A Memory Called Empire

INTERLUDE

AN imago-machine is small: the length of the smallest joint of a human thumb, at most. Even on a station of thirty thousand souls, and ten thousand preserved imago-lines alongside and within them, the entire storage facility for the machines is one small and sterile sphere of a room. It nestles close to the beating power-core heart of Lsel, insulated as far as it can be from the vicissitudes of space debris or cosmic rays or accidents of decompression: it is, Aknel Amnardbat has said, the safest place on the Station. The harbor of all Stationers: where the dead eventually come to rest, for a time, and then go out again, remade.

Amnardbat stands in its direct center. On every surface but the small patch of floor containing her feet and the path from there to the door, the walls of the room are covered in sealed, labeled compartments: numbers. Names, sometimes, on the very oldest or most important containers for imago-lines. If she was to look up over her shoulder she would see a compartment labeled Heritage, where her own imago once came from, and where the imago she will become will go.

She used to find this room soothing: utterly peaceful, a perfect reminder that all of Lsel was under her care, extending back into the past and forward into the future. Aknel Amnardbat thinks herself an archivist; if she lived on a green planet she’d call herself a gardener. It is her task to graft plant to plant, mind to mind, to preserve and design and let nothing of Lsel be lost.

She used to find this room soothing.

Some little time ago—six weeks, by the Teixcalaanli reckoning the Station has come to use, was using even before Amnardbat was born, it is by such small degrees that a culture is devoured, she had not ever known to notice that a “week” bore no resemblance to the rotation of Lsel, facing and unfacing again its sun—some little time ago she had stood here, and with the access granted to her as the Councilor for Heritage, caused one of those little containers to disgorge its contents into her waiting hands.

She’d cleaned her nails with solvent, just before. Cleaned them, filed them to uncharacteristic points.

The machine in her palms, then, had come from a container marked P-N (T.2). In the parlance of Heritage’s imago-machine codes, that meant Political-Negotiation—a designation of specialty, of type—and then Teixcalaan, for the imago-line of political negotiators sent to deal with the Empire—and 2, the second in a chain. The imago-machine that recorded Yskandr Aghavn, fifteen years more out of date than it should have been.

Amnardbat had held it, carefully; lifted it, turned it in the soft light so it glimmered, metal and ceramides, the fragile connecting places where it would slot into the machine-cradle at the brainstem of its host. Thought, as fierce as she had ever been: You are as corrupt as an arsonist, as an imago-line that would shatter the shell of the station with a bomb. You are worse than both of those, Yskandr Aghavn: you want to invite Teixcalaan in. You speak poetry and you send back reams of literature, and more of our children every year take the aptitudes for the Empire and leave us. Leave us bereft of who they might have been. You are a corrosive poison, and a righteous person would crush this machine under her foot.

She did not stamp the machine to shards.

Instead she took her sharpened nails and scraped them—so lightly, so, so lightly, hardly believing she was doing it, committing a kind of treason of her own, a treason against memory, against the idea of Heritage, against the flood of nauseous horror from her imago (six generations of Heritage Councilors, and all of them sick-frightened, sick-intoxicated)—over each of those fragile connections. Weakening them. So that they might snap, under stress.

And then she had put it back and gone to recommend Mahit Dzmare as the next ambassador to Lsel and for weeks she’d felt—good. Righteous.

But now she stands in her room of memory, her soothing peaceful repository, and her heart races, and she tastes adrenaline and lead, the aftertaste of the displeasure of her own imago, who would never have done the harm she has done to any imago-line, not without doing it officially, in front of the Council, with the Council’s full approval. What else could I touch, Aknel Amnardbat thinks. What else could she change.

And would it make a single bit of difference, now that there were Teixcalaanli warships pointed toward their sector anyway?

Even this protected room would shatter, float away in so much debris, if a ship like Ascension’s Red Harvest decided that Lsel Station’s Lagrange point was better unoccupied. All her intervention into memory, all her scouring-out of poison: it would mean nothing. She was too late.