A Desolation Called Peace
Teixcalaan #2
by Arkady Martine
This book is for all the exiles:
the displaced, the refugee, the stateless;
the abandoned and the abandoner;
those made desolate and those cast free.
(And for Stanislav Petrov, who knew when to question orders.)
First, reality was suspended. All breaches to Inca protocol occurred at once: the rules governing personal contact (visual, oral, and corporal), drinking, and eating were broken. When Ciquinchara first met the conquerors he was allowed to do what no Indian could, and now the tables were turned. Since there was no signifying context to frame their interactions, the actors exposed themselves to limitless risk. Atahualpa could have been slaughtered, or Soto and Hernando poisoned.…
To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles—this they name empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
PRELUDE
TO think—not language. To not think language. To think, we, and not have a tongue-sound or cry for its crystalline depths. To have discarded tongue-sounds where they are unsuitable. To think as a person and not as a wantful voice, not as a blank-eyed hungering beast, not as a child thinks, with only its own self and the cries of its mouth for company. To look outward from the two-ring or three-ring of one of our starflyers, and see every pinpoint light, every fusion-heart star. To see the pattern these stars make in our eyes reflecting the pattern of our eyes in the dark on the old planet. How our eyeshine glowed in the dirt-home, the blood-home! How we closed them and were invisible, dark-scavengers, secret-hunters! How our starflyers glow in the void-home, the light-home of us! How we slip sideways, like a closing eye, and are invisible! To think as a person, with the singing fractal swarm of we, and see these places that we have not yet scavenged, not yet torn open, claws as delicate as surgeon-scalpels, for their secrets!
Oh, the other hunger, the hunger of we that is nothing to do with the body. The hunger of we to reach out.
This body or that body: flesh full of the genes for strength and savagery, flesh full of the genes for patience and pattern-spotting. This body a curious body, an observer body, trained well for celestial navigation and surveying, its claws laced through with the filaments of metal that allow it to sing not only to we but to any starflyer it touches. This body a body that almost did not become we, almost became meat instead, but is we, and sings we, and is a body for making other bodies meat, for making also other bodies with itself: this body full of kits and clever with its hands on the triggers of a starflyer’s energy cannons.
These bodies, singing in the we, singing together of the flesh of bodies who are not we but have built starflyers and energy cannon. Bodies who are meat and cannot sing! Bodies who think language, who cry with their mouths and leak water from their eyes, who are clawless but vicious in their own hunger to reach out. Who have touched so much of the void-home already, and dwell in it, and have come so very close to the jumpgates behind which are all of our blood-homes, new and old.
These bodies sing: the clever meat dies like every other meat, like we do, but it does not remember what its dead meat knew. So we have brought down our sibling-bodies onto one of their planets, not a blood-home but a dirt-home, full of resources to scavenge, and we have rendered them up for usage, the meat and the resources both.
To sing—hunger satisfied. To sing—understanding. Except:
Another body provides counterpoint, a dissonant chord. This body a curious body, an observer body, a stubborn and patrolling body who has slipped sideways in and out of vision in the same sector of void for lo these many cycles and remains a curious body even so. This body sings in the we, sings of a few clever meat bodies that do remember what their dead meat knew. But not all of them. Not all the same knowing. Not like the singing of the we.
To think of a we that fragments! That does not flock, that remembers but could not hold the shape of a murmuration. We sing disturbance and we sing the hunger of reaching-out, to think of fragmentation! We sing, too: What does this clever meat have that we do not? What singing is their singing, that we cannot hear?
And we send our starflyers whirling, whirling close. Close enough to taste.
CHAPTER ONE
… INTERDICT SUSPENDED—for a duration of four months, extensible by Council order, the interdict regarding Teixcalaanli military transport through Stationer space is suspended; all ships bearing Teixcalaanli military callsign are permitted to pass through the Anhamemat Gate—this suspension does not authorize Teixcalaanli ships, military or otherwise, to dock at Lsel Station without prior visas, approvals, and customs clearances—SUSPENSION AUTHORIZED BY THE COUNCILOR FOR THE MINERS (DARJ TARATS)—message repeats …
Your Brilliance, you have left me with all the world, and yet I am bereft; I’d take your star-cursed possessing ghost, Six Direction, if only he would teach me how not to sleep.
NINE Hibiscus watched the cartograph cycle through its last week of recorded developments for a third time, and then switched it off. Without its pinpoint stargleams and Fleet-movement arcs inscribed in light, the strategy table on the bridge of Weight for the Wheel was a flat black expanse, dull-matte, as impatient as its captain for new information.
There was none forthcoming. Nine Hibiscus didn’t need to watch the cartograph again to remember how the displayed planet-points had winked first distress-red and then out-of-communication black, vanishing like they were being swallowed by a tide. No matter how thickly laid the lines of incoming Teixcalaanli ships were shown on that cartograph, none of them had advanced into the flood of blank silence. Beyond this point, Nine Hibiscus thought, not without a shimmering anticipation, we are quite afraid to see.
Her own Weight for the Wheel was the second-closest vessel to the communicationless swath. She’d sent only one ship farther out than she’d take her own people. That was the hybrid scout-gunner called Knifepoint’s Ninth Blooming, a near-invisible sliver of a ship that slipped free of her flagship’s open-mawed hangar and into the silent black. Sending it might have been Nine Hibiscus’s first mistake as Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze’s newest yaotlek—commander of Fleet commanders, with multiple Teixcalaanli legions under her control. An Emperor made new yaotlekim when that Emperor wanted to make a war: the one begot the other. Nine Hibiscus had heard that old saying the first time when she’d been a cadet, and thought it herself approximately once a week, absent confirmation of absolute observed truth.