A Desolation Called Peace
Page 48
Remembered that, and couldn’t fall asleep at all.
* * *
Everything on the hydroponics deck of Weight for the Wheel was green. The air felt luxurious, almost too thick for Mahit to breathe. There were flowers—lotuses, lilies—all through the rice and the vegetable gardens, mixed in like they were as necessary as calories. Probably they had been, to Twenty Cicada. This had been his kingdom. Three Seagrass had told her so, told her all about the conversation they’d had, here, when she’d been convinced that the last thing Twenty Cicada would ever do would be to let Teixcalaan allow a species as wantonly and uncaringly destructive as the aliens had seemed, to exist.
The two of them were leaning on the decorative railing. Mahit wondered who was standing where: Was she where Twenty Cicada had been, or was Three Seagrass? Whose narrative was going around again?
Without prompting or preamble, only taking enough time to set her shoulders and lift her chin, like Mahit was a problem that needed as much of her headlong determination as any of the negotiation she’d done on the bridge, Three Seagrass asked her, “Do you want to come back with me?”
At least she hadn’t said, Do you want to come home with me?
“No,” Mahit told her. She couldn’t look at her while she did it. “No, but—where’s back?”
“The Jewel of the World,” said Three Seagrass, which—of course. There was no other real place for a Teixcalaanlitzlim, was there. “I mean. I have a flat. I have to—do the dishes. Probably talk to the Emperor Herself, too. But—if it’s the City you don’t want, I could—I mean, there’s got to be some system out there which needs an overqualified asekreta and has a halfway decent poetry salon—I could get transferred. Is what. I’m saying.”
“Reed,” Mahit said, soft, and Three Seagrass stopped talking, turned to her, tipped her head up. Her eyes were very dark and very wide. She was still so small. Mahit forgot, most of the time.
She bent down, and kissed her mouth. Not for long. Not long enough to be yes.
“Don’t do that for me,” she said. “Don’t leave the City. Go home. Do your dishes. Talk to the Emperor, if there’s time after doing the dishes.”
Three Seagrass snickered. It was a wet sound; the sound a person made when they were laughing but had meant to cry. “Dishes, then Her Brilliance the Edgeshine of a Knife, in that order, yes. Fine. And where will you go?”
“I don’t know,” Mahit said. It was true. There were no places left: there was no such thing as home, not for her, not anymore. Darj Tarats had taken his flitter-ship back through the Anhamemat Gate. The ceasefire Twenty Cicada had brokered extended throughout the entirety of the alien fleet, whether its prey had been Teixcalaanli warships or Lsel itself. All humans were one thing, to them: one sacrifice had, for now, bought a collective peace. Lsel had not even been touched—Mahit had heard the transmissions from Teixcalaanli supply ships passing by that proved it. And yet she believed what Tarats had told her on the bridge: if she came back to Lsel Station while he and Aknel Amnardbat were in power, she would die under their hands. One, or the other. Heritage or Miners. All safety torn up, tossed away. And for what?
Now we are exiles truly, she thought, and couldn’t even muster up an internal tone of recrimination: she’d been right, all along, and Yskandr hadn’t. But Yskandr would have followed Three Seagrass back to her flat with its undone dishes, its promise of poetry salons—Yskandr would have taken that offer the first time she made it, three months and a war ago.
“It doesn’t have to be with me,” said Three Seagrass. “If that’s your problem with going back to the City—that I’d—I still don’t understand why you feel half the ways you do about how much I like you, but I promise I’m perfectly capable of pretending we don’t know each other or never kissing you again, and you’re still the Ambassador if the Emperor says you are, so there’s work…”
Mahit cut her off, a hand on her shoulder, gentle as she could. “No. It’s not you. I— Reed, I don’t understand why I feel half the ways I do about how much I like you, either. But I like you a great deal.”
I want, Mahit thought, and with that phrase felt all the tumbling headlong desire to fall, and be subsumed, and be—oh, the Teixcalaanlitzlim she’d imagined herself in all those long-ago language instruction classes when she’d called herself Nine Orchid and thought poetry would be enough to make her the kind of person that a Teixcalaanlitzlim would automatically think of as a person.
“If it’s not me,” Three Seagrass asked, “then—what? If you tell me you’re planning to join the fungal hive mind, I’m going to be angry and also not believe you. You’re enough people already, and you like being a person, not a—that.”
“I’m just Mahit Dzmare,” Mahit said, wry. “Imago and all. Just one person.”
I want, she thought again, and Yskandr finished for her.
No such place.
She tried again. “Three Seagrass, I want—work, and I want—things I can’t have, that don’t exist or never did, and I want—I want, if you ask me to come to the City with you a third time, I want to be able to say yes and mean it.”
Three Seagrass was quiet. Listening. Turning over what Mahit had said; Mahit imagined the problem like a pebble in her mouth, an impediment to clear verse. After a moment she took a deep breath of the green-laced air and settled her shoulders. “I want someone to remember that I like being called Reed,” she said. “And to—not be bored. You’re never boring. I like your—that graphic story. I don’t know stories like that one, and I’d like to. You make me have to think, Mahit, and that’s not fair, no one else makes me work this hard and like it at the same time.”
Mahit found herself laughing, soft, a hand covering her mouth. “Are you complimenting or insulting me?”
Three Seagrass considered this with more gravitas than Mahit thought it strictly deserved. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “Both, probably. Mahit—”
“Yes?”
She could see Three Seagrass steeling herself, drawing her shoulders back, breathing from the diaphragm. Like Mahit was an oration contest she wanted to win. “What if—those other systems I mentioned, what if you went there?” she said. Mahit opened her mouth to reply, but Three Seagrass waved her quiet with a gesture of one hand. “You went there,” she went on, “and I didn’t. Her Brilliance would send you anywhere you wanted to go. It wouldn’t be the Jewel of the World. It’d be somewhere—new. And you could write to me, if you wanted me to not be bored. I’d write to you. You could mail me more volumes of The Perilous Frontier! and I’d—send you new poems, and—anything else you’d want to hear, from me…”
“You would?” Mahit asked. After all this time, she had apparently retained the capacity to be shocked by sweetness.
“I would,” Three Seagrass said. “And you could decrypt your own mail. Promise.”
She was bad at smiling like a Stationer. She showed every tooth she had, the bright bone-white of them. A smile like starlight and threat. Mahit wanted, abruptly, to teach her how to do it right.
She smiled back. She felt brittle and fragile and on the verge of tears, and still she didn’t want to not smile. It was—
The Emperor Six Direction, promising peace in exchange for betrayal. Nineteen Adze, who didn’t see light between loving someone and thinking they needed to die before they could do harm. Compared to those, letters and a temporary post on some distant provincial Teixcalaanli planet seemed like something she could countenance.
“I’d write back,” she said. “All the time.”
POSTLUDE
TO think as a person and to not think language. To think fractal scatter-song, the shape of an unfamiliar body, an inclus
ion like a garnet in the matrix of a stone—stone, still, but otherwise, crystalline and complete. Inside that crystal language—like the mouth-cries of unpersons, but made singable—lodges and reverberates, isolated until necessary. We, singing all through us, singing harmonic variance, vibration on an almost-interfering frequency. This body, that body: this body had a call-sign when it wasn’t a person, and it is not the only one: this body was called LEAP! and that body greypattern, this body sweetling and that body Cleverer Than Littermates, and so, this new body, singing in the we: called Swarm, which is a laughing name now. Some call-signs are exactly like the person that is we, and that is glitter-sharp delight; the body LEAP! is a building-designing body, a structure-maker, whose structures are gossamer spaces for springing across. So too the body Swarm. To think that this body was a person before it was a person, and called itself appropriately even so!
We did not name this body, the unfamiliar body sings, we were named. We were known. The unfamiliar body sings the inside of a Teixcalaanli ship, a scatter of images and warmth: another body, a commander-body, a person-not-a-person in a thousand memory-points, reassembled. We-when-we-are-Teixcalaan are known without singing, Swarm tells the we. We-when-we-are-Teixcalaan are known with language only, and still clearly.
There is some disbelief, within the reaches of the we. To think language would be so transparent as to allow knowing!
Language is not so transparent, Twenty Cicada thinks—thinks out, a long reaching flicker through all of himself, which is all of the we together and still himself, ourselves. Language is not so transparent, but we are sometimes known, even so. If we are lucky.
Slide-shimmer query, the endless curiosity and want and reaching that is the we, thinking without language: Show us, then!
And on Peloa-2, in the desert night waiting for the shuttle that will take his body to a more hospitable environment, what remains of Twenty Cicada settles, cross-legged in the sand, and begins to try.
A GLOSSARY OF PERSONS, PLACES, AND OBJECTS
ahachotiya—An alcoholic drink, popular in the City, derived from fermented fruit.
Ajakts Kerakel—A life support analyst III on Lsel Station.
Aknel Amnardbat—Councilor for Heritage, one of six members of the governing Lsel Council; her purview is imago-machines, memory, and cultural promotion.
All Points Collapse—A Teixcalaanli band, playing in the shatterharmonic musical style.
amalitzli—A Teixcalaanli sport, played on a clay court with a rubber ball that opposing teams attempt to throw, bounce, or richochet into a small goal. Versions of amalitzli specialized for low- or zero-gravity environments are also popular.
Anhamemat Gate—One of two jumpgates situated in Bardzravand Sector; leads from Stationer space into a resource-poor area not currently under the control of any one specific known political actor. Colloquially, “the Far Gate.”
Aragh Chtel—A Stationer pilot assigned to sector reconnaissance.
Ascension’s Red Harvest—A Teixcalaanli warship, Engulfer-class.
asekreta—A Teixcalaanli title, referring to an actively serving member of the Information Ministry.
Asphodel Drowning—A Teixcalaanli holodrama, currently in its fifth season.
Bardzravand Sector—The sector of known space within which Lsel Station and other Stations are located (Stationer pronunciation).
Belltown—A province of the City, divided into multiple districts; for example, Belltown One is a “bedroom community” for Teixcalaanlitzlim who cannot or do not wish to live in the Inmost Province districts, but Belltown Six is a notorious hotbed of criminal activity, urban congestion, and low-income residents.
Buildings, The (epic poem)—An ekphrastic poem describing famous architectural achievements of the City, commonly taught as a school text in Teixcalaan.
Captain Cameron—Fictional hero of the Lsel graphic novel THE PERILOUS FRONTIER!
Chatoyant Sirocco—The flagship of the Seventeenth Legion, Eternal-class.
City, the—The planetary capital of Teixcalaan.
cloudhook—Portable device, worn over the eye, which allows Teixcalaanlitzlim to access electronic media, news, communications, etc.; also functions as a security device, or key, which can open doors or give accesses; also functions as a geospatial positioning system, communicating location to a satellite network.
cuecuelihui—A Teixcalaanli military rank for non-officer specialist soldiers.
Darj Tarats—Councilor for the Miners, one of six members of the governing Lsel Council; his purview is resource extraction, trade, and labor.
Dava—A newly annexed planet in the Teixcalaanli Imperium, famous for its mathematical school.
Dawn With Encroaching Clouds—A Teixcalaanli serial holodrama depicting the history of the Emperor Two Sunspot and the attempted usurper, Eleven Cloud.
Dekakel Onchu—Councilor for the Pilots, one of six members of the governing Lsel Council; her purview is military defense, exploration, and navigation.
Dreaming Citadel—A warship of the Tenth Legion.
Dzoh Anjat—A pilot from Lsel Station.
Ebrekt/Ebrekti—The Ebrekti (singular “Ebrekt,” adjectival form “Ebrekt”) are a species of quadripedal obligate carnivores, whose social structure (called a “swift”) resembles a pride of lions. The Teixcalaanli emperor Two Sunspot negotiated a permanent peace treaty with the Ebrekti, clearly defining zones of mutual non-competition, four hundred years ago (Teixcalaanli reckoning).
Eight Antidote—A ninety-percent clone of His Brilliance the Emperor Six Direction. Heir to the Sun-Spear Throne of Teixcalaan. Eleven years old. Sometimes called Cure.
Eight Loop—The Minister of the Judiciary on Teixcalaan. Crèchesib to His Brilliance the Emperor Six Direction.
Eight Penknife—A member of the Information Ministry.
Eighteen Chisel—Chief navigation officer on the Weight for the Wheel.
Eighteen Coral—A Teixcalaanli artist who worked primarily in mosaic.
Eighteen Gravity—The captain of the Flower Weave.
Eighteen Turbine—An ikantlos, currently commanding Battle Group Nine of the Twenty-Sixth Legion, assigned to Odile System.
Eighty-Four Twilight—Captain of the scout-ship the Gravity Rose. A member of the Tenth Legion.
Eleven Cloud—A failed usurper who tried to overthrow the Emperor Two Sunspot four hundred years ago (Teixcalaanli reckoning).
Eleven Conifer—A patrician third-class, retired from honorable service in the Teixcalaanli fleet at third sub-ikantlos rank. Deceased.
Eleven Lathe—A Teixcalaanli poet and philosopher, best known for his work Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier.
Eleven Laurel—The Third Undersecretary of the Ministry of War. The Third Palm. Sometimes called Wreath.
Esharakir Lrut—Fictional character in the Lsel graphic novel The Perilous Frontier!
Esker-1—A planet in the Western Arc of Teixcalaan, known for choral singing.
Expansion History, The—A history of Teixcalaanli expansion, attributed to Thirteen River (attribution debunked; current literary scholars of Teixcalaan refer to the Expansion History as being composed by “Pseudo-Thirteen River,” an unknown person).
ezuazuacat—The title for a member of the Emperor’s personal advisory council; referred to as His, Her, or Their Excellency. Derives from the original name of the Emperor’s sworn band of warriors, back when Teixcalaan had not yet broken space.
Fifteen Calcite—A Shard pilot. A member of the Tenth Legion.
Fifteen Engine—The former cultural liaison to Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn. Killed in an incident of domestic terrorism during the insurrection surrounding the ascension of Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze.
Fifteen Ton—An ixplanatl, investigator on the research study “Report on Human-Algorithmic Interfaces: Military Applications.”
Fifth Palm—One of the branches of the Ministry of War. Research and development.
Five Agate—Ezuazuacat to Her Brillian
ce the Emperor Nineteen Adze.
Five Diadem—Pen name of the famed Teixcalaanli historian and poet Five Hat.
Five Needle—Teixcalaanli historical figure, memorialized in the poem “Encomia for the Fallen of the Flagship Twelve Expanding Lotus.” Died defending her ship after a series of field promotions left her the ranking officer.
Five Orchid—A fictional Teixcalaanli historical figure, the protagonist of a children’s novel, in which she was the crèchesib of the future Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare.
Five Portico—A mechanic—of bodies and brains, amongst other things—living in Belltown Six.
Five Thistle—Chief weapons officer on the Weight for the Wheel.
Flower Weave—A Teixcalaanli medical supply skiff, operating out of Inmost Province Spaceport.
Forty Oxide—Fleet Captain of the Seventeenth Legion, on the flagship Chatoyant Sirocco. A member of the Teixcalaanli force sent beyond the Anhamemat Gate to prosecute war with unknown enemies.
Forty-Five Sunset—An aide to Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze.
Foundation Song—Teixcalaanli song cycle memorializing the deeds of the First Emperor. Passed through oral tradition; more than one thousand versions are known.
Four Aloe—The current Minister of Information.
Four Crocus—A Shard pilot. A member of the Second Legion.
Four Lever—A protospathat in service to the Judiciary Ministry, in the role of Medical Examiner.
Four Sycamore—A newscaster, employed by Channel Eight!
Fourteen Scalpel—The writer of the poem “Encomia for the Fallen of the Flagship Twelve Expanding Lotus.”
Fourteen Spike—Crewmember on the scout-gunner Knifepoint’s Ninth Blooming. A translator and interrogation specialist in the Tenth Legion, of cuecuelihui rank.
Fourteen Spire—A minor Teixcalaanli contemporary poet.
Fulcrum—First in a series of Teixcalaanli popular novels about a band of thieves, grifters, and other criminals who take down corrupt officials for the good of the Empire and its people.