A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  —METRO AND SUBWAY CLOSURES AND SERVICE CHANGES, DAY 248 (Y3-I11)

  * * *

  … five Teixcalaanli warships transiting through our sector without presenting evidence of permits; while I expect their negligence is not only theirs but also the failure of our then-Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn, and that proper permits will soon again be issued, I submit this report to the Council on behalf of Heritage as a point of information: the security of our sector is limited to our own ships and there is nothing we can do to these Teixcalaanli vessels but issue them fines, which they seem to have no difficulty in paying cheerfully …

  —portion of report submitted to Lsel Council as new business, 248.3.11 (Teixcalaanli reckoning) by the Councilor for Heritage

  THE problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.

  The sun slipping up over the horizon was bright and chilly through the unshaded windowpanes, inescapable; it drove Mahit out of what scraps of sleep she’d managed. It was barely dawn, and yet there were three new infofiche sticks resting in the bowl outside the office door, sealed shut. Did Nineteen Adze have the mail delivered on the hour, every hour, even in the night? Mahit wrapped the enormous feather-filled quilt—presented to her at sundown the night before by the hyper-efficient hands of Seven Scale—around her shoulders. She was awake. Awake, and still alone inside her mind. It looked to be a permanent condition.

  Sitting up hurt. Her hip had stiffened more in the night, and when she peeled down her borrowed pajama trousers she could see the bruise there—black-purple, paling to a sick green at the edges—was as large as her spread hand. She wondered if there were painkillers to be had in her new, elaborate prison, as well as the delivered quilt and last night’s tray of serviceable but unremarkable vegetable slices and more of that fibrous paste Three Seagrass had served her for breakfast. Otherwise Nineteen Adze had left her alone. As if Her Excellency was waiting for her new pet to settle, so she wouldn’t snap at outstretched hands.

  Still encased in the quilt, and wincing as she stood up and got the hip moving, Mahit went to fish out the infofiche sticks and open them.

  The first was as anonymous as the one she’d sent: grey and sealed with undyed wax. She snapped it open, shook it to make it disgorge its light-spun glyphs.

  Your friend composes warily on the subject of enclosures

  Boundaries, demarcations, edges of knives

  But thinks also of you, subject to lonesomeness

  And sends twelve flowers as a promise if you need them.

  It was poetry. It wasn’t very good poetry, but it seemed to be an allusion meaning oh fuck did the edgeshine-of-a-knife ezuazuacat throw you in prison and can I help?

  It was unsigned.

  Not that it needed to be signed. Mahit had only sent three messages, and neither the Minister for Science nor the multitude of minor functionaries in the Information Ministry would reply in blatant code. This was Twelve Azalea, and he was probably simultaneously sincere in his desire to effect a rescue if she needed one, and having far too much fun. Coded messages! Anonymous communiqués across departmental lines! And Mahit thought that she had an untoward degree of affection for the genre conventions of political intrigue in Teixcalaanli literature.

  Was it untoward if one lived it, in one’s own culture? Yes, she decided. It was untoward when one reenacted it for the sake of the convention. But a Teixcalaanlitzlim wouldn’t think that.

  No one had blown up Twelve Azalea, or even tried to do so. His friend might be hospitalized, and his new dangerous political acquaintance might be writing to him from rarefied captivity, but he was still perfectly within his rights to act like he’d walked out of Red Flowerbuds for Thirty Ribbon or some other palace romance.

  She wrote a couplet back, thinking at least she wouldn’t be any worse at poetry than he was, and probably better: What encloses me I chose / I seek only what I asked of you: information. And when she sealed the infofiche, she didn’t bother to sign her name either. Someone should have a good time; it might as well be Twelve Azalea, for as long as he could manage it.

  The second infofiche stick was not anonymous in any fashion. It was transparent glass aside from its electronic innards, and sealed with deep green wax stamped with a white glyph of a sun-wheel: Science Ministry. When she opened it, it unfolded into an elegant and condescending little letter: Ten Pearl congratulated her on her appointment as Ambassador, expressed formulaic regrets for Yskandr’s unfortunate demise—so formulaic that Mahit instantly knew he’d copied those regrets from one of the practical rhetoric manuals, perhaps the very one she’d learned to write from herself. She had a very Teixcalaanli moment of being insulted at his lack of effort in allusion, and then a very personal moment of satisfaction at having successfully played the dull barbarian, trying so hard to emulate a citizen’s education and only achieving an awkward and pitiable imitation.

  At the close of the letter Ten Pearl suggested that of course he would be pleased to greet the Lsel Ambassador socially, perhaps at the upcoming imperial banquet in a day’s time.

  A public meeting, then. Safer in some ways; if Ten Pearl thought he was under any suspicion of having killed Yskandr outright, then meeting Yskandr’s successor in public would allay any scurrilous publicity about trying to have that successor similarly eliminated. There couldn’t be any secret murders of foreign dignitaries when the entire court was watching! Safer, for Ten Pearl’s reputation (and Mahit’s actual safety, if he had been responsible for Yskandr’s death), but also politic: it would demonstrate to everyone that there were no hard feelings between Lsel and the Science Ministry.

  Well. It wasn’t like Mahit hadn’t already said she’d go to the banquet. What was one more political hazard to negotiate, at this rate? And if she could corner Ten Pearl for a second, more direct meeting after the public bows and smiles he clearly wanted from her, so much the better. She put his message aside and turned to the last of the mail. (The last of the mail that she could get at—the sticks must be piling up inside her apartment in terrible little drifts of undone work.)

  The final infofiche stick was another anonymous bit of grey plastic—but this one was flagged with a red tag marked with a black starfield. Off-world communication, routed somehow to her through her own office in Palace-East and Nineteen Adze’s in Palace-North. Not for the first time Mahit wondered if she was being watched by the City, and thought again of the shimmering rise of those confining walls in Plaza Central Nine. Then she cracked the infofiche open, and stopped thinking of the City at once and entirely.

  The message inside was not a spill of Teixcalaanli ideographs rendered in holographic light. Coiled into the stick was a machine-printed slip of semitransparent plastic, and when Mahit pulled it free and spread it out to read, the characters on it were alphabetic: her own alphabet. This message had come from Lsel Station.

  And it was not addressed to her. Nor was it addressed to The Ambassador from Lsel to Teixcalaan. It was addressed to Yskandr Aghavn, and dated 227.3.11—the two hundred twenty-seventh day of the third year of the eleventh indiction of the Emperor Six Direction. About three weeks ago.

  For Ambassador Aghavn from Dekakel Onchu, Councilor for the Pilots, it began.

  If you are receiving this message you have personally queried your electronic database since the request for a new ambassador was delivered to Lsel Station. This message serves as a double warning, from those who would still be your allies on the station which was once your cradle and your home: firstly, someone is trying to replace you at the imperial court. Secondly, your replacement may have been sabotaged; she bears an early imago-recording of you which neither the Councilor for the Pilots nor the Councilor for Hydroponics was able to verify the condition of before integration. She was sponsored by Heritage—and by Miners. Be wary. Onchu for the Pilots suspects Amnardbat for Heritage is behind sabotage if same exists and originates on Lsel. Destroy this communication. Further communication may follow if
possible.

  The message must have been triggered when she’d accessed the Lsel Ambassador’s electronic database the night before, composing her messages.

  Mahit read it twice. Three times, to memorize it—automatic habit, born out of years of knowing how to study Teixcalaanli texts, knowing how to pack a collection of phrases and words into her mind, like a heat-compressed diamond of meaning. If sabotage exists and originates on Lsel. Unable to verify the condition. Your cradle and your home—

  She found herself thinking—thinking to not think, thinking to let herself feel and exist through the shock and the distress. Practicalities like a veil over the way her stomach twisted, the way she automatically reached for the comfort of the imago that should have been in her mind and wasn’t, and got that dizzy vertigo again for her trouble. Thought that she was going to have to burn Yskandr’s corpse soon. While she thought she tore the plastic sheet into small pieces, and melted them with the handheld lighter she’d used to melt the sealing wax for the infofiche sticks. She hoped she could burn the corpse with full knowledge of who had killed him. It would be a strange, pale form of justice—but even if he never came back to her, she owed him that much. Most successors knew how their imago-predecessors had died: age, or accident, or illness, any of the thousand small ways a station could kill a person. You couldn’t exact justice on a cancer or a failed airlock. There wasn’t any point. But there was a point in knowing how the last person to hold all the knowledge you held had died, if only so that you could correct the mistake and keep your line alive a little longer, a little better. To stretch the continuity of memory just a bit farther, out on the edges of human space where it feathered away into the black.

  Mahit folded the quilt evenly at the foot of the couch she’d slept on, dressed—awkward and in pain when she had to lift her leg higher than the height of the opposite calf—again in the same white borrowed trousers and blouse as yesterday, and considered when she’d begun to feel so strongly about Lsel ethical philosophy. Since her imago had abandoned her, probably. If she was being poetic about it. Since she had come unmoored from one of those long, long lines of memory.

  She and her predecessor were never supposed to be enemies. And yet she could still hear Onchu’s message (and when had it been sent? How long had it been waiting for Yskandr—dead Yskandr—to read it, and take care?) echoing like the best poetry: if sabotage exists and originates on Lsel—if she was without her imago because of some sabotage engendered by Aknel Amnardbat—but hadn’t Amnardbat wanted her to be the new ambassador? Hadn’t Amnardbat pushed for her, wanted her presence on Teixcalaan, insisted that she be granted the out-of-date imago of Yskandr to help her? Why would she do that, if she meant for Mahit to lose that imago, to be alone in the Empire, to be cut off from everything? Had she been sent to do harm to Yskandr, or to correct his policies? Or neither one?

  It hurt, how much she didn’t know. How alone she was. Hearing a voice from home should have made her feel comforted, even if it was the acerbic voice of the Councilor for the Pilots, but instead Mahit found herself sitting back on the edge of the couch, her head in her hands, still dizzy. The absence of Yskandr in her mind felt like a hole in the world. And now—now she couldn’t trust herself, her own motives—

  Be a mirror, she told herself again. Be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone. Be as Teixcalaanli as you can, and be as Lsel as you can, and—oh, fuck, breathe. That too.

  She breathed. Slowly the dizziness passed off. The sun had just barely risen above the level of the windowsill. Her stomach growled. She was still here. She knew a little less (about what she was meant to do, as Ambassador to Teixcalaan) and a little more (about what might have been done to her, and why, and from where) than she had before she’d read Onchu’s message. She would compensate.

  * * *

  Mahit left the infofiche sticks on which she’d written her replies in the outgoing basket and padded barefoot out into the warren of Nineteen Adze’s office complex. Most of the doors were shut to her—blank panels that wouldn’t budge for any cloudhookless gesture. If only she had Three Seagrass to open doors, she thought, and was bleakly amused at the difference a single day made in how she felt about that necessity. Fifteen minutes of wandering showed her the front office she’d seen yesterday, still empty of everything but dawnlight, all the infographs quiescent. She passed it by, turned left down a new corridor, and waded deeper into unfamiliar territory. Somewhere in this complex—it must be a floor of the building at least—Nineteen Adze slept. Mahit imagined her denned like a giant hunting cat, the sort that was too large to have retractable claws. Her sides rising and falling in huge, even breaths; eyes slit open even asleep.

  Oh, but Mahit hadn’t come to the City to be a poet.

  (Why had she come—and under whose control—no. Not now.)

  She hadn’t come to the City to be trapped inside the home of an ezuazuacat, either, but here she was.

  The corridor ended, opening up through a wide archway into a room that must have been on the opposite side of the building from the front office, judging by the dimmer, softer diffusion of morning light. It was clearly a library: all the walls lined with codex-books and infofiche where they weren’t hung with star-charts. On a broad couch in the center, Five Agate sat with her legs folded under her, lotus-fashion. Above her knee she spun a brightly colored holograph of the City’s local solar system, the orbits marked out in glowing-gold arcs and each planet labeled in glyphs Mahit could read from across the room—and standing in front of the holograph, his small hands busy pulling the planets apart and watching them snap back to their appropriate gravitational wells, was a child who couldn’t be more than six.

  “Good morning,” Mahit said, to let them know she was there.

  Five Agate looked up, her face flat and unsurprised. “Ambassador,” she said, and turned to the boy. “Map, say hello to the Ambassador from Lsel.”

  The child gazed at Mahit critically, and pressed his baby hands together above his heart. “Hello,” he said. “Why are you in the library before breakfast?”

  Mahit came forward out of the archway, feeling ungainly and tall. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I like your solar system. It’s very beautiful.”

  The child stared at her, unmoved. Teixcalaanli expressionlessness on a person that age was more than a little unsettling.

  “Oh, sit down,” said Five Agate. “You’re looming.”

  Mahit sat. The boy stuck his hand into the center of the holograph and grasped the sun in his palm, pulling the whole holograph out of Five Agate’s lap. “It’s mine,” he said.

  “Map, go work on the orbital maths, won’t you?” Five Agate said. “Just for a moment. You can take the model.”

  Mahit thought for a moment he would resist—she’d hated being locked out of adult conversations when she’d been small—but he nodded and retreated to the other side of the couch willingly enough.

  “That’s Two Cartograph,” Five Agate said. “I’m sorry. Usually no one is in the library at this hour.”

  Two Cartograph, and called Map. Mahit smiled. “It’s not a problem,” she said. “Lsel has lots of children running around—usually in big crèchemate agegroups—I got into all sorts of things when I was that age. I don’t mind. Is he yours?”

  “My son,” Five Agate said, and then, with a little bit of pride: “My son by my own body.”

  That was unusual on Teixcalaan—unheard of on Lsel. A woman using her own uterus rather than an artificial womb to grow a child was a luxury of resources the Station simply didn’t have—women died doing that, or destroyed their metabolisms or their pelvic floors, and women were people who could be doing work. Mahit had been given her contraceptive implant at the age of nine. When she’d learned that Teixcalaanlitzlim sometimes bore their own children inside themselves, she’d thought of it the way she thought about the water spilling out of one of those flower bowls in the restaurant in Plaza Central Nine. To have that much to easily
spend felt both offensive and compelling.

  “Was it difficult?” she asked, genuinely curious. “The process.”

  Five Agate’s eyes went smugly wide in a Teixcalaanli-style grin: “I spent two years getting into the best physical shape of my life beforehand,” she said. “And it was still difficult, but I was a good home for him, and he came out exactly as healthy as he would have from an artificial womb.”

  “He’s beautiful,” Mahit said, with complete honesty. “And clever, if he’s doing orbital mechanics that young.” It was so gratifying to have a conversation with a Teixcalaanlitzlim that wasn’t immediately, entirely politically barbed. Especially here in Nineteen Adze’s offices. “Do you live here, the both of you?”

  “Recently, we do,” said Five Agate. “Her Excellency is very good to us.”

  “I wouldn’t imagine she would be anything else,” said Mahit. It was even true. “You’re her people, aren’t you?”

  “For a long time now. Since far before I had Map.”

  Mahit wanted to ask Five Agate several questions, each more intrusive than the last: what do you do for her was the first one, and then how did she make you hers, and possibly on to did she want you to have a child? But what she asked was, “What changed? Recently, before you moved in.”

  Some of the openness in Five Agate’s face shuttered, like an anti-glare coating coming down over the viewport of a shuttlecraft. “We’re all working late, nowadays,” she said. “And the commute was very long. I wouldn’t want my son to be alone so much. And Her Excellency thought Map would be—better. Here. Close by.”