A Desolation Called Peace
Page 10
“Councilors,” she said, and took the seat on the other side of Onchu. “There are twice as many of you as I expected.”
“Dekakel has predictable drinking habits, Dzmare,” said Darj Tarats. “This is the bar to find her in, if a man wanted to catch up with his friend in a less formal setting than the Council chambers. As I see you have noticed.”
It was an obvious power play—so obvious that Mahit was briefly annoyed she didn’t rate a better one. Use Dekakel Onchu’s first name, intimate the longstanding friendship between the two of them, and then call Mahit by her surname without the title she still owned by rights. There was no Ambassador to Teixcalaan save her. She was the imago-line.
Shut up, would you? she told Yskandr, and waved the bartender over.
“What the Councilors are having,” she said, and then turned to Tarats and smiled, taking a certain vicious joy in how baring her teeth would always feel like a threat now, how smiling this brightly even on Lsel was a kind of threat. “Councilor Onchu was kind enough to introduce me to the best vodka on-Station, yes,” she told him. “It’s a pleasure to drink with you as well, Councilor.”
He was unreadable. It was going to drive her crazy (no, that was Yskandr, Yskandr’s twenty years of pent-up frustration and competition with this man). He didn’t return the smile. “You came back home from the Empire,” he said. They were talking right through Onchu, and she was letting them, sitting a little back on her bar stool. “That’s unusual for your imago-line.”
That you were committing treason, yes, shut up, I need to talk and if I say what you’re thinking, we’re both fucked, all right?
Prickles up and down her spine, chiding. But Yskandr backed off, retreated—for a moment Mahit felt dizzyingly alone. Dizzyingly herself, which was a very naked thing to be.
“Haven’t you heard?” she said, still smiling. “I was sabotaged. Who knows what I’ll do? Heritage certainly doesn’t.”
Dekakel Onchu laughed, and shoved her lowball glass, half finished, the ice floating and clinking and turning the vodka cloudy white, over to Mahit. “Have the rest,” she said. “Tarats owes me another—he bet you’d go all Yskandr Aghavn at us, superior and elusive. I told you, Darj, this one is direct when forced. And I was right about the sabotage.”
Mahit took it. Drank it. All of it, including the ice chips, fast enough that the alcohol burned and she had to work not to cough. When it was empty, she put it down on the counter, upside down, with a sharp click, loud enough to make her feel brave—floating. Flying. “Councilor,” she said, when she had her breath back. “Your compatriot for the Pilots told me to consult with my imago about you before I came back to her. So I have. Here I am. Heritage probably would prefer I wasn’t. Or at least she’d like to see inside my skull a bit. How about you?”
The bartender approached with Mahit’s drink, and she waved it over to Onchu instead. Playing musical drinks; playing who has power here. She didn’t, she knew that; she was having this drink at all because she was in the sort of trouble with Heritage she didn’t know how to get out of, but—
Tarats extended a grey-brown hand, tilted it side to side. “On balance,” he said, “I’d also like to see inside your skull. If I could see my own reports on your imago-integration, as opposed to Heritage’s, of course. Interesting, that you came back. Interesting, that you retain enough of your imago-line despite putative sabotage to consult with it. Interesting, that you spent the time since you returned doing absolutely nothing instead of informing someone about all of these intriguing facts.”
Mahit wasn’t going to flinch. She wasn’t. She hadn’t been doing nothing. She’d been trying to recover her balance, her sense of herself, the shape of a life—any life—that could encompass both Lsel Station and Teixcalaan, two Yskandrs and one of her and whoever they were going to be. Admittedly she’d done a lot of that thinking while walking aimless loops around the Station, but she hadn’t come up with any better way of processing. Physical motion helped. That was right out of basic psychotherapeutic technique that every kid on Lsel knew.
She didn’t flinch. She said, “It’ll be Heritage who gets to see.”
An offer. If you do nothing, either of you, Aknel Amnardbat will take me apart and I will be useless to you.
I’ve had luck with sanctuary before—
Onchu said, contemplatively, “For a while, I considered whether Heritage can legally commit imago-line sabotage at all. Considering that it’s their purview to manage our collective memories in the first place.”
Tarats nodded to her. “Your conclusions, Dekakel? Doubtless you have them.” He was ignoring Mahit, entirely. Gambit refused. She didn’t know why, either.
“Heritage can’t,” said Dekakel Onchu. “But an individual working for Heritage—even the Councilor for Heritage—absolutely can. Darj, someone should cut that woman’s imago-line loose into hard vacuum.”
On this, Mahit thoroughly agreed. Maybe Pilots would help her even if Miners wouldn’t—she just needed some way to be too useful to be sent into the careful surgical maw of Heritage’s analysts, who would know instantly that she’d had entirely unscheduled adjustments to her imago-machine. If they didn’t simply kill her outright, and cover up Amnardbat’s sabotage thereby.
“I don’t disagree,” Tarats said. “I knew her predecessor, and he would have done nothing of the kind; and that imago-line of Heritage councilmembers is six generations long. Something has slipped. This … business … with Dzmare is more of the same.”
“Personally,” Mahit said, as dry and unconcerned as she could manage, which wasn’t very, “I’d prefer not to be Heritage’s business at all.”
“You should have gone back to the Empire, then,” said Tarats, looking at her directly. Finally, looking at her directly.
“You spent such time trying to convince Yskandr to come home,” she replied. “Here I am.”
Here I am, you used to want this.
Upsettingly, Yskandr murmured,
“Your imago knows me,” Tarats said, as if he could hear Yskandr as well as she could. “You say the sabotage you experienced was insufficient enough that you still have some continuity, even if it is out of date—I have what I wanted from him, thanks to your good work. If you’d stayed in the Empire, or if you’d come to me when you returned and been willing to go out again, perhaps I could have found a further use for you, too.”
She needed to hear him say it. Out loud, in this bar full of pilots, where he could be overheard. “What did you want from Yskandr?”
Darj Tarats’s eyes were the coldest brown Mahit could imagine; brown like dust, like rust in vacuum. “Teixcalaan’s gone to war,” he said. “Right over us; ships come through our gates all the time, and not a one stops here with legionary soldiers to annex this Station.”
“It won’t last,” Onchu muttered. “That not stopping.”
“It will,” said Tarats. “They’ve larger problems than us. It’s quite refreshing.”
Mahit thought, vicious and distant and cold, that Tarats was too satisfied with himself—too satisfied with what he’d helped her do, back in the City. He’d created this war between the Empire and some greater, worse
thing beyond the Far Gate as a political pressure point, a fulcrum to turn a succession crisis on and simultaneously divert a war of conquest away from the Station. He’d done it all to benefit his desire to lure the Empire into a destructive conflict. He’d succeeded, and that was too pleasant a thought for him to let the possibility that Onchu was right—that no power, whether Teixcalaanli or alien, could leave resource-rich mining stations alone forever—ruin his sense of accomplishment.
“How will you know if they change their minds?” she asked, out of pure, apolitical—if anything could be said to lack politics that came out of her mouth now, what the Empire had done to her tongue was more than language—spite.
“I assume I’ll have about thirty minutes’ warning to scramble our pilots,” said Dekakel Onchu, “when the farther mining outposts start getting shot up.”
“Before Dzmare came back to us, we might have had a clearer view, even from the City,” Tarats said.
That was the crux of it. Why he wasn’t helping her, why he didn’t care if Amnardbat killed her or took her apart: he no longer had his window on the Emperor. Yskandr Aghavn was dead, and Mahit Dzmare returned home in what he considered to be a state of failure, sabotaged or not; what was the point of showing her some special treatment? Of offering a rescue?
“I am still Ambassador to Teixcalaan,” she said. She was. She hadn’t resigned. She’d taken—leave, really, an extended vacation. She’d tried to come home.
I know, I know, but I wanted—
Tarats shrugged, an infinitesimal, tired motion of his shoulders. “So you are, though I doubt that will last past Heritage’s examination.”
“And then you’ll have no eyes at all, no one who has met and knows the new Emperor—”
She sounded desperate even to herself. But Tarats was looking at her, quite directly, as if she was a piece of molybdenum ore, something to hold up to the light and watch for reflective facets in. She held still. Made herself be quiet.
“You’re not wrong,” he said, finally. “You’re quite like Yskandr, too. Maybe enough like Yskandr.” Another pause. Mahit found that she was holding her breath. “You do this, Mahit Dzmare: you go to your scheduled meeting with Amnardbat and her surgeons. But it won’t be her surgeons there. It’ll be mine.”
She didn’t breathe out. “Yours, and they’ll do what?”
“Strip you of your imago-machine,” said Darj Tarats, “and check it for sabotage, in truth; and if it is whole enough, put it into the brainstem of a new Ambassador to Teixcalaan. One I—and Dekakel, here, perhaps—have chosen. Some young person right out of the aptitudes. Clearly you are damaged, Dzmare, and you were Heritage’s choice to begin with. Best we start over.”
For a strange objective moment, it sounded like a good idea to Mahit. Go in to this scheduled checkup as if she had nothing to hide; let Tarats take her imago-machine, all of the memories of two Yskandrs and one Mahit, out of her. Relieve her of the responsibility, entirely, of being either Lsel’s representative in Teixcalaan or finding a way to love Teixcalaan while being a Stationer, and not suffocate of it. Be free.
There’s no such fucking thing. Her own voice, this time, not Yskandr’s. The same tonality. The reassurance of blur.
She asked, “And what happens to me? In this hypothetical scenario.”
“This year’s aptitudes are coming up,” Tarats said. “Retake them. For a new imago-line, or for anything else you like. You came back to the Station: be a Stationer. And all you have done and learned and remembered will be enshrined forever in the imago-line of ambassadors.”
It was the sort of offer that got made to people who ended up with incompatible imagos—whose gender identity was stronger than they had thought it was and found a cross-gender memory match unbearable, or who were too close to the web of relationships their predecessor had maintained and couldn’t figure out how to navigate them without emotional damage, or whose imago-line was so weighty and long that they weren’t able to integrate fast enough and shattered under the strain. One of Mahit’s agemates had been one of those. A hydroponics engineer, given an imago thirteen generations of memory long. The highest aptitude scores on systems thinking and biology on the Station, and she’d just collapsed under the weight. Two weeks, and she was stripped out of the line, and allowed to retake the aptitudes a year later.
Mahit didn’t know where she’d ended up.
It was a bad offer.
She couldn’t imagine what she’d be without Yskandr. She didn’t know how integrated they were—or weren’t—or how deep the damage of sabotage went; she didn’t know if there’d be anything left of her if this imago-machine was carved out of her skull like Five Portico had carved out the other one. Not to mention the poor, stupid kid who would get the hybrid of three, a double dose of Yskandr and whatever there was of Mahit herself—and the first of their line, the negotiator Tsagkel Ambak, who mostly existed as a feeling.
And besides, she didn’t trust Darj Tarats to actually do it. She’d walk into the Heritage medical facility and lie down on the table, and it would be Amnardbat’s people after all, and what then?
Both Tarats and Onchu were looking at her. She wondered what shape her expression was. Her face felt numb and wooden.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said, because she didn’t.
“I could offer you a position on a mining station instead,” said Tarats, “but it’d be a waste, unless you’re a sight better at operational and financial analysis than the usual diplomatic types.”
“Amnardbat would call me back,” Mahit said, because that was true, and because she didn’t want to live as Tarats’s creature, preserved by his sufferance, in charge of an asteroid mine, out of the way. But what choice did she have?
“She would,” Tarats agreed, and said nothing more.
They were all bad offers, and if Mahit turned them down, she had nothing at all. She waved for the bartender. If she ordered another vodka, maybe she’d have a chance to think—come up with some angle, something she knew that only she knew, that wouldn’t be preserved down an imago-line—
Mahit opened her mouth.
All the proximity alarms on the pilots’ deck of the Station went off at once.
INTERLUDE
TO consider the uses of meat.
Sustenance: meat that explodes on the tongues of us, the taste of heme and the texture of bundled muscle fiber, taurine tang and rich putrescene. A body requires meat, because a body is meat, and we, singing, take joy not only in the building of starflyers and cities, the investigation of natural processes and song-variants, but also the simple pleasure of taking in nutrients, energy, flavor.
Reuse: some bodies in a litter are not suitable for being persons, and all bodies eventually senesce and cease. But nothing made is lost, in the singing we: all bodies that are not persons or have ceased to be persons are reclaimed, used again, broken down into components, consumed as appropriate.
Skill: all bodies are meat, and each body’s meat and genetics and experience create skill. To consider the uses of meat in this way is to invite the consideration of grief. All bodies senesce, or are damaged beyond repair, and are no longer a voice harmonizing; to know loss of voices is to know grief, to know lack, to cease from singing and to lament.
To consider the uses of this meat, however, is methodologically complex. There are two bodies of this type of meat, carved neatly out of their starflyers like a claw scoops shellfish from the clasp of abalone. The two bodies did not come to the we at the same time, though they came from the same sort of starflyer: the starflyers that originate from the void-home the meat has built on the other side of the
nearest jumpgate to a far-from-center dirt-home of we.
They are not persons.
They think language.
But they react as if they were persons. A single pattern, repeated: but only in how they fly their starflyers, their understanding of vector and thrust. In all other ways they are not persons, they do not hear the singing of we, they are sustenance and skill alone. Save for that pattern. Save for piloting.
After a time, they are no longer skill, but only sustenance. We, singing, wonder if the taste of them will import their singular pattern into the harmony of us: it is a puzzlement that the taste of them is merely taste.
* * *
Aknel Amnardbat spends more time alone than she knows she ought to. She’s the Councilor for Heritage, after all—she has six voices of other Councilors for Heritage echoing down her imago-line for company, to begin with, and besides that chain of memory, she is Heritage, culture and community and everything that makes Lsel Station itself, and she remembers being a person who went to every ridiculous local art event she could find on the Station intranet. Bad holofilm documentaries and new kinds of music, kids yelling poetry in bars, song-and-dance ensembles, zero-g dance, that one year she’d been obsessed with an imagoless restaurateur who had come up with a new way of using fungi and capsaicin and aldehydes to create meals that were an impossible sense-explosion—before she was Councilor, she had known the Station like she knew her own body.
It’s more difficult now. She’s Heritage. When she arrives at an event, it’s either a statement of official approval or a message that the event might be sanctioned. She doesn’t know when that started happening. When she stopped being trusted, even when she was at something that didn’t even have a hint of Teixcalaanli cultural infiltration—something she’d never have even considered censoring—