A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  That felt like the first good news Mahit had heard in a long time. Her skin went prickly, relief and excitement and a kind of intoxicating fear. “Yes,” she said. “I need to have access to that cipher even more now. I need to do something. Change something. Make the situation otherwise.”

  Three Seagrass considered her, head tilted just slightly. Mahit wanted to look away. She had just suggested that she was preparing to intervene in the current political chaos. If there was a point where her liaison would balk, back away … but Three Seagrass merely nodded, and said, “I would be terrified.”

  “Who says I’m not?”

  “But you’ve done it before.”

  “Under far more expert care than whoever Twelve Azalea has found for us.”

  Three Seagrass looked like she wanted to bristle at that insult to Teixcalaanli medical technology, but she turned it into a shrug, instead. “He knows a lot of people. All kinds of people. I’m sure this person has at least some idea of what they’re doing.”

  “If I die, or wake up scrambled,” Mahit said, “I want you to tell the next ambassador from Lsel—if there is a next ambassador—absolutely everything. As much as possible, all at once.”

  “If you die, the Information Ministry is not going to let me near the next ambassador from Lsel, nor any other ambassadors.”

  Mahit had to smile. “I’ll try not to.”

  “Good,” said Three Seagrass. “Do you want one of these?”

  “What?”

  “A sandwich; you keep staring.”

  Mahit’s mouth filled with saliva. “Was it an animal? Before it was food.”

  “… yes?” Three Seagrass said. “This is a nice restaurant, Mahit.”

  She was probably going to die of experimental brain surgery, all of her allies save two Information Ministry agents were either vanished or suspect, and Teixcalaan would most likely eat her home alive with bloody starship-teeth.

  “Yes,” she said. “I want one.”

  The meat, when she tasted it, bloomed on her tongue with juice.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Jewel of the World Central Traffic Control Supervisor Three Nasturtium to Imperial Flagship Twenty Sunsets Illuminated: PLEASE CONTACT CT APPROACH CONTROL AT ONCE YOU HAVE ENTERED CONTROLLED AIRSPACE WITHOUT CLEARANCE OR COMMUNICATION DECLARE INTENTIONS AND VECTORS FOR CTC TO ROUTE TRAFFIC AROUND YOU CONTACT CT APPROACH ON FREQUENCY ONE EIGHT ZERO POINT FIVE AGAIN IMPERIAL FLAGSHIP TWENTY SUNSETS ILLUMINATED YOU HAVE ENTERED CONTROLLED AIRSPACE WITHOUT CLEARANCE OR COMMUNICATION PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE

  —satellite communication, 251.3.11-6D

  * * *

  >>QUERY/auth:ONCHU(PILOTS)/last access

  >>Imago-machine 32675(Yskandr Aghavn) last accessed by Medical (Neurosurgery), 155.3.11-6D (Teix.Rec.)

  >>QUERY/auth:ONCHU(PILOTS)/all access

  >>field too large

  >>QUERY/auth:ONCHU(PILOTS)//all access *.3.11

  >>Imago-machine 32675(Yskandr Aghavn) accessed by Medical (Neurosurgery), 155.3.11-6D (Teix.Rec.); Medical (Maintenance), 152.3.11-6D; Aknel Amnardbat for Heritage, 152.3.11-6D; Medical (Maintenance), 150.3.11-6D; Medical (Maintenance) 50.3.11-6D […]

  —record of queries made to Lsel imago database by Dekakel Onchu, 220.3.11-6D (Teixcalaanli reckoning)

  BACK into the subway, and past another checkpoint—the Sunlit all still, all golden and observant. They were less concerned with people leaving the palace complex than they had been with people coming in, which wasn’t surprising, but Mahit was nevertheless profoundly nervous passing through them. She wondered if an algorithm could sense plans, could feel the anticipatory thrum of guilt; if an algorithm, even one which was made up of people who had at least at one point been Teixcalaanlitzlim, could have observed the conversation she and Three Seagrass had had in the restaurant, and act to stop them before they could do anything more. And oh, how she wanted to have time to find out if the Sunlit still were Teixcalaanlitzlim, considering the stated Teixcalaanli attitude toward neurological enhancements, and how all of the Sunlit nevertheless turned to look at her and Three Seagrass as they passed, a collective rotation like the inevitable swing of a satellite around a star, seven golden helmets rotating together.

  Mahit was braced for them to at least want to ask her more questions about the dead man in her apartments—he was two days dead, now, and surely someone like Eleven Conifer, who had been able to show up at the Emperor’s oration-contest banquet, would have had family, associates, old friends from the army. Someone to make a fuss, someone to demand justice.

  But the Sunlit only paused, and seemed to consult with one another, and let them go without a word. Perhaps she was being protected? If the algorithm was controlling the Sunlit, there might be more than one person influencing it—not just whoever it was in War, or Ten Pearl himself, but … someone else. Those glimpses of grey, the Judiciary agents (or the Judiciary mirages), occurred to her again, and Mahit glanced around. She couldn’t spot them, but that didn’t mean they were gone. Walking faster now, keeping pace with Three Seagrass with quick little steps, she considered jurisdiction in Teixcalaanli law. If the Judiciary was following her, perhaps the Sunlit wouldn’t dare intervene. She really ought to have studied the intricacies of the legal code for criminal law, not just the laws governing the movement and activity of barbarians.

  She should have done a lot of things. In the subway, with Three Seagrass directing her toward the central train station, Mahit could still feel the racing of her pulse in her fingertips, beating there along with the ever-present hum of the peripheral neuropathy.

  “Not arrested yet,” she murmured again.

  Three Seagrass’s expression was caught somewhere between laughter and what looked like a desperate desire to tell Mahit to hush. “Not yet,” she said. Mahit grinned at her. Hysteria was catching. She felt like a child, suddenly, playing in the corridors of the Station with her friends, holding on to a secret that the adults weren’t supposed to see. When she breathed deeply the wrapped bandage holding the encrypted communiqué around her ribs pressed into her, a reminder.

  The central transportation hub for the Inmost Province—the province which contained seventeen million Teixcalaanlitzlim, the palace, the Central City, the province where Mahit had expected to spend the majority of her ambassadorial career—was an enormous, monumental building. It hove into view as they climbed the long staircase up from the subway: a huge edifice crowned with a dome that ate half the sky, surrounded by thorn-spiked towers: a thistle of a building, concrete and glass. Behind it would spread the tendrils and loops of maglev tracks, like a huge system of twisting vines spread in a fan. Mahit knew the verse from The Buildings which began the description of this station: indestructible, many-faceted, the eye that sends out / our citizens, observing. It did look something like an eye, the eye of an insect—the facets gleamed. When Teixcalaanli literature talked about eyes it was often talking about touch, or the ability to affect—an eye sees, an eye changes what it sees. Half quantum mechanics, half narrative.

  All narrative, on Teixcalaan, even if quantum mechanics helped.

  “Where are we meeting Twelve Azalea?” Mahit asked. It would be so easy to get lost in this building—to vanish into the stream of constant motion, Teixcalaanlitzlim traveling in and out, a flow like water.

  “In the Great Hall, by the statue of ezuazuacat One Telescope,” Three Seagrass said. “It’ll be obvious; that statue was done during the period where statues were extremely shiny, and also very large—two hundred years back, it was a fad, One Telescope is basically all mother-of-pearl.”

  An enormous statue covered with the insides of shells, that had to have been harvested from an actual ocean. Slowly. Over time. Mahit wanted to laugh, again, and couldn’t quite feel why, why she couldn’t calm down, why everything was edged with this sense of hurtling toward an inevitable crash. You’re about to have experimental neurosurgery, that might be why, she told herself, and nodded to Three Seagrass. “Let’s go, the
n.”

  They spotted the grey-suited Judiciary agents, spotted them in truth and not just in Mahit’s imagination, at the entrance. They loitered there, too casual, too observant, as they walked in. Mahit wasn’t sufficiently dazzled by the sudden clear arc of the Great Hall, the cantilevered glass dome stretching impossibly wide, to not notice that everyone who came through those doors was being taken careful note of. When she spotted another one of them, pacing like a distracted commuter in front of the ticket kiosks but never buying a ticket, she nudged Three Seagrass in the shoulder.

  “The Mist. Do you think they followed us?”

  “… I’m not sure,” Three Seagrass muttered, almost soundless in the din of Teixcalaanlitzlim searching for their trains. “There might have been one on the street outside Twelve Azalea’s apartment who was following us, but if that one even existed they’d peeled off by the time we came out of Science—and these ones were here before we got here…”

  There were a lot of reasons the Judiciary might be looking for people who looked like her and Three Seagrass, beginning with Eight Loop has reconsidered how useful I am and heading on down to illegal desecration of Yskandr’s corpse. Though that latter action had been mostly Twelve Azalea.

  “I don’t think they’re looking for us,” Mahit said. “They’re looking for—” She didn’t want to use his name. “For Petal. Because of the machine.”

  Three Seagrass cursed quietly. “And they only followed us because we came out of his apartment, and then—We were innocuous, we went to an appointment and out to lunch, we’re not the targets.”

  Again, Mahit considered jurisdiction. Maybe they hadn’t been the targets of the agent who’d followed them, but they’d been followed, and that might have kept the Sunlit from arresting them right then. She found herself in a state of simultaneous gratitude and fury. (She was getting used to the combination: that doubling, the strangeness of being grateful for something she should never have had to experience in the first place. Teixcalaan was full of it.)

  “Maybe we’re not,” said Mahit. “Can you see him? Petal.” She gestured toward what must be the statue of One Telescope, an enormous woman with a barrel chest and wide hips, glowing in swirling ocean-pearl colors from the top of her pedestal. She couldn’t spot Twelve Azalea anywhere nearby.

  “Let’s go around back,” Three Seagrass said. “As if we have no idea what’s going on here. Be easy. Match the pace of everyone else.”

  It was very like being in a bad spies-and-intrigue holovision show. Strange people loitering in a transportation center, and Mahit and Three Seagrass trying to be unobtrusive—how could a barbarian and an asekreta, still in cream-and-flame court dress, be unobtrusive—but perhaps they were simply trying to look unconnected from the very person they were trying to locate. That might be manageable.

  Twelve Azalea wasn’t behind the statue of One Telescope. Three Seagrass leaned against its base, perfectly nonchalant, so Mahit leaned as well—leaned, and waited. Tried to see if she could find any visual trace of him in the sea of moving Teixcalaanlitzlim. She couldn’t. There were too many, and too many of them looked like Twelve Azalea: short, broad-shouldered, dark-haired and brown-skinned men dressed in multilayered suiting.

  “Don’t react when I move,” Three Seagrass murmured. “I see him. Follow me on a thirty-second count; he’s in the shadow by the food kiosk, two gates over—between gates 14 and 15.” She gestured with her chin, and then set off, wandering with apparent aimlessness toward the kiosk. It was gleefully, loudly, holographically advertising SNACK CAKES: LYCHEE FLAVOR! as well as SQUID STICKS: JUST IMPORTED! Mahit couldn’t imagine wanting to eat either of those. Three Seagrass bought something from the kiosk, and vanished into the shadows beside it just as Mahit counted thirty and began to make her own way over. She avoided the kiosk entirely and skirted around its back, where the holographic advertisements provided substantial visual distraction.

  Twelve Azalea was dressed in the most casual clothes Mahit had ever seen him in: a long jacket over a shirt and trousers, all in shades of pink and green. His face was pinched, distracted. The Mist were after him, then, or at least they were following him. They didn’t seem terribly inclined to arrest him, at the moment.

  “Pity there isn’t another water garden for us to hide in,” Three Seagrass was saying, soft under the chatter of the SNACK CAKES jingle. “I assume these are your stalkers?”

  “My stalkers multiplied,” Twelve Azalea replied. “There was only one before, when I snuck out of the Judiciary.”

  “They must have been watching your flat,” Mahit said. “We think they followed us too, when we left, but they gave up when we didn’t do anything peculiar.”

  Twelve Azalea laughed, a nasty choked noise, rapidly over. “You must have leashed Reed very tight, Ambassador, to not have done anything peculiar. It’s been hours and hours.”

  “Do you think they spotted you?” Three Seagrass asked, graciously ignoring everything else he’d said.

  “Yes—but they don’t get close. They’re not trying to catch me, they want to know where I’m going, and follow us out to—”

  To the unlicensed neurosurgeon. If they were tracked all the way out there, Mahit was sure, the entire plan would collapse under a pile of Teixcalaanli legalities and arrests.

  “—and they’re between us and the kiosk. I can’t let them see me buy the tickets,” Twelve Azalea finished.

  Three Seagrass was utterly calm, completely focused: that shimmering crisis-energy and determination that Mahit found so frustratingly admirable about her. “I’ll get the tickets. No one is watching me. You and Mahit meet me over at gate 26, two minutes. Let her walk in front of you, she’s much more visible, even if you are stupidly pretty and wearing bright colors.”

  “I didn’t dress for practical spywork,” Twelve Azalea muttered, “I dressed for going out-province.”

  Three Seagrass shrugged, gave him and Mahit both a dazzling Teixcalaanli-style grin, her eyes huge in her thin face, and shrugged out of her asekreta’s jacket. She turned it inside out, revealing the orange-red lining, shook her hair out of its queue to hang in a curtain around her shoulders, and flung the now-red jacket over one arm. “Be right back,” she said.

  “She seems equipped for practical spywork,” Mahit said dryly.

  “Reed might be a conservative at heart,” Twelve Azalea said, not unadmiringly, “but her conservatism extends as far as thinking about the Information Ministry as an infiltration and extraction unit, like it was before it was a ministry.”

  Mahit began walking, slowly. Ambling, really, making herself noticeable. A tall barbarian, in barbarian clothing. She made herself move like a Stationer, like someone used to less gravity than this planet: someone slowed down, and felt an echo of Yskandr’s own time getting used to the pull of the earth, like a reassuring muscular ache. “What was Information before it was a ministry, specifically?” she asked, keeping her eyes on the grey-clad Judiciary officials. They weren’t looking at her. They were looking for Twelve Azalea, who was hidden behind her taller shadow. She wasn’t important. Not here. Not now.

  “The intelligence and analysis arm of the Six Outreaching Palms,” Twelve Azalea explained, under his breath. “But that was hundreds of years ago. We’re civilians now. We serve the Emperor, not any one yaotlek. It helps to reduce the number of usurpation attempts…”

  Gate 26 announced a departure of a commuter train from Inmost Province to Poplar Bridge, calling at Belltown One, Belltown Four, Belltown Six, the Economicum, and Poplar Bridge. Mahit and Twelve Azalea stood at the side of the gate. Twelve Azalea was pressed against the wall, Mahit standing in front of him, facing him, hiding him as best as she could from view. The gate announced the departure of the train in two minutes. She could feel the eyes of the Judiciary people pass over her—heard approaching, directed footsteps, chanced a look over one shoulder. There was Three Seagrass, looking entirely like a young woman off home to an outer province from university and not like hers
elf, coming toward them—and a set of the grey-clad Judiciary investigators, converging on them in the other direction.

  When Mahit made the decision, she made it all at once. She was getting on this train, she was going to find Twelve Azalea’s secret neurosurgeon, she was not going to be denied access to her predecessor’s memory and ability if she could have it at all. And those Mist agents might know what train they were going to get on, but they absolutely weren’t going to know where they’d get off.

  “Run,” she said, “run now,” and grabbed Twelve Azalea’s sleeve, pulling him through the gate and toward the waiting sleek black-and-gold capsule of the commuter maglev. She had to trust Three Seagrass to run after her—fuck her hip hurt when she did this, it still hadn’t healed properly—

  The doors of the train irised open for them, easily; irised closed behind them. “Up,” Mahit said, and Twelve Azalea followed her to the second level of the capsule. A moment later she heard the first announcement of impending departure—doors will be closing, please stand clear—and hoped that Three Seagrass had made it on, and that the Judiciary agents hadn’t and—

  —and was gasping with exertion still when the capsule began to move, a graceful soundless shift, frictionless, and Three Seagrass came up the stairs.

  “They didn’t make it, they didn’t have tickets,” she said, “look, they’re on the platform,” and fell into a seat, her chest heaving. Mahit looked. There were two men in grey, there, rapidly decreasing in size as the maglev accelerated away.

  “That was more exciting than I strictly expected,” said Mahit, out of not knowing what else to say. Now that it was … not over, but paused, she was exquisitely aware of just how much she hurt. Not the best shape to undergo experimental surgery in.

  “That could describe my entire week since you arrived, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said, and handed her a ticket. Mahit choked a little, trying not to laugh.