A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EIGHT Antidote lost twenty minutes trying to find a Shard berthed somewhere in Nasturtium Terminal. There was nothing that looked like the sliver of tumbling sharp-edged glass that he thought a Shard should be, based on all of the specs he’d seen in the Ministry of War, the shape of glitter-point single-pilot fighters scattered over the black of a cartograph table. Twenty minutes before he remembered that almost all Shards would be inside a larger Fleet ship, hanging in berths.

He didn’t need a Shard, exactly. He needed a Shard pilot, who would let him into a Shard.

That was worse, because how was he going to find a pilot—he couldn’t go into a bar, he couldn’t call up the Ministry and ask—and he was losing time every moment. Every minute he stood lost in the chaos of Nasturtium Terminal, Nineteen Adze’s order to commit the Fleet to the total destruction of a whole planet got closer and closer to reaching the yaotlek. His own order was so far behind.

Eventually he found himself lurking behind the Information mail kiosk again, out of eyeshot of the asekretim, trying to imagine how he could get onto a Fleet ship. Maybe he could enlist? He wasn’t old enough, but he could pretend to be … until someone looked up his genetic print and found out that he was the imperial heir and returned him to Palace-Earth like a lost kitten. That wouldn’t work. He could maybe—climb into a crate being loaded onto a Fleet ship? Stow away?

All of his ideas were out of the stupidest episodes of holodramas, the ones he always turned off.

And then, as if he’d made them up, two Fleet soldiers walked right around the Information kiosk and straight toward him. They were both tall and had long dark hair in military-style tight queues, and the one on the left had, right below the patch on her sleeve with the emblem of the Second Legion—that binary star-system in mutual orbit was one of the easiest to recognize—a metallic triangle, all of its lines curved as if it was in motion. She was a Shard pilot. Right here. It seemed impossible. He needed one, and one appeared—except. Except it was the Shards which took the mail on fastest-courier override through the jumpgate mail-system, when the destination was the Fleet.

He had made this soldier up, in a way.

He’d made her come to the kiosk to take his message to the Fleet, and she’d just picked it up.

Eight Antidote swallowed. Straightened up to his full height, and wished he could be dressed like the imperial heir Eight Antidote, and not the errand runner Eight Antidote. But he didn’t have anything but himself. He intercepted the soldiers on an angle, and stopped directly in front of them, making himself a nuisance that would either be tripped over or paused for.

“Honorable pilots,” he said, not quite knowing whether honorable was the right respectful honorific, but he was about to demand a favor from them so he figured it would do. “I am the imperial associate His Excellency Eight Antidote, and I would be very grateful if you would allow me access to your ship for a short moment.”

The two soldiers glanced at each other, and back at him. One of them—not the pilot, her friend—said, “You’re who, kid?”

Eight Antidote gritted his teeth. “I am Eight Antidote. Heir to the sun-spear throne and the rule of all Teixcalaan. If you’d like, I’m sure your cloudhook will show you holos of me, for a visual comparison. I need access to your ship … Well. Her ship.” He pointed with his chin at the Shard pilot. “I need a Shard.”

“This is definitely the weirdest thing that’s happened to me since we got drunk on Kumquat at that really horrible bar on Xelka Station,” said the soldier. Eight Antidote really didn’t want to know what Kumquat was, aside from a fruit. Or whether it could be an alcoholic fruit.

“What do you need a Shard for?” asked the Shard pilot, which was a lot better than anecdotes about getting drunk. Eight Antidote hoped that she’d told her friend about the Shard trick, because otherwise her friend was going to find out right now, in the middle of Inmost Province Spaceport.

“I know,” he said, “that Shard pilots can feel each other when you’re inside your ships. Feel, and talk maybe. Over impossible distances. Over jumpgates.”

The pilot’s face had gone statue-still, like a mask. “How did you come by this information?” she said.

Eight Antidote told the truth. It seemed the most effective method. “From the Minister of War Three Azimuth, in private conference.” Not in private conference with him, but it was close enough.

“… If you are really that Eight Antidote,” the Shard pilot said, slowly, consideringly—and her friend interrupted her.

“Four Crocus, I am sure the kid who’s the imperial heir is, like, one indiction old. If that. This guy’s too old.”

“Look it up,” Eight Antidote said, pleading. If they wouldn’t believe him—if he was stopped now, he was never going to get a chance like this again, and half-done interstellar mail fraud was far worse than successful interstellar mail fraud. “Please. I need this. I’ll order you as the heir to the Teixcalaanli Empire if I have to, honorable pilots, but I don’t want to have to. Please.”

The pilot Four Crocus did something with her cloudhook, her eyes moving very fast, shuddering in their sockets. Rapid-search.

“… He looks right,” she said. “And. And you don’t know what it’s been like, Thirteen Muon, in the Shard-sight these past few days. If he wants to see it—if the Minister sent him to see it—I have to get this message out, but I’ll show him a Shard.”

“It’s on your head,” said Thirteen Muon. “But you know I don’t stop you, I never stop you, we’d never have any fun if I did.”

“This way, Your Excellency,” said Four Crocus, and Eight Antidote followed her and her fellow soldier back into the maze of Nasturtium Terminal’s ships.

The Shard was smaller than he’d imagined it would be. It wasn’t inside a Fleet ship after all—Four Crocus was on mail-courier duty, some complex sort of punishment or possibly reward that Eight Antidote couldn’t understand from her conversations with Thirteen Muon while they walked, and thus she and her ship were right in the spaceport, not hanging in a Shard-berth inside her usual ship. That ship was the Exultation-class medium cruiser Mad With Horizons of the Second Legion, and it was waiting for her three jumpgate-trips away from the Jewel of the World, and from what it sounded like, she couldn’t wait to get back and was worried about going back at the same time.

But for now her Shard nestled in Nasturtium Terminal like a splinter of glass stuck in a palm, ready to be caught up in one of the spaceport’s skynets and launched orbitward. It was big enough for one grown person to fit in, if they didn’t move too much. Eight Antidote touched its side. The metal was cool and smooth. He knew that the little ship could orient itself in any direction, on any axis, and the pilot would hang in the center, in her capsule, gravityless and free.

“Wait with him,” said Four Crocus to Thirteen Muon. “Ten minutes, no more. I need to ask a favor from whoever else is on mail duty—this message is really urgent, and I don’t know how long His Excellency is going to want to experience Shard-sight—so the next ship in line can take it through the jumpgate.”

Eight Antidote was glad that Four Crocus took her job so seriously. He wished he could do something like—give her a commendation. Maybe he could, when he was Emperor, if she remembered him. That message—his order—needed to leave now. Even if it meant he had to spend an excruciating ten minutes under the supervision of Thirteen Muon, who clearly hadn’t encountered a child since they’d been one themselves, and thought all children were interested mostly in star handball players (Eight Antidote didn’t care) or star musicians that sold out enormous concert venues and made kids scream a lot (Eight Antidote really didn’t care).

Eventually, out of agonized frustration at waiting, sure that at any moment someone would either set off an incendiary device or come to collect him and throw him back into his rooms in the palace like they were a jail, he asked what Thirteen Muon did in the Second Legion. This seemed to be a relief to both of them: Thirteen Muon was an engineering specialist who spent most of their time working on better ways to repair starship hulls, and Eight Antidote knew absolutely nothing about handheld microthrusters for close navigation in zero gravity, which meant he could actually concentrate without vibrating out of his skin with impatience, because he had to pay attention if he wanted to understand anything Thirteen Muon was saying.

Even so, when Four Crocus finally came back, he cut Thirteen Muon off directly. “I need to go inside,” he said to her. “I need to be inside Shard-sight, Pilot Four Crocus.” And then, feeling himself blush with frustration at needing to ask for everything, “I need you to show me how.”

Four Crocus glanced at Thirteen Muon, and then back to him. “Are you sure?” she asked. “It’s a lot easier than you think. It’s a lot worse than you think.”

“He’s a kid, Four Crocus, even if he actually is who he says he is—you came down to the Jewel of the World on leave and called me up to go get smashed because of what you said happened to you the last time you were in Shard-sight, and you’re going to put a kid through that?” asked Thirteen Muon, and Eight Antidote really, really didn’t have time for some kind of adult argument about whether this would be good for him or not, or whatever else their argument was about. He didn’t understand it, and he didn’t want to.

“Show me,” he repeated. “Now. It’s an order, Pilot.”

“You’ll need my cloudhook, Your Excellency,” Four Crocus said. “And you’ll need to be inside the Shard—Shard-sight works off of any cloudhook with the programming, but the Shard trick—I can’t believe they’re calling it that, it sounds like we’re doing it on purpose—the Shard trick takes too much processing power for a little thing like a cloudhook. Or a mind. You need the ship.” Her hand was on the hull of her Shard, stroking it like she would stroke a pet that needed to be quieted. “She’s a good ship,” she went on. “My Shard.”

Very seriously, Eight Antidote said, “I believe you,” because Four Crocus seemed to need to hear it.

She took a deep breath, like an orator about to begin a poem at court. “All right. Let’s—get this over with. Fuck, but I really hope you’re who you seem to be, because otherwise this is absolutely going to get me kicked out of the Shard corps—”

Inside, there was hardly space for one person, let alone two. Four Crocus showed him where to sit. Where to put his hands to call up the Shard’s engine and onboard targeting AI without actually triggering a takeoff sequence. And then she settled her cloudhook over his left eye. It was too big, of course—he had to tilt his head to keep it exactly settled—but it worked just like his own. The interface was the same, except overlaid with a hundred commands and programs he’d never seen. Fleet hardware with Fleet programming. It was terrifying. All of this was. But he’d left being scared somewhere outside the Shard, somewhere in the boredom of waiting for Four Crocus to come back. All he had left was being cold. He thought he might be shivering.

“It’s like a kaleidoscope,” Four Crocus murmured. “You might throw up at first. People do. I did. But you’ll see. You’ll see what’s happening to us. Ready?”

He nodded. He realized, for the first time in his life, that he had no idea what was about to happen to him.

“Wake up the ship, then,” Four Crocus said, “and when the programming comes up, say yes to everything.”

She got out of her Shard, and the shipglass hood of the pilot’s chamber clicked shut behind her. Eight Antidote was alone. His hands on the controls—

He executed the sequence. Felt the ship come awake under him, a thrum, an impatience. Half his vision went black with starfields—the cloudhook coming online, some version of Shard-sight—there was a flicker of a prompt in the corner of that field, a yes? And he said yes, one blink—

And fell into the void, tumbling, thrown from himself as far as he had ever been. Into the void, and into how it was screaming.

“What good would that do?” asked Nine Hibiscus. “Even if you lived through it, which fuck knows if you would—”

“It’s a system,” said the static-distorted voice of Twenty Cicada. “It’s a distributed system, and it’s out of balance because they don’t understand how we can be people and not be part of it. It’d do—a lot of good, Mallow. To have a—foreign graft.”

Mahit watched the yaotlek’s face as she grappled with the basic Teixcalaanli horror of artificial augmentation of the mind. It was the one thing she never had quite understood—the depth of their cultural taboo, the central reason behind why Yskandr-the-man had died: he’d offered Emperor Six Direction the imago-technology, and neither the Ministry of Science nor Nineteen Adze could countenance what they seemed to understand as a fundamental corruption of the self.

Yskandr murmured in the back of her mind. else.>

Isn’t that what they say about us? she asked him. That we aren’t human, really, us barbarians with our mind-sharing technology—

Yskandr said, and he was all the old Yskandr, the one who had seduced an Emperor with the promise of continuity of memory.

Nine Hibiscus said, “Swarm. Your religion doesn’t require you to balance the entire starfucked universe all by yourself.”

“Who else would try?” said Twenty Cicada, and Mahit shivered, a violent little shudder of the muscles in her back.

“Do you think he’s right?” Three Seagrass said to her, almost too low to hear. “They’re a collective? Is it like—you?”

“Stationers are chains,” Mahit said, “lines, not—he’s describing a fractal web of minds, that’s nothing like—yes, I think he could be right, it would make sense with how they always seem to know where their other ships are, with no lag over time. He could be.”

Three Seagrass reached for Mahit’s hand, caught it in hers. Mahit hadn’t expected it—hadn’t expected Three Seagrass to touch her at all, in public. But she didn’t pull away. No one was paying attention to them right now. Not when they could be listening to the yaotlek and her adjutant argue about whether he should functionally join the enemy forces, biochemically, mentally, entirely, in hopes of being able to stop a war. And Three Seagrass’s fingers were warm and tight on hers, like an anchor in a spinning world.

“If he does it,” Three Seagrass said, “and he’s right, and he lives—then he’ll have achieved a kind of first-contact negotiation no Teixcalaanlitzlim has ever managed.”

“… Are you jealous?” Mahit found herself asking.

“I’m not brave enough to be jealous,” said Three Seagrass, and looked away.

He died twice before he learned to talk. The worst experiences were the loudest, the strongest: they drew Shard-pilot minds like a black hole draws mass. A Shard dissolving from outside in, all of its shipglass coated with black squirming oil, liquid, thick, the ship-AI alarms all screaming at once and then silenced, and then the pilot himself screaming and screaming and silenced—and even before Eight Antidote could think, could stop tumbling end over end, made of a thousand minds and two thousand eyes, gyroscopic, ever-shifting

(how did anyone survive this, how did anyone learn to be this kind of pilot, to feel everyone near them—)

before he could find himself in the midst of the cacophony, he was spinning in a rictus of fear, engines cut, some other Shard-pilot’s blanked-out panic in his throat as her Shard was struck by the edge of a three-ringed, slick-grey spinning wheel of a ship and she saw the flat pockmarked side of the asteroid coming up fast and faster and faster and I love you I’ve always loved you remember me and nothing. An afterimage of fire.

Two deaths, and almost a third—the spiral-caught tug of horror, a near miss of energy cannon, friendly fire in all its blue death right in front of his face—but that one wasn’t a death, and Eight Antidote somehow found enough of himself to scream in words.

To weep and scream and say, Stop, stop, whoever is carrying a courier message from Three Azimuth, stop, please, wait.

And from a thousand minds and two thousand eyes: What? Who are…? Where? Some attention, a scattering. Not all of them were falling apart. Not all of them were dying: some of them were just—flying, or fighting, or being together, and the nearer ones to him—in his own sector of space, he thought, snatch of coherency, It’s only the worst things that go all the way through accidentally—heard him, and knew he wasn’t Four Crocus, and wanted to know why.

Please, he said. He didn’t know if he was speaking out loud or if he was thinking. I’m Eight Antidote—the old Emperor’s ninety-percent clone—I need to stop that message. It’s wrong. It’s false.

And he tried, as hard as he could, not to think, But you’re dying, and it’s horrible, and what if Three Azimuth and Nineteen Adze were right, and that genocide order is the only way to stop it?

Because if he thought that, they’d never believe him.

Nine Hibiscus was pacing the bridge, back and forth, as if some internal mechanism inside the massive curves of her could not be still and talk to her adjutant at the same time. Mahit couldn’t quite believe the degree to which the conversation they were having was public, where she and Three Seagrass and half the officers on the bridge could all hear how it flitted back and forth through the long shape of friendship, trust, arguments they’d clearly had a hundred times before, but were no longer theoretical, no longer abstract. But how could it be private, when Twenty Cicada was down in a killing-desert and Nine Hibiscus was where she belonged, on the bridge of the ship he had kept running for her? Mahit imagined him with the tendrils of white fungus in their plastic cube, balanced on his palm. The sun would be finally beginning to set on Peloa-2 by now. She wondered if the aliens had claws to his throat or if they’d gone back to their own ship to wait, or retreat, or be smug (if they were capable of smugness) at having convinced a Teixcalaanlitzlim to ingest a poison deliberately.

She imagined how he would open the box, and put the fungus on his tongue, and be prepared to die, or to solve the problem, exactly as he had in the medbay of Weight for the Wheel. Imagined that, and found that Yskandr was thinking of Six Direction—or she was thinking of Six Direction—fever-flushed, worn to bones and eyes by age and illness. Prepared to die, or solve the problem, even if it meant he was not himself any longer by making use of a Lsel imago-machine.

Is it good to know that he wasn’t the only Teixcalaanlitzlim who would make an attempt like this? she asked, forming the question deliberately in the empty mirrored room of their mind.

Yskandr told her, which was a sideways answer. The rush of grief and longing and pride was clearer—Yes, he was saying, but he never would have been in a situation like this one, so who knows.