“Truthfully,” Mahit said, choosing each word carefully, “what have you to gain from knowing what sort of implants the Lsel Station Ambassador has in his brainstem or anywhere else?”
“Someone murdered him and I want to know why,” Twelve Azalea said. “Oh, don’t look so shocked, Ambassador! As if you weren’t thinking the same thing yourself, no matter what Reed and the ixplanatl told you this morning. I know better. It’s all over your face, you barbarians can’t hide a thing. Someone murdered an ambassador, and no one was admitting it. Even Information isn’t talking about it, and I do have some medical training—I was almost an ixplanatl, once—so I thought I’d be the best possible candidate to find out why the court was covering it up. Especially if the cover-up came from Science rather than Judiciary; Ten Pearl in Science has been feuding with Two Rosewood for years—”
“That’s the Minister of Science and our Minister for Information,” Three Seagrass murmured, quite imago-like in her adroit filling in of information.
Twelve Azalea nodded, waved a hand for quiet, went on. “I got myself assigned to this investigation to make sure Ten Pearl wasn’t pulling one over on Information, and I came down here and investigated on my own because ixplanatl Four Lever was annoyingly aboveboard and I still didn’t know why the Ambassador was dead. Finding the implant was chance. Now that I’ve enticed you down here I think the one is connected to the other, but that’s hardly where I started.” He shook out his sleeves, set his palms flat on the table. “And now it’s my turn to ask.”
Mahit braced herself. She was more prepared to tell the truth—she was even predisposed to confess, just now, with the relief of Twelve Azalea admitting that Yskandr had been murdered coming close on the heels of Three Seagrass being so publicly embarrassed, being so un-Teixcalaanli and recognizably human—she was falling into the Teixcalaanli patterns, now, dividing everyone into civilized and uncivilized except inverse, backward. She was as human as they were. They were as human as she was.
She’d tell some of the truth, then. When Twelve Azalea inevitably asked. And deal with the consequences afterward. It was better than making a blanket decision that no one could be trusted because they were Teixcalaanli. What an absurd premise, from someone who’d spent their whole childhood wishing she could be an imperial citizen, if only for the poetry …
“What does the implant do, Ambassador?”
Hey, Yskandr, Mahit thought, reaching for the silence where the imago should be, watch me. I can commit sedition too.
“It makes a record,” she said. “A copy. A person’s memories and their patterns of thought. We call it an imago-machine, because it makes an imago, a version of the person that outlives their body. His is probably useless now. He’s dead, and it’s been recording brain decay for three months.”
“If it wasn’t useless,” Three Seagrass said carefully, “what would you do with it?”
“I wouldn’t do anything. I’m not a neurosurgeon. Or an ixplanatl of any kind. But if I was, I’d put the imago inside someone, and nothing Yskandr had learned in the last fifteen years would ever be lost.”
“That’s obscene,” Twelve Azalea said. “A dead person taking over the body of a living one. No wonder you eat your corpses—”
“Try not to be insulting,” Mahit snapped. “It’s not a replacement. It’s a combination. There aren’t that many of us on Lsel Station. We have our own ways of preserving what we know.”
Three Seagrass had come around the table and now she laid two fingers on the outside of Mahit’s wrist. The touch felt shockingly invasive. “Do you have one?” she asked.
“Truth pact time is over, Three Seagrass,” Mahit said. “Guess. Would my people send me to the Jewel of the World without one?”
“I could present convincing arguments for both options.”
“That’s what you’re for, aren’t you? Both of you.” Mahit knew she should stop talking—emotional outbursts weren’t appropriate in Teixcalaanli culture and were a sign of immaturity in her own—and yet she wasn’t stopping. All the helpful, mitigating voices she ought to have had with her were silent anyhow. “You asekretim. Convincing arguments and oratory and truth pacts.”
“Yes,” said Three Seagrass. “That’s what we’re for. And information extraction, and getting our charges out of unfortunate or incriminating situations. Which this is becoming. Are we done here, Petal? Did you get what you wanted?”
“Part of it,” said Twelve Azalea.
“Good enough. Let’s go back to your quarters, Mahit.”
She was being gentle, which was … There was no part of that which was good. Mahit took her wrist back, stepped away from her. “Don’t you want to extract more information?”
“Yes, of course,” Three Seagrass said, as if saying so didn’t matter. “But I’ve also got professional integrity.”
“She does,” Twelve Azalea added. “It’s infuriating, occasionally. ‘Likes aliens’ or not, Reed is really quite a conservative at heart.”
“Goodnight, Petal,” Three Seagrass said, sharp, and Mahit was not proud of how grateful she was to know she wasn’t the only person rattled.
The message-box had filled up with infofiche sticks again by the time Three Seagrass had led Mahit back to her quarters. Mahit looked at them with a dull and inevitable sense of despair.
“In the morning,” she said. “I’m going to sleep.”
“Just this one,” Three Seagrass said. She held up an ivory stick set with a golden seal. It was probably real ivory, from some butchered large animal. Sometime earlier Mahit might have been offended, or intrigued, or both. Now she waved a hand at it: If you must. Three Seagrass snapped it open and it spilled its holographs in pale gold light all over her hands, reflecting off the cream and red and orange of her suit.
“Her Excellency the ezuazuacat wants to meet with you at your earliest convenience.”
Of course she did. (Of course she’d have an infofiche stick made out of an animal.) She was suspicious and smart and she knew Yskandr, and she’d been prevented from getting what she wanted in the morgue, so she’d try to get it another way.
“Do I have a choice?” Mahit asked. “No, don’t answer that. Tell her yes.”
Yskandr’s bed smelled like nothing, or like Teixcalaanli soap, an empty smell with just the suggestion of mineral water. It was wide and had too many blankets. Curled up in it, Mahit felt as if she was a collapsing point at the center of the universe, sinking in on herself in recursions. She didn’t know what language she was thinking in. The starfield art above the bed glimmered in the dark—it was gauche—and she missed Yskandr, and she wanted to be angry with someone who would understand how she was angry—and the Jewel of the World made the small settling noises of any city around her outside the window—
Sleep hit her like a gravity well, and she gave in.
CHAPTER FOUR
In-City cuisine is as varied as a visitor to any planet might expect: the City, despite being urbanized to nearly 65 percent of land area, has as many climates as any other planet, and there is excellent cold-weather food (this author kindly recommends the thin-sliced loin of small-elk, wrapped around winter vegetables, at Lost Garden in Plaza North Four—if you’re willing to make the trip!). Nevertheless classic in-City food is the food of the palace complex: subtropical, focused on the vast variety of flowers and pool-grown plants which are characteristic of the palace’s famous architecture. Begin your day with fried lily blossoms, their petals cupping fresh goat-milk cheese—almost every street vendor sells these and they’re better hot—before heading out on a culinary tour of Plaza Central Nine’s many interplanetarily celebrated restaurants …