A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  “If the mail is addressed to me, I ought to read it myself,” said Mahit.

  “Legally, I’m an absolute equivalent,” Three Seagrass said, pleasantly enough.

  Pleasantness wasn’t sufficient. Just because Mahit wanted an ally—wanted Three Seagrass to be helpful and useful and not an immediate threat, considering the woman had to live in the next room and open doors for however long she’d been assigned to mind Mahit, considering that Mahit was beginning to realize how trapped she was going to be in the City, considering that she was not real to that City’s panopticon eyes—just because Mahit wanted wasn’t enough to make Three Seagrass an actual extension of Mahit’s will, no matter what she said she was.

  “Perhaps by Teixcalaanli law,” Mahit said. “By Stationer law, you are nothing of the kind.”

  “Ambassador, I hope you aren’t assuming I’m not trustworthy enough to guide you through the court.”

  Mahit shrugged, spreading her hands wide. “What happened to my predecessor’s cultural liaison?” she asked.

  If Three Seagrass was disturbed by the question, the disturbance didn’t reach her face. Impassive, she said, “He was reassigned after his two years of service were up. I believe he is no longer in the palace complex at all.”

  “What was his name?” Mahit asked. If Yskandr was with her she would have known, those two years of service would have been his first two years in the City, well within the five years that the imago remembered.

  “Fifteen Engine, I think,” said Three Seagrass, easily enough—and Mahit had to clutch at the edge of Yskandr’s desk, hang on to it, flooded with a complex of emotion out of nowhere: fondness and frustration, the echo of a face wearing a cloudhook set in a bronze frame that filled up his entire left eye socket from cheekbone to browbone. Fifteen Engine, as Yskandr the imago remembered him. Memory-flash, memory-swarm, and Mahit reached for the imago, thought Yskandr? And got nothing.

  Three Seagrass was staring at her. She wondered what she looked like. Pale, probably, and distracted.

  “I would like to speak to him. Fifteen Engine.”

  “I assure you,” said Three Seagrass, “I have extensive experience and really unusually excellent scores on all the necessary aptitudes for working with noncitizens. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

  “Asekreta—”

  “Please call me Three Seagrass, Ambassador. I’m your liaison.”

  “Three Seagrass,” said Mahit, trying very hard not to raise her voice, “I would like to ask your predecessor about how my predecessor conducted his business here, and perhaps also about the circumstances of his extremely untimely, and based on the quantity of this mail, inconvenient death.”

  “Ah,” said Three Seagrass.

  “Yes.”

  “His death was quite, as you say, inconvenient, but entirely accidental.”

  “I’m sure, but he was my predecessor,” Mahit said, knowing that if Three Seagrass was as Teixcalaanli as she seemed, a request to know the intimate details of the person who had held one’s own position in society would be culturally compelling, like asking to know about a prospective imago would be on Lsel Station. “And I would like to speak to someone who knew him as well as we are going to get to know one another.” She tried to remember the muscle memory of the precise degree to which Yskandr had widened her eyes in a Teixcalaanli-style smile, and imitated it by feel.

  “Ambassador, I have every sympathy with your current—predicament,” said Three Seagrass, “and I’ll have a message sent to Fifteen Engine, wherever he might be now, along with the rest of the answered mail.”

  “… which I can’t answer myself, because it is encrypted.”

  “Yes! But I can decrypt nearly any of the standard forms, and most of the nonstandard ones.”

  “You still haven’t explained why my mail is encrypted in a fashion I can’t decrypt.”

  “Well,” said Three Seagrass, “I don’t at all mean to be disparaging. I’m sure that on your station you are an extremely educated person. But in the City, encryption is usually based in poetic cipher, and we certainly don’t expect noncitizens to have to learn that. And an ambassador’s mail is encrypted for the sake of showing off that an ambassador is an intelligent person, well-acquainted with courts and court poetry—it’s customary. It’s not a real cipher, it’s a game.”

  “We do have poetry out on Lsel, you know.”

  “I know,” said Three Seagrass, with such sympathy that Mahit wanted to shake her, “but here, look at this one.” She held up a scarlet lacquered infofiche stick, its two parts held closed with a round gold wax seal embossed with the stylized image of the City—the Teixcalaanli imperial symbol. “It’s definitely for you, it’s dated today.” She cracked the seal and the infofiche spilled into the air between them, a stream of holographic word-shapes in Teixcalaanli script that Mahit felt like she ought to be able to understand. She’d been reading imperial literature since she was a child.

  Three Seagrass touched her cloudhook and said, “I bet you could decrypt this kind by hand, actually—do you know political verse?”

  “Fifteen-syllable iambic couplets with a caesura between syllable eight and syllable nine,” said Mahit, realizing only as she spoke that she sounded more like a candidate in an oral exam than a knowledgeable subject of Teixcalaan, but having no idea how to stop sounding so. “It’s easy.”

  “Yes! So, the cipher for most communication at court is a straight transposition, with the opening four couplets of whoever’s written the best encomiastic poem—that’s praise poetry, which I’m sure you do know if you can count syllables and caesuras—from last season. It’s been Two Calendar’s ‘Reclamation Song’ for months now. I can get you a copy, if you really want to decrypt your own mail.”

  “I would certainly like to hear what the City thinks is the best encomiastic poetry going,” Mahit said.

  Three Seagrass snorted. “You’re great. You could have been born here, with that attitude.”

  Mahit did not feel complimented. “What does it say?” she asked.

  Three Seagrass narrowed her eyes—her pupils tracked to the left and up in tiny jerks, micromuscular instructions to her cloudhook—and peered intently at the infofiche. “Formal invitation to the Emperor’s own salon and oration contest, hosted within a presentational diplomatic banquet, in three days. I’ll assume you want to go?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well, if you want to insult all your predecessor’s contacts and establish that Lsel Station is hostile to imperial interests, not coming to dinner is a wonderful start.”

  Mahit leaned in quite close, close enough that she could feel the warm pulse of Three Seagrass’s breath on her face, and smiled with all her teeth, as barbaric as possible. Mahit watched her try to stay still and not flinch back; spotted the moment when she succeeded, rationalized what was happening.

  “Three Seagrass,” Mahit said then, “how about we assume that I’m not an idiot.”

  “We could do that,” Three Seagrass said. “Do your people invade personal space as a reprimand on a regular basis?”

  “When necessary,” Mahit said. “And in exchange I will assume you’re not involved in an obvious attempt at diplomatic sabotage.”

  “That seems like a fair trade.”

  “So I’m accepting His Imperial Majesty’s gracious invitation. Send the message and I’ll sign it. And then we need to get through the rest of this backlog of infofiche.”

  * * *

  The backlog took the rest of the afternoon and stretched on into the evening. Most of it was the usual sort of communication for a minor but still politically significant ambassadorial office—information requests from the chancellery and from universities concerning the habits, economics, and tourist opportunities available at Lsel, protocol queries. Repatriation requests from Stationers who had been living in Teixcalaanli space and wanted to stop—Mahit signed those—and a smaller batch of entrance queries, which she approved and sent onward to one of the im
perial offices concerned with “barbarian entry visas.” An unexpectedly high number of half-authorized safe-passage-through-Stationer-space visas for Teixcalaanli military transport—all of them stamped with Yskandr’s personal seal, but few of them actually signed by him. The half-authorized copies didn’t mean anything: they weren’t done. It was as if Yskandr had been interrupted in the process of officially allowing half a legion’s worth of Teixcalaanli ships into Lsel territory. Mahit spared a moment to wonder at the sheer number of them, and why they hadn’t all been sealed and signed at the same time, and set them aside for a quieter moment of contemplation. She wasn’t prepared to send Teixcalaanli warships through her Station’s sector without doing some research as to why they wanted to move in such quantity, no matter what Yskandr had been doing when he died.

  None of the requests were for Ascension’s Red Harvest. Someone other than Yskandr must have approved that ship’s journey to pick her up. But then Yskandr had already been dead by the time that request needed to be processed. Mahit felt mildly ill. Someone had sent that ship—she should find out who—

  But Three Seagrass handed her the next infofiche stick, which turned out to be a thoroughly distracting mess concerning import fees on a shipping manifest that would have taken half an hour to sort out had it been answered when it was originally asked, back when Yskandr had been alive. It took nearly three times that long for Mahit to solve, considering one of the parties had left the planet—that was the Stationer—and another had married into citizenship and changed his name during the lag time. Mahit made Three Seagrass hunt down the new-made Teixcalaanlitzlim under his new name and issue him a formal summons to the Judicial Department of Interstellar Trade Licensing.

  “Just make sure he shows up to pay the import fees on the cargo he bought from one of my Station’s citizens, whatever his name is,” Mahit told her.

  The name the man had chosen, it turned out, was Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle, a revelation that produced in both Mahit and Three Seagrass a kind of stunned silence.

  “No one would actually name a child that,” Three Seagrass complained after a moment. “He has no taste. Even if his parent or his crèche was from a low-temperature planet with a lot of tundra in need of all-terrain vehicles.”

  Mahit wrinkled her eyebrows in sudden puzzlement, remembering—vividly—the part of her early language training on Lsel when her entire class had been encouraged to make up Teixcalaanli names to call themselves while they were learning to speak. She’d picked Nine Orchid, because the heroine of her then-favorite Teixcalaanli novel, about the adventures of the crèchemate of the future Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare, had been called Five Orchid. It had felt very Teixcalaanli, picking a name based on one’s favorite book. She’d thought the names the other children had chosen were much less successful, at the time, and had felt very superior. Now, in the center of Teixcalaanli space, the entire episode seemed not only appropriative but absurd. Nevertheless, she asked Three Seagrass, “Just how do you Teixcalaanlitzlim name yourselves?”

  “Numbers are for luck, or the qualities you want your child to have, or fashion. ‘Three’ is perennially popular, all the low numbers are; Threes are supposed to be stable and innovative, like a triangle. Doesn’t fall over, can reach pinnacles of thought, that sort of thing. This person picking ‘Thirty-Six’ is just trying to look new-money City-dweller, it’s a little silly but not that bad. The bad part is ‘All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle.’ I mean. Blood and sunlight, it’s technically permissible, that’s an inanimate object or a piece of architecture, but it’s so … nice names are plants and flowers and natural phenomena. And not so many syllables.”

  This was the most animated Mahit had seen Three Seagrass be so far, and it was really making it difficult for Mahit not to like her. She was funny. Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle was funnier.

  “When I was learning the language,” she said, deciding all at once to share, to offer something back for this little bit of cultural exchange—if they were going to work together they should work together—“we had to pretend to have Teixcalaanli-style names, and one of my classmates—the kind of person who scores perfectly on exams and has a terrible accent—called himself 2e Asteroid. The irrational number. He thought he was being clever.”

  Three Seagrass contemplated this, and then snickered. “He was,” she said. “That’s hilarious.”

  “Really?”

  “Enormously. It’s like turning your whole persona into a self-deprecating joke. I’d buy a novel written by a Two-E Asteroid, it’d probably be satire.”

  Mahit laughed. “The person in question wasn’t subtle enough for satire,” she said. “He was a dreadful classmate.”

  “He sounds it,” Three Seagrass agreed, “but he’s accidentally subtle, which is even better.” And then she handed over the next infofiche stick, and began to decrypt the next problem Mahit needed to solve.

  The whole afternoon was—work. Work Mahit was good at, work she had been trained to do, even if the forms of it were obscure and Teixcalaanli and required Three Seagrass’s decryption skills. At sunset Three Seagrass ordered them both small bowls of a spiced meat in dumpling wrappers, covered in a creamy semi-fermented sauce laced with red oil, assuring Mahit that it was extremely unlikely that she would be allergic to anything in the meal.

  “It’s ixhui,” she explained. “We feed it to babies!”

  “If I die, no one will answer the mail for three more months, and then where will you be,” Mahit said, stabbing a dumpling with the two-pronged fork the meal had come with. It burst when she bit into it, tangy and warm. The red oil was finely spiced, just hot enough to linger on her tongue and make her wonder about neurotoxic effects before it faded to pleasantness. She was abruptly starving. She hadn’t eaten since the cruiser.

  It was somewhat gratifying to see Three Seagrass devour her own bowl of ixhui with a similar level of enthusiasm. Mahit waved the fork at her. “This is too good for babies,” she said.

  Three Seagrass widened her eyes in a Teixcalaanli version of a grin. “Work food. Anything that’s too delicious to eat slow.”

  “And then you get back to the job faster?”

  “You’re getting the idea.”

  Mahit tilted her head to the side. “You’re the sort of person who works all the time, aren’t you.”

  “It’s in the job description, Ambassador.”

  “Call me Mahit, please,” Mahit said, “and surely there are cultural liaisons less helpful.”

  Three Seagrass nearly looked pleased. “Oh, lots. But cultural liaison’s my assignment. Asekreta’s the job.”

  Intelligence, protocol, secrets—and oratory. If all the literature about the City Mahit had ever read hadn’t lied to her. “And that job is?”

  “Politics,” said Three Seagrass.

  A close enough correspondence to the literature. “Why don’t you tell me about these military transport visas, then?” Mahit started, just as the door to the suite chimed in a chord that made Mahit wince but seemed not to strike Three Seagrass as lacking any euphony.

  Three Seagrass went to the door and punched in a code on the wall-keypad next to it. Mahit watched her fingers and tried to internalize as much of the sequence as possible. Surely she would be able to operate the door codes to her own suite. (Unless she was more of a prisoner than she thought. How narrow were the City’s definitions of real people who could move through it? She wished she could ask Yskandr.) The wall-keypad, satisfied, projected an image of the face of the person waiting outside, his name and string of titles floating above his head in blocky gold-limned glyphs. Young, broad-cheeked, bronze skin, a thick dark hairline over the short forehead all the imperial art seemed to prefer. Mahit recognized him from the mortuary viewing hall. Twelve Azalea, Indistinguishable Courtier Number Three, except for how looking at him gave Mahit the impression of being in the presence of some other culture’s impeccably observed standard of masculine beauty. She felt a little peculiar about her lack of resp
onse. He was like an art object. Twelve Azalea, patrician first-class, Three Seagrass had said, which meant she knew him by name at least, and possibly by something closer to reputation.

  “I haven’t any idea what he wants,” Three Seagrass said, which did suggest that reputation was somewhat of a factor.

  Mahit said, “Let him in.”

  Three Seagrass pressed her thumb to the wall-keypad firmly (what if it was fingerprint-locked? But surely the Teixcalaanli wouldn’t use technology that primitive) and the door admitted Twelve Azalea in a sweep of orange sleeves and cream lapels. Mahit braced herself for the full sequence of greeting protocols without any help from Yskandr (she was supposed to not have to worry about these things), but had only begun to introduce herself when Twelve Azalea said, “I came to your suite, we really don’t have to bother,” brushed past Three Seagrass, leaving an affectionate kiss on her temple and a look of profound annoyance on her face, and sat down on the divan.

  “Ambassador Dzmare,” he said, “welcome to the Jewel of the World. A pleasure.”

  Three Seagrass settled next to him, wide-eyed, the corners of her mouth visibly tilted up. “I thought we weren’t doing formalities, Petal,” she said.

  “Lacking formalities hasn’t robbed me of being polite, Reed,” Twelve Azalea said, and then turned a large, un-Teixcalaanli smile on Mahit. It made him appear slightly unhinged. “I hope she hasn’t been too rude to you, Ambassador.”

  “Petal, must you,” Three Seagrass said.

  They had pet names for one another. It was … cute, and simultaneously hilarious and embarrassing. “Not rude at all,” Mahit said, earning her a theatrically grateful look from Three Seagrass. “Welcome to the diplomatic territory of Lsel Station. How might I help you, other than letting you renew your acquaintance with my liaison?”

  Twelve Azalea took on an expression of concern, which Mahit suspected was a thin veil over a more unsavory—and more honest—excited interest. It was inconvenient in the utmost that every single Teixcalaanlitzlim was going to assume she was as astute as an airlock door, recognizing only the surface images of people: uniforms, and expressions of concern. She wondered how long it would take before anyone at all would take her seriously.