Empire was empire – the part that seduced and the part that clamped down, jaws like a vise, and shook a planet until its neck was broken and it died.
Next up in the Hugo nominees is Arkady Martine’s novel of interplanetary intrigue, A Memory Called Empire.
The book’s cover art of a lone figure standing in front of a towering throne is the perfect illustration for the situation that Ambassador Mahit Dzmare finds herself in. The Teixcalaanli Empire has requested (demanded) a new ambassador from the artificial world Lsel Station (with no explanation for what happened to their previous ambassador), so Mahit is rushed to the City, the Jewel of the World, a place that she’s been dreaming of since she was a teenager reading Teixcalaani pulp series and writing bad Teixcalaani poetry. Her assignment is the same assignment that all Lsel ambassadors are given; Convince the Empire to Leave Us Alone.
Mahit barely has a chance to unpack and start opening several months of unread official mail before she’s having to investigate a murder and survive bombings, assassination attempts, and an imperial war of succession, all while being unexpectedly stranded without support in a poetry-centric civilization that considers her little more than a barbarian. Oh, and she can’t trust anyone, not even the people who sent her there in the first place.
The Teixcalaan Empire is a complicated place to be, and I’ll apologize in advance if I mess up the grammar here when referring to the empire, the people, or the style of poetry. There are so many subtle shades of meaning even in day-to-day life, from how low you bow to how long to hold eye contact to whether someone spells their name with this glyph or that one and how all of that changes depending on what level of the government bureaucracy you’re dealing with. And all of that is before you get to the poetry, something which Mahit has loved for most of her life but which reaches a level in the Jewel of the World that she knows she’s never going to truly master.
If she wanted to weep she should weep for Yskandr, or for how much political trouble she was in, not over being unable to describe pool grout while referencing a centuries-old poem on departmental conflict.
Every type of communication in the City is connected in some way to poetry. Mahit is greeted upon arrival by her liaison, who entertains her with sections of “The Buildings – a seventeen-thousand-line poem which describes the City’s architecture (with the liaison improvising little bits with extra interesting information.) Official messages are always coded with a cypher based on the most popular political verse of the day. The height of fashion is poetry contests, and remembering all the great poets and poetry that’s already been written so you can reference them at will is mandatory. Even the Teixcalaani citizens’ names feel poetic, each of them a combination of a number and a noun, hence Three Seagrass, Fifteen Engine, and (not kidding here) Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle (even native Teixcalaans aren’t sure what to think of that one).
Chapters start with news announcements, recordings from ships under attack, segments from popular fiction, police reports (that don’t always say what actually happened), and lots of other information that’s probably as disorienting to the reader as it is to Mahit who’s making her first trip to a planet with a sky, and society that uses the words Empire and World interchangeably to mean the universe, or the part that counts, anyway. Everything else is just a barbarian society that hasn’t been completely civilized yet.
So how exactly is a single ambassador from a tiny space-station supposed to keep up with any of this? The answer is with an imago; basically a tiny device implanted in the brain stem that contains the memories – and skills, and knowledge, and emotions – of the previous person who had the imago implanted. Mahit has been implanted with a fifteen-years-out-of-date imago of Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn, and that becomes especially important when she arrives on-planet to find out that Yskandr is dead, most likely murdered, and she has to figure out not only how he was killed, but what he could have been doing in the years since the last time the imago was updated.
…there was a point in knowing how the last person to hold all the knowledge you held had died, if only so that you could correct the mistake and keep your line alive a little longer, a little better. To stretch the continuity of memory just a bit farther, out on the edges of human space where it feathered away into the black.
Imagos are incredibly important to the tiny population of Lsel Station; there are hundreds of imago-lines, all recording the progression of person-to-person, with all their memories and skills. The worst punishment for a criminal imago-carrier is to be executed and have their entire generations-long imago-line destroyed with them (like creating a fire break in a forest by destroying an entire section of trees). Naturally being uploaded with the personality of an entire other human being can be pretty overwhelming, so imago-carriers go through a lot of psychotherapy until the older personality integrates with the mind of the host, making a new person with the memories of both.
The whole process takes about a year. Mahit had three months.
She and Yskandr are still at the point where they’re having conversations inside Mahit’s head and trying to figure out who has control of her hands when something goes wrong and Yskandr just…disappears. Mahit doesn’t know if someone in her home station sabotaged her imago or if she was somehow unfit to have one in the first place (and she’s not sure which option is worse) but all she has left is random flashes of memory, nothing that would indicate what Yskandr might have been involved with that got him killed. And things get even more interesting when Mahit starts receiving mail from Lsel Station, from someone who doesn’t know that the former ambassador is dead and is trying to warn him about…his replacement.
It’s an intriguing combination of inside knowledge and being a total outsider that makes the story fly by. Not having any way to know who she can trust, Mahit has to depend on the few contacts she’s made so far, primarily her assigned liaison Three Seagrass. The representative from the Information Ministry ends up being one of my favorite characters in the whole book; smart, impossible to intimidate, with a snide sense of humor and – as her friend Twelve Azalea gossips – a “thing” for barbarians.
Ambassador Mahit, Three Seagrass, and Twelve Azalea make for beautifully unlikely partners in crime, with some very appealing scenes like Azalea (or “Petal” as Seagrass calls him) having to put everyone up in his apartment, or an impeccably-dressed Seagrass (“Reed”) smilingly facing down a government flunky with more power than good sense, or the three of them sharing early-morning ice cream in a public park after a night of some pretty shocking violence.
There is a lot, and I mean a lot of political intrigue, the tasty kind with betrayal and prejudice and some really unwise love affairs. The author mixes this in with images of the dazzling Teixcalaani fashion and technology, like impossibly beautiful architecture, highly-decorated computer interfaces worn over one eye, and holographic images that can be spun around and tossed to someone else in the room, looking like something out of Tony Stark’s computer lab (my favorite are the infofiche sticks, which are something like a USB drive, except they can be made out of wood or metal or even hand-carved ivory, and they spill out a holographic message when you break open the wax seal.)
The author takes some subtle digs at topical issues, like people who protest but don’t run for election or join civil service or do anything useful other than graffiti political messages in the subway, or someone claiming military genius based on all the battles their supporters believe they could win. And of course there’s the usual chaos that comes when people decide that their agenda is worth death. Other people’s deaths, naturally.
They didn’t look like Teixcalaanlitzlim, Mahit thought. Drifting thought, absurd, disconnected. They looked like people. Just like people. Tearing each other apart.
Politics in the Jewel of the World can be a surprisingly brutal process, with some creative ways of killing people, and Mahit goes back and forth between being terrified, determined, and about to laugh hysterically at how much it feels like she’s stuck in an awful Teixcalaani spy novel. She ends up having to make decisions that we still don’t know the repercussions from, and won’t until Book 2 comes out in 2021. A lot of people in the Empire might want the imago technology if they knew about it, and there are several very good reasons why letting them have it would be a very bad idea. But trying to keep something like that secret sounds like exactly the same kind of situation as trying to keep Lsel Station safe from the Empire: it’s not a problem that can just ever be fixed, just indefinitely delayed.