“I would certainly like to hear what the City thinks is the best encomiastic poetry going,” Mahit said.
Three Seagrass snorted. “You’re great. You could have been born here, with that attitude.”
Mahit did not feel complimented. “What does it say?” she asked.
Three Seagrass narrowed her eyes—her pupils tracked to the left and up in tiny jerks, micromuscular instructions to her cloudhook—and peered intently at the infofiche. “Formal invitation to the Emperor’s own salon and oration contest, hosted within a presentational diplomatic banquet, in three days. I’ll assume you want to go?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well, if you want to insult all your predecessor’s contacts and establish that Lsel Station is hostile to imperial interests, not coming to dinner is a wonderful start.”
Mahit leaned in quite close, close enough that she could feel the warm pulse of Three Seagrass’s breath on her face, and smiled with all her teeth, as barbaric as possible. Mahit watched her try to stay still and not flinch back; spotted the moment when she succeeded, rationalized what was happening.
“Three Seagrass,” Mahit said then, “how about we assume that I’m not an idiot.”
“We could do that,” Three Seagrass said. “Do your people invade personal space as a reprimand on a regular basis?”
“When necessary,” Mahit said. “And in exchange I will assume you’re not involved in an obvious attempt at diplomatic sabotage.”
“That seems like a fair trade.”
“So I’m accepting His Imperial Majesty’s gracious invitation. Send the message and I’ll sign it. And then we need to get through the rest of this backlog of infofiche.”
The backlog took the rest of the afternoon and stretched on into the evening. Most of it was the usual sort of communication for a minor but still politically significant ambassadorial office—information requests from the chancellery and from universities concerning the habits, economics, and tourist opportunities available at Lsel, protocol queries. Repatriation requests from Stationers who had been living in Teixcalaanli space and wanted to stop—Mahit signed those—and a smaller batch of entrance queries, which she approved and sent onward to one of the imperial offices concerned with “barbarian entry visas.” An unexpectedly high number of half-authorized safe-passage-through-Stationer-space visas for Teixcalaanli military transport—all of them stamped with Yskandr’s personal seal, but few of them actually signed by him. The half-authorized copies didn’t mean anything: they weren’t done. It was as if Yskandr had been interrupted in the process of officially allowing half a legion’s worth of Teixcalaanli ships into Lsel territory. Mahit spared a moment to wonder at the sheer number of them, and why they hadn’t all been sealed and signed at the same time, and set them aside for a quieter moment of contemplation. She wasn’t prepared to send Teixcalaanli warships through her Station’s sector without doing some research as to why they wanted to move in such quantity, no matter what Yskandr had been doing when he died.
None of the requests were for Ascension’s Red Harvest. Someone other than Yskandr must have approved that ship’s journey to pick her up. But then Yskandr had already been dead by the time that request needed to be processed. Mahit felt mildly ill. Someone had sent that ship—she should find out who—
But Three Seagrass handed her the next infofiche stick, which turned out to be a thoroughly distracting mess concerning import fees on a shipping manifest that would have taken half an hour to sort out had it been answered when it was originally asked, back when Yskandr had been alive. It took nearly three times that long for Mahit to solve, considering one of the parties had left the planet—that was the Stationer—and another had married into citizenship and changed his name during the lag time. Mahit made Three Seagrass hunt down the new-made Teixcalaanlitzlim under his new name and issue him a formal summons to the Judicial Department of Interstellar Trade Licensing.
“Just make sure he shows up to pay the import fees on the cargo he bought from one of my Station’s citizens, whatever his name is,” Mahit told her.
The name the man had chosen, it turned out, was Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle, a revelation that produced in both Mahit and Three Seagrass a kind of stunned silence.
“No one would actually name a child that,” Three Seagrass complained after a moment. “He has no taste. Even if his parent or his crèche was from a low-temperature planet with a lot of tundra in need of all-terrain vehicles.”
Mahit wrinkled her eyebrows in sudden puzzlement, remembering—vividly—the part of her early language training on Lsel when her entire class had been encouraged to make up Teixcalaanli names to call themselves while they were learning to speak. She’d picked Nine Orchid, because the heroine of her then-favorite Teixcalaanli novel, about the adventures of the crèchemate of the future Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare, had been called Five Orchid. It had felt very Teixcalaanli, picking a name based on one’s favorite book. She’d thought the names the other children had chosen were much less successful, at the time, and had felt very superior. Now, in the center of Teixcalaanli space, the entire episode seemed not only appropriative but absurd. Nevertheless, she asked Three Seagrass, “Just how do you Teixcalaanlitzlim name yourselves?”
“Numbers are for luck, or the qualities you want your child to have, or fashion. ‘Three’ is perennially popular, all the low numbers are; Threes are supposed to be stable and innovative, like a triangle. Doesn’t fall over, can reach pinnacles of thought, that sort of thing. This person picking ‘Thirty-Six’ is just trying to look new-money City-dweller, it’s a little silly but not that bad. The bad part is ‘All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle.’ I mean. Blood and sunlight, it’s technically permissible, that’s an inanimate object or a piece of architecture, but it’s so … nice names are plants and flowers and natural phenomena. And not so many syllables.”
This was the most animated Mahit had seen Three Seagrass be so far, and it was really making it difficult for Mahit not to like her. She was funny. Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle was funnier.
“When I was learning the language,” she said, deciding all at once to share, to offer something back for this little bit of cultural exchange—if they were going to work together they should work together—“we had to pretend to have Teixcalaanli-style names, and one of my classmates—the kind of person who scores perfectly on exams and has a terrible accent—called himself 2e Asteroid. The irrational number. He thought he was being clever.”
Three Seagrass contemplated this, and then snickered. “He was,” she said. “That’s hilarious.”
“Really?”
“Enormously. It’s like turning your whole persona into a self-deprecating joke. I’d buy a novel written by a Two-E Asteroid, it’d probably be satire.”
Mahit laughed. “The person in question wasn’t subtle enough for satire,” she said. “He was a dreadful classmate.”
“He sounds it,” Three Seagrass agreed, “but he’s accidentally subtle, which is even better.” And then she handed over the next infofiche stick, and began to decrypt the next problem Mahit needed to solve.