“How many people do you feed?” she asked, following Twenty Cicada to the edge of one of the terraced pools. The effect was like standing on a balcony: they leaned on the fine-wrought metal railings of a catwalk, looking down into green.
“The capacity is five thousand,” Twenty Cicada said. “On emergency rations, for three months. With Weight for the Wheel’s usual crew numbers, we’re entirely self-sufficient, at better than subsistence levels.”
“And enough flowers for every deck,” Three Seagrass added. “All those lotuses…”
“As I said: better than subsistence.”
Beauty, then, was part of his definition of self-sufficiency. Three Seagrass had always thought that homeostat-cultists weren’t supposed to like anything overly pretty or overly ugly, but this hydroponics deck was—gorgeous. And so were all the lotuses. Every color: blue and silver-pale, white and the sort of pink that looked like sunrises.
“What are the casualty rates looking like?” she inquired, after a moment of deliberate quiet, the both of them breathing the thick air like nectar. “Aside from Peloa-2. Our casualty rates.”
“Don’t you know?” He lifted the place where his eyebrow would be, under the cloudhook, as if to indicate her Information-issue dress.
“We’re not omniscient by virtue of being in the Information Ministry, ikantlos-prime. And even if we were, there’s a difference between reading reports and hearing from a soldier on the front.”
Twenty Cicada made a small, considering noise: a click of the tongue against the teeth. “Omniscience is somewhat crippled by lack of omnipresence, I’d agree. And—too high. That’s what our casualty rate is. Too high, for a Fleet that is waiting to decide what to do next, who has not yet found the source of these enemies, despite our best scouting efforts throughout the sector.”
We don’t know where they grow, Three Seagrass thought. We don’t even know what the garden heart of their home would look like, except that it wouldn’t look like this deck, this place that Twenty Cicada values. “You’d prefer action,” she said.
“My preferences are hardly the point, Envoy. I merely—dislike waste, and wasteful things.”
And you think these aliens are—offensive. Your word for “offensive” is “wasteful.” Three Seagrass wrapped her fingers around the railing, felt the slick dampness of the metal. “What would you ask them? If they do answer our message and come to talk to us.”
This time, the noise he made was not so considering. “What makes you think they’re going to want to talk? No matter how clever you and the Lsel Ambassador have been in your sound-splicing—oh, bloody stars, one of them’s gotten into the rice again.”
“One of what?” Three Seagrass started, but Twenty Cicada had already swung his hips up over the railing and landed with a splash, water up above his knees and soaking the pants of his uniform. He waded with purpose and annoyance—paused, entirely still, like an ibis waiting to spear a fish with its beak—and ducked to grab a small dark shape from amongst the stalks of rice.
It squalled. He held it out at arm’s length, by the scruff of its neck, and brought it back to her as if it was an unpleasant trophy. “Hold this,” he said, and shoved it through the bars of the railing for Three Seagrass to grab.
“It’s a cat,” she said. It was. A black kitten, by the size of it, with enormous yellow eyes and the usual needle-claws that kittens had, all of which were now sunk into Three Seagrass’s jacket sleeve, and her skin underneath. It was also dripping and damp, and unlike any other cat she had heard of, didn’t seem perturbed by the water.
Twenty Cicada clambered back onto the dry side of the balcony. “It was a cat,” he said darkly, “several thousand years ago before it became an arboreal pest that lives in the mangrove swamps on Kauraan. An arboreal pest that has escaped into the air ducts of my ship because someone on the down-planet team thought they were cute and brought back a pregnant one.”
The kitten climbed onto Three Seagrass’s shoulder. It was very sharp. It also was much better at holding on to her than she remembered kittens being, the last time she’d been close to a kitten, in the sitting room of some patrician’s poetry salon back in the City. That kitten had been fluffy, pale, and uninterested in sitting on her shoulder. This one had very long phalanges, like the fingers of a human being, and a sort of thumb that was quite nearly opposable. “They’re in the air ducts,” she repeated, dumbfounded and delighted.
“They, like me, are everywhere,” said Twenty Cicada, and sighed so as not to laugh. “And they shouldn’t be in here. They’re not native to the hydroponic ecosystem and their waste products have too much ammonia. You can have that one.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?” Three Seagrass asked. “I have a report to give to the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus—I can’t keep a kitten.”
“It won’t stay with you long. Just take it out with you and leave it on a deck that isn’t this one. And don’t worry about Nine Hibiscus. I’ll give her your message.”
“Will you?” Three Seagrass asked, knowing that what she was asking was closer to ought I to trust you, now that you’ve shown me how little you think these enemies are worth talking to at all?
“Nine Hibiscus asked for it,” said her adjutant, as if this fact rendered the universe entirely simple. “So I’ll bring it to her. I always know where she is.”
He could have gone straight to Nineteen Adze right after he left the Ministry of War. There was no reason not to: it wouldn’t be suspicious. Eight Antidote lived in Palace-Earth, same as the Emperor did, and he went to see her all the time. And he did have—well, not actionable intelligence, like people talked about in spywork holodramas, but useful information of the kind that Her Brilliance had specifically asked for. He could have walked right in.
But it felt wrong. It felt like—oh, like being a tattletale, not a spy. Like being someone else’s ears, instead of his own person, making his own decisions. He would tell her about Ambassador Mahit Dzmare and Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, of course. And—maybe, probably—about Eleven Laurel’s concern that Her Brilliance didn’t trust the War Ministry. He’d even tell her today. But first—well. First he wanted to really understand, for himself, what he’d learned.
Which was why Eight Antidote had walked into the lobby of the Information Ministry, announced himself with all of his titles, and asked the nice asekreta trainee who was staffing the public information desk to find him someone who could spare a half hour to explain rapid communications through jumpgates to the future Emperor of all Teixcalaan.
“It’s for my education,” Eight Antidote had said, extremely cheerfully, and the trainee had actually stifled a conspiratorial giggle behind her hand. Yes, he thought. You’re helping the heir to the Empire with his homework. Keep thinking that.
He only had to wait a little while, and he kept himself amused by looking at the way the Information Ministry presented itself, so different from the Six Outreaching Palms: clear and clean, serenely white marble walls coupled with ever-present coral-colored accents, like the sleeves of their asekretim had bled into the architecture. Coral inlay on the floor, done in a carnelian-stone mosaic of an enormous chrysanthemum framed by smaller lotuses. Eternity, Eight Antidote remembered from some very long-ago tutoring session, when he’d been extremely small, hardly older than a baby. Everybody learned flowers first. Chrysanthemums are eternity, and lotuses are memory and rebirth, which is why the Information Ministry sigil has got both. They like to think that they know everything and always have and always will. Or at least that’s what Eleven Laurel would say.