient number of Shards together: and there was one of those now, a center-point of a swarm, a group that knew one another even without the collective feeling that made the Shard trick work over impossible boundaries, impossible distances. That group hung suspended like a scatter of stars themselves, all around a flagship, all moving together, a shifting shield that kept the behemoth of their flagship-home hidden from easy view, easy comprehension. He caught the very edge of a name: that ship was the Parabolic Compression. That ship was the pride of the Twenty-Fourth Legion.

  And it, and its Shards, were already—already, without ever being ordered, heedless of anything Eight Antidote had done or learned or promised—approaching the inhabited planetary system of the alien enemy, and they were aflame with triumph and vicious anticipation: they were going to end this all, now, together, at last—

  No, Eight Antidote thought, but the word was gone, gone inside the wide stretch of linked-up minds. Too soft to hear. He wasn’t enough of anything, anymore, to reach so far.

  Please, no! One voice in a cacophony, in a choir of other negations, worse ones: no, don’t let me die—no, I can’t do this, I am afraid—no, no, no, this cannot be happening—

  And the Shards of the Twenty-Fourth pressed forward, unafraid; unconvinced, if they’d even heard him at all.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  There is no instruction in the practice of balance that firmly forbids or firmly commands an observance: if a person chooses to bleed for the sun and stars of Teixcalaan, there is no harm in it, as long as they are willing to bleed also for the earth and water of each planet, or for the tears and saliva of a stranger, or for something so small and unimportant as a barren patch of garden.

  —from Catena Commentary on the Practice of Balance, vol. 3 of 57, Anonymous Commentator G (blue text, left-hand side, dated to approximately one hundred Neltoc years post-conquest); Anonymous Commentator G writes in Teixcalaanli, which may be used to disambiguate them from Anonymous Commentator F (blue text, left-hand side), who writes in Neltoca. For arguments on the validity of F and G as separate persons, see Catena Commentary on the Practice of Balance, vol. 39 of 57.

  THE war dissolved around Nine Hibiscus like spun sugar in water, too fast for her to grieve. She was yaotlek of this six of legions, and she was on the bridge of her flagship, and every report of the sudden hesitance of the enemy, the vanishing of attack forces, the hovering pause of three-ringed death-spitting ships, orbiting Teixcalaanli vessels now, observing and slow, instead of smashing them to pieces—every report came to her. She held them all. She spun up the cartograph strategy table and marked the position of her Fleet, the position of her Fleet’s enemies, kept it updated in as close to real time as possible, while all of the crisis-flashpoint of conflict seemed to simply—stop. Hold itself in patient abeyance. The only moving piece was the Twenty-Fourth, Sixteen Moonrise’s Parabolic Compression, and even she seemed to have slowed, surprised by the sudden lack of forceful opposition. Still moving, but—that was all right. She’d rather have the Twenty-Fourth in position if this strange détente ended, if what Swarm had done wasn’t sufficient.

  Whatever Swarm had done, he’d at lea
st bought them time. She’d shouted—no, she’d screamed down the narrowcast band, even after he’d cut it off—screamed nonsense negation she was ashamed of, but it hurt, it hurt like a hole in the center of her, as if the alien acid spit was wearing her away like she was the metal of a ship. That he was either dead, or gone, or—not himself. Her friend. Her dearest friend. What was she going to do about all of his plants? About keeping the hydroponics deck in order? About that fucking Kauraanian kitten he’d been feeding? What was she supposed to do, other than watch the thing that she was for—prosecuting a war, in any way necessary, in all ways possible—become unnecessary, marked out in points of light?

  She wanted to ask him: Swarm. Swarm, what are you doing? But he wouldn’t respond to any message she sent. It was possible that he had simply eaten the fungus and died and the enemy had understood this as some sort of sufficient sacrifice.

  * * *

  No one heard him or cared to listen; all Shard-sight was grief or was single-minded determination that shut out grief and dying in a scintillation of light. Eight Antidote lost the shape of the Shards guarding the Parabolic Compression; died again, a simple ugly death, someone thinking so clearly aw, fuck, as a fast-moving piece of debris struck the side of their Shard, deformed it, cracked its bubble of shipglass from its seals—cold, shock-cold, and anger, and then quiet.

  He wanted to stop. He wanted to get out. There was no out. There was no stop.

  Except that:

  —the eyes of Shard after Shard saw a sudden hesitance in the barrage of ship-dissolving acids and energy-cannon fire, a pause as if the enemy was thinking, all together, as a whole—a three-ringed ship, hardly larger than a Shard itself, hung motionless and then made a slow and lazy circle around two Shards without attacking them at all, as if trying to map their edges—alien targets vanished, leaving squirming visual discontinuity in their wakes, and Teixcalaanli hands trembled on Shard controls, hands that had been clenched so tightly they hurt as they were released—there was a stretched-out held breath, a thousand Shards and two thousand eyes trying to feel, to understand, to realize they were not dying any longer.

  All except the Shards surrounding the Parabolic Compression, who did not hear, or listen, or care. Who had a purpose and a design. For whom discontinuity—even favorable discontinuity—was something to be undone, as if it had never been. Who had paused, for a moment of disbelief, the dissolve of opposition shocking to stillness—and then had heard some voice, some order, or just some heart-vicious want of their own, and accelerated again. Faster. Faster.

  There was a convulsion. A shaking. Eight Antidote wondered if he was dying again, or if the Twenty-Fourth Legion had started the deathrain bombing and this was what it would be like—sudden light—hands—

  And he looked up, dazzled, shocked back to his small singular body, as the golden featureless faceplate of a Sunlit removed Four Crocus’s cloudhook from his face and scooped him out of her Shard like the stone from a peach.

  * * *

  When the order on the Imperial fast-courier ship arrived, sealed in one of Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze’s own white-on-white seals (or a facsimile thereof, Nine Hibiscus had always heard that Nineteen Adze used animal bone for hers, but that wouldn’t have gone through the transmission stations between jumpgates—this was a plastic copy), the order inside was almost unnecessary.

  His Excellency Eight Antidote, Imperial Associate, Heir to the Sun-Spear Throne, it read, on behalf of the government of the star-encompassing Teixcalaanli Empire, to the Yaotlek Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus of the Tenth Legion: Teixcalaan is civilization, and it is our job to safeguard it.

  Interesting that it came in the voice of the imperial heir, not the Emperor Herself. A complex political maneuver—the Emperor commands war, her successor practices mercy. It was very designed, in Nine Hibiscus’s opinion. Or maybe she was simply exhausted, and everything seemed to be a little beyond what mattered here on her ship, right now.

  This order forbids the use of civilization-destroying weapons or tactics on the alien threat beyond Parzrawantlak Sector, including nuclear strikes on civilian-occupied planetary systems, except in cases where such weapons or tactics are the only thing standing between us and certain civilization-wide death.

  There was no certain civilization-wide death. Not now. Not anymore. Not since Swarm had done what he’d done.

  She looked up from the strategy table and said, “Two Foam. Send Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise an order to stand down—for the moment.”

  * * *

  The Sunlit—there were more than one of them, of course, there were always more than one Sunlit—caught Eight Antidote by the upper arms when his legs wouldn’t hold him up. The world kept spinning. Nasturtium Terminal seemed claustrophobic—but not because of how many people were in it, this time. Now it felt tiny compared to being stretched over sectors and sectors of space, so spread-thin that being all in himself again was a rush of hideously intense sensation. Eight Antidote squeezed his eyes shut. It didn’t help. Even the reddish dark behind his eyelids was so present.

  One of the Sunlit said, “Your Excellency. We have orders to form an escort for you back to the palace.”

  Of course they did. The Emperor was going to kill him. Or maybe she’d let Three Azimuth do it. He was probably—definitely—a disruptive person now. “… You have my permission,” he managed to say. His voice sounded like a drunk person’s voice, not steady, sounds blurring into each other. Besides, they didn’t need permission. They were going to take him anyway.

  Distantly, he heard Four Crocus ask, “Did you get what you needed, Your Excellency?”

  He didn’t know what to tell her. Maybe wasn’t good enough. Yes, he’d achieved what he’d set out to do, and no one would ever get that order from Three Azimuth to kill a planet. And no, he didn’t think he’d made any difference at all.

  “I hope so,” he managed instead, and let the cool gold-gloved hands of the Sunlit lead him away.

  * * *

  None of them expected to hear from Twenty Cicada again, Three Seagrass especially. That goodbye had been so final. So absolutely exquisite. She wished she had recorded it—she could have written him such a poem. She might. She might write for him, since it looked like they all might live, at least for long enough to compose a single set of verses.

  (Maybe not long enough for an epic, or anything with a complex caesura-dependent rhyme scheme—there was still the problem of Darj Tarats, and who knew how long the détente Twenty Cicada had bought them would last?)

  So when that channel stuttered back into static, open, two-way communication instead of just the one-way frequency Nine Hibiscus had shouted down, Three Seagrass was not only surprised but shocked: she’d been almost sure Twenty Cicada was dead. Or so far transformed that it was a functional equivalency.

  But there was his voice. It was static-distorted, still, but also—off. The rhythms of his phrasing were gone to syncopation, like he was trying to remember speech and assembling it from first principles. His voice flooding the bridge, because Nine Hibiscus hadn’t adjusted the volume on that comms feed at all.

  “Singing,” he said, and then there was a pause. And again, “Singing, oh—we—”

  Nine Hibiscus said, “Swarm?” with a kind of broken hope that made Three Seagrass cringe.

  “Yes,” he said. “Mostly yes—we are, it’s appropriate, that name. Hello. Mallow. Hello, we. Our—Weight for the Wheel, Mallow, love her for us. For—me. And. We—us and the others, we—want to establish. Is there the envoy?”

  “Yes,” said Three Seagrass. “I’m here.”

  “And is there the other one? The—memory-person. The. The spook and her pet.” He sounded like he’d found the phrase somewhere in memory, a single phrase recalled all together. “The Stationer.”

  “I’m here too,” Mahit said. Nine Hibiscus was staring at them, her eyes glitter-wet with tears she was clearly refusing to shed.

  “We—we want to establish. Diplomatic proto
col. For a period of cease-fire.”

  Three Seagrass looked to Nine Hibiscus, wordless, asking for permission. Nine Hibiscus nodded, a bare fraction of a movement.

  “We accept a cease-fire,” she said. “What sort of diplomatic protocol did you have in mind, Twenty Cicada?” Using his name, in case there was enough of him left that his name meant something.

  “Send—send us people. People to prove we are people. The memory-sharers. To talk with.”

  Mahit said, “Stationers, you mean.”

  A long pause.

  “Yes?” said Twenty Cicada. Or what had been Twenty Cicada. “Stationers. Pilots. Sunlit. All. All. And we are people. If. We are singing, if.”

  All. Everyone. Everyone, Teixcalaanli or not, who had ever been part of some kind of shared mind. Three Seagrass looked at Mahit, helpless with how little she understood of what this meant. What kind of person could be useful here.

  “Yes,” said Mahit, and nodded to Three Seagrass. “The diplomats will be humans who understand—collectivity.”

  If it was even possible for anyone to understand the kind of collectivity Twenty Cicada had rendered himself up to. Three Seagrass wasn’t so sure.

  And then Two Foam said, “Yaotlek—Sixteen Moonrise won’t answer our comms. She’s still on approach target to the alien system. Approach and moving fast.”

  Watching Nine Hibiscus try to reorient herself from talking to what was left of her adjutant to deal with whatever Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise was doing was like watching a warship attempt to reverse thrust; a wrench, a straining, not entirely effective. It made Three Seagrass wince.

  “She’s what?” asked the yaotlek.

  “Still on attack vector,” Two Foam repeated. “With shatterbombs primed. She hasn’t acknowledged any of the stand-down orders you sent—”