Location from deaths-end by
Sophon's Japanese-style tea pavilion built high in a giant tree-city — the tasteful set on which she stages humanity's last polite conversations with Trisolaris.
Sophon designed and built the tea house herself in the early Deterrence Era as a public stage. The ritual she performs is exact and beautiful and has the texture of a held breath. Visitors who come for diplomacy come for tea and leave having committed nothing. The seasonal flowers, the slight shift of the kettle, the angle of the bowl handed across the table — all of it is theater, performed by an alien quantum supercomputer with a knife in her sash. After Cheng Xin's failure she stops bothering with the tea house; it is empty and intact and absurd.
A perfect single-room tea house in the late Heian style, raised on stilts among the upper canopy of one of the kilometer-tall tree-cities of the Deterrence Era. Sliding paper walls, tatami mats, a low lacquered table, an iron kettle on a brazier. Floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides open onto cloud and sky. Shoes are removed at the door. A single ikebana arrangement is changed daily.