A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  He must have meant was she a failure of the imago process. Was the fact that she wasn’t Yskandr on purpose or a mistake. And if it was a mistake, was it a purposeful mistake—did the Emperor know about the sabotage? He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have, if he’d asked if she was a failure or a warning. Mahit imagined, abruptly, Six Direction’s expression on the unlined child’s face of Eight Antidote. The same patient calculation. The child was a ninety-percent clone; his face would grow into this face, given muscle memory. The idea was repulsive. A child couldn’t stand up to an imago. He’d drown in the older memory; a child hardly had a self to hold on to yet. That was probably what Six Direction wanted.

  “If I were a failure-state,” Mahit said, “here to show you the uncertainty of imago-transfer, I certainly wouldn’t tell you that I was.”

  And if I am a warning, I don’t even know it. She shied away from the concept—she couldn’t think through it, here, and even the edges of the idea, flavored with Onchu’s secret messages to the dead, made her furious. That Lsel would have sent her, flawed, to prove some sort of point to Six Direction, a rebuke, a broken thing—but she couldn’t be furious. Not now. She was alone with the Emperor.

  He was asking, “Would you demonstrate it, instead?”

  “I imagine I wouldn’t have a choice,” Mahit said. “So it’s really up to you to decide, Your Illuminate Brilliance, exactly what I am.”

  “Perhaps I will continue to see what you’ll do.” When he shrugged, the sunlamps orbiting his shoulders moved with his motion, as if he and they were some cohesive machine, a system much larger than a man that responded to a man’s will. “Tell me one thing, Ambassador Dzmare, before we return to negotiations and answers. Do you carry Yskandr’s imago, or are you someone else’s memory altogether?”

  “I’m Mahit Dzmare,” Mahit said, which felt quite like lying by omission, a small betrayal of Lsel, so she went on: “And I’ve never carried any imago but Yskandr Aghavn.”

  The Emperor met her eyes, as if he was evaluating just who was behind them, and did not let her look away. Mahit thought, Yskandr, if there ever was a time for you to start talking to me …

  Imagined him saying, dry and archly removed and suffused with recognition. She knew the precise tone he’d use.

  Didn’t say it.

  The Emperor asked, “When we discussed the Western Arc families, and what to do about their demands for exclusive trade, what was your opinion?”

  Mahit had no idea what Yskandr had thought. Her Yskandr had met the Emperor socially, but had never been so highly regarded as to discuss policy with him. “That was before my time,” she said, evading.

  She was still being observed. Evaluated. The Emperor’s eyes were such a dark brown they were nearly black—his cloudhook a stripped-down net of near-invisible glass—she wanted to knot her hands together in her lap, to stop them from having a chance of shaking. It would hurt too much, if she did.

  “Yskandr,” said the Emperor, and for a moment Mahit was not sure if she was being addressed or if he was talking about her predecessor, “made many arguments and offered any number of things, trying to sway me away from expansion. It was fascinating, to see a mind so fluent in our language try so hard to convince us to act contrary to all the millennia of our success. We spent hours in this room, Mahit Dzmare.”

  “An honor for my predecessor,” Mahit murmured.

  “Do you think so?”

  “It would be one for me.” She wasn’t even lying.

  “So the commonality goes that far. Or perhaps you are merely being ambassadorial.”

  “Does it matter, Your Brilliance, which one?”

  Six Direction, when he smiled, smiled like a man from Lsel had shown him how: wrinkled cheeks drawn up, teeth visible. A learned motion, but one which felt shockingly familiar, even after just four days seeing only Teixcalaanli expressions. “You,” the Emperor declared, “are as slippery as Yskandr was.”

  Mahit shrugged, deliberately. She wondered if the few sunlamps which surrounded her were responding to her motion, too.

  He leaned forward. The light around him was warm where it spilled onto her shins and knees, as if his fever was mobile, could touch her. “It doesn’t work, Mahit,” he said. “Philosophy and policy are conditional—multiple, reactive. What would be true for Teixcalaan, touching Lsel, is simultaneously untrue for Teixcalaan touching some other border state, or Teixcalaan in its refined form here in the City. Empires have many faces.”

  “What doesn’t work?”

  “Asking us to make exceptions,” he said. “Yskandr did try. He was very good at trying.”

  “But you told him yes,” Mahit said, protesting.

  “I did,” said Six Direction. “And if you will pay what he promised, I’ll tell you the same.”

  Mahit needed to hear him say it. To be sure; to get out of the endless loops of her conjecture. “What did Yskandr promise you?”

  “The schematics to Lsel’s imago-machines,” the Emperor said, quite easily, like he was discussing the prices for electrical power, “and several for immediate Teixcalaanli use. In exchange for which I would guarantee the independent sovereignty of Lsel Station for as long as my dynasty holds the Empire. I thought it was a rather clever bargain, on his part.”

  It was in fact clever. For as long as his dynasty holds the Empire. A series of imago-emperors would be one single dynasty—one single man, endlessly repeated, if Six Direction really thought that the imago process was iterative instead of compilatory—and thus Lsel technology bought Lsel independence. In perpetuity. And Six Direction would escape the illness which was killing him, and live again in a body unmarked by age.

  Yskandr, Mahit thought, reaching, you must have been so self-satisfied when you came up with the terms.

  “Perhaps,” Six Direction went on, “you’d like to add some of your Lsel psychological therapists. I suspect their contributions to Teixcalaanli theories of mind might be quite fascinating.”

  How much of Lsel did he want to take? Take and devour and transform into something that wasn’t Lsel at all, but Teixcalaan. If he wasn’t the Emperor, she might have slapped him.

  If he wasn’t the Emperor, she might have laughed and asked what, exactly, the Teixcalaanli theory of mind involved. How wide is the concept of you?

  But he was the Emperor—grammatically and existentially—and he thought of all fourteen generations of Lsel imago lines as something that could contribute to Teixcalaan.

  The Empire, the world. The same word, benefiting equally.

  She hadn’t said anything for too long. Her head was full of the trajectories of all those Teixcalaanli military transports, rattling against how furious she was, how suddenly, miserably trapped she felt. Against the sick pain-pulse in her damaged hand, beating in time with her heart.

  “It took Yskandr years to come to such a decision, Your Brilliance,” she managed. “Allow me more than one evening of the honor of your company before I make mine.”

  “You would like to come back, then.”

  Of course she would. She was sitting in private audience with the Emperor of all Teixcalaan, and he was a challenge, and he took her seriously, and he’d taken her predecessor seriously, and how could she not want this? Even through the misery, she wanted it.

  What she said was, “If you would have me, Your Brilliance. My predecessor was clearly—of interest to you. I might be, as well. And you do me considerable favor, to talk so clearly.”

  “Clarity,” said Six Direction, still smiling that very Lsel smile, the one that made her want to grin back at him, conspiratorial, “is not a rhetorical virtue. But it is very useful, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” In a particular sense, this was the clearest conversation Mahit had had since she came to the City. She took a steadying breath—set her shoulders, trying to neither echo Yskandr’s body language nor mirror the Emperor’s—and took the offered conversational bait. “With your gracious permission to continue to f
ail at rhetoric, Your Brilliance: What made you want our imago-machines? Most people who aren’t Stationers find imago-lines quite … inexplicable. Inexplicable at best.”

  Six Direction closed his eyes and opened them again: a long, slow blink. “How old are you, Mahit?”

  “Twenty-six, by Teixcalaanli annual time.”

  “Teixcalaan has seen eighty years of peace. Three of your lives, stacked up, since the last time one part of the world tried to destroy the rest of it.”

  There were border skirmishes reported every week. There’d been an outright rebellion put down on the Odile System just a few days back. Teixcalaan was not peaceful. But Mahit thought she understood the difference Six Direction was so fixated on: those were skirmishes that brought war to outside the universe, to uncivilized places. The word he’d used for “world” was the word for “city.” The one that derived from the verb for “correct action.”

  “It is a long time,” she admitted.

  “It must continue,” said the Emperor Six Direction. “I cannot allow us to falter now. Eighty years of peace should be the beginning, not a lost age when we were more humane, more caring, more just. Do you see?”

  Mahit saw. It was simple and wrong and terrible: it was fear, of leaving the world unguided by a true and knowing hand.

  “You have seen my successors,” Six Direction went on. “Imagine with me, Ambassador Dzmare, the truly exceptional civil war we might have under their care.”

  * * *

  The external chambers of Palace-Earth were empty of everyone but Three Seagrass, who staggered to her feet when the irising inner doors spat Mahit back out again.

  “Were you asleep?” Mahit asked, wishing she could nap on a couch, even for ten minutes.

  Three Seagrass shrugged. Under the dim gold lights of the antechamber her brown skin looked grey. “Did you get what you wanted?”

  Mahit had no idea how to answer that. She was buzzing, shimmering, full up with poison secrets. What Yskandr had sold. Why Six Direction would do anything to remain himself, and Emperor. Nothing she could easily explain.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Before anyone notices we’ve misplaced ourselves.”

  Three Seagrass made a considering noise, hummed between her teeth. Mahit walked right by her, out of the antechamber door. The last thing she wanted to do was to explain herself. Not now.

  If she stopped to think.

  She was doing nothing but thinking.

  Three Seagrass came up behind her, at her left shoulder, a perfect shadow, just like she’d been at the oration contest.

  “Nineteen Adze left a message,” she said, just before they exited the Emperor’s chambers. “She said to tell you that she wasn’t going to stop you from doing anything ill-advised. That she wasn’t going to stop you at all.”

  Mahit shivered, knowing she’d been cut loose, and felt pathetically grateful to both Nineteen Adze and Three Seagrass anyhow.

  INTERLUDE

  AN imago-machine is small: the length of the smallest joint of a human thumb, at most. Even on a station of thirty thousand souls, and ten thousand preserved imago-lines alongside and within them, the entire storage facility for the machines is one small and sterile sphere of a room. It nestles close to the beating power-core heart of Lsel, insulated as far as it can be from the vicissitudes of space debris or cosmic rays or accidents of decompression: it is, Aknel Amnardbat has said, the safest place on the Station. The harbor of all Stationers: where the dead eventually come to rest, for a time, and then go out again, remade.

  Amnardbat stands in its direct center. On every surface but the small patch of floor containing her feet and the path from there to the door, the walls of the room are covered in sealed, labeled compartments: numbers. Names, sometimes, on the very oldest or most important containers for imago-lines. If she was to look up over her shoulder she would see a compartment labeled Heritage, where her own imago once came from, and where the imago she will become will go.

  She used to find this room soothing: utterly peaceful, a perfect reminder that all of Lsel was under her care, extending back into the past and forward into the future. Aknel Amnardbat thinks herself an archivist; if she lived on a green planet she’d call herself a gardener. It is her task to graft plant to plant, mind to mind, to preserve and design and let nothing of Lsel be lost.

  She used to find this room soothing.

  Some little time ago—six weeks, by the Teixcalaanli reckoning the Station has come to use, was using even before Amnardbat was born, it is by such small degrees that a culture is devoured, she had not ever known to notice that a “week” bore no resemblance to the rotation of Lsel, facing and unfacing again its sun—some little time ago she had stood here, and with the access granted to her as the Councilor for Heritage, caused one of those little containers to disgorge its contents into her waiting hands.

  She’d cleaned her nails with solvent, just before. Cleaned them, filed them to uncharacteristic points.

  The machine in her palms, then, had come from a container marked P-N (T.2). In the parlance of Heritage’s imago-machine codes, that meant Political-Negotiation—a designation of specialty, of type—and then Teixcalaan, for the imago-line of political negotiators sent to deal with the Empire—and 2, the second in a chain. The imago-machine that recorded Yskandr Aghavn, fifteen years more out of date than it should have been.

  Amnardbat had held it, carefully; lifted it, turned it in the soft light so it glimmered, metal and ceramides, the fragile connecting places where it would slot into the machine-cradle at the brainstem of its host. Thought, as fierce as she had ever been: You are as corrupt as an arsonist, as an imago-line that would shatter the shell of the station with a bomb. You are worse than both of those, Yskandr Aghavn: you want to invite Teixcalaan in. You speak poetry and you send back reams of literature, and more of our children every year take the aptitudes for the Empire and leave us. Leave us bereft of who they might have been. You are a corrosive poison, and a righteous person would crush this machine under her foot.

  She did not stamp the machine to shards.

  Instead she took her sharpened nails and scraped them—so lightly, so, so lightly, hardly believing she was doing it, committing a kind of treason of her own, a treason against memory, against the idea of Heritage, against the flood of nauseous horror from her imago (six generations of Heritage Councilors, and all of them sick-frightened, sick-intoxicated)—over each of those fragile connections. Weakening them. So that they might snap, under stress.

  And then she had put it back and gone to recommend Mahit Dzmare as the next ambassador to Lsel and for weeks she’d felt—good. Righteous.

  But now she stands in her room of memory, her soothing peaceful repository, and her heart races, and she tastes adrenaline and lead, the aftertaste of the displeasure of her own imago, who would never have done the harm she has done to any imago-line, not without doing it officially, in front of the Council, with the Council’s full approval. What else could I touch, Aknel Amnardbat thinks. What else could she change.

  And would it make a single bit of difference, now that there were Teixcalaanli warships pointed toward their sector anyway?

  Even this protected room would shatter, float away in so much debris, if a ship like Ascension’s Red Harvest decided that Lsel Station’s Lagrange point was better unoccupied. All her intervention into memory, all her scouring-out of poison: it would mean nothing. She was too late.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  It is commonality that destroys me: I cannot run as the Ebrekti run together in their swifts, quadrupedal and alive to the hunt, but I understand the nature of a swift: how it depends upon its leader for direction, how it becomes one organism in the moment of the kill. I understand this nature because it is my nature, and Teixcalaanli—though perhaps it is not human-universal, to find common purpose like this, to want to subsume the self in a sworn band. I am no longer so sure of human-universal. I am out alone too long; I am becoming a barba
rian, amongst these barbarians, and I dream of seeing Teixcalaan in alien claws. I do not think my dreaming is untoward; it is the casting-forward of desire, the projection of a self into the future. An imagining of possibles.

  —from Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier, Eleven Lathe

  * * *

  ITEMS PROHIBITED FOR IMPORT (LSEL STATION): fauna not previously listed under PERSONAL EFFECTS (PETS AND COMPANIONS), flora and fungi which are not certified as irradiated by sterilizing electron beam, food items not in packaging (food items may be sterilized at border control at the discretion of border control agents), all items capable of discharging a hard projectile through atmosphere, all items capable of discharging flame or flammable liquids, all items capable of emitting airborne particulates (including recreational substances meant to be inhaled, “smoke machines” used by entertainers, “smokers” used by chefs or food preparers) …

  —from CUSTOMS INFORMATION PACKET, distributed to ships seeking to dock at Lsel Station

  THE City was alien in the dark. Not so much silent as haunted: the boulevards and deep-sunk flower pools in Palace-Earth were vaster without the sun, the shape of all the buildings uncannily organic, like they might breathe or bloom. What few Teixcalaanlitzlim were still abroad in the streets met no one’s eyes—they moved like shadows, operating on some palace business of their own, unspeaking. Mahit followed Three Seagrass and kept her head down. She felt sickly tired, and everything hurt: her hip and her hand and her head, aching with what was almost certainly a tension headache and not an incipient neurological event. Almost certainly.