A Desolation Called Peace

INTERLUDE

TO consider the uses of meat.

Sustenance: meat that explodes on the tongues of us, the taste of heme and the texture of bundled muscle fiber, taurine tang and rich putrescene. A body requires meat, because a body is meat, and we, singing, take joy not only in the building of starflyers and cities, the investigation of natural processes and song-variants, but also the simple pleasure of taking in nutrients, energy, flavor.

Reuse: some bodies in a litter are not suitable for being persons, and all bodies eventually senesce and cease. But nothing made is lost, in the singing we: all bodies that are not persons or have ceased to be persons are reclaimed, used again, broken down into components, consumed as appropriate.

Skill: all bodies are meat, and each body’s meat and genetics and experience create skill. To consider the uses of meat in this way is to invite the consideration of grief. All bodies senesce, or are damaged beyond repair, and are no longer a voice harmonizing; to know loss of voices is to know grief, to know lack, to cease from singing and to lament.

To consider the uses of this meat, however, is methodologically complex. There are two bodies of this type of meat, carved neatly out of their starflyers like a claw scoops shellfish from the clasp of abalone. The two bodies did not come to the we at the same time, though they came from the same sort of starflyer: the starflyers that originate from the void-home the meat has built on the other side of the nearest jumpgate to a far-from-center dirt-home of we.

They are not persons.

They think language.

But they react as if they were persons. A single pattern, repeated: but only in how they fly their starflyers, their understanding of vector and thrust. In all other ways they are not persons, they do not hear the singing of we, they are sustenance and skill alone. Save for that pattern. Save for piloting.

After a time, they are no longer skill, but only sustenance. We, singing, wonder if the taste of them will import their singular pattern into the harmony of us: it is a puzzlement that the taste of them is merely taste.

Aknel Amnardbat spends more time alone than she knows she ought to. She’s the Councilor for Heritage, after all—she has six voices of other Councilors for Heritage echoing down her imago-line for company, to begin with, and besides that chain of memory, she is Heritage, culture and community and everything that makes Lsel Station itself, and she remembers being a person who went to every ridiculous local art event she could find on the Station intranet. Bad holofilm documentaries and new kinds of music, kids yelling poetry in bars, song-and-dance ensembles, zero-g dance, that one year she’d been obsessed with an imagoless restaurateur who had come up with a new way of using fungi and capsaicin and aldehydes to create meals that were an impossible sense-explosion—before she was Councilor, she had known the Station like she knew her own body.

It’s more difficult now. She’s Heritage. When she arrives at an event, it’s either a statement of official approval or a message that the event might be sanctioned. She doesn’t know when that started happening. When she stopped being trusted, even when she was at something that didn’t even have a hint of Teixcalaanli cultural infiltration—something she’d never have even considered censoring—

It doesn’t matter. She’s Heritage, and she isn’t alone—she has all of Lsel Station with her, all its history and its people to watch over. She comes to the station’s secret heart, the imago-machine repository, whenever she feels too much like her office has built a glass cage between her and her home. All the memories of the Station’s imago-lines, in her safekeeping here, where she stands now.

An echo, imago-memory flare, emotion quickly repressed: Except those you mar.

Aknel Amnardbat doesn’t make mistakes often. When she does, she admits them to herself and holds herself accountable.

What she’d done to Mahit Dzmare hadn’t been a mistake. Cutting the imago-line of Empire-besotted ambassadors out of the heart of Lsel was right; no one should have been heir to Yskandr Aghavn’s memories at all. Dzmare was acceptable collateral. She was a perfect match on aptitudes for him—she would have been another one just like him, even without his live memory to infect her. Getting them both off-Station had been the best possible idea.

Adjusting—weakening—the imago-machine Dzmare carried in her brainstem was almost as good. Either have the new Ambassador short out somewhere no one could help her—or free her of Yskandr Aghavn entirely, and see what she’d make of herself out there.

(Sabotage, one of the voices of her imago-line murmured, and she ignored it.)

Except Dzmare came back, imago apparently intact, and now Teixcalaan was closer than it had ever been, sucking up Lsel resources into the bellies of its warships as they passed through Bardzravand Sector on the way to their war.

Aknel Amnardbat doesn’t make mistakes that she refuses to acknowledge. She acknowledges this one: her mistake here was imagining that Aghavn and Dzmare were already so different from their fellow Stationers that Lsel would never be a place they’d want to come home to. She’d been wrong: the two of them weren’t so far gone as to want to get away and stay away.

It makes Dzmare more dangerous than she could ever have been off playing Ambassador. Returned, her whole imago-line is capable of spreading its empire-infected, already-colonized ideas to other imago-lines, and live Stationers carrying them. It makes them a vector, a more subtle one than an approaching warship, but just as true and just as poisonous to Lsel. It is the minds of a people that have to stay free. Bodies die, or suffer, or are imprisoned. Memory lasts. And what would Lsel Station be, with its memory suborned to the seduction of Teixcalaanli culture? They’re losing enough lines already—mostly pilots, recently, vanished out by the Far Gate, to whatever enemy Teixcalaan is fighting (or, Amnardbat thinks, viciously and sharp, to Teixcalaan itself, under pretense). They can’t afford to lose more to corruption.

If Dzmare misses her appointment with the imago-machine technicians, Amnardbat thinks, she will have her arrested. Even Darj Tarats can’t argue with the legality of arresting someone for disobedience to a direct order from a Councilor. The law is embedded in all of Lsel’s codes, woven into the meat of what Stationer culture is. The Council can give emergency commands, which must be obeyed.

And once Dzmare is arrested, Amnardbat will have her imago-machine under her hands one more time. Once the Lsel Council were captains and commanders, and their words meant death, or life amongst the black between the stars.

Perhaps they should be again.