A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1)

by Arkady Martine

Twelve Azalea, Indistinguishable Courtier Number Three, except for how looking at him gave Mahit the impression of being in the presence of some other culture’s impeccably observed standard of masculine beauty. She felt a little peculiar about her lack of response. He was like an art object. Twelve Azalea, patrician first-class, Three Seagrass had said, which meant she knew him by name at least, and possibly by something closer to reputation.

There was nothing safe; there were only gradations of exposure to danger. She felt deliriously unmoored, and that was before any cyanide exposure.

Some other life when she’d come here alone, imagoless in truth, and—studied, wrote poetry, learned the rhythms of other ways of speaking that didn’t come out of a textbook. Some other life, but the walls between lives felt so thin sometimes.)

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.

“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.”

Walls kept out the visible signifiers of unrest.

Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.

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—