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Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives life back to those who no longer exist. —Guy de Maupassant, “Suicides”
There is, Tarats believes, a kind of inevitability to empire unchecked.
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.
Be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone.
But if a system was no longer foreign—if the world was large enough, the Empire large enough, to encompass and subsume all that was barbaric about that world—well, it wasn’t barbaric anymore. It wasn’t threatening anymore. If Nine Maize was pointing out the threat of importation, he was calling for—or at least suggesting—that Teixcalaan act to normalize that threat. To civilize it. And Teixcalaan had always civilized—had always made something Teixcalaanli—with force. Force, like a war.
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.
For the first time she wondered what it would be like if she was like this forever; if she was damaged in an unfixable way. If everything she would ever touch again would be dim electric fire, and not sensation.
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.
“Immoral is being someone you cannot hope to emulate,”
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.)
Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.
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.
