A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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, then.”

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 herself, 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.

“So,” Three Seagrass went on, blithe and determined, “how far out are we going? And does this person we are going to see have a name, or are we continuing the amateur spies theme and loitering on a street corner with a pass-phrase?”

“She goes by Five Portico, and we’re going to Belltown Six,” said Twelve Azalea, and Three Seagrass hissed a bit through her teeth.

“Six, really,” she said. Outside the train windows the City rushed by in a glowing mess of steel and gold and wire. Mahit stared at it, and listened without listening too hard—the sort of casual cultural immersion which she knew from all of her Lsel psychotherapeutic training was one of her best traits. To let go—to float in the newness, absorb it, internalize when necessary. She needed the rest. She needed to be as calm as she could.

“Yes, Belltown Six, she’s an unlicensed ixplanatl, where do you think she’d live? Somewhere with good property values?” Twelve Azalea said. He sounded defensive.

“If I wanted to get plastic surgery I could find an unlicensed ixplanatl in your neighborhood without going halfway across the province.”

“It’s a little trickier to find someone who will carve open the Ambassador’s skull, thanks.”

A little pause. The train made a soft thrumming noise as it ran, a comforting sort of repeated ka-thnk, just on the edge of Mahit’s hearing.

“I do appreciate you, Petal,” Three Seagrass said, sighing. “You know that, right? It’s merely … it’s been a week. Thank you.”

Twelve Azalea shrugged, his shoulder moving against Mahit’s. “You’re going to buy me drinks for about a year. But it’s all right. You’re welcome.”

After nearly an hour, the train exited Inmost Province—the heart of the City, the only place Mahit had expected to go for at least the first three months of her tenure as Ambassador (tourism was for once she was settled, she thought, a distant sentiment from some other Mahit Dzmare, in some other, more hospitable universe)—and entered Belltown Province. At first there was hardly any noticeable change, aside from in the composition of passengers: a slight difference in ethnic group, Mahit thought, a little taller in general, a little paler than Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea. But slowly the composition of architecture changed as well, as they passed through Belltown One and Three and into Belltown Four, outward in an expanding fan shape of districts—the buildings were no lower but they were darker, less airy—the constant motif of flowers and light, the gossamer webwork of the Central City all replaced by tall oppressive spears of buildings, swarming with identical windows. They blocked most of the light.

To Mahit’s eyes, used to the narrow corridors of Lsel Station, the lack of blue sky-vault felt strangely comforting, like she could stop keeping track of some small nagging task, and set it down; not having to think about the sheer size of the sky. She wondered what the Teixcalaanli thought of it. It was probably a sign of urban blight, all these people close together, blocking out the sun.

Belltown Six was closer-packed still, a spear-garden of buildings in grey concrete—dim from the moment they stepped out of the train station. The sky above was a bluish sliver. Three Seagrass had her shoulders up by her ears, hunched against a nonexistent chill, and that right there explained most of what Central City denizens thought of this province.

“How did you find this Five Portico?” Mahit asked Twelve Azalea as he led them down the narrow streets.

He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Reed knows this already—she used to tease me—but I tried for Science before I tried for Information, and didn’t make the cut on the entrance exams. There’s always groups of disaffected students, after an exam cycle. Angry people talking in cafés, on semi-legal cloudhook message nets—I still keep in touch with a couple of them.”

“You have—unexpected depths,” said Mahit.

Three Seagrass snickered, a sharp little noise. “Don’t underestimate him because he’s pretty,” she said. “He didn’t get Science because he scored too damn high on Information to go anywhere else.”

“Regardless of that,” Twelve Azalea said, “one of my old friends knows Five Portico and I trust her to not send us to a complete charlatan. All right?”

“Only a partial charlatan for us,” said Three Seagrass, and then Twelve Azalea was stopping them at the central doorway of one of those enormous spear-buildings. It didn’t have a cloudhook interface, like the doors in Central City and the palace—it had a push-button dialpad.

He leaned on one of the lower buttons with his thumb. It made a whining, blatting sound like a tiny alarm.

“Does she know we’re coming?” Three Seagrass asked, just in time for the huge door to click and swing open.

“That’d be a yes,” Mahit said, and walked in like she wasn’t even the slightest bit afraid.

Five Portico’s apartment was on the ground floor, the only open door in the entirety of the corridor: a deep-grey slice of dimness. The woman herself stood in it and watched them come down the hall with no expression on her face save a patient sort of evaluation. Up close, she looked very little like how Mahit had imagined an unlicensed ixplanatl would look. She was spare and of middle height, with the Teixcalaanli high cheekbones pressing tight against bronze skin gone ashy with middle age and lack of vitamin D. She looked, in fact, like someone’s eldest sib, the sort who neglected to fill out their reproductive quota forms and didn’t have the genetics to make the Station’s population board annoy her into doing so.

Except: one of her eyes wasn’t an eye at all.

It might have been a cloudhook, a very long time ago. Now it was a metal and plastic section of her skull, the edges of it obscured with long-healed twisted skin, and in the center, where the eyeball should have been, was a telescoping lens. It glowed faintly red. As Mahit came closer, the aperture widened.

“You must be the Ambassador,” Five Portico said. Her voice matched neither the middle-aged normalcy nor the artificial eye. It was mellifluous, lovely, like she’d been a singer in some other life. “Come in and shut the door.”

Five Portico’s household was not given to the rituals of courtesy. No one made Mahit and her companions overdetermined cups of tea—she thought of Nineteen Adze, and fleetingly regretted the absence of even a prisoner’s sense of sanctuary—nor were they invited to sit down, despite the presence of a couch, upholstered in threadbare turquoise brocade. Instead, Five Portico paced a quick circle around Mahit, as if inspecting her general health, and stopped in front of her, square-shouldered, her head tilted up to look her in the face. The technology where her skull should have been glittered where it wasn’t transparent, and in the transparent parts Mahit could see through to the yellowish bone and the bright red-pink of blood vessels, sealed away from the air.

“Where’s the machine you want installed in you?” she asked.

Three Seagrass coughed, a gesture toward politesse, and said, “Perhaps we might introduce ourselves—”

“This is the Lsel Ambassador, the boy is the one who contacted me, and you are a high-palace Information Ministry official who hasn’t been out-province since you had to take school excursions. I’m who you hired. Are you satisfied?”

Three Seagrass widened her eyes in a Teixcalaanli formal smile, viciously pained. “To be sure,” she said. “I didn’t expect hospitality from you, ixplanatl, but I thought I might make the attempt.”

“I’m not an ixplanatl,” Five Portico said. “I’m a mechanic. Think about it, asekreta, while I talk to your Ambassador.”

“There’s already a machine in my head,” Mahit said. “Here, where the brainstem meets the cerebellum.” She tilted away from Five Portico, twisting to show her, and ghosted a thumb over the tiny scar-ridge at the top of her neck. “I want you to install the new one exactly where and in the same fashion as that one is now. The central portion unweaves—and can be woven back together, the connections to the outer machine resoldered.”

“And what precisely does this machine do, Ambassador?”

Mahit shrugged. “It’s a form of memory amplification. That’s simplest.”

That was not simplest, but it was as much as she was willing to share on three minutes’ rude acquaintance. Five Portico looked both intrigued and dubious, and both expressions seemed natural to her face. “Is the current version damaged?” she asked.

Mahit hesitated, and then nodded.

“Can you describe how?”

The questions Five Portico was asking were subtly different from the sorts of questions Mahit had heard from Twelve Azalea or Nineteen Adze or even the Emperor Himself when she talked about the imago-machines: they felt oblique, shifting, hinting at the actual purpose, but not outright pushing for Mahit to reveal it. Mahit realized that she must ask them all the time to all sorts of people who didn’t want to reveal why they needed illegal neurosurgery, and felt peculiarly comforted by not being anything like Five Portico’s first patient.

“I don’t know what you’ll see when you open me up,” she began. “The damage might be mechanical and visible. It might … not be. The machine is not functioning properly, and I am also having what I can only describe as the symptoms of peripheral neuropathy when I try to access it.”

“And at what point in the extraction and replacement would you like me to abort, Ambassador?” The red-glowing center of Five Portico’s artificial eye widened, telescoping. It was like looking into a laser housing’s white-hot heart.

“We would prefer the Ambassador not be damaged,” Three Seagrass said.

“Of course you would. But it isn’t you whose skull I am cracking, asekreta, so I’d have it from the Ambassador herself.”

Mahit considered what disasters she was prepared to tolerate. None of them—tremors, blindness, cascading seizures, death—seemed terribly important, in the face of all Teixcalaan pointed at her station, wide jaws akimbo. She’d never felt like this before: untethered from everything. A tiny mote of a person, on this enormous and teeming planet, about to try an experiment that even Lsel’s own vaunted neurologists wouldn’t approve of.

“I’d like to live,” she said. “But only if I am likely to retain most of my mental faculties.”

Behind her, Twelve Azalea made a protesting noise. “Really,” he said, “I’d be a little more conservative, Mahit—Five Portico takes a person seriously…”

Five Portico tapped the tip of her tongue against her teeth with a small, considering snort. “That vote of confidence is appreciated,” she said, with such dryness that Mahit was not entirely sure if she was offended or pleased. “Alive and mentally agile. All right, Ambassador. And how are you prepared to pay for this little adventure?”

Dismayed, Mahit realized she hadn’t even thought of how she would be paying. She had her ambassadorial salary—as yet uncollected, and she possessed some doubts that she’d ever receive a single paycheck, if the Teixcalaanli government devolved any further—and she had a currency account on a credit chip that wouldn’t even be read by anything but a Lsel bank machine. And she’d come out here, somehow thinking that this surgery would be like the restaurants in the palace—someone else’s largesse, or someone else’s political bargain. It was stupid. She hadn’t thought. She’d been behaving like—

—oh, like a Teixcalaanli noble, perhaps.

Fuck it.

“You can have the machine you remove,” she said. “And you can do with it whatever you like, as long as whatever you like is not handing it over to a member of the Science Ministry or the Emperor Himself.”

“—Mahit,” Three Seagrass said, shocked.

Mahit looked at her, and set her jaw against the way all the lines of Three Seagrass’s face curved into betrayed disappointment. Had it really mattered to her, so much, that Mahit had been respecting Teixcalaanli values, going along with the modes and functions of Teixcalaanli bureaucracy and palace culture? And here she was giving away what Yskandr had tried so hard to sell. Yes. Yes, it probably had, and she didn’t want that to be true but here it was (no friendship after all, no chance-found ally, only self-interest, and that hurt and there wasn’t a thing to be done about it right now), and she did not have the time or energy to explain herself, or to try to make that disappointment go away.

But Five Portico said, “Done,” and looked as if Mahit had given her a rich-flavored dessert to bite into. Mahit felt ill. “A little piece of technological piracy from a culture that actually practices neurosurgery is worth more than just one expedition into your head, Ambassador. Anything else you need done? Vision enhancement? Reshape your hairline into something even the asekreta here would think is attractive?”

“That’s not necessary,” Mahit said, trying not to flinch. Trying not to let her expression change at all. Perfectly Teixcalaanli, serene. Like Yskandr had taught her. (Was she killing him, her imago, her other-self? Was that the real price she was paying: destroying the person she was supposed to have become, even if she intended to replace him with himself?)

“As you like,” said Five Portico. “Barring events beyond my control—even out here in Belltown we’re not immune to Sunlit raids, Ambassador, and I’ll hand over your machine if it means my life—I promise none of your off-world technology will get back to the people who want it most.”

“This was a terrible idea,” Three Seagrass said to no one in particular, and Twelve Azalea put his hand on her arm.

“I know,” Mahit said, “but I don’t exactly have a better choice.”

“I imagine you don’t,” said Five Portico. “Or you’d never have ventured out here. Come on into the surgery. Let’s get started. You’ll have her back in three hours or so, asekretim—if you get her back at all.”