So said his religion, anyhow, and she suspected he’d do it anyway, even if homeostasis didn’t request it of him. That was the difficulty of Twenty Cicada: determining where the devotion to an entirely minority religious practice stopped and the person began. If there was a space between the two concepts at all.
He was sitting in the middle of the floor, cross-legged, a halo of holograph analyses arced around his head, transparent enough to show all the green creeping up the walls through each image. Most of them were views of ship systems she knew, instant familiarity even seen backward: the readout of energy consumption and life support systems from the entirety of Weight for the Wheel was pinned in its usual place about a foot above his forehead, so that everything else he wanted to look at could spin around it. A still point like a crown.
Also, curled in his lap like a puddle of space without stars, was one of the pets from Kauraan. It seemed to be asleep. He was petting it.
“I thought you hated them,” Nine Hibiscus said, dryly. “Was all of that complaining about ecosystem disruption for show, then?”
Twenty Cicada looked up at her, and dismissed most of his work holos with the hand that wasn’t petting the small void on his knee. “I do hate them,” he said, smiling. “But this one likes me, and what am I going to do with the things, space them? It’s not their fault they exist.”
She came to sit next to him, knee to knee. There always seemed to be more oxygen in one of Twenty Cicada’s garden rooms. (Not seemed: there was. Plant respiration. She’d checked the readouts once. It was a fractional difference, but real.) The Kauraanian pet lifted its head and opened yellow eyes. It made a noise like a badly tuned stringed instrument, stood, paced in a tight circle on Twenty Cicada’s lap, and settled down again. “I didn’t think you’d space them, Swarm,” she said. “But this is cuddling.”
“It yowls if I don’t,” Twenty Cicada said, perfectly bland, and Nine Hibiscus laughed. For a moment she felt very young: transported more than a decade back. To some ship where she’d been of use, and so had he, and she had never thought of not sleeping for the sake of her Fleet.
“Ah, well, then I assume you’ll have to keep it,” she said, and stroked its fur herself. It was very soft.
“Nothing from Peloa-2 yet?” Twenty Cicada asked, just as neutrally as he’d explained his sudden affection for the pet.
“If there was anything, I wouldn’t be here, would I?”
“I know you wouldn’t,” he said, and waved off the insinuation with a falling gesture of one hand. “Better question, yaotlek: how many hours until we go down to pick up their corpses and the doubtless ruined remains of my favorite wall hanging?”
Nine Hibiscus blinked. “Why do the envoy and the Stationer have any of your wall hangings, let alone your favorite?” The object in question was a tapestry of pink and blue-gold lotus flowers, in the highest City style. It usually hung in Twenty Cicada’s bedroom, which meant Nine Hibiscus hadn’t seen it since he’d bought it and shown it off to her. There were other, presumably less-favorite wall hangings all over his quarters: everywhere there wasn’t a plant. For someone who hardly ate and who divested his own personal self of all but the most severely correct trappings of his job and his authority—just the uniform, no hair and no skin-pigments, the essence of a Teixcalaanli Fleet officer distilled—Twenty Cicada surrounded himself with a riot of color and aesthetic luxury. He’d explained it once: it was one of those balances that the homeostasis-worshippers could practice. Excess and asceticism at once.
“I thought the envoy would need something lush to stand in all that desert with. If she doesn’t get herself eviscerated before the enemy has time to notice symbolism.”
“… If the enemy is capable of noticing symbolism,” Nine Hibiscus muttered.
Twenty Cicada shrugged. “I’m sure they have some. But I doubt they care for ours.”
“Why give the envoy your flower tapestry, then? If you’re just expecting us to go down and retrieve partial envoys and partial tapestries in another three hours.”
“Three hours. Longer than I’d wait, yaotlek, but you’re the one who gets to make decisions.” There was something in his expression, in the shape of that phrase, that made Nine Hibiscus want to wince. Yes—she was the one who made decisions, and she didn’t much like it when her adjutant disagreed with them, especially when he went along with her anyway. When he placed so very much weight on his trust in her.
“There are other luxuries on our ship we could have given the envoy that weren’t your favorite tapestry, Swarm,” she said. “If you wanted to set her up to use symbolic valence provided she could get these aliens to recognize what a flower is.”
He scratched the Kauraanian pet behind its ears. It emitted a purr like a very small starship engine. “I could have,” he said, “but why would I send anyone out on one of your missions, Mallow, without the sharpest knives and the most beautiful examples of our culture I have to give? If we are trying to talk to these—things—then we’re trying. Entirely.”
Which was precisely what made her want to flinch. He didn’t want to talk to them, or even make the attempt to, but she had set their course and here he was devoting their resources to that course, no matter what sacrifices were required. She wanted to apologize, but that wasn’t something she did. It undermined both that trust and the authority it gave her. Instead she nodded. “If we go down there to fetch the envoy and our people back and there’s nothing but rent tapestry pieces and entrails, I will give you an absurd service bonus next time we’re on leave in the Western Arc and you can go buy a larger one, with more thread count.”
“In such a situation, if we survive long enough to go on leave, yaotlek, I’d quite appreciate it.”
“Your confidence is overwhelming.”
Twenty Cicada cast his eyes up toward the ceiling, which had been well colonized by a creeping net of green, laden with tiny white flowers. “You’ve seen their firepower,” he said. “And we both know ours. This is going to be a very bad, very long war, and while the prospect is the furthest thing from what I’d wish for, I don’t think you or I will be the last set of yaotlek-and-adjutant to lead it.”
“We haven’t died yet,” she said. “Despite the best efforts of a great many people.”
“People, yes,” Twenty Cicada said, correcting her. “If it was people in those solvent-spitting ring-ships, I’d be negotiating with you for just how large my service bonus should be. But they’re not people. Perhaps the envoy can turn them into people, but she’s just one Information agent, and she is very young. As is her Stationer companion. You know who that is, don’t you?”
“Mahit Dzmare. The one who was on the newsfeeds when One Lightning was pulling that incredibly stupid stunt at the end of the last Emperor’s reign. I know.”
“Good,” said Twenty Cicada. “Because Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise definitely knows who she is, and if I have her dead to rights—and I almost always do—she’ll find a way to use Mahit Dzmare, or what she represents, against you.”