A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1)

by Arkady Martine

There is, Tarats believes, a kind of inevitability to empire unchecked.

There was nothing safe; there were only gradations of exposure to danger.

Not arrested; taken into custody for her own protection. And how different were these two descriptions? Not different enough, no matter who was arresting her.

So perfectly imperial, to have messages made of light and encrypted with poetry, and require a physical object for propriety’s sake. Such a waste of resources. Time and energy and material.

THE problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.

Your friend composes warily on the subject of enclosures Boundaries, demarcations, edges of knives But thinks also of you, subject to lonesomeness And sends twelve flowers as a promise if you need them. It was poetry. It wasn’t very good poetry, but it seemed to be an allusion meaning oh fuck did the edgeshine-of-a-knife ezuazuacat throw you in prison and can I help? It was unsigned.

Be a mirror, she told herself again. Be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone.

Nine Maize’s oration, when it came, was the epigram Three Seagrass had promised it would be. He’d hardly begun—only took his place, cleared his throat, and recited a three-line stanza: Every skyport harbor overflows Citizens carry armfuls of imported flowers. These things are ceaseless: star-charts, disembarkments when he hesitated just long enough to signal a shift, a caesura. Mahit felt the entire room catch on his held breath. No matter how little she had liked him, she saw why he was the toast of the court’s literati: what charisma he had was amplified the instant he spoke in verse. It was what he was made for. On Lsel he’d have been a candidate for an imago-line of poets, if Lsel had had such a thing. “The curl of unborn petals holds a hollowness,” said Nine Maize. Then he sat down again.

“A war very soon,” Mahit said, uneasily thrilled with discovery. “An annexation. A conquest war. For the purpose of making places less foreign.” Three Seagrass reached over and plucked Mahit’s glass of alcohol out of her hand, took a large sip, and returned it. “We haven’t had an annexation war since before I was born.” “I know,” said Mahit, “we do have history on the stations. We were enjoying Teixcalaan being a quiescent neighboring predator—” “You make us sound like a mindless animal.” “Not mindless,” Mahit said. It was as close as she could bring herself to an apology. “Never that.” “But an animal.” “You do devour. Isn’t that what we’re talking about? A war of annexation.” “It’s not—devour would be if we were xenophobes or genocides, if we didn’t bring new territories into the Empire.” Into the world. Shift the pronunciation of the verb, and Three Seagrass could have been saying if we didn’t make new territories real, but Mahit knew what she meant: all the ways that being part of Teixcalaan gave a planet or a station prosperity. Economic, cultural—take a Teixcalaanli name, be a citizen. Speak poetry.

The jaws of the Empire opening up again, akimbo, bloody-toothed—the endless self-justifying desire that was Teixcalaan, and Teixcalaanli ways of thinking of the universe. The Empire, the world. One and the same. And if they were not yet so: make them so, for this is the right and correct will of the stars.

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.

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.)

Blank. Slow decay, a winding-down wound backward, wound up again, the memory of a closing dark, descent, and then—he woke to un-startled flesh, a flicker of oxygen drawn easily, slowly through the throat—relief, first, dizzying profound relief, breathing, the intense joy of lungs perfused with air where no air had been able to come— (he had been on the floor, on the floor and choking, the carpet-pile pressed into his cheek, and now his cheek was on something cold) A breath, slower still, drugged-slow— (—not his cheek, the lungs too small, the body narrow and brittle-bright with youth and exhaustion easily mixed and had he ever been this young, not for decades—other-body, a new small self, he was dead, wasn’t he—dead and an imago, in a new body—) His mouth was making keening, absurd sounds. He couldn’t figure out why. It didn’t matter. He was breathing. He sank back into blackness.

Are we ourselves? One of them is asking. One of them thinks this is a rhetorical question: there’s continuity of memory, and that makes a self. A self is whoever remembers being that self. One of them corrects: Continuity of memory filtered through endocrine response. One of them corrects: We all remember being that self, and we are not the same.

A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness.

“You are using us as bait,” says Dekakel Onchu. “A clash between Teixcalaan and these aliens will happen right on top of us—” “Not bait,” Darj Tarats replies. “I am making us something worth preserving, in our current form, to a polity which has constantly threatened to absorb us. The clash will not happen here—Teixcalaan’s fleet will go through our Anhamemat Gate, and through all the rest of the jumpgates where these ships have been showing up—and out into wherever the aliens are coming from.” Onchu imagines Tarats’s mind: he must think of Teixcalaan as a tide, a sort of thing that could wash through and pull back again, and leave the ocean the same. She’s seen an ocean once. She’s seen what a high tide does to the shoreline. Tarats does not think of tides. He thinks of weights: of pressing his thumb down as hard as he can on the scale of the galaxy, making a little indentation, a tiny shift. The sort of tiny shift that might happen if a man were to go to Teixcalaan, and love it with all his heart and mind, and seduce it as much as he himself had been seduced: and thus guide it to its death. “What do you want from this?” Onchu asks, in the quiet of her pod. “An end,” says Darj Tarats, who has grown quite old while pressing his fingers down onto the scale. “An end to empires. An immovable object to crash an impossible force upon, and break it.”

“We do,” she said. “But I owe the Ministry some courtesy, since they came to get us.” They came to get us. They drove us through a riot. They brought us coffee and breakfast. The world functions as it ought to, and if I keep behaving as if it will continue to, nothing will go wrong. Mahit knew that line of thinking. She knew it intimately and horribly, and she sympathized (she sympathized too much, this was her essential problem, wasn’t it?), and Three Seagrass was still wrong.

In the soft hands of a child even a map of the stars can withstand forces that pull and crack. Gravity persists. Continuity persists: uncalloused fingers walk orbital paths, but I am drowning in a sea of flowers; in violet foam, in the fog of war—

Released, my tongue will speak visions. Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.

Is personal or institutional violence more threatening?

I carry exile in my heart. It animates my poetry and my politics; I will never be free of it, having lived outside of Teixcalaan for so long. I will always be measuring the distance between myself and a person who remained in the heart of the world; between the person I would have been had I stayed and the person I have become under the pressure of the frontier. When the Seventeenth Legion came through the jumpgate in bright star-snatching ships and filled up the Ebrekti sky with the shapes of my home, I was at first afraid. A profound discontinuity. To know fear in the shape of one’s own face. —from Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier, Eleven Lathe

<Nothing empire touches remains itself,> Yskandr murmured to her.

Mahit herself felt comfortless, angry, blown open and empty: she kept remembering how much blood there had been, how Six Direction had said released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun, as if she’d written it for him. For him, and not for her or for Lsel. Nothing touched by empire stays clean, she thought, and tried to imagine it was Yskandr saying so when it wasn’t Yskandr at all.

Thirty Larkspur’s part of the insurrection took a bit longer to wind to a close—there was a loose détente established, a series of small newsfeed reports that a new Information Minister had been appointed—a man Mahit had never heard of—and that Thirty Larkspur had himself been given some sort of advisory role on commerce. Not one of Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze’s ezuazuacatlim. But not out of the government either. It wasn’t Mahit’s problem. She wanted it to be, which was part of the problem. It was so difficult to put everything down, to trust that anyone, anywhere, would in fact do their jobs. That there was any safety. She wondered how Nineteen Adze felt about it. About the same, she suspected.

She saw Three Seagrass there, and heard her read a poem for Twelve Azalea: a stark, bleak thing, vicious in its grief. An epitaph for worlds ripped out of the sky, for unfairness. For all the senseless deaths. It was beautiful, and Mahit felt … guilt, when she thought of all the senseless deaths that were still waiting. All those Teixcalaanlitzlim, singing as they signed up for the legions. All those planets they would touch, and devour.

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.

I began this book in the Cartel Coffee Lab in Tempe, Arizona, in the summer of 2014, two weeks into an intensive language course in Modern Eastern Armenian: my head full of the shapes of words that weren’t mine. I finished it in a bedroom in Baltimore in the high spring of 2017, too early for my wife to be awake, watching the light come in slow over the city: thinking about exile, and how a person almost but does not quite ever come home.