Three Seagrass was quiet. Listening. Turning over what Mahit had said; Mahit imagined the problem like a pebble in her mouth, an impediment to clear verse. After a moment she took a deep breath of the green-laced air and settled her shoulders. “I want someone to remember that I like being called Reed,” she said. “And to—not be bored. You’re never boring. I like your—that graphic story. I don’t know stories like that one, and I’d like to. You make me have to think, Mahit, and that’s not fair, no one else makes me work this hard and like it at the same time.”
Mahit found herself laughing, soft, a hand covering her mouth. “Are you complimenting or insulting me?”
Three Seagrass considered this with more gravitas than Mahit thought it strictly deserved. “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “Both, probably. Mahit—”
“Yes?”
She could see Three Seagrass steeling herself, drawing her shoulders back, breathing from the diaphragm. Like Mahit was an oration contest she wanted to win. “What if—those other systems I mentioned, what if you went there?” she said. Mahit opened her mouth to reply, but Three Seagrass waved her quiet with a gesture of one hand. “You went there,” she went on, “and I didn’t. Her Brilliance would send you anywhere you wanted to go. It wouldn’t be the Jewel of the World. It’d be somewhere—new. And you could write to me, if you wanted me to not be bored. I’d write to you. You could mail me more volumes of The Perilous Frontier! and I’d—send you new poems, and—anything else you’d want to hear, from me…”
“You would?” Mahit asked. After all this time, she had apparently retained the capacity to be shocked by sweetness.
“I would,” Three Seagrass said. “And you could decrypt your own mail. Promise.”
She was bad at smiling like a Stationer. She showed every tooth she had, the bright bone-white of them. A smile like starlight and threat. Mahit wanted, abruptly, to teach her how to do it right.
She smiled back. She felt brittle and fragile and on the verge of tears, and still she didn’t want to not smile. It was—
<It’s a good offer, Mahit,> Yskandr told her. <It’s kinder than any I ever had.>
The Emperor Six Direction, promising peace in exchange for betrayal. Nineteen Adze, who didn’t see light between loving someone and thinking they needed to die before they could do harm. Compared to those, letters and a temporary post on some distant provincial Teixcalaanli planet seemed like something she could countenance.
“I’d write back,” she said. “All the time.”
POSTLUDE
TO think as a person and to not think language. To think fractal scatter-song, the shape of an unfamiliar body, an inclusion like a garnet in the matrix of a stone—stone, still, but otherwise, crystalline and complete. Inside that crystal language—like the mouth-cries of unpersons, but made singable—lodges and reverberates, isolated until necessary. We, singing all through us, singing harmonic variance, vibration on an almost-interfering frequency. This body, that body: this body had a call-sign when it wasn’t a person, and it is not the only one: this body was called LEAP! and that body greypattern, this body sweetling and that body Cleverer Than Littermates, and so, this new body, singing in the we: called Swarm, which is a laughing name now. Some call-signs are exactly like the person that is we, and that is glitter-sharp delight; the body LEAP! is a building-designing body, a structure-maker, whose structures are gossamer spaces for springing across. So too the body Swarm. To think that this body was a person before it was a person, and called itself appropriately even so!
We did not name this body, the unfamiliar body sings, we were named. We were known. The unfamiliar body sings the inside of a Teixcalaanli ship, a scatter of images and warmth: another body, a commander-body, a person-not-a-person in a thousand memory-points, reassembled. We-when-we-are-Teixcalaan are known without singing, Swarm tells the we. We-when-we-are-Teixcalaan are known with language only, and still clearly.
There is some disbelief, within the reaches of the we. To think language would be so transparent as to allow knowing!
Language is not so transparent, Twenty Cicada thinks—thinks out, a long reaching flicker through all of himself, which is all of the we together and still himself, ourselves. Language is not so transparent, but we are sometimes known, even so. If we are lucky.
Slide-shimmer query, the endless curiosity and want and reaching that is the we, thinking without language: Show us, then!
And on Peloa-2, in the desert night waiting for the shuttle that will take his body to a more hospitable environment, what remains of Twenty Cicada settles, cross-legged in the sand, and begins to try.
A GLOSSARY OF PERSONS, PLACES, AND OBJECTS
ahachotiya—An alcoholic drink, popular in the City, derived from fermented fruit.
Ajakts Kerakel—A life support analyst III on Lsel Station.
Aknel Amnardbat—Councilor for Heritage, one of six members of the governing Lsel Council; her purview is imago-machines, memory, and cultural promotion.
All Points Collapse—A Teixcalaanli band, playing in the shatterharmonic musical style.
amalitzli—A Teixcalaanli sport, played on a clay court with a rubber ball that opposing teams attempt to throw, bounce, or richochet into a small goal. Versions of amalitzli specialized for low- or zero-gravity environments are also popular.
Anhamemat Gate—One of two jumpgates situated in Bardzravand Sector; leads from Stationer space into a resource-poor area not currently under the control of any one specific known political actor. Colloquially, “the Far Gate.”
Aragh Chtel—A Stationer pilot assigned to sector reconnaissance.
Ascension’s Red Harvest—A Teixcalaanli warship, Engulfer-class.
asekreta—A Teixcalaanli title, referring to an actively serving member of the Information Ministry.
Asphodel Drowning—A Teixcalaanli holodrama, currently in its fifth season.
Bardzravand Sector—The sector of known space within which Lsel Station and other Stations are located (Stationer pronunciation).
Belltown—A province of the City, divided into multiple districts; for example, Belltown One is a “bedroom community” for Teixcalaanlitzlim who cannot or do not wish to live in the Inmost Province districts, but Belltown Six is a notorious hotbed of criminal activity, urban congestion, and low-income residents.
Buildings, The (epic poem)—An ekphrastic poem describing famous architectural achievements of the City, commonly taught as a school text in Teixcalaan.
Captain Cameron—Fictional hero of the Lsel graphic novel THE PERILOUS FRONTIER!
Chatoyant Sirocco—The flagship of the Seventeenth Legion, Eternal-class.