<Yes,> Yskandr agreed. <When I was ambassador it was my habit to say all sorts of meaningless things. You should try it. It’s quite enjoyable.>
In the privacy of her body, Yskandr used the most intimate forms of address, as if he and Mahit were clonesibs or lovers. Mahit had never spoken them out loud. She had a natural younger brother back on Lsel Station, the closest she would ever get to a clonesib, but her brother only spoke the Stationers’ language, and calling him “you,” intimate-otherself in Teixcalaanli, would have been both pointless and unkind. She could have said “you” to a few people who had been in those language and literature courses with her—her old friend and classmate Shrja Torel would have taken the compliment correctly, for instance, but Mahit and Shrja hadn’t spoken since Mahit had been picked to be the new Ambassador to Teixcalaan and carry the imago of the previous one. The why of that little breakage between them was obvious, and petty, and Mahit regretted it—and it wasn’t something she was going to get a chance to repair, except by apologetic letter from the center of the Empire both she and Shrja had wanted to see. Which almost certainly wouldn’t help.
The City had come closer: it filled up the horizon, a vast curve she was falling into. To Yskandr, she thought, I am the Ambassador now. I might speak meaningfully. If I wanted.
<You speak correctly,> Yskandr said, which was the sort of compliment the Teixcalaanlitzlim gave to a still-crèched child.
Gravity caught at the seed-skiff and sank into the bones in Mahit’s thighs and forearms, giving her the sensation of spin. It was dizzying. Below her the skyport’s nets flared open. For a moment she thought she was falling, that she would fall all the way to the planet’s surface and smear to paste on the ground.
<It was the same for me,> Yskandr said quickly, in that Stationers’ language that was Mahit’s native tongue. <Don’t be afraid, Mahit. You are not falling. It is the planet.>
The skyport caught her with hardly a bump.
She had time to gather herself together. There was some business with the seed-skiff being shunted into a long line of other such vessels, moving along a great conveyor until each one could be identified and come to its assigned gate. Mahit found herself rehearsing what she would say to the imperial citizens on the other side as if she was a first-year student preparing for an oral examination. In the back of her mind, the imago was a watchful, thrumming presence. Every so often he moved her left hand, the fingers tapping along her harness, someone else’s nervous gesture. Mahit wished they’d had longer to get used to each other.
But she hadn’t undergone the normal process of having an imago implanted, complete with a year or more of integration therapy under the precise care of one of Lsel’s psychotherapists: she and Yskandr had had a scant three months together, and now they were approaching the place where they’d need to work together—work as one person, compiled out of a memory-chain and a new host.
When Ascension’s Red Harvest had arrived, hanging in parallel orbit around Lsel Station’s sun, and had demanded a new ambassador to take back to Teixcalaan, they had refused to explain what had happened to the previous one. Mahit was sure there had been a great deal of politics on the Lsel Council as to what—and who—to send back, and with what demands for information. But this she knew was true: she herself had been one of the few Stationers both old enough for the job and young enough not to have already been brought into an imago-line—and one of the fewer still within that group who had any of the appropriate aptitudes or training for diplomacy. Of those, Mahit had been the best. Her scores on the Imperial Examinations in Teixcalaanli language and literature had approached those of an imperial citizen, and she’d been proud of that—spent the half year since the exams imagining that she would come to the City, sometime in her middle age, once she was established, and collect experiences—attending whatever salons were open to noncitizens that season—gathering up information for whoever she’d share her memory with after she died.
Now she’d get to the City, all right: more important than any Teixcalaanli examination, her scores on the imago-aptitudes had come up green, green, green for this match. Her imago would be Yskandr Aghavn, the previous Ambassador to Teixcalaan. Who was now somehow unsuitable to that empire—dead, or disgraced, or held captive if still alive. Mahit’s instructions from her government included determining precisely what had gone so wrong with him—but she still had his imago. He—or, at least, the last version of him available to give her, fifteen years out of date—was the closest thing Lsel could provide to a native guide to the Teixcalaanli court. Not for the first time, Mahit wondered whether or not there would be a Yskandr waiting for her in the flesh when she stepped outside. She was not sure which would be easier, having one—a disgraced ambassador? A competitor for her, but perhaps salvageable?—or not having one, which meant he had died without ever giving to any younger person what he had learned in his lifetime.
The imago-Yskandr in her head was hardly older than she was, which was both helpful in finding commonality and uncomfortable—most imagos were elders or victims of early-death accidents—but the last record of Yskandr’s knowledge and memory had been taken when he’d last returned to Lsel on leave from his post in Teixcalaan, only five years after he had first gone down to the City. It had been another decade and a half since then.
So he was young, and so was she, and whatever advantage to integration that might have granted the two of them was belied by how short a time they’d been together. Two weeks between the courier’s arrival and when Mahit learned that she’d be the next ambassador. Three more weeks for her and Yskandr to learn how to live together in the body that used to belong to her alone, under the supervision of the Station’s psychotherapists. A long, slow time on Ascension’s Red Harvest, traversing the sublight distances between the jumpgates that were scattered like jewels throughout Teixcalaanli space.
The seed-skiff peeled open like a ripe fruit. Mahit’s harness retracted. Taking hold of her luggage in both hands, she stepped onto the gate, and thus into Teixcalaan itself.
The skyport gate had an airy utilitarianism constructed of wear-resistant carpet and clearly marked signage between glass-and-steel-paneled walls. Standing in the center of the gate’s connecting tunnel, a precise halfway between the seed-skiff and the skyport proper, was a single Teixcalaanli imperial official in a perfectly cut cream suit. She was smalclass="underline" narrow at the shoulder and hip, much shorter than Mahit, and she wore her hair in a fishtail-braid queue of black that spilled over her left lapel. Her sleeves, wide like bells, shaded through flame-orange at the upper arm—<Information Ministry coloring,> Yskandr told Mahit—down to the deep red cuffs that were the privilege of the titled members of the court. Over her left eye she wore a cloudhook, a glass eyepiece full of the ceaseless obscuring flow of the imperial information network. Hers was sleekly decorative, much like the rest of her. Her large, dark eyes and thin cheekbones and mouth were more delicate than was fashionable on Teixcalaan, but by Mahit’s Stationer standards she was interesting, if not quite pretty. She touched her fingers together politely in front of her chest and inclined her head to Mahit.
Yskandr lifted Mahit’s own hands to make the same gesture—and Mahit dropped the two bags she’d been carrying on the floor with an embarrassing clatter. She was horrified. They hadn’t slipped like that since the first week they’d been together.