A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1)

by Arkady Martine

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

“What’s the other sort of person? Since domestic terrorism doesn’t usually lend itself to a glorious return to ideal rulership, as most of the populace can’t possibly enjoy it enough to like their new emperor afterward.”

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

He was as flexible as a holograph, bending in the light, saying different words at different angles of approach.

“You have seen my successors,” Six Direction went on. “Imagine with me, Ambassador Dzmare, the truly exceptional civil war we might have under their care.”

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.

“Because Teixcalaan is an enormous, hungry thing, and His Brilliance Six Direction is neither crazy nor power-hungry nor cruel. There aren’t all that many good emperors, Nineteen Adze. Even in poetry.”

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.

The Emperor of Teixcalaan greets you, she said. Her face was wet. Blood. Tears. Wet and grim and absolutely determined. Be calm. Order is a flower blooming at dawn, and dawn is breaking now.