She could wish it didn’t delight her.
CHAPTER SIX
Remains of an accident on Chrysanthemum Highway are still being cleared as of early morning; commuters should be aware of heavy traffic … delays on Central Line expected to continue; Central Nine stop remains closed for Sunlit investigation into bombing; reroute through North Green Line for Central City stops beyond Central Nine; leave extra travel time for checkpoints when entering the palace or entertainment venues until further notice … the Circumpolar Maglev train will add an extra service every third day to accommodate winter tourisms, beginning D260, tickets now purchasable at municipal train stations throughout the City …
… five Teixcalaanli warships transiting through our sector without presenting evidence of permits; while I expect their negligence is not only theirs but also the failure of our then-Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn, and that proper permits will soon again be issued, I submit this report to the Council on behalf of Heritage as a point of information: the security of our sector is limited to our own ships and there is nothing we can do to these Teixcalaanli vessels but issue them fines, which they seem to have no difficulty in paying cheerfully …
THE problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.
The sun slipping up over the horizon was bright and chilly through the unshaded windowpanes, inescapable; it drove Mahit out of what scraps of sleep she’d managed. It was barely dawn, and yet there were three new infofiche sticks resting in the bowl outside the office door, sealed shut. Did Nineteen Adze have the mail delivered on the hour, every hour, even in the night? Mahit wrapped the enormous feather-filled quilt—presented to her at sundown the night before by the hyper-efficient hands of Seven Scale—around her shoulders. She was awake. Awake, and still alone inside her mind. It looked to be a permanent condition.
Sitting up hurt. Her hip had stiffened more in the night, and when she peeled down her borrowed pajama trousers she could see the bruise there—black-purple, paling to a sick green at the edges—was as large as her spread hand. She wondered if there were painkillers to be had in her new, elaborate prison, as well as the delivered quilt and last night’s tray of serviceable but unremarkable vegetable slices and more of that fibrous paste Three Seagrass had served her for breakfast. Otherwise Nineteen Adze had left her alone. As if Her Excellency was waiting for her new pet to settle, so she wouldn’t snap at outstretched hands.
Still encased in the quilt, and wincing as she stood up and got the hip moving, Mahit went to fish out the infofiche sticks and open them.
The first was as anonymous as the one she’d sent: grey and sealed with undyed wax. She snapped it open, shook it to make it disgorge its light-spun glyphs.
Your friend composes warily on the subject of enclosures
Boundaries, demarcations, edges of knives
But thinks also of you, subject to lonesomeness
And sends twelve flowers as a promise if you need them.
It was poetry. It wasn’t very good poetry, but it seemed to be an allusion meaning oh fuck did the edgeshine-of-a-knife ezuazuacat throw you in prison and can I help?
It was unsigned.
Not that it needed to be signed. Mahit had only sent three messages, and neither the Minister for Science nor the multitude of minor functionaries in the Information Ministry would reply in blatant code. This was Twelve Azalea, and he was probably simultaneously sincere in his desire to effect a rescue if she needed one, and having far too much fun. Coded messages! Anonymous communiqués across departmental lines! And Mahit thought that she had an untoward degree of affection for the genre conventions of political intrigue in Teixcalaanli literature.
Was it untoward if one lived it, in one’s own culture? Yes, she decided. It was untoward when one reenacted it for the sake of the convention. But a Teixcalaanlitzlim wouldn’t think that.
No one had blown up Twelve Azalea, or even tried to do so. His friend might be hospitalized, and his new dangerous political acquaintance might be writing to him from rarefied captivity, but he was still perfectly within his rights to act like he’d walked out of Red Flowerbuds for Thirty Ribbon or some other palace romance.
She wrote a couplet back, thinking at least she wouldn’t be any worse at poetry than he was, and probably better: What encloses me I chose / I seek only what I asked of you: information. And when she sealed the infofiche, she didn’t bother to sign her name either. Someone should have a good time; it might as well be Twelve Azalea, for as long as he could manage it.
The second infofiche stick was not anonymous in any fashion. It was transparent glass aside from its electronic innards, and sealed with deep green wax stamped with a white glyph of a sun-wheeclass="underline" Science Ministry. When she opened it, it unfolded into an elegant and condescending little letter: Ten Pearl congratulated her on her appointment as Ambassador, expressed formulaic regrets for Yskandr’s unfortunate demise—so formulaic that Mahit instantly knew he’d copied those regrets from one of the practical rhetoric manuals, perhaps the very one she’d learned to write from herself. She had a very Teixcalaanli moment of being insulted at his lack of effort in allusion, and then a very personal moment of satisfaction at having successfully played the dull barbarian, trying so hard to emulate a citizen’s education and only achieving an awkward and pitiable imitation.
At the close of the letter Ten Pearl suggested that of course he would be pleased to greet the Lsel Ambassador socially, perhaps at the upcoming imperial banquet in a day’s time.
A public meeting, then. Safer in some ways; if Ten Pearl thought he was under any suspicion of having killed Yskandr outright, then meeting Yskandr’s successor in public would allay any scurrilous publicity about trying to have that successor similarly eliminated. There couldn’t be any secret murders of foreign dignitaries when the entire court was watching! Safer, for Ten Pearl’s reputation (and Mahit’s actual safety, if he had been responsible for Yskandr’s death), but also politic: it would demonstrate to everyone that there were no hard feelings between Lsel and the Science Ministry.
Well. It wasn’t like Mahit hadn’t already said she’d go to the banquet. What was one more political hazard to negotiate, at this rate? And if she could corner Ten Pearl for a second, more direct meeting after the public bows and smiles he clearly wanted from her, so much the better. She put his message aside and turned to the last of the mail. (The last of the mail that she could get at—the sticks must be piling up inside her apartment in terrible little drifts of undone work.)
The final infofiche stick was another anonymous bit of grey plastic—but this one was flagged with a red tag marked with a black starfield. Off-world communication, routed somehow to her through her own office in Palace-East and Nineteen Adze’s in Palace-North. Not for the first time Mahit wondered if she was being watched by the City, and thought again of the shimmering rise of those confining walls in Plaza Central Nine. Then she cracked the infofiche open, and stopped thinking of the City at once and entirely.