Laughing inside one’s own mind is uncomfortable, Mahit realizes as she does it, or maybe what’s uncomfortable is trying to fit three minds into one mind, and she/they are going to break apart right along the fault line where the other two are too much alike and she is … not, she is female, a generation younger, four inches too short, she likes the taste of processed fish-flake powder on her breakfast porridge and they are repulsed, tiny stupid things like that and she is falling inside her own mind, feeling like an echo the place where she is being carved open and made into something she’s not under alien and impersonal hands—
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.
<Mahit,> says one of the Yskandrs. She thinks it’s the young one, her imago, the one who is more than half her already. <Mahit, remember how you felt when you first read Pseudo-Thirteen River’s Expansion History, and you came to the description of the triple sunrises you can see when you’re hanging in Lsel Station’s Lagrange point, and you thought, At last, there are words for how I feel, and they aren’t even in my language—>
Yes, Mahit says. Yes, she does. That ache: longing and a violent sort of self-hatred, that only made the longing sharper.
<I felt that way.>
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—<I’m dead,> 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.)