She said, “An interesting idea. When I return to my own workstation, in my own apartments, I’ll be sure to look into it.”
“Don’t wait so long,” said Nineteen Adze. “After all the work you did to get yourself to a place of relative security, do you imagine I’d send you back out into the palace alone? While we still don’t know who is willing to blow up innocent citizens right next to you?”
“My cultural liaison—” Mahit began, intending to argue that she certainly was not alone.
“Should be out of the hospital soon enough. I have more than enough infograph displays to spare one, Mahit. I’ll have Seven Scale set up a temporary office for you.”
Right here, where I am not on Lsel diplomatic ground, Mahit thought, but she schooled her hands into one of the gestures of formal thanks—and when the young man who had disposed of the tea service came to lead her away into the further depths of Nineteen Adze’s territory, she went with him.
The office—Mahit was doing her best to not think of it as a prison cell, and mostly managing—was flooded with late-afternoon light, shaded pink through a bay window. Tucked into its curve was a low, wide couch. Seven Scale showed her how to open her very own infograph display and provided her with a stack of blank infofiche sticks in neutral, impersonal grey. He was calm and incurious and efficient, and everything about him was a relief in comparison to Nineteen Adze. Which had likely been designed. She introduced comfort and withdrew it like a master interrogator, and Mahit was agonizingly tired of the emotional swing. When Seven Scale left, closing the door behind him, she lay down on the couch, turned her face to the wall under the windowsill, and drew her knees up to her chest until her bruised hip ached.
If she stared at the blank white paint, and stretched one hand over her head to touch the curving sill around the top of the couch, she could imagine she was in her room on the Station. The safe three-by-three-by-nine tube of it, the gentle eggshell cup of its walls: tiny and inviolate and hers, hanging in rows with everyone else’s rooms. Soundproof. Lockable. You could curl up with a friend there, spine to spine, or belly to belly with a lover, or— It was closed. It was safe.
She made herself sit up. Outside the window a Palace-North courtyard was a riot of blue lotuses floating in ponds and star-shape paths, busy with Teixcalaanli feet marching on Teixcalaanli business. She considered first the impulse to go out the window herself, and second the equally unsuitable impulse to try to write fifteen-syllable verse about how she felt.
Hey, Yskandr, she thought, like throwing a stone into the dark water of one of those ponds. What did you miss most about home?
Then she turned on the infograph display and signed into it like she’d been instructed. As she did so, she realized that it was the first time she’d signed into her own equivalent of a cloudhook, instead of having Three Seagrass open doors for her. So strange, to have as much freedom as she’d demanded in her own apartments—her own diplomatic territory—and only to receive it here, where she was some very complicated kind of prisoner. With perfect knowledge that Nineteen Adze was almost certainly recording everything she did, Mahit got to work.
The interface was, when one wasn’t trying to decrypt basic communication, more intuitive than Mahit had expected. She gestured and the infograph responded—spreading her hands and twisting her wrist spawned multiple transparent workscreens, and she could make her own halo of information. She found Nineteen Adze’s preset camera feeds and called up the one that was still trained on the demonstration in favor of One Lightning—let the ezuazuacat think what she wanted about Mahit’s continuing interests—and set it to run off to her right side. Over her left shoulder she put a window full of a running stream of tabloid headlines, and resolved to improve her vocabulary of casual and insulting vernacular—and perhaps also to learn something more about anti-imperial activists, or Thirty Larkspur, or just what Teixcalaanli tabloids thought about bombings in restaurants. In the center she found a basic text input and began composing messages, routing them through her own accesses as Lsel Ambassador.
She’d probably have to encrypt them with that encomiastic verse, wouldn’t she. If she wanted to be taken seriously—
No. She’d leave them unadorned. Uncivilized. Written in unseemly haste and urgency by a woman away from her home office (she thought, with absurdist longing, of the basket of unanswered infofiche sticks that was probably overflowing in her apartment right now) who was a stranger to the City. A mirror could reflect more than one thing—she’d been a knife, when she reflected Nineteen Adze. Now she’d be a rough stone: inescapable, blunt, barbaric. Expected, except for those people who had expected her to be Yskandr, and wouldn’t she find out who they were, now?
In plain language, the sort that she’d discarded after her first trip through the aptitude exams in Teixcalaanli language, she wrote to the last man who had ever seen Yskandr alive. The Minister of Science, Ten Pearl. She asked for a meeting. She expressed a desire for normalization of relations—took out “normalization” and put in “I hope our offices will be on good terms in the future,” since wishes didn’t require any more specialized grammar than the future tense, and “to normalize” was a resumptive verb and required the speaker to have more than a passing acquaintance with tense sequencing and the subjunctive.
Teixcalaanli was a terrible language, sometimes, even if it did sound beautiful in fifteen-syllable verses. But there was nothing in that message to suggest that she was interested in investigating the death of her predecessor—nothing to suggest that she was even a marginally competent political operator.
So deeply in over her head, the new Lsel Ambassador. Did you hear? She had to ask Her Excellency Nineteen Adze to keep her from getting arrested.
Mahit snickered to herself. The sound was loud in the room, even over the muted roar of the feed from the demonstration. She schooled her face to imperial impassivity, as if she’d been caught in a compromising position.
The other messages were easier to compose. One to Twelve Azalea, asking him to check on Three Seagrass—surely he’d be interested in his friend Reed being hospitalized, and might even be inclined to let her know if her liaison was going to recover from that neurological insult. One to herself, copying both of the previous two messages so that she’d have a record delivered into the marginal physical safety of Lsel diplomatic territory, not just the limited safety of her electronic access—and one final message, to the Ministry of Information, addressee unspecified, requesting an account of who had approved her entrance permit.
Let Nineteen Adze watch what she did.
After Mahit had impressed her letters onto the infofiche sticks she’d been provided, and checked that each one would spill out her message when cracked open, she sealed them with hot wax. The wax came out of a sealing kit on the endtable by the office door, and had to be melted with a handheld ethanol lighter. Mahit burned her thumb, pouring it. So perfectly imperial, to have messages made of light and encrypted with poetry, and require a physical object for propriety’s sake.
Such a waste of resources. Time and energy and material.