There’s no such fucking thing. Her own voice, this time, not Yskandr’s. The same tonality. The reassurance of blur.
She asked, “And what happens to me? In this hypothetical scenario.”
“This year’s aptitudes are coming up,” Tarats said. “Retake them. For a new imago-line, or for anything else you like. You came back to the Station: be a Stationer. And all you have done and learned and remembered will be enshrined forever in the imago-line of ambassadors.”
It was the sort of offer that got made to people who ended up with incompatible imagos—whose gender identity was stronger than they had thought it was and found a cross-gender memory match unbearable, or who were too close to the web of relationships their predecessor had maintained and couldn’t figure out how to navigate them without emotional damage, or whose imago-line was so weighty and long that they weren’t able to integrate fast enough and shattered under the strain. One of Mahit’s agemates had been one of those. A hydroponics engineer, given an imago thirteen generations of memory long. The highest aptitude scores on systems thinking and biology on the Station, and she’d just collapsed under the weight. Two weeks, and she was stripped out of the line, and allowed to retake the aptitudes a year later.
Mahit didn’t know where she’d ended up.
It was a bad offer.
She couldn’t imagine what she’d be without Yskandr. She didn’t know how integrated they were—or weren’t—or how deep the damage of sabotage went; she didn’t know if there’d be anything left of her if this imago-machine was carved out of her skull like Five Portico had carved out the other one. Not to mention the poor, stupid kid who would get the hybrid of three, a double dose of Yskandr and whatever there was of Mahit herself—and the first of their line, the negotiator Tsagkel Ambak, who mostly existed as a feeling.
<I’d drown in us,> some Yskandr said. Both of them, maybe, the young and the old. A kind of fear of what they were, all of them, together; a protectiveness of that same thing.
And besides, she didn’t trust Darj Tarats to actually do it. She’d walk into the Heritage medical facility and lie down on the table, and it would be Amnardbat’s people after all, and what then?
Both Tarats and Onchu were looking at her. She wondered what shape her expression was. Her face felt numb and wooden.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said, because she didn’t.
“I could offer you a position on a mining station instead,” said Tarats, “but it’d be a waste, unless you’re a sight better at operational and financial analysis than the usual diplomatic types.”
“Amnardbat would call me back,” Mahit said, because that was true, and because she didn’t want to live as Tarats’s creature, preserved by his sufferance, in charge of an asteroid mine, out of the way. But what choice did she have?
“She would,” Tarats agreed, and said nothing more.
They were all bad offers, and if Mahit turned them down, she had nothing at all. She waved for the bartender. If she ordered another vodka, maybe she’d have a chance to think—come up with some angle, something she knew that only she knew, that wouldn’t be preserved down an imago-line—
<Offer him me,> Yskandr told her. <The fifteen years of me that I denied him. Tell him that there are two of us, two Yskandrs, and that I will talk.>
Mahit opened her mouth.
All the proximity alarms on the pilots’ deck of the Station went off at once.
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.
Skilclass="underline" 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.