As if I knew how to send a message to Tarats from the heart of the Teixcalaanli flagship anyhow, she said, which was a sort of apology. An offer: can we put this away, for now, given all the rest of the circumstances we find ourselves in?
And a response—a flush of warmth all through her, a sense that perhaps she could sleep. A gentle sort of tiredness, like a gift from her own endocrine system. She shut her eyes. Curled on her side, facing the wall, her hands folded tight against her chest, protective. Breathed out.
And was startled to full, adrenaline-sharp consciousness when there was a loud banging on the door.
Her first thought was that Three Seagrass had come back after all—but she’d left the plastifilm VOID password-note on the door’s touchpad, and she hadn’t changed the password itself yet. Three Seagrass could have let herself in. This was someone else. Mahit swung herself off the edge of the bunk, finding the lower bed with her toes and stepping lightly down onto the floor. She wasn’t dressed for this—the loose culottes and tank of her pajamas were not in any sense official, nor in any sense Teixcalaanli—
Whoever it was hammered on the door again. Shouted—muffled through the airtight metal—something that sounded like Envoy! Ambassador!
There was absolutely no point in pretending she wasn’t here, and opening the door wouldn’t make her any less safe than keeping it closed: this was not the Jewel of the World, or Lsel, or anywhere else Mahit had ever been. This was a Teixcalaanli warship, and there was nothing outside it but airless void, far closer than it was on a Station. Ships were smaller. Ships weren’t peoples, even if they were societies. There was no disappearing into a ship, even a ship carrying five thousand. (Especially a Teixcalaanli ship: Mahit hadn’t found the camera-eyes yet, but she knew they were here, watching—even without Sunlit behind them to analyze and follow and adjust.)
She opened the door. There was a soldier there, a man of medium height and a fashionable Teixcalaanli military haircut—low hairline accentuated by the sharpness of how he’d pulled his hair back into its queue, the tight fishtail braiding. “Ambassador,” he said. “The yaotlek wants you and the envoy on the bridge immediately. I am to tell you that your message worked, and she needs another one right away.”
The thrill that spun up her, thighs to vagus nerve to throat, was victory, as sharp and sweet as anything she could remember: it had worked, they had figured it out, the aliens were talking back. Mahit knew she was grinning, Stationer-smile, all teeth—knew it by the way that the soldier recoiled slightly, and didn’t care. She deserved this. She and Three Seagrass had established first contact, and everything else—their fight, Sixteen Moonrise, Darj Tarats, the whole war—didn’t matter at all. Not this minute. “That’s fantastic,” she said. “That’s—brilliant, really.”
It might be the most significant thing she’d done in her entire life. The list of people who had established a communicative relationship with a previously uncontacted spaceflight-capable alien species was now, in total, the Emperor Two Sunspot (and whatever aides she’d had, of course), Three Seagrass, and Mahit Dzmare. It was terrifying. It was amazing. She felt on the verge of hysterical, delighted laughter, or tears, or—she’d never dreamed of this, astrobiology hadn’t been an aptitude she’d even tested for, and linguistics had always been about human beings, but—oh. It had worked.
“Where is the envoy?” the soldier asked, interrupting Mahit’s excess of internal delight and sending her just as easily crashing down into the humdrum, miserable reality of having driven off her only friend (if friends were even a category that Teixcalaanlitzlim could fit into, and that was the horrible crux of everything, wasn’t it).
She shrugged.
“Wasn’t she also assigned to these quarters?” the soldier continued, obviously checking some kind of manifest on his cloudhook.
“Yes,” said Mahit. “But she is out, currently.”
“It’s 0200 hours,” said the soldier, puzzled, and then lifted one shoulder and put it down again, as if implying that, well, Information agents must keep very peculiar hours to go along with the rest of their very extensive peculiarities. “… Um. Do you know when she’ll be back? The yaotlek wants you both. Immediately.”
“I’m sure she does,” Mahit said. “But what you have, sir, is me. I suggest you use your surveillance camera-eyes and your cloudhook’s search algorithms to find the envoy—try bars, or some sort of park or recreation area with flowers, if a ship like this has them—she likes those—while I put on clothing that is appropriate for the bridge. I’ll be a moment.” She took a step backward into the room, and the door, no longer commanded to remain open by her proximity, slid shut in the soldier’s face.
Mahit remembered deliberately, which was a skill she’d only really understood since acquiring an imago, even though all Lsel children were trained in the basics of how to do it, in anticipation of future need: to recall, very specifically, an event from one’s own life which was the automatic reference point for a present action or feeling. To show, in such recall, how you thought, the patterns of your mind, so that your imago could learn them and follow them and engrave them deeper with their own overlays. A pathway to joint neuroplasticity. Mahit called up the gardens of Plaza Central Four, the taste of green-colored ice cream, the scent of crushed grass under Three Seagrass’s folded and napping arms. Called up, too, Twelve Azalea telling her that this sort of trouble was exactly like the trouble Three Seagrass had always gotten into, when they’d been trainees together. Slumming in garden parks, ice cream for breakfast after terrible, dangerous, interpersonal adventures.
Mahit did. Mahit did, hugely, and wished she didn’t.
I have a formal dress that is that outfit. She’d brought one, and only one—a long black thing, architectural in design, a dress that was all angles and no drape, collarbone-exposing, with sleeves to the wrists. She’d brought it to the City, too, and had never worn it there. She’d never worn it at all.
Yskandr, do you even know what clothing types for female-bodied people are?
Both of them were better with Teixcalaanli style, then. On Lsel Mahit wore what everyone wore, which was trousers and jackets and various undershirts or undertunics, mostly grey and black and white.
Like Nineteen Adze.
Well, she could do worse.
When Mahit opened the door again, in white trousers and asymmetric draped shirt and a short, Lsel-style cropped jacket (she’d had to leave The Perilous Frontier! in the other one, there wasn’t room for it in this iteration), the soldier was still there, exactly as he had been. He blinked at her for a very long moment. She wondered if he was thinking of Nineteen Adze, the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, in her pristine white suits, before she’d been soaked in blood and rendered suitable for the sun-spear throne.
“Have you located the envoy?” Mahit asked him, lightly.
“Not personally,” said the soldier. “The ship has. Are you ready now, Ambassador, or is the
re anything else you need to do?”
If he was thinking of Nineteen Adze, thinking so wasn’t making it difficult to be snide and impatient toward the barbarian.
“Show me,” Mahit said. “Quickly. I imagine the aliens won’t wait for very long before they decide we don’t know how to say more than hello.”
* * *
Walking onto the bridge, Three Seagrass experienced a moment of debilitating psychological vertigo: standing next to the yaotlek, right behind the comms officer’s station, was a tall woman all in white with short dark hair, poised and utterly in control of herself. She was aware of the process of understanding what she was seeing: not, of course not, the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, her once-possibly-patron and definitely-now-Emperor. Impossible, for three reasons. The Emperor couldn’t have gotten here from the City so quickly (Three Seagrass was intimately acquainted with the fastest route by now, and really, what a mess it would have been to get an imperial vessel through some of those ports!); no one was deferring to this woman, as they all would be if she was the Emperor; and, well. She was Mahit Dzmare, not Nineteen Adze at all.
The curls of her hair just brushing the collar of her white jacket. That was Mahit, entirely.
And yet Three Seagrass felt as if she had been punched in the solar plexus, breathless and knocked back with superposition of imagery. Whatever game Mahit was playing, it was one with high stakes—
Why, for the sake of every sun and every bleeding star, had she had that stupid fight with Mahit? And not come back to their quarters? She wanted to be in on this. She should have been in on this. Instead, here she was, late to what might be the most important act of communication in her life, in yesterday’s uniform, which had both Kauraanian kitten hairs and hydroponic waterstains on one sleeve. Having stayed up through a sleep shift talking to Tenth Legion soldiers and avoiding everything else but fried noodle cakes until an on-duty member of the Fleet had come to fetch her posthaste to the bridge.
Looking at her Ambassador, already here and at work, dressed in perfectly designed white—it made her chest ache. Which was inconvenient. At best.
“Yaotlek,” she called across the bridge, pitched to carry and to be as respectful as possible. “I apologize for my tardiness—there was an episode with a kitten—but I see you are already in the Ambassador’s capable hands.”
There. That was an opening. It was even possible that Mahit might forgive her, a little, if she kept positioning them both as absolute equals. That seemed to be the crux of the whole miserable mess.
Nine Hibiscus turned toward her, but Mahit did not—Mahit bent her head close to that of the comms officer (Three Seagrass consulted her cloudhook, and pulled up the officer’s name, Two Foam, ikantlos first-class, and a whole string of service records which she really didn’t need right now, the War Ministry’s internal user interface for personnel lookup was utterly clunky compared to Information’s, but at least she’d gotten access to the ship’s network at all), and made a quick gesture in the air, as if she was drawing an orbital arc with her fingertips. Two Foam nodded to her.
“Behold your handiwork,” said the yaotlek, and Three Seagrass left off staring uselessly at Mahit and looked instead at her very first glimpse of their live enemy.
Or at least their enemy’s ships, presumably with live enemies inside them, rotating slowly at the edge of Weight for the Wheel’s visual range, rings on rings. A small ship and a large one. Three Seagrass thought they were peculiarly beautiful. Like the ringed mouths of cave-dwelling fish. An inhuman, somewhat disturbing beauty, but beautiful in symmetry at least. And if they liked symmetry, and were mammals, and had decided to talk back—well, then, she’d manage this, wouldn’t she. Of course she would.
“What have we been saying back to them?” she asked Nine Hibiscus, walking by her, the comms officer, and Mahit to stand by the curved plastisteel windows, four layers thick between her and vacuum, only vacuum between her and the aliens.
“That we heard them play our message back—and then, since I didn’t have either you or the Ambassador, Envoy, for a good twenty minutes, Two Foam and I switched to visual composition. If they can hear us and they want to talk, then they can see images that we transmit on the same channels.” Nine Hibiscus had come to stand next to her, a large solid form, immovable, like a star that satellites could orbit around. Three Seagrass wished rather a lot that she’d spent a little less time trying to get rid of the kitten and feeling sorry for herself, and even a little less time talking to Fourteen Spike about how impressive the yaotlek was, and a little more time going to the bridge, even if Twenty Cicada had obviated her of the direct responsibility. Since Fourteen Spike was right about the yaotlek and her impressiveness. She was the sort of person who made you want to do what she asked, before she asked it.
“Images are easier than trying to speak their language with my extremely limited and machine-mediated vocabulary, yes,” Three Seagrass agreed. “And the aliens do have eyes that seem to work in the usual fashion, based on the autopsy. What’s the visual?”
“Two Foam is drawing it,” Nine Hibiscus said. “Your Ambassador is helping. She’s a decent hand at orbital mechanics, which is interesting.”
“She was raised on a space station.”
Nine Hibiscus lifted one shoulder, suggesting that living in space did very little to guarantee that a person knew how space worked. Three Seagrass assumed that was valid. Then the yaotlek said to her, “Envoy, before we send this message—you and the Ambassador are willing to meet face-to-face with these things, yes? Given appropriate military escort.”
“Are you inviting them onto the ship?” Three Seagrass asked, as blandly as she could manage while thinking, quite vividly and nauseatingly, of all those holoimages of the disemboweled people on Peloa-2.
“Certainly not,” said the yaotlek.
“Without much more substantive communication,” Three Seagrass said, warily, “I would prefer not negotiating on their ship. No matter whether I am with the Ambassador, a military escort, or you yourself. It shows a certain weakness.” Also, she didn’t trust those pretty cave-fish mouths, spinning in space: she had already had enough of the physical effects of these aliens and their noises to last several lifetimes, and that was without whatever resonant capacities the material of their hulls provided.
“Funny,” Nine Hibiscus said, “the Ambassador said the same thing, nearly word for word. Don’t think we’re such rubes at negotiation, Envoy, just because we’re the Fleet. We’re sending you down to Peloa-2. And presumably, they will also send down their representatives. Or at least that’s what Two Foam is attempting to draw.”
Down amongst the eviscerated. Delightful. “Let me see,” Three Seagrass said, and braced herself for being near enough to Mahit to brush one of those pure white sleeves in apology.
Mahit didn’t say hello. But she did shift slightly, so there was room around the holodisplay Two Foam was working at for Three Seagrass to see properly. The comms officer clearly knew how to draw: she’d sketched two little humans, and two aliens that looked very like the dead thing in the medical lab. Below the two humans and the two aliens was a static flat image of Peloa-2, captured from real holo. As Three Seagrass watched, the aliens and the humans descended on parallel arcs, the orbit Mahit had sketched with the gesture of one hand, and stood facing one another on the surface of the planet. They were extremely out of scale. Neither humans nor evisceration-prone aliens were several thousand feet in height, even when engaged in critical negotiations.
“You need to put the ships in,” Three Seagrass said. “Ours and theirs. So it’s clear that we want to talk specifically to the ones right out there.” They were still spinning, those three-wheeled rings. Spinning and not moving yet, just transmitting louder and louder self-reinforcing renditions of the message Three Seagrass and Mahit had written. Come talk. Come talk. Come talk. For our mutual benefit.
Mahit nodded. “She’s right. Both ships, and when they get to Peloa-2—when we get to Peloa-2
—do you know the symbol for volume? For increasing volume?”
Two Foam looked at her as if she’d said something in her own incomprehensible language, instead of a perfectly understandable Teixcalaanli sentence. “The glyph for crescendo?” she asked. “… If you want me to draw that, I can…”
Mahit’s face acquired a particular amused, arch expression that Three Seagrass didn’t think she’d ever possessed back in the City. Again, she wondered if what she was seeing was the other person, the other Ambassador from Lsel Station, dead and machine-reborn Yskandr Aghavn. (And worse, in terms of the inconvenient timing of the realization: she felt a sudden spike of hope that it wasn’t Mahit that she’d had this terrible fight with, but Yskandr, and everything could still be put back the way it had been. That would be nice, wouldn’t it. Most things turned out not to be nice, so perhaps she should immediately forget she’d thought of it.)
All Mahit said was, “That has eleven strokes and doesn’t even look like a sound wave, ikantlos, of course not the glyph for crescendo. Let me show you.” And instead of sketching an orbit in the air she made a gesture with one cupped hand, moving across space: a small curve, a larger one, a larger one still. Like a cone of sound.
“Oh,” said Two Foam. “Volume. Absolutely.”
Three Seagrass really needed to get Mahit a cloudhook so she could move holoimages around, but bloody stars, she hardly needed one, did she? Two Foam drew exactly what she’d described: three cupped curves, increasing in size, being emitted from the aliens and the humans once their silhouettes were standing on the surface of Peloa-2. Like they were talking to each other.
“That’s good,” Three Seagrass said. “I like it. Anything else, Mahit, or should we transmit?”
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