A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  Mahit could see the way her career on Teixcalaan might curve, now: could see herself becoming like Ambassador Gorlaeth of Dava, trying to find commonality with the other newly conquered. She must have looked stricken, because Three Seagrass said, “Look. We know a lot more now than we did yesterday, and that’s not nothing.”

  Mahit admitted that they did. “I wonder if this is what Thirty Larkspur was trying to warn me about,” she said. “The deal is off.”

  “You mean that your predecessor had somehow made an arrangement to keep Lsel Station out of the path of annexation,” said Three Seagrass.

  Mahit nodded. “And whatever he agreed to was an agreement between him and … His Majesty, I suspect. And now that he’s dead, the deal is off.”

  “If I was a suspicious person…” Three Seagrass began.

  “You are a suspicious person, you work for the Information Ministry,” Mahit said.

  Three Seagrass composed herself into a picture of innocence, which didn’t have any reassuring effects at all. “If I was a suspicious person,” she said again, “I would suspect that it is extremely convenient for whoever wanted the fleet to head toward Parzrawantlak that he is dead.”

  “And if I was a suspicious person,” Mahit said, “I would agree with you. Three Seagrass, can you get me a private audience with His Majesty?”

  Three Seagrass pressed her lips together, considering. “Under normal circumstances,” she said, “I’d tell you that I could, but there’d be a three-month waiting period and I couldn’t guarantee you’d be alone. But under the circumstances, I believe I might just be able to do better than that. You have very good, very official reasons to want to speak directly to His Illuminate Majesty.”

  “I do,” Mahit said. “Arrange it. We have this delightfully equipped office, we might as well use it.”

  “It’s all being recorded,” Three Seagrass said, slightly apologetic. “I’d guarantee Nineteen Adze keeps track of every gesture and every glyph.”

  “I know,” Mahit said. “But I don’t see us having many other options, do you?”

  “As long as you know—”

  “Arrange it,” Mahit said, more firmly, and Three Seagrass nodded, got up, and went to open one of the infograph screens. Mahit instantly felt better. She knew it was a false feeling—the sensation of being in control of the headlong, desperate rush was illusory, even if you took the initial leap under your own power—but she could use whatever comfort she could find.

  Every moment she wasn’t doing something else, she imagined the vector of ships.

  What could she do?

  It was a logic problem, or something out of classical physics: given these constraints, what action was possible? Given: that she was trapped in the heart of Palace-North, with only electronic access to her own files and messages, and no access at all to the pile of physical mail which was certainly growing in size and urgency in her own office. Given: that every action she took on an electronic system while here in Nineteen Adze’s apartment would be monitored, which further constrained her ability to communicate unguardedly. Given: that Lsel Station would not know yet that the might of Teixcalaan was about to rush over them like the casually outflung loop of a solar flare, and had nothing like sufficient military capacity to meaningfully resist a full Teixcalaanli expedition. Given: that her predecessor had been murdered, perhaps to allow this conquest to proceed in this direction. Given: that her imago’s presence as conscious memory was malfunctioning, leaving her with only the ghosts of neurochemical feelings that didn’t belong to her, and flashes of memory so vivid they were like living another life. Given: that her imago’s malfunction might have been sabotage, and—think about it, Mahit, let yourself really think about it—that sabotage might have taken place long before she ever arrived on the Jewel of the World—might, in fact, have originated with her own people, for reasons she didn’t understand.

  Also given: that if Mahit didn’t do something she was going to shatter out of her skin with nerves. By the rosy quartz windows, Three Seagrass was enveloped in a little shell of infographs, murmuring subvocalizations to her cloudhook as if she were talking to an imago herself. Mahit stood up.

  Better to take action than to be paralyzed by the thousands of shifting possibilities. Human beings walked and breathed and stepped out of cycling airlock doors to patch thinning places on a station’s skin, all without thinking about how their limbs moved, where gravity had caught them, whether the internal bellows of lung and diaphragm had inflated enough or too little. She just needed to—not think. Or, to think, but to keep acting while she thought. Like speaking to Thirty Larkspur at the banquet: there was no time for paralysis. At the very least, she needed to make contact with Lsel and give them some idea of what she was dealing with.

  She could hope for advice, though she wasn’t sure what use advice even would be. She’d already disobeyed her only real directive when she’d admitted the existence of the imago-machines; she wasn’t sure if further directives would be any more sustainable. But she’d like to feel a little less alone. To hear any voice from Lsel. Any voice which wasn’t the stern and strange warning of Onchu of the Pilots, telling dead Yskandr to beware sabotage. That message hadn’t been for Mahit anyway. The warning of the weapon wasn’t for the weapon to hear.

  This was why there were imago-lines for diplomats. So no one would be alone.

  Yskandr, please. If you’re there at all—

  Static, like electric prickles down her arms. The ulnar nerves through the elbow to her smallest fingers. But the imago was just as silent as he’d been since that first hour in the morgue.

  No time for cascading neurological disaster either. She’d think about it later. She’d fix it later, somehow. Now Mahit summoned up her own infograph halo and, standing at the opposite end of the office from Three Seagrass, began to compose two messages to the Council on Lsel. She composed them at the same time. They looked like the same message—and how she wished she could show off what she was doing to Three Seagrass, so busily arranging meetings on her behalf. Three Seagrass would understand ciphering a second message inside the first, and she’d admire it.

  It wasn’t a good cipher. It wasn’t even a poetic cipher that would require a Teixcalaanli asekreta to fashionably decode. It was a book substitution cipher. Mahit had worked it out when she was a teenager, bored and playing at being Teixcalaanli: a master of intrigues and byzantine plots, a person who encrypted everything, and she’d used a Teixcalaanli glyph dictionary as her key. The most common one, Imperial Glyphbook Standard, the one which was distributed Empire-wide—and beyond the official borders of Teixcalaan—to teach barbarians and children to read. It had all the useful words, after all: “to hide,” and “to betray,” and so very many interlocking words for “civilization.” She’d picked Standard to make her cipher out of simply because it was the most likely to be present in any location. Not even Teixcalaanlitzlim could possibly remember every glyph in their ideographic writing system. There was a copy in Nineteen Adze’s library, and it was the work of only a few minutes for Mahit to go fetch it.

  Yskandr had laughed inside her skull when she’d suggested her old cipher to the Council as a method for hidden communication; had laughed more when they’d agreed. The ciphering process required that she write in Stationer, which had a thirty-seven-letter alphabet, and that the receiving decoder knew to look at the first letter of each Stationer word for the page number in IGS; the second letter for the line number; the first glyph in that table for the meaning. It wasn’t meant to be a hyper-secure code; just enough encryption to get messages through. A little cover. A shield.

  The message she wrote in Stationer she expected to be read, first by Nineteen Adze, then by the Imperial Censor Office, and perhaps even by the captain of the ship that would take it toward Lsel. It contained no more information than the newsfeeds had; instead, it recapitulated them exactly, along with—Mahit thought—a relatively reasonable note of distress and concern.

  That
extra distress and concern gave her enough words to encode the hidden message, an ungrammatical sequence of Teixcalaanli nouns and verbs: PRIORITY. Former ambassador compromised—movement (self, on foot, round-trip) restricted—memory bad—sovereignty threatened—request Council guidance.

  Even as Mahit was enclosing the double message in an infofiche stick she doubted guidance would reach her in time for it to matter. But she had asked. And she had provided warning. Even if it was clear from any examination of the fleet’s vectors that they were headed toward Lsel space, it was possible that no broadcasts of the fleet vectors would be sent out toward Lsel anyhow—why would the Empire warn their prey?

  She tucked the stick into the silver basket marked for outgoing mail on its table to the left of the office’s door, where it sat innocuous with all the others aside from its red-wax marker for urgency, and the red-and-black sticky tab for off-planet communication. Soon Seven Scale would appear on his rounds through the office and bear it away into the City, through the labyrinth of the Censor Office and out.

  “Three Seagrass,” Mahit said, turning back and thinking of the similar basket back in the ambassadorial apartments, certainly overflowing now with angry messages on their pretty sticks, “is there any useful way I can get access to the work I’m supposed to be doing? The infofiche messages?”

  “Huh,” said Three Seagrass. She considered it. “Maybe part of it. How do you feel about breaking a very minor law?”

  “What kind of minor law?” Mahit asked.

  “The kind a Teixcalaanlitzlim breaks the first time when she’s about nine years old. Using someone else’s cloudhook.”

  “I am sure,” Mahit said dryly, “that it gets more complicated when the person doing the using is not a citizen.”

  Three Seagrass reached up to the side of her head and lifted her cloudhook from over her eye. “Absolutely,” she said, “but that just means you shouldn’t get caught. Come over here.”

  Mahit came close. “We’re being recorded,” she said, even though she knew Three Seagrass was well aware.

  “Bend down, you barbarians are unreasonably tall.”

  Mahit bent—thought suddenly and vividly of kneeling in front of the Emperor—and then Three Seagrass was settling the cloudhook over her eye. Half her vision went to data, an endless stream of it that resolved into a list of queries and requests. The interface was surprisingly intuitive: the cloudhook recalibrated to Mahit’s own tiny eye movements rapidly, and the structure of the files was a version of the electronic version of her own office, just seen through Three Seagrass’s accesses. It was a very small amount of cover, but it was cover. If she used Three Seagrass’s cloudhook to access her own files, Nineteen Adze wouldn’t be able to see that she’d gone in at all. Only that she was wearing her liaison’s cloudhook.

  “The lower-level requests to the Ambassador’s office—visa queries, that sort of thing—are all things you could be telling me to do,” Three Seagrass said, “if I wasn’t having a fight on your behalf with three protocol officers and a queue system.” Her fingers were warm on Mahit’s temples. “If you want to do work while I sort out when you get to speak with the Emperor Himself, there’s your list.”

  “Thanks,” Mahit said. She straightened. “You don’t need it?” She gestured at the cloudhook. Half her vision was gone, like she’d had a hemispheric brain injury that had replaced her eye with a to-do list.

  “Not for an hour or so. Be useful, Ambassador.”

  Mahit thought she sounded—fond. Indulgent, even.

  It was going to hurt so much if she had to stop pretending Three Seagrass was possessed of no agenda but her own ambition and a mild affection for barbarians.

  * * *

  The list of queries to the Ambassadorial Office of Lsel Station was approximately half requests to have a visa renewed and half somewhat offensive public interest queries as to “how Stationers conduct their daily lives, particularly with regard to holiday celebrations or other days of local excitement!” Mahit would have been irritated by all of them had they not been a perfectly distracting way of spending the time. As it was, answering tabloid journalists and distressed commercial traders was quite soothing. It took her nearly an hour to notice that there was one particular sort of business query that she had received absolutely none of: no one had written to ask her what she wanted done with Yskandr’s body, still nestled in the basement of the Judiciary morgue. It had been more than half a week since ixplanatl Four Lever had asked her what she wanted done with it, and yet no one had followed up—not even an undersecretary.

  Had they asked, and someone had prevented her from receiving the request? It could be as simple as her lack of access to messages sent on infofiche sticks, but surely someone placed as highly as ixplanatl Four Lever would have noticed that the Lsel Ambassador was quite publicly living in the offices of the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, and rerouted the mail. She would assume that if the request had been sent, it had been deliberately mislaid.

  Or Four Lever hadn’t asked, assuming that she would make inquiries first. Or hadn’t asked, assuming that until she made an inquiry he could keep hold of Yskandr’s body. Mahit thought of how she’d first met Nineteen Adze, sweeping into the morgue without any sort of retinue or reason for being there. Imagined her hands, unerringly reaching for the imago-machine at the base of Yskandr’s skull to retrieve it before Mahit could have the body properly burnt. Someone had given her access. Perhaps it had been Four Lever. Mahit could imagine many things an ezuazuacat could provide for a Judiciary scientist in exchange for an unsupervised visit to the dead. Worse, she could also imagine many other people who could trade favors or influence or money for an hour or two alone with the body of her predecessor and all of his illegal imported neurological technology.

  It was a problem. It was a problem that couldn’t be fixed by simply requisitioning the body, either: Mahit imagined having the undecaying corpse of her predecessor brought into Nineteen Adze’s office complex—perhaps she could prop it up on the couch, or lean it against the wall like a coat rack.

  That would certainly make Nineteen Adze herself happy.

  There had to be a better solution.

  “Three Seagrass?” Mahit asked. “How long have you known Twelve Azalea?”

  Three Seagrass extricated herself from her whirl of infographs. “Did he write to the office?” she asked, puzzled. “I thought he was entirely enamored of sending you anonymous messages on infofiche sticks.”

  “He didn’t write, no,” Mahit said. “But I might write to him. Do you trust him?”

  “That is a very different question than how long I’ve known him.”

  “The one leads into the other,” said Mahit.

  “Do you trust me?”

  She could look so calm and ask such personal questions. Maybe it was a Teixcalaanli trait. It reminded Mahit of Nineteen Adze, which didn’t exactly make her feel more trusting.

  Nevertheless, she said, “As much as I trust anyone in the City,” and said it honestly.

  “And with us only working together for half a week.” Three Seagrass smiled, the corners of her eyes tilting up. “Not that you are spoiled much for choice, considering! I like Twelve Azalea, Mahit. We’ve been friends since we both joined the Information Ministry as tiny ignorant cadets. But he is conniving and theatrical and convinced he’s immortal.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Mahit said dryly.

  “So trusting him depends entirely on what you want him to do. What do you want him to do?”

  “Something he’ll probably enjoy, as it’s both conniving and theatrical. And … secret.” Mahit gestured at the infograph screens, and then at her ears.

  “Well, he’ll like it. Whatever it is. But I can’t tell you if he’ll do it if I don’t know what it is.”

  Mahit said, “This message-task list that I’m using—that’s on your cloudhook, isn’t it. And a person’s cloudhook is private to them.”

  “Or to whoever is wearing it,” Three Seagras
s said, pleased. “I think I get the idea. Pass it back over when you’re ready.”

  Composing a message to the Ambassador of Lsel and sending it to herself was fairly trivial. Mahit wrote, drawing glyphs in the air with her finger on the cloudhook’s projected screen that only she could see: Twelve Azalea should return to the morgue and retrieve the machine we discussed. Then she lifted Three Seagrass’s cloudhook off her head, blinking at the restoration of the other side of her vision, and gave it back.

  After she had read the message, Three Seagrass asked, “Do you want that for yourself?”

  “No,” said Mahit. “I have one, and besides, that one isn’t useful anymore—it’s recording decay and nothing else.”

  “Could it record something else?”

  Mahit thought about it. “If it was correctly installed, maybe? I’m not sure. I really am not an ixplanatl, Three Seagrass.”

  “Mm. Well, Twelve Azalea will do it, I’m sure, and he’ll even keep quiet about it, but—” She shrugged.

  “But what?”

  “You’ll owe him a favor. And he’ll probably take it apart and make schematic drawings. He’ll tell you it’s out of his own curiosity, and he won’t even lie. Him being curious is how we used to get into half of the trouble we got into.”

  “How,” Mahit asked, amused despite herself, “did you get into the other half?”

  “I make friends with terribly interesting people with terribly complicated problems.”

  “So nothing has changed,” Mahit said, feeling on the verge of laughter; feeling again the absolute danger of thinking Three Seagrass was her friend like a Stationer could be her friend.

  “I did say you were my first barbarian. So, a little change.”

  Like that. That unbridgeable gap. Maybe if Mahit hadn’t been the ambassador, if she’d met her at an oration contest, in some other life where Mahit had never taken up Yskandr’s imago-line but had won a travel visa and a scholarship—maybe in that life she could have argued. Told Three Seagrass more of the truth of what she felt.