They also had some verbs, but none of them made much sense. There was drink, or what Mahit hoped was drink, but could have been consume, internalize, or even perform an action on command—Second used the pitch-growl sound of that word when it wanted her or Three Seagrass to repeat what it was saying. Maybe drink was for both water and for concepts. To take in. Their other verbs were not much clearer: something which might have been fly, land, or pilot a spacecraft, and something else which was probably stop. Though that sound wasn’t necessarily a verb. It could have been just the negation sound, no and zero and not that. Or a threat: don’t continue, or harm will come to you. Second had raised its claws to them twice. Once when Three Seagrass had stepped quite close to it, and offered an open palm—Mahit had thought of poison, of contact poison, of all the ways Teixcalaan could seep through the skin—only to be met with bared teeth, that noise, and claws at her throat that made her skitter backward, pale as glass. And the other time, when one of their soldier escorts had come out from under the shade of the tapestry to bring them more water. Both First and Second had made the no sound, then, and followed it with a resonant scream that made that soldier gag and drop the precious water to spill in the sand.
Mahit wished that she could convey the concept of waste, seeing that dark puddle vanish, drunk up by Peloa-2’s silica dust. But she couldn’t even get close. The aliens had watched the water disappear, too, but they didn’t react to it in any way she could understand, any way she could hook onto, emotionally or linguistically. Was their whole planet desert? Were they used to loss? Did they even have the concept of loss?
The other problem was that as far as either she or Three Seagrass was able to tell, they weren’t learning a language. They were learning a pidgin. There was no alteration in form, pitch, or volume of any of the words they’d put together when they were used in different contexts. None of the verbs related to objects. None of the verbs had tenses, or referred to the future or the past, completed or uncompleted actions. They were all pinpoints, unrelated to everything surrounding them. Even more frustratingly, they had not in the slightest been able to establish the concept of names. Of selves, at all. No pronouns, no name signs, nothing. No I.
Mahit thought, with exhausted irony, And how wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of “you”?—that question she’d asked Three Seagrass so very many times in the City. No way to ask it here. If these aliens had a concept of you, it was entirely opaque.
Worst, though—worst was how First and Second communicated, obviously communicated, and used absolutely no sounds to do so. Not the resonant vibrations and not these pidgin syllables. Soundless and perfect accord. Whatever language they were learning, it wasn’t the language the aliens spoke.
And whatever language it was, Mahit couldn’t do it any longer. She couldn’t make sounds in Teixcalaanli, let alone sing; she thought that if she tried again, even with water poured down her throat, she might faint.
<Hold on,> Yskandr murmured to her, sharp instruction like a stone in her mouth to suck on even though there was no moisture. It gave her enough presence of mind to turn away from Second—not turn her back on it, no, never, the idea was atavistically horrible—but to turn away, and reach to touch Three Seagrass’s shoulder, and rasp, “We’re going to have to come back. It’s too hot. I can’t think, and if I can’t think, I can’t think fast enough to keep them from deciding we’re evisceratable—I know that isn’t a word—”
Three Seagrass nodded. She was flushed and grey at once, and not sweating as much as she should have—Mahit tried to remember the symptoms of incipient heat exhaustion and figured being unable to remember them was a symptom in and of itself. “They don’t look terribly well either,” she said, hardly audible. Her voice went in and out like an unturned radio channel, as hoarse as Mahit’s was. “This planet is bad for everyone except—except sand.”
“We’re not done,” Mahit said. “We don’t know anything yet.”
“A meeting is not a negotiation if it is singular,” said Three Seagrass, which was obviously a quotation from some Teixcalaanli text that Mahit had never read—it was a perfect fifteen-syllable line with a caesura in the middle. An Information Ministry instruction manual, maybe. Those would probably be in political verse.
“… Yes,” she said, “but we need to convince them of that.”
Three Seagrass grimly straightened her shoulders in agreement, and turned to face Second again, who looked—exhausted. Possibly. It was hard to tell; Second’s white-and-grey-spotted skin didn’t show bloodflow or sweat. There was nothing to read. But Mahit thought its head hung lower on the great curve of its neck, and she was sure its round, faintly furred ears were pulled back against its skull in some sort of distress.
Years of oration had given Three Seagrass some natural advantages over Mahit on maintaining volume and pitch even when her voice was a wreck. She sang fly/pilot-a-spaceship/land and pointed at herself, Mahit, and their escorts—made a collective gesture like gathering all of them into her cupped palm—and then pointed up. Sang no/stop. Mahit hoped it was no/stop, and not back the fuck off. Because otherwise they’d said something like we’re never leaving and neither are you.
Second looked at her for a very long, very still moment. Mahit thought about how some animals looked carefully at prey before striking; the lizards that lived in the City, plant-eating and enormous, who tilted their eyes just like Second was tilting its eyes at Three Seagrass—and then lunged. (Mahit had never seen one herself, only holorecordings; they were kept out of the palace grounds and she had hardly had time to go exploring, she’d hardly had time for anything—the very idea of the water-rich air on the Jewel of the World seemed impossible now, a place where lizards could grow to such size on plants alone—)
<You’re drifting, Mahit,> Yskandr told her. <Don’t faint. I probably can’t stop you, and I am absolutely sure it would be a faux pas.>
She bit her tongue, deliberately and hard. It helped. Second hadn’t lunged and eaten Three Seagrass after all. It was backing off. So was First; they moved in their terrible and perfect silent communication.
“Quick,” Three Seagrass rasped. “The holoprojector—play the sequence where we leave and come back.”
Mahit caught up the controls again. Her hands felt very distant from the rest of her. She could wish for neuropathy, neuropathy was better than dissociation—
<No it isn’t. Play the fucking recording.>
She cued the visual. Two little alien silhouettes and two little human silhouettes, retreating away from the image of Peloa-2 back to their respective ships … and then a pause, while the planet rotated a quarter-turn (Peloa rotated slowly, it would still be day when they came back, the killing sun would still be here), followed by the same aliens and the same humans coming back down again.
While it was playing, Mahit added the resonant-scream noise of victory-hurrah! over it. Do this, and we all benefit. Listening to it was like suddenly drowning in nausea. The antiemetics were wearing off. Or she was just not all right. Or both.