He wasn’t sure what he’d say. Yet.
The person who showed up to talk to him was a round, broad-shouldered man with an open sort of face, the kind of face that seemed friendly even when it wasn’t. A good face for an Information Ministry employee.
“Your Excellency,” he said. “I understand you would like to discuss interstellar communication?”
Eight Antidote made himself look like his ancestor-the-Emperor, composed his mouth and eyes into that same knowing, interested, serene expression that had made Nineteen Adze flinch back from him in surprised recognition. He was getting good at it. It worked even on people who hadn’t known his ancestor so well; it was an adult expression, and people got nervous in a useful way when he made it with his kid’s face. “I would, very much,” he said. “If I’m not taking up your valuable time, asekreta—I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”
“One Cyclamen, Your Excellency,” said the asekreta, “and I have the honor of being the Second Sub-Secretary of the Epistolary Department of the Ministry of Information, which means I am the person who spends a great deal of time on the intricacies of interstellar communication through jumpgates—a process, Your Excellency, which is so very automated and regular that my time is absolutely most valuably spent on informing you about it. Would you like to come into a conference room?”
One Cyclamen was amazingly obsequious, and in such a way that Eight Antidote felt more flattered than annoyed. He wished he could learn that skill. “Yes please,” he said, and wondered what the camera-eyes of the City would think of him now: following an Information agent into a white-and-beige conference room. No holographic strategy tables here, no star-chart outlines of the universe. Only a holoprojector at one end of a regular sort of table, decorously turned down to a low flicker of light. The chairs were too big for him. His feet didn’t touch the floor, so he tucked them up under himself, sitting cross-legged. It was better than letting them swing. He felt steadier.
“How does a message get to the Jewel of the World from thousands of light-years away in just a few hours, Second Sub-Secretary?” he asked, in tones of high politeness, as if he was speaking to one of his tutors. “And can it go faster than usual? Or slower?”
“In the most technical sense, a message cannot go faster or slower than it can be routed through a jumpgate, Your Excellency,” said One Cyclamen. “The jumpgates are our sticking point. Forgive me—you do understand how they work, do you not?”
“If I get confused, I’ll tell you,” Eight Antidote said, and folded his hands together to make a cup for his chin, looking up at One Cyclamen intently. Everyone knew how jumpgates worked. They were like narrow mountain passes: the only way to get from one side to the other was through the aperture. Except instead of two pieces of land with a mountain range dividing them, one side was a sector of space and the other side was a completely different one, which could be anywhere. There wasn’t a connection between the sectors, except for through the gates, and some sectors of Teixcalaanli space, well … no one knew exactly where they were in terms of vectors away from the Jewel of the World. But you could get there, just as easily as you could take the subway out to Plaza Central Nine, if you knew which jumpgate to go through.
And if you didn’t, you’d have to crawl at sublight speeds across the galaxy, hoping to run into where you meant to go before you died. Jumpgates were why the Empire worked.
One Cyclamen was talking, and had been talking for several seconds, and Eight Antidote wasn’t sure if it was good or bad that he had apparently learned to look like he was paying attention when he wasn’t.
“… electronic communication is essentially transmittable at faster-than-light speeds—practically instantaneous!—via our signaling stations within a sector, and has been for hundreds of years. But only physical objects can go through a jumpgate, and only nonphysical ones can be transmitted via the imperial signal service. You see the problem?”
“Someone has to carry the message on an infofiche stick through every jumpgate between its origin and destination.”
“Yes! Which is why I have a job, Your Excellency, incidentally. Or—why my job exists. The Epistolary Department staffs the jumpgate postal services. We’re the only Information workers who fly spaceships—though they’re quite short little flights, back and forth through the jumpgate with the mail, and most of them are automated these days.”
Eight Antidote nodded. “Unpiloted ships.”
“It’s a very simple routing algorithm,” One Cyclamen said, shrugging. “No reason to use a person unless it is a rush job or the jumpgate is very tricky or heavily trafficked.”
A rush job, like Sixteen Moonrise’s. Had Information passed the very message that was so anti-Information? Did Information read the physical messages, or did they merely arrive, a pile of infofiche sticks, like the worst possible heap of unanswered palace mail? Eight Antidote imagined a sack of the things, or a series of crates, and was a bit horrified at the idea of so many messages all at once.
He didn’t ask how a rush job got scheduled. That would be too—obvious. And he was being a spy today. (It was possible that once a person started being a spy, they were going to be one forever, which was definitely something he would need to think about later.) What he asked instead was, “Does Information process everyone’s mail? From all of Teixcalaan?”
One Cyclamen paused. There was a faint line between his eyebrows, a tension line, like he’d just remembered that he was talking to an imperial heir and not any crèche-kid doing an enrichment project. “We don’t process,” he said. “We transmit. Unless ordered to do otherwise by Her Brilliance the Emperor, of course. But I’m sure that’s not what you meant, Your Excellency—perhaps you wanted to know if there were other mail carriers?”
“Are there?” said Eight Antidote, and waited. The waiting was another adult trick. A Nineteen Adze trick. She did it to him all the time: made him answer questions while not knowing why she’d asked them, and learned what he was thinking by how he answered, whether he wanted her to or not.
“Aside from the Fleet, which carries its own orders on its own ships … no official ones,” One Cyclamen said, “but any vessel moving through a jumpgate can carry a message with them, of course. And then there are sector-wide mail services, a great number, some governmental and some private businesses—would you like a list? I can have one prepared and sent to your cloudhook.”
He wasn’t about to turn down information, even if it wasn’t information he currently could think of any actual use for. Except for that moment where One Cyclamen had said the Fleet carries its own orders on its own ships. Had Sixteen Moonrise’s message come in that way? “I’d like that,” he said. “Thank you.” Then he paused, as if he was suddenly remembering another question, and leaned forward on his elbows, smiling wide-eyed—I’m eleven, I’m small, I’m harmless, I’m doing my homework—and asked one more question. “Has anyone ever—delayed jumpgate mail? Or captured it, or changed it, or sent it through other jumpgates than the ones it was routed to?”