What he’d asked, in his message to the Fleet, was simple: Why do you believe, Envoy Three Seagrass, that negotiating with our enemies will succeed? And why did you choose to go, instead of anyone else from Information? Only those two questions. He just wanted to hear her justification. To try to understand her, at all, and see if he believed what she was doing.
Envoy Three Seagrass had a clear alto voice run ragged. She sounded like someone who had gone to a very loud concert and sung along with the band, or a person who had been really enthusiastic at an amalitzli game the night before. She looked straight at the recording-cloudhook, so now Eight Antidote felt like she was looking straight into his eyes. Direct eye contact. He wanted to look away, and she wasn’t even here to look away from.
“Your Excellency,” she said, in exquisitely formal tense. “Ezuazuacat. Your Brilliance. My most esteemed greetings to you on the Jewel of the World, from the flagship of the Tenth Legion, Weight for the Wheel. I apologize for the brevity of this message, but we are, as you might imagine, somewhat busy.”
There was a pause. An emotion rippled across Dzmare’s holoimage face, and Eight Antidote thought it might be stifled laughter. The laughing that adults did when they were horrified and didn’t want children to know.
“You ask very complicated questions in small and simple packages, Your Excellency,” Three Seagrass went on. “Ambassador Dzmare and I will not be able to give you the sort of response you deserve, considering time and—other factors. But she—Mahit, here”—she gestured at the Ambassador—“is of the opinion that you deserve answers when you ask for them, especially at such a remove.”
Beside him, Nineteen Adze murmured, “… She would think that, wouldn’t she.”
“And you don’t?” Five Agate said, as if Eight Antidote wasn’t right here and they weren’t all talking about him.
“Oh, on this the Ambassador and I have tended to agree quite profoundly,” said Nineteen Adze, and Eight Antidote remembered, harsh and abrupt, what she’d said to him when she’d given him the spearpoint: You’re not Six Direction, no matter what your face looks like. I made sure you didn’t have to be. He wondered again what exactly she had done. For him, or to him—but the envoy was speaking again, the holo going on without respect for a conversation happening five and a half hours in its future.
“You want to know why I took this job. Instead of anyone else from Information. That’s the simple question, Your Excellency. I wanted to. The request came in, and I—wanted to, wanted to do something more than sit in my office and not sleep very much and fail at writing poetry.”
Next to her, Dzmare murmured, “Reed—” Soft and sympathetic. That must be the envoy’s use-name. It was strange that the Ambassador knew it. Stranger that she’d use it. Three Seagrass waved her off, a little falling gesture of one hand that seemed to mean later.
“Ask Her Brilliance about wanting to do something, if you don’t understand it, Your Excellency. I’m sure she’s watching this with you. And if you still think you don’t know why me and not anyone else from Information, ask her why she didn’t stop me, or send someone else with me.”
Nineteen Adze laughed, when the envoy said that. Laughed, and nodded. Eight Antidote was very sure he was being manipulated, over more than six jumpgates and five and a half hours of time—but it was so strange and refreshing to be manipulated by being earnestly told the truth. He needed to learn that one.
In the holo, the envoy sighed. “Your other question is harder. That’s why I’m sitting here with Ambassador Dzmare. She understands languages better than I do, even if I’m a much better diplomat than she is— It’s not her fault, she’s—” Three Seagrass looked as if she’d eaten the first word she’d meant to say, swallowed it back quickly, and replaced it with “—out of practice. Why do I believe that negotiating with our enemies might succeed? Because they talk, Your Excellency. Because when we figured out how to make communicative sounds that they knew were communicative, they talked back. Because—oh, because I grew up reading Eleven Lathe. Get Five Agate to get you a copy of Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier, you’re a ninety-percent clone of His Brilliance Six Direction, you’re old enough to understand it.”
Dzmare interrupted her, carefully. Like a swimmer diving into water without a splash. “Because, Your Excellency, the envoy likes aliens. Likes human aliens, at least—she told me so when she met me the first time—because she, unlike some Teixcalaanlitzlim, thinks humans who aren’t Teixcalaanli might be a kind of human. It’s easy to get from there to thinking that aliens might be a kind of—person. Even if they aren’t human persons.”
“Mahit,” said Three Seagrass, like she was shocked.
But the Ambassador went on. “I don’t know how they talk. I know they have more languages than the ones we’ve learned how to say words to them in, and that at least one of those languages isn’t one a human can hear. I know they don’t care about death the way we do, but that they do understand death. I know that they came back to the negotiating table, after the first meeting. And that they haven’t stopped attacking the Fleet, even during the negotiations. I know all that, and not much more. But I think they might be a kind of person. And if they are…”
“If they are, Your Excellency,” said Three Seagrass firmly, “there is the possibility of a brokered peace before we lose too many more Fleet ships. That’s all.”
A murmur in the background. Whoever else was with them, saying something inaudible. Dzmare looked frightened, or nauseated, or just annoyed. Stationers had too many expressions, and it was hard to tell what they meant. The envoy looked serene. “That is all. End recording.”
And then the holo vanished, and there was only the Emperor’s living-room suite, and Two Cartograph looking up from his homework on the floor, saying “Mama, does Eight Antidote do matrix algebra, because I can, and I solved all the problems while you were watching holo.”
Eight Antidote missed being seven years old, he decided. Being seven was so much simpler than being eleven.
He got up off the couch. He wanted to think about what he had just seen, and not talk about it, not with the Emperor Herself or Five Agate or anyone. “I can do some matrix algebra,” he said, and sat down next to Two Cartograph. “You want to show me?”
They came out of the recording room with the evaluating, watching eyes of Two Foam, Weight for the Wheel’s comms officer, still fixed on them. Three Seagrass had ignored her very determinedly the entire time they’d been on holo. It was easier to ignore her than to deal with simultaneously being observed by suspicious Fleet personnel—at least they weren’t wearing isolation gear any longer—and being called back to the flagship to answer, not a summons from the Emperor Herself, but some sort of evaluatory question sequence from the imperial heir. It was like getting an are-you-a-good-cultural-fit-for-my-team job placement interview, from an eleven-year-old. An eleven-year-old who looked exactly like every picture of His Brilliance Six Direction from when Six Direction was a child.
Three Seagrass had been just about willing to turn around and get back on the shuttle to Peloa-2 and let the kid deal with wanting to know for a few hours—her answers would have been more complete anyway if she could have kept working on the negotiation, kept trying to make the enemy understand that really, they didn’t like casualties very much at all, not even slightly. But Mahit had shaken her head. Had said, If anyone deserves answers about why Teixcalaan does what it does, it’s that child.