Look carefully at the points at which their universal cartographies do not correspond.
Onchu has brought Tarats her reports on the great three-wheeled ships that are moving through Stationer space and eating Stationer ships and Stationer pilots; she has brought as well the frisson of gravity-skewed fear that her imago-line has instilled in her as a response to the incomprehensible. It costs her some of her pride to admit these things to Tarats, but the Miners and the Pilots are allies of old: the two points of Lsel’s government which send men and women out into the black outside the Station’s metal shell.
She does not expect what Tarats brings her in reply: that he has known about these incursions, by rumor and hint and suppressed report, for the better part of two decades. Has known, and kept a secret map, and a network of spies and informants to supply that map’s points of data. The cargo captain who had come to Onchu made a stop at Darj Tarats’s office, afterward.
Onchu is angry at him, for that. But it is not a useful anger, nor one she can spend time on harboring, since Tarats goes on, a spill of confession like a weight released after long hours bearing it up: amongst the constellation of his plans for Yskandr Aghavn, gone to Teixcalaan so many years ago to serve there, was to prepare for an alliance wherein the one empire, as human as the Stationers but more hungry, might be cajoled into throwing itself open-jawed into the maw of an empire vaster and more strange, when the time came. That such an empire might be devoured there, just as it has devoured so much and for so long.
“You are using us as bait,” says Dekakel Onchu. “A clash between Teixcalaan and these aliens will happen right on top of us—”
“Not bait,” Darj Tarats replies. “I am making us something worth preserving, in our current form, to a polity which has constantly threatened to absorb us. The clash will not happen here—Teixcalaan’s fleet will go through our Anhamemat Gate, and through all the rest of the jumpgates where these ships have been showing up—and out into wherever the aliens are coming from.”
Onchu imagines Tarats’s mind: he must think of Teixcalaan as a tide, a sort of thing that could wash through and pull back again, and leave the ocean the same. She’s seen an ocean once. She’s seen what a high tide does to the shoreline.
Tarats does not think of tides. He thinks of weights: of pressing his thumb down as hard as he can on the scale of the galaxy, making a little indentation, a tiny shift. The sort of tiny shift that might happen if a man were to go to Teixcalaan, and love it with all his heart and mind, and seduce it as much as he himself had been seduced: and thus guide it to its death.
“What do you want from this?” Onchu asks, in the quiet of her pod.
“An end,” says Darj Tarats, who has grown quite old while pressing his fingers down onto the scale. “An end to empires. An immovable object to crash an impossible force upon, and break it.”
Onchu hisses through her teeth.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
PATRICIAN THIRD-CLASS ELEVEN CONIFER DIES AFTER A SHORT ILLNESS
Patrician Third-Class Eleven Conifer, who bravely served the Imperium in the Twenty-Sixth Legion under yaotlek One Lightning, died yesterday after a short illness, according to his nearest genetic kin, forty-percent clone One Conifer, who was reached by this reporter at his place of employment at the Central Travel Authority Northeast Division. “My genetic ancestor’s death was unexpected,” said One Conifer, “and I will be undergoing a full battery of tests in order to determine if I carry the gene markers for stroke as well…”
—TRIBUNE broadsheet, obituary feed, 252.3.11-6D
* * *
Movement of Teixcalaanli vessels detected en route to our sector—please advise—intercept unlikely due to sheer numbers—this is at least a legion on the march—
—communiqué received by Dekakel Onchu in her capacity as nominal head of the Lsel Station defense, from Pilot Kamchat Gitem, 252.3.11-6D (Teixcalaanli reckoning)
MAHIT woke to dim light, the scratchy comfort of rough fabric under her palms and cheek, and the worst headache she had ever had in her life. Her mouth felt like a polluted desert—too dry to swallow, and tasting of filth. Her throat was raw from screaming, and her left hand was a dull throb, almost as strong as it had been right after the episode with the poison flower—and she was not dead and she was thinking in full sentences.
So far, so good.
Yskandr? she asked, warily.
Mostly, but not entirely. Her Yskandr seemed to exist in interstices and cracks—the imago-machine which had housed him was gone, but he’d been a presence as much as she had been in the fantasia of memory and image that had followed that removal. They’d inhabited the same neural architecture and endocrine system for a little over three months. It wasn’t enough time for integration—if it had been, she’d never have needed to replace him—but she could still feel him, remember his versions of Yskandr’s memories, fifteen years younger and inflected differently.
They were her memories now. Thinking about them made her feel dizzy and sick with doubled recall—this was why, she guessed, that adding a second version of the same imago, even a later recording, was such a bad idea and never done.
Hello, Yskandr, she managed, thinking past the nausea. The corners of her mouth tugged into that wide smile that was his, and she chided him, gently (they were going to have to start over on so many things and oh fuck she missed her own imago), get out of my nervous system.
Yskandr said.
It’s not the same thing, Mahit thought.
Mahit sighed, and even sighing hurt her throat. She must have screamed a lot. I know, she thought. We have each other now. We’re all there is of our line—first and second Ambassadors to Teixcalaan.
We would not be in this sort of trouble had you not gotten us into it in the first place, she said. And now I need your help. And we need to … figure out who we’re going to be. My priorities are not yours—
A flash, an emotional spike just below her sternum, of how she’d felt while talking to the Emperor.
No, she repeated. And stay out of my nervous system, I told you. You’re dead. You’re my imago, my living memory, and we are the Lsel Ambassador—
said Yskandr.
Flickers, in the interstices, of the version she knew. Nevertheless she felt invaded, heavy with the unfamiliar mental weight of someone else, someone who had more life than her, had seen more than her, who knew Teixcalaan better—she thought, helpless and sudden, of how that ninety-percent clone would feel if he ever had all of Six Direction stuffed into his ten-year-old head, and ached with sympathy.
The Yskandr-sense—heavy weight and bright rag both—backed off. That might be some kind of apology.
Mahit mustered her courage, braced for the inevitable physical consequences, and opened her eyes. The headache spiked immediately along with the light, as she’d expected it would, but she didn’t vomit and she didn’t have another convulsion or experience any immediate visual distortions. Could be worse.
She was lying on a turquoise couch, just like the other turquoise couch Five Portico owned, the one in her front room. The fabric under her cheek was upholstery fabric. Maybe Five Portico had an entire set of turquoise furniture. Maybe she’d bought them all on sale. The last time Mahit had woken up from brain surgery she’d been in the medical center on Lsel, in a sterile and soothing silver-grey room. This was … different.
Moving carefully, and feeling like
every part of her body had been desiccated in vacuum, she sat up. Neither Five Portico nor Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were in visual range. That gave her a long moment to brace herself for the nauseating process of standing up and walking toward the only visible door. Her ribs felt constricted when she tried to take a full breath—oh, that was the sport bandage, still wrapped around her lower floating ribs exactly where it had been before the surgery had begun.
It was strange, the things which could make you trust someone: Mahit felt profoundly grateful to Five Portico for not having done more to her than she’d asked for. Only the requested violation, thank you: she still had the letter from Darj Tarats, and now, with Yskandr’s help, she could read it.
If the others were outside that door, waiting for her to wake up—probably wondering if she’d wake up—this might be the best time to decrypt it, while she was alone.
As alone as she was ever going to be again.
And then you vanished on me, Mahit told him. All right. Show me how to read this, if you can.
She lifted her shirt and unwound the wrapping. The communiqué was wrinkled from how she must have rolled on it, curved to the shape of her ribs, but still whole and still entirely readable with her own book cipher, except for the encrypted section at the bottom. It says you have the encryption key. Or you did, fifteen years ago.
Yskandr told her, and she knew he felt the wash of relief that spilled over her as strongly as she did.
Show me, said Mahit.
Yskandr did.
Sharing skill with an imago felt like discovering an unexpected and enormous talent; like she had sat down to do the Station’s orbital calculations and suddenly realized she had been studying mathematics for decades, all the correct formulas and the experience to use them arrayed at her fingertips; or being asked to dance in zero-g, and automatically knowing how her body should feel, how to move in space. The cipher was mathematical—which must have been Darj Tarats’s preference, as Mahit was aware that Yskandr had had to learn to do the matrix algebra which formed the basis of generating the one-time decryption key. She was glad she wasn’t learning it, just feeling it unfold inside her like a blooming flower.
Mahit laughed a little, gingerly—laughing hurt her throat and her head. She reached up to touch the back of her neck. There was a bandage there, covering the surgical site. By touch she guessed the wound was as long as her thumb, and tried to imagine what the scar would look like. Then, still careful, she pushed herself up to her feet and tottered toward anything that might contain a writing implement. Five Portico was just anti-establishment enough that she might have actual pens on her desk, not just holographic infofiche-manipulators.
There weren’t pens, but there was a drafting pencil resting on top of a bunch of mechanical sketches. Mahit didn’t flip through them—Five Portico hadn’t removed her shirt, she wasn’t going to look through her papers—but even a cursory glance at the top sketch was enough for her to recognize it as a schematic for a prosthetic hand.
And why would a person have to come all the way out here for a prosthesis?
She wished she could tell whether he was being dryly sarcastic or expressing a genuinely held opinion—but that wasn’t new. That confusion was inherent to every Yskandr, from the first moment she’d had him in her head, back on Lsel.
Here’s a pencil, she thought at him. Teach me how to read what Tarats wants me to do about having an annexation force pointed at our station.
They—she, she with Yskandr’s prior knowledge flooding her, opening unexpected windows in her mind—decrypted the message, letter by letter, through the sequential matrix transform that Yskandr had memorized twenty years ago, on his way into Teixcalaan: how he’d spent those long weeks in transit. She caught a flash of memory, a spinning scrap—Yskandr on his first night in her (his) ambassadorial apartment, burning the piece of paper Tarats had handed him, that he’d learned from.
Mahit was working so hard on the process of decryption that she hardly paid attention to the contents of the message until the entire thing existed in plaintext. It wasn’t long. She’d known that, before this entire terrible adventure—it couldn’t be long, there weren’t enough characters, there wouldn’t be the sort of elaborate instructions that she wanted. No one would tell her how to get out of what was happening. There would only be advice.
What advice there was terrified her.
Demand re-route of annexation force; claim certain provable knowledge of new-discovered nonhumans plotting invasion at points as given below; withhold coordinates until confirmation given.
She felt a little like Yskandr was the only thing holding her up. Her head ached viciously. Yes, she thought. I know all of Pseudo-Thirteen River, I can memorize a coordinate string.
How?
Mahit stared at the coordinate string for a full minute—set it to rhythm and meter in her head, held it like she’d hold a poem. And then she tore the strip of paper she’d written the plaintext on off the original communiqué and stuffed it in her mouth, thinking the whole time: We eat the best parts of our dead. Whose ashes am I consuming now?
She had to chew to get the paper to go down, and chewing hurt the surgical site. She did it anyway. It was something to do, while she considered her options.
Who was she supposed to demand this of? The Emperor?
You’re biased, Yskandr.
Maybe he was. Maybe what she should do was exactly what Yskandr would have done if he wasn’t dead, and march into Palace-Earth with these coordinates on her tongue like a string of pearls to trade for peace.
* * *
When she finally made her way into the front room of Five Portico’s apartment—giving the surgery door a wide berth—both Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were sitting, side by side like children in a waiting room, on the other turquoise couch, and Five Portico was nowhere to be seen. Three Seagrass was on her feet the instant Mahit came through the door. She ran to her and threw her arms around Mahit in a tight hug that broke every personal-space taboo held by Lsel or Teixcalaan. Mahit could feel the racing of her heart through the wall of her ribs.
“You’re alive!” Three Seagrass said, and then “—oh fuck did I hurt you?” before letting Mahit go with nearly the same degree of force as she’d embraced her. “Are you—you?”
“… yes, not any more than I hurt already, and that still depends on the Teixcalaanli definition of you, Three Seagrass,” Mahit told her. Smiling also hurt the surgical site, but not as much as chewing.
“And you can talk,” Three Seagrass went on. Mahit wanted to stroke her hair back behind her ears; she hadn’t put it back up in its queue since they’d run away from the Judiciary officials, not even during the time between when Mahit had gone into the surgery and now—whenever now was, Mahit wasn’t sure of the hour—and with it loose Three Seagrass looked devastatingly young.
“I think I retained most of my higher faculties,” she said to her, as neutral-Teixcalaanli as possible.
Three Seagrass blinked several times, and then laughed.
“I’m glad,” said Twelve Azalea from the couch. “But did it … work?”
“Yes,” Mahit said, out loud and internally at once. “At least it worked enough. I decrypted the message.”
“What does it feel like?” Twelve Azalea aske
d, just as Three Seagrass said, “Good. Given that, what would you like to do next?”
Mahit would have liked to sit down, if she had a preference. Possibly to sleep until everything was over, and there was a new emperor, and the universe returned to normal. If she slept that long she would probably be dead. Sitting down, though, that she could do, at least for a moment. She made her way to the couch, Three Seagrass at her elbow—keeping a decorous foot of distance now, which Mahit vaguely regretted—and sat.
“I need,” she said, “to get back to Palace-Earth and speak with His Brilliance Six Direction.”
“Must have been some message,” Twelve Azalea said.
Mahit very gingerly put her head in her hands. “An annexation force is headed for my home, the Empire is on the verge of civil war, and I requested immediate guidance from my superiors in government, did you expect a neutral statement of affirmation?”
“I’m not an idiot,” said Twelve Azalea. “I got you here, didn’t I?”
“You did,” Mahit said. “Forgive me. I’ve been mostly unconscious for … I don’t know how long, what time is it?”
Three Seagrass patted her lightly on the back, once. “Eleven hours. It’s around one in the morning.”
No wonder Mahit felt this ill. She’d been under anesthetic for a long while. “How much of that was surgery? And where is Five Portico? I’d like to thank her, I think.”
A Memory Called Empire Page 33