A Memory Called Empire

(I am remembering what I have never seen–)

I’ve seen this. I am this. Who are you?

(An inward turn, searching, to find that foreign voice—to look at her, inside themselves. A turning-in, and in turning they see one another, doubled—)

says Yskandr Aghavn.

We felt that way.

Both of their voices, almost the same. Electric fire in her nerves, the sweetness of being known.

Abruptly and sickeningly, Mahit was aware in a way she never wanted to have been aware of the movement of air currents on the internal structure of her cervical vertebrae, a sickeningly intimate caress that transmuted into a cascade of nerve impulse, fingertips and toetips lighting up with shimmering pressure that flipped over, the shunt of some massive switch, to sudden pain.

Why wasn’t she unconscious?

What was Five Portico doing to her?

Mahit tried to scream, and could not: whatever drugs were supposed to be keeping her under the threshold of unconsciousness were paralytic (at least something works, she thought horribly, at least she wasn’t going to thrash and tear out her own nervous system on the points of Five Portico’s microsurgery rig).

Waves of electric feeling, up from her extremities in a helpless rush—

There are two of them. They see each other; one is dead and one decohering, young face a half-remembered sketch, filled in with Mahit’s eyes, green instead of brown; the wrongness of being in an unfamiliar sensorium, this body’s sense of smell more acute, her stress-response hormones different—more tolerance of greater pain, and some Yskandr (it doesn’t matter which) remembers that female-hormonal bodies are simply better at dealing with pain than male-hormonal ones, thinks At least that’ll be easier but it hurts so much, what is happening to her. Them. Her.

Flicker-shuffle; memory scraps like drifting debris in zero-g, caught in some sun-glint and illuminated to the point of visual pain:

(—sunglare through the window falling on the back of his hand; there are too many lines there, the veins prominent. He’d never thought he’d get old on Teixcalaan but here he is, writing in cipher on paper in his apartment, informing Darj Tarats that it is unsafe to send further imago-copies of himself by any channel, and he will not be returning to Lsel again to leave his imago-machine in safekeeping and have a new blank installed to continue recording. It isn’t true: what’s not safe is letting anyone from Lsel know what he’s prepared to do in order to keep them all safe. 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—)

(“—in extremis, we must ensure that the Emperor’s wishes for his successor are respected,” says Eight Loop, “and therefore I propose I adopt the ninety-percent clone as my legal heir.” Yskandr stares at her, thinks Nothing I will do to this child is as bad as what his own people have planned for him—they will control every aspect of his life, they made him, they choose for him. Is giving him to the Emperor to dwell inside so much worse?

Then he thinks, Yes, it is, and I’m doing it anyway.)

(—the Emperor Six Direction is resplendent on his sun-spear throne, a casual intensity on every plane of his face, and Yskandr’s stomach flips over in giddy anticipation, a wave of electric feeling that lodges in the base of his throat: He wants to talk to me, I’ve shared enough interesting maybe-secrets, this is going to work—I know what I could offer, what he won’t say no to—)

(—his last bite of stuffed flower lodges in the base of his throat; he cannot breathe or swallow. The place where Ten Pearl had stabbed his wrist is a bright spike of heat. Ten Pearl looks at him critically from across the table, and sighs: a faint melancholy sound, resigned. “I did try to come up with a better way to keep you out of our Emperor’s mind,” he says, “and so did Nineteen Adze—do forgive her, if your religion grants you the sort of afterlife that involves forgiveness—”)

The flutter of memories coalesces. Collapses. Mahit follows it down, down into the center of the three of them. There is a flicker of resistance—(No one should know, I can’t, it’s—you’re dead, thinks Mahit— thinks the other Yskandr, the young one)—before:

“Was the Emperor in bed with you when he asked you to make him immortal?”

Nineteen Adze, sprawled across Yskandr’s naked chest, props her chin on her hands and looks up at him with deadly seriousness. She’s slick all over with fine sweat. Yskandr should stop finding her erotic at any point now, considering what she’s just asked him, but it doesn’t seem to make a bit of difference. He wishes he was surprised at himself. He trails his fingers through her hair, gets them tangled in the dark silky strands of it. The Emperor’s hair is like this, but silver-grey. The texture is the same.

(The other Yskandr is a flicker: mostly libido, prurient interest that Mahit feels as a pulse low in her groin, an acknowledgment of desire. It almost shields her from an explosive realization: the answer to Nineteen Adze’s question is yes.)

(<You got her to notice you,> says Yskandr to Yskandr.)

(I was ten years older than you that night and she started taking me seriously about two months before it, says Yskandr. Shut up and let me remember this, this was…)

(<Enjoyable?>)

(No, says the Yskandr whose memory they’re in. No, this was important.)

(Mahit is flooded with the memory of Nineteen Adze in the bathroom in her office complex, the strange tenderness of her hands on Mahit’s hands, the brisk sudden care of her. She tries to recall if the want had been her own or Yskandr’s or both of theirs—says to the both of them, watching this memory, Blood and starlight, what made you think this was a good idea. She makes the echo vicious. Viciousness does not cover the revelation that she is not at all surprised that Yskandr had seduced—been seduced by—either Nineteen Adze or the Emperor himself. Both of them.)

In that remembered bed, Yskandr averts his eyes from the calm and even gaze of Nineteen Adze, and says, “It’s not immortality. If that’s what you’re asking. The body dies, and that really does matter. Most of personality is endocrine.”

Nineteen Adze considers this. Her nakedness seems to make no difference to the cool evaluation in her face; it is the same expression she’d worn before she’d taken him to bed. “So you match for endocrine compatibility?”

“We match for personality; there are a lot of different endocrine systems that can produce very similar people, and it’s whether the personalities can integrate that matters. But it’s easier when there’s a degree of physical similarity, or similarity in early life experience.”

“His Brilliance wants to have a clone made.”

Yskandr shudders at the idea, and tries not to let Nineteen Adze see him do it. (Yskandr shudders. Yskandr-Mahit shudders. Some taboo seems to be indelible, no matter how many Teixcalaanlitzlim one is seduced by or how long a person marinates in the culture of the palace. One doesn’t put an imago into a clone of the predecessor; there’s too much congruence. The personalities don’t integrate. One of them wins, instead, and whatever the other self had to offer is lost.) “We don’t use clones for imago-hosts, Nineteen Adze. I don’t have any idea how a clone body will change what happens to the expression of Six Direction as an imago.”

She clicks her tongue against her upper teeth. She is plastered against him; she can feel his revulsion just fine, he suspects.

“If I think about it as re-use of His Brilliance, it disturbs me less. But it still disturbs me,” she says.

Yskandr says, “I’d be surprised if it didn’t. It disturbs me, and I suggested that he use an imago-machine in the first place.”

“Then why did you suggest it?”

Yskandr sighs, and shifts them over in the pillows. When he lies on his side, Nineteen Adze fits in the hollow cup made by his hip and chest; a small bony presence, indelible. “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.”

“And you love him,” she says.

Yskandr thinks of waking up, wrung out and pleasantly aching, an hour or so after he’d fallen asleep in the Emperor’s bed, and finding him awake, a stack of infofiche on his bare knees, working. He’d curled around him, then, made a warm curve of himself as a brace to work from. It was such a small thing and Six Direction had left one hand cupped to Yskandr’s cheek, lingering—he’d wondered, then, if he ever slept, and heard, an echo like a cloudhook in his mind, a verse from Fourteen Scalpel’s “Encomia for the Fallen of the Flagship Twelve Expanding Lotus”: the verse 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.

“And I love him,” Yskandr says to Nineteen Adze. “I shouldn’t, but I do.”

“So do I,” she says. “I hope I still will, when he’s not himself any longer.”

Are we ourselves?

One of them is asking. One of them thinks this is a rhetorical question: there’s continuity of memory, and that makes a self. A self is whoever remembers being that self.

One of them corrects: Continuity of memory filtered through endocrine response.

One of them corrects: We all remember being that self, and we are not the same.

They see each other, that peculiar internal triple-vision. Mahit does not remember seeing Yskandr the first time she did this. Yskandr—her imago, her other-self, a tatter fading now, never quite cohesive, the parts of him that exist now are only the parts which were already written into her neurology—he does not remember it either, and does not know (a miserable confessional spill of not-knowing) if he has forgotten or if he has simply remembered what Mahit remembered, or what Yskandr (the other Yskandr, dead, caught up on the point of his dying like a man impaled) remembered.

(—his last bite of stuffed flower lodges in the base of his throat; he cannot breathe or swallow—)

Stop it, Mahit says. You were dying and now you’re us.

She is still reeling from his other memories, from knowing the depth of his mutual seduction with Teixcalaan, but she has enough sense of herself still (it is her body they are part of) to not want to feel again the strangling poison administered by Ten Pearl.

You were dead, and now you’re not, and I need you, she says. I need your help, Yskandr. I am your successor and I need you now.

Her-Yskandr, a torn rag: I’m sorry.

The old man, dying, in love: a gasp, an attempt to breathe—to control the lungs he lives in now—

On that steel table, grit-teethed and straining into a convulsed, tonic-clonic arch, Mahit (or Yskandr) (or Yskandr) came to horrified consciousness for a second time since Five Portico had begun the surgery. The terrible sensation of her nervous system being open to the air was gone—tiny mercy; at least there were no more instruments inside her skull, at least if she was going to have convulsions she was going to fry her brain with anomalous electrical activity, not tear it up with blunt-force trauma—

Her lungs seized. Yskandr breathed differently than she did, was used to larger lungs, or lungs that were currently frozen in neurotoxic paralysis. Most of her vision went to sparkles, blue and white, encroaching fizzing grey at the edges of her visual field, and she tried not to panic, tried to remember how to get this endocrine system to breathe, to calm down, to stop—

Yskandr, I need you, we have work, you don’t get to be finished—

The hand which had been burnt by the poison flower slammed into the steel table—and for a dizzy moment she couldn’t tell if the pain was her own or the memory of Yskandr dying with a needle stabbed into his hand, radiating poison heat. She felt that same electric rush down her ulnar nerves which had been signaling the malfunctioning of the imago-Yskandr she’d shared her mind with.

What if all of this pain was useless, what if it wasn’t the imago-machine that had been sabotaged, but Mahit herself, the malfunction was in her nerves, what if she’d had Five Portico break her open for nothing—

said a Yskandr. The internal voice was peculiar, twinned. Patchy. But there.

Her spine was a horrible arch that she couldn’t release. We’re not dying unless you make us die, she told that voice, and tried to believe it.

There was a stinging needle-stick, this time in the flesh of her buttock. Five Portico, Mahit thought, that’s Five Portico trying to fix me.

Flat darkness swallowed her up like a thunderclap. It was a reprieve.