Mahit sat down herself, on the same couch she’d been interrogated on the evening previously, and made sitting an invitation for Three Seagrass to join her. It was gratifying when she did: sympathetic mirroring, and also not having to look at her, standing so very still and looking half shattered. She wondered if there were aftereffects of being attacked by the City itself. Physical, or psychological. Both, she’d guess, from how Three Seagrass carried herself.
“Tell me how it’s strange?”
Three Seagrass tilted one hand back and forth in the air. “Not enough pedestrians. It’s like a collective case of nerves. And of course Central Nine is blocked off, and the subway isn’t running—”
Running, Mahit heard, an echo from a long distance off. A sensation like electric sparks ran from her shoulders through her elbows to hover in her outmost fingers, buzzing.
“—keeps your new integrated subway running at all hours without operators,” Yskandr Aghavn is saying. He leans his elbows on the inlaid wood table that Ten Pearl—new-made Science Minister Ten Pearl, who wears a mother-of-pearl ring on each of his fingers like a living pun on his name—has installed in his office. “There’s surely some methodology the City used when the lines were separate, and some new methodology of yours now, and I admit to a profound curiosity.”
Ten Pearl has refined Teixcalaanli expressionlessness to a high art: he conveys utter disdain with the tiniest of sighs, but Yskandr knows this kind of person—what he really wants is to show off his project. And his project was connecting every part of the transit of the entire planetary City, subway and rail both, and rendering them seamlessly autonomous. It had won him his ministry—he headed Science now.
“Ambassador,” says Ten Pearl, “I cannot imagine that you need a subway on Lsel Station.”
“We do not,” Yskandr agrees, willingly enough, “but an automated system that can be trusted to move hundreds of thousands of people, without error and without conflict—that, you must imagine, is of enormous interest to anyone who lives in a less-perfect automated system, as those of us who are planetless do. Have you embedded minds within the City’s extant AI? A corps of volunteers, like the Sunlit, all together watching over this system?”
Ten Pearl warms to the subject: Yskandr watches him thaw by inches. Yskandr has said something to him which is almost right, but just wrong enough that his natural desire to inform and educate a barbarian is going to override his much more prudent wish to keep his new technology safely under wraps. His eyes widen a fraction. Yskandr waits for him: this is like drawing out a hungry animal from its lair.
“Not like the Sunlit,” says Ten Pearl at last, “the City is not a collective mind.”
That is already interesting, as it implies that the Sunlit are such a collective: and yet Yskandr had recently met a young Teixcalaanlitzlim who was very excited about joining the imperial police, and was very much an individual person. It implies a process, a making of the Sunlit, and Yskandr wonders whether it is anything like an imago process, and how an empire so completely opposed to neurological enhancement thought about it. None of this is worth asking; all of it would expose his own interests too obviously. What Yskandr asks is, “If not a collective, is there a mind?”
“If you consider an artificial, algorithm-driven intelligence a mind, Ambassador—then yes, the City now has a mind, and that mind watches the subway for conflicts.”
“How remarkable,” Yskandr says, with only the faintest edge of mockery. “An infallible algorithm.”
Ten Pearl says, “It hasn’t failed me,” implying that it is good enough to have made him Science Minister, and Yskandr thinks: It hasn’t failed you yet.
More electric prickles swam in Mahit’s fingers. Her nose filled with the remembered scent of ozone, the blue flash of light from the City’s algorithm going very, very wrong and catching Three Seagrass unawares and—
She was back, alone again in her body instead of remembering some conversation Yskandr had had more than a decade ago.
Three Seagrass was still talking. Mahit thought she’d missed perhaps a half second, nothing more—a half second with an entire flash of memory in it, minutes of it. “—and the acclamation in Central Seven wasn’t the only mass gathering, there was an old-fashioned sacrifice out in Ring Two, it showed up in the Information Ministry Bulletin this morning—”
“You checked that from the hospital?”
“Decryption’s good for making sure I still have all my higher brain functions,” Three Seagrass said, and Mahit began to get a sense of what had scared her worst about the scene in Plaza Central Nine. She could sympathize. The echoes of the imago-flash were still buzzing in her smallest two fingers. Ulnar nerve damage, or the facsimile of it.
“And I was bored until Petal came by with your unsigned communiqués,” finished Three Seagrass.
“I think he’s having fun,” Mahit confessed.
“I know he is,” Three Seagrass said, and sighed. “He brought me chrysanthemums.”
Mahit was trying to remember what chrysanthemums meant in Teixcalaanli symbolism, and coming up mostly blank—eternal life? Because they were star-shaped?—when Nineteen Adze, emerging from the doorway like a sudden apparition, said, “How sweet of your friend, asekreta. I’m pleased to see you’ve survived yesterday’s unfortunate accident.”
Three Seagrass made to get to her feet and Mahit put her hand on her forearm—personal space norms or not—and held her still. “If I’m Your Excellency’s guest,” she said to the both of them, “then Three Seagrass is mine, and she’s welcome where I am.”
Nineteen Adze laughed, a short, bright sound. To Mahit she said, “Of course, Ambassador, as if I would be so rude to the guest of my guest,” and then, sitting across from them, she looked Three Seagrass plainly in the face and told her, “Three days and you’ve got her loyalty. I’ll remember you.”
To Three Seagrass’s credit, she didn’t flinch, and she didn’t take her arm away from Mahit’s hand. “I’ll be honored by your recollection,” she said.
Mahit thought she ought to say something, if only as an attempt to reclaim some control over the conversation, if such a thing was even possible with Nineteen Adze and Three Seagrass both in the room. “What makes a sacrifice old-fashioned?”
She sounded like an ignorant barbarian, but she hardly had a choice about that. Not here. Not now.
“Someone died,” Three Seagrass said.
“Someone chose to die,” Nineteen Adze corrected her. “Some citizen made opening cuts from wrist to shoulder and knee to thigh and bled out in a sun temple, calling on the ever-burning stars to take them up in exchange for something they wanted.”
Mahit’s mouth was dry. She thought of the vivid spill of Fifteen Engine’s arterial blood over his shirtfront and her face. A sacrifice for no particular reason. A Teixcalaanlitzlim would describe it that way. Not a death he chose. A waste of a sacrifice. “What does a citizen get, in exchange for their life?” she asked.
Three Seagrass, whose arm was still under Mahit’s fingers, said, “Remembered,” sharp and sure.
Nineteen Adze had that same expression as she’d had when Mahit had wished aloud for a joyous reunion with her predecessor back when they’d all stood in the morgue around what was left of Yskandr. That twist of emotion that Mahit couldn’t parse. “The asekreta is right. Such a citizen is remembered as long as sacrifices are named in sun temples. You should attend a service, Mahit, and hear the litany of names. It’d be a cultural experience.” She settled back onto the couch. “All aside from its memorial applications, dying in a temple is not in fashion. It is an extreme response to perceived threat.”