"A Memory Called Empire"

[fiefoe]

Perhaps because I've already had my fill with imperial succession drama, the plotting in Arkady Martine's debut novel didn't impress me much. Other minor complaints -
-- it's exhausting to read about protagonists who have to operate with very little sleep for days,
-- I don't find 3 Seagrass's instant loyalty to Mahit too convincing,
-- why the empire seems so low-tech given its galactic superpower.

The imago machines and Teixcalaan's rich poetic tradition are quite enjoyable to read about.

• This book is dedicated to anyone who's fallen in love with a culture that's devouring their own.
• (imago:) work as one person, compiled out of a memory chain and a new host.
• The mouth of the corpse was slack, but she could see the smile line at its corners, feel it on her own mouth, how Yskander's muscle would have formed them over time.
• Mahit liked her abruptly, and was aware that the liking was more of a desparate grasp at an ally than anything else.
• Mahit thought, gleeful fleeting desire, of going barefoot at home for the sheer physical pleasure of it, and thought again about how imago successors matched even on aesthetic preferences with their predecessors.
• 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.
  “No one would actually name a child that,” Three Seagrass complained after a moment. “He has no taste. Even if his parent or his crèche was from a low-temperature planet with a lot of tundra in need of all-terrain vehicles.”
• “When I was learning the language,” she said, deciding all at once to share, to offer something back for this little bit of cultural exchange—if they were going to work together they should work together—“we had to pretend to have Teixcalaanli-style names, and one of my classmates—the kind of person who scores perfectly on exams and has a terrible accent—called himself 2e Asteroid. The irrational number. He thought he was being clever.”
  Three Seagrass contemplated this, and then snickered. “He was,” she said. “That’s hilarious.”
  “Really?”
  “Enormously. It’s like turning your whole persona into a self-deprecating joke. I’d buy a novel written by a Two-E Asteroid, it’d probably be satire.”
• Three Seagrass widened her eyes in a Teixcalaanli version of a grin. “Work food. Anything that’s too delicious to eat slow.” “And then you get back to the job faster?”
• Mahit thought she was the most beautiful Teixcalaanli woman she’d ever seen, which likely meant that she was mediocre to ugly by local standards. Too slight, too tall, all dimension in the face in the nose, and difficult to look away from.
  She catches all the light in the room and bends it around herself.
  That didn’t feel like Mahit’s own observation. It had floated up in her mind the way an imago-borne skill would, like knowing how to gesture like a Teixcalaanlitzlim or do multivariable calculus—perfectly natural and perfectly alien to Mahit’s own experiences.
• “Her Excellency, the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze,” Three Seagrass went on, and then murmured, “whose gracious presence illuminates the room like the edgeshine of a knife,” one fifteen-syllable-long participial phrase in Teixcalaanli, as if the woman in white came with her own premade poetic epithet. Perhaps she did.
• Three Seagrass slapped both her hands down on the morgue table, one on each side of the corpse’s head. Her rings clicked on the metal. “We can trade truths just as well as lies,” she said. “One from each of us, for a pact.”
  “That is out of Eleven Lathe,” Twelve Azalea said. “The truth pact between him and the sworn band of aliens in book five of Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier.”
  Three Seagrass did not look embarrassed, though Mahit thought she might have reason to. Allusions and references were the center of Teixcalaanli high culture, but were they supposed to be so obvious that any one of your old friends could pick up the precise citation? Not that she’d read Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier. It wasn’t a text that had ever reached Lsel Station. It sounded like one which probably hadn’t got past the Teixcalaanli censors—religious texts, or texts that could be read as statecraft manuals or unsanitized accounts of Teixcalaanli diplomacy or warfare, rarely did.
• “Archives, the Ministry of War, and the Imperial Censor Office,” said Three Seagrass, answering her earlier question.
  “That’s not wrong, cosmologically.”
  “What an opinion you have of what we send out into the universe,” Three Seagrass said.
  “Literature, conquest, and things that are forbidden. Isn’t that accurate?”
• The subway laced through the City like ice crystals on a pane of glass: a fractal merging of multiple lines, an impossible complexity. And yet the Teixcalaanlitzlim used it with impunity and ease
• Not everyone in the City loves the City. Not everyone in the world loves the world, civilization is not coextensive with the known universe for someone, someone with a bomb who doesn’t care about civilian deaths …
• “I’m afraid I won’t be able to go with you,” she said, to buy time. Used the extra few seconds to remember her technical diplomatic vocabulary, the most official forms, and then prepared—feeling as if she was about to deliberately step outside an airlock without checking the oxygen volumes on her vacuum suit—to claim sanctuary. “I am compelled by prior agreement to keep my appointment with the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, whose gracious presence illuminates the room like the edgeshine of a knife, this afternoon. I believe that she would be exceptionally displeased if I instead attended a meeting with the most respected and admired One Lightning without first fulfilling my obligation to her.
• The water hit lower on his shoulders than on hers—four inches in height would do that. The shape of his torso and his center of gravity, in the chest rather than the hips, overriding her sense of herself. She’d remembered like this when they had first been integrated, just briefly, the shape of his body rather than hers, superimposed—but why would he ever have been in the shower of the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze?
  Yskandr? she tried, again. Silence. The ache of muscles that weren’t hers, a kind of exquisite tiredness.
• Nineteen Adze’s grasp of imago theory was amazingly perverse: the idea that Yskandr would be walking around inside her body, with her own self pushed out or vanished or killed, and only her name remaining to her flesh? The Station didn’t waste its children like that. It was nauseating to contemplate—and reminded her far too much of that moment in the shower, where she hadn’t quite felt like her at all. Not her, and not the combined person she and Yskandr were meant to become, either.
• “An imago is live memory,” Mahit said. “Memory comes with personality. Or they’re the same thing. We found that out very early. Our oldest imago-lines are fourteen generations as of when I left, and might be fifteen now.”
  “What role is worth preserving over fifteen generations on a mining station?” Nineteen Adze asked. “Governors? Neurobiologists, to keep making the imago-machines?”
  “Pilots, ezuazuacat,” said Mahit, and found herself vividly and suddenly proud of the Station, a sort of upwelling patriotism she hadn’t considered part of her emotional vocabulary. “We, and the other stations in our sector, haven’t been tied to a planet since we colonized the area. There aren’t planets to live on in our sector, only planets and asteroids to mine. We’re Stationers. We will always preserve pilots first.”
• Not that it needed to be signed. Mahit had only sent three messages, and neither the Minister for Science nor the multitude of minor functionaries in the Information Ministry would reply in blatant code. This was Twelve Azalea, and he was probably simultaneously sincere in his desire to effect a rescue if she needed one, and having far too much fun. Coded messages! Anonymous communiqués across departmental lines! And Mahit thought that she had an untoward degree of affection for the genre conventions of political intrigue in Teixcalaanli literature.
  Was it untoward if one lived it, in one’s own culture? Yes, she decided. It was untoward when one reenacted it for the sake of the convention. But a Teixcalaanlitzlim wouldn’t think that.
  No one had blown up Twelve Azalea, or even tried to do so. His friend might be hospitalized, and his new dangerous political acquaintance might be writing to him from rarefied captivity, but he was still perfectly within his rights to act like he’d walked out of Red Flowerbuds for Thirty Ribbon or some other palace romance.
• Mahit had been given her contraceptive implant at the age of nine. When she’d learned that Teixcalaanlitzlim sometimes bore their own children inside themselves, she’d thought of it the way she thought about the water spilling out of one of those flower bowls in the restaurant in Plaza Central Nine. To have that much to easily spend felt both offensive and compelling.
• Three Seagrass had no such qualms. “A blood death in a temple was how we used to ensure the success of a war, Mahit,” she said. “One death from every regiment, hand-selected by the yaotlek. No one does it anymore. Not for hundreds of years. It’s terribly selfish, for one citizen to take away the responsibility of calling on the favor of the stars from everyone else.”  <> “Selfish” wasn’t how Mahit would have described it. She’d say “barbaric,” if she was speaking a language where that would be an intelligible sequence of words to describe a Teixcalaanli religious practice.
• Instead she introduced Mahit formally, and Mahit bowed over her fingertips and was an extremely proper barbarian—respectful, occasionally clever, mostly quiet in the midst of the sharp chatter of ambitious young people. She could follow about half of the allusions and quotations that slipped in and out of their speech. It made her jealous in a way she recognized as childish: the dumb longing of a noncitizen to be acknowledged as a citizen. Teixcalaan was made to instill the longing, not to satisfactorily resolve it, she knew that. And yet it wormed into her every time she bit her tongue, every time she didn’t know a word or the precise connotations of a phrase.
• “Naturally you do,” said Ten Pearl. He stepped closer, a fraction past the norms of Teixcalaanli personal space, into that precise zone of closeness that Mahit was most comfortable with: how friends stood on Lsel, where there wasn’t enough space to be standoffish. “Do be careful, Ambassador,” he said.
  “Of what?” Mahit asked. She wouldn’t break the illusion of incompetence.
• Somewhere in the middle of the second oration, an acrostic ode that simultaneously spelled out the name of the poet’s hypothetical lost beloved via the opening letters of each line and told a heart-wrenching story of his self-sacrifice to save his shipmates from a vacuum breach, Mahit had the sudden realization that she was standing in the Teixcalaanli court, hearing a Teixcalaanli poetry contest, while holding an alcoholic drink and accompanied by a witty Teixcalaanli friend.
  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.
  The orations were good. Some of them were better than good—driving rhythms over clever internal rhyme, or an orator whose delivery of that particular Teixcalaanli style of half-sung, half-spoken rapid-fire chant was exceptionally fluid. Exquisite imagery washed over Mahit in waves, and she felt nothing. Nothing aside from wishing that she could have copies of every poem written down, confined to glyphs that she could read on her own someplace quiet and silent and still. If she could just read the poems—speak them in her own voice, try out the rhythms and the cadences, find how they moved on her tongue—surely she’d feel the power of them. She always had before.
• “I’ve been going through the bar. Local culture, you understand. You understand!” Gorlaeth’s hand was back on Mahit’s arm, and she felt a distant kind of disgusted pity for the other woman: she’d been sent here by her government, and her government was newly a protectorate of Teixcalaan, and she was alone (like Mahit was alone—but Mahit wasn’t supposed to be alone), and being alone in Teixcalaan was like drowning in clear air.
  A person might try all the drinks at a bar and call it experiencing local culture.
  “How long have you been here?” Mahit asked. The same phrase Three Seagrass had used in the groundcar during her first minutes within the City. How long have you been inside the world?
• “Politics,” said Gorlaeth. When she smiled, she stopped looking affable and a little lost. She had a great many small teeth, and most of them were pointed. It wasn’t a Stationer’s smile, but it wasn’t Teixcalaanli either, and Mahit felt, for one dizzying instant, the width and breadth of the galaxy—how far a jumpgate might take a person. How the people on the other side might be people, or might be something that looked like people but weren’t—
  That was how a Teixcalaanlitzlim would think. She was getting very good at it, wasn’t she.
• she understood exactly what Five Agate had meant when she said that Mahit would understand why this man had been made an ezuazuacat and then an imperial co-heir after she’d seen him work in person. He was as flexible as a holograph, bending in the light, saying different words at different angles of approach.
• “Before we had spaceflight, Teixcalaanli archers would dip arrowheads in blooms to poison them,” Nineteen Adze went on. “And now the Science Ministry distills the oils into some kind of treatment for palsy. What can kill can cure, if you like that sort of thing. You should be flattered; someone wants you dead artistically, Ambassador.”
  There would be a certain satisfying circularity to the Science Ministry trying to kill every Lsel ambassador. Mahit didn’t trust it—it was like a ring composition in an oration, the same theme coming around again at the end of the stanza. It was too Teixcalaanli, and even if Nineteen Adze hadn’t meant her to think of it, she could guess that she had come up with it because of exactly that kind of overdetermined thinking. Echoes and repetition. Everything meaning something else.
  It was the first time she wondered if Nineteen Adze—if any Teixcalaanlitzlim—could compensate for the sheer thematic weight of how Teixcalaanli logic worked. Wondering felt like being thrown into cold water, shock-bright clarity as the pain in her fingers began to fade.
• Amnardbat had held it, carefully; lifted it, turned it in the soft light so it glimmered, metal and ceramides, the fragile connecting places where it would slot into the machine-cradle at the brainstem of its host. Thought, as fierce as she had ever been: You are as corrupt as an arsonist, as an imago-line that would shatter the shell of the station with a bomb. You are worse than both of those, Yskandr Aghavn: you want to invite Teixcalaan in. You speak poetry and you send back reams of literature, and more of our children every year take the aptitudes for the Empire and leave us. Leave us bereft of who they might have been. You are a corrosive poison, and a righteous person would crush this machine under her foot.
  She did not stamp the machine to shards.
  Instead she took her sharpened nails and scraped them—so lightly, so, so lightly, hardly believing she was doing it, committing a kind of treason of her own, a treason against memory, against the idea of Heritage, against the flood of nauseous horror from her imago (six generations of Heritage Councilors, and all of them sick-frightened, sick-intoxicated)—over each of those fragile connections. Weakening them. So that they might snap, under stress.
• Three Seagrass reached over and patted Mahit gently on the shoulder, a hesitant feather-pressure. “Somewhat of a relief, really; I was wondering if Stationers were primed for explosive violence as well as carrying around dead people inside their heads…”
  “Just once,” Mahit said, with a sort of desperate and useless frustration, “I’d like you to imagine I might do something because it’s what a person does.”
• “It happens in histories,” Mahit said inanely, like she was trying to make a gift of it: an allusion for a Teixcalaanlitzlim. For the sort of woman who would take her hand for no reason at all. “Pseudo-Thirteen River. Not exactly, but this sort of thing. When the yaotlek Nine Crimson is ambushed on the edge of known space—”
  “It’s not that bad,” Three Seagrass said, but she swept her thumb over Mahit’s knuckles. “You only killed one person, and he’s definitely not secretly your clonesib defected to the wrong faction of the Empire. Histories are always worse by the time they get written down.”
• “More an observation from experience—whoever inscribes the history has an agenda and that agenda’s usually half dramatics. I mean, Pseudo-Thirteen River, everyone in that is desperately upset about mistaken identities and communication delay, but if you read Five Diadem instead on the very same expansion campaign, she wants you to think about supply lines because her patron was the Minister for the Economy—”
• That bureaucracy parted for Three Seagrass like over-irradiated plastic, rotten-soft under pressure. There was something wrong with it; they were moving too easily up the great needle-spear of the Judiciary.
• She’d never quite thought about how barbaric—still a terrible little thrill, to apply that word in Teixcalaan to the language’s own speakers—Teixcalaanli modes of succession really were. When it wasn’t confined properly to epics and songs, empire claimed by acclamation was a brutal process that cared not at all for the places and peoples who had to succumb to make that acclamation plausible.
• 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.”
• Twelve Azalea added, “And they are illegal to use in the aptitudes. There’s a scandal every few years—”
  Mahit was finding it difficult to equate an imago—the combination of persons, the preservation of skill and memory down generations—with cheating on exams. “It has to be more complex than that; cheating is illegal, but immoral?”
  “Immoral is being someone you cannot hope to emulate,” Three Seagrass said. “Like wearing someone else’s uniform, or saying the First Emperor’s lines from the Foundation Song and planning to betray Teixcalaan all at once. It’s the juxtaposition is what’s wrong. How do I know that you are you? That you are conscious of what you’re attempting to preserve?”
  “You pump the dead full of chemicals and refuse to let anything rot—people or ideas or … or bad poetry, of which there is in fact some, even in perfectly metrical verse,” said Mahit. “Forgive me if I disagree with you on emulation. Teixcalaan is all about emulating what should already be dead.”
• Mahit thought she could understand, by analogy and longing if nothing else. It was hard for her to wrap her mind around—the very idea of Teixcalaan not being permanent, irrevocable, eternal. And she was a barbarian, a foreign particle, just a thing that loved (did she? Did she still?) the Empire’s literature and culture, it wasn’t home; it had never been the shape of the world for her like it must be for Three Seagrass, only the shape that distorted the world out of true, the warp of heavy mass pulling at the fabric of space.
• “Or it’s being used faultily. An algorithm’s only as perfect as the person designing it.”
  “Oh, that’s clever, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said, delighted. “If you want revenge on Science for a murder, murder Science’s reputation of impartiality.”
• Lsel Station has a long tradition of psychotherapy because if it didn’t, everyone on board would have decompensated into identity crisis a long time ago.
  In the earliest stages of integration with an imago, during the most difficult part where the two personalities are sorting out what is valuable about the imago-structure and what should be discarded, what is necessary for the host personality to keep as self-identity and what can be edited, written over, given up—in those early stages what a person is supposed to do is consider a choice, a small choice, an unimportant one where the imago and the host choose the same way. To focus on that choice as a still place, a conflictless heart. Something to build out from.
• 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.
• 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.
  Tarats does not think of tides. He thinks of weights: of pressing his thumb down as hard as he can on the scale of the galaxy, making a little indentation, a tiny shift. The sort of tiny shift that might happen if a man were to go to Teixcalaan, and love it with all his heart and mind, and seduce it as much as he himself had been seduced: and thus guide it to its death.
• And then, like a curtain parting, they turned one last corner and Mahit found herself in front of the Information Ministry, which looked entirely unscathed. A clean thing, out of a former world.
• It was an incredibly transparent ruse. But transparency had worked for them before; transparency seemed to have its own gravity when placed alongside the Teixcalaanli overcommitment to narrative. It bent the light.
• “Sometimes I swear you could be one of us,” Three Seagrass said, quite softly. She smiled a tremulous but creditable Stationer-smile, all her teeth visible. “Now, help me write this, won’t you? I know you have at least a rudimentary sense of scansion, and we need to get this done before Thirty Larkspur’s man-on-the-spot remembers we have cloudhooks.” Then she did reach out to touch Mahit, her fingertips like a ghost, brushing over her cheekbone. Mahit shivered helplessly, and went very still: like she was waiting for a blow.
  “Reed,” Twelve Azalea said, theatrically scandalized, “flirt on your own time.”
• Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.
• “I have written political poetry appropriate to the current moment of my experience,” said Three Seagrass. “If that’s treason, take it up with our two thousand years of canon. I’m sure you’ll find more treason there.”“He set her up for it,” Three Seagrass said wonderingly. “She didn’t know until she was up there next to him. Her Brilliance. The Edgeshine of a Knife. I guess it’ll fit. Still.”
  They’d reversed emotional positions, somehow. Mahit couldn’t stop crying for very long; even if it wasn’t entirely her own endocrine response, her body had decided to dissolve into the weight of grief. Yskandr wasn’t gone—she didn’t think she’d ever feel that hollow blank-space wrongness again—but both versions of him were bleak, scoured-cold landscapes, rooms without air, and Mahit kept weeping, even when she wanted to talk.
• Once the City had exhaled enough ceremony, and felt more like an exhausted runner, leaning out of breath, trying to adjust to the deep ache in its lungs, small funerals bloomed like fungi after rain: there were more and more announcements each day, some arriving by infofiche and some by public newsfeed.
• The problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.
• “I could have told her the truth,” Mahit said. “Here I am, new to the City, being led astray by my own cultural liaison and a stray courtier.” Twelve Azalea folded his hands together in front of his chest. “We could have told her the truth,” he said. “Her friend, the dead Ambassador, has mysterious and probably illegal neurological implants.” “How nice for us, that everyone lies,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully.
• and then a Teixcalaanlitzlim of a gender Mahit didn’t recognize, and then it was back to the initial challenger—who changed the game again, adding another element: now each quatrain had to start with the last line of the previous one, be in dactylic verse with a vowel-repeated caesura, and be on the subject of repairs made to City infrastructure. Three Seagrass was annoyingly good at describing repairs to City infrastructure. She was lucid even through many glasses of ahachotiya, laughing, saying lines like the grout seal around the reflecting pool / lapped smooth and clear-white by the tongues of a thousand Teixcalaanli feet / nevertheless frays granular and impermanent / and will be spoken again, remade in the image / of one department or another / clamoring,
• And she missed home, missed planetrise above the Station, and being clever and ambitious and not responsible yet, talking to Shrja Torel and her other friends in the ninth-tier station bars, imagining what they might do and not actually having to do it.
• Each sector was composed of needle-sharp towers jammed full of archives and offices, tied together by multilevel bridges and archways. Stacked courtyards hung in midair between the more populated towers, their floors translucent or inset with sandstone and gold. At the center of each was a hydroponic garden, with photosynthesizing plant life floating in standing water. The unbelievable luxuries of a planet.