But would she have liked her as well, if she hadn’t been?
The soldier acting as doorkeep took her sweet time checking her records, though Three Seagrass thought she saw a flush on her dark cheeks—embarrassment, or even shame, to be so effortlessly put in her place by a barbarian. Mahit should be proud of herself.
She was about to say so, even—they were finally inside, with a delicious profusion of audiovisual and holorecording equipment arrayed like a bouquet of flowers for their use, and the door shut quite firmly against the doorkeepers outside—but Mahit went straight for the audioplay controls. She had the infofiche stick with the intercepted alien noises on it in her hands, and Three Seagrass absolutely didn’t have time to tell her that this particular audioplay looked like it was preset to full volume repeater before she broke it open and the familiar, completely hideous noises flooded the room—from every direction. The repeater was surround-sound, there were speakers in every wall, the horrible static-singing sounds were hitting her from every angle instead of just one—
They were getting into her bones, Three Seagrass thought, right before she threw up. The noises were getting into her bones and would sing in there forever, and she was going to die of nausea—
It stopped. Three Seagrass retched again, helplessly (how brilliant; the first thing the envoy does is vomit on the floor of the flagship, fantastic work on her part), and waited for the waves of queasiness to ease back.
“—sorry,” Mahit said, thinly. Three Seagrass looked up. Ah. At least she wasn’t the only one to have vomited on the floor. But Mahit had found the off switch for the audioplay. Two and a half minutes of that—the length of the recording—would have left the both of them incapacitated, not just embarrassed.
“… We forgot the bin liners,” she managed, and Mahit looked as if she would laugh if it was something her innards found advisable.
Instead, she swiped the back of her hand across her mouth, grimaced, and said, “That was worse than when we listened to it on the shuttle. Much worse.”
“That audioplay is set to repeater. All input is retransmitted through every speaker in every wall in here.”
Mahit considered this information, coiled and still, evaluating it—like she was tasting it, or maybe she was only tasting the sourness of her own mouth, like Three Seagrass was. Then she said, “We need a live alien. Not a corpse.”
“I don’t disagree, but—what makes you bring that up just now?”
“I think,” Mahit said, “that if a whole lot of them make those noises in a circle—like the speakers did—it amplifies. A reinforcing sound wave. Infrasound, not just what we can hear. I wonder if they know it makes us ill.”
“I suspect they do,” Three Seagrass said, as dryly as she could manage while looking around for some sort of cloth to wipe up or at least cover two persons’ worth of sick. “They’ve met a lot more live us than we have live them. Everybody on Peloa-2, for example.”
“All the more reason we need a live one,” said Mahit. “The one in the medbay was a mammal. Even if they’re scavenger mammals, weren’t we the same, a long time ago? And they have to be talking in more ways than just this, this noise—”
“Some way we can’t hear. A sign language, or—pheromones, or—” There were a lot of cabinets in this room, and none of them had anything absorbent in them—just banks of electronics.
“Or structural skin coloration that shifts in patterns, I don’t know. Anything, really. Probably not pheromones, pheromones would be more tonal markers, for mammals. I think. Comparative zoology is not my specialty.”
“All right. A live one. Maybe we can make this message good enough, even if it’s just tone-shrieking into the void, that they’ll send over someone we can see.” Three Seagrass opened another cabinet, and shut it again in frustration. “Give me your jacket,” she said.
“Why?”
Three Seagrass sighed. Mahit was brilliant, and was solving this entire puzzle just like she’d hoped she would, and yet she couldn’t recognize why Three Seagrass needed something made out of cloth. “To clean up with, unless you feel like working surrounded by un-bin-linered stomach contents?”
“Why my jacket?” Mahit said.
“Because mine is a uniform, which at least some of the Fleet on this enormous ship recognize as a uniform, and yours is a very nice and very absorbent piece of cloth. We should get you a uniform yourself, really. I’m sure they have some without rank signs, or I can try to adjust one of mine to fit you if you’d rather look like Information. It’ll save us time later, in the hallways…”
She trailed off at Mahit’s expression, which was as complicatedly hurt as it might have been if Three Seagrass had hit her across the face.
“I’m not a Fleet member,” said Mahit, too evenly, too sharply. “Nor am I a special envoy of the Information Ministry.”
“If you’re worried about insubordination for wearing a Teixcalaanli uniform, I’ll take responsibility?” Three Seagrass tried, puzzled as to the severity of Mahit’s reaction. All right, she was being slightly awful about the jacket, she wouldn’t have wanted someone to suggest her jacket be used as a rag—
“Of course you’d take responsibility,” said Mahit. “That’s always been your job with me, hasn’t it? Opening doors and taking responsibility and being an exact legal equivalent for your barbarian. Since the very beginning.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Three Seagrass said, shocked. She hadn’t. It was a stupid, flippant suggestion, that was all, not some kind of—assumption that Mahit couldn’t decide for herself what she should do. “Stars, Mahit, we’ll use my jacket instead, forget it.”
She shrugged out of one sleeve, was halfway through the next, apologetically turned away, when Mahit said, as narrow and distantly cold as Three Seagrass had ever heard her: “You didn’t mean it. But you said it, Reed.”
Her nickname, polished and sharpened to wound. In that mouth, which had not known to say it when Twelve Azalea had still been alive.
She snapped, “You think I said that, because you can’t hear anything but one of us saying you aren’t a Teixcalaanlitzlim whenever we speak to you.” Snapped, and regretted snapping, and at the same time felt that brutal and brittle glee she always had at getting right down to the meat of some argument, some problem, and sinking in her teeth, ready to tear.
“Don’t you?” asked Mahit. “Say that.” She was very still, very calm. Three Seagrass thought of snakes, of spiders, of all the creatures that stung when threatened. “You remind me I’m a barbarian all the time. Now, in the City before—and not just you, Three Seagrass, the soldiers in the corridors too, but at least they have the honesty not to pretend that I’m anything but what Teixcalaan thinks I am. You? You want to give me uniforms and make me useful and have a clever almost-human barbarian to show off on your arm—you decide that you want me and here I am, you decide it’d be useful if your barbarian exercised diplomatic authority and so I do, you decide I need a uniform so we don’t get stopped in corridors and you don’t think about what it’d look like if you dressed me up like a toy Teixcalaanlitzlim—”