A Memory Called Empire

Which was all the old Yskandr, the one who remembered dying. Mahit considered when that would be, when she wouldn’t want to make sure that she was doing some justice to her imago-line—and put the box of ashes away.

She did not meet the Emperor in the imperial apartments in Palace-Earth, and neither did she meet her in Nineteen Adze’s office complex back in Palace-East. Mahit imagined the latter had been shuttered.

They met just before dawn, in the plaza in front of the Judiciary, with its pool full of deep-red floating flowers. Mahit was awake by virtue of being summoned by a grey-suited imperial attendant knocking at her door, and wished vehemently for coffee, or tea, or even a nice simple caffeine pill. Nineteen Adze looked as if sleep was something that happened to other people, who happened not to be emperors. It was beginning to suit her; or her face was settling into it. The new hollownesses, the focus of long-seeing eyes.

“Your Brilliance,” said Mahit.

They were sitting on a bench. There was one attendant-guard with them, and she did not wear a cloudhook, and she carried a projectile weapon. Nineteen Adze folded her hands in her lap. “I’m almost used to it,” she said. “People calling me Your Brilliance. I think when I’m used to it, that will mean he’s really dead.”

“No one is dead,” Mahit said carefully, “who is remembered.”

“Is that Lsel scripture?”

“Philosophy, maybe. Practicality.”

“I assume it’d have to be. Considering how wrapped up you are in your dead.” Nineteen Adze lifted one hand, let it fall. “I miss him. I can’t imagine what it’d be like having him in my head. How do you make decisions?”

Mahit exhaled hard. In her mind, Yskandr was all fondness, warmth, laughter. “We argue,” she said. “A little. But mostly we agree. We’re … we wouldn’t match, I wouldn’t be his successor, if I wasn’t going to mostly agree with him.”

“Mm.” Nineteen Adze was quiet, then, for a long moment. The wind ruffled the petals of all the red flowers: a vast confined sea. The sky lightened from dark grey to paler grey, shaded gold where the sun would burn off the clouds.

When she couldn’t stand the silence any longer, Mahit asked, “Why did you want to meet with me?” She left off the honorific. She left it a plain sentence: Why did you, one person, want to meet with me, another person?

“I thought I’d ask you what you wanted,” said Nineteen Adze. She smiled; that viciously gentle smile, all her attention focusing down onto Mahit. “I can imagine you might like to extract some promises from me.”

“Are you planning to annex my Station to Teixcalaan?” Mahit asked.

Nineteen Adze laughed, a brutal, shoulder-shaking sound. “No. No, stars, I hardly have time. I hardly have time for anything. You’re safe, Mahit. You and Lsel Station can be as much of an independent republic as you’d like. But that’s not what I asked. I asked what you wanted.”

In the pool, a long-legged bird had alighted: white-feathered, long-beaked. Two feet high at the shoulder, at least. As it stepped, it didn’t disturb the flowers; its great feet slipped between them and rose again, dripping. Mahit didn’t know the word for the kind of bird it was. “Ibis,” maybe. Or “egret.” There were a lot of kinds of birds in Teixcalaanli, and one word for “bird” in Stationer. There’d been more, once. They didn’t need more than that now. The one stood for the concept.

She could ask for … oh, an appointment to a university. A place in a poetry salon. A Teixcalaanli title. A Teixcalaanli name to go with it. Money; fame; adulation. She could ask for absolutely nothing, and remain in service, the Ambassador from Lsel, and answer mail, and sing a song in Teixcalaanli pubs that once she’d written some of the words to, a long time ago.

Nothing the Empire touched would remain hers. Very little was hers already.

“Your Brilliance,” said Mahit Dzmare, “please send me home, while I still want to go.”

“You keep surprising me,” said Nineteen Adze. “Are you sure?”

Mahit said, “No. Which is why I want you to send me home. I’m not sure.”

Trying to see who we are. What is left of us. Who we might be now.

Approached from the underside of the largest of the pockmarked metallic atmosphereless planets that formed the Lsel System, the station hung suspended, perfectly balanced in the gravity well between two stars and four planets. It was small, a dull metal toroid, spinning to maintain thermal control. Rough from fourteen generations of solar radiation and small-particle impact. Thirty thousand or so people dwelling in the dark. More, if you counted the imago-memories. One of them at least had recently tried to sabotage one of those long memory-lines, and would be waiting to see what had come of her attempt.

Mahit watched the Station come into view.

The Emperor’s hand—slim, dark-fingered, intimately familiar—had reached out, in the plaza. Reached out and taken Mahit’s jaw between her fingers, turned her face. Mahit should have been frightened, or stunned into endocrine cascade. But she had felt—floating. Distant, free.

“We do need an ambassador from Lsel,” Nineteen Adze had said, “though it’s not terribly urgent at the moment. If I want you, Mahit, I will send for you.”

Mahit felt that way now, as Lsel came back into the center of her ship’s viewports. Very distant. A certain kind of free.

Not, in the end, quite home.