When he did think of it, it was so obvious he felt even stupider and more like a dumb kid than ever. He turned on his cloudhook’s navigation function, and cross-referenced the berth number the Flower Weave’s absurdly bureaucracy-happy captain had filed when he arrived. His cloudhook chimed, soft enough that only he could hear, and lit up a navigational path from his position (which was apparently in Auxiliary Spaceport Corridor B, Tulip Terminal) to the Flower Weave’s berth, all the way over in what his cloudhook was calling Nasturtium Terminal. The path in front of him glowed a comforting white, everything limned in the color right before dawn on a cloudy day. Eight Antidote struck out across the spaceport floor, trying to look confident and comforted and like a man on a mission.
Nasturtium Terminal was clearly for ships that were headed out-system, through jumpgates. The entire feeling of it was very different than Tulip Terminaclass="underline" Tulip Terminal had been full of Teixcalaanlitzlim, going everywhere, short hops and long ones, on-planet or up to a satellite or on a cruise around the Jewel of the World’s local planetary systems. Nasturtium Terminal had tourists, sure, but it also had a lot of grown-ups looking very seriously at their travel manifests and visas for out-Teixcalaan trips, and businesspeople with crates of wares, and a few columns of Fleet soldiers in their perfect uniforms, new cadets heading out to their first postings. Looking at them made Eight Antidote straighten his spine and square his shoulders as he walked. His illuminated cloudhook path took him right by an Information Ministry mail kiosk, staffed by two asekretim who looked hardly older than the Fleet cadets. Operating interstellar jumpgate mail must be the sort of thing people got assigned to when they weren’t trained enough to be useful anywhere else.
Eight Antidote stopped and watched them work. It didn’t seem difficult, what they were doing. They took the infofiche sticks that were brought to them—they came in bins about the size of the wastebasket in his bathroom—sorted them (probably by destination, or at least by jumpgate they were supposed to go through first on the way to their destination) into different bins, and then handed off the bins to other Information Ministry workers who had pilots’ uniforms on, except in Information cream-and-orange. Boring. Eight Antidote would hate to have this job. It only got interesting when a non-Information person, someone in perfectly normal clothes except for the Judiciary-grey armband she wore, came and stood at the little window on the side of the kiosk and handed over what looked like a very official infofiche stick. That one didn’t go into a bin. That one made one of the asekretim leave the kiosk, special infofiche in hand, and vanish off to hand-deliver it to what Eight Antidote guessed was a very fast courier indeed. The other asekreta wrote out a receipt.
He was trying to decide if he was going to let the Flower Weave be for a minute and go ask the receipt-writing asekreta about who was authorized to request fast messages from this side of the jumpgates leading away from the Jewel of the World, when the entire spaceport seemed to explode with noise: not chattering, shouting Teixcalaanlitzlim, but the shrill, incessant scream of an evacuation alarm.
In some of the older ethics manuals that Three Seagrass had once spent an excruciating semester of her time as an asekreta cadet reading, there was a persistent fear that extensive emotional—or, stars forbid, physical—contact with non-Teixcalaanlitzlim would produce a state of irredeemable contamination in the Teixcalaanlitzlim who had experienced the contact. Taking an elective course called Philosophical Shifts in Teixcalaanli Xenocontact had seemed like a good idea during the registration period, but also that had been the semester she’d registered drunk, at four in the morning, from an Information kiosk on the Jewel of the World’s southern continent, where she had been practicing cultural immersion, if cultural immersion could be measured by her success at infiltrating music scenes she didn’t even like. Mostly she remembered being bemused at those old manual writers, some of whom recommended prophylactic doses of both antibiotics, sun temple services, and social isolation if close contact had accidentally occurred. Three Seagrass had thought, as a very frustrated and no longer even slightly drunk cadet, that those writers were absurdly old-fashioned. What citizen of the Empire couldn’t hold their own against the paltry cultural contamination of a nonimperial civilization? And anyone who fucked someone with a social disease had bigger problems than irreversible contamination. Problems like fucking someone who came from a planet without adequate public health.
Currently, standing unpleasantly nude next to Mahit Dzmare in a decontamination shower in Weight for the Wheel’s medical facilities, she was beginning to wonder if the Fleet had taken those old manuals to heart. Maybe they hadn’t read anything written on the subject in the past five hundred years. She was also wondering if there were pruriently placed camera-eyes in their quarters.
Shivering in the chlorine-laced water, she said, “This was not what I had in mind for the morning, Mahit,” and was very profoundly gratified when Mahit laughed, even if the laughter was forced and angry.
“On the Station,” she said, “we don’t require new lovers to get quite this clean.”
“On your Station you don’t spend hours talking to apparently infectious aliens before taking new lovers, unless I am entirely wrong about your native culture.”
Mahit shook her head. Her curls, dripping wet, reached almost to the top of her shoulders and she kept shoving them back out of her eyes. “You’re not wrong—about that. And if we’re full of alien fungus, I don’t know how a decon shower is supposed to help.”
Three Seagrass didn’t know either. It certainly hadn’t been what she expected, walking out of the room they’d shared once she’d finished reading The Perilous Frontier! and discovered there were nine more volumes and made Mahit promise to get her them if she had any possible method of doing so. They’d dressed, and headed out with the intention of immediately keeping their scheduled second rendezvous with the aliens, back in the terrible heat of Peloa-2.
So Three Seagrass had in no way anticipated being grabbed by Fleet soldiers in full isolation gear and spirited away into the medbay, where she and Mahit were unceremoniously stripped and decontaminated while hearing only the edges of why this was necessary. The dead alien in the autopsy room had bloomed with fungal infiltrates, apparently. At any moment, perhaps she and Mahit would do the same.
Three Seagrass had her doubts. She felt exactly as uninfiltrated as before. At least by fungi. (When she wasn’t being thoroughly distracted by having chemical disinfectants sluiced over her in chilly waves, she was quite aware of how she had been thoroughly infiltrated by Mahit’s clever fingers, and by the strangeness of the narrative pattern of her graphic story. But there was absolutely nothing sexy about a decontamination shower. This moment was, in fact, the least attractive Three Seagrass had ever felt while being naked and near someone she’d had sex with.)