A Desolation Called Peace
Page 27
Transmit, and get ready to go down there. We’re not going to have time to make up. Maybe that’s easiest.
“We’ve kept them waiting long enough,” said Mahit. “Send it. And let’s see how much audio playback equipment we can make portable, and does the Fleet have exceptionally strong antiemetics?”
“You’d have to ask medical,” said Two Foam.
“Someone ask medical,” said Mahit. “I can’t talk to anyone. I’m not a citizen.” And she smiled, terrifying and far too beautiful with all those teeth exposed, gesturing to her entire lack of cloudhook.
* * *
“I’m disappointed in you, Cure,” Eleven Laurel said, and Eight Antidote cringed so hard he almost fell off the bench he was sitting on and into the reflecting pool in the garden outside Palace-Earth. Which would have been hideously embarrassing, and bad aquaculture besides. Splash, one wet kid and a lot of ruined water lilies, smashed pink petals.
“I don’t like being snuck up on,” he said, which was true and also not a good response to being surprised by a teacher who was disappointed. But he’d really thought he was alone.
“Pay more attention, then,” said Eleven Laurel. “You’re easy to spot, right out in the open like this, and you’re not watching your blind spots. Do they not teach you anything in Palace-Earth about your own defense?”
“I’m eleven,” Eight Antidote said. “I know how to kick a male-bodied person between the legs and bend anybody’s arm back far enough so that they scream, but I don’t have much body mass or height leverage, and also the entire City watches me. Haven’t you seen the camera-eyes? If I get kidnapped, the Sunlit will kidnap me right back.”
“I certainly hope they would,” Eleven Laurel said, and came around the bench to sit next to Eight Antidote. All of his very long limbs folded up too much; the bench was too high for Eight Antidote and too low for him. His knees stuck up. “It would be a bad time in Teixcalaan indeed if the Sunlit let the imperial heir stay kidnapped.”
Eight Antidote wondered if that was some kind of threat. It felt like it might be, but he didn’t understand the shape of it, or why he was being threatened right now, in this way. Was Eleven Laurel implying the Sunlit were currently not trustworthy, or that they could become so, if Eight Antidote continued to be disappointing? Either version was bad. Either version was frightening.
He asked, “Why have I disappointed you?”
Eleven Laurel sighed, a long, deliberate release of breath. “When a person—young or old, seasoned or brand-new—is brought into the sort of meeting like the one you were party to, Cure, a meeting in which one Ministry is suspicious of the motivations of another one—and then that person chooses to go directly from the Ministry that had hosted them to the Ministry under suspicion, direct and brazen—well, that person must either be very young, very stupid, or very untrustworthy. Or all three. I am hoping that it isn’t all three, in your case.”
“You followed me.”
“As I was saying, you’re not watching your blind spots very well. You’re a fair sneak, Your Excellency, but you light up the entire Palace when you walk in a Ministry front door in broad daylight. Especially the Information Ministry.”
Eight Antidote liked being called Cure a lot better than Your Excellency, but maybe he didn’t deserve an affectionate use-name right now. He’d made a dumb mistake—apparently—the worst kind of mistake, the kind you don’t know is a mistake that you could make, so you can’t avoid it. He said, “I guess you wouldn’t have liked it better if I wriggled in through the Information air ducts instead.”
Eleven Laurel cleared his throat like he was pushing away a laugh. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t have liked that any better. I’d have liked that worse—then I’d know you were trying to be surreptitious. You’ve at least managed the benefit of my doubts by being obvious. Now. What did you tell Information about what you heard at War, Your Excellency?”
“Nothing,” Eight Antidote said, and tried to make himself sound offended, insulted, and not let his voice go high and whiny like a baby’s. “I cross-checked, Undersecretary, to improve my understanding of communication over interstellar distances. So I could better understand what I heard at War.”
“That does sound plausible,” Eleven Laurel said, and then said nothing more.
Eight Antidote knew this trick; knew it from Nineteen Adze, knew it from his tutors, knew it from how he’d tried to use it himself on One Cyclamen just an hour ago. It was the trick where he was being invited to get himself in trouble by continuing to talk, by explaining more, to make how uncomfortable this conversation was go away. He wasn’t going to fall for it. Not this time. (And if he was actually really upset that Eleven Laurel was manipulating him like this, like he was an asset and not a person, well, he never should have expected otherwise; people like him didn’t have friends, even grown-up friends, and also he wasn’t going to cry. Or even sniffle like crying was a possibility.)
“Are there any other ways I’ve disappointed you?” he asked, instead.
Eleven Laurel patted him on the shoulder, a brief touch that almost felt parental. “Not yet. Try to watch your blind spots, would you? It’d be nice to see you live to be Emperor.”
And then he stood up, brushed his trousers clear of dust with his hands, straightened his already-straight cuffs, and strode off through the gardens. Eight Antidote was about to call after him, That’s not the way out, but thought better of it. Either Eleven Laurel wanted to wander through the lily-maze, or he didn’t, and Eight Antidote didn’t owe him any help. He got up himself—kicked a clod of dirt into the pool, which he knew was self-indulgent and environmentally irresponsible, and he didn’t care one bit—and headed, finally, to talk to Her Brilliance the Emperor. If he was going to get accused of spying by someone he thought had liked him, he should actually do some spying. And he was sure Nineteen Adze would want to know about the Lsel Ambassador appearing, suddenly, on the site of the battlefront.
And maybe about Eleven Laurel implying to Minister Three Azimuth that the Emperor Herself didn’t trust the Ministry of War. Telling her that would serve him right.
INTERLUDE
DEKAKEL Onchu is not the sort of person who stands on ceremony, or bothers with channels of communication when she could achieve the same results by simply taking advantage of her own authority. She is the Councilor for the Pilots; her imago-line is the oldest imago-line on Lsel Station. Sometimes, if she is tired enough, she dreams fourteen generations back: the great calculations for maneuvering what had been a ship-world to a point where it could forever be still, a home for all its travelers at last. She never remembers the numbers when she wakes, but she remembers being someone who knew how to find them.
That is all the authority she will ever need to walk directly into Aknel Amnardbat’s office without appointment or announcement. She has questions she wants answered, and she will have her answers now. There will be no further slippery avoidance regarding sabotage. There will be no further waiting for semidisgraced ambassadors to decide to finally admit what Dekakel had suspected to be true all along. And there will be no chance for Councilor Amnardbat to neatly slip away and refuse to talk to her fellow Councilor, like she had in the cargo bay when Mahit Dzmare had so unceremoniously been allowed to be nigh-on kidnapped by a Teixcalaanli envoy.
Amnardbat is behind her desk. She has the grace to not look surprised when Dekakel walks through her door; perhaps her secretary managed to send her a warning message. Dekakel does not sit down, even when Amnardbat gestures at the chair opposite her own. Sitting down would imply a certain equality between the two of them that Dekakel no longer feels.
“Councilor,” says Amnardbat. “How can I help you?”
“You can tell me why you let Dzmare get onto that shuttle when you’d convinced her you wanted her here badly enough that she came to me for rescue. Let’s start there. Councilor.”
Aknel Amnardbat has a face that settles easily into serene and confident distaste; the bubbles o
f her curls and the pleasant high arches of her cheekbones are accustomed to the look she gives Dekakel now. “I don’t care what happens to Dzmare,” she said, “as long as she isn’t on this Station. I don’t care one bit, as long as that imago-line isn’t here, twisting whatever it touches. If that Teixcalaanlitzlim wants her, she can have her.”
Dekakel doesn’t let herself be shocked. That imago-line. Aghavn and Dzmare. Twisting whatever it touches. No wonder Amnardbat had sabotaged Mahit Dzmare: she’d wanted to kill the whole line, and that line was only one imago-machine strong, if you didn’t count Tsagkel Ambak, and Dekakel doesn’t—she wasn’t an ambassador, she was a negotiator, and a long-gone one. Aghavn’s reticence in returning to Lsel had made sure of that. Sabotage, and let the Empire deal with the wrecked remains of an ambassador; it’d probably kill her its own self.
“And if she’d stayed on-Station? What would you have done with her then?”
“Why does Pilots care what Heritage does with an imago-line? You are out of your jurisdiction, Councilor Onchu.”
“Pilots always cares what Heritage does,” Dekakel snaps, “since Heritage holds our imago-lines as well as everyone else’s—tell me, Aknel, that you aren’t making unilateral decisions about line corruption and suitability, tell me that true, and I will walk out of here and leave you be.”
“I’m the Councilor for Heritage,” says Aknel Amnardbat. “My mandate is to preserve Lsel Station. Are you questioning that mandate, or my adherence to it?”
“That wasn’t no.”
Amnardbat looks at her, and deliberately, slowly, and with intent—shrugs. “Someone, Councilor, needs to make decisions that preserve not only our lives, and our sovereignty, but our sense of ourselves as ourselves. That’s what Heritage is for. That’s what I’m doing.”
“And if Dzmare were to come back?” Dekakel isn’t sure why she asked that; she’s fairly certain that Mahit Dzmare is going to die at war, along with a great many Teixcalaanlitzlim.
“Then I’d want to carve that machine out of her skull, Dekakel, and space it, and see if there was anything left of her worth keeping on-Station if she woke up. Poor woman. I do take a little of the blame—had I given her another imago rather than Aghavn’s, perhaps her xenophilic obsession could have been ameliorated.”
“Why didn’t you, then?”
Amnardbat sighs, put-upon. “Someone needed to be a sacrifice to the Empire, and her aptitudes really were outrageously green for Aghavn’s imago. Might as well be her. And it gets them both off our decks, Councilor.”
Chilled, Dekakel asks one last question: “Is there any other line you’ve done this to?”
“Is there a line you’d recommend?”
Dekakel will remember the easiness with which Aknel Amnardbat answered her for a very long time; the easiness, and the way she abruptly knew she couldn’t trust any imago-line that this woman had touched to be unaltered. How clearly she saw what Amnardbat was, in that moment: a person who so loved Lsel Station that she’d replaced her ethical responsibilities with the appalling brightness of that love, and didn’t care what she burned out to preserve it.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Industrial Employment Opportunity SILICA-2318A—Temporary Relocation—Hardship Bonus Pay—Four-Month Rotations. An opportunity for glassworkers, manufactory employees with management experience, and natural resource specialists (particularly those Teixcalaanlitzlim with extraction and/or arid-landscape experience) is available for imperial citizens willing to relocate to the Peloa System for at least four months. Hardship bonus pay conditions derive from planetary temperature extremes, but Peloa-2 has no indigenous predators or known disease vectors. Contraindications: asthma, reactive airway disorder, heat sensitivity, prior episode of sunstroke …
—job posting on Teixcalaanli central government jobs board, to be reposted every month
* * *
And am I made to die? / To lay this body down / to let my trembling mem’ry fly / into a mind unknown?
Our home in deepest shade / well-caught by pilots’ knots / the brilliant regions of the dead / where nothing is forgot!
Soon as from flesh I go / what will become of me? / eternal memory bestowed / will now my portion be.
And woken by the Station, bound, / I from my body rise / and see my successor glory-crowned / within our star-flamed skies!
—Lsel vernacular folk-harmony song, unknown origin, possibly pre-establishment of the Station
HER first desert, even without the anticipation of attempted negotiations with murderous and incomprehensible alien life, was intoxicating. It stretched all around the landing site in an endless wave of bone-white silica sand, unmarked by water or by vegetation save for one copse of small, wide-crowned grey-green trees near the buildings that the Teixcalaanli refinery workers had lived in before they had all died. Those buildings were white, too. Sun-bleached. Even the sky had all the color leached out of it, reducing it to a hazy blue-pallor vault.
Mahit had never been on a planet as hot as Peloa-2. She’d never thought about planets as hot as Peloa-2, certainly not as places people might actually live. Temperatures this high were on the edge of human tolerances. If there had been a heat anomaly of this intensity on Lsel Station, half of the Stationers would be preparing for emergency evacuation because of radical life support system failure. The soldiers on Weight for the Wheel had warned her and Three Seagrass before they’d all boarded the atmospheric-descent shuttle: take extra water. Drink even if you aren’t thirsty. If you’re down there for more than eight hours, take salt pills. Try to stay out of direct sunlight.
Mahit had thought they were being melodramatic, trying to tease the Information agent and the barbarian, City-born or eternally foreign: neither one the sort of people who would know how to deal with inclement environments, of course. But they weren’t teasing. The air on Peloa-2 was dry enough it sucked the moisture from her tongue in the space of a breath. The light seemed to have both weight and weightlessness all at once. She felt a pressured sort of heat, sunlight on her skin but also the air itself, so hot, making her respiration deeper, her heart slower, as if the gravity on this planet was twice as high as it truly was—and at the same time, she felt drunk. Featherlight. Like she could walk forever into the bright desert of Peloa-2 and come back unharmed.
And then the wind changed, and the smell of charnel drifted toward her and Three Seagrass and their small escort of Fleet soldiers: the dead colonists, rotting in their factory buildings. The leavings of the creatures—the people, Mahit was going to think of them as people for the duration of this encounter—that they were here to meet.
She’d never been on a planet that all of Teixcalaan had held a funeral for before, either. She suspected none of them had: not her, not Three Seagrass, not their small escort of ground-combat specialists, bristling with black-muzzled energy weapons.
She’d had no time to talk to Three Seagrass alone, hardly enough time to do more than prepare a sequence of short recordings in what they believed was the alien language. A repetition or two of hello-we’re-here and hurrah! and something they suspected might be back-the-fuck-off—since their intercepted transmission had included something that might have been that, right when the aliens had noticed Knifepoint but before they had begun to chase them. They’d also found time to locate a very large, but still portable, holoprojector programmed for graphic representation, since one could only go so far with approximately six vocabulary words, that weren’t words as much as tonal markers for feelings, anyhow.
Whatever she and Three Seagrass were going to do about what had happened between them would have to wait until this meeting was done.
“You’re the better draftsman,” Three Seagrass said, her voice a curl of smoke in the heat, wavering and distant. Mahit wondered if heat distorted sound or if she was simply experiencing a mild auditory hallucination. “If they want to talk in pictures, I’ll give you my cloudhook so that you can draw.”
“All right,”
Mahit said, and then—because she didn’t want to go into this conversation raw, with nothing but work between the two of them to hold it together—and because the desert was so beautiful and horrible at once, the stretched-out shimmer of it—asked, “Are all deserts like this?”
Three Seagrass shook her head. “I’ve never been anywhere like this,” she said. “The deserts I know are—red rock, plateaus and carved-out mountains, flowers. The south continent back home. This is a sand desert. It’s—”
“It makes me want to walk out into it,” Mahit said, as a confession. As a single offering: I will try to trust you, on the very small things at least, if you try too.
“I know,” said Three Seagrass, and she really sounded as if she did. As if the desert heat pulled at her that way, too. “Guess what, Mahit? We get to. A little. The meeting site is fifteen minutes away.”
They’d picked a plateau, a flat place where the dunes drifted less and where it was possible for their escort soldiers to erect a canopy to provide some shade. Mahit had expected a piece of high-albedo tarp and some tent-poles, from what the soldiers unpacked, moving with practiced speed—but when the canopy was unfolded, and she and Three Seagrass and all their battery-powered audiovisual equipment were positioned underneath it, she saw that the underside of the tarp was patterned in silver and pink and gold-shot blue, lotuses and water lilies, a woven fabric sewn to the light-reflective plastic. A piece of the City spread out here like a traveling palace.