A Memory Called Empire

“There may soon come a day when such a ship does not retreat, but turns the bright fire of its energy weapons on the fragile metal shell that contains thirty thousand lives, Tarats’s included, and spills them all into the killing chill of space like seeds from a smashed fruit.”

Watching the Ascension’s Red Harvest, a Teixcalaanli warship, leave Lsel Station, councilor Darj Tarats, who hates the Teixcalaanli Empire, wonders when the Empire will annex them. In comparing his home, a space station, to a fruit, he understands how little his and others’ lives and destruction would matter to the Empire. This quote foreshadows Mahit’s later framing and understanding of the Empire as an animal that devours—with Lsel Station being a potential meal.

“But the Empire preserved everything, told the same stories over and over

again; why not also preserve flesh instead of rendering it up for decent use?”

At the Judiciary, Mahit sees predecessor Yskandr’s corpse and explains how, on Lsel Station, they cremate bodies and eat the ashes. Responding to the implied horror of the city ministers, she connects their memory and collection of territories, peoples, and poems—creating an analogy between their retaining of memory and wasting of bodies.

“She fished out a fistful, holding them between her fingers like her knuckles

had sprouted claws.”

When Mahit arrives at her ambassadorial apartment, she sees a mail container and grabs the letters. Mirroring her later framing of the Empire as an animal, this simile—her claw-like hand—establishes how the Empire’s citizens look at her, foreign and strange, as if she were an animal herself.