Three Seagrass coughed, a gesture toward politesse, and said, “Perhaps we might introduce ourselves—”
“This is the Lsel Ambassador, the boy is the one who contacted me, and you are a high-palace Information Ministry official who hasn’t been out-province since you had to take school excursions. I’m who you hired. Are you satisfied?”
Three Seagrass widened her eyes in a Teixcalaanli formal smile, viciously pained. “To be sure,” she said. “I didn’t expect hospitality from you, ixplanatl, but I thought I might make the attempt.”
“I’m not an ixplanatl,” Five Portico said. “I’m a mechanic. Think about it, asekreta, while I talk to your Ambassador.”
“There’s already a machine in my head,” Mahit said. “Here, where the brainstem meets the cerebellum.” She tilted away from Five Portico, twisting to show her, and ghosted a thumb over the tiny scar-ridge at the top of her neck. “I want you to install the new one exactly where and in the same fashion as that one is now. The central portion unweaves—and can be woven back together, the connections to the outer machine resoldered.”
“And what precisely does this machine do, Ambassador?”
Mahit shrugged. “It’s a form of memory amplification. That’s simplest.”
That was not simplest, but it was as much as she was willing to share on three minutes’ rude acquaintance. Five Portico looked both intrigued and dubious, and both expressions seemed natural to her face. “Is the current version damaged?” she asked.
Mahit hesitated, and then nodded.
“Can you describe how?”
The questions Five Portico was asking were subtly different from the sorts of questions Mahit had heard from Twelve Azalea or Nineteen Adze or even the Emperor Himself when she talked about the imago-machines: they felt oblique, shifting, hinting at the actual purpose, but not outright pushing for Mahit to reveal it. Mahit realized that she must ask them all the time to all sorts of people who didn’t want to reveal why they needed illegal neurosurgery, and felt peculiarly comforted by not being anything like Five Portico’s first patient.
“I don’t know what you’ll see when you open me up,” she began. “The damage might be mechanical and visible. It might … not be. The machine is not functioning properly, and I am also having what I can only describe as the symptoms of peripheral neuropathy when I try to access it.”
“And at what point in the extraction and replacement would you like me to abort, Ambassador?” The red-glowing center of Five Portico’s artificial eye widened, telescoping. It was like looking into a laser housing’s white-hot heart.
“We would prefer the Ambassador not be damaged,” Three Seagrass said.
“Of course you would. But it isn’t you whose skull I am cracking, asekreta, so I’d have it from the Ambassador herself.”
Mahit considered what disasters she was prepared to tolerate. None of them—tremors, blindness, cascading seizures, death—seemed terribly important, in the face of all Teixcalaan pointed at her station, wide jaws akimbo. She’d never felt like this before: untethered from everything. A tiny mote of a person, on this enormous and teeming planet, about to try an experiment that even Lsel’s own vaunted neurologists wouldn’t approve of.
“I’d like to live,” she said. “But only if I am likely to retain most of my mental faculties.”
Behind her, Twelve Azalea made a protesting noise. “Really,” he said, “I’d be a little more conservative, Mahit—Five Portico takes a person seriously…”
Five Portico tapped the tip of her tongue against her teeth with a small, considering snort. “That vote of confidence is appreciated,” she said, with such dryness that Mahit was not entirely sure if she was offended or pleased. “Alive and mentally agile. All right, Ambassador. And how are you prepared to pay for this little adventure?”
Dismayed, Mahit realized she hadn’t even thought of how she would be paying. She had her ambassadorial salary—as yet uncollected, and she possessed some doubts that she’d ever receive a single paycheck, if the Teixcalaanli government devolved any further—and she had a currency account on a credit chip that wouldn’t even be read by anything but a Lsel bank machine. And she’d come out here, somehow thinking that this surgery would be like the restaurants in the palace—someone else’s largesse, or someone else’s political bargain. It was stupid. She hadn’t thought. She’d been behaving like—
—oh, like a Teixcalaanli noble, perhaps.
Fuck it.
“You can have the machine you remove,” she said. “And you can do with it whatever you like, as long as whatever you like is not handing it over to a member of the Science Ministry or the Emperor Himself.”
“—Mahit,” Three Seagrass said, shocked.
Mahit looked at her, and set her jaw against the way all the lines of Three Seagrass’s face curved into betrayed disappointment. Had it really mattered to her, so much, that Mahit had been respecting Teixcalaanli values, going along with the modes and functions of Teixcalaanli bureaucracy and palace culture? And here she was giving away what Yskandr had tried so hard to sell. Yes. Yes, it probably had, and she didn’t want that to be true but here it was (no friendship after all, no chance-found ally, only self-interest, and that hurt and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it right now), and she did not have the time or energy to explain herself, or to try to make that disappointment go away.
But Five Portico said, “Done,” and looked as if Mahit had given her a rich-flavored dessert to bite into. Mahit felt ill. “A little piece of technological piracy from a culture that actually practices neurosurgery is worth more than just one expedition into your head, Ambassador. Anything else you need done? Vision enhancement? Reshape your hairline into something even the asekreta here would think is attractive?”
“That’s not necessary,” Mahit said, trying not to flinch. Trying not to let her expression change at all. Perfectly Teixcalaanli, serene. Like Yskandr had taught her. (Was she killing him, her imago, her other-self? Was that the real price she was paying: destroying the person she was supposed to have become, even if she intended to replace him with himself?)
“As you like,” said Five Portico. “Barring events beyond my control—even out here in Belltown we’re not immune to Sunlit raids, Ambassador, and I’ll hand over your machine if it means my life—I promise none of your off-world technology will get back to the people who want it most.”
“This was a terrible idea,” Three Seagrass said to no one in particular, and Twelve Azalea put his hand on her arm.
“I know,” Mahit said, “but I don’t exactly have a better choice.”
“I imagine you don’t,” said Five Portico. “Or you’d never have ventured out here. Come on into the surgery. Let’s get started. You’ll have her back in three hours or so, asekretim—if you get her back at all.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CURFEW 22.00-06.00—DUE TO INCREASED CIVIL UNREST THE SUNLIT HAVE INSTITUTED A CURFEW IN THE FOLLOWING PROVINCES: CENTRAL-SOUTH, BELLTOWN ONE, BELLTOWN THREE […]
[…] in light of current circumstances, the Teixcalaanli Imperium requests the services of a new ambassador from Lsel Station. Message ends.