A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  So, not arrested for murder. Just exiled, again, this time from her own apartment, from Lsel diplomatic territory …

  She had the imago-machine, safe inside her shirt, but what she didn’t have was the mail. And with the mail, any instructions that might have come to her from Lsel. Instructions for her, not for dead Yskandr being warned about her. Instructions that would take into account the problems of a live Lsel ambassador. She turned to Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea, shrugged herself—trying to keep the motion her own, not a Teixcalaanli imitation—and said, “Let’s get out of these officers’ way…”

  If she could just pick up the basket of infofiche at the door. There was a communiqué from Lsel there, something printed on plastifilm, like orders always were back home, and then rolled into a tube as if the mail-delivery person had tried to make it look like an infofiche stick.

  She swept her hand through the bowl as she walked out—caught the tube of paper in her palm.

  “Ambassador,” one of the Sunlit said, reproving, as she reached. “Don’t worry, we will not open your mail. We don’t have that kind of access.”

  But they would have, if they did, she was sure. Mahit left the actual infofiche sticks in the bowl, as if chastised, and smiled with all her teeth, not caring if it was rude. “See that you don’t,” she said, and then the door to what ought to have been safety was irising shut behind the three of them, and they were in the City, alone, with absolutely nowhere to go.

  * * *

  “I used to do this when I’d spent all night in the library and couldn’t go back home before the next lectures,” said Three Seagrass. She handed Mahit a small bowl of ice cream she’d bought from a proprietor who had set up their business in the shell of a motor vehicle under a spreading, red-leaved tree.

  “Don’t believe her,” Twelve Azalea said. “Ice cream in the public gardens is what she used to do after she stayed out all night clubbing.”

  “Oh really?” Mahit scooped up some of the ice cream on the disposable plastic spoon it’d come with—it was thick and smooth, made of cream that had come out of a mammal recently, and Mahit had no intention of asking what mammal. When she turned the spoon in the early morning light, the ice cream glinted pale gold-green. Feeling as if she was completing a ritual, she asked, “Is this going to poison me?”

  “It’s made of green-stonefruit and cream and pressed oil and sugar,” Three Seagrass said, “the latter two of which I’m sure you have on Lsel, and the former of which, again, we feed to babies. Unless you’re allergic to lactose, I think you’ll be fine.”

  Mahit’s primary experience with lactose had been in its powdered milk form, but it hadn’t done her any harm. She put the ice cream in her mouth. It was shock-sweet, dissolving to a complex flavor she’d expect to be savory—a green taste, rich, that coated the tongue. She picked up more, licked it off the back of the spoon. It was the first food she’d had since before she’d been nearly killed by the poison flower—the first murder attempt of last night, what was even happening to her—and she could feel her blood sugar struggling out of the hole she’d dropped it into. Being exiled into the City began to seem a little less insurmountable.

  Three Seagrass led the three of them out onto the lawn, a manicured hill covered in a bluish-green grass that had no scent at all, and surrounded by more of the same red-leaved trees, their boughs nearly brushing the ground. It was like a tiny gemstone, one facet of the Jewel of the World, glimmering. Uncaring of her suit—it was wrinkled anyway; Mahit assumed that grass stains wouldn’t matter—Three Seagrass sat down, and began to consume her own ice cream with a deliberate and concentrated attitude.

  “I don’t know why I’m even still with you,” Twelve Azalea said, flopped on his back in the grass. “I haven’t been kicked out of my apartment by the Sunlit.”

  “Solidarity,” Three Seagrass said. “And your documented inability to leave well enough alone.”

  “This is more trouble than we’ve ever been in, Reed.”

  “Yes,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully.

  “That was … that was odd, wasn’t it?” Mahit asked. She kept going over it in her mind. How easy it had been to persuade the Sunlit that she’d acted in self-defense. Their not-that-subtle threat implying that if she’d only gone over into One Lightning’s custody at the Ministry of War—the Six Outreaching Palms—none of this would be happening to her. “That they just … let us go. Exiled us from my apartment, and didn’t ask us to wait in some police station to be questioned. Despite the degree of trouble we are undoubtedly in.”

  “It’s not unusual that they let us go, necessarily,” Three Seagrass said. “I don’t know how self-defense is adjudicated on your station, but we tend to allow a substantive benefit of the doubt in the favor of the person claiming it.”

  “What’s odd was the part where the Sunlit suggested you wouldn’t have had to commit murder in self-defense if you’d only turned yourself over to the War Ministry,” Twelve Azalea added, with an expansive shrug. “Or why Reed here thought it was a good idea to threaten them right back.”

  Mahit licked the back of her spoon, chasing that green taste. When it was clean, she asked, choosing the words deliberately, as careful as she’d ever been: “Who do the Sunlit serve?”

  “The City,” Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea said, together and at once. Rote answer, memorized answer—the answer provided by Teixcalaanli narrative about how the world was.

  “And who runs them?” Mahit went on.

  “No one,” said Three Seagrass. “No one at all, that’s the point, they’re responsive to the City-AI, the central algorithm which keeps watch…”

  “Like the subway,” Twelve Azalea added. “They’re the City, so they serve the Emperor first.”

  Mahit paused, trying to find the edges of the question, the right way to ask it. “The subway’s algorithm was made by Ten Pearl,” she started, thinking of the flash of memory that her imago had given her, how Ten Pearl had won his ministry—an infallible algorithm.

  “Ten Pearl doesn’t control the Sunlit,” Twelve Azalea said. “The Sunlit are people.”

  “People who respond to the City’s needs,” Three Seagrass said, slow, testing the idea. “People who go where the City tells them they ought to go—and the central AI core is run by Science, I assume—”

  Mahit interrupted her. “Who controls the Six Outreaching Palms?”

  “The Minister of War is Nine Propulsion. She’s new—less than three years in the City—but her record in the fleet’s impeccable. Annoyingly so; I had to look her up in Information’s database once.”

  “Three Seagrass,” Mahit said, “could the Minister of War change what is meant by the City’s needs? For … any reason at all, really.”

  “What a deliciously awful suggestion, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said with an exhausted silkiness. “Are you proposing a conspiracy between two of our Illuminate Emperor’s ministries to subvert the police?”

  “I don’t know,” Mahit said. “But it’d be one plausible explanation for this morning.”

  “Plausible doesn’t mean likely,” Twelve Azalea said. He sounded offended. Disturbed by the idea. It was a disturbing idea. Mahit didn’t blame him. She couldn’t think of why War would do such a thing, even if it was possible. And she didn’t much want it to be possible.

  How many eyes does the City have on us right now?

  Three Seagrass said, “Talk it over with the Ambassador, Petal, I’m taking a nap.”

  “You are?” Mahit said, incredulous.

  Three Seagrass, having finished her ice cream, took off her jacket, lay down on her belly in the grass as if making a point, and dropped her forehead into her crossed arms. Muffled, she said, “I’ve been awake for thirty-nine hours. My judgment is entirely impaired and so is yours. I have no idea what to do about your immortality machines, a possible conspiracy between Science and War, the war in general, the fact that various members of my government want you to die, which I am expressly again
st for both professional and personal reasons, and you still have not told me what the Emperor said to you—”

  “You spoke to His Illuminate Majesty?” asked Twelve Azalea, flabbergasted, at the same moment as Mahit said,

  “Personal reasons?”

  Three Seagrass snickered. “I am taking a nap,” she repeated. “Talk to Petal, Mahit, or go to sleep, we look like slumming asekretim trainees, no one will bother us in a garden in East Four, and I’ll … think of a plan when I’m awake again.” She shut her eyes. Mahit could see her go limp—whether she was sleeping or just pretending to was somewhat beside the point.

  “Was she like this when you were students?” Mahit said, feeling entirely overwhelmed.

  “A … less terrifying version, yes,” said Twelve Azalea. “Did you actually have an audience with Six Direction?”

  Eighty years of peace, the Emperor had told her, in that audience. He’d spoken the words with such vehemence, such naked want. Eighty years of civil servants feeling so remarkably secure that taking a nap on a lawn was preferable to finding political shelter. The vast arc of the sky was so blue and so endless, and Mahit felt so very tiny under it. She was never going to get used to the unboundedness of planets, even a planet that was mostly a city.

  “Yes,” she said. “I did. But I can’t talk about it now.”

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “About as long as she has, I guess.” Longer, possibly. Mahit had lost track. That was a bad sign. Her fingers were still prickly, almost numb. For the first time she wondered what it would be like if she was like this forever; if she was damaged in an unfixable way. If everything she would ever touch again would be dim electric fire, and not sensation.

  If she could learn to live with that. She wasn’t sure. Abruptly she felt on the verge of tears.

  Twelve Azalea sighed. “Much as I hate to say it, I think Reed is right. Lie down. Shut your eyes. I’ll … keep watch.”

  “You don’t have to,” Mahit said, out of some impulse to protect at least one person from the spiraling mess that association with anything Yskandr had touched was becoming.

  “I already desecrated a corpse for you, and now I sound like a bad holoproduction of Ninety Alloy. Go to sleep.”

  Mahit lay down. It felt like giving in. The grass was surprisingly comfortable, and the sunlight was dizzyingly warm against her skin. She could feel the tiny lumps of Yskandr’s imago-machine and the Lsel communication lying pressed against her ribs. “What’s Ninety Alloy?” she asked.

  “Military propaganda spun through a remarkably addictive romance storyline,” Twelve Azalea said. “Someone is always telling someone else they’ll keep watch. Usually they all end up dead.”

  “Pick a different genre to quote from,” Mahit said, and then found herself falling away from consciousness, easily, lightly, the dark behind her eyelids opening up like the soft comfort of freefall.

  * * *

  She couldn’t stay asleep long, even as exhausted as she was. The garden filled up with Teixcalaanlitzlim as the morning wore on, and they ran and shouted and enthusiastically bought ice cream and strange breakfasts made of rolled-up pancakes. None of them seemed to be concerned with civil unrest or domestic terrorism. They were just young, and happy, and there was sunlight and laughing voices in dialects of Teixcalaanli that Mahit didn’t know and wanted to. (Some other life. Some other life when she’d come here alone, imagoless in truth, and—studied, wrote poetry, learned the rhythms of other ways of speaking that didn’t come out of a textbook. Some other life, but the walls between lives felt so thin sometimes.) After a while Mahit couldn’t even pretend she was sleeping by keeping her eyes shut, so she sat up. There were blue-green grass stains on her elbows. Some of the prickling nerve pain had died back, but it was still there as an undercurrent, a distraction, a thread underneath the worse pain of her damaged hand.

  Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were talking quietly, their heads together, bent over a piece of infosheet; the easy familiarity between them made Mahit feel hideously lonely. She missed Yskandr. She kept missing him, even when she was angry with him, and she was angry with him almost all the time.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Mid-morning,” said Three Seagrass. “You might want to see this, come here.”

  At Three Seagrass’s side was a small pile of news: a whole bunch of pamphlets and plastifilm infosheets, wide transparent sheets of foldable plastic, covered all over with glyphs. The ones on top of the pile seemed to be an angry university-student pamphlet on atrocities committed in the Odile System by overzealous imperial legions, an advertisement for discounted tickets to a game of handball between two teams from provinces Mahit didn’t recognize but were clearly endowed with a great many fans, and a broadsheet full of new poetry, most of which was simultaneously very bad in terms of scansion and very happy about One Lightning. Mahit thought again about who was running around so blithely in this garden. Slumming asekretim trainees, Three Seagrass had said. University students. This was a place young people felt safe, safe enough to be mildly radical. To pass around pamphlets for just about anything, and not worry about the imperial censorship boards. Who would censor kids just learning to be servants of empire?

  The infosheet that Twelve Azalea was holding seemed to be a newsfeed—stories, sketches, headlines. Twelve Azalea ran his fingers over it, and the text moved under his command: it was like he was holding a transparent window made of news. Mahit caught sight of a small Item of Note! in the lower left: her name spelled out in Teixcalaanli glyphs, rendered awkwardly syllabic. LSEL AMBASSADOR MAKES HIGH-PLACED FRIENDS, it read. Is the new ambassador from distant Lsel still as close with the Light-Emitting Emperor as the old one? Surveillance photographs suggest SHE IS! Last seen in the company of the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze entering Palace-Earth AT MIDNIGHT …

  “Delightful,” Mahit said. “Gossip.”

  “Not that,” said Three Seagrass. “That’s fine. It’s probably good for your—brand. Look at the headline, that’s what I wanted you to see.”

  IMPERIAL ASSOCIATE EIGHT LOOP ISSUES STATEMENT ON LEGALITY OF ANNEXATION WAR, the headline-glyphs spelled.

  “Huh,” Mahit said. “Give me that? I wouldn’t expect public dissent from that direction—”

  Twelve Azalea handed it over. Mahit kept reading: Eight Loop’s statement was short, impenetrably layered in references to Teixcalaanli precedent, and composed in unrhymed political verse, which she ought to have expected, considering the woman was head of the Judiciary—but after staring at it for a long moment she thought she understood what Eight Loop was getting at.

  While going to war was entirely at the Emperor’s discretion (of course it was), a war of expansion was legally required to be conducted beginning in an atmosphere of perfect serenity, which was—if Mahit was reading the Teixcalaanli legalese correctly— a time in which there were no actual threats to Teixcalaan to be faced before the fleet could go off conquering. “What threat is she implying exists?” Mahit asked. “And why would she suggest that Six Direction is not competent to run this war, now? Didn’t they grow up together?” Weren’t they allies?

  Three Seagrass shrugged, but she looked like she’d been given a present: a puzzle to solve. “She isn’t exactly saying there’s a direct threat to the integrity of the Empire, though there’s always some sort of rumor that this is the year some alien species or other is actually going to invade human space. She’s just saying that His Brilliance didn’t prove there wasn’t a threat. It’s not quite a condemnation of his inaction, more like a suggestion that he’s missed something important that he should have thought of. Like he’s not fit to rule anymore, if he can’t remember things like this…”

  “I don’t like it,” Twelve Azalea added. “It’s sneaky.”

  It was sneaky. “She sent for me,” Mahit said. “As a further point of data. It was Eight Loop who got a new Lsel ambassador here as soon as Yskandr was dead.”

  “Was murdered; i
t’s all right, we know,” Three Seagrass said.

  “Was murdered,” Mahit agreed. “But either way, she sent for me, and now she is doing this, and I want to see her in person.”

  Three Seagrass clapped her hands together. “Well,” she said. “We don’t have anywhere else to be until your appointment at the Science Ministry, and that’s tomorrow. Since we can’t go back to your apartments, and I don’t imagine you want to call up the ezuazuacat for help again…”

  “Not without a better reason than wanting a shower and an actual bed,” Mahit said. “I might get to that point by this evening.”

  “Then we might as well walk straight into Eight Loop’s offices.”

  “We’ve napped in a garden and now we’re invading the Judiciary?” Twelve Azalea asked, plaintive.

  “You can go home, Petal,” Three Seagrass said. It had much the same attitude as Eight Loop’s little insinuation: You could go home, but you’d be letting down the side.

  Twelve Azalea got up, brushing off his much-abused suit. “Oh no. I want to see this. Even if the Mist do ask me questions about what I was doing sneaking around in the morgue. And they might not even know it was me.”

  * * *

  They made quite a picture, Mahit suspected: two Information Ministry functionaries and one barbarian, all wrinkled and grass-stained; one with a long tear up the sleeve of her jacket from struggling with Eleven Conifer’s awful needle (that would be her) and one looking as if he had hidden in a water feature—which he had (Twelve Azalea); only Three Seagrass seemed to wear her disarray as if it was the height of court fashion. Nevertheless they received little direct opposition on their way into the Judiciary: the doors still opened to Twelve Azalea’s cloudhook, which implied that even if he was being stalked by some sort of Judiciary-specific investigatory force, they hadn’t forbidden him from being here, and the functionaries within the Ministry kept a quiet sort of watch on them as Three Seagrass walked them through the layers of bureaucracy separating Eight Loop from the sort of annoyance that came in off the street.