A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  Mahit wasn’t exactly sure of that, but she could damn well pretend to be for the length of some political theater. She squeezed Three Seagrass’s fingers back, and let them go. Walked a little farther away from the dais, into an open space in the glitter of the crowd. She could feel the focus of the room shift around her—from the Emperor on the dais, sitting back now and murmuring something to his tiny clone, audiences over, to where the barbarian ambassador had put herself right under the lights in an open space, a public declaration that something important was about to happen and maybe they should watch.

  Ten Pearl, for an ixplanatl—and surely the Science Minister was a scientist, and not just an appointed bureaucrat—had enough theatricality in him to know that Mahit had taken his offer of a public meeting and accepted the gambit. This was as public as was available in Palace-Earth. He had to know it. The next five minutes would be all over the newsfeeds in the morning, right next to holographs of Mahit with her wrists in the Emperor’s hands, and he came striding up to meet her in a swirl of deep-red coattails, a bony man with a scientist’s hunched shoulders. He was older than he’d been in the memory-flash—more stooped—but he still wore a ring on each finger: thin bands of mother-of-pearl, stoneless. For his name—ostentatious, but in a self-deprecating sort of way. Mahit admired it. As Yskandr had admired it, the same rueful appreciation of a joke. Whether the feeling was genuine to Mahit she honestly didn’t know.

  “Ambassador,” Ten Pearl said. “Congratulations on your investiture.”

  Mahit bowed over her fingertips. “Much appreciated,” she said, a full level of formality lower than she ought to have kept to at court. But she’d planned to play the wide-eyed foreigner at this meeting and she was going to go through with it, even if she was still buzzing with imago-induced neurochemicals—the oxytocin rush from meeting the Emperor, the echo of Yskandr’s conversation with this man fifteen years ago. The subway. The City as a mind, an algorithm that watched where everyone was, and ran seamlessly in response.

  “I’m terribly sorry for the unfortunate incident that befell your predecessor,” Ten Pearl went on. “I feel personally responsible; I ought to have inquired after his biological sensitivities.”

  His biological sensitivities! What a way to phrase it. Mahit hoped fervently she was not about to dissolve into hysterical giggling; it would wreck the play for the newsfeeds. “I’m sure there was nothing you could have done about it,” she said, managing to stay straight-faced. “Lsel Station bears no enmity toward the Science Ministry, of course.” Even a barbarian would know enmity; it was a rote diplomatic phrase. It was what you had before you started a war.

  “You’re quite understanding,” Ten Pearl said. “A credit to your government. They’ve certainly made a solid choice with you.”

  “I hope so,” Mahit said. Fawning, wide-eyed, a credulous provincial. Not a political threat. Not at all, not even with how the Emperor had greeted her. Of course it wouldn’t hold up for long—Ten Pearl was the only one she was playing this particular game with—but this was the game for the newsfeeds, and it might give her some cover. A few days. A week, before someone tried to kill her like they’d killed Yskandr, who had clearly been quite dangerous.

  She hadn’t really thought of it like that before. That she was buying time.

  It knocked the remains of the neurochemical high right back down to baseline.

  “Ambassador Aghavn did not leave very many notes,” she went on, shrugging as if to say what can be done about the errors of the dead, “but I would of course like to continue to explore whatever projects he was working on with the Science Ministry.” A quick breath, and then she let her face fall into the pattern of Yskandr’s expressions, the familiar-unfamiliar stretch of wider muscles, deeper-set eyes, and said: “Automated systems—without error and without conflict—such algorithms have certainly persisted.”

  Ten Pearl looked at her a fraction too long—had she been too obvious, leaving bait for a more private meeting than this? Using what Yskandr had said, so long ago—but it had felt correct—and then Ten Pearl nodded, saying, “Perhaps we can resurrect a little of what Ambassador Aghavn wanted to achieve, between the two of us—he was so interested in our automated systems, and how they might be applied on your station. I’m sure you are as well. Have your liaison arrange a time and place. I’m sure we can fit you in sometime this week.”

  Resurrect was a terrible choice of word. “Of course,” Mahit said. She bowed again. “I hope for many future accomplishments for both of us.”

  “Naturally you do,” said Ten Pearl. He stepped closer, a fraction past the norms of Teixcalaanli personal space, into that precise zone of closeness that Mahit was most comfortable with: how friends stood on Lsel, where there wasn’t enough space to be standoffish. “Do be careful, Ambassador,” he said.

  “Of what?” Mahit asked. She wouldn’t break the illusion of incompetence.

  “You’re already attracting a thousand eyes, just like Aghavn did.” Ten Pearl’s smile was perfectly Teixcalaanli, mostly in the cheeks and in a widening of the eyes, but Mahit could tell it was a show regardless. “Look around. And think of the eyes of that automated system you and your predecessor so admire.”

  “Oh,” said Mahit. “Well. We are in front of the imperial throne.”

  “Ambassador,” said Three Seagrass, materializing at Mahit’s side, “I recall you wanted to watch the oration contest. It is about to begin. Perhaps Minister Ten Pearl would also like to hear the newest compositions from our court’s poets?”

  She’d spoken very slowly and clearly, as if she didn’t know that Mahit could understand Teixcalaanli at full speed. Mahit could have picked her up and spun her around in gratitude for understanding and participating, without instruction. Was this how she’d been supposed to feel all this time, if Yskandr had remained with her? How an imago should make their successor feel: two people accomplishing one goal, without needing to consult. Perfect synchronicity.

  “I wouldn’t want to distract the Ambassador,” said Ten Pearl. “Go on.” He waved a hand at where Nine Maize and a cluster of other courtiers had begun to assemble, off to the left of the dais. Mahit expressed her gratitude to him again—tripped deliberately over the pronunciation of the most formal thanks, even though she knew she was pushing her luck, but it was so satisfying to see him try to figure out if she was lying. And how she was lying.

  When she and Three Seagrass were safely out of his earshot, she leaned down and murmured, “I thought that went well.”

  “I thought you said you needed to sit down and rest, not that you needed to play at uncivilization with the Science Minister,” Three Seagrass hissed, but her eyes were glittering-bright.

  “Did you have fun?” Mahit said, realizing as she said it that she wasn’t as done with the neurochemical imago-effect as she’d thought—she still felt sparkling, giddily pleased. She hadn’t exactly felt that way during the conversation with Ten Pearl, but now, with Three Seagrass hanging on her arm—

  “Yes, I had fun! Are you going to be like this all the time? He isn’t a fool, Mahit, he’ll have you figured out by the time I set up that meeting.”

  “It’s not for him,” Mahit said. “It’s for the audience. The court and the newsfeeds.”

  Three Seagrass shook her head. “No other job is ever going to be this interesting, is it?” she said. “I promised I’d get you a drink. Come on. They’re about to start.”

  * * *

  Somewhere in the middle of the second oration, an acrostic ode that simultaneously spelled out the name of the poet’s hypothetical lost beloved via the opening letters of each line and told a heart-wrenching story of his self-sacrifice to save his shipmates from a vacuum breach, Mahit had the sudden realization that she was standing in the Teixcalaanli court, hearing a Teixcalaanli poetry contest, while holding an alcoholic drink and accompanied by a witty Teixcalaanli friend.

  Everything she had ever wanted when she was fifteen. Right here.

  S
he thought it should probably have made her feel happy, instead of abruptly unreal. Disconnected—depersonalized. Like she was happening to someone else.

  The orations were good. Some of them were better than good—driving rhythms over clever internal rhyme, or an orator whose delivery of that particular Teixcalaanli style of half-sung, half-spoken rapid-fire chant was exceptionally fluid. Exquisite imagery washed over Mahit in waves, and she felt nothing. Nothing aside from wishing that she could have copies of every poem written down, confined to glyphs that she could read on her own someplace quiet and silent and still. If she could just read the poems—speak them in her own voice, try out the rhythms and the cadences, find how they moved on her tongue—surely she’d feel the power of them. She always had before.

  She drank from her glass. Three Seagrass had brought her some spirit distilled from a grain she didn’t know. It was the pale gold color of all the swarming lights, and burned going down her throat.

  Nine Maize’s oration, when it came, was the epigram Three Seagrass had promised it would be. He’d hardly begun—only took his place, cleared his throat, and recited a three-line stanza:

  Every skyport harbor overflows

  Citizens carry armfuls of imported flowers.

  These things are ceaseless: star-charts, disembarkments

  when he hesitated just long enough to signal a shift, a caesura. Mahit felt the entire room catch on his held breath. No matter how little she had liked him, she saw why he was the toast of the court’s literati: what charisma he had was amplified the instant he spoke in verse. It was what he was made for. On Lsel he’d have been a candidate for an imago-line of poets, if Lsel had had such a thing.

  “The curl of unborn petals holds a hollowness,” said Nine Maize.

  Then he sat down again.

  There was no release of tension. The sense of unease remained, floating like a miasma. The next orator came forward in the midst of the awkward silence, the scrape of her shoes on the floor audible. She fumbled the first line of her own composition and had to begin again.

  Mahit turned to Three Seagrass, questioning.

  “Politics,” murmured Three Seagrass. “That was … a critique. In several ways. I really thought Thirty Larkspur had Nine Maize under his thumb, but people can be so surprising.”

  “I’d think it was most critical of Eight Antidote?” Mahit said. “The child. Unborn petals…”

  “Yes,” Three Seagrass said, her eyebrows knit together, “but Thirty Larkspur’s the heir who is most responsible for increasing importation of in-Empire goods to the City. It’s why he has money—he’s bringing it in from the Western Arc systems, that’s where his family is from. And there’s that suggestion of corruption for every citizen carrying a flower … every import being somehow poisoned … as if Thirty Larkspur’s wealth is as bad as importing objects from outside Teixcalaan entirely.”

  Politics by means of literary analysis. Were there aptitudes that tested for that, or was it something a Teixcalaanlitzlim would learn through intense exposure? Mahit could imagine Three Seagrass as a child, deciphering the political messages in The Buildings with her school peers at lunch. It wasn’t difficult to picture.

  “Critical of everyone save Eight Loop, then,” she said.

  “She only survives pillory by overt omission,” Three Seagrass said. “I think it’s deeper than just which heir is best, Mahit. Why else would Nine Maize make such a dangerous choice in topics?”

  Mahit thought of the fundamental assumption of Teixcalaanli society: that collapse between world and Empire and City—and how if there was such a collapse, importation was uneasy, foreign was dangerous, even if that importation was just from a distant part of the Empire. And barbarians like herself oughtn’t be able to conceptualize why a poem about the perilous corruption of some other planet’s flowers might be, in fact, designed to make a Teixcalaanlitzlim nervous.

  But if a system was no longer foreign—if the world was large enough, the Empire large enough, to encompass and subsume all that was barbaric about that world—well, it wasn’t barbaric anymore. It wasn’t threatening anymore. If Nine Maize was pointing out the threat of importation, he was calling for—or at least suggesting—that Teixcalaan act to normalize that threat. To civilize it. And Teixcalaan had always civilized—had always made something Teixcalaanli—with force. Force, like a war. Nine Maize wasn’t really talking to Thirty Larkspur; Nine Maize was shoring up whatever political factions were preparing for war. All those troop movements. One Lightning, with his legions and his shouting partisans—but also Six Direction, setting the fleet into the kind of readiness that had marked his early reign, when he’d been a star-conquering emperor himself.

  “Where are One Lightning’s supporters tonight, Three Seagrass?” she asked. “They’re who that poem was for. For anyone who is interested in a stronger, more centralized, less importation-focused Teixcalaan.”

  “He’s a populist and this is court, it’s not fashionable. But I’m sure—oh,” Three Seagrass said. “Oh. Well. We were looking for the war.”

  “A war very soon,” Mahit said, uneasily thrilled with discovery. “An annexation. A conquest war. For the purpose of making places less foreign.”

  Three Seagrass reached over and plucked Mahit’s glass of alcohol out of her hand, took a large sip, and returned it. “We haven’t had an annexation war since before I was born.”

  “I know,” said Mahit, “we do have history on the stations. We were enjoying Teixcalaan being a quiescent neighboring predator—”

  “You make us sound like a mindless animal.”

  “Not mindless,” Mahit said. It was as close as she could bring herself to an apology. “Never that.”

  “But an animal.”

  “You do devour. Isn’t that what we’re talking about? A war of annexation.”

  “It’s not—devour would be if we were xenophobes or genocides, if we didn’t bring new territories into the Empire.”

  Into the world. Shift the pronunciation of the verb, and Three Seagrass could have been saying if we didn’t make new territories real, but Mahit knew what she meant: all the ways that being part of Teixcalaan gave a planet or a station prosperity. Economic, cultural—take a Teixcalaanli name, be a citizen. Speak poetry.

  “Let’s not argue, Three Seagrass,” she said. “I don’t want to.”

  Three Seagrass pressed her lips together. “We’re going to argue. I want to understand what you think. It’s my job. But we can argue later. The Emperor is going to announce the contest winner soon, look.”

  The orations were finished. Mahit had missed the last few entirely. None of them had disturbed the room the way Nine Maize had. Now the Emperor stood up, his ezuazuacatlim flanking him—had they conferred, chosen a winner together? She doubted that they could so quickly come to a conclusion, not when the group of them included Thirty Larkspur, two Teixcalaanlitzlim Mahit hadn’t met, and Nineteen Adze, resplendent still in white. Quite nearly a relief to look at, in all of the gleaming lights.

  Six Direction gestured, pointing out a poet who had made absolutely no impression on Mahit. She looked as surprised by her honor as the rest of the crowd, which hesitated on the verge of the expected acclamatory cheering as if they weren’t certain of what had happened either.

  “Who is that?” Mahit whispered to Three Seagrass.

  “Fourteen Spire,” Three Seagrass said. “She’s exquisitely dull in her basic competence and always has been. She’s never won anything before.”

  Nine Maize’s face was impassive. Mahit couldn’t tell if he was pleased to be so obviously snubbed or angry about it; whether he’d meant to ruin the evening so firmly. Fourteen Spire prostrated herself before the Emperor and received a blown-glass flower as her prize. Got up again. The assembled courtiers managed to shout her name, and Mahit joined in—it would have been stranger not to.

  “Are you going to finish the drink?” asked Three Seagrass when the noise had died away.

  “Yes. Why
?”

  “Because I am going to have to talk about Fourteen Spire’s use of assonance for the rest of the evening, and you’re going to have to listen, and we should both be slightly more inebriated.”

  “Oh,” said Mahit. “When you put it like that.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  SIX OUTREACHING PALMS (TEIXCALAAN HIGH COMMAND) to FLEET CAPTAIN THREE SUMAC, 249.3.11-SIX DIRECTION, code 19 (TOP SECRET): Prepare for immediate withdrawal of Battle Groups Eight through Thirteen of the Twenty-Sixth Legion from active engagement in Odile. Battle Group Nine will remain in place under the command of ikantlos Eighteen Turbine. Proceed immediately with Groups Eight through Thirteen to the following coordinates to rendezvous with the rest of the Third Imperial Fleet and prepare for imminent jumpgate travel toward the Parzrawantlak Sector. Expedite. MESSAGE ENDS. COORDINATES FOLLOW.

  —message received by Fleet Captain Three Sumac in orbit around Odile-1 249th day, 3rd year, 11th indiction of the Emperor Six Direction of Teixcalaan

  * * *

  Lsel Station thanks you for your interest in serving our people in our deepest tradition: movement through space. We of the Pilots’ Guild are proud to welcome prospective pilots to this informational session. This pamphlet summarizes how to adequately prepare for application to the Pilots’ Guild during the period approaching aptitude testing. Prospective candidates should keep in mind the following requirements: mathematical preparation in classical and quantum physics, basic chemistry, engineering; physical condition rated Excellent-2 with capacity to reach Excellent-4 in hand-eye coordination; high scores on aptitudes in spatial awareness and proprioception; high scores on aptitudes in group cohesion as well as independent initiative …

  —pamphlet distributed to youth considering application to the Lsel Guild of Pilots (age 10–13)

  SOMEWHERE in the middle of her third glass of the pale spirit Three Seagrass kept bringing her (Three Seagrass herself was drinking something milky-white that she called ahachotiya, which Mahit was convinced meant “spoilt burst fruit”—at least from her understanding of the roots of the unfamiliar word—and couldn’t quite figure out why it was in any way desirable to consume, let alone consume multiple instances of), Mahit found herself standing on the edge of a circle of Teixcalaanlitzlim, watching them have what she could only describe as not a poetry contest but a battle of wits conducted entirely in extemporaneous verse. It had begun as a sort of game: one of Three Seagrass’s evanescently clever friends took up the last line of Fourteen Spire’s dull and prize-winning poem, said “Let’s play, shall we?” and proceeded to use that last line as her first one, composing a quatrain that shifted the rhythm from the standard fifteen-syllable political verse form to something that was absolutely stuffed full of dactyls. And then she’d pointed her chin at another one of Three Seagrass’s friends, in challenge—and he took her last line, and apparently came up with a perfectly acceptable quatrain on his own, with no preparatory time. Mahit caught a few of his references: he was imitating the style of a poet she’d read, Thirteen Penknife, who used the same vowel-sound pattern repeated on either side of a caesura.