A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  Better. Mahit heard that word as safer, and thought about long commutes by subway, and how a bomb might devastate a subway car just as easily as it had a restaurant yesterday.

  Her expression must have betrayed something of what she was thinking, because Five Agate changed the subject. “Were you just looking for the library, or…?”

  “Looking for anyone who wasn’t asleep.”

  “Two Cartograph gets up with the sun, so I do the same.” Five Agate shrugged one shoulder. “Do you need anything, Ambassador? Tea? A particular book?”

  Mahit spread her hands open on top of her knees. She didn’t want to treat Five Agate like a servant; and she couldn’t afford to forget that this woman, as barefoot and casually dressed as herself, was Nineteen Adze’s prize assistant. And therefore at least half as dangerous as her master. “No. Unless you’d like to tell me about the Emperor,” she said. “I was watching the newsfeeds all last evening, but newsfeeds assume a kind of familiarity with local political emotion that someone from outside the City can’t have—let alone someone who isn’t Teixcalaanli.”

  “What do you want to know that I would know? I’m not even a patrician, Ambassador.” Five Agate had a way of speaking—when she wasn’t talking about her son—which was so dryly self-deprecating that the humor was nearly invisible. Not even a patrician, but instead an ezuazuacat’s servant—a much more important post, even if it had lower rank at court.

  “Based on yesterday I’d take you for an analyst, which perhaps benefits from not being a patrician,” Mahit said. It was like fencing; but a friendlier version than with Nineteen Adze. So far.

  “All right,” Five Agate said with a trace of a Teixcalaanli-style smile, her eyes widening. “If I’m an analyst. What do you want to know that I would know?”

  And that you would tell me, Mahit thought. “Why doesn’t His Brilliance Six Direction have a certain successor? Surely even if he hasn’t got a child of his body he could have a child of his genetics. Or name a designate unrelated heir.”

  “He could,” Five Agate said. “In fact, he has.”

  “He has?”

  “He’s associated three people to the Imperium. Three designate co-imperial heirs, none of whom have any superiority over the others—they’re all co-emperor. Do Stationers not get centralized broadcast? The last time he designated anyone, Thirty Larkspur, there was nothing else but the ceremony on any newsfeed for months.”

  “We’re not Teixcalaanli,” Mahit said, thinking all the while of Thirty Larkspur, who Nineteen Adze had said was both an ezuazuacat like herself and benefiting from public fear. Public fear and trying to control import-export trade to benefit his own family’s planetary holdings. “Why would we get centralized broadcasts?”

  “Still. Just because you live two months out by ship—”

  Mahit said, pointedly, “We manage,” and watched Five Agate curl her lip up, wry, noticing that she’d slipped—the unconscious assumption that everyone in the universe would want exactly the same things as a Teixcalaanli person would want. Mahit took some pity on her, and said, “Though we remain ignorant of why Thirty Larkspur was worthy of being associated.”

  “His Excellency Thirty Larkspur is the most recent member of the Emperor’s ezuazuacatlim. He has risen quite quickly in court, based on his wisdom—and,” Five Agate said, tilting one of her hands ambivalently, “perhaps also for his strong family connections to the patricians from the planets on the Western Arc of the Empire.”

  “I see,” said Mahit. She thought she did, actually. When Six Direction had made Thirty Larkspur an imperial associate, he was shoring up his support from the wealthy inhabitants of the Western Arc systems. Thirty Larkspur’s family, along with the other patrician families who made the Western Arc— a distant string of resource- and manufacturing-wealthy systems all linked heavily together with jumpgates—would be assured of having a voice not only in the current government but in the next one. And—if Mahit understood the centripetal nature of the kind of usurpation attempt that did get celebrated in Teixcalaanli histories—the Emperor was also preventing those wealthy-but-distant aristocrats from throwing their support behind anyone but Thirty Larkspur. Revolts led by yaotlekim (like One Lightning’s almost-revolt happening right now, being shouted about in the City) came from the outer corners of the Empire, where people were more loyal to their own commanders than to some distant figure in the palace. They were often bankrolled by just the sort of people like the Western Arc families. By giving Thirty Larkspur power, the Emperor ensured that his family was loyal to the man who had given him that power: His Brilliance Six Direction.

  “You’ll see if you meet Thirty Larkspur, Ambassador.”

  “And the other successors? You said there were three.”

  “Eight Loop, of the Judiciary—she is nearly as old as His Brilliance Himself, they were crèchesibs together—”

  Mahit had read enough novelizations of Six Direction’s early life to recognize Eight Loop; his sister by either blood or emotion, the brutal politician behind Six Direction’s military brilliance and sun-given favor. She nodded. “Of course, Eight Loop.”

  “And Eight Antidote, who is hardly older than my Map,” said Five Agate. “But who is a child of Six Direction’s genetics. A ninety-percent clone.”

  “A very disparate crowd.”

  From behind them, Nineteen Adze said, “Who could replace His Brilliant Majesty, after all?”

  Mahit scrambled to her feet. “It takes three people?” she said, trying to feel less like she’d just been caught.

  “At least,” Nineteen Adze said. “Have you been interrogating my assistant?”

  “Mildly,” Mahit said. It seemed better to lead with self-awareness.

  “Did you learn what you wanted?”

  “Some of it.”

  “What else would you like to know?”

  That was a trap, baited and set with something as sweet and easy as the infinite weight of Nineteen Adze’s concerned regard, and Mahit decided to step into it anyhow. “How a succession would work in an ideal time, at an ideal place. The histories, Your Excellency, tend to focus on the exciting variants.”

  Nineteen Adze smiled, as if Mahit had answered entirely sufficiently. “An emperor has a child, of their body or their genetics, and the child is of age and mental capacity, and the emperor crowns them co-emperor. And thus, when the old emperor dies, there is already a new emperor, who the stars know and love and favor; made in blood, acclaimed in sunlight.”

  “How often does that happen,” Mahit said dryly.

  “Less often than some military commander backed by a hundred thousand loyal legionary soldiers claiming that the good regard of the universe has designated them emperor. The histories, Ambassador, are both exciting and all too accurate.”

  And how often does an emperor appoint a ruling council of three to succeed him? Not very often, I suspect, Mahit thought. Only when there is something not quite right. No suitable successor. Not entirely. Even if Thirty Larkspur and Eight Loop are meant to stand as regents for the ninety-percent clone, that’s going to be a long and contentious regency.

  “If you’ve had enough of politics,” said Nineteen Adze, “there’s tea. And you have acquired a visitor. In the front office.”

  “I have?” Mahit asked, surprised.

  “Go see,” Nineteen Adze said, and snapped her wrist, as if Mahit was an infograph in the wrong place.

  * * *

  Three Seagrass looked terrible, but it was a version of terrible that had improved relative to the last time Mahit had seen her, half catatonic after a City-induced seizure. Now she was ashen in the face and bruised under the eyes, but upright, impeccably dressed in her Information Ministry suit, her hair raked back from her forehead and knotted in an unfashionable but functional tail. Mahit had no idea what had possessed her to come here after the hospital had let her out instead of going home like a sensible person who had suffered a substantial neurological event.

  Neve
rtheless, seeing her standing in the middle of Nineteen Adze’s front office hit Mahit with a wave of relief—some small bit of familiarity here in Mahit’s new prison-sanctuary, some kind of continuity. And she had apparently cared enough to come find Mahit, instead of going home, however unsensible it might be.

  “You’re not dead!” Mahit said.

  “Not yet,” said Three Seagrass, “but it’s only a matter of time.”

  Mahit stopped short. “Are you serious? You should go back to the hospital—”

  “Mahit, I am making a joke in poor taste about the inevitability of mortality,” Three Seagrass said with a brittle gaiety. “And here you were telling me you were fluent in Teixcalaan.”

  “Humor is the last thing anyone learns in a second language,” Mahit said, but she knew she was blushing, embarrassed—as much for the overt concern as for the linguistic slip. “What are you doing here?”

  “When he came to pick me up at the hospital, Twelve Azalea implied you were being held against your will and forced to send unsigned infofiche messages through the palace maildrop. I thought I’d—rescue you? Being as you’re my responsibility, and I nearly got you blown up yesterday.”

  “Twelve Azalea may have overstated slightly,” Mahit said.

  “Only slightly,” said Three Seagrass, with a pointed look at Mahit’s all-white borrowed outfit.

  Mahit protested, “I was covered in Fifteen Engine’s blood. It’s not—”

  “You’ve spent the night with the most dangerous woman at court and you’re wearing her clothes.”

  Mahit pressed two fingers to the space between her eyebrows, trying not to laugh. “I swear, Three Seagrass, between your insinuations of impropriety and Twelve Azalea’s unsigned messages, I really will feel like I’m a character in Red Flowerbuds for Thirty Ribbon.”

  “Putting aside how I’m not sure how that ever got past the imperial censors and out to Lsel,” Three Seagrass said dryly, “and that I would never accuse an ezuazuacat of taking advantage of a foreign dignitary, at least not while in the recording range of that same ezuazuacat’s own front office, and certainly not an ezuazuacat who I personally respect and admire—Her Excellency isn’t letting you leave, is she?”

  There was a hectic flush in Three Seagrass’s cheeks, beneath the hollow shadows under her eyes. Mahit wished she’d sit down. But no, she stood in the center of the room like the reed Twelve Azalea called her, narrow and wind-whipped and still doing her job: warning Mahit that they were most certainly being observed. Mahit said, “There were demonstrations in Plaza Central Seven. Acclamations.”

  “A very good excuse to keep you off the streets. I’m not arguing, Mahit. It’s … the City is strange this morning, even this close to the center. Bombings do that, I imagine.”

  Mahit sat down herself, on the same couch she’d been interrogated on the evening previously, and made sitting an invitation for Three Seagrass to join her. It was gratifying when she did: sympathetic mirroring, and also not having to look at her, standing so very still and looking half shattered. She wondered if there were aftereffects of being attacked by the City itself. Physical, or psychological. Both, she’d guess, from how Three Seagrass carried herself.

  “Tell me how it’s strange?”

  Three Seagrass tilted one hand back and forth in the air. “Not enough pedestrians. It’s like a collective case of nerves. And of course Central Nine is blocked off, and the subway isn’t running—”

  Running, Mahit heard, an echo from a long distance off. A sensation like electric sparks ran from her shoulders through her elbows to hover in her outmost fingers, buzzing.

  “—keeps your new integrated subway running at all hours without operators,” Yskandr Aghavn is saying. He leans his elbows on the inlaid wood table that Ten Pearl—new-made Science Minister Ten Pearl, who wears a mother-of-pearl ring on each of his fingers like a living pun on his name—has installed in his office. “There’s surely some methodology the City used when the lines were separate, and some new methodology of yours now, and I admit to a profound curiosity.”

  Ten Pearl has refined Teixcalaanli expressionlessness to a high art: he conveys utter disdain with the tiniest of sighs, but Yskandr knows this kind of person—what he really wants is to show off his project. And his project was connecting every part of the transit of the entire planetary City, subway and rail both, and rendering them seamlessly autonomous. It had won him his ministry—he headed Science now.

  “Ambassador,” says Ten Pearl, “I cannot imagine that you need a subway on Lsel Station.”

  “We do not,” Yskandr agrees, willingly enough, “but an automated system that can be trusted to move hundreds of thousands of people, without error and without conflict—that, you must imagine, is of enormous interest to anyone who lives in a less-perfect automated system, as those of us who are planetless do. Have you embedded minds within the City’s extant AI? A corps of volunteers, like the Sunlit, all together watching over this system?”

  Ten Pearl warms to the subject: Yskandr watches him thaw by inches. Yskandr has said something to him which is almost right, but just wrong enough that his natural desire to inform and educate a barbarian is going to override his much more prudent wish to keep his new technology safely under wraps. His eyes widen a fraction. Yskandr waits for him: this is like drawing out a hungry animal from its lair.

  “Not like the Sunlit,” says Ten Pearl at last, “the City is not a collective mind.”

  That is already interesting, as it implies that the Sunlit are such a collective: and yet Yskandr had recently met a young Teixcalaanlitzlim who was very excited about joining the imperial police, and was very much an individual person. It implies a process, a making of the Sunlit, and Yskandr wonders whether it is anything like an imago process, and how an empire so completely opposed to neurological enhancement thought about it. None of this is worth asking; all of it would expose his own interests too obviously. What Yskandr asks is, “If not a collective, is there a mind?”

  “If you consider an artificial, algorithm-driven intelligence a mind, Ambassador—then yes, the City now has a mind, and that mind watches the subway for conflicts.”

  “How remarkable,” Yskandr says, with only the faintest edge of mockery. “An infallible algorithm.”

  Ten Pearl says, “It hasn’t failed me,” implying that it is good enough to have made him Science Minister, and Yskandr thinks: It hasn’t failed you yet.

  More electric prickles swam in Mahit’s fingers. Her nose filled with the remembered scent of ozone, the blue flash of light from the City’s algorithm going very, very wrong and catching Three Seagrass unawares and—

  She was back, alone again in her body instead of remembering some conversation Yskandr had had more than a decade ago.

  Three Seagrass was still talking. Mahit thought she’d missed perhaps a half second, nothing more—a half second with an entire flash of memory in it, minutes of it. “—and the acclamation in Central Seven wasn’t the only mass gathering, there was an old-fashioned sacrifice out in Ring Two, it showed up in the Information Ministry Bulletin this morning—”

  “You checked that from the hospital?”

  “Decryption’s good for making sure I still have all my higher brain functions,” Three Seagrass said, and Mahit began to get a sense of what had scared her worst about the scene in Plaza Central Nine. She could sympathize. The echoes of the imago-flash were still buzzing in her smallest two fingers. Ulnar nerve damage, or the facsimile of it.

  “And I was bored until Petal came by with your unsigned communiqués,” finished Three Seagrass.

  “I think he’s having fun,” Mahit confessed.

  “I know he is,” Three Seagrass said, and sighed. “He brought me chrysanthemums.”

  Mahit was trying to remember what chrysanthemums meant in Teixcalaanli symbolism, and coming up mostly blank—eternal life? Because they were star-shaped?—when Nineteen Adze, emerging from the doorway like a sudden apparition, said, “How sweet of
your friend, asekreta. I’m pleased to see you’ve survived yesterday’s unfortunate accident.”

  Three Seagrass made to get to her feet and Mahit put her hand on her forearm—personal space norms or not—and held her still. “If I’m Your Excellency’s guest,” she said to the both of them, “then Three Seagrass is mine, and she’s welcome where I am.”

  Nineteen Adze laughed, a short, bright sound. To Mahit she said, “Of course, Ambassador, as if I would be so rude to the guest of my guest,” and then, sitting across from them, she looked Three Seagrass plainly in the face and told her, “Three days and you’ve got her loyalty. I’ll remember you.”

  To Three Seagrass’s credit, she didn’t flinch, and she didn’t take her arm away from Mahit’s hand. “I’ll be honored by your recollection,” she said.

  Mahit thought she ought to say something, if only as an attempt to reclaim some control over the conversation, if such a thing was even possible with Nineteen Adze and Three Seagrass both in the room. “What makes a sacrifice old-fashioned?”

  She sounded like an ignorant barbarian, but she hardly had a choice about that. Not here. Not now.

  “Someone died,” Three Seagrass said.

  “Someone chose to die,” Nineteen Adze corrected her. “Some citizen made opening cuts from wrist to shoulder and knee to thigh and bled out in a sun temple, calling on the ever-burning stars to take them up in exchange for something they wanted.”

  Mahit’s mouth was dry. She thought of the vivid spill of Fifteen Engine’s arterial blood over his shirtfront and her face. A sacrifice for no particular reason. A Teixcalaanlitzlim would describe it that way. Not a death he chose. A waste of a sacrifice. “What does a citizen get, in exchange for their life?” she asked.

  Three Seagrass, whose arm was still under Mahit’s fingers, said, “Remembered,” sharp and sure.