He swallowed, dry-mouthed, and almost choked. “What would I have been like?”
The Emperor had stopped looking at whatever was on the inside of her eyelids, and was looking at him instead. He wanted to squirm away. She said, “I don’t know. Not you. Not Six Direction, either. Something—untenable. Untenable to me. To Teixcalaan.”
And yet it was tenable to her to kill a whole planet to maybe stop a war. Eight Antidote didn’t understand. He didn’t want to understand. He was glad he wasn’t some ghost, some half-thing, his ancestor and himself wrapped up together, because he was himself, and he didn’t want to understand how Nineteen Adze could kill her friend to save a kid and kill a planet to maybe do nothing but kill a planet.
“I’m not him,” he said. “I’m not Six Direction.”
“You aren’t,” Nineteen Adze said. “You are the imperial heir Eight Antidote. Nothing more and nothing less.”
“You let me be myself,” he said. Making sure.
“I—gave you the opportunity, when it would have been taken away, yes.”
“Then I am myself, and I think you’re wrong, Your Brilliance, you’re wrong to go along with Three Azimuth’s idea, this isn’t my Teixcalaan. The one you’re building.”
And somehow he found that he could stand up, and turn his back on his Emperor, and walk straight-spined right out of her suite, leaving his uneaten breakfast behind him.
“Fire on that ship,” said Nine Hibiscus, with the brittle determination that accompanied making an unwise choice that nevertheless felt better than making no choice at all. She knew this kind of thinking. She’d thought she’d grown out of it, long before she’d been a Fleet Captain, let alone a yaotlek. It was the sort of thinking that obliterated possibilities, unbalanced worlds. Twenty Cicada would be disappointed.
Twenty Cicada wasn’t here.
“Don’t,” Mahit Dzmare said, her face twisted in some incomprehensible expression. Grief or anger or another barbarian emotion that made no sense. “Yaotlek, please, don’t. He is—that’s Darj Tarats, he’s one sixth of our government, please.”
Such a simple request. She should deny it. Everything Sixteen Moonrise had warned her about—the compromising of Information by Lsel agents, the infiltration of Stationer concerns into what should have remained Fleet business—all of that was apparently true, by virtue of the presence of this barbarian in his little ship, demanding Ambassador Dzmare. And yet here was that selfsame Ambassador Dzmare, begging for his life, for the life of some member of her government.
“Hold,” Nine Hibiscus said to Five Thistle, whose hands were already finished targeting the small skiff containing this Darj Tarats. “Why shouldn’t I fire, Ambassador? That ship wouldn’t be the first Stationer vessel caught in the crossfire of this war.”
The Ambassador probably hadn’t known that. She flinched. Everything was so visible on her face, so clear. And yet her expression wasn’t anything that Nine Hibiscus was sure she recognized.
“He asked to speak to me,” said Dzmare. “I am—duty-bound to defend him, to preserve the life of my fellow citizen—”
“Also it’s rude,” said the envoy Three Seagrass, perfectly bland. “To fire on someone who announced himself as friendly.”
Nine Hibiscus wanted so badly for her to be wrong. For the both of them to be wrong. To be the sort of Fleet Captain who wouldn’t care if they were wrong.
But she wasn’t.
“Bring him on board,” she said to Five Thistle, instead. “On board and to me. In restraints. I don’t trust this timing, Envoy. Ambassador. I don’t trust it at all.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It has always been Teixcalaanli policy to take in and provide for refugee populations fleeing natural disaster on their home systems, whether those systems are hostile or friendly toward the Empire. Those who flee disasters of their people’s own making—war or persecutions—are naturally subject to more stringent integration requirements and evaluation (refer to Judiciary Code 1842.A.9 for procedural details). Given these policies, describe an appropriate course of action for a Teixcalaanli governor of a Western Arc planet confronted with a “worldship” claiming refugee status: 20,000 persons in a self-contained mobile space station, with unknown military capabilities and sanitation practices, parked in orbit around the largest planet in the governed system. Provide citations to defend your course of action.
For all the work that imago-memory does for us—the preservation of skill, the continuity of institutional knowledge that is so necessary to keep a closed and carefully balanced society-system like Lsel Station and its surrounding subsidiary Stations functional through the inevitably high loss-rate of individuals subject to cosmic radiation and the standard accidents of living in vacuum both—imago-memory has not managed to preserve for us the reasons that we Stationers came to Bardzravand Sector and stayed. Nor do we remember where we were coming from, or where we were going. Fourteen generations down the chain of live memory, and all our oldest lines have are dreams of numbers and a certainty that if we did this once, we could do it again. Live memory does not retain the reasons for decisions; only the ability to make them. And yet: we did this once. Could we do it again, in reverse? Unpin Lsel from our gravitational wellpoint and go traveling?
THE first thing that Councilor Darj Tarats of Lsel Station said on the bridge of Weight for the Wheel, his hands cuffed behind him in the sort of restraints Three Seagrass assumed were usually used for court-martials or other Fleet unpleasantnesses, was “This is not what I sent you here to do, Dzmare.” He said it in Teixcalaanli, which meant that he wanted everyone else to know that Mahit was his creature and no one else’s. Three Seagrass thought that was, if nothing else—and there was so much else—rude.
His face was cadaverously thin and highly mobile, and he looked like he thought being restrained by Teixcalaanli soldiers was a minor inconvenience of dignity, nothing more. He didn’t engage in the protocol of politesse: bowed to no one, acknowledged no one but Mahit. Mahit, who was standing next to her, color draining from her cheeks like water disappearing into desert sand. She didn’t reply. It didn’t help. Tarats kept talking, and Three Seagrass could feel the attention of all of Weight for the Wheel’s bridge officers settle on Mahit, the stranger in their midst—and on Three Seagrass herself, by proximity and association, if nothing else—like a pack of diving birds, waiting for the silver belly-shine of vulnerable fish.
Behind them, Two Foam’s strategy holomap of the Fleet’s position showed Sixteen Moonrise’s flagship creeping closer and closer to the marked-out location of the aliens’ planet. Not stopping. Accelerating on a vector of her own choosing, and this whole bridge was looking at Mahit Dzmare instead.
You terrify me, Mahit, Three Seagrass thought, and found that the thought was galvanizing—terror and desire were wound so close inside her chest. Maybe she’d always been that way. Maybe it was Mahit’s fault. Oh, but she wanted time to find out. How absolutely starfucked inconvenient, to discover that she wanted anything but to live through this, and live through it a credit to her Ministry and her empire—