“I won’t disparage your hospitality by worrying about poison or drugs.”
“Good! That saves me the time of reassuring you that there are neither, and unless Lsel has vastly changed its conception of human since Yskandr got here, it should also be entirely harmless to you physiologically.”
“We’re still just as human as you,” Mahit said, and drank. The tea was bracing, a bittersweet green flavor that persistently clung to the back of her throat.
“Twenty years is hardly long enough for significant genetic drift, I do agree. And all the other definitions are quite arbitrary, culture to culture.”
“I’m sure you’d like me to ask what Teixcalaan arbitrarily considers inhuman, now.”
Nineteen Adze tapped her index finger against the side of the tea bowl. Her rings clicked, metal on porcelain. “Ambassador,” she said, “I was a friend of your predecessor. Perhaps one of his only friends, though I do hope that wasn’t as true as I suspect. For his sake, I am offering you a conversation. But we can skip to the end, if you’d prefer to forgo the process of building a mutual edifice of common ground.” Her smile, when it came, was that edgeshine-brightness that had gotten into her epithet. “I would like to talk to Yskandr. Either stop pretending to be Mahit Dzmare, or allow him to speak.”
Quite exactly like a knife, Mahit thought.
“With all respect, ezuazuacat, I can’t do either of those things,” she said. “The first is impossible, as I am not pretending to be myself. The second is more complicated than you are suggesting.”
“Is it,” said Nineteen Adze. She pressed her lips together. “Why aren’t you him?”
“On Lsel you’d be a philosopher,” Mahit said, and promptly wished she hadn’t. Even with the formal-respectful “you” she’d used, that was a much too intimate statement in Teixcalaan—but she didn’t know another way of phrasing it which wasn’t the suggestion of selecting a model for allusion and imitation, as Three Seagrass had apparently selected Eleven Lathe.
Nineteen Adze said, “How flattering. Now explain, Mahit Dzmare—I do believe the body you wear was once called that, so it will suit me fine to call you what you like to be called—explain why you are not my friend.”
Mahit put down the bowl of tea and left her hands palm-down on the white linen of her borrowed trousers. Nineteen Adze’s grasp of imago theory was amazingly perverse: the idea that Yskandr would be walking around inside her body, with her own self pushed out or vanished or killed, and only her name remaining to her flesh? The Station didn’t waste its children like that. It was nauseating to contemplate—and reminded her far too much of that moment in the shower, where she hadn’t quite felt like her at all. Not her, and not the combined person she and Yskandr were meant to become, either. “I will,” she said, “but tell me first: was the bomb in Plaza Central Nine for me or for Yskandr?”
“I don’t think it was for either of you,” Nineteen Adze said. “At worst it was for Fifteen Engine, and that’s a conjecture I would not put weight upon. The victims of domestic terrorism are most often suffering from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A mild case of political malaise like Fifteen Engine’s links to the Odile insurrection are hardly a reason for someone to blow him up, especially as our local bomb-throwers tend to be for insurrections,” Nineteen Adze said.
Mahit bit back the question she’d meant to ask Three Seagrass, this morning—the Odile insurrection? What is going on in Odile?—thinking, almost sure, that the ezuazuacat was trying to redirect her. She wouldn’t be redirected, not yet. She could ask about Odile and the local bomb-throwers in good time; she needed to know what Nineteen Adze wanted with her before she could deal with the larger troubles of the City.
Nineteen Adze watched her, took in her silence. And went on. “Which does not answer your question about whether anyone save me knows about your Station’s imago-machines, I know.”
She was too sharp. Too old. How long had she been at court? Decades. Longer than Yskandr. And half that time at least in the perilous innermost circle of the Emperor. Clearly subtle misdirection and leading questions weren’t going to work.
Like a knife, Mahit reminded herself, and tried to be a mirror.
“What did he tell you would happen to him after he died?” she asked.
“That it would be unthinkable of Lsel to not send the next ambassador carrying his imago. That it would be—how did he put it. An unimaginable waste.”
“That sounds like Yskandr,” Mahit said dryly.
“Doesn’t it just? Arrogant man.” Nineteen Adze sipped at her tea. “You do know him, then.”
Mahit lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Less well than I’d like,” she said, which was true even if it was deceptive. “And what did he tell you the next ambassador would be like? When she got to the City, carrying his imago.”
“Young. Not completely informed. Fluent in Teixcalaanli, to an unusual degree for a barbarian. Happy to see his friends again and get back to work.”
“The term we’d use,” Mahit said, “is ‘out of date.’ The Yskandr I know is not the Yskandr you knew.”
“Is that the problem we’re having?”
Mahit exhaled, slowly. “No. It is a very small subset of the possible problems we might have had.”
“It is in fact my job to solve problems, Mahit Dzmare,” Nineteen Adze said, “but I tend to find it easier to do so when I know what they are.”
“The problem,” said Mahit, “is that I don’t trust you.”
“No, Ambassador. That is your problem. Our problem is that I am still not speaking to Yskandr Aghavn, and that, despite his apparent death, the same unrest which is an ongoing problem in my City and which surrounded him—even and unto his more distant contacts, like Fifteen Engine—has surrounded you as well.”
“I don’t know anything about other bombs, if there have been any,” Mahit said. “Or Fifteen Engine’s involvement with the sort of people who’d set them, or the sort of people who’d set them against him.” The same unrest. What had Yskandr done? Though, if she knew that, she might know who had killed him, or at least why he had died. And whether it was the sort of thing which would require retaliation in the form of multiple civilian casualties. That didn’t seem—he’d said sedition, when she asked him what he’d most likely done, before he vanished, but sedition was one thing and meaningless death another and she could not quite imagine sharing sufficient aptitudes to have an imago made from anyone who would accept casual terrorism as a reasonable side effect of political action.
“Bombs in pricey restaurants in the City’s center are an escalation, in my opinion,” said Nineteen Adze. “Other similar incidents have kept themselves to the outer provinces. Thus my conjecture that Fifteen Engine may have gotten himself involved with those sorts of people, to his detriment and eventual dismemberment.”
Mahit wondered if Nineteen Adze had just made a joke. It was difficult to tell—the humor of it cut so sharply, if it was humor. A joke like that could flay a person open before they noticed the pain.
“You and he might merely be collateral damage, Mahit,” Nineteen Adze went on. “But I knew Yskandr, and thus I wonder.”
“What I wonder,” Mahit said carefully, “is what this level of domestic terrorism escalated from. In terms of local unrest. How many other bombings have there been?”
Nineteen Adze didn’t answer her directly. Mahit hadn’t precisely expected her to. She said, “Because you are ‘out of date,’ mm?”
“Yes. The imago that I accepted”—and here Mahit was committing sedition again, twice in twenty-four hours, maybe she and Yskandr had been right for one another after all, this was easy—“was made from Yskandr when he had only been Ambassador for five years.”
“That is a problem,” said Nineteen Adze, quite sympathetically, which made it worse.
“But not our problem,” Mahit went on. “I don’t think you understand, Your Excellency, what an imago is.”
“Enlighten me.”
; “It’s not a re-creation. Or a double. It’s a—think of it as a mindclone language and protocol program.”
Like an afterimage, Yskandr in the back of her mind:
Frantic, she thought, Are you there?
Nothing. Silence, and the ezuazuacat talking again, and Mahit didn’t have the attention to spare and she’d probably imagined the whisper anyway, called it up like a ghost or a prediction.
“—that is not how Yskandr described the process,” Nineteen Adze was saying.
“An imago is live memory,” Mahit said. “Memory comes with personality. Or they’re the same thing. We found that out very early. Our oldest imago-lines are fourteen generations as of when I left, and might be fifteen now.”
“What role is worth preserving over fifteen generations on a mining station?” Nineteen Adze asked. “Governors? Neurobiologists, to keep making the imago-machines?”
“Pilots, ezuazuacat,” said Mahit, and found herself vividly and suddenly proud of the Station, a sort of upwelling patriotism she hadn’t considered part of her emotional vocabulary. “We, and the other stations in our sector, haven’t been tied to a planet since we colonized the area. There aren’t planets to live on in our sector, only planets and asteroids to mine. We’re Stationers. We will always preserve pilots first.”
Nineteen Adze shook her head, a wry, humanizing gesture; some of her short dark hair fell across her forehead and she pushed it back with the hand that didn’t hold her bowl of tea. “Of course. Pilots. I ought to have guessed.” She paused; Mahit thought it was more for effect than anything else, an indrawn breath to mark that moment of delighted mutual discovery and then to discard the connection it had made between them. “Memory comes with personality, then. Let’s grant that. Which makes it all the more interesting that you still haven’t told me why I’m not talking to Yskandr right now.”
“Ideally the two personalities integrate.”
“Ideally.”
“Yes,” Mahit said.
Nineteen Adze reached out across the low table between them and put her hand on Mahit’s knee. The touch was heavy, grounding, firm. Mahit thought of being pinned beneath an entire planet’s mass, the gravitational fall of descent. “But this is not ideal, is it,” Nineteen Adze said, and Mahit shook her head, no. No it wasn’t.
“Tell me what’s gone wrong,” Nineteen Adze went on, and the worst part of it wasn’t that it was a demand, but that her voice had become so endlessly, vastly sympathetic. Miserably, Mahit thought she was learning something about interrogation techniques. The kind that worked on angry, exhausted, culturally isolated people.
“He was here,” she said, wanting more than anything to get it over with. “My Yskandr, not yours. We were here. And then he wasn’t. He shut up on me; I can’t reach him. Which is why I’m not able to oblige you, Your Excellency. At this point I wish I could. It’d be simpler, considering how thoroughly my predecessor has dismantled the secrecy of our state secrets. No point in hiding it.”
Nineteen Adze said, “Thank you, Mahit, I do appreciate the information,” and took her hand away from Mahit’s knee; took the weight of her attention away in the same motion, all of the intent pressure vanishing somewhere internal to her. Mahit felt … she wasn’t sure. Relieved, and angrier now that she was relieved. Now that there was space across the table for relief. She took two breaths, deliberately even.
“I would have been Mahit Dzmare even if my imago was as present as we’d both like,” she said. “The pair always takes the name of the newest iteration.”
“The habits of Stationer culture suit Stationers,” Nineteen Adze said, which was a dismissal if Mahit had ever heard one.
She tried again, differently. (A mirror. A clean hostage.) “I’d like to know why someone thinks blowing up Fifteen Engine was an appropriate escalation of hostilities. In your most-estimable opinion, ezuazuacat.”
“There are always people who don’t love being Teixcalaanli,” said Nineteen Adze, dry and sharp. “Who wish we’d never broken atmosphere, never stretched out our hands across the jumpgates from system to system and had stayed … oh, something that isn’t an everlasting state ruled by a man like Six Direction under the guidance of the brilliant stars. They’d like us to be a republic, or to stop annexing new systems even when those systems ask us to, or—any number of things which look sane on the surface and aren’t, when one looks at them closely. Some of those people become Ministers, or think they could be Emperor themselves, and change everything to be as they see fit. Teixcalaan has always had problems with that sort, as I’m sure you’re well aware. If you’re as much like Yskandr as you claim his successor would have to be, you’ll know all our histories.”
Mahit did. She knew a thousand stories, poems, novels—bad film adaptations of poems—all of which told the stories of people who had tried to usurp the sun-spear throne of Teixcalaan, and mostly failed—or succeeded, and been acclaimed Emperor, and by virtue of their success declared the previous emperor a tyrant, unfavored by the sun and the stars, unworthy to hold the throne, and justly replaced by a new version of himself. The Empire survived the transfer of power, even when the emperor didn’t.
“I have some idea,” she said. “What’s the other sort of person? Since domestic terrorism doesn’t usually lend itself to a glorious return to ideal rulership, as most of the populace can’t possibly enjoy it enough to like their new emperor afterward.”
Nineteen Adze laughed, and Mahit felt an outsize satisfaction. Like making this woman laugh was a victory, hard won, long sought-after, each time a prize. Perhaps Yskandr had been Nineteen Adze’s lover—and even if Mahit was lacking his voice and his memory, she still had his endocrine system response.
“The other sort of person,” said Nineteen Adze, when the laughter had subsided, “doesn’t want power; they want the destruction of what power currently exists, and nothing else. We only sometimes have problems with them. But we have been having one now, for some span of years. We are a very large empire, as of late, and peaceful, and it gives men and women a great deal of time to think about what displeases them.” She got to her feet. “Come over to the infographs, Ambassador. Work waits for nothing, even interesting young barbarians like yourself and our Yskandr.”
Our? Mahit thought, startled—and didn’t ask. Watched.
Nineteen Adze’s servants reappeared as if they’d merely been waiting for a signal; one clearing away the tea service, another—the same one who had brought Mahit to the shower, Five Agate—surrounding herself with her own arc of holographs. Returning to the work, now that her boss was finished with extracting the sensitive information from the hostage. Nineteen Adze said, “Summarize it, Five Agate, and get me the Sunlit’s reports on the survivor interviews,” and Five Agate made an elegantly abbreviated version of one of the gestures for acquiescence.
“Mahit,” Nineteen Adze went on, just as if she was one of her servants—her apprentices, perhaps, that was better, more accurate—“what did you intend to ask Fifteen Engine about? Your meeting with him was the most public he’d been since he retired. He moved out of the palace and practically vanished into the outer boroughs. He looked like he was living quietly, even if he was dissatisfied with the direction in which His Brilliance the Emperor was taking us.”
That must be what she’d meant, earlier, when she’d talked about Odile—Fifteen Engine being unsatisfied with how the Odile insurrection, whatever it was, was being handled. Mahit said, “I intended to ask him about how Yskandr died.”
“Anaphylaxis due to allergies.”
“Really,” Mahit said.
“Suspicion will certainly serve you well at court,” Nineteen Adze said, perfectly straight-faced. Behind her busy screens, Five Agate might have snickered.
“We’ve been so direct with each other so far,” Mahit said, daring a little. “I had to make an attempt.”
Nineteen Adze flicked her wrist, vanishing one set of holographs and calling up another. “I don’t know the precise
physiological process that killed him. The ixplanatl’s report said allergies.”
“For someone with your illustrious career at this court, Your Excellency, I would have assumed you’d be more suspicious.”
Nineteen Adze laughed. “I do like you, Ambassador. I think Yskandr would also have.”
That hurt to think about, in a way Mahit hadn’t expected. A sort of loss she hadn’t thought to expect, to go along with missing the Yskandr she did know. Not every link in an imago-sequence knew their predecessor personally, but it was always considered a sort of honor if one had—if a person had been chosen, not just come up all green on the aptitude tests and the practical exams. She’d thought that she didn’t care: she was going to be an ambassador, she was significant and necessary, and of course it’d never be personal for her, hardly anyone came back to Lsel from Teixcalaan, and all her aptitudes had been aimed at getting her to the City even before she knew whose imago she’d receive or if she’d even earn one at all.
But all the same, she wished she could have met the Yskandr who had been embodied here, whose corpse she had been presented with. And she missed home, missed planetrise above the Station, and being clever and ambitious and not responsible yet, talking to Shrja Torel and her other friends in the ninth-tier station bars, imagining what they might do and not actually having to do it.
All she said was, “We are carefully selected for compatibility with our predecessors, yes.”
“Did Fifteen Engine like you, then?” Nineteen Adze asked. “If you’re that compatible.” Mahit thought she might be amused, or that interest was close enough to amusement for her that the two had become essentially indistinguishable.
“No,” she said. “I asked too many questions, while simultaneously failing to be the person he worked with twenty years ago, before he retired. Did you like Fifteen Engine?”
A Memory Called Empire Page 10