They’d arrived at their—agreement, or decision, inside the fungible rent-an-office, and then Mahit had said that she had some loose ends to tie up, which was entirely transparent: she had to go use Three Seagrass’s offer to get herself out of whatever political tangle she’d been in the middle of. Two Councilors out of—Three Seagrass consulted her cloudhook’s onboard storage memory, pulling up the dossier on Lsel Station’s government—only six. A full one-third of the government right there in the hangar, chummily having some sort of problem on either side of Mahit Dzmare.
So it made sense that she’d need the time. Even if waiting for her was nerve-racking.
Waiting also left Three Seagrass at loose ends, in a place she’d never been, and what she wanted more than just about anything else, right now, was to go wandering and get to know it. She’d promised not to leave the deck with the hangar bay, and she planned to keep that promise, but—oh, it was likely a good two miles of a loop around, and full of all sorts of sights. And when would she have the opportunity to see Mahit’s home again? Probably never. It’d be a waste not to go sightseeing. It wasn’t even sightseeing! It was reconnaissance. She was designed for reconnaissance; she was Information Ministry.
She climbed out of the office-pod and arbitrarily decided to turn left down the corridor. Her cloudhook was next to useless here, aside from communicating with Teixcalaanli vessels that might be inside this sector of space. Once she’d gone through a jumpgate into a sector without a Teixcalaanli repeater station network, it couldn’t talk to the City or to much else; cloudhook technology didn’t cross jumpgates. Nothing crossed a jumpgate unless it went through a jumpgate, physically. All she had was onboard storage, her own documents, and a scaled-down, nonupdating version of the Information Ministry intranet, which entirely lacked a map of the inside of Lsel Station. (If she was really doing reconnaissance, she should turn on her cloudhook’s geomapping function while she walked around, but she hadn’t come here to be a spy. It seemed vastly impolite.)
The corridors on Lsel were wide enough to walk four abreast, and floored in metal polished by many feet to a comfortable matte sheen. The first strange thing about walking inside them was that there was sunlight. Sunlight everywhere. She’d always imagined that a station would be a closed metal box, all artificial lighting and no plants to speak of, nothing that grew. But Lsel’s corridors—or at least this outer loop—had well-designed plastisteel window ports, and outside was the lovely spangled starfield, and a genuine small and cheerful sun with a pleasant white-gold light. It was moving quite quickly, that light—the station’s rotational period certainly wasn’t going to be anything like a day, more like four sunrises and sunsets in a usual human-length cycle. Three Seagrass could imagine enjoying that. All those sunrises.
The second strange thing was the people. Stationers were tall, and Stationers were very, very good at ignoring one another, and even at ignoring small Teixcalaanlitzlim in bright coral-orange uniforms. They didn’t make much eye contact, and they slipped out of each other’s way even in the more-crowded parts of the corridors with practiced ease. Three Seagrass imagined that it was a side effect of living in such a small space; they acted like they were Inmost Province City-dwellers, happy and comfortable with being crowded, and yet she knew very well that there were only thirty thousand of them on the whole Station.
It must be very strange to be one of only thirty thousand of a people. Three Seagrass thought it would feel fragile. Just these thin metal walls between all of you and the void.
Actually it was better if she didn’t think about the thinness of Station walls; she’d make herself claustrophobic. Instead she took another turn—she was in a more inward corridor now, and instead of real windows there were flat infoscreens displaying the outside, which was a fascinating choice—maybe Stationers liked feeling close to the stars all the time—and found herself in a shopping district. Kiosks, mostly. She really needed to learn some more of Mahit’s language; it took her far too long to piece out the squiggles of Stationer alphabetics into phonemes, and even then she wasn’t always sure on vocabulary. Let alone pronunciation.
But half the kiosks had glyphs in understandable language right alongside the squiggles of Stationer alphabetics. Very artistic glyphs, more decoration than communication, and she was pretty sure the kiosk selling bottled beverages didn’t mean to have their Teixcalaanli sign read HERE IS PORKS! unless she had severely misunderstood both the nature of bottled beverages and Station animal husbandry capabilities. Also the plural was terribly formed. It was probably meant to say HERE ARE RICH-UMAMI-FLAVORS. The glyphs were close enough that someone could confuse them, she guessed. Unsweet bottled beverages, then.
She approached that kiosk and smiled like a Stationer, remembering to bare her teeth. The kiosk operator didn’t smile back. Maybe she was doing it wrong—she stretched her cheeks until they hurt—
“I didn’t know there were guests from Teixcalaan,” said the Stationer, in entirely decent Teixcalaanli. “Would you like a sample of our drinks?”
Three Seagrass blinked at him, and stopped smiling with relief. “Yes,” she said. “I would enjoy that. You speak so well!”
“I took courses.” He poured a small amount of his beverage into a plastic cup that looked extremely biodegradable—probably a four-hour cup, organic plastic, with a hydro-triggered decay cycle. The beverage foamed. Interesting.
“What is it made of?” Three Seagrass asked, and then drank it before he could answer her.
It tasted like salt. Like—alcoholic salt, and oceans. There weren’t any oceans here. It was fascinating, and also awful, and she was never, ever drinking it again.
The Stationer said a word in his own language. And then screwed up his face like he was racking his brain for vocabulary, and came up with “Underwater wavy plants?”
“Kelp,” Three Seagrass said. “You made beer out of kelp.”
“Do you think it would be popular in the Empire?” asked the Stationer. “I’ve been thinking about an export contract…”
No, Three Seagrass thought. It tastes like kelp. Blood and starlight, no one would drink that—“Perhaps on some planets,” she told him, brightly. “Teixcalaan is very large.”
“Are you with a trade delegation, miss—?”
The kiosk operator had attracted several other kiosk operators during the conversation. They had samples of their own. How hungry was Lsel for trade with the Empire? Mahit had always been so adamant about preserving their independence …
“I am Three Seagrass,” said Three Seagrass, “and I am afraid I have absolutely nothing to do with trade in an official capacity.”
“A private investor, then,” said one of the other Stationers, also in Teixcalaanli. Three Seagrass hoped her … cake? It seemed like cake—wasn’t also made out of kelp.
“Not quite,” she said, and was about to go on when there was another voice, behind her and to the right.
“What is all this, then?” that voice asked, and Three Seagrass watched all the Stationers draw themselves up to their full ridiculous heights. An authority. A … trade authority. She tried to remember which of the six Lsel Councilors controlled trade. It was Miners, wasn’t it? But she’d met the Councilor for the Miners, the cadaverous man in the hangar. She turned around.