“Fuck, but I missed you,” said Three Seagrass, with a sort of regret that Mahit couldn’t place. “Someone else who throws themselves at problems—”
Mahit could feel the ghost with them then, as abrupt and clear as any other realization of political loyalties, secret alliances: the missing third person. Twelve Azalea was three months dead and interred with the rest of the Information Ministry’s fallen officers behind a plaque down on the City, an unfathomable distance away from the two of them. The one of us who was practical at all, she thought—and then revised. No. The one Three Seagrass needed to keep her steady. I’ve never had a friend like that. Or lost one, either.
“Tell me the problem, then,” Mahit said, “aside from ‘we have to talk to aliens’ and ‘you missed me.’” They were walking past a multitude of Teixcalaanli soldiers, all of whom seemed unabashed in their willingness to stare at an Information envoy and a barbarian.
“That’s really the sum of the problem,” Three Seagrass said. “Those two. The aliens are a bit more pressing. Also I could add that you seem to have made many enemies while you were visiting your Station—”
“That’s not a current problem,” Mahit said, as serene as she could manage.
<Ah, so we are going be Tarats’s agent? I was beginning to wonder if you’d simply confess to her.>
Like I said before, Yskandr, if I was going to give us up to Teixcalaan, it would take a lot more than some political pressure.
She didn’t feel as brave as she sounded. She knew he knew that; he was inside her endocrine system, party to the thousand messages of her neurotransmitters and her glands. He knew precisely how neatly Darj Tarats had trapped her: make sure Teixcalaan remains endlessly at war, or be subject to Heritage’s plans. One or the other. So far, all she’d done was fail to mention Tarats’s orders. That wasn’t very much of being his agent. But it left all the doors of future action open. Keeping secrets always did.
“If you say it’s not a current problem, fine,” Three Seagrass said, dryly, and opened a door to the tiny transit chamber—hardly larger than the rent-an-office they’d been in on Lsel—which they had been assigned for the duration of the trip. It had no windows. Mahit wasn’t terribly interested in seeing the distortion of space around a jumpgate, but she still felt obscurely disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to. With the door shut behind them, there was nothing between her and Three Seagrass but three months of time, an envoy’s uniform, and deep suspicion.
Three Seagrass set her luggage down beside the door and knelt to rummage in it. She came up again with her hands full of infofiche sticks, the simple industrial-grey plastic kind, stamped with the Information Ministry seal in cheery and threatening coral-orange.
“Surely,” Mahit found herself saying, “you can’t have brought along the unanswered mail. I swear I had it forwarded when I left, I’ve been working on it—”
She was rewarded by Three Seagrass laughing, and a brief, utterly pleasant relaxation of all the tension months apart had somehow engendered. “No,” said Three Seagrass. “I don’t have a scrap of mail for you. What I have is all the records the yaotlek in charge of the Fleet has of our mysterious and very dangerous aliens. I haven’t had a chance to look at them yet. Want to see?”
<Yes,> murmured Yskandr, covetous, excited—exactly the same as Mahit was. Acquisitiveness, a certain degree of xenophilia—that showed up in both of their aptitudes. It was a central part of their compatibility. Show me something new.
“Let’s figure out what we’re learning to talk to,” she said to Three Seagrass, and took the first of the infofiche sticks from her hand, snapping it open easily between her fingers.
It was audio only. It was—fuck, it was like Mahit had carved a hole in the world between the space of one side of the infofiche stick and the other, and on the inside was static and screaming, or static that was screaming, or—
She felt ill. There didn’t seem to be a way to turn it off. Three Seagrass had gone grey-green under the warm brown of her skin. It made her look dead, or dying. Or like she wanted to be dead, or dying.
And yet there were different terrible sounds in the audio recording, a stuttering shriek that was repeated three times, a lower buzz that roiled Mahit’s stomach and occurred after every pause longer than ten seconds. She couldn’t understand it, and it was hideous, but it wasn’t noise.
When the recording was finally over, both she and Three Seagrass were breathing in hyperventilating gasps, huge snatches of air to shove back the nausea. They stared at each other. “… I don’t know if it’s language,” Mahit managed, finally, “but it’s definitely communication. Phonemes, or—I don’t think words, it’s not enough differentiation, but—maybe tone markers?”
Three Seagrass nodded. Swallowed like she was forcing back bile, and nodded again, more firmly. “Horrible sick-making tone markers. Got it. I want to cross-reference it to the readout from the ship that recorded the transmission, they were interacting with it somehow—maybe we can map which noise goes with what—”
“If either of us vomits, we should vomit in a bin,” Mahit said. “Do we have a bin—are any more of these audio only?” She gestured at Three Seagrass’s fistful of infofiche sticks.
“Only one was marked for audio. The rest should be visual and text,” said Three Seagrass. “Open them up, and I’ll go find two bins. This is a resupply vessel, I’m sure they’ve got bins.”
“Possibly also bin liners. We’re going to have to listen to that—a lot.”
“Bleeding sunlight,” Three Seagrass cursed, but she was smiling, Stationer-style: the edges of her teeth showing. Mahit felt charmed, and worried at being charmed, and utterly relieved that, given work to do, the two of them were apparently fine with one another. “Bin liners, excellent. Seven hours is plenty of time to categorize our tone markers by how many bin liners listening to them requires—”
“Wouldn’t want you to look bad in front of the yaotlek,” Mahit said. “She’ll want the bin liner report straightaway. And presumably the rest of the report also.”
“See?” said Three Seagrass, still smiling that almost-Stationer smile. “I knew fetching a barbarian diplomat who could learn our language would save me time in learning someone else’s—”
She slipped out the door before Mahit could ask her the questions on the tip of her tongue: Would you be as fascinated with these aliens as you have been with me? Considering we are all barbarians, even if I am as human as you are?
<Better not to ask,> Yskandr told her. <You don’t really want to know the answer anyhow.>
In poetry and epics, and even in statecraft manuals of the driest and most clinical kind, emperors were exempt from sleep, or ought to be, and therefore so were starship captains. Nine Hibiscus had always thought that a yaotlek, who was somewhere in-between captain and emperor, really ought to develop the ability to stay awake indefinitely upon receiving her spear-arc collar tabs. Practicality, however, had a notorious way of ignoring poetry, epics, and statecraft manuals. Like everyone else on Weight for the Wheel, Nine Hibiscus had a designated eight-hour shift for sleeping.
Lately, she wasn’t very good at it. Which said something about Emperors, and yaotlekim, and the difference between being in charge of one small but powerful thing, like a starship, and a whole lot of disparate things, like a fleet full of Teixcalaanlitzlim all ready to die for the sake of the Empire, and at her command.