A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LATER, Mahit would remember the rest of that afternoon in snatches: single moments, disconnected from one another by how time stretched and denatured itself under the pressure of exhaustion. Her first view of Twelve Azalea’s flat, the walls hung with artwork—copies of off-world oil and acrylic and ink drawings, mass-produced but of high quality—and how Twelve Azalea had looked obscurely embarrassed when she’d mentioned how nice they were, as if he hardly ever had visitors to comment on his taste. The needle-sharp heat of his shower, and how all the soap in Teixcalaan smelled of a flower she couldn’t place, peppery and foreign-shading-to-familiar. The texture of the loose trousers and shirt he’d loaned her, rough-silk and too short in every dimension, hovering halfway up her calves and her forearms. How lying down on the wide couch had felt absurd, and then gone, texture and sound blinked out to nothing.

The weight of Three Seagrass’s back, pressed to her back, stretched out beside her. Opening her eyes to a blur of motion on the holoscreen, Twelve Azalea eating some sort of noodle dish out of a plastic container with long sticks, cross-legged on a chair as he watched a sanitized version of the end of the protest going on just outside his windows, and hearing the distant crash of breaking glass, and going away again inside her own mind, just for a little while, into that dark space where Yskandr should have been.

When she woke properly it was full dark. Twelve Azalea had fallen asleep at the table next to his meal, his head folded on his arms, and the holoscreen was still going with the volume turned down: moving images casting light across his face. Mahit gingerly disentangled herself from both the couch and Three Seagrass, who looked pale and unhealthily grey even asleep (had she sufficiently recovered from the neurological strike? Mahit couldn’t imagine that she had), and crossed to the window. The street outside was quiet. The golden, blank face-shield of a Sunlit glinted from the corner of the intersection. There were at least four of them, in this quiet residential neighborhood, keeping a threatening watch.

Bombs in a restaurant. Demonstrations. And now riots. If the Sunlit really were under One Lightning’s control, their presence here was a sign of how much the yaotlek was trying to present himself as the only possible force for order in a rapidly intensifying climate of social distress and anxiety. Mahit thought it was smart positioning. She’d think it was even smarter if One Lightning didn’t need to head up a war of conquest to prove his imperial bona fides. Still, the repeated attempts of the Sunlit to get her to surrender, not to the Emperor or to the City, but to One Lightning, reflected a deeper wound in Six Direction’s ability to control Teixcalaan than she’d expected. How much had he already lost?

She’d never quite thought about how barbaric—still a terrible little thrill, to apply that word in Teixcalaan to the language’s own speakers—Teixcalaanli modes of succession really were. When it wasn’t confined properly to epics and songs, empire claimed by acclamation was a brutal process that cared not at all for the places and peoples who had to succumb to make that acclamation plausible.

The holoscreen was still on the newsfeeds. Bright red glyphs cycled over the bottom half of the screen, arranged in a charming doggerel verse: Urgently direct your attention! / novelty and importance characterize what comes next / in two minutes on Channel Eight!

Mahit nudged Twelve Azalea on the shoulder, and he startled into consciousness. “—what?” he said, rubbing a hand over his face. “Oh, you’re up.”

“How do you change the channels on your holoscreen?” Mahit asked.

“Uh. What do you want to watch?”

“The novelty and importance on Channel Eight.”

“Channel Eight is politics and economics … hang on—” His eyes tracked under his cloudhook, tiny micro-adjustments, and the holoscreen flickered, shifted.

Channel Eight! hovered in the right top corner, superimposed on the image of the bridge of some vast ship: a gleaming place, cold metal and pale lights, titanium and steel and the golden Teixcalaanli battle flag splayed on the back wall, blatant in its cluster of sunbeam-spears. In front of it was a dark man, blunt-faced, with narrow lips and high cheekbones. A face like the facets of a stone, made for bludgeoning. His uniform was silver-shot with regalia, medals and honors and rank stripes.

“One Lightning,” Twelve Azalea said. “Hey, Reed, wake up for this.”

Three Seagrass shoved herself upright. There were pressure marks from the couch cushions across one of her cheeks, but her eyes were intent. “—can’t sleep through the propaganda, no, it’s out of character for me,” she said.

“Not at all like Eleven Lathe,” Twelve Azalea said, fond, and Mahit ached, suddenly; to have friends who could tease her like this. To have friends, like she’d had on Lsel.

“Hush, the yaotlek is talking, turn it up,” said Three Seagrass.

He was. He had a stentorian delivery—not a rhetorician, One Lightning, but a man who could shout effectively over long distances. Mahit could imagine being one of his soldiers—and as he continued, firm and deliberate and with an air of vast and urgent concern, she could imagine why his soldiers would follow him even against the Emperor they were all sworn to serve.

“Even here in orbit, just returned from our successes in the Odile System to the heart of the world, my ship Twenty Sunsets Illuminated is aware of the chaos and uncertainty which has boiled up in the streets of the Jewel of the World,” the yaotlek said, and whoever was in charge of broadcasting on Channel Eight! obligingly began to splice in footage of the protests. Mahit recognized the view outside Twelve Azalea’s window, some hours earlier, and wondered where the cameras were, and how many other people were watching through them. Thought again of the City as an algorithm: considered, for the first time clearly, that no algorithm was innocent of its designers. It couldn’t be. There was an originating purpose for an algorithm, however distant in its past—a reason some human person made it, even if it had evolved and folded in on itself and transformed. A City run by Ten Pearl’s algorithm had Ten Pearl’s initial interests embedded in it. A City run by an algorithm designed to respond to Teixcalaanli desires was not innocent of those same Teixcalaanli desires, magnified, twisted by machine learning. (A City run by an algorithm designed by Ten Pearl could suddenly rise up against anyone Ten Pearl designated—and if he was working with the Ministry of War, if the Ministry of War had … what, gone over to One Lightning already, and made some sort of arrangement with Science?)

This street wasn’t the only one showing up on the newsfeed, full of angry Teixcalaanlitzlim. Apparently there had been a sort of mass outbreak of peace protests all across the sector. The camera unerringly picked out the purple lapel flowers on the shoulders of many of the protestors, in every location.

Channel Eight!, economics and politics, was certainly not on the payroll of Thirty Larkspur, Mahit guessed. Not with that focus, while simultaneously playing One Lightning’s anti-protest speech, his voice rolling onward, saying, “I, and all of the brave servants of Teixcalaan I have the honor to serve with, have sympathy for the wishes of the people of the Jewel of the World as they dream of peace and prosperity—but from our vantage point above you, the clarity of our eyes sees what you cannot. Your full-hearted desires have been coopted by the self-serving design of the imperial associate Thirty Larkspur.”

Three Seagrass hissed through her teeth, a sharp little intake of breath that fit perfectly into how One Lightning paused for all the watchers to have their own moment of shock.

“The imperial associate cares neither for war nor peace!” One Lightning thundered. “The imperial associate cares for profits! He would not have lent his approval or funding to these protests if our war had been directed toward any other sector of space—but this sector threatens his interests!”

“Yeah, come on, tell us how, where’s the punchline,” Three Seagrass said. Mahit stole a glance at her; she looked transfixed, alight, her eyes blazing.

“—in this quadrant lies Lsel Station, an insignificant independent territory which has, unbeknownst to the population of Teixcalaan, been providing Thirty Larkspur with illegal and immoral technology for neurological enhancements. I can only imagine that the annexation of this station would cut off his secret supply, and thus he feels compelled to coopt the noble impulses of the people we both serve and stir up unrest!”

“Now that’s interesting,” Three Seagrass breathed, at the same time as Twelve Azalea turned the holoscreen off.

“That’s a problem,” he said. “Is it true, Mahit?”

“Not to my knowledge,” said Mahit, who could not imagine how One Lightning had decided that it was Thirty Larkspur who wanted imago-machines, and not Six Direction, not to mention how One Lightning had discovered them in the first place—unless it was blatant propaganda … She sighed. “And that is in fact the fucking problem, to my knowledge isn’t sufficient.”

Twelve Azalea sat down across from her, heavily. “To your knowledge, Ambassador Aghavn did not provide Thirty Larkspur with … illegal technology? With neurological enhancements? With immoral technology? What’s the part you don’t know about, Ambassador?”

Everything about this was abruptly infuriating. Mahit was so very tired of disambiguating between the tiny shades in meaning between one Teixcalaanli phrase and another, the effort it took to rearrange the emphasis of a sentence to render it accurate. The effort it took to keep straight what she had told Three Seagrass, what she had told Twelve Azalea, and what she hadn’t told anyone at all.

(The Emperor saying to her, Who else can provide eighty years of peace. Her sick, growing certainty that maybe he was right, considering the state of his possible successors and how determined they all seemed to be to rile the people of the City into destruction and violence for the sake of their own ascensions.)

Her jaw hurt from gritting her teeth. “Ambassador Aghavn did not provide Thirty Larkspur with anything of the kind. To my knowledge. Also I am not entirely sure what counts as immoral in Teixcalaan—why are neurological enhancements such a problem for you?”

“—but he provided someone with them!” Twelve Azalea said, as if he had come to a satisfying conclusion to a logic puzzle.

“Promised them,” Mahit said, resigned, “which actually does leave me with more leverage than I might have had otherwise. If he’d actually delivered before he got himself killed, I’d have nothing at all to bargain with.”

“Mahit,” Three Seagrass interjected, entirely too calm for Mahit’s taste, “I am beginning to have certain suspicions about what you discussed with His Illuminate Majesty.”

“Hiding anything from you is an exercise in futility, isn’t it,” Mahit said. She wanted to put her head down on Twelve Azalea’s table, and possibly bang her forehead against it a few times.

Three Seagrass touched her shoulder, a brief soothing gesture, and shrugged. “I’m your liaison. Technically we aren’t supposed to hide anything from one another. We’ll work on it.”

“Must we?” Mahit said, helpless, and then, when Three Seagrass managed a credible Lsel-style smile with visible teeth, and she found her face echoing it all despite herself, asked again: “What makes technology immoral? Tell me that, if you’re not hiding things.”

“Very little is immoral,” Three Seagrass began. “The yaotlek is appealing to a very traditionalist, law-and-order-and-triumphal-processions-every-spring sort of person. But there’s something unsettling about your imago-machines, Mahit. We don’t like devices—or chemicals—that make a person more mentally capable than they are on their own merits.”

“You took the exams, didn’t you?” Twelve Azalea asked. “The imperial aptitudes.”

Mahit nodded. They’d been a delight, after the endless series of imago-aptitudes; they’d been all Teixcalaanli literature and history and language, and she’d taken them for her, and out of the hope that she might win a visa to the center of the Empire, someday.

“So much of who we are is what we remember and retell,” said Three Seagrass. “Who we model ourselves on, which epic, which poem. Neurological enhancements are cheating.”

Twelve Azalea added, “And they are illegal to use in the aptitudes. There’s a scandal every few years—”

Mahit was finding it difficult to equate an imago—the combination of persons, the preservation of skill and memory down generations—with cheating on exams. “It has to be more complex than that; cheating is illegal, but immoral?”

“Immoral is being someone you cannot hope to emulate,” Three Seagrass said. “Like wearing someone else’s uniform, or saying the First Emperor’s lines from the Foundation Song and planning to betray Teixcalaan all at once. It’s the juxtaposition is what’s wrong. How do I know that you are you? That you are conscious of what you’re attempting to preserve?”

“You pump the dead full of chemicals and refuse to let anything rot—people or ideas or … or bad poetry, of which there is in fact some, even in perfectly metrical verse,” said Mahit. “Forgive me if I disagree with you on emulation. Teixcalaan is all about emulating what should already be dead.”

“Are you Yskandr, or are you Mahit?” Three Seagrass asked, and that did seem to be the crux of it: Was she Yskandr, without him?

Was there even such a thing as Mahit Dzmare, in the context of a Teixcalaanli city, a Teixcalaanli language, Teixcalaanli politics infecting her all through, like an imago she wasn’t suited for, tendrils of memory and experience growing into her like the infiltrates of some fast-growing fungus.

“How wide, Three Seagrass, is the Teixcalaanli concept of you,” she said, just as she’d said before all of this had really gotten started.

Three Seagrass spread her hands apart, a strained, rueful gesture. “I’m not sure. Narrower than the Stationer one. For—most of us.”

“Otherwise One Lightning’s little stunt on Channel Eight wouldn’t be effective,” Twelve Azalea added. “Just the suggestion that Thirty Larkspur is not only using the populace for his own purposes but that those purposes are … corrupted, pathetic, anyone who needs enhancements is clearly not worthy of being emperor—”

“I think,” said Three Seagrass, “that we are going to have a civil war.”

And then, quite abruptly, she pressed her hand over her face as if she was trying to hold back tears.

Twelve Azalea had taken Three Seagrass out of the room; Mahit could still hear their voices, rising and falling softly, from around the corner in the kitchen. She had never seen Three Seagrass quite that upset. Not when she had been in danger of her life, not when Mahit herself had been upsetting and alien and frustrating to work with; not even in the aftermath of seizure. But she had crumpled like metal overexposed to radiation, friable, when her own considerable powers of analysis had come up with the answer that Mahit already knew: Teixcalaan was hovering on the verge of devouring itself alive.

Mahit thought she could understand, by analogy and longing if nothing else. It was hard for her to wrap her mind around—the very idea of Teixcalaan not being permanent, irrevocable, eternal. And she was a barbarian, a foreign particle, just a thing that loved (did she? Did she still?) the Empire’s literature and culture, it wasn’t home; it had never been the shape of the world for her like it must be for Three Seagrass, only the shape that distorted the world out of true, the warp of heavy mass pulling at the fabric of space.

The tears dripping out from behind Three Seagrass’s fingers had still been awful, and she was glad that Twelve Azalea had walked her off into the kitchen for water and the sort of comfort that old friends could provide. Alone for the moment, she reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and fished out her salvaged prizes from her apartment: the roll of paper shaped into a faux infofiche stick carrying a new message from Lsel Station, and Yskandr’s imago-machine.

She lay them both on the table in front of her. Neither was larger than the two joints of her thumb: a silver-pale spider of a machine that had held all of Yskandr Aghavn, and a slim grey tube of paper, sealed with the red wax and red-and-black-striped stickers that marked off-world communication. Carefully, she ran her thumbnail over the wax, cutting through it, peeling back a curl of fragile red. The sealant was far more symbolic than actual: it would be very easy to open the communiqué and close it back up invisibly, if some mailroom official had wanted to. The sealant was metaphorical, and here she had to depend on Teixcalaanli beliefs in privacy, in propriety—

Those, and Lsel encryption.

Before she unrolled the paper all the way, she repeated the motion, just her nail sliding against the metal of Yskandr’s imago-machine, touching what had touched him. Had been nestled inside him. The central rectangular chip, dull now as if the metal had been pickled, and all the long filament-legs stretching from the corners, fractal branches which had infiltrated his brain stem. The base of her skull ached where her own machine rested, sympathetic pain.

Lsel encryption here, too: no one could get to the Yskandr encoded in the machine’s memory, with all of his knowledge. Those missing fifteen years that she’d never had access to, not even when the Yskandr in her mind had been functioning correctly. She missed him so much.

(Would she like him, the man who had sold Lsel’s secrets to Six Direction? She was worried that she would. That what he’d done wouldn’t matter in the slightest, if only she could have an ally again in truth.)

Mahit cracked the rest of the wax on the communiqué and pressed the roll of paper flat on the table with both of her hands.

What she saw written there was not what she expected. Oh, the message looked right—for the first moment she stared at it. Paragraphs, written in an alphabet, the Lsel alphabet with all of its thirty-seven letters, shockingly familiar and unfamiliar at once. And the opening salutation signaled clearly that the following paragraph was using her own substitution cipher, the one which depended on a Teixcalaanli grammar. It was the paragraph below that began to worry her—that one was in a cipher she not only didn’t know, but one she’d never seen.

Well, she had been hoping for good encryption …

“Twelve Azalea?” she called, toward the kitchen.

“Yes?”

“Do you have a dictionary? Specifically, do you have Imperial Glyphbook Standard?”

“Everyone has Imperial Glyphbook Standard,” Three Seagrass called back. She only sounded mostly like she’d been crying.

“I know!” Mahit said. “That’s why I chose it—so do you?”

Twelve Azalea came back in and peered inquisitively at the unfolded paper. “Is that your language? It’s got so many letters.”

“You say this, and Imperial Glyphbook Standard has forty thousand different glyphs.”

“But alphabets are supposed to be simple. That’s what they tell us in Information Ministry training sessions, anyhow. Hang on, I’ll get the dictionary.”

At least he had one. She could probably have bought one in any shop, but it was a relief to not have to find a shop. Not with the City in its current unsettled state.

Twelve Azalea dropped the book at her elbow with a thud. In codex form it was over four hundred pages long, grammar and glyphs arrayed in tables. “What do you want with it?”

“Sit down,” said Mahit. “Watch me reveal some Lsel state secrets.”

He sat. After a moment, Three Seagrass emerged—her eyes red—and sat next to him.

It was strange, doing decryption for an audience—but Mahit was, she had realized, committed to these two. They’d stayed with her, they’d protected her, they’d put themselves in political and physical danger for her. And besides, she wasn’t telling them how to decrypt the cipher, just which book to use. It didn’t take her long—she’d written this cipher, she knew how to read in it.

The first paragraph of the communiqué identified its sender—Darj Tarats. Mahit was almost surprised: that the Councilor for the Miners would send a message to her, not Aknel Amnardbat from Heritage. But if Amnardbat was responsible, as Dekakel Onchu’s secret communiqués implied, for sabotaging her imago-machine, rendering her as damaged as she currently was, perhaps Tarats had … intervened? Intercepted the message and made sure he was the one to answer it?

If she believed that, she was taking Dekakel Onchu’s suspicions—suspicions she was never meant to have seen—as truth. And Tarats wouldn’t have known about Onchu’s warning to Yskandr. Tarats would be thinking about talking to a Mahit Dzmare who—might or might not have access to Yskandr Aghavn, her imago, but who certainly didn’t know why she didn’t. If she didn’t. Perhaps the sabotage was something else entirely, some personal failure of her own, and had nothing to do with a feud between distant Councilors being played out at a remove.

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.