He was in the middle of trying to do a one-handed push-up, a trick he’d never managed yet (puberty and its accompanying muscle development couldn’t get here soon enough, in his opinion), when he had the idea. It was like feeling his mind go click, information falling into place, like solving one of Eleven Laurel’s strategy puzzles.
A person who was as fit as Three Azimuth definitely had to do physical work to stay that way, especially if she was also the Minister of War.
And the War Ministry had a gymnasium with much more equipment than the one in Palace-Earth. Including a shooting range. And Eight Antidote really had been meaning to practice his targeting, like Eleven Laurel had told him to. He was behind on that, now that he was thinking about strategy so much. It would be very easy to run into the Minister there, he bet.
He was so pleased with himself that he didn’t mind at all when his push-up attempt failed spectacularly and dumped him on his face.
Three Seagrass had never been debriefed by an officer of the Teixcalaanli Fleet before, let alone a yaotlek. It was extremely novel. It was also much less frightening than being debriefed by an ezuazuacat who was less than six hours away from becoming Emperor. After Nineteen Adze, almost everyone paled in comparison, no matter how much this particular yaotlek looked like she’d walked straight out of a holodrama casting call for yaotlekim.
Almost everyone. She’d been absolutely terrified of the aliens. If they counted as people, they beat Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze for intimidation hands down.
She was going to remember those claws for a long time. The claws and the teeth and how very close they had come to her skin. Everything else about Peloa-2 was blurring into a haze of heat exhaustion and mental overwork. They’d talked to the aliens, though. She and Mahit had. They had managed it. Even if they hadn’t done a damn thing to stop or slow down the war, they’d done it, and Three Seagrass was going to fly on that for as long as she could. She felt delicious. And hysterical. And absolutely delighted to be standing in front of Nine Hibiscus, Mahit at her side, explaining what they had done and how.
It helped that she’d been given several large glasses of water, and had remembered to drink them in slow sips so she didn’t bring them right back up again. She’d had to remind Mahit about that. Deserts weren’t something that Stationers trained their diplomats for. Which wasn’t surprising. (What had been surprising was Mahit’s hand on her back, in the sun and the sand, the sheer comfort of being touched and acknowledged, the opening up of possibility: perhaps she hadn’t fucked everything up between them irrevocably after all!… Perhaps. But even perhaps felt shimmering, gorgeously amazing. Like everything did right now.)
They’d been scooped off the shuttle with enormous, near-secretive haste. She’d caught a brief glimpse of Twenty Cicada in the enormous hangar bay, and expected him to show up to the briefing, to reclaim his tapestry, if nothing else—she’d folded it up ever so carefully and shaken out the sand first—but he hadn’t. It was only the yaotlek, and the comms officer Two Foam. No adjutant and no accusatory and disparaging supernumerary Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, either. Interesting. When Three Seagrass was less dehydrated and less exhilarated, she would examine the political situation on Weight for the Wheel with the attention it obviously deserved. Later! Neither dehydration nor exhilaration made for decent analytic capabilities. The Information Ministry taught cadets a whole list of altered states not to be in while evaluating a situation, and Three Seagrass did try to remember her training.
The water she’d drunk made her able to talk. Even sing one of the absurd pitched-consonant words that they’d picked up from the aliens in demonstration for the yaotlek, though Mahit was so much better at making those noises that Three Seagrass had begun to plan a scheme in which she taught her how to have some halfway-decent breath and pitch control, pass on the lessons she’d had as a crèche-kid in how to project from the diaphragm when orating. But no amount of water got her and Mahit past the very simple, very structural problem that was threaded through their magnificent success: they had twenty words, and not a single one of them was much use to ask, Please hand over your war criminals who murdered our colonists, and also cease from contemplating attacking any of our systems closer to the heart of the Empire. In exchange, we will try really hard not to point our very large energy weapons at your spaceships.
They were going to need a lot more meetings to get to that point. If it was possible to get to that point. Three Seagrass wasn’t half the linguist Mahit was, and she still knew that they’d been speaking—singing, rather—some kind of sketch of a language. Less of a sketch than the tone marker vibrations, but still a sketch.
“… no pronouns?” asked Two Foam, the comms officer, who was also clearly more of a linguist than Three Seagrass. She and Mahit had been talking about grammar for the last five minutes, and Three Seagrass was both enjoying Mahit’s easy comfort in explaining, her command of technical Teixcalaanli vocabulary effortless, and enjoying the opportunity to exchange blood-and-sunlight-these-scientists-can-you-even-believe glances with the yaotlek herself. She’d need Nine Hibiscus to keep liking them—to like them at all, possibly, she hadn’t had time to figure out how the yaotlek figured in the spread of happy that Information was here to Sixteen Moonrise—if they were going to get a chance to keep talking to the aliens. Or to make the right kind of decision to stop talking.
Stars, she just needed allies out here in the middle of the Fleet. Any allies she could get. Three Seagrass liked being in foreign environments—what Information-trained person didn’t—but she was exquisitely aware that she didn’t know the rules here, the shape of the relationships between ship and ship and their commanders and soldiers. No civilian would. (And yet it was still easier than dealing with the aliens—)
“… the larger difficulty is that there’s no time in the language we’re acquiring,” Mahit was saying. “No tenses. No causality; I’m not sure there’s a way to ask a question, let alone offer multiple options or convey consequences. It’s as if they were talking to us like we were very young.”
“Maybe they think we are,” said Nine Hibiscus. “Or that you two are. Possibly they send their young to negotiate with hazardous foreigners.”
“What, because they think younger members of the species are more expendable?” Three Seagrass asked. It was a very interesting idea. Except it didn’t make sense with how First and Second had looked. “If so, then their adults must be very large. The two that came down to the desert were—oh, as big or bigger than the one you were autopsying, yaotlek.”
“So either all their soldiers are neonates…” Two Foam began, consideringly.
“… or they have another language we still can’t hear,” Mahit finished for her. “An impenetrable language.”
Three Seagrass didn’t think Mahit knew that she’d quoted Eleven Lathe’s Asymptote/Fragmentation just then. As far as she was aware, Mahit still had never read Three Seagrass’s favorite poet-diplomat, who had lived six years amongst the Ebrekti and come back still human, his tongue loosened and made strange, his poetry full of images Three Seagrass had never quite been able to comprehend. The motion of a swift is an impenetrable language, he’d written, attempting to describe the shifting, protean hierarchies of how the Ebrekti moved and ran, their predatory herds, the physicality of their social behavior. It was so strange to hear Mahit say the same words and not know—she was almost sure she didn’t know—the deep resonance of them. The echo of Teixcalaan’s history with what could not be understood, what was too alien to stay with long. Eleven Lathe had come home, after his long exile. And written, after he was home, in language worth remembering.