A Memory Called Empire

Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.

So much of who we are is what we remember and retell,

This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever fallen in love with a culture that was devouring their own.

The problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives life back to those who no longer exist.

Histories are always worse by the time they get written down.

Be a mirror, she told herself again. Be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone.

Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.

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. We felt that way.

An algorithm’s only as perfect as the person designing it.

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

An end to empires. An immovable object to crash an impossible force upon, and break it.

You pump the dead full of chemicals and refuse to let anything rot—people or ideas or … or bad poetry, of which there is in fact some, even in perfectly metrical verse,” said Mahit. “Forgive me if I disagree with you on emulation. Teixcalaan is all about emulating what should already be dead.” “Are you Yskandr, or are you Mahit?” Three Seagrass asked, and that did seem to be the crux of it: Was she Yskandr, without him? Was there even such a thing as Mahit Dzmare, in the context of a Teixcalaanli city, a Teixcalaanli language, Teixcalaanli politics infecting her all through, like an imago she wasn’t suited for, tendrils of memory and experience growing into her like the infiltrates of some fast-growing fungus.

The Empire, the world. One and the same. And if they were not yet so: make them so, for this is the right and correct will of the stars.

I make friends with terribly interesting people with terribly complicated problems.

Three Seagrass had taken her hands away from her face, and the expression which was growing there was one that Mahit had seen before: it was Three Seagrass focusing inward, preparing to bend the universe around her will, because all other options were untenable.

I could have told her the truth,” Mahit said. “Here I am, new to the City, being led astray by my own cultural liaison and a stray courtier.” Twelve Azalea folded his hands together in front of his chest. “We could have told her the truth,” he said. “Her friend, the dead Ambassador, has mysterious and probably illegal neurological implants.” “How nice for us, that everyone lies,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully.

Here is the grand sweep of civilization’s paw, stretched against the black between the stars, a comfort to every ship’s captain when she looks out into the void and hopes not to see anything looking back. Here, in star-charts, the division of the universe into empire and otherwise, into the world and not the world.

A joke like that could flay a person open before they noticed the pain.

It was going to hurt so much if she had to stop pretending Three Seagrass was possessed of no agenda but her own ambition and a mild affection for barbarians.

IN Teixcalaan, these things are ceaseless: star-charts and disembarkments. Here is all of Teixcalaanli space spread out in holograph above the strategy table on the warship Ascension’s Red Harvest, five jumpgates and two weeks’ sublight travel away from Teixcalaan’s city-planet capital, about to turn around and come home. The holograph is a cartographer’s version of serenity: all these glitter-pricked lights are planetary systems, and all of them are ours. This scene—some captain staring out at the holograph re-creation of empire, past the demarcated edge of the world—pick a border, pick a spoke of that great wheel that is Teixcalaan’s vision of itself, and find it repeated: a hundred such captains, a hundred such holographs.

We're arrested. But—fuck it. Let's unarrest ourselves.

The name the man had chosen, it turned out, was Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle, a revelation that produced in both Mahit and Three Seagrass a kind of stunned silence.

When Three Seagrass kissed her, Mahit opened up for her as if she was a lotus floating in one of the City's gardens at dawn - slow, inexorable, like she had been waiting a long, long time through the night.

I carry exile in my heart. It animates my poetry and my politics; I will never be free of it, having lived outside of Teixcalaan for so long. I will always be measuring the distance between myself and a person who remained in the heart of the world; between the person I would have been had I stayed and the person I have become under the pressure of the frontier. When the Seventeenth Legion came through the jumpgate in bight star-snatching ships and filled up the Ebrekti sky in the shapes of my home, I was at first afraid. A profound discontinuity. To know fear in the shape of one's own face.

Then she did reach out to touch Mahit, her fingertips like a ghost, brushing over her cheekbone. Mahit shivered helplessly, and went very still: like she was waiting for a blow.

Thought again of the City as an algorithm: considered, for the first time clearly, that no algorithm was innocent of its designers. It couldn’t be. There was an originating purpose for an algorithm, however distant in its past—a reason some human person made it, even if it had evolved and folded in on itself and transformed.

and then a Teixcalaanlitzlim of a gender Mahit didn’t recognize, and then it was back to the initial challenger—who changed the game again, adding another element: now each quatrain had to start with the last line of the previous one, be in dactylic verse with a vowel-repeated caesura, and be on the subject of repairs made to City infrastructure. Three Seagrass was annoyingly good at describing repairs to City infrastructure. She was lucid even through many glasses of ahachotiya, laughing, saying lines like the grout seal around the reflecting pool / lapped smooth and clear-white by the tongues of a thousand Teixcalaanli feet / nevertheless frays granular and impermanent / and will be spoken again, remade in the image / of one department or another / clamoring,

Ambassador. A pleasure. I heard you were missing!" ... "I've known where I was the whole time," she said... .... Ten Pearl laughed politely. "I'm sure you have! What a charming way of putting it.