A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  Mahit realized she’d thought Fifteen Engine would be younger, someone only five or ten years her senior. But he’d been Yskandr’s cultural liaison when Yskandr had arrived, twenty years ago, and only for a brief time: her imago might be young, but her imago was also fifteen years out of date, and whatever Fifteen Engine knew of him would be similarly aged.

  Mahit lifted her hands to greet him, nevertheless. The pressure between her fingertips felt electrical, like she could feel all the nerves in her arms, an echo of all the times Yskandr had done this motion. Almost as if he was back with her.

  When Fifteen Engine lowered his palms, he looked her over and said, wryly, “Stars, Yskandr, she’s a quarter of your age. What does that feel like?”

  “I knew it!” Three Seagrass said, shoving Mahit in the shoulder. “You’ve got one of those machines, and of course you’d have the brain of your predecessor stuck in your head—”

  “Hush,” Mahit said, and sat down. She did it like she’d sat when she was eighteen: awkward, girlish, too-long limbs folding into her chair, and she watched Fifteen Engine’s hopeful expression change to wariness.

  “Yskandr may have somewhat exaggerated the degree of carryover,” she said, clipped.

  “But you are in there—”

  “Not at the moment he isn’t,” Mahit said, and hoped that Three Seagrass would understand that statement as something that intentionally happened with imago-machinery, not as a fundamental error. “In addition, I am fascinated to know that my predecessor was so profligate with sharing what is proprietary technology.”

  “I see it’s taken your liaison approximately thirty-six hours to get the same information out of you,” Fifteen Engine said.

  “Extenuating circumstances, patrician, considering that Yskandr is dead.”

  “Is he,” Fifteen Engine said, dust-dry.

  “The man you knew, yes.”

  “I have no reason to be speaking with you, then,” Fifteen Engine said. “I have been out of interstellar politics for the better part of two decades. I resigned from the Information Ministry more than ten years ago. I live quietly and pursue my own work away from the vicissitudes of the central government.” He gathered himself to stand, pushing back his chair from the table. The bowl of flowers and water shook; some of the water slopped over the side and ran across the stone to drip onto the restaurant floor.

  Transfixed by the waste, Mahit said, “He must have trusted you,” trying to salvage something of the meeting, but Fifteen Engine took a step back, avoiding the puddle adroitly—and the world flashed white and roared.

  * * *

  She was lying on the ground, her cheek wet in the spilled water. The air roiled with thick, acrid smoke and shouting in Teixcalaanli. Part of the table—or part of the wall, some heavy immobilizing marble—had come down on her hip and pinned her with a radiating spike of pain when she tried to move. She could only see a partial visual arc—there were chair legs and debris blocking her—but in that arc was fire.

  She knew the Teixcalaanli word for “explosion,” a centerpiece of military poetry, usually adorned with adjectives like “shattering” or “fire-flowered,” but now she learned, by extrapolation from the shouting, the one for “bomb.” It was a short word. You could scream it very loudly. She figured it out because it was the word people were screaming when they weren’t screaming “help.”

  She couldn’t see Three Seagrass anywhere.

  Wetness dripped onto her face, as wet as the spilled water but from the other side. Dripped and collected and spilled over the hollow of her temple and across her cheek and her eye and was red, was blood. Mahit turned her head, arched her neck. The blood flowed downward, toward her mouth, and she clamped her lips shut.

  It was coming from Fifteen Engine, collapsed back into his chair, the front of his shirt—the front of his torso—torn open and away, his throat studded with shrapnel. His face was pristine, the eyes open and glassily staring. The bomb must have been close. To his right, from the angle of the pieces she could see.

  Yskandr, I’m sorry, she thought. No matter how much she disliked Fifteen Engine—and she had been developing a very direct and powerful dislike, just a moment ago—he was someone who had been Yskandr’s. She was Yskandr enough to feel a displaced sort of grief. A missed opportunity. Something she hadn’t safeguarded well enough.

  A pair of knees in smoke-scorched cream trousers appeared in front of her nose, and then Three Seagrass was wiping the blood off her face with her palms.

  “I would really like you to be alive,” Three Seagrass said. It was hard for Mahit to hear her over the shouting, and even the shouting was being drowned out by a rising electric hum, like the air itself was being ionized.

  “You’re in luck,” Mahit said. Her voice worked fine. Her jaw worked fine. There was blood in her mouth now, despite Three Seagrass’s efforts to smear it away.

  “Great,” said Three Seagrass. “Fantastic! Reporting your death to the Emperor would be incredibly embarrassing and possibly end my career and also I think I’d be upset—are you going to die if I move the piece of the wall that’s fallen on you, I am not an ixplanatl, I don’t understand anything about non-ritual exsanguination except not to pull arrows out of people’s veins and I learned that from a really bad theatrical adaptation of The Secret History of the Emperors—”

  “Three Seagrass, you’re hysterical.”

  “Yes,” said Three Seagrass, “I know,” and shoved whatever was pinning Mahit to the ground off of her hip. The release of pressure was a new kind of pain. The hum in the air was growing louder, the space between Three Seagrass’s body and her own beginning to shade a delicate and terrifying blue, like twilight approaching. The marble restaurant floor had lit up with a tracery of aware circuits, all blue, all glowing, coloring the air with light. Mahit thought of nuclear core spills, how they flashed blue as they cooked flesh; thought of what she’d read of lightning cascading out of the sky. If it was ionized air they were already dead. She struggled up on her elbows, lunged for Three Seagrass’s arm, and catching it, hauled herself to sitting.

  “What’s wrong with the air?”

  “A bomb went off,” Three Seagrass said. “The restaurant is on fire, what do you think is wrong with the air?”

  “It’s blue!”

  “That’s the City noticing—”

  A section of the restaurant’s roof shuddered and fell, ear-shatteringly loud. Three Seagrass and Mahit ducked simultaneously, pressed forehead to shoulder.

  “We have to get out of here,” Mahit said. “That might not have been the only bomb.” The word was easy to say, round on her lips. She wondered if Yskandr had ever said it.

  Three Seagrass pulled her to her feet. “Has this happened to you before?”

  “No!” Mahit said. “Never.” The last time there had been a bomb on Lsel was before she was born. The saboteurs—revolutionaries, they’d called themselves, but they’d been saboteurs—had brought the vacuum in when their incendiaries exploded. They’d been spaced, afterward, and the whole line of their imagos cut off: thirteen generations of engineering knowledge lost with the oldest of them. The Station didn’t keep people who were willing to expose innocents to space. If an imago-line could be corrupted like that, it wasn’t worth preserving.

  It was different on a planet. The blue air was breathable, even if it tasted like smoke. Three Seagrass had hold of her elbow and they were walking out into Plaza Central Nine, where the sky was still the same impossible color, as if nothing had gone wrong. A stream of Teixcalaanlitzlim fled across the square toward the safety of other buildings or the dark shelter of the subway.

  “Is it possible,” Three Seagrass asked, “that Fifteen Engine brought the bomb with him? Did you see—”

  “He’s dead,” Mahit interrupted. “Are you suggesting he was some kind of—self-sacrifice?”

  “Badly managed, if he was. You’re not dead. Neither am I. And nothing about Fifteen Engine’s record, ties to Odile or no ties to O
dile, suggests he’d be in with domestic terrorists or suicide bombers or the kind of activists for whom posters are definitely not enough—”

  “What would be the point of killing us? He wanted to talk to me—well, to Yskandr—and you’re the one who asked him to breakfast for me in the first place.”

  “I’m trying,” said Three Seagrass, “to figure out just how badly I have misread the situation and determine how much danger you’re actually in—or if this is just terrible luck—or if something’s set off another rash of bombings—”

  “Another?” Mahit asked, and instead of answering, Three Seagrass stopped walking. Froze, her hand on Mahit’s elbow, jerking her to a standstill.

  The center of the plaza unfolded in front of them. What Mahit had thought were tiles and metal inlay when she’d walked across them were instead some kind of armature, emerging from the ground and corralling the crowd inside walls of gold and glass, crackling with that same blue light. Words scrolled up their transparent sides as they drew closer, pinning Mahit and Three Seagrass in the center of a little group of smoke-stained, shocked Teixcalaanlitzlim. The words were printed in the same graphic glyphs as the street signs and subway maps. A four-line quatrain, repeating over and over. Stillness and patience create safety, Mahit read, the Jewel of the World preserves itself.

  “Don’t touch the City,” Three Seagrass said. “It’s keeping us confined until the Sunlit get here. The Emperor’s police.” The corners of her mouth curved down. “It shouldn’t be holding me—I’m a patrician—but it probably hasn’t noticed yet.”

  Mahit didn’t move. The walls crawled with gold poetry and blue shimmering light.

  “What happens to people who can’t read?” she said.

  Three Seagrass said, “Every citizen can read, Mahit,” as if Mahit had said something incomprehensible. She reached up to her cloudhook, tapping the frame of it where it rested over her left eye, adjusting. The thin pane of transparent plastic that covered her eye socket lit up red and grey and gold, like an echo of the patrician colors on her sleeves. “Hang on,” she said. “That should do it.”

  She shoved her way to the front of the crowd. Mahit followed in her wake. Walking hurt, a bruised and insulted ache that spread from her hip across her lower belly. Three Seagrass went right up to the unfolded section of plaza, her nose inches from the glass, and said, “Three Seagrass, patrician second-class, asekreta. Request to transmit Information Ministry identification, City.”

  A tiny section of the glass wall and her cloudhook both swarmed with words, reflecting one another. Communicating. Three Seagrass muttered something subvocal—Mahit thought it might be a string of numbers, but she wasn’t sure—and then the glass printed a word she could read quite clearly.

  Granted, it said. Three Seagrass stuck out her hand and did exactly what she’d told Mahit not to do: she touched the wall, as if she expected it to part like a door in front of her. The gesture was so casual, so instinctively comfortable, that Mahit didn’t understand when Three Seagrass made a noise like she’d been punched, and fell backward, stiff-limbed. A line of blue fire connected her outstretched fingertips to the City.

  Mahit caught her. She was very small. Teixcalaanlitzlim all were, but Three Seagrass was the size of a half-grown Stationer teenager, barely coming up to Mahit’s breastbone, and absurdly light for someone wearing as many layers of suiting as she was. Mahit sat on the ground. Three Seagrass fit in her lap, stunned and breathing in ugly gasps, her eyes rolled back in her skull. The crowd backed away from them both.

  The City was still saying Granted, where the door wasn’t. Mahit entertained a vivid and horrific fantasy of the entire artificial intelligence that kept the Jewel of the World in operation, all the sewers and the elevators and every code-locked door, having been programmed by whomever Yskandr had so deeply offended for the specific purpose of killing her and anyone so unlucky as to be associated with her. The concept felt absurdist: she was one person, even if she was also the inheritor of all of Yskandr’s plans, and there were so many Teixcalaanlitzlim in the City to be accidentally hurt. So many citizens. Too many real people for the Empire to sacrifice for the sake of one barbarian. And yet she was entombed in glass, her cultural liaison electrocuted for performing a routine action. Absurd possibilities made too much sense, when so much had gone wrong so quickly.

  “Do any of you have water? For her?” she asked, looking up. The faces of the Teixcalaanlitzlim surrounding her didn’t change: tear-streaked or burnt or untouched, none of them looked upset, not the way a Stationer would. Her own face felt like a mask, scrunched up with emotion. Abruptly she was afraid she had spoken the wrong language; she didn’t know what language she was thinking in. Either, or both. “Water,” she said again, helplessly.

  A man took pity on her, or on Three Seagrass, still limp and unresponsive; he came forward and squatted down. His hair was coming undone from a thick braid, tendrils sticking sweatily to his forehead, and he wore a large, tacky shoulder pin shaped like a sprig of purple flowers on the left lapel of his suit. “Here,” he said, speaking both loudly and slowly as he held out a plastic bottle, “some water.”

  Mahit took it. “I’m Mahit Dzmare,” she said, “I’m an ambassador—I don’t know what’s happening.” I am absolutely alone. She flipped open the top of the bottle, poured water into her cupped palm, and tried to decide if it would be better to throw it into Three Seagrass’s face or drip it into her mouth. “Thank you, sir. Can you inform the palace that one of the asekretim is hurt? Send a … a doctor vehicle.” There was a better word for that and she couldn’t find it.

  “She’s an asekreta?” the man asked. “You should wait. The Sunlit will be here soon—the City will call them. It’s better if they take care of you.”

  Mahit wondered if by take care of he meant finish murdering. She supposed it didn’t matter. She wasn’t about to run. There wasn’t anywhere to run to. “Thank you for the water,” she said.

  “Where are you from?”

  Mahit choked on a noise that wanted to be a laugh. “Space,” she said. “A station.”

  “Really,” said the man. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t worry. No one will think the bomb is your fault. This isn’t that kind of neighborhood.” He reached out to pat her on the forearm and she flinched away.

  “Whose fault is it?” Mahit asked him.

  She hadn’t expected him to answer. But he shrugged, and said, “Not everyone in the City loves the City,” and then stood up again, leaving her with the water bottle.

  Not everyone in the City loves the City. Not everyone in the world loves the world, civilization is not coextensive with the known universe for someone, someone with a bomb who doesn’t care about civilian deaths …

  The water dripped through her fingers and onto Three Seagrass’s mouth; it rolled down her cheek like Fifteen Engine’s blood had rolled down Mahit’s. Mahit couldn’t watch it. She handed the bottle back to its owner like she’d hand back a knife, handle-first, careful not to spill. Three Seagrass made a noise like a thin hum in the back of her throat, and Mahit decided it was a good sign: she wasn’t dead. She might not even die.

  Surrounded by Teixcalaanlitzlim, Mahit felt nearly invisible. Not a one of them knew that she ought to have been more Yskandr, or what Yskandr might or might not have done. Not a one of them, unless one was the bomber—and there was nothing she could do about that, except to wait.

  * * *

  The Sunlit arrived like planetrise over the Station: slowly and then all at once, a distant intimation of gold shimmering through the occlusion of the City’s confining walls, which crept closer and closer before resolving into a platoon of imperial soldiers in gleaming body armor, a vision out of every Teixcalaanli epic Mahit had ever loved as a child and every dystopian Stationer novel about the horrors of the encroaching Empire. The wall which had shocked Three Seagrass came down for them, sinking back into the plaza seamlessly, and Mahit remembered the man with the water saying the City will call them.r />
  Mahit got to her feet, Three Seagrass tucked under her arm and propped on her hip. Her head lolled back, semiconscious, against Mahit’s shoulder. Her hands came up to nearly press fingertip to fingertip, an automatic gesture that seemed to Mahit to be more instinctive or—if such a thing were possible—imago-supplied than something that originated in Three Seagrass’s own mind. Neurological puppetry.

  The leader of the Sunlit returned that half-gestured greeting with perfect and unconcerned formality. Their face, like all the faces of the troop, was obscured by a cloudhook large enough to cover them from hairline to jaw, an opaque reflective gold shield. Mahit could make out no distinguishing features, which she suspected was the point.

  “Are you Mahit Dzmare?” the Sunlit asked. Behind Mahit, the man who had given her water, and all of his companions, had vanished. Fleetingly she wondered if somehow they’d been responsible, and were now hiding from law enforcement. Not everyone in the City—

  “Yes,” she said. “I am the Lsel Ambassador. My liaison is hurt and I would like to return to my chambers in the palace.”

  If the Sunlit officer reacted, favorably or unfavorably, Mahit couldn’t tell. “On behalf of the Teixcalaanli Empire,” they said, “we regret the physical danger that you were subject to within our territory. We are sure you’ll be pleased to know that an investigation has begun into the origins and purposes of the explosive device.”

  “Entirely,” Mahit said, “but I’d be more pleased with medical help and safe return to my diplomatic territory.”

  The Sunlit went on as if Mahit hadn’t spoken. “For your own safety, Ambassador, we request that you come with us into the custody of the Six Outreaching Palms, where the Light-Emitting Starlike Emperor Six Direction’s yaotlek, One Lightning, and the Minister of War Nine Propulsion can provide you with adequate protection.”