A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

“He was secretive, combative, and deeply connected to several patrician families that have little taste for me. During his tenure in Information he was often a thorn pricking my thumb. I was glad he retired, though I found it suspicious and still do—but he’d been quiet after his retirement. On the surface, at least. I will attend his memorial out of respect for a good opponent, an erstwhile drinking companion, and a former friend of my friend, the former Lsel Ambassador.”

  She paused, and looked directly at Mahit, expressionless, like a dark glass wall. Her cloudhook glowed in her eye. “Does that count for like, on Lsel?”

  “Close enough,” said Mahit. Of course Yskandr would be sufficiently charming to collect friends both assigned and attracted, and keep both kinds even when they weren’t to each other’s taste. “Who benefits from Fifteen Engine’s death, ezuazuacat?”

  “Anyone who didn’t want you to know Yskandr’s old friends,” Nineteen Adze said, calling up a fresh infograph and annotating it with rapid small shifts of her fingertips, forming a list of word-glyphs in the surface of the air. “But more likely: anyone who wants people who quietly speak out against imperial methods of quelling insurrection to stop thus speaking. Or someone attempting to foment public fear, of which there is a great deal lately, much encouraged by incidents like this one and the anti-imperial activists who claim responsibility for them. So who benefits—what an interesting way of phrasing it, Mahit. Add half the ezuazuacatlim, particularly Thirty Larkspur, who’d like to shut down any trade which doesn’t come from a system where his family has an economic interest, and will take xenophobia as a happy excuse to do so, and xenophobia is easily stoked when Teixcalaanlitzlim get exploded while at lunch … oh, and you. If you wanted to eliminate your predecessor’s allies in order to take a radically new position on Teixcalaan–Lsel diplomatic relations.”

  “I didn’t set that bomb,” said Mahit, trying to remember Odile and Thirty Larkspur, trying to remember public fear—commit them to memory now, so that later she could hold the whole puzzle up in her mind, spin it, look for how it fit together.

  “Did I say I thought you did, Mahit?” said Nineteen Adze, and there was that weight of her attention again, the intimation of sympathetic total intimacy. Mahit imagined her and Yskandr in bed, a flash of possible-memory that might just have been desire. Skin on skin. Something more than a political friendship. (Would it matter, if they had? Mahit had no intention of—not that she wouldn’t, Nineteen Adze was—)

  “If I might interrupt, Your Excellency,” Five Agate broke in, to Mahit’s considerable relief. “But you should look at the feeds from Plaza Central Seven.”

  Nineteen Adze lifted both eyebrows. “Shove them over here, then,” she said. Five Agate did, with a broad sweep of her palm that caught the trailing edge of one of her infographs and sent it sailing over to Nineteen Adze’s workspace. Nineteen Adze caught it through a combination of hand and eye gestures, positioned it, expanded its borders until it hung like a window in midair. Mahit stepped closer, standing at Nineteen Adze’s left elbow like Five Agate stood at her right.

  Plaza Central Seven, rendered in transparency from some high-up camera—planted by Nineteen Adze’s agents? By the Emperor? The Sunlit? Or did the City itself watch itself?—looked much like Plaza Central Nine, if less grand by an order of magnitude. It had the same spread-petal shape that Mahit now knew could unfold into barrier walls; it was lined with shops and restaurants and what she suspected was either a government building or a public theater, from its size and from the statues arrayed in front of it. It was also full of Teixcalaanlitzlim.

  Some of them had placards.

  They were shouting. The sound came through the feed like a distant roar, indistinct.

  “Can you—” Mahit started.

  “Turn it up, yes,” said Five Agate. “A little. It’ll depend on what they’re shouting, how clear it is—”

  “They’ll be shouting ‘One Lightning,’” Nineteen Adze said. “I will buy you a new suit for the Emperor’s banquet this week if I’m wrong, Five Agate. But turn it up.”

  They were shouting “One Lightning”—the name of the yaotlek who had been mentioned by the Sunlit while they’d been trying to arrest her. The yaotlek who was commander of the fleet nearest to the City right now. They were shouting his name, and a four-line snatch of iambic doggerel that Mahit made out primarily as rhythm, built around an excited repetition of “Teixcalaan! Teixcalaan! Teixcalaanli!” that ended the verse.

  “Are they trying to acclaim him without a military triumph?” asked Five Agate wonderingly.

  Nineteen Adze said, “Not yet.” She spread her fingers away from her palm like a starburst, and the feed zoomed in, onto the faces of the demonstrators. Some of them had streaked their foreheads horizontally with red paint. Mahit thought of the sacrificial crowns that returning Teixcalaanli generals wore in poetic epics: not paint but blood, their own mixed with that of whoever they’d defeated. Entirely symbolic, now, in this age of interplanetary conquests.

  “I was under the impression that such things were illegal,” she said.

  “Ineffective, not illegal,” Nineteen Adze said. “Five Agate, the purpose of military acclamation. For the edification of the Ambassador.”

  Five Agate coughed and caught Mahit’s eyes sidelong. Mahit thought she looked slightly apologetic. “To confer legitimacy upon a prospective emperor of Teixcalaan, who does not ascend by congruence of blood or by the appointment of the previous emperor, a military acclamation is public demonstration of his virtue—which is to say, public demonstration of the favor of the ever-burning stars.”

  “And the form of that favor?” asked Nineteen Adze, prompting.

  “Traditionally, a major military victory. Or a great number of them. Preferably a great number.”

  Nineteen Adze nodded. “Quite right. The great number of victories is the proof; all else is shouting, and a functional bureaucracy or a marginally intelligent citizenry—both of which we are blessed with—can strip all legitimacy from mere shouting.”

  “You’d like me to ask why they’re shouting for One Lightning anyway,” Mahit said. “Since he does not have the military achievements that would make him a viable emperor. Or at least such achievements have not reached the distant and uninformed regions where Lsel Station lies.”

  Five Agate’s expression looked slightly shocked; more than slightly intrigued. “He’s ambitious,” she said, and when Nineteen Adze nodded at her she went on. “He’s the sort of ambitious which looks for opportunities. He’s won skirmishes out in some of the wilder sectors, not to mention a small campaign or two to quell local unrest or head off out-Empire incursions—and his troops have spectacular morale reports. He wasn’t at Odile, but he trained the commander who is there, Three Sumac, and she remembers to thank him every time she is on the newsfeeds. He wants significant military achievements, and he has enough backing to assure his soldiers that they’ll have an opportunity to get them under his command.”

  “An acclamation based on belief in the future,” Mahit said dryly. An acclamation based on needing a war to fight. “I wish him the greatest of personal success. Since he apparently lacks significant military achievements aside from taking credit for there not being more than one bomb in Plaza Central Nine today.”

  “A person might suspect you of being a diplomat, Ambassador,” said Nineteen Adze.

  “A person might.”

  “And she’d be right, if she suspected. But there is one significant factor you are missing, diplomat or no—and you’ve missed it only by having spent your first forty-eight hours here so eventfully.”

  Mahit tried to navigate between feeling insulted and feeling amused, and came up with sarcastic. “Enlighten me, ezuazuacat. If it wouldn’t trouble you too much to skip to the end.” After the conversation over the tea she oughtn’t to have been able to manage sarcasm—but perhaps that was part of the point of Nineteen Adze: that the glittering quick-spoken politician who made you want to toss quips back
and forth with her was the same creature who could slice a conversation to ribbons and make you want to weep that she understood.

  She wished for Three Seagrass again: for anyone at all who could be a distraction or a covering shield. A friend. Her own friend, not some ghost-emotion friend of Yskandr’s.

  Nineteen Adze had zoomed the camera feed out. The whole mass of cheering Teixcalaanlitzlim hung in the center of the air between them and rotated slowly around a central axis when she inscribed the turn with a twist of her wrist. “The Emperor Six Direction, our light-emitting starlike ruler, brighter than jewels and more kind, he to whom I am sworn and for whose sake I would spill the last drop of my blood: he is eighty-four years old and has no biological offspring. That is what you’re missing, Ambassador.”

  “You have a succession problem,” Mahit said, because she couldn’t say I’m so sorry that you’ll soon lose your friend; it seemed—unkind. Unnecessary. Not on topic. And how was she to know whether an ezuazuacat was really a friend of the Emperor, or just a symbolic one? This was the problem with an entire society that obsessively re-created its own classical literature, and wouldn’t she have liked to explain that to herself two weeks ago. Or to talk to Yskandr about it. She was sure he’d have something to say.

  “One Lightning’s shouters certainly think we do,” Nineteen Adze said. She flicked her hand at the feed and it folded in on itself and faded out. “I am reserving judgment, myself. But you picked a fascinating moment to arrive at court, Ambassador.”

  “I didn’t pick,” Mahit said. “I was summoned.”

  Nineteen Adze tilted her head to the side. “With urgency?” she asked.

  “With unseemly urgency,” Mahit said, thinking of herself and Yskandr, shoved together with only hope and three months of meditation to make them one agent of the Station.

  “If I were you,” said Nineteen Adze, “I would find out who authorized your entrance permit. I suspect it would be quite revelatory.”

  Was it a leading question? Did she intend to have Mahit go through some laborious investigative process only to come up with the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze as her answer? No, Mahit decided—she was too canny to want to watch Mahit squirm on the long-line of a tether. Tricks like that were for stock villains, melodramas, and even Teixcalaanli obsession with narrative was mostly reserved for good narrative. This was worse: this was Nineteen Adze giving her an assignment, like she’d give one of her servants. Go find out, tell me what you know. As if Mahit belonged to her. (As if Yskandr had belonged to her—but she was beginning to believe he hadn’t, not entirely, not even if she’d shared her bed with him, and that had been part of the problem the two of them had had with one another.)

  She said, “An interesting idea. When I return to my own workstation, in my own apartments, I’ll be sure to look into it.”

  “Don’t wait so long,” said Nineteen Adze. “After all the work you did to get yourself to a place of relative security, do you imagine I’d send you back out into the palace alone? While we still don’t know who is willing to blow up innocent citizens right next to you?”

  “My cultural liaison—” Mahit began, intending to argue that she certainly was not alone.

  “Should be out of the hospital soon enough. I have more than enough infograph displays to spare one, Mahit. I’ll have Seven Scale set up a temporary office for you.”

  Right here, where I am not on Lsel diplomatic ground, Mahit thought, but she schooled her hands into one of the gestures of formal thanks—and when the young man who had disposed of the tea service came to lead her away into the further depths of Nineteen Adze’s territory, she went with him.

  * * *

  The office—Mahit was doing her best to not think of it as a prison cell, and mostly managing—was flooded with late-afternoon light, shaded pink through a bay window. Tucked into its curve was a low, wide couch. Seven Scale showed her how to open her very own infograph display and provided her with a stack of blank infofiche sticks in neutral, impersonal grey. He was calm and incurious and efficient, and everything about him was a relief in comparison to Nineteen Adze. Which had likely been designed. She introduced comfort and withdrew it like a master interrogator, and Mahit was agonizingly tired of the emotional swing. When Seven Scale left, closing the door behind him, she lay down on the couch, turned her face to the wall under the windowsill, and drew her knees up to her chest until her bruised hip ached.

  If she stared at the blank white paint, and stretched one hand over her head to touch the curving sill around the top of the couch, she could imagine she was in her room on the Station. The safe three-by-three-by-nine tube of it, the gentle eggshell cup of its walls: tiny and inviolate and hers, hanging in rows with everyone else’s rooms. Soundproof. Lockable. You could curl up with a friend there, spine to spine, or belly to belly with a lover, or— It was closed. It was safe.

  She made herself sit up. Outside the window a Palace-North courtyard was a riot of blue lotuses floating in ponds and star-shape paths, busy with Teixcalaanli feet marching on Teixcalaanli business. She considered first the impulse to go out the window herself, and second the equally unsuitable impulse to try to write fifteen-syllable verse about how she felt.

  Hey, Yskandr, she thought, like throwing a stone into the dark water of one of those ponds. What did you miss most about home?

  Then she turned on the infograph display and signed into it like she’d been instructed. As she did so, she realized that it was the first time she’d signed into her own equivalent of a cloudhook, instead of having Three Seagrass open doors for her. So strange, to have as much freedom as she’d demanded in her own apartments—her own diplomatic territory—and only to receive it here, where she was some very complicated kind of prisoner. With perfect knowledge that Nineteen Adze was almost certainly recording everything she did, Mahit got to work.

  The interface was, when one wasn’t trying to decrypt basic communication, more intuitive than Mahit had expected. She gestured and the infograph responded—spreading her hands and twisting her wrist spawned multiple transparent workscreens, and she could make her own halo of information. She found Nineteen Adze’s preset camera feeds and called up the one that was still trained on the demonstration in favor of One Lightning—let the ezuazuacat think what she wanted about Mahit’s continuing interests—and set it to run off to her right side. Over her left shoulder she put a window full of a running stream of tabloid headlines, and resolved to improve her vocabulary of casual and insulting vernacular—and perhaps also to learn something more about anti-imperial activists, or Thirty Larkspur, or just what Teixcalaanli tabloids thought about bombings in restaurants. In the center she found a basic text input and began composing messages, routing them through her own accesses as Lsel Ambassador.

  She’d probably have to encrypt them with that encomiastic verse, wouldn’t she. If she wanted to be taken seriously—

  No. She’d leave them unadorned. Uncivilized. Written in unseemly haste and urgency by a woman away from her home office (she thought, with absurdist longing, of the basket of unanswered infofiche sticks that was probably overflowing in her apartment right now) who was a stranger to the City. A mirror could reflect more than one thing—she’d been a knife, when she reflected Nineteen Adze. Now she’d be a rough stone: inescapable, blunt, barbaric. Expected, except for those people who had expected her to be Yskandr, and wouldn’t she find out who they were, now?

  In plain language, the sort that she’d discarded after her first trip through the aptitude exams in Teixcalaanli language, she wrote to the last man who had ever seen Yskandr alive. The Minister of Science, Ten Pearl. She asked for a meeting. She expressed a desire for normalization of relations—took out “normalization” and put in “I hope our offices will be on good terms in the future,” since wishes didn’t require any more specialized grammar than the future tense, and “to normalize” was a resumptive verb and required the speaker to have more than a passing acquaintance with tense sequencing and the subju
nctive.

  Teixcalaanli was a terrible language, sometimes, even if it did sound beautiful in fifteen-syllable verses. But there was nothing in that message to suggest that she was interested in investigating the death of her predecessor—nothing to suggest that she was even a marginally competent political operator.

  So deeply in over her head, the new Lsel Ambassador. Did you hear? She had to ask Her Excellency Nineteen Adze to keep her from getting arrested.

  Mahit snickered to herself. The sound was loud in the room, even over the muted roar of the feed from the demonstration. She schooled her face to imperial impassivity, as if she’d been caught in a compromising position.

  The other messages were easier to compose. One to Twelve Azalea, asking him to check on Three Seagrass—surely he’d be interested in his friend Reed being hospitalized, and might even be inclined to let her know if her liaison was going to recover from that neurological insult. One to herself, copying both of the previous two messages so that she’d have a record delivered into the marginal physical safety of Lsel diplomatic territory, not just the limited safety of her electronic access—and one final message, to the Ministry of Information, addressee unspecified, requesting an account of who had approved her entrance permit.

  Let Nineteen Adze watch what she did.

  After Mahit had impressed her letters onto the infofiche sticks she’d been provided, and checked that each one would spill out her message when cracked open, she sealed them with hot wax. The wax came out of a sealing kit on the endtable by the office door, and had to be melted with a handheld ethanol lighter. Mahit burned her thumb, pouring it. So perfectly imperial, to have messages made of light and encrypted with poetry, and require a physical object for propriety’s sake.

  Such a waste of resources. Time and energy and material.

  She could wish it didn’t delight her.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Remains of an accident on Chrysanthemum Highway are still being cleared as of early morning; commuters should be aware of heavy traffic … delays on Central Line expected to continue; Central Nine stop remains closed for Sunlit investigation into bombing; reroute through North Green Line for Central City stops beyond Central Nine; leave extra travel time for checkpoints when entering the palace or entertainment venues until further notice … the Circumpolar Maglev train will add an extra service every third day to accommodate winter tourisms, beginning D260, tickets now purchasable at municipal train stations throughout the City …