She was a poet, Three Seagrass. Before she was a—whatever she was now.
He called up a public search on his cloudhook for her work. There was a lot of it. She hadn’t written anything—or at least anything public—in the past two and a half months, though, and he really didn’t want to sit around reading poetry all morning. He’d end up feeling like he’d have to write an essay about it afterward, and submit it to one of his tutors. And it wouldn’t explain much about her; it was all from—before.
There were other searches he could run. He was Eight Antidote, His Excellency, associate-heir to the sun-spear throne of Teixcalaan, after all. He was all of that, even if he was eleven, and his cloudhook had a lot of accesses. Probably more than he knew about. Probably more than he’d ever thought to use, or knew existed.
He queried the general records office for every public activity Three Seagrass had been recorded as doing in the last month. The general records office had a very annoying interface—it was part of the Judiciary Ministry, apparently, or at least it was a Judiciary glyph that spun in midair while the office’s AI decided whether or not he was allowed to know what Three Seagrass did in her free time. He wondered if the Sunlit used an interface like this. Probably not. They had their own ways of seeing.
Three Seagrass hadn’t done a lot of things, it turned out. Not in the past month. She spent money in restaurants. She had her uniforms dry-cleaned, which everybody did. She didn’t buy anything strange or big or connected to aliens, and she didn’t write any messages that went off-planet (or at least she didn’t write any personal messages that did—the General Records Office didn’t keep track of what Information sent in or out. Which was probably good. Probably. Even if Eight Antidote wished he could see into Information’s records of who Three Seagrass had been talking to). What she did do had happened all in an eighteen-hour period right before she left the City: she got reclassified as a special envoy, withdrew most of her savings and added them to an account that was definitely Information property, ordered a whole lot of new uniforms, and left from the Inmost Province Spaceport as supernumerary cargo on a medical transport called the Flower Weave.
And then she was gone. Gone, and vanished to the other side of all the jumpgates between here and the aliens she’d decided to talk to.
Eight Antidote knew where he was going now. The Flower Weave made a circuit of close-in jumpgates to the Jewel of the World—its captain was really weirdly meticulous about noting all of them—and it was back in Inmost Province Spaceport right now.
A medical transport captain would not have an agenda about the palace or inter-ministry competition. A medical transport captain wouldn’t know anything about aliens, or disruptive persons. A medical transport captain would just tell Eight Antidote what his impressions of the envoy had been. And that was what he needed. He needed to figure out if he thought it was a good idea that this envoy and Mahit Dzmare were talking to the aliens Three Azimuth had sent a whole yaotlek’s six of legions out to kill instead.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
QUARANTINE PROCEDURES FOR CONTAGIOUS DISEASE: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW! It is most important for Stationers to listen to the staff of the Councilor for Life Support Systems and to trust their judgment rather than your own during a quarantine event. However, it is very unlikely that you will ever need to! The last quarantine event on Lsel Station occurred five generations ago. Nevertheless the imago-lines of medical personnel who assisted in keeping almost every citizen of the Station safe have been carefully preserved and live amongst us now. Don’t be afraid! A minor illness like the common cold, or a fungal infection like ringworm, while contagious, is unnecessary to quarantine, and happens to everyone … even Life Support staff. If a more serious disease outbreak occurs, you will receive detailed instructions. A sample follows …
TRAVEL ADVISORY: There are currently no travel advisories for Teixcalaanlitzlim within the Empire. Please expect and plan for minor delays as military transport receives priority at jumpgate crossings.
WHEN Eight Antidote had been small, he’d had minders, like any child: people to keep him from falling into a water garden or eating an infofiche stick or something else very stupid that really little kids did all the time. But he hadn’t had minders for a while now. He had tutors, of course—though since his ancestor-the-Emperor had died, the tutors were more of something he went to when he wanted, rather than something that happened to him every day—and he had all of the camera-eyes of the City.
Camera-eyes couldn’t stop him from deciding to get on the subway and go to the spaceport. They’d keep track of him—and now that he was on his way, he found that kind of reassuring, because there were a lot of people in the Jewel of the World once you got on the subway, and they all seemed to know where they were going and weren’t distracted or overwhelmed by anything they saw, which felt absurd. He was distracted and overwhelmed. There was just so much. He knew the palace complex as well as he knew the shape of his own knees, and he’d mapped out warship trajectories for sectors six jumpgates away, and still the City felt very loud and very—well. Very much.
But he was going to the spaceport. And the City’s eyes would track him. That was, for the first time in a long time, nice.
The subway had signs, and Eight Antidote knew the map—who didn’t know the map?—and even if he didn’t, his cloudhook would. The subway, he decided, made sense. Loud, fast-moving, uncomfortable sense, but sense. If he waited on this platform or that one, the timetables would show when the next train would arrive, and where it was going, and it did arrive then, and went where it was supposed to. That was the subway algorithm doing its work. He switched lines twice—terrified the first time, gleeful the second. He could do this. He absolutely could. It was so much easier than being in Three Azimuth’s office that he didn’t even mind when people walked in front of him and almost tripped him because he was too short for them to have noticed.
And then he was in Inmost Province Spaceport, and he wasn’t sure he could do it after all. The subway was one thing. The spaceport was another thing altogether. There were even more people, and they were milling around looking at arrival and departure holos, clutching suitcases or pushing baggage carts taller than he was. The vaulted ceilings of the spaceport took all their conversations and made them into a wave of noise, a clattering that got itself mixed in with the cheerful holo jingles of food kiosks, all trying to get him to buy SNACK CAKES: LYCHEE FLAVOR! as well as SQUID STICKS: JUST IMPORTED! He felt sick to his stomach. He usually loved squid sticks, and right now he thought he was going to scream, or maybe cry, because everything was so loud, and he never really wanted to eat anything ever again, squid sticks included. How was he going to find the Flower Weave in all of this?
He ducked into a quieter side corridor, where people were moving in one direction or another instead of wandering around without any patterns at all, and sat down on a bench. He wanted to pull his knees up to his chest and hide behind them. But that was what a really little kid would do. He tried to think. He was the ninety-percent clone of the Emperor Six Direction, who was supposed to have been one of the most intelligent Emperors who ever started out as a soldier, so he should be able to think of something.