An imago installed in a weak mind, one who passed just enough aptitudes for compatibility, but not enough to create a new, real, functioning person out of the two original personalities. An imago that ate the mind of the successor.
That one was bad enough that she didn’t want to think about
(how that was exactly what His Brilliance Six Direction wanted to do)
what it would feel like.
Good work, Mahit. You found something that you like less than what Three Seagrass suggested you might do.
Three Seagrass thought she should take Ambassador Aghavn’s machine and extract an updated Yskandr-imago to overwrite the one which fluttered, broken and useless and only half here in flashes, in her mind. Thought that if she needed that code so badly—and she did, she did—it was the only logical course of action.
Three Seagrass, for her part, was not volunteering for what would end up being experimental neurosurgery. Experimental neurosurgery on a planet—in a culture—which didn’t like neurosurgical intervention. Which found the entire concept squirmy. Immoral. Three Seagrass was volunteering Mahit.
Hey Yskandr, you could fix this, she thought, for the hundredth time, and got nothing back but silence except for the peripheral nerve buzzing. Who knew if she could even handle another imago? This one might have gone wrong because she was broken, unsuitable, incompatible; and even if she wasn’t, she remembered what the first time had felt like: the dizzying double overlay of perception, the sense of standing on the edge of a high precipice. The slightest movement and she would fall into the hugeness of someone else’s memory, and they hadn’t had enough time, to be a new person, to be Mahit-Yskandr, and the ghost of whoever Yskandr had absorbed when he was young, Mahit-Yskandr-Tsagkel …
That name, floating up from the shards of the imago in her mind; the echo of how it had felt when she’d looked it up in Lsel’s records, trying to trace back the line she was joining. Tsagkel Ambak, who had not been to the City but had negotiated with Teixcalaan from the bow of a space cruiser, ensuring the continued independent rights of Lsel and the other stations to mine their sector, four generations back. Mahit had read her poetry and thought it was dull, pedestrian, all about home, and had thought—had thought three months ago—that she could do better.
Maybe the new imago could tell her more about the imago he’d absorbed into the person she’d met when he entered her mind.
She was going to try it, wasn’t she. She’d already decided, without even realizing she’d come to the conclusion; she was going to try it because she was alone, and because it needed to be done, and because she wanted to be whole, part of the long line of ambassadors from Lsel—the line she should be part of, the line she’d been inducted into and was still reeling from the loss of. If she had been sabotaged she wanted to undo it; she wanted her imago-line back, she wanted it preserved. She wanted to be a worthy inheritor of memory. To safeguard it, for the people she was meant to be serving here, as an extension of Lsel Station’s sovereignty. For the people who might follow after her, and carry her mind and memory onward on her Station.
Patriotism seemed to derive quite easily from extremity.
Mahit supposed that was true for all the rioters in the City’s streets, too.
She found Three Seagrass in the kitchen, doing something incomprehensible to a plant: hollowing it out and stuffing it full of another substance, a paste made of rice and what looked like ground meat.
“Is that food?”
Three Seagrass looked over her shoulder. Her face was drawn and set. “Not yet. Wait about an hour, and it will be. Do you need me?”
“I need a neurosurgeon,” Mahit said. “If such a thing exists on this planet.”
“You’re going to do it?”
“I’m going to try.”
Three Seagrass nodded, once. “Everything exists in the City, Mahit. In one form or another. But I’m afraid I have absolutely no idea where to find someone who would be willing—and able—to cut open your brain.”
From the other room, Twelve Azalea called, “You don’t, Reed, but I bet you anything you can find someone who does.”
“Stop eavesdropping and get in here,” Three Seagrass shouted, and when Twelve Azalea appeared in the doorway, she affixed him with a pointed stare. “And where shall I find this person? I want my Ambassador alive afterward.”
“While you go see the Science Minister I will pursue someone via less official means,” Twelve Azalea said smugly. “I am attached to the Medical College as my Information Ministry post. Aren’t you glad you got me involved in this conspiracy?”
“Yes,” Three Seagrass said, “for several reasons, including the use of your flat as a safe house—”
“You are only fond of me for my material possessions, Reed.”
“And for your persistent connections to people outside of the court and the ministries. That too.”
“You could have just as many, if you wanted,” Twelve Azalea said carefully. “If you were interested in branching out.”
Three Seagrass sighed. “Petal. You know that’s a bad idea. It’s been a bad idea.”
“Why?” Mahit found herself asking. She couldn’t think of what would be bad about having out-palace contacts, for an asekreta.
“Because I’d use them as assets, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said, sharp, almost self-castigating. “Just as assets. And Petal here has actual friends, some of whom I’d probably find my way to reporting as anti-imperial, eventually. When it seemed appropriate or useful.”
“You consistently do yourself a disservice,” said Twelve Azalea. “All vainglorious ambition and—”
“Not enough empathy, I know,” Three Seagrass replied. “Wasn’t this conversation about you?”
Twelve Azalea sighed, and smiled, his eyes dark and wide, and Mahit realized they’d had this conversation a hundred times; it was settled, this thing between them, a carefully tended corner of their friendship, where Three Seagrass didn’t ask about what Twelve Azalea did outside of work and Twelve Azalea didn’t try to get any of his—what, peculiarly anti-establishment medical friends?—involved with government business in the form of Three Seagrass. They knew what lines not to cross, the two of them; knew them and kept them, and what Mahit was asking for was going to blur every single one. And yet they both seemed to be willing.
She hoped she deserved it. (Lsel Station deserved it—there was that patriotism again, she couldn’t get over how it was becoming a strange reflex—but her asekretim weren’t doing this for Lsel.)
“Yes,” Twelve Azalea was saying. “All about me, and how useful I am, and how much I’m helping you. I’ll get this done while you’re at your appointment tomorrow.”
Travel across the City was bad and getting worse, even in the clear light of the next early morning. Mahit was almost sure that she and Three Seagrass were being followed, as they left Twelve Azalea’s apartment building and headed back inside the subway: not by gold-masked Sunlit, but by shadows, the ghosts of people in grey. The Mist, Twelve Azalea had called the Judiciary’s own private investigatory force. If these were them—if these were real—the name was appropriate.