“Good morning,” Mahit said, to let them know she was there.
Five Agate looked up, her face flat and unsurprised. “Ambassador,” she said, and turned to the boy. “Map, say hello to the Ambassador from Lsel.”
The child gazed at Mahit critically, and pressed his baby hands together above his heart. “Hello,” he said. “Why are you in the library before breakfast?”
Mahit came forward out of the archway, feeling ungainly and tall. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I like your solar system. It’s very beautiful.”
The child stared at her, unmoved. Teixcalaanli expressionlessness on a person that age was more than a little unsettling.
“Oh, sit down,” said Five Agate. “You’re looming.”
Mahit sat. The boy stuck his hand into the center of the holograph and grasped the sun in his palm, pulling the whole holograph out of Five Agate’s lap. “It’s mine,” he said.
“Map, go work on the orbital maths, won’t you?” Five Agate said. “Just for a moment. You can take the model.”
Mahit thought for a moment he would resist—she’d hated being locked out of adult conversations when she’d been small—but he nodded and retreated to the other side of the couch willingly enough.
“That’s Two Cartograph,” Five Agate said. “I’m sorry. Usually no one is in the library at this hour.”
Two Cartograph, and called Map. Mahit smiled. “It’s not a problem,” she said. “Lsel has lots of children running around—usually in big crèchemate agegroups—I got into all sorts of things when I was that age. I don’t mind. Is he yours?”
“My son,” Five Agate said, and then, with a little bit of pride: “My son by my own body.”
That was unusual on Teixcalaan—unheard of on Lsel. A woman using her own uterus rather than an artificial womb to grow a child was a luxury of resources the Station simply didn’t have—women died doing that, or destroyed their metabolisms or their pelvic floors, and women were people who could be doing work. Mahit had been given her contraceptive implant at the age of nine. When she’d learned that Teixcalaanlitzlim sometimes bore their own children inside themselves, she’d thought of it the way she thought about the water spilling out of one of those flower bowls in the restaurant in Plaza Central Nine. To have that much to easily spend felt both offensive and compelling.
“Was it difficult?” she asked, genuinely curious. “The process.”
Five Agate’s eyes went smugly wide in a Teixcalaanli-style grin: “I spent two years getting into the best physical shape of my life beforehand,” she said. “And it was still difficult, but I was a good home for him, and he came out exactly as healthy as he would have from an artificial womb.”
“He’s beautiful,” Mahit said, with complete honesty. “And clever, if he’s doing orbital mechanics that young.” It was so gratifying to have a conversation with a Teixcalaanlitzlim that wasn’t immediately, entirely politically barbed. Especially here in Nineteen Adze’s offices. “Do you live here, the both of you?”
“Recently, we do,” said Five Agate. “Her Excellency is very good to us.”
“I wouldn’t imagine she would be anything else,” said Mahit. It was even true. “You’re her people, aren’t you?”
“For a long time now. Since far before I had Map.”
Mahit wanted to ask Five Agate several questions, each more intrusive than the last: what do you do for her was the first one, and then how did she make you hers, and possibly on to did she want you to have a child? But what she asked was, “What changed? Recently, before you moved in.”
Some of the openness in Five Agate’s face shuttered, like an anti-glare coating coming down over the viewport of a shuttlecraft. “We’re all working late, nowadays,” she said. “And the commute was very long. I wouldn’t want my son to be alone so much. And Her Excellency thought Map would be—better. Here. Close by.”
Better. Mahit heard that word as safer, and thought about long commutes by subway, and how a bomb might devastate a subway car just as easily as it had a restaurant yesterday.
Her expression must have betrayed something of what she was thinking, because Five Agate changed the subject. “Were you just looking for the library, or…?”
“Looking for anyone who wasn’t asleep.”
“Two Cartograph gets up with the sun, so I do the same.” Five Agate shrugged one shoulder. “Do you need anything, Ambassador? Tea? A particular book?”
Mahit spread her hands open on top of her knees. She didn’t want to treat Five Agate like a servant; and she couldn’t afford to forget that this woman, as barefoot and casually dressed as herself, was Nineteen Adze’s prize assistant. And therefore at least half as dangerous as her master. “No. Unless you’d like to tell me about the Emperor,” she said. “I was watching the newsfeeds all last evening, but newsfeeds assume a kind of familiarity with local political emotion that someone from outside the City can’t have—let alone someone who isn’t Teixcalaanli.”
“What do you want to know that I would know? I’m not even a patrician, Ambassador.” Five Agate had a way of speaking—when she wasn’t talking about her son—which was so dryly self-deprecating that the humor was nearly invisible. Not even a patrician, but instead an ezuazuacat’s servant—a much more important post, even if it had lower rank at court.
“Based on yesterday I’d take you for an analyst, which perhaps benefits from not being a patrician,” Mahit said. It was like fencing; but a friendlier version than with Nineteen Adze. So far.
“All right,” Five Agate said with a trace of a Teixcalaanli-style smile, her eyes widening. “If I’m an analyst. What do you want to know that I would know?”
And that you would tell me, Mahit thought. “Why doesn’t His Brilliance Six Direction have a certain successor? Surely even if he hasn’t got a child of his body he could have a child of his genetics. Or name a designate unrelated heir.”
“He could,” Five Agate said. “In fact, he has.”
“He has?”
“He’s associated three people to the Imperium. Three designate co-imperial heirs, none of whom have any superiority over the others—they’re all co-emperor. Do Stationers not get centralized broadcast? The last time he designated anyone, Thirty Larkspur, there was nothing else but the ceremony on any newsfeed for months.”
“We’re not Teixcalaanli,” Mahit said, thinking all the while of Thirty Larkspur, who Nineteen Adze had said was both an ezuazuacat like herself and benefiting from public fear. Public fear and trying to control import-export trade to benefit his own family’s planetary holdings. “Why would we get centralized broadcasts?”
“Still. Just because you live two months out by ship—”
Mahit said, pointedly, “We manage,” and watched Five Agate curl her lip up, wry, noticing that she’d slipped—the unconscious assumption that everyone in the universe would want exactly the same things as a Teixcalaanli person would want. Mahit took some pity on her, and said, “Though we remain ignorant of why Thirty Larkspur was worthy of being associated.”
“His Excellency Thirty Larkspur is the most recent member of the Emperor’s ezuazuacatlim. He has risen quite quickly in court, based on his wisdom—and,” Five Agate said, tilting one of her hands ambivalently, “perhaps also for his strong family connections to the patricians from the planets on the Western Arc of the Empire.”