Worst, though—worst was how First and Second communicated, obviously communicated, and used absolutely no sounds to do so. Not the resonant vibrations and not these pidgin syllables. Soundless and perfect accord. Whatever language they were learning, it wasn’t the language the aliens spoke.
And whatever language it was, Mahit couldn’t do it any longer. She couldn’t make sounds in Teixcalaanli, let alone sing; she thought that if she tried again, even with water poured down her throat, she might faint.
Three Seagrass nodded. She was flushed and grey at once, and not sweating as much as she should have—Mahit tried to remember the symptoms of incipient heat exhaustion and figured being unable to remember them was a symptom in and of itself. “They don’t look terribly well either,” she said, hardly audible. Her voice went in and out like an unturned radio channel, as hoarse as Mahit’s was. “This planet is bad for everyone except—except sand.”
“We’re not done,” Mahit said. “We don’t know anything yet.”
“A meeting is not a negotiation if it is singular,” said Three Seagrass, which was obviously a quotation from some Teixcalaanli text that Mahit had never read—it was a perfect fifteen-syllable line with a caesura in the middle. An Information Ministry instruction manual, maybe. Those would probably be in political verse.
“… Yes,” she said, “but we need to convince them of that.”
Three Seagrass grimly straightened her shoulders in agreement, and turned to face Second again, who looked—exhausted. Possibly. It was hard to tell; Second’s white-and-grey-spotted skin didn’t show bloodflow or sweat. There was nothing to read. But Mahit thought its head hung lower on the great curve of its neck, and she was sure its round, faintly furred ears were pulled back against its skull in some sort of distress.
Years of oration had given Three Seagrass some natural advantages over Mahit on maintaining volume and pitch even when her voice was a wreck. She sang fly/pilot-a-spaceship/land and pointed at herself, Mahit, and their escorts—made a collective gesture like gathering all of them into her cupped palm—and then pointed up. Sang no/stop. Mahit hoped it was no/stop, and not back the fuck off. Because otherwise they’d said something like we’re never leaving and neither are you.
Second looked at her for a very long, very still moment. Mahit thought about how some animals looked carefully at prey before striking; the lizards that lived in the City, plant-eating and enormous, who tilted their eyes just like Second was tilting its eyes at Three Seagrass—and then lunged. (Mahit had never seen one herself, only holorecordings; they were kept out of the palace grounds and she had hardly had time to go exploring, she’d hardly had time for anything—the very idea of the water-rich air on the Jewel of the World seemed impossible now, a place where lizards could grow to such size on plants alone—)
She bit her tongue, deliberately and hard. It helped. Second hadn’t lunged and eaten Three Seagrass after all. It was backing off. So was First; they moved in their terrible and perfect silent communication.
“Quick,” Three Seagrass rasped. “The holoprojector—play the sequence where we leave and come back.”
Mahit caught up the controls again. Her hands felt very distant from the rest of her. She could wish for neuropathy, neuropathy was better than dissociation—
She cued the visual. Two little alien silhouettes and two little human silhouettes, retreating away from the image of Peloa-2 back to their respective ships … and then a pause, while the planet rotated a quarter-turn (Peloa rotated slowly, it would still be day when they came back, the killing sun would still be here), followed by the same aliens and the same humans coming back down again.
While it was playing, Mahit added the resonant-scream noise of victory-hurrah! over it. Do this, and we all benefit. Listening to it was like suddenly drowning in nausea. The antiemetics were wearing off. Or she was just not all right. Or both.
The alien they had been calling Second opened its maw and echoed the same noise. The whole world was a resonant chamber. Mahit needed to not vomit. Not until the aliens had left—
They didn’t turn their backs on her and Three Seagrass as they went. They loped backward, seemingly as comfortable with that direction of locomotion as they had been with coming forward. Mahit wondered about their hip joints. Wondered if they could move sideways, if they could slide, imagined the disconcerting rapidity of that sort of travel. Thought, dizzyingly, of how their ships winked in and out of the void, there and then not-there, secret and revealed.
And then they were gone, disappeared over the crux of the dune. Whether or not they’d come back—whether or not she and Three Seagrass had accomplished anything aside from learning a few words in a pidgin language without tenses—was entirely unclear.
Three Seagrass vomited first, before Mahit could turn off the holo and the audioplay. Vomited and went down on her knees with dry heaves afterward. Mahit dropped the controls and found herself, operating on complete instinct, all arguments and irrevocable conflicts between them rendered profoundly unimportant, crouched protectively next to her in the sand and in the hot silence. Her hand came to rest on Three Seagrass’s spine, gentle and steadying, until the physical convulsion was over.
“… That could have gone much worse,” said Three Seagrass, when she could. She straightened up. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. And didn’t try to get away from Mahit’s touch, not at all. “Look, Mahit—nobody died, not even slightly.”
CHAPTER
TWELVE
Minister Three Azimuth, I have taken the opportunity to review precisely how you accomplished the pacification of Nakhar System, and I begin to see in detail why you are so unfortunately called “the butcher of the Nakharese mind” by the sort of people who resort to petty doggerel. Your accomplishments are impressive in both their efficacy and the precision of their cruelty. I have preserved recordings for later consultation, if necessary.
—personal communication from Undersecretary Eleven Laurel to Minister of War Three Azimuth, 35.1.1–19A
* * *
When you traveled with him, my dear, when you were young and did all those great deeds in the dirt by his side, how did you breathe from being near him? How did you hold on to yourself? If you’ve a bit of advice for a barbarian, entranced, you know I’d appreciate it. I’ll buy the drinks.
—note from the Lsel Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn to the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, handwritten, preserved in the private files of Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze, undated
HER Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze had said to him, If you get a chance, you should try to find out what Three Azimuth thinks about the Ambassador Mahit Dzmare. Not what Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise thought of her, not what the Emperor Herself thought of her, not what his dead ancestor-the-Emperor had thought of her or her predecessor in the role of Lsel Ambassador, a man Eight Antidote primarily remembered for how often he’d been in the palace, how easily he’d become a normal, everyday presence—but what the Minister of War thought about the Lsel Ambassador, right now.
And then she’d left it up to him to decide if what the Minister of War thought was something the Emperor should disagree with. A poison flower in someone else’s hand.
It seemed like a much bigger and harder task th
an he was capable of. (He could get it wrong. What would happen if he got it wrong? He didn’t know, and not knowing was frightening in itself.)
But that wasn’t the first problem. The first, biggest problem was that he didn’t know how to get close to the Minister of War at all. There was no way he was going to find out what she thought by looking up official documents about Teixcalaanli-Stationer relations, and the legal status of Teixcalaanli military passage through Stationer space, which was what he’d tried first. Also, attempting to read legal documents about the difference between freight supply and personnel supply and full armaments of war, as applied to various sorts of ships with various sorts of cargo, during various situations of more or less hypothetical nature, had done very little for him but give him a headache and the conviction that when he was Emperor, he was going to pick a Judiciary Minister who liked reading this sort of stuff and would do it for him.
He was pretty sure that relations between Teixcalaan and Lsel Station were what his tutors would call normalized but fraught, though. Teixcalaanli vessels could move through Stationer space, and Teixcalaan bought a lot of Stationer-refined metals, but Stationers needed more immigration papers than Eight Antidote had previously thought existed to come live in the Empire, and Teixcalaanlitzlim couldn’t live on the Station at all. Ever.
He’d looked at the star-charts. Almost every battleship that was headed to the front was moving through Stationer space, from the jumpgate they shared with Teixcalaan to the jumpgate they didn’t. The jumpgate that had the war on the other side of it.
And none of this was going to help him unless he could figure out how to get Three Azimuth alone. Alone, and to trust him with her real opinions.
He really, really wished he was older. If he was older, he could—oh, enlist in the Fleet, or something. Be the Minister’s cadet-assistant. But there were probably a lot more Fleet cadets who were more suited to that job than he was, and less politically fraught to pick. It wouldn’t work, even if he was fourteen and of enlistable age instead of just-eleven-last-month. Also it’d be transparent. Why would Eight Antidote make himself Three Azimuth’s assistant unless he wanted something from her?
There had to be another way. A not-official way. A way of being in the right place, a place that all the camera-eyes and City-algorithms and Sunlit would think was how the world should be if he was in it, and that place needed to be where Three Azimuth was, too. Which meant that he needed to figure out what kind of places Three Azimuth spent time in, without her knowing he wanted to know.
Being a spy was difficult. Eight Antidote sighed, and got up from his desk and its many, many infofilm transparencies with legal regulations printed on them. He was really tired of sitting still. Outside his windows it was already late afternoon, and he’d done nothing with his day but homework and trying to investigate Lsel Station, and he thought if he looked at any more documents he might throw something. (If he was a kid, for real, and not himself, he guessed he would go play outside. Or something. He wasn’t really sure what a person did while playing outside if it wasn’t amalitzli, and you needed a whole team for amalitzli.)
Instead of trying to locate an imaginary amalitzli team, he stretched his arms above his head as far as he could reach and bent forward from the waist in a standing pike stretch. Put his hands on the ground and jumped his feet backward, thud, and held the plank for a whole minute until his arms burned. Calisthenics counted as homework, and they felt good, too.
He was in the middle of trying to do a one-handed push-up, a trick he’d never managed yet (puberty and its accompanying muscle development couldn’t get here soon enough, in his opinion), when he had the idea. It was like feeling his mind go click, information falling into place, like solving one of Eleven Laurel’s strategy puzzles.
A person who was as fit as Three Azimuth definitely had to do physical work to stay that way, especially if she was also the Minister of War.
And the War Ministry had a gymnasium with much more equipment than the one in Palace-Earth. Including a shooting range. And Eight Antidote really had been meaning to practice his targeting, like Eleven Laurel had told him to. He was behind on that, now that he was thinking about strategy so much. It would be very easy to run into the Minister there, he bet.
He was so pleased with himself that he didn’t mind at all when his push-up attempt failed spectacularly and dumped him on his face.
* * *
Three Seagrass had never been debriefed by an officer of the Teixcalaanli Fleet before, let alone a yaotlek. It was extremely novel. It was also much less frightening than being debriefed by an ezuazuacat who was less than six hours away from becoming Emperor. After Nineteen Adze, almost everyone paled in comparison, no matter how much this particular yaotlek looked like she’d walked straight out of a holodrama casting call for yaotlekim.
Almost everyone. She’d been absolutely terrified of the aliens. If they counted as people, they beat Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze for intimidation hands down.
She was going to remember those claws for a long time. The claws and the teeth and how very close they had come to her skin. Everything else about Peloa-2 was blurring into a haze of heat exhaustion and mental overwork. They’d talked to the aliens, though. She and Mahit had. They had managed it. Even if they hadn’t done a damn thing to stop or slow down the war, they’d done it, and Three Seagrass was going to fly on that for as long as she could. She felt delicious. And hysterical. And absolutely delighted to be standing in front of Nine Hibiscus, Mahit at her side, explaining what they had done and how.
It helped that she’d been given several large glasses of water, and had remembered to drink them in slow sips so she didn’t bring them right back up again. She’d had to remind Mahit about that. Deserts weren’t something that Stationers trained their diplomats for. Which wasn’t surprising. (What had been surprising was Mahit’s hand on her back, in the sun and the sand, the sheer comfort of being touched and acknowledged, the opening up of possibility: perhaps she hadn’t fucked everything up between them irrevocably after all!… Perhaps. But even perhaps felt shimmering, gorgeously amazing. Like everything did right now.)
They’d been scooped off the shuttle with enormous, near-secretive haste. She’d caught a brief glimpse of Twenty Cicada in the enormous hangar bay, and expected him to show up to the briefing, to reclaim his tapestry, if nothing else—she’d folded it up ever so carefully and shaken out the sand first—but he hadn’t. It was only the yaotlek, and the comms officer Two Foam. No adjutant and no accusatory and disparaging supernumerary Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, either. Interesting. When Three Seagrass was less dehydrated and less exhilarated, she would examine the political situation on Weight for the Wheel with the attention it obviously deserved. Later! Neither dehydration nor exhilaration made for decent analytic capabilities. The Information Ministry taught cadets a whole list of altered states not to be in while evaluating a situation, and Three Seagrass did try to remember her training.
The water she’d drunk made her able to talk. Even sing one of the absurd pitched-consonant words that they’d picked up from the aliens in demonstration for the yaotlek, though Mahit was so much better at making those noises that Three Seagrass had begun to plan a scheme in which she taught her how to have some halfway-decent breath and pitch control, pass on the lessons she’d had as a crèche-kid in how to project from the diaphragm when orating. But no amount of water got her and Mahit past the very simple, very structural problem that was threaded through their magnificent success: they had twenty words, and not a single one of them was much use to ask, Please hand over your war criminals who murdered our colonists, and also cease from contemplating attacking any of our systems closer to the heart of the Empire. In exchange, we will try really hard not to point our very large energy weapons at your spaceships.
They were going to need a lot more meetings to get to that point. If it was possible to get to that point. Three Seagrass wasn’t half the linguist Mahit was, and she still knew that
they’d been speaking—singing, rather—some kind of sketch of a language. Less of a sketch than the tone marker vibrations, but still a sketch.
“… no pronouns?” asked Two Foam, the comms officer, who was also clearly more of a linguist than Three Seagrass. She and Mahit had been talking about grammar for the last five minutes, and Three Seagrass was both enjoying Mahit’s easy comfort in explaining, her command of technical Teixcalaanli vocabulary effortless, and enjoying the opportunity to exchange blood-and-sunlight-these-scientists-can-you-even-believe glances with the yaotlek herself. She’d need Nine Hibiscus to keep liking them—to like them at all, possibly, she hadn’t had time to figure out how the yaotlek figured in the spread of happy that Information was here to Sixteen Moonrise—if they were going to get a chance to keep talking to the aliens. Or to make the right kind of decision to stop talking.
Stars, she just needed allies out here in the middle of the Fleet. Any allies she could get. Three Seagrass liked being in foreign environments—what Information-trained person didn’t—but she was exquisitely aware that she didn’t know the rules here, the shape of the relationships between ship and ship and their commanders and soldiers. No civilian would. (And yet it was still easier than dealing with the aliens—)
“… the larger difficulty is that there’s no time in the language we’re acquiring,” Mahit was saying. “No tenses. No causality; I’m not sure there’s a way to ask a question, let alone offer multiple options or convey consequences. It’s as if they were talking to us like we were very young.”
“Maybe they think we are,” said Nine Hibiscus. “Or that you two are. Possibly they send their young to negotiate with hazardous foreigners.”
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