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.
INTERLUDE
A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness. Two minds, together, each contain a vast map of past and present, a vaster projected map of futures—and two minds, together, however close, however entwined, have their own cartography, alien to one another. Look now at Darj Tarats and Dekakel Onchu, erstwhile friends, longtime colleagues, deeply suspicious of one another’s motives—here they are meeting together in the quiet private space of Onchu’s personal sleeping pod. Their knees, folded up, almost touch. The soundproofing is on.
Look carefully at the points at which their universal cartographies do not correspond.
Onchu has brought Tarats her reports on the great three-wheeled ships that are moving through Stationer space and eating Stationer ships and Stationer pilots; she has brought as well the frisson of gravity-skewed fear that her imago-line has instilled in her as a response to the incomprehensible. It costs her some of her pride to admit these things to Tarats, but the Miners and the Pilots are allies of old: the two points of Lsel’s government which send men and women out into the black outside the Station’s metal shell.
She does not expect what Tarats brings her in reply: that he has known about these incursions, by rumor and hint and suppressed report, for the better part of two decades. Has known, and kept a secret map, and a network of spies and informants to supply that map’s points of data. The cargo captain who had come to Onchu made a stop at Darj Tarats’s office, afterward.
Onchu is angry at him, for that. But it is not a useful anger, nor one she can spend time on harboring, since Tarats goes on, a spill of confession like a weight released after long hours bearing it up: amongst the constellation of his plans for Yskandr Aghavn, gone to Teixcalaan so many years ago to serve there, was to prepare for an alliance wherein the one empire, as human as the Stationers but more hungry, might be cajoled into throwing itself open-jawed into the maw of an empire vaster and more strange, when the time came. That such an empire might be devoured there, just as it has devoured so much and for so long.
“You are using us as bait,” says Dekakel Onchu. “A clash between Teixcalaan and these aliens will happen right on top of us—”
“Not bait,” Darj Tarats replies. “I am making us something worth preserving, in our current form, to a polity which has constantly threatened to absorb us. The clash will not happen here—Teixcalaan’s fleet will go through our Anhamemat Gate, and through all the rest of the jumpgates where these ships have been showing up—and out into wherever the aliens are coming from.”
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.
“What do you want from this?” Onchu asks, in the quiet of her pod.
“An end,” says Darj Tarats, who has grown quite old while pressing his fingers down onto the scale. “An end to empires. An immovable object to crash an impossible force upon, and break it.”
Onchu hisses through her teeth.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PATRICIAN THIRD-CLASS ELEVEN CONIFER DIES AFTER A SHORT ILLNESS
Patrician Third-Class Eleven Conifer, who bravely served the Imperium in the Twenty-Sixth Legion under yaotlek One Lightning, died yesterday after a short illness, according to his nearest genetic kin, forty-percent clone One Conifer, who was reached by this reporter at his place of employment at the Central Travel Authority Northeast Division. “My genetic ancestor’s death was unexpected,” said One Conifer, “and I will be undergoing a full battery of tests in order to determine if I carry the gene markers for stroke as well…”
Movement of Teixcalaanli vessels detected en route to our sector—please advise—intercept unlikely due to sheer numbers—this is at least a legion on the march—
MAHIT woke to dim light, the scratchy comfort of rough fabric under her palms and cheek, and the worst headache she had ever had in her life. Her mouth felt like a polluted desert—too dry to swallow, and tasting of filth. Her throat was raw from screaming, and her left hand was a dull throb, almost as strong as it had been right after the episode with the poison flower—and she was not dead and she was thinking in full sentences.
So far, so good.
Yskandr? she asked, warily.
<Hello, Mahit,> said Yskandr, weary. It was mostly the voice of the other Yskandr, of Ambassador Aghavn: older, rougher, than the Yskandr she’d known and lost.
Mostly, but not entirely. Her Yskandr seemed to exist in interstices and cracks—the imago-machine which had housed him was gone, but he’d been a presence as much as she had been in the fantasia of memory and image that had followed that removal. They’d inhabited the same neural architecture and endocrine system for a little over three months. It wasn’t enough time for integration—if it had been, she’d never have needed to replace him—but she could still feel him, remember his versions of Yskandr’s memories, fifteen years younger and inflected differently.
They were her memories now. Thinking about them made her feel dizzy and sick with doubled recall—this was why, she guessed, that adding a second version of the same imago, even a later recording, was such a bad idea and never done.
Hello, Yskandr, she managed, thinking past the nausea. The corners of her mouth tugged into that wide smile that was his, and she chided him, gently (they were going to have to start over on so many things and oh fuck she missed her own imago), get out of my nervous system.
<I miss him too,> Yskandr said. <Who wouldn’t miss being twenty-six?>
It’s not the same thing, Mahit thought.
<No. I assume it’s not.>
Mahit sighed, and even sighing hurt her throat. She must have screamed a lot. I know, she thought. We have each other now. We’re all there is of our line—first and second Ambassadors to Teixcalaan.
<You have gotten us into even more trouble than I did,> said Yskandr. She could feel him shuffle through the past week of her life, like a flipbook of infofiche. <I’m actually impressed.>