Mahit wondered if Nineteen Adze had just made a joke. It was difficult to tell—the humor of it cut so sharply, if it was humor. A joke like that could flay a person open before they noticed the pain.
“You and he might merely be collateral damage, Mahit,” Nineteen Adze went on. “But I knew Yskandr, and thus I wonder.”
“What I wonder,” Mahit said carefully, “is what this level of domestic terrorism escalated from. In terms of local unrest. How many other bombings have there been?”
Nineteen Adze didn’t answer her directly. Mahit hadn’t precisely expected her to. She said, “Because you are ‘out of date,’ mm?”
“Yes. The imago that I accepted”—and here Mahit was committing sedition again, twice in twenty-four hours, maybe she and Yskandr had been right for one another after all, this was easy—“was made from Yskandr when he had only been Ambassador for five years.”
“That is a problem,” said Nineteen Adze, quite sympathetically, which made it worse.
“But not our problem,” Mahit went on. “I don’t think you understand, Your Excellency, what an imago is.”
“Enlighten me.”
“It’s not a re-creation. Or a double. It’s a—think of it as a mindclone language and protocol program.”
Like an afterimage, Yskandr in the back of her mind: <You wish.>
Frantic, she thought, Are you there?
Nothing. Silence, and the ezuazuacat talking again, and Mahit didn’t have the attention to spare and she’d probably imagined the whisper anyway, called it up like a ghost or a prediction.
“—that is not how Yskandr described the process,” Nineteen Adze was saying.
“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.”
Nineteen Adze shook her head, a wry, humanizing gesture; some of her short dark hair fell across her forehead and she pushed it back with the hand that didn’t hold her bowl of tea. “Of course. Pilots. I ought to have guessed.” She paused; Mahit thought it was more for effect than anything else, an indrawn breath to mark that moment of delighted mutual discovery and then to discard the connection it had made between them. “Memory comes with personality, then. Let’s grant that. Which makes it all the more interesting that you still haven’t told me why I’m not talking to Yskandr right now.”
“Ideally the two personalities integrate.”
“Ideally.”
“Yes,” Mahit said.
Nineteen Adze reached out across the low table between them and put her hand on Mahit’s knee. The touch was heavy, grounding, firm. Mahit thought of being pinned beneath an entire planet’s mass, the gravitational fall of descent. “But this is not ideal, is it,” Nineteen Adze said, and Mahit shook her head, no. No it wasn’t.
“Tell me what’s gone wrong,” Nineteen Adze went on, and the worst part of it wasn’t that it was a demand, but that her voice had become so endlessly, vastly sympathetic. Miserably, Mahit thought she was learning something about interrogation techniques. The kind that worked on angry, exhausted, culturally isolated people.
“He was here,” she said, wanting more than anything to get it over with. “My Yskandr, not yours. We were here. And then he wasn’t. He shut up on me; I can’t reach him. Which is why I’m not able to oblige you, Your Excellency. At this point I wish I could. It’d be simpler, considering how thoroughly my predecessor has dismantled the secrecy of our state secrets. No point in hiding it.”
Nineteen Adze said, “Thank you, Mahit, I do appreciate the information,” and took her hand away from Mahit’s knee; took the weight of her attention away in the same motion, all of the intent pressure vanishing somewhere internal to her. Mahit felt … she wasn’t sure. Relieved, and angrier now that she was relieved. Now that there was space across the table for relief. She took two breaths, deliberately even.
“I would have been Mahit Dzmare even if my imago was as present as we’d both like,” she said. “The pair always takes the name of the newest iteration.”
“The habits of Stationer culture suit Stationers,” Nineteen Adze said, which was a dismissal if Mahit had ever heard one.
She tried again, differently. (A mirror. A clean hostage.) “I’d like to know why someone thinks blowing up Fifteen Engine was an appropriate escalation of hostilities. In your most-estimable opinion, ezuazuacat.”
“There are always people who don’t love being Teixcalaanli,” said Nineteen Adze, dry and sharp. “Who wish we’d never broken atmosphere, never stretched out our hands across the jumpgates from system to system and had stayed … oh, something that isn’t an everlasting state ruled by a man like Six Direction under the guidance of the brilliant stars. They’d like us to be a republic, or to stop annexing new systems even when those systems ask us to, or—any number of things which look sane on the surface and aren’t, when one looks at them closely. Some of those people become Ministers, or think they could be Emperor themselves, and change everything to be as they see fit. Teixcalaan has always had problems with that sort, as I’m sure you’re well aware. If you’re as much like Yskandr as you claim his successor would have to be, you’ll know all our histories.”
Mahit did. She knew a thousand stories, poems, novels—bad film adaptations of poems—all of which told the stories of people who had tried to usurp the sun-spear throne of Teixcalaan, and mostly failed—or succeeded, and been acclaimed Emperor, and by virtue of their success declared the previous emperor a tyrant, unfavored by the sun and the stars, unworthy to hold the throne, and justly replaced by a new version of himself. The Empire survived the transfer of power, even when the emperor didn’t.
“I have some idea,” she said. “What’s the other sort of person? Since domestic terrorism doesn’t usually lend itself to a glorious return to ideal rulership, as most of the populace can’t possibly enjoy it enough to like their new emperor afterward.”
Nineteen Adze laughed, and Mahit felt an outsize satisfaction. Like making this woman laugh was a victory, hard won, long sought-after, each time a prize. Perhaps Yskandr had been Nineteen Adze’s lover—and even if Mahit was lacking his voice and his memory, she still had his endocrine system response.
“The other sort of person,” said Nineteen Adze, when the laughter had subsided, “doesn’t want power; they want the destruction of what power currently exists, and nothing else. We only sometimes have problems with them. But we have been having one now, for some span of years. We are a very large empire, as of late, and peaceful, and it gives men and women a great deal of time to think about what displeases them.” She got to her feet. “Come over to the infographs, Ambassador. Work waits for nothing, even interesting young barbarians like yourself and our Yskandr.”