A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  Start from the idea that Darj Tarats wanted to speak to her, whether or not he’d known about Amnardbat’s sabotage, if Amnardbat’s sabotage was even real. The Councilor for the Miners was almost always concerned with issues of defense and self-rule; it won him votes. If this message came from Tarats, the threat a Teixcalaanli expansion war posed to Lsel sovereignty was being taken seriously, at least.

  Start with what she could absolutely be sure of, and entertain fantasies of sabotage (wouldn’t it be nice to have the cascading neurological failure not be her fault?—an unworthwhile thought if she’d ever had one) later.

  Mahit pieced together the rest of the decipherable paragraph, glyph by glyph. It acknowledged her message (that was one glyph), thanked her for it (another), and instructed her that the book cipher was not an appropriate level of encryption for the remainder of the message, which contained specific guidelines for action based upon an important point of information to which Mahit had heretofore not been privy. (That took six glyphs, and the last one was damn obscure; she’d never seen it written before. It was a Teixcalaanli word for “secret previously unrevealed to the uninitiated.” Of course they had a word for that.)

  “Yes, yes,” she muttered, “so how do I decrypt the rest…”

  Three Seagrass snickered, and when Mahit looked up at her to glare, she held up her hands, apologetic. “I like watching you work,” she said. “You’re very fast, even when you’re confused. You could learn a real cipher, one of ours, if you memorized the season’s fashionable poems—”

  “Easily,” Mahit said, not mollified. “But they’re not real ciphers either, Three Seagrass. I mean—they’re not real encryption. Substitution ciphers are trivial to break with a decent AI and knowing what the key is. Glyphbook or poem.”

  “I know,” she said. “They’re not encryption, they’re art, and you’d be good at them.”

  That was a strange kind of sting. Mahit shrugged, and looked again at the last sentence of the only paragraph she could understand.

  Cipher || kept safe/imprisoned/locked away || (personal/hereditary) knowledge (location within) || (belonging-to)

  And then in perfectly clear Stationer letters, Yskandr-imago.

  The code to decrypt the rest of the message, with its secret-previously-unrevealed-to-the-uninitiated, was located in Yskandr’s knowledge-base, not Mahit’s. And Darj Tarats had expected her to be able to access it. (He must not know about the sabotage. Or he’d expected that the sabotage would fail, that she and Yskandr would have already integrated enough that any damage to the machinery that had brought them together would nevertheless be sufficient to decode this.)

  Yskandr, who was malfunctioning. Who was half gone, whether through sabotage or her own neurological failure, instead of here with Mahit. Who she had no real way of reaching. There weren’t enough curses in any language she knew, and even the worst possible words in Glyphbook Standard wouldn’t be bad enough. How did she explain I have lost the other half of myself, and I need him, to these two Teixcalaanlitzlim who had spent some time a little while ago explaining how things like Yskandr were immoral? How did she even begin?

  Helpless with it, she said, “I am so completely screwed,” and waited for the reaction.

  She got one: Twelve Azalea looked worried, like he wasn’t sure what he’d do if the barbarian burst into tears, too—and Three Seagrass lost the last of her former expression of misery and returned to absolute and entire focus.

  “Probably, but if you tell us why I might be able to offer some unscrewing,” she said, and Mahit got, all at once, why it was Three Seagrass and not Twelve Azalea who had been given the cultural liaison assignment. There were aptitudes that spelled for analysis, good observation of a situation, information acquisition—and then there were aptitudes that spelled for determination, and Three Seagrass was full up with the latter as well as the former.

  She squared her shoulders. Braced herself. If she—and Lsel Station—were going to survive the transition of power from Six Direction to his successor unscathed, she needed as much unscrewing as Three Seagrass was willing to provide.

  Here we go, Yskandr. This is me, trusting someone from Teixcalaan with our lives. How did it feel when you did this?

  She wasn’t talking to the silent imago-Yskandr, she realized. She was talking to the dead man, who could only hear her if somehow she got access to whatever imprint of him might still dwell, an unused ghost, on his imago-machine.

  “I am supposed to have Yskandr Aghavn, or at least a version of him, with me in my mind; I have an imago-machine just like this one,” Mahit began, picking up Yskandr’s machine between her thumb and forefinger. “My copy of his memories is from fifteen years ago. Or would be, if he was still with me—he isn’t, he hasn’t been since I saw his body, the first day I was here. He is—or I am—malfunctioning.”

  Three Seagrass said, “I’d figured that much out, Mahit.”

  “I hadn’t—”

  “Petal, you just joined us this morning.”

  “Do you really have one of these inside you? What is it like?”

  He said it like he’d say Does it hurt? to a person with a blistering burn. Blank absurdity.

  Mahit sighed. “Irrelevant to the current problem, Twelve Azalea, except that usually it’s nice and presently it is not working and I need it to be … I need him.”

  “Because of what’s in your encrypted message,” said Three Seagrass.

  “Because he has the key to it, and I need to know what my government wants me to do.”

  There was a short silence. Mahit wondered if Three Seagrass was waiting for some further revelation, some actual useful piece of information that she could use to give Mahit some cultural-liaison help. But there wasn’t anything else. There was the message, and Mahit, and the hollow electric silence in her head.

  Then Three Seagrass said, “What about the Yskandr in there?” and pointed at the imago-machine resting on the table between them all. “I suspect he’d know just as well.”

  It hit Mahit in a flash of psychosomatic ache: the tiny scar at the base of her skull opening, the new weight of an imago-machine nestled against the pink-grey folds of neurological tissue. All of that, again.

  She closed her palm around what was left of Yskandr Aghavn, murdered Ambassador, as if to hide him from Three Seagrass’s observant Teixcalaanli eyes.

  “… let me think about it,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  28. EXT. DAY: chaos and smoke of the BATTLEFIELD of GIENAH-9. Track in past TANGLED BODIES marked with carbon scoring, churned mud, to find THIRTEEN QUARTZ lying half conscious in the shelter of an overturned groundcar. HOLD on THIRTEEN QUARTZ before cutting to

  29. EXT. DAY: same as before only POV of NINETY ALLOY. Pull back past NINETY ALLOY’s shoulder to watch as they FALL TO THEIR KNEES beside THIRTEEN QUARTZ—who OPENS THEIR EYES and SMILES FAINTLY.

  THIRTEEN QUARTZ (weak)

  You came back for me. I always … knew you would. Even now.

  (Track around to see NINETY ALLOY’s face.)

  NINETY ALLOY

  Of course I came back. I need you. Where else am I going to find a second-in-command who can win half a war on their own before breakfast? (sobers) And I need you. You’ve always been my luck. Stand down, now. I’ve got you. We’re going home.

  —shooting script for Ninety Alloy season 15 finale

  * * *

  Panel Three: long shot of Captain Cameron on the bridge of his shuttle. All eyes are on him; the rest of the crew look terrified, eager, impatient. Cameron’s consulting his imago, so have the colorist emphasize the white glow around his hands and his head. He is looking at the enemy ship, floating in black space, super ominous and spiky—the ship’s the focus of the panel.

  CAMERON: I learned to talk to Ebrekti, back when I was Chadra Mav. This isn’t even going to be hard.

  —graphic-story script for THE PERILOUS FRONTIER! vol. 3, distributed from local small printer ADVEN
TURE/BLEAK on Tier Nine, Lsel Station

  MAHIT thought about it all through the rest of the evening, while Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea did laundry, washing their grass-stained clothes, and they all watched the newsfeeds on the holoscreen replay One Lightning’s speech and the protest footage. Mahit thought about it obsessively, to the counterpoint of troop movements and political exhortations, tonguing the idea like it was a raw sore place in her mouth she couldn’t leave properly alone. She’d put Yskandr’s imago-machine back inside her jacket pocket. The small weight swung there like a pendulum heartbeat.

  There were a lot of ways to misuse an imago-machine.

  No, better: there were a lot of ways to use an imago-machine that made Mahit, Lsel-raised, Lsel-acculturated down to the blood and bone all despite her pretentions toward loving Teixcalaanli literature, feel the way Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea had described feeling about cheating on the imperial exams. There were a lot of ways to use an imago-machine that were, for lack of more specific vocabulary in either of her languages, immoral.

  For instance, a person could take up an imago of their lover who had died—tragically, usually, this was a daytime-entertainment holovision plot—and carry them around instead of allowing that imago to go to the next aptitudes-identified person in the line, and destroy both themselves and the knowledge of generations in the process. That felt immoral. And then there were all the smaller variants: new imago-carriers coming back to the widows of the dead, trying to resume relationships which had ended. That actually happened, everyone knew someone, there were good reasons that Lsel had built psychotherapy into a science …

  Make it worse, she told herself. The kind of misuse that makes you squirm, not just the kind that makes you sad.

  An imago installed in a weak mind, one who passed just enough aptitudes for compatibility, but not enough to create a new, real, functioning person out of the two original personalities. An imago that ate the mind of the successor.

  That one was bad enough that she didn’t want to think about

  (how that was exactly what His Brilliance Six Direction wanted to do)

  what it would feel like.

  Good work, Mahit. You found something that you like less than what Three Seagrass suggested you might do.

  Three Seagrass thought she should take Ambassador Aghavn’s machine and extract an updated Yskandr-imago to overwrite the one which fluttered, broken and useless and only half here in flashes, in her mind. Thought that if she needed that code so badly—and she did, she did—it was the only logical course of action.

  Three Seagrass, for her part, was not volunteering for what would end up being experimental neurosurgery. Experimental neurosurgery on a planet—in a culture—which didn’t like neurosurgical intervention. Which found the entire concept squirmy. Immoral. Three Seagrass was volunteering Mahit.

  Hey Yskandr, you could fix this, she thought, for the hundredth time, and got nothing back but silence except for the peripheral nerve buzzing. Who knew if she could even handle another imago? This one might have gone wrong because she was broken, unsuitable, incompatible; and even if she wasn’t, she remembered what the first time had felt like: the dizzying double overlay of perception, the sense of standing on the edge of a high precipice. The slightest movement and she would fall into the hugeness of someone else’s memory, and they hadn’t had enough time, to be a new person, to be Mahit-Yskandr, and the ghost of whoever Yskandr had absorbed when he was young, Mahit-Yskandr-Tsagkel …

  That name, floating up from the shards of the imago in her mind; the echo of how it had felt when she’d looked it up in Lsel’s records, trying to trace back the line she was joining. Tsagkel Ambak, who had not been to the City but had negotiated with Teixcalaan from the bow of a space cruiser, ensuring the continued independent rights of Lsel and the other stations to mine their sector, four generations back. Mahit had read her poetry and thought it was dull, pedestrian, all about home, and had thought—had thought three months ago—that she could do better.

  Maybe the new imago could tell her more about the imago he’d absorbed into the person she’d met when he entered her mind.

  She was going to try it, wasn’t she. She’d already decided, without even realizing she’d come to the conclusion; she was going to try it because she was alone, and because it needed to be done, and because she wanted to be whole, part of the long line of ambassadors from Lsel—the line she should be part of, the line she’d been inducted into and was still reeling from the loss of. If she had been sabotaged she wanted to undo it; she wanted her imago-line back, she wanted it preserved. She wanted to be a worthy inheritor of memory. To safeguard it, for the people she was meant to be serving here, as an extension of Lsel Station’s sovereignty. For the people who might follow after her, and carry her mind and memory onward on her Station.

  Patriotism seemed to derive quite easily from extremity.

  Mahit supposed that was true for all the rioters in the City’s streets, too.

  She found Three Seagrass in the kitchen, doing something incomprehensible to a plant: hollowing it out and stuffing it full of another substance, a paste made of rice and what looked like ground meat.

  “Is that food?”

  Three Seagrass looked over her shoulder. Her face was drawn and set. “Not yet. Wait about an hour, and it will be. Do you need me?”

  “I need a neurosurgeon,” Mahit said. “If such a thing exists on this planet.”

  “You’re going to do it?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  Three Seagrass nodded, once. “Everything exists in the City, Mahit. In one form or another. But I’m afraid I have absolutely no idea where to find someone who would be willing—and able—to cut open your brain.”

  From the other room, Twelve Azalea called, “You don’t, Reed, but I bet you anything you can find someone who does.”

  “Stop eavesdropping and get in here,” Three Seagrass shouted, and when Twelve Azalea appeared in the doorway, she affixed him with a pointed stare. “And where shall I find this person? I want my Ambassador alive afterward.”

  “While you go see the Science Minister I will pursue someone via less official means,” Twelve Azalea said smugly. “I am attached to the Medical College as my Information Ministry post. Aren’t you glad you got me involved in this conspiracy?”

  “Yes,” Three Seagrass said, “for several reasons, including the use of your flat as a safe house—”

  “You are only fond of me for my material possessions, Reed.”

  “And for your persistent connections to people outside of the court and the ministries. That too.”

  “You could have just as many, if you wanted,” Twelve Azalea said carefully. “If you were interested in branching out.”

  Three Seagrass sighed. “Petal. You know that’s a bad idea. It’s been a bad idea.”

  “Why?” Mahit found herself asking. She couldn’t think of what would be bad about having out-palace contacts, for an asekreta.

  “Because I’d use them as assets, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said, sharp, almost self-castigating. “Just as assets. And Petal here has actual friends, some of whom I’d probably find my way to reporting as anti-imperial, eventually. When it seemed appropriate or useful.”

  “You consistently do yourself a disservice,” said Twelve Azalea. “All vainglorious ambition and—”

  “Not enough empathy, I know,” Three Seagrass replied. “Wasn’t this conversation about you?”

  Twelve Azalea sighed, and smiled, his eyes dark and wide, and Mahit realized they’d had this conversation a hundred times; it was settled, this thing between them, a carefully tended corner of their friendship, where Three Seagrass didn’t ask about what Twelve Azalea did outside of work and Twelve Azalea didn’t try to get any of his—what, peculiarly anti-establishment medical friends?—involved with government business in the form of Three Seagrass. They knew what lines not to cross, the two of them; knew them and kept them, and what Mahit was asking for
was going to blur every single one. And yet they both seemed to be willing.

  She hoped she deserved it. (Lsel Station deserved it—there was that patriotism again, she couldn’t get over how it was becoming a strange reflex—but her asekretim weren’t doing this for Lsel.)

  “Yes,” Twelve Azalea was saying. “All about me, and how useful I am, and how much I’m helping you. I’ll get this done while you’re at your appointment tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Travel across the City was bad and getting worse, even in the clear light of the next early morning. Mahit was almost sure that she and Three Seagrass were being followed, as they left Twelve Azalea’s apartment building and headed back inside the subway: not by gold-masked Sunlit, but by shadows, the ghosts of people in grey. The Mist, Twelve Azalea had called the Judiciary’s own private investigatory force. If these were them—if these were real—the name was appropriate.

  She could be imagining it. Paranoia was a very understandable response when a multitude of people were, in fact, out to get you. They’d taught that in the psychology classes on Lsel, and Mahit had less and less reason to disbelieve it. Besides, half of the subways were on delay or closed entirely, and angry commuters were not contributing to anyone’s sense of safety or well-being. The borders between the six-pronged palace complex and the rest of town were visible as borders, now, as they hadn’t been when Mahit and Three Seagrass had left Mahit’s confiscated crime-scene apartments with Twelve Azalea. There were Sunlit standing in a line, checking the cloudhooks of each Teixcalaanlitzlim, verifying identities. Behind them was the shimmering glass and wire wall of the City itself, irising open and shut for the approved visitors. It seemed like more of a direct threat than ever.