A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  It must be very strange to be one of only thirty thousand of a people. Three Seagrass thought it would feel fragile. Just these thin metal walls between all of you and the void.

  Actually it was better if she didn’t think about the thinness of Station walls; she’d make herself claustrophobic. Instead she took another turn—she was in a more inward corridor now, and instead of real windows there were flat infoscreens displaying the outside, which was a fascinating choice—maybe Stationers liked feeling close to the stars all the time—and found herself in a shopping district. Kiosks, mostly. She really needed to learn some more of Mahit’s language; it took her far too long to piece out the squiggles of Stationer alphabetics into phonemes, and even then she wasn’t always sure on vocabulary. Let alone pronunciation.

  But half the kiosks had glyphs in understandable language right alongside the squiggles of Stationer alphabetics. Very artistic glyphs, more decoration than communication, and she was pretty sure the kiosk selling bottled beverages didn’t mean to have their Teixcalaanli sign read HERE IS PORKS! unless she had severely misunderstood both the nature of bottled beverages and Station animal husbandry capabilities. Also the plural was terribly formed. It was probably meant to say HERE ARE RICH-UMAMI-FLAVORS. The glyphs were close enough that someone could confuse them, she guessed. Unsweet bottled beverages, then.

  She approached that kiosk and smiled like a Stationer, remembering to bare her teeth. The kiosk operator didn’t smile back. Maybe she was doing it wrong—she stretched her cheeks until they hurt—

  “I didn’t know there were guests from Teixcalaan,” said the Stationer, in entirely decent Teixcalaanli. “Would you like a sample of our drinks?”

  Three Seagrass blinked at him, and stopped smiling with relief. “Yes,” she said. “I would enjoy that. You speak so well!”

  “I took courses.” He poured a small amount of his beverage into a plastic cup that looked extremely biodegradable—probably a four-hour cup, organic plastic, with a hydro-triggered decay cycle. The beverage foamed. Interesting.

  “What is it made of?” Three Seagrass asked, and then drank it before he could answer her.

  It tasted like salt. Like—alcoholic salt, and oceans. There weren’t any oceans here. It was fascinating, and also awful, and she was never, ever drinking it again.

  The Stationer said a word in his own language. And then screwed up his face like he was racking his brain for vocabulary, and came up with “Underwater wavy plants?”

  “Kelp,” Three Seagrass said. “You made beer out of kelp.”

  “Do you think it would be popular in the Empire?” asked the Stationer. “I’ve been thinking about an export contract…”

  No, Three Seagrass thought. It tastes like kelp. Blood and starlight, no one would drink that—“Perhaps on some planets,” she told him, brightly. “Teixcalaan is very large.”

  “Are you with a trade delegation, miss—?”

  The kiosk operator had attracted several other kiosk operators during the conversation. They had samples of their own. How hungry was Lsel for trade with the Empire? Mahit had always been so adamant about preserving their independence …

  “I am Three Seagrass,” said Three Seagrass, “and I am afraid I have absolutely nothing to do with trade in an official capacity.”

  “A private investor, then,” said one of the other Stationers, also in Teixcalaanli. Three Seagrass hoped her … cake? It seemed like cake—wasn’t also made out of kelp.

  “Not quite,” she said, and was about to go on when there was another voice, behind her and to the right.

  “What is all this, then?” that voice asked, and Three Seagrass watched all the Stationers draw themselves up to their full ridiculous heights. An authority. A … trade authority. She tried to remember which of the six Lsel Councilors controlled trade. It was Miners, wasn’t it? But she’d met the Councilor for the Miners, the cadaverous man in the hangar. She turned around.

  This was not Darj Tarats at all. This was a small, spare woman with grey bubbles of curls and high, windburned cheekbones. Three Seagrass bowed to her and waited for her to introduce herself. Safest—simplest. Let the other person lead, until you can take control of the conversation. That was one of the earliest lessons she’d learned as an asekreta cadet. She used to practice on Twelve Azalea. (She didn’t want to think about Twelve Azalea.)

  “I was not aware that a Teixcalaanli delegation had been approved to land, let alone wander around a public market,” said the authority. “And yet here you are. I would have you understand, whoever you are, that Heritage does not allow individual trade agreements between Lsel merchants and Teixcalaanli ones.”

  “To be sure,” said Three Seagrass. “I have no interest in violating your local laws. I assume you are from Heritage, then?”

  “That’s Councilor Amnardbat,” said the kelp beer merchant, behind her. He sounded like he was worried he was about to be given a truly massive fine, and possibly have his kelp confiscated.

  What had Mahit told her about the Councilor for Heritage, back in the City? Three Seagrass couldn’t remember anything specific. Certainly she hadn’t mentioned Heritage being a trade-protectionist faction of the Lsel government. “Councilor,” she said. “I merely was interested in sampling local products. I am not a member of a trade concern.”

  “What are you a member of?” asked the Councilor.

  It sounded rather like saying I’m from the Ministry of Information would be as poor a choice of stated allegiance as I’m a traveling merchant looking for something peculiar enough to surprise even the Teixcalaanli markets. Someone who disliked trade-that-wasn’t-under-her-control this much was also going to dislike what she would doubtlessly interpret as a spy.

  “I am on my way to the war,” Three Seagrass said instead, somewhat grandly. “I am a translator and a diplomat. I will shortly be leaving on the Jasmine Throat.”

  All true.

  Councilor Amnardbat was unimpressed. “Ah,” she said. “I must have missed an arrival manifest.” Her smile was extremely unpleasant, and Three Seagrass sincerely hoped she’d be off this Station and safely on a Teixcalaanli warship being attacked by mysterious aliens before the Councilor finished looking for that manifest which would explain how Three Seagrass had arrived.

  “Have you paid for your drink?” asked the Councilor.

  “Not yet,” Three Seagrass said, as breezily as she could manage, which was getting less breezy all the time.

  “It was a free small drink,” said the kiosk operator, which was rather brave of him, especially since he clearly didn’t know the Teixcalaanli word for sample. “If the—visitor?—wants a big bottle, I will charge her.”

  Amnardbat said, “I’ll cover it. I doubt the Teixcalaanlitzlim has anything by the way of local currency.”

  Three Seagrass had plenty of local currency—well, not plenty, not after Esker-1 and the cargo barge bribe, but she had some, and this was quite insulting, but also—useful. Interestingly useful. Perhaps she could make the Heritage Councilor believe she owed her. “I’d appreciate that, Councilor,” she said. “As I mentioned, I am only here briefly, and I had no intention of making purchases outside of our already-extant trading contracts…”

  The kiosk operator held out a hand-sized scanner, and Amnardbat waved a credit chit at it until it made a pleasant chime. “That’s done, then,” she said. “Now, Three Seagrass—diplomat and translator or whatever you are—might I walk you back to the main transport hangar? I wouldn’t want you to get lost and miss your shuttle.”

  You wouldn’t want me to see more of your Station. Or talk to any more unsuspecting citizens. You’re very angry with Teixcalaan, aren’t you, Councilor. And here we didn’t even annex you—“Of course,” Three Seagrass said, and bowed again. “I am honored that you’d spend your time on such a simple errand.”

  “It’s so rare that I see a Teixcalaanlitzlim on this deck,” said Amnardbat, still with that very unpleasant smile. “I wouldn’t miss the chanc
e for the world. Come on, then.”

  * * *

  When Eight Antidote climbed out of the tunnels and into the basement of the Ministry of War this time, Eleven Laurel wasn’t waiting for him; it wasn’t time for their weekly meeting. Eight Antidote hadn’t finished the strategy exercise he’d been given after they’d talked about Kauraan, either—he’d looked at it, seen the complex shape of it, and left its cartographs mostly unopened on his cloudhook and kept thinking about Kauraan instead. But even so, being here without having solved his puzzle first made Eight Antidote feel guilty and worried. He always did his assignments. Even the unofficial ones.

  But Eleven Laurel wasn’t expecting him, and he was here to—maybe talk to Eleven Laurel, if he saw him, but more to watch the war with the aliens. He’d started thinking of it as Nine Hibiscus’s war, which he definitely wasn’t going to say out loud in the Ministry of War. He wasn’t dumb.

  He just wanted to see a real strategy room, with real communication with a real battlefront, and try understanding that the way he understood the puzzles and exercises. See whether the war was going badly, or well, or unexpectedly. Maybe—if he was lucky—he’d talk to someone here in the Six Outreaching Palms who would like having a maybe-someday-Emperor to show off to. That kind of thing worked on adults all the time, even if he was still eleven. It was only going to work better as he got older. He should get in some practice now.

  When he passed the first set of camera-eyes that he knew about, the ones that he thought Nineteen Adze watched for him through, he waved at them and smiled, eyes wide, and went on as cheerfully as he could imagine. Walking cheerfully was kind of complicated—what he wanted to do was break into a run. Not to escape—there wasn’t any escape, some official had probably already sent Her Brilliance a note about where Eight Antidote had gone this time—but to get to more populated places of the Ministry faster. To get away from his usual paths, and see something new.

  The Ministry of War was laid out in a six-pointed star (how could it be anything else?), and a long time ago each Palm had probably lived in its corresponding sector. Now, because bureaucracy was more efficient if teams were near each other no matter who they ultimately reported up to (this was something his tutors liked to repeat a great deal, which just told Eight Antidote that they were bureaucrats and didn’t like the thought of moving offices), the six spokes of the star were much harder to find one’s way around in. If a person was looking for a specific individual, that was. Eight Antidote wanted to find the central command room. He wanted to look at a real strategy table for a real war. And all that would be in the middle of the star.

  Security increased considerably as he turned toward the center of the building, which meant he was headed the right way. There were all sorts of soldiers in a variety of uniforms: the Ministry uniform, like Eleven Laurel wore, was on most of them, but Eight Antidote saw members of at least seven different legions as well; he recognized the diving-hawk patch of the Eighth on one woman’s shoulder, and the star-shower of the First on another’s, plus emblems he couldn’t place immediately. The first person to stop him—four corridors and one security check that he got waved right through later—was carrying a shockstick half as long as Eight Antidote was tall, grey to match his grey War Ministry jacket. The point of the shockstick rested just above Eight Antidote’s breastbone.

  He probably should have been scared.

  Not being scared was fun.

  He bowed, fingertips pressed together, pushing the shockstick into his chest. Then he said, “I am the imperial-associate Eight Antidote, sir, and I would like to see the progress of our war.”

  The shockstick went away so fast it might as well have never been there. “Please forgive my impertinence,” said the soldier, and Eight Antidote waved one hand, dismissive. Magnanimous, he thought. Be magnanimous.

  “It’s nothing. I appreciate your efforts to keep the Ministry secure.” And then he smiled, wide-eyed, and remembered how he had made himself look like Six Direction when he’d been talking to Nineteen Adze. Tried it again. Remember me? I’m the Emperor, just in kid shape. Just wait, and I might be the Emperor again.

  It worked. “This way, Your Excellency,” the soldier said, having received some sort of confirmation on his cloudhook—Eight Antidote had seen the rapid flicker of messages behind the glass. “You are in luck—the Minister Three Azimuth, she who kindles enmity in the most oath-sworn heart—she herself is at the strategy table right now.”

  Which was a little more significant of a success than he’d particularly planned. He’d thought he’d just—see the strategy room, hang around, maybe meet some generals, another Undersecretary—if Eleven Laurel was there, that wouldn’t be bad, he’d be showing initiative and creativity—but the Minister of War herself? That was—a lot. He’d met her, but only once, right when she’d arrived two months ago. She hadn’t paid him any attention then, not after the obligatory good-morning-your-Excellencies, just gone in to speak with Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze. She had a poetic epithet that made her sound dangerous and frightening, but that was what poetic epithets were supposed to do.

  The soldier took him into the center point of the Ministry’s star. He knew that the strategy rooms were there—Eleven Laurel had explained that a long time back—all of them except for the one for the Emperor, which was in Palace-Earth instead. Everyone stared at him as he passed, trying to look confident in the soldier’s wake, and wishing so much that he was taller already. He wasn’t going to be taller until he was thirteen at least. Holographs of Six Direction only started looking like a man in his midteens. Sometimes Eight Antidote wished his genetics came from someone who was more physically impressive. At least he was going to be able to put on muscle easily and stay as agile as he was now—

  The door to Central Strategy Two irised open for him at his escort’s gesture, and beyond was twilight laced so thickly with stars that for a moment he thought the air had turned into a net. Then he blinked and saw the cartograph table—huge, wider than he imagined they could be, set into the floor instead of raised above it—was projecting four entire sectors of space at once, and that the Ministry analysts and generals had dimmed the lights to see the vector trajectories better. Minister of War Three Azimuth was at the far side of it, her hands moving in sweeping gestures, lightening some stars and darkening others. She made a fist, twisted her hand, and shook out a tiny fleet of gunnery ships from her fingertips, holoimages that she flicked out into the starscape and adjusted with minute nudges. It looked like dancing, like she was dancing the battlefield into existence.

  I want to do that, Eight Antidote thought. I want to do that more than almost anything I can think of.

  Three Azimuth was small and paler than most Teixcalaanlitzlim, with short sleek hair as dark and thick and straight as Eight Antidote’s own, and narrow almond-shaped eyes. She’d taken off her jacket and was arranging the battlefield bare-armed. She had the kind of muscles that came from lifting herself and heavier things, and putting them down again: ropy and defined. Somehow Eight Antidote always thought of her as being taller. Before Nineteen Adze had become Emperor, Three Azimuth had been the military governor of Nakhar System, and Nakhar hadn’t rebelled while she was in control of it, and Nakhar rebelled every indiction or so usually, according to his political history lessons. He still didn’t know why she’d been the one to become Minister of War, or why Nine Propulsion had retired early, but he was pretty sure that Nineteen Adze had made a really good choice.

  It took her a while to notice him. She had more ships to place first, and a whole set of supply-line vectors to adjust, her fingers plucking at the lines of light like they were the strings of some instrument. When she was satisfied, she said, “Barring our scouts locating their supply-line bases, this is where we are,” and brought her hands together in a clap. The whole enormous projection began slowly to move, running its simulation.

  “His Excellency the imperial heir Eight Antidote is here, Minister,” said Eight Antidote’s soldie
r. “He would like to see the war, he says.”

  “Well, bring the kid over, then,” said Three Azimuth. “He can’t see a bloody thing from that side of the room.”

  Eight Antidote went. He tried to skirt around the edges of the projection, but he still walked through star systems, blanking them out for brief moments in his wake, as if he was the aliens who were destroying Teixcalaanli communications. They were in the simulation too—a spreading blackness, like ink. There were a lot of eyes on him: all the advisors and commanders and analysts here to see Three Azimuth simulate the war were watching him traverse a starscape instead. He tried to walk as cheerfully as he had when he’d waved to the camera-eye. The camera-eyes were so much easier than so many pairs of real ones attached to people. (At least none of them were Eleven Laurel. He didn’t know where Eleven Laurel was. Shouldn’t the Third Undersecretary be here too?)

  When he got to Three Azimuth’s side—she was only a few inches taller than him, which made him feel very strange, he was a kid and she was the Minister of War—he said, “Thank you for allowing me to see the strategy simulation, Minister,” in the second-highest form of politeness he knew. (Highest was for talking to the Emperor Herself, formally and in public, and he only knew that one because he’d grown up hearing it. It didn’t get used much.)

  “I expected you’d find your way in here eventually,” said the Minister. “You’ve been in the Palms enough, and kids your age get curious. I know I was. Watch.”