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This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.
IN Teixcalaan, these things are ceaseless: star-charts and disembarkments.
Here, in star-charts, the division of the universe into empire and otherwise, into the world and not the world.
There is, Tarats believes, a kind of inevitability to empire unchecked.
He said it in the Teixcalaanli language, which made it a tautology: the word for “world” and the word for “the City” were the same, as was the word for “empire.”
Bodies should decompose, and be recycled. But the Empire preserved everything, told the same stories over and over again; why not also preserve flesh instead of rendering it up for decent use?
The name the man had chosen, it turned out, was Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle, a revelation that produced in both Mahit and Three Seagrass a kind of stunned silence.
There was nothing safe; there were only gradations of exposure to danger.
Changes in comfort levels with strangers were indicative of insecurity; she knew that from the very basic training in psychological response that all Lsel citizens had as part of their aptitude testing. Something had changed in the City, and she didn’t know what.
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.
THE problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.
Everything she had ever wanted when she was fifteen. Right here. She thought it should probably have made her feel happy, instead of abruptly unreal. Disconnected—depersonalized. Like she was happening to someone else.
Even as she walked further into the strange dim sanctuary of it, she peered upward, trying to understand how the birds didn’t fly up the funnel and escape into the vaulted Teixcalaanli sky—it was surely warm enough out there for them, though not nearly as sweet—not so many red flowers all at once. Perhaps succor was enough to keep a whole population trapped, willingly. Succor, and the fine mesh of a net. When she tilted her head to exactly the right angle, she could see it, strung silvery and near-invisible at the funnel’s mouth.
He was as flexible as a holograph, bending in the light, saying different words at different angles of approach.
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.
It was going to hurt so much if she had to stop pretending Three Seagrass was possessed of no agenda but her own ambition and a mild affection for barbarians.
Some little time ago—six weeks, by the Teixcalaanli reckoning the Station has come to use, was using even before Amnardbat was born, it is by such small degrees that a culture is devoured, she had not ever known to notice that a “week” bore no resemblance to the rotation of Lsel, facing and unfacing again its sun—some little time ago she had stood here, and with the access granted to her as the Councilor for Heritage, caused one of those little containers to disgorge its contents into her waiting hands.
(Some other life. 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.)
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.
“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.”
Patriotism seemed to derive quite easily from extremity. Mahit supposed that was true for all the rioters in the City’s streets, too.
An algorithm’s only as perfect as the person designing it.”
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.
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.)
(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?)
He feels not just old but ancient, a decaying conglomeration of choices made in extremis—in extremis and out of passion, a terrifying combination—but extremis and devotion would be worse, and might be truer—)
describing the captain of that ship, how she had died with her people. There is no star-chart unwatched by her / sleepless eyes, or unguided by / her spear-calloused hand, and thus / she falls, a captain in truth. Sleepless emperors. Seduction’s a matter of poetry. Of a story he wants to be true.
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.
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.
“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.” Onchu hisses through her teeth.
They didn’t look like Teixcalaanlitzlim, Mahit thought. Drifting thought, absurd, disconnected. They looked like people. Just like people. Tearing each other apart.
(she sympathized too much, this was her essential problem, wasn’t it?),
She’d become very cheerful, in the time between having had an idea—whatever that idea would turn out to be—and announcing it. Mahit understood that, too. The power of having any sort of plan, no matter how absurd or impossible.
<And she has been flirting back,> Yskandr went on. <When you’re not in the middle of a coup attempt, you might want to do something about that.>
Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.
Perhaps she was old enough for poetry now: she had three lives inside her, and a death.
Empire was empire—the part that seduced and the part that clamped down, jaws like a vise, and shook a planet until its neck was broken and it died.
Is personal or institutional violence more threatening?
Nothing is untouched,> Yskandr murmured—the young Yskandr, hers, that familiar flickering static-bright voice. <Nothing you make is unmarked by Teixcalaan. Even I learned that.
In the oldest version of this custom, Mahit knew, they would all drink the contents of the bowl. So much for Teixcalaanli squeamishness about the consumption of the revered dead. They ate people who were still alive.
A profound discontinuity. To know fear in the shape of one’s own face.
“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.”
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.
