[…] anticipate the ability to authorize up to five hundred nonreplacement births in the next five years, due to the greater efficiency of the zero-gravity rice crop in its newest iteration. Births should be accounted first to individuals who have been on the registered-genetic-heritage list for more than ten years; then to the Councilor for the Miners, in anticipation of producing children likely to score highly on aptitudes for mining and engineering-line imagos …
YSKANDR was not back in the morning.
Mahit woke as empty-minded as she’d fallen asleep. She felt cavernous and echoing, a glassy fragility that was like the very beginning stages of a hangover. She put her hands out in front of her, held them flat. They didn’t shake. She tapped her fingertips against her thumb in alternating rhythmic patterns: it was as easy as it ever had been. If she had neurological damage—if her imago-machine had fucked up irrevocably and burnt out the neural pathways that were supposed to have inscribed Yskandr permanently into her, made them one individual out of two—it wasn’t showing up on the kind of basic workup she could do for herself. She bet she could walk toe-to-heel on a painted line, too. Not that it helped.
On Lsel, now would have been past time to go see her integration therapist and be very distressed. This sort of thing—the cascading failure in the morgue, the blackouts and emotion-spikes and then silence—she had never heard of an imago integration going wrong like hers was going wrong. On Lsel she would have checked herself in to the medical decks. Now she was sitting on Yskandr’s bed in the center of Teixcalaan and being infuriated that he wasn’t here with her, instead. And if she was suffering neurological failure it didn’t seem to be having effects that a Teixcalaanli medical professional would notice, even if she wanted to see one.
Yskandr’s bedroom had narrow, tall windows, three of them in a row, and the dawn sunlight came in in floodlight beams. There were tiny floating motes in them, dancing weightlessly—perhaps she was having neurological symptoms, or some kind of ocular migraine.
She got up, walked over (heel-toe, just to see) and swept her hand through them. Dust. Dust motes. No air scrubbers in the Jewel of the World. There was a sky, too, and plants. Just like other planets she had been on, those brief visits. She was being ridiculous. It was only that everything was strange and she was so alone that was making her have these flights of paranoid fantasy.
Three months wasn’t enough time for anyone to integrate properly. She and Yskandr were supposed to have had a year, a period to grow into each other, for her to absorb everything he knew and for him to dissolve from a voice in her mind to an instinctive second opinion. There were meditation practices and therapy sessions and medical checks and she had none of that here in the place she’d always wanted to be most.
Yskandr, she thought. Your precursor has gotten you and me and the whole Station in more trouble than any of us strictly deserve, and you’d enjoy it, you’d love this whole mess, so where the fuck are you?
Nothing.
Mahit slammed the heel of her hand into the wall between two of the windows, hard enough to hurt.
“Are you quite all right?” Three Seagrass inquired.
Mahit spun around. Three Seagrass, already impeccably dressed as if she’d never removed her suit in the intervening night, leaned against the doorframe.
“How wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of ‘you’?” Mahit asked her, rubbing her hand where she’d hit it. She’d probably bruised herself.
“Grammatically or existentially?” Three Seagrass asked. “Get dressed, Ambassador, we have so many meetings today. I’ve found you Fifteen Engine—your predecessor’s former liaison—and pinned him down for a late breakfast in the Central City. And you would not believe the things that Information has in his file. If you want to make him nervous, ask him about his ‘charitable donations’ to humanitarian organizations which have been implicated in supporting that nasty little insurrection out in Odile.”
“Do you sleep?” Mahit asked dryly. “Grammatically or existentially, as you prefer.”
“Occasionally, on both counts,” Three Seagrass said, and vanished into the outer suite as swiftly as she’d arrived, leaving Mahit to think about what little she knew of Odile—there was some kind of petty rebellion there, but it had been kept quiet on the versions of Teixcalaanli newsfeeds which arrived on Lsel, as such things tended to be. Odile was on the Western Arc—one of the last systems annexed by Teixcalaan, at the beginning of Six Direction’s reign, when he’d been a military emperor first and foremost, a starship captain. Why there would be an insurrection there, Mahit wasn’t sure. But if she could pressure Fifteen Engine with having bad politics, she might have an advantage—if she needed one.
Three Seagrass was rather determined to be useful, wasn’t she.
Mahit dressed in her most neutral Stationer greys, trousers and blouse and short jacket that would only be out of place in the City by virtue of not being Teixcalaanli, which was to say, incredibly conspicuous but not overt about it, and spent the whole time wondering if she’d live long enough to get imperial-style clothes made. In the outer room of the suite, she discovered that Three Seagrass had come up with bowls of some sort of creamy yellow porridge.
“Not poisonous, promise,” she said, sucking a mouthful off a spoon. “The paste is processed for sixteen hours.”
Mahit accepted a bowl with only mild trepidation. “I am convinced you aren’t deliberately trying to get me killed, if only for reasons of your vainglorious personal ambition,” she said. Three Seagrass made an undignified noise through her nose. “What would happen if the paste wasn’t processed?”
“Cyanide,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully. “Natural antinutritional factor in the tubers. But delicious. Try yours.”
Mahit did. There wasn’t much point to refusing. There was nothing safe; there were only gradations of exposure to danger. She felt deliriously unmoored, and that was before any cyanide exposure. The porridge was faintly bitter, rich and delicious. She licked the last of it off the back of her spoon when she was done.