A Memory Called Empire Read online

  “I have some worrisome information,” said Twelve Azalea, “concerning the corpse of your predecessor.”

  Well. Perhaps seriously began now. (And perhaps she’d been right to immediately assume Yskandr could not have died by accident; it wasn’t like him. And it wasn’t like the City, to be so straightforward.)

  “Is there a problem with his body?”

  “Possibly?” said Twelve Azalea, gesturing as if to suggest that there was certainly a problem and it was a matter of determining its exact nature.

  “As if you’d get involved in my business for just possibly, Petal,” Three Seagrass said.

  “I would suggest that the body of my predecessor is my business,” Mahit said.

  “We covered this, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said briskly. “Legal equivalency—”

  “But not moral or ethical equivalency,” said Mahit, “especially involving a Lsel citizen, as my predecessor certainly was. What is the problem?”

  “After ixplanatl Four Lever left the operating theater I stayed a little while with the corpse, and availed myself of the theater’s imaging equipment,” Twelve Azalea said. “My current assignment within the Information Ministry—I have been working with noncitizens on their medical and accessibility needs while they are visiting us here—has made me quite curious about the physiologies of noncitizens—some are quite different from human people! Not that I’m implying Lsel Station isn’t human, Ambassador, nothing of the kind. But I am insatiably curious, you can ask Reed, she’s known me since we were cadet asekretim together.”

  “Insatiably curious and often in large amounts of trouble, especially if it involves interesting forensics or peculiar medical practices,” Three Seagrass said. Mahit could see the lines of tension in her jaw, the sharpening angle of her mouth. “Get to the point. Did Two Rosewood send you to check up on me?”

  “As if I’d run errands, Reed, even for the Minister for Information. The point is that I stayed behind and examined the corpse of the Ambassador’s predecessor. And that corpse is not entirely organic.”

  “What?” said Three Seagrass, at the same time as Mahit found herself struggling to keep her mouth shut around a Stationer expletive.

  “How so?” she asked. Perhaps Yskandr had replaced a failing hip joint. That would be innocuous and explicable, and more easily noticeable than the implant nestled at the base of his skull that had first given him his own imago and then had recorded an imprint of his knowledge and self and memory—the imago-imprint, which was meant to be passed on down the line.

  “His brain is full of metal,” Twelve Azalea said, denying her even that brief moment of hope.

  “Shrapnel?” Three Seagrass inquired.

  “There were no wounds. Trust me, wounds would have been noticed by the morgue attendant. A full-body scan on the imager is much more complete. I can’t think why it hadn’t been done previously—perhaps it was just so obvious that the Ambassador had died of anaphylaxis—”

  “I am interested in your immediate assumption that shrapnel is a possibility,” said Mahit quickly, trying to steer the conversation away from its most dangerous aspects. It would help if she knew what, if anything, Yskandr had exposed about the imago process—but she couldn’t even ask her version of him, and how was that version to know what his … continuation? His continuation, that would do—what he had done in the time which had elapsed between them?

  “The City is occasionally hostile,” said Three Seagrass.

  “There are accidents,” added Twelve Azalea. “More lately. A person mis-operates their cloudhook, the City overreacts…”

  “It isn’t a problem you’ll ever need to deal with,” Three Seagrass said, with a blithe reassurance that Mahit did not believe at all.

  “Did my predecessor have a cloudhook?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” said Three Seagrass. “He’d have to have been granted permission to use one from His Majesty, Six Direction, himself. Noncitizens don’t have them—it’s a right, having a connection to the City; it comes with being Teixcalaanli.”

  It came with being Teixcalaanli, and having one opened doors, and also, apparently, brought a person into a certain sphere of heightened risk. Mahit wondered just how well the cloudhooks tracked Teixcalaanli citizens as they moved around, and who exactly kept track of that information.

  “What the former Ambassador has got, cloudhook or not,” Twelve Azalea interrupted, “is a very large quantity of mysterious metal in his brainstem, and I thought perhaps you, Ambassador, would like to know, before someone tries to install some in yours.”

  “Cheerful as always, Petal.”

  “Who else knows about this?” Mahit asked.

  Twelve Azalea said, “I haven’t told anyone,” and folded his hands demurely in the long sleeves of his jacket. Mahit could hear the “yet” implicit in that statement, and wondered what this person wanted from her.

  “Why did you tell me? The Ambassador might have had all sorts of implants—an epileptic pacemaker, for instance—those are common, if epilepsy develops late in life,” she said, deploying the standard lie about an imago-machine to someone who wasn’t from Lsel. “I assume you have them here in a civilization as great as Teixcalaan. You could have looked up the Ambassador’s medical records and found out, without going to all this trouble.”

  “Would you believe me if I said I wanted to see what you’d do? Your predecessor was—mm. Quite a political man, for an ambassador. I am curious to see if all Lsel people are.”

  “I’m not Yskandr,” Mahit said, and felt, as she said it, acutely ashamed—she should have been more Yskandr. If they’d had time to integrate—if he hadn’t disappeared inside her head. “‘Political’ varies. Does the ixplanatl know, you think?”

  Twelve Azalea smiled enough to show his teeth. “He didn’t mention it to you. Or to me. But he is a ixplanatl of the Medical College of the Science Ministry—who is to say what he thinks is important?”

  “I want,” said Mahit, standing up, “to see this for myself.”

  Twelve Azalea looked up at her, delighted. “Oh. You are political after all.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Within each cell is a bloom of chemical fire

  [DECEASED’S NAME] committed to the [earth/sun]

  shall burst into a thousand flowers, as many as their breaths in life

  and we shall recall their name

  their name and the name of their ancestor(s)

  and in those names the people gathered here

  let blood bloom also from their palms, and cast

  this chemical fire as well into the [earth/sun] …

  —Teixcalaanli standard funeral oration (partial), modeled on the Eulogy for the ezuazuacat Two Amaranth, earliest attested date second indiction of the Emperor of All Teixcalaan Twelve Solar-Flare

  * * *

  [static]—repeat, lost all attitudinal control—I’m tumbling—unknown energy weapon, I have fire in the cockpit [garbled] [garbled] [expletive] black—black ships, they’re fast, they’re holes in the [expletive] void—no stars—there’s [garbled] can’t—[expletive] more of them [sound of scream for 0.5 seconds followed by roaring sound, presumed explosive decompression, for 1.8 seconds before loss of signal]

  —last transmission of Lsel pilot Aragh Chtel, on reconnaissance at sector-edge, 242.3.11 (Teixcalaanli reckoning, reign of Six Direction)

  THIS time, Mahit approached the Judiciary complex on foot, Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea walking in an ever-shifting pattern around her. She felt like a hostage, or someone who was worried about political assassination, both of which were too close to accurate for her to be particularly sanguine. Besides, she was on her way to break into a morgue. Or help someone with legitimate access to the morgue bring people without that access inside. Either way. She was being political.

  She wished she had better instructions from the Stationer Council as to just how she should be political. The majority of her instructions, after find out what
happened to Yskandr Aghavn, were on the order of do a good job, advocate for our citizens, try to keep the Teixcalaanli from annexing us if the subject arises. She’d gotten the impression that about half the Council—particularly Aknel Amnardbat, the Councilor for Heritage, which tended to take diplomacy and cultural preservation within its purview—had been hoping she’d like Teixcalaanli culture just enough to enjoy her assignment and dislike it sufficiently to discourage further cultural interpenetration into Stationer art and literature. The other half of the Council, led by Councilor Tarats for the Miners and Councilor Onchu for the Pilots (what Mahit thought of as the practical half of Lsel’s six-person governing board, and so much for Aknel Amnardbat’s hopes for her, really) had harped on keep the Empire from annexing us and also continue to make sure we are the prime source of molybdenum, tungsten, and osmium—not to mention information and travel access to the Anhamemat Gate. Was “my predecessor has been murdered and I suspect I am involving myself in an under-table investigation in order to protect Stationer technology” a case of “try to keep the Teixcalaanli from annexing us”? Yskandr would have known. Or at least have had a strident opinion.

  The part of the City which contained the imperial government was enormous and old, shaped like a six-pointed star: sectors for East, West, North, and South, and two more: Sky, extending out between North and East, and Earth, pointing out from the middle of South and West. Each sector was composed of needle-sharp towers jammed full of archives and offices, tied together by multilevel bridges and archways. Stacked courtyards hung in midair between the more populated towers, their floors translucent or inset with sandstone and gold. At the center of each was a hydroponic garden, with photosynthesizing plant life floating in standing water. The unbelievable luxuries of a planet. The flowers in the hydroponic gardens seemed to be color-coded; as they moved closer to the Judiciary, their petals shaded redder and redder, until the center of each courtyard looked like a pool of iridescent blood, and Mahit caught sight of the building that had been her first destination, a practically unthinkable number of hours earlier that morning.

  Twelve Azalea brushed a burnished green-metal plate next to the door with his index finger, tracing a sweeping figure that Mahit thought might have been a calligraphic signature—she caught the glyph for “flower” hidden in the middle of it, and his name written out would have “flower” along with one of the glyphs for “twelve” and some adjustment for the type of flower. The doors to the Judiciary hissed open. When Three Seagrass raised her hand to touch the plate too, Twelve Azalea caught her around the wrist.

  “Just come inside,” he said under his breath, shooing them both through and letting the doors seal shut behind them. “You’d think you’d never snuck in anywhere before…”

  “We have legal access,” Three Seagrass hissed. “And besides, we’re on the City’s visual record—”

  “Which our host doesn’t want us to associate with his access,” Mahit said pointedly, just loud enough to be heard.

  “Exactly,” said Twelve Azalea, “and if we get to the point that someone is scraping City audiovisual for ‘who went into the Judiciary today,’ we have such bigger problems, Reed.”

  Mahit sighed. “Get on with it; take us to my predecessor.”

  Three Seagrass’s mouth compressed into a thin, considering line, and she slipped back to walk at Mahit’s left shoulder while Twelve Azalea led them underground.

  The morgue looked the same. The air was chill and smelled forcibly clean, like it was being churned through purifiers. The ixplanatl—or Twelve Azalea, after he was done investigating—had covered Yskandr’s corpse with the sheet. Mahit was abruptly consumed with crawling dread: the last time she’d stood here, her imago had sent up terrible flares of emotion and endocrine-system hormones and then vanished. And she’d come back anyway. A nasty flicker of sabotage reoccurred: Was this room somehow inimical? (Did she want the room to be inimical, so that the sabotage could not be either her own failure or from someone on Lsel?)

  Twelve Azalea peeled the sheet down again, revealing the dead face of Yskandr Aghavn. Mahit came close. She tried to see the corpse as a material shell; a physical problem of the present world, instead of something which had housed a person like she housed a person. The same person.

  Twelve Azalea pulled on a pair of sterile surgical gloves and gently lifted the corpse’s head, turning it in his hands so the back of its neck faced Mahit, hiding the largest of the preservative injection sites, the one in the great veins of the throat. The corpse moved like something fresher than three months dead: supple and floppy.

  “It’s quite difficult to see—a very small scar,” he said, “but if you press down at the top of the cervical spine, I’m sure you’ll feel the aberration.”

  Mahit reached out and pressed her thumb into the hollow of Yskandr’s skull, directly between the tendons. His skin was rubbery. Too much give, and the wrong kind. The small imago-scar was a tiny irregularity under the pad of her thumb; beneath it was the unfolded architecture of the imago-machine, a firmness as familiar as the skull bones themselves. Her own was identical. She used to rub her thumb against it while she was studying. She hadn’t done that since the imago-machine containing five years of Yskandr’s experience had been surgically installed inside her. It wasn’t one of his habitual gestures, and it was a tell, outside of the Station, and so she’d let it dissolve into the new combined person they were supposed to be becoming.

  “Yes,” she said. “I feel it.”

  “Well then.” Twelve Azalea smiled. “What do you think it is?”

  She could tell him. If he had been Three Seagrass, she might have—an impulse she knew was dangerous even as she felt it; there was no appreciable safety in confession to one Teixcalaanlitzlim over another, not after a single day—but she was desperately alone, without Yskandr, and she wanted.

  “It’s certainly not organic,” she said. “But he’s had it for a long time.” A sidestep. She needed to get through this unwise bit of corpse-handling and back to her rooms and shut a door and deal with wanting … friends. A person wasn’t friends with Teixcalaanli citizens. A person especially wasn’t friends with asekretim, the both of them were Information Ministry—

  “I never heard of him having spinal surgery,” said Three Seagrass. “Not in all the time he was here. Not for epilepsy or anything else.”

  “Would you have noticed?” asked Mahit.

  “With the amount of time he spent at court? He was very visible, your predecessor. If he disappeared for a week someone would have commented that His Majesty must be missing him—”

  “Really,” said Mahit.

  “I did mention he was a political man,” Twelve Azalea said. “So you’d say the metal was, perhaps, inserted before he became Ambassador.”

  “And what does it do?” Three Seagrass said. “I am far more intrigued by that possibility than when it was installed, Petal.”

  “Does the Ambassador know such technical matters?” Twelve Azalea said, lightly. Teasingly, Mahit thought. Perhaps even insultingly. He was baiting her.

  “The Ambassador,” she said, gesturing to herself, “is not a medical practitioner nor an ixplanatl, and could not possibly explain the neurological effects of such a device in any detail.”

  “But it is neurological,” said Three Seagrass.

  Twelve Azalea said, “It’s in his brainstem,” as if that was a sufficient answer. “And it is certainly not Teixcalaanli; no ixplanatl would adjust the functioning of a person’s mind in such a way.”

  “Don’t be insulting,” said Three Seagrass. “If noncitizens want to stuff their skulls with metal it is their own business, unless they plan to become citizens—”

  “The Ambassador was certainly involved with the functioning of Teixcalaan, Reed, you know that, it’s practically why you applied to be this new one’s liaison—so it does matter that he had some kind of neurological enhancement—”

  “I am entirely fascinated by this information,”
Mahit said pointedly, and then cut herself off as both Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea abruptly straightened and composed their faces to formal stillness. Behind Mahit the morgue door opened with a shallow hiss. She turned around.

  Coming toward them was a Teixcalaanli woman dressed entirely in bone-white: trousers and many-layered blouse and a long asymmetrical jacket. The planes of her face were dark bronze, her cheekbones wide, her nose knifelike over a wide and narrow-lipped mouth. Her soft leather boots were soundless on the floor. Mahit thought she was the most beautiful Teixcalaanli woman she’d ever seen, which likely meant that she was mediocre to ugly by local standards. Too slight, too tall, all dimension in the face in the nose, and difficult to look away from.

  She catches all the light in the room and bends it around herself.

  That didn’t feel like Mahit’s own observation. It had floated up in her mind the way an imago-borne skill would, like knowing how to gesture like a Teixcalaanlitzlim or do multivariable calculus—perfectly natural and perfectly alien to Mahit’s own experiences. She wondered if Yskandr had known this woman and was again angry that he wasn’t here to ask. That he’d absented himself when she needed him, left nothing but these shreds of thought, brief impressions.

  Three Seagrass stepped forward and lifted her hands in precise formal greeting, her fingertips just touching, and bowed deeply.

  The newcomer did not bother to return the gesture. “How unexpected,” she said. “Here I thought I’d be the only one coming to visit the dead at this hour of night.” She did not seem perturbed.

  “May I present the new Ambassador from Lsel Station, Mahit Dzmare,” Three Seagrass said, using the highest formal construction of the phrase, as if they were all standing in the Emperor’s receiving hall instead of a sub-basement of the Judiciary.