Mahit watched the yaotlek’s face as she grappled with the basic Teixcalaanli horror of artificial augmentation of the mind. It was the one thing she never had quite understood—the depth of their cultural taboo, the central reason behind why Yskandr-the-man had died: he’d offered Emperor Six Direction the imago-technology, and neither the Ministry of Science nor Nineteen Adze could countenance what they seemed to understand as a fundamental corruption of the self.
<An imago is nothing like what that man is about to do to himself,> Yskandr murmured in the back of her mind. <If he lives, he won’t even be human. He’ll be part of something else.>
Isn’t that what they say about us? she asked him. That we aren’t human, really, us barbarians with our mind-sharing technology—
<Some of them,> Yskandr said, and he was all the old Yskandr, the one who had seduced an Emperor with the promise of continuity of memory. <But only some.>
Nine Hibiscus said, “Swarm. Your religion doesn’t require you to balance the entire starfucked universe all by yourself.”
“Who else would try?” said Twenty Cicada, and Mahit shivered, a violent little shudder of the muscles in her back.
“Do you think he’s right?” Three Seagrass said to her, almost too low to hear. “They’re a collective? Is it like—you?”
“Stationers are chains,” Mahit said, “lines, not—he’s describing a fractal web of minds, that’s nothing like—yes, I think he could be right, it would make sense with how they always seem to know where their other ships are, with no lag over time. He could be.”
Three Seagrass reached for Mahit’s hand, caught it in hers. Mahit hadn’t expected it—hadn’t expected Three Seagrass to touch her at all, in public. But she didn’t pull away. No one was paying attention to them right now. Not when they could be listening to the yaotlek and her adjutant argue about whether he should functionally join the enemy forces, biochemically, mentally, entirely, in hopes of being able to stop a war. And Three Seagrass’s fingers were warm and tight on hers, like an anchor in a spinning world.
“If he does it,” Three Seagrass said, “and he’s right, and he lives—then he’ll have achieved a kind of first-contact negotiation no Teixcalaanlitzlim has ever managed.”
“… Are you jealous?” Mahit found herself asking.
“I’m not brave enough to be jealous,” said Three Seagrass, and looked away.
He died twice before he learned to talk. The worst experiences were the loudest, the strongest: they drew Shard-pilot minds like a black hole draws mass. A Shard dissolving from outside in, all of its shipglass coated with black squirming oil, liquid, thick, the ship-AI alarms all screaming at once and then silenced, and then the pilot himself screaming and screaming and silenced—and even before Eight Antidote could think, could stop tumbling end over end, made of a thousand minds and two thousand eyes, gyroscopic, ever-shifting
(how did anyone survive this, how did anyone learn to be this kind of pilot, to feel everyone near them—)
before he could find himself in the midst of the cacophony, he was spinning in a rictus of fear, engines cut, some other Shard-pilot’s blanked-out panic in his throat as her Shard was struck by the edge of a three-ringed, slick-grey spinning wheel of a ship and she saw the flat pockmarked side of the asteroid coming up fast and faster and faster and I love you I’ve always loved you remember me and nothing. An afterimage of fire.
Two deaths, and almost a third—the spiral-caught tug of horror, a near miss of energy cannon, friendly fire in all its blue death right in front of his face—but that one wasn’t a death, and Eight Antidote somehow found enough of himself to scream in words.
To weep and scream and say, Stop, stop, whoever is carrying a courier message from Three Azimuth, stop, please, wait.
And from a thousand minds and two thousand eyes: What? Who are…? Where? Some attention, a scattering. Not all of them were falling apart. Not all of them were dying: some of them were just—flying, or fighting, or being together, and the nearer ones to him—in his own sector of space, he thought, snatch of coherency, It’s only the worst things that go all the way through accidentally—heard him, and knew he wasn’t Four Crocus, and wanted to know why.
Please, he said. He didn’t know if he was speaking out loud or if he was thinking. I’m Eight Antidote—the old Emperor’s ninety-percent clone—I need to stop that message. It’s wrong. It’s false.
And he tried, as hard as he could, not to think, But you’re dying, and it’s horrible, and what if Three Azimuth and Nineteen Adze were right, and that genocide order is the only way to stop it?
Because if he thought that, they’d never believe him.
Nine Hibiscus was pacing the bridge, back and forth, as if some internal mechanism inside the massive curves of her could not be still and talk to her adjutant at the same time. Mahit couldn’t quite believe the degree to which the conversation they were having was public, where she and Three Seagrass and half the officers on the bridge could all hear how it flitted back and forth through the long shape of friendship, trust, arguments they’d clearly had a hundred times before, but were no longer theoretical, no longer abstract. But how could it be private, when Twenty Cicada was down in a killing-desert and Nine Hibiscus was where she belonged, on the bridge of the ship he had kept running for her? Mahit imagined him with the tendrils of white fungus in their plastic cube, balanced on his palm. The sun would be finally beginning to set on Peloa-2 by now. She wondered if the aliens had claws to his throat or if they’d gone back to their own ship to wait, or retreat, or be smug (if they were capable of smugness) at having convinced a Teixcalaanlitzlim to ingest a poison deliberately.
She imagined how he would open the box, and put the fungus on his tongue, and be prepared to die, or to solve the problem, exactly as he had in the medbay of Weight for the Wheel. Imagined that, and found that Yskandr was thinking of Six Direction—or she was thinking of Six Direction—fever-flushed, worn to bones and eyes by age and illness. Prepared to die, or solve the problem, even if it meant he was not himself any longer by making use of a Lsel imago-machine.
Is it good to know that he wasn’t the only Teixcalaanlitzlim who would make an attempt like this? she asked, forming the question deliberately in the empty mirrored room of their mind.
<I miss him,> Yskandr told her, which was a sideways answer. The rush of grief and longing and pride was clearer—Yes, he was saying, but he never would have been in a situation like this one, so who knows.
Nine Hibiscus was a shadow passing in front of the shipglass forward viewports, her silhouette hiding and revealing the still-present shape of that alien ship that had brought the negotiators down to Peloa-2. It hovered and spun, and she paced. Argued.
When Darj Tarats emerged from the little room he’d been taken off to, accompanied by one of the other bridge officers—Mahit thought that was the navigation officer, but she couldn’t remember his name or what exactly he did—she was almost as surprised as she’d been by his presence at all. It was so much easier to not think of him. To not feel Yskandr recoil—to recoil herself, ashamed and angry and afraid.