One of the other officers on the bridge said, “Yaotlek. A ship has come through the jumpgate—behind us—”
“An enemy ship?” asked Nine Hibiscus, and Mahit thought, ice-clear and sudden: If it is one of the enemy, coming through the Anhamemat Gate from the Stationer side, then they have already taken Lsel, and I never even knew when all my people were killed. I was here, talking to their murderers, and I never knew—
If she breathed, she’d hyperventilate. If she moved, that thought would be true, and real, and she’d have to keep breathing afterward.
“No,” said the officer, and Mahit exhaled so hard that she almost missed what he said next, lost in a sudden, imago-doubled flood of relief—a relief which vanished almost as soon as it rocked through her, leaving her shaking.
Because the officer had put the incoming ship’s wide-channel broadcast on full audio, and the voice which was filling the bridge of the Weight for the Wheel belonged to Darj Tarats, Lsel Councilor for the Miners, first amongst six—and he was demanding to be brought on board to speak with Mahit herself.
Cauterize.
Eight Antidote didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to say it. How did he tell the Emperor Herself that she was wrong? How could she be this wrong? “… I don’t understand,” he managed. “You told me—you told me all those things about how my ancestor-the-Emperor wanted a Teixcalaan that could have another eighty years of peace, and you want to do this anyway? It’s—”
“Go on,” said Nineteen Adze. “Say what you think.”
“It’s a planetary genocide,” said Eight Antidote, and said it angrily, and didn’t burst into tears at all. That icy clear place beyond fear was back with him. “I don’t care if it cauterizes. If you think it would cauterize. If someone murdered my home, I would fight them forever.”
“I do think you would,” Nineteen Adze said. She wasn’t reacting to him. He didn’t know what he could say to make her stop being so calm, so already-decided. “I would have, when I was eleven. Maybe when I was twice eleven, too. But that was before I met Six Direction. We have to think beyond ourselves, and what we’d want. That’s what I learned from him. What I learned from watching him rule, and watching the end of his reign. This is an ugly decision to make, and it hurts, Eight Antidote, and I’m sorry you had to find out about it in secret. I would have preferred to have been with you, so you could ask questions and I could have explained.”
“You said. Before, in my bedroom—” He tried to remember the words. The exact words. It would have been easier if Nineteen Adze had recited a poem, but she hadn’t. She’d just told him—“… You said that Six Direction’s Teixcalaan was an empire strong enough to be at peace. How are we going to get there from—from killing a planet?”
Nineteen Adze lifted one shoulder in a shrug, and put it down again. “You’re really not like him,” she said. “Or you’re like he was when he was a child, and I never knew him as a child—he only told me stories. I’m glad you’re not, you know. I meant what I said, in your bedroom. I’d rather have a clever, annoying successor than a dullard. Even if you are in my living room trying to make me feel ashamed of killing our enemies viciously enough that they will leave us alone. Your ancestor would have done what I am doing. We did it together once. On that campaign. The one in the holo that I gave you.”
“You killed a planet?”
“A city. It—came to the same thing, little spy. There, and then, it came to the same thing.”
He could imagine it. The two of them, on their horses. The bloody spears. He wondered how you killed a city without killing the planet along with it, and whether he’d know how when he was grown. He said, “You keep saying I’m not my ancestor. I know I’m not. I’m a clone. Most people are clones! It’s not weird.”
The Emperor put her hand on Eight Antidote’s wrist. Her skin felt like skin. Warm and human, just like his. “You’re exactly you,” she said. “But—you could have been something else. And I didn’t want that for you.”
Eight Antidote was sure that he was being distracted, being led away from the horrible and certain knowledge that even now there was probably a message on an infofiche stick going toward the spaceport, on a fastest-of-fast-courier ships, jumpgate to jumpgate and only five and a half hours between here and genocide. But he couldn’t help asking. He felt like he’d choke if he didn’t ask.
He said, “What would I have been?” And waited.
Nineteen Adze closed her eyes. The lids were unpainted—she never really painted herself, Eight Antidote had always suspected that the white suits and the sun-spear throne were enough decoration for her—unpainted and thin. Every poem he knew said that Emperors never slept. Maybe it was true. Her eyes were still closed when she said, like the beginning of a story, the preamble to an epic, “Your ancestor the Emperor Six Direction loved many people in his time. Me—his crèche-sister Eight Loop, who you’re named for, who is your legal guardian now—countless others. But once he loved the Ambassador from Lsel Station.”
“Mahit Dzmare?” Eight Antidote asked, confused.
“No,” said Nineteen Adze. “Stars, no, he met her—three times, I think. Three times I know about. He loved her predecessor, little spy. Yskandr Aghavn. And I—oh, Yskandr was easy to love. Like drinking too much and not minding being drunk. Like taking a strike force over a hill and not knowing if there’s an ambush on the other side.”
“He died, though,” said Eight Antidote, and wondered if he should be offering condolences. Adults and the way adults loved had never made sense to him. What the Emperor was describing didn’t sound like love at all.
Nineteen Adze nodded. Her eyes were still closed. “Yes. He died. I helped kill him, for what that’s worth. Which was like killing a city, or a planet. There and then, it really did come to the same thing. Do you want to know why?”
“… That’s a stupid question, Your Brilliance.”
She laughed. The sound was fragile and strange. “Of course it is. I set you up for it. But you do want to know, don’t you?”
“Yes.” He did. He also didn’t, but he felt like being surprised with it later would be worse.
“Because on Lsel Station, where Yskandr and Mahit both come from—there is a technology that they use to put the mind of one’s predecessor inside the mind of the successor. To—share, Mahit said. To have memory live forever. And Yskandr loved your ancestor-the-Emperor. I don’t know, little spy, if a barbarian like Yskandr could believe in Six Direction’s Teixcalaan, but he believed in Six Direction, and when your ancestor was old, and dying slowly, Yskandr offered him one of those machines. Imago-machines, they call them. A way to record himself, and put himself inside a new body, like a ghost. And have eighty times eighty years of peace.”
There was a rock in his stomach, and he hadn’t even eaten his cassava and cheese. “It’d need to be a close body, wouldn’t it?” he said. His voice sounded thin. Babyish. He couldn’t care. “A clone, if he could get one.”
“Yes,” said Nineteen Adze. “A clone would work very well. You’re quite like him. Except in all the ways you’re not.”