“So,” Three Seagrass went on, blithe and determined, “how far out are we going? And does this person we are going to see have a name, or are we continuing the amateur spies theme and loitering on a street corner with a pass-phrase?”
“She goes by Five Portico, and we’re going to Belltown Six,” said Twelve Azalea, and Three Seagrass hissed a bit through her teeth.
“Six, really,” she said. Outside the train windows the City rushed by in a glowing mess of steel and gold and wire. Mahit stared at it, and listened without listening too hard—the sort of casual cultural immersion which she knew from all of her Lsel psychotherapeutic training was one of her best traits. To let go—to float in the newness, absorb it, internalize when necessary. She needed the rest. She needed to be as calm as she could.
“Yes, Belltown Six, she’s an unlicensed ixplanatl, where do you think she’d live? Somewhere with good property values?” Twelve Azalea said. He sounded defensive.
“If I wanted to get plastic surgery I could find an unlicensed ixplanatl in your neighborhood without going halfway across the province.”
“It’s a little trickier to find someone who will carve open the Ambassador’s skull, thanks.”
A little pause. The train made a soft thrumming noise as it ran, a comforting sort of repeated ka-thnk, just on the edge of Mahit’s hearing.
“I do appreciate you, Petal,” Three Seagrass said, sighing. “You know that, right? It’s merely … it’s been a week. Thank you.”
Twelve Azalea shrugged, his shoulder moving against Mahit’s. “You’re going to buy me drinks for about a year. But it’s all right. You’re welcome.”
After nearly an hour, the train exited Inmost Province—the heart of the City, the only place Mahit had expected to go for at least the first three months of her tenure as Ambassador (tourism was for once she was settled, she thought, a distant sentiment from some other Mahit Dzmare, in some other, more hospitable universe)—and entered Belltown Province. At first there was hardly any noticeable change, aside from in the composition of passengers: a slight difference in ethnic group, Mahit thought, a little taller in general, a little paler than Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea. But slowly the composition of architecture changed as well, as they passed through Belltown One and Three and into Belltown Four, outward in an expanding fan shape of districts—the buildings were no lower but they were darker, less airy—the constant motif of flowers and light, the gossamer webwork of the Central City all replaced by tall oppressive spears of buildings, swarming with identical windows. They blocked most of the light.
To Mahit’s eyes, used to the narrow corridors of Lsel Station, the lack of blue sky-vault felt strangely comforting, like she could stop keeping track of some small nagging task, and set it down; not having to think about the sheer size of the sky. She wondered what the Teixcalaanli thought of it. It was probably a sign of urban blight, all these people close together, blocking out the sun.
Belltown Six was closer-packed still, a spear-garden of buildings in grey concrete—dim from the moment they stepped out of the train station. The sky above was a bluish sliver. Three Seagrass had her shoulders up by her ears, hunched against a nonexistent chill, and that right there explained most of what Central City denizens thought of this province.
“How did you find this Five Portico?” Mahit asked Twelve Azalea as he led them down the narrow streets.
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Reed knows this already—she used to tease me—but I tried for Science before I tried for Information, and didn’t make the cut on the entrance exams. There’s always groups of disaffected students, after an exam cycle. Angry people talking in cafés, on semi-legal cloudhook message nets—I still keep in touch with a couple of them.”
“You have—unexpected depths,” said Mahit.
Three Seagrass snickered, a sharp little noise. “Don’t underestimate him because he’s pretty,” she said. “He didn’t get Science because he scored too damn high on Information to go anywhere else.”
“Regardless of that,” Twelve Azalea said, “one of my old friends knows Five Portico and I trust her to not send us to a complete charlatan. All right?”
“Only a partial charlatan for us,” said Three Seagrass, and then Twelve Azalea was stopping them at the central doorway of one of those enormous spear-buildings. It didn’t have a cloudhook interface, like the doors in Central City and the palace—it had a push-button dialpad.
He leaned on one of the lower buttons with his thumb. It made a whining, blatting sound like a tiny alarm.
“Does she know we’re coming?” Three Seagrass asked, just in time for the huge door to click and swing open.
“That’d be a yes,” Mahit said, and walked in like she wasn’t even the slightest bit afraid.
Five Portico’s apartment was on the ground floor, the only open door in the entirety of the corridor: a deep-grey slice of dimness. The woman herself stood in it and watched them come down the hall with no expression on her face save a patient sort of evaluation. Up close, she looked very little like how Mahit had imagined an unlicensed ixplanatl would look. She was spare and of middle height, with the Teixcalaanli high cheekbones pressing tight against bronze skin gone ashy with middle age and lack of vitamin D. She looked, in fact, like someone’s eldest sib, the sort who neglected to fill out their reproductive quota forms and didn’t have the genetics to make the Station’s population board annoy her into doing so.
Except: one of her eyes wasn’t an eye at all.
It might have been a cloudhook, a very long time ago. Now it was a metal and plastic section of her skull, the edges of it obscured with long-healed twisted skin, and in the center, where the eyeball should have been, was a telescoping lens. It glowed faintly red. As Mahit came closer, the aperture widened.
“You must be the Ambassador,” Five Portico said. Her voice matched neither the middle-aged normalcy nor the artificial eye. It was mellifluous, lovely, like she’d been a singer in some other life. “Come in and shut the door.”
* * *
Five Portico’s household was not given to the rituals of courtesy. No one made Mahit and her companions overdetermined cups of tea—she thought of Nineteen Adze, and fleetingly regretted the absence of even a prisoner’s sense of sanctuary—nor were they invited to sit down, despite the presence of a couch, upholstered in threadbare turquoise brocade. Instead, Five Portico paced a quick circle around Mahit, as if inspecting her general health, and stopped in front of her, square-shouldered, her head tilted up to look her in the face. The technology where her skull should have been glittered where it wasn’t transparent, and in the transparent parts Mahit could see through to the yellowish bone and the bright red-pink of blood vessels, sealed away from the air.
“Where’s the machine you want installed in you?” she asked.
Three Seagrass coughed, a gesture toward politesse, and said, “Perhaps we might introduce ourselves—”
“This is the Lsel Ambassador, the boy is the one who contacted me, and you are a high-palace Information Ministry official who hasn’t been out-province since you had to take school excursions. I’m who you hired. Are you satisfied?”
Three Seagrass widened her eyes in a Teixcalaanli formal smile, viciously pained. “To be sure,” she said. “I didn’t expect hospitality from you, ixplanatl, but I thought I might make the attempt.”
“I’m not an ixplanatl,” Five Portico said. “I’m a mechanic. Think about it, asekreta, while I talk to your Ambassador.”
“There’s already a machine in my head,” Mahit said. “Here, where the brainstem meets the cerebellum.” She tilted away from Five Portico, twisting to show her, and ghosted a thumb over the tiny scar-ridge at the top of her neck. “I want you to install the new one exactly where and in the same fashion as that one is now. The central portion unweaves—and can be woven back together, the connections to the outer machine resoldered.”
“And what precisely does this machine do, Ambassador?”
<
br /> Mahit shrugged. “It’s a form of memory amplification. That’s simplest.”
That was not simplest, but it was as much as she was willing to share on three minutes’ rude acquaintance. Five Portico looked both intrigued and dubious, and both expressions seemed natural to her face. “Is the current version damaged?” she asked.
Mahit hesitated, and then nodded.
“Can you describe how?”
The questions Five Portico was asking were subtly different from the sorts of questions Mahit had heard from Twelve Azalea or Nineteen Adze or even the Emperor Himself when she talked about the imago-machines: they felt oblique, shifting, hinting at the actual purpose, but not outright pushing for Mahit to reveal it. Mahit realized that she must ask them all the time to all sorts of people who didn’t want to reveal why they needed illegal neurosurgery, and felt peculiarly comforted by not being anything like Five Portico’s first patient.
“I don’t know what you’ll see when you open me up,” she began. “The damage might be mechanical and visible. It might … not be. The machine is not functioning properly, and I am also having what I can only describe as the symptoms of peripheral neuropathy when I try to access it.”
“And at what point in the extraction and replacement would you like me to abort, Ambassador?” The red-glowing center of Five Portico’s artificial eye widened, telescoping. It was like looking into a laser housing’s white-hot heart.
“We would prefer the Ambassador not be damaged,” Three Seagrass said.
“Of course you would. But it isn’t you whose skull I am cracking, asekreta, so I’d have it from the Ambassador herself.”
Mahit considered what disasters she was prepared to tolerate. None of them—tremors, blindness, cascading seizures, death—seemed terribly important, in the face of all Teixcalaan pointed at her station, wide jaws akimbo. She’d never felt like this before: untethered from everything. A tiny mote of a person, on this enormous and teeming planet, about to try an experiment that even Lsel’s own vaunted neurologists wouldn’t approve of.
“I’d like to live,” she said. “But only if I am likely to retain most of my mental faculties.”
Behind her, Twelve Azalea made a protesting noise. “Really,” he said, “I’d be a little more conservative, Mahit—Five Portico takes a person seriously…”
Five Portico tapped the tip of her tongue against her teeth with a small, considering snort. “That vote of confidence is appreciated,” she said, with such dryness that Mahit was not entirely sure if she was offended or pleased. “Alive and mentally agile. All right, Ambassador. And how are you prepared to pay for this little adventure?”
Dismayed, Mahit realized she hadn’t even thought of how she would be paying. She had her ambassadorial salary—as yet uncollected, and she possessed some doubts that she’d ever receive a single paycheck, if the Teixcalaanli government devolved any further—and she had a currency account on a credit chip that wouldn’t even be read by anything but a Lsel bank machine. And she’d come out here, somehow thinking that this surgery would be like the restaurants in the palace—someone else’s largesse, or someone else’s political bargain. It was stupid. She hadn’t thought. She’d been behaving like—
—oh, like a Teixcalaanli noble, perhaps.
Fuck it.
“You can have the machine you remove,” she said. “And you can do with it whatever you like, as long as whatever you like is not handing it over to a member of the Science Ministry or the Emperor Himself.”
“—Mahit,” Three Seagrass said, shocked.
Mahit looked at her, and set her jaw against the way all the lines of Three Seagrass’s face curved into betrayed disappointment. Had it really mattered to her, so much, that Mahit had been respecting Teixcalaanli values, going along with the modes and functions of Teixcalaanli bureaucracy and palace culture? And here she was giving away what Yskandr had tried so hard to sell. Yes. Yes, it probably had, and she didn’t want that to be true but here it was (no friendship after all, no chance-found ally, only self-interest, and that hurt and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it right now), and she did not have the time or energy to explain herself, or to try to make that disappointment go away.
But Five Portico said, “Done,” and looked as if Mahit had given her a rich-flavored dessert to bite into. Mahit felt ill. “A little piece of technological piracy from a culture that actually practices neurosurgery is worth more than just one expedition into your head, Ambassador. Anything else you need done? Vision enhancement? Reshape your hairline into something even the asekreta here would think is attractive?”
“That’s not necessary,” Mahit said, trying not to flinch. Trying not to let her expression change at all. Perfectly Teixcalaanli, serene. Like Yskandr had taught her. (Was she killing him, her imago, her other-self? Was that the real price she was paying: destroying the person she was supposed to have become, even if she intended to replace him with himself?)
“As you like,” said Five Portico. “Barring events beyond my control—even out here in Belltown we’re not immune to Sunlit raids, Ambassador, and I’ll hand over your machine if it means my life—I promise none of your off-world technology will get back to the people who want it most.”
“This was a terrible idea,” Three Seagrass said to no one in particular, and Twelve Azalea put his hand on her arm.
“I know,” Mahit said, “but I don’t exactly have a better choice.”
“I imagine you don’t,” said Five Portico. “Or you’d never have ventured out here. Come on into the surgery. Let’s get started. You’ll have her back in three hours or so, asekretim—if you get her back at all.”
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
CURFEW 22.00-06.00—DUE TO INCREASED CIVIL UNREST THE SUNLIT HAVE INSTITUTED A CURFEW IN THE FOLLOWING PROVINCES: CENTRAL-SOUTH, BELLTOWN ONE, BELLTOWN THREE […]
—public announcement on cloudhook and newsfeeds, 251.3.11
* * *
[…] in light of current circumstances, the Teixcalaanli Imperium requests the services of a new ambassador from Lsel Station. Message ends.
—diplomatic communiqué delivered by a courier from Ascension’s Red Harvest to the government of Lsel Station
ASIDE from sterile cleanliness, Five Portico’s surgery bore no resemblance to the white plastic suites Mahit remembered from Lsel. It consisted of a polished-steel table on an adjustable platform, surrounded by a forest of mobile instrumentation arms and complicated restraints. She felt dreamlike, entirely unreal as she stripped out of her jacket. She left her shirt on, with her Lsel secrets still bound to her ribs underneath it. Five Portico did not seem to care; she briskly guided Mahit to lie on her belly on the table and secured her head with a cage of padded bars and straps. This was absurd. She was going to let a stranger rip her imago-machine out of her in a back room of an apartment complex on another planet. She had said yes, over and over.
Yskandr, she thought, one last desperate reaching-out, forgive me. I’m sorry—come back, please—
Still silence. Nothing but that nerve-damage flicker down her arms to her outermost fingers.
Five Portico came at her with a needle, the tip beading with anesthetic. The iris of her artificial eye yawned, a shutter-spin of metal expanding outward; the needle’s sting in Mahit’s upper arm was a sharp afterthought in the face of the white-laser heart of that eye.
She was dizzy. Five Portico’s hands were on her arms. She could feel all of her bones where they pressed against the steel. That laser eye slipped wider—she could feel its heat—was she going to use the eye to cut—
* * *
Blank. Slow decay, a winding-down wound backward, wound up again, the memory of a closing dark, descent, and then—he woke to un-startled flesh, a flicker of oxygen drawn easily, slowly through the throat—relief, first, dizzying profound relief, breathing, the intense joy of lungs perfused with air where no air had been able to come—
(he had been on the floor, on the floor and
choking, the carpet-pile pressed into his cheek, and now his cheek was on something cold)
A breath, slower still, drugged-slow—
(—not his cheek, the lungs too small, the body narrow and brittle-bright with youth and exhaustion easily mixed and had he ever been this young, not for decades—other-body, a new small self, he was dead, wasn’t he—dead and an imago, in a new body—)
His mouth was making keening, absurd sounds. He couldn’t figure out why.
It didn’t matter. He was breathing. He sank back into blackness.
* * *
Sunrise on Lsel Station happens four times in a twenty-four-hour cycle. Sunrise across the backs of his (unlined, square-nailed) hands, resting on tempered grey steel, cold. His fingers prickle with adrenaline like stinging needles. Across from him is Darj Tarats, (from somewhere distant, a voice he doesn’t recognize: this Darj Tarats is absurdly young, he looks more like a person than the mobile cadaver that someone else is remembering him looking like) grave-faced under the tight speckled-grey curls of his hair, saying, “We are going to send you to Teixcalaan, Mr. Aghavn, if you’re willing to go.”
He says
And the rush of bright desire, the naked shameful want for the thing that was not his by right. Was this the first time he felt it?
(Of course not. It hadn’t been the first time for her either.)
“Your wanting to is not why you are being sent,” says Darj Tarats. “Though it might mean the Imperium finds more flesh on your body to feast on, and doesn’t spit you back out at us for a while. We need influence in Teixcalaan, Mr. Aghavn. We need you to get in as far as you can go, and be indispensable.”
He says, “I will be,” with all the arrogance of his youth, and only then does he ask, “Why now?”
A Memory Called Empire Page 31