“I didn’t ignore anyone!” Lieutenant Awn protested.
Lieutenant Skaaiat waved her protest away. “And ignoring what anyone else would have seen as the natural local hierarchy. Your house can’t afford to offer clientage to anyone here. Yet. Neither you nor I can make any contracts with anyone. For now. We had to exempt ourselves from our houses’ contracts and take clientage directly from Anaander Mianaai, while we serve. But we still have those family connections, and those families can use connections we make now, even if we can’t. And we can certainly use them when we retire. Getting your feet on the ground during an annexation is the one sure way to increase your house’s financial and social standing.
“Which is fine until the wrong person does it. We tell ourselves that everything is the way Amaat wants it to be, that everything that is, is because of God. So if we’re wealthy and respected, that’s how things should be. The aptitudes prove that it’s all just, that everyone gets what they deserve, and when the right people test into the right careers, that just goes to show how right it all is.”
“I’m not the right people.” Lieutenant Awn set down her empty cup, and Lieutenant Skaaiat refilled it.
“You’re only one of thousands, but you’re a noticeable one, to someone. And this annexation is different, it’s the last one. Last chance to grab property, to make connections on the sort of scale the upper houses have always been accustomed to. They don’t like to see any of those last chances go to houses like yours. And to make it worse, your subverting the local hierarchy—”
“I used the local hierarchy!”
“Lieutenants,” I cautioned. Lieutenant Awn’s outburst had been loud enough to be heard in the street, if anyone had been on the street this evening.
“If the Tanmind were running things here, that was as things must be in Amaat’s mind. Right?”
“But they…” Lieutenant Awn stopped. I wasn’t sure what she had been about to say. Perhaps that they had imposed their authority over Ors relatively recently. Perhaps that they were, in Ors, a numerical minority and Lieutenant Awn’s goal had been to reach the largest number of people she could.
“Careful,” warned Lieutenant Skaaiat, though Lieutenant Awn hadn’t needed the warning. Any Radchaai soldier knew not to speak without thinking. “If you hadn’t found those weapons, someone would have had an excuse not only to toss you out of Ors, but to come down hard on the Orsians and favor the upper city. Restoring the universe to its proper order. And then, of course, anyone inclined could have used the incident as an example of how soft we’ve gotten. If we’d stuck to so-called impartial aptitudes testing, if we’d executed more people, if we still made ancillaries…”
“I have ancillaries,” Lieutenant Awn pointed out.
Lieutenant Skaaiat shrugged. “Everything else would have fit, they could ignore that. They’ll ignore anything that doesn’t get them what they want. And what they want is anything they can grab.” She seemed so calm. Even almost relaxed. I was used to not seeing data from Lieutenant Skaaiat, but this disjunction between her demeanor and the seriousness of the situation—Lieutenant Awn’s still-extreme distress, and, to be honest, my own discomfort at events—made her seem oddly flat and unreal to me.
“I understand Jen Shinnan’s part in this,” Lieutenant Awn said. “I do, I get that. But I don’t understand how… how anyone else would benefit.” The question she couldn’t ask directly was, of course, why Anaander Mianaai would be involved, or why she would want to return to some previous, proper order, given she herself had certainly approved any changes. And why, if she wanted such a thing, she didn’t merely order the things she desired. If questioned, both lieutenants could, and likely would, say they weren’t speaking of the Lord of the Radch, but about some unknown person who must be involved, but I was certain that wouldn’t hold up under an interrogation with drugs. Fortunately, such an event was unlikely. “And I don’t see why anyone with that sort of access couldn’t just order me gone and put someone they preferred in my place, if that was all they wanted.”
“Maybe that wasn’t all they wanted,” answered Lieutenant Skaaiat. “But clearly, someone did at the very least want those things, and thought they would benefit from doing it this particular way. And you did as much as you could to avoid people getting killed. Anything else wouldn’t have made any difference.” She emptied her own cup. “You’re going to stay in touch with me,” she said, not a question, not a request. And then, more gently, “I’ll miss you.”
For a moment I thought Lieutenant Awn might cry again. “Who’s replacing me?”
Lieutenant Skaaiat named an officer, and a ship.
“Human troops then.” Lieutenant Awn was momentarily disquieted, and then sighed, frustrated. I imagine she was remembering that Ors was no longer her problem.
“I know,” said Lieutenant Skaaiat. “I’ll talk to her. You watch yourself. Now annexations are a thing of the past, ancillary troop carriers are crowded with the useless daughters of prestigious houses, who can’t be assigned to anything lower.” Lieutenant Awn frowned, clearly wanting to argue, thinking, maybe, of her fellow Esk lieutenants. Or of herself. Lieutenant Skaaiat saw her expression and smiled ruefully. “Well. Dariet is all right. It’s the rest I’m warning you to look out for. Very high opinions of themselves and very little to justify it.” Skaaiat had met some of them during the annexation, had always been entirely, correctly polite to them.
“You don’t need to tell me that,” said Lieutenant Awn.
Lieutenant Skaaiat poured more arrack, and for the rest of the night their conversation was the sort that needs no reporting.
At length Lieutenant Awn slept again, and by the time she woke I had hired boats to take us to the mouth of the river, near Kould Ves, and loaded them with our scant luggage, and my dead segment. In Kould Ves the mechanism that controlled its armor, and a few other bits of tech, would be removed for another use.
If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference, Lieutenant Skaaiat had said, and I had agreed. I still agree.
The problem is knowing when what you are about to do will make a difference. I’m not only speaking of the small actions that, cumulatively, over time, or in great numbers, steer the course of events in ways too chaotic or subtle to trace. The single word that directs a person’s fate and ultimately the fates of those she comes in contact with is of course a common subject of entertainments and moralizing stories, but if everyone were to consider all the possible consequences of all one’s possible choices, no one would move a millimeter, or even dare to breathe for fear of the ultimate results.
I mean, on a larger and more obvious scale. In the way that Anaander Mianaai herself determined the fates of whole peoples. Or the way my own actions could mean life or death for thousands. Or merely eighty-three, huddled in the temple of Ikkt, surrounded. I ask myself—as surely Lieutenant Awn asked herself—what would have been the consequences of refusing the order to fire? Straightforwardly, obviously, her own death would have been an immediate consequence. And then, immediately afterward, those eighty-three people would have died, because I would have shot them at Anaander Mianaai’s direct order.
No difference, except Lieutenant Awn would be dead. The omens had been cast, and their trajectories were straightforward, calculable, direct, and clear.
But neither Lieutenant Awn nor the Lord of the Radch knew that in that moment, had one disk shifted, just slightly, the whole pattern might have landed differently. Sometimes, when omens are cast, one flies or rolls off where you didn’t expect and throws the whole pattern out of shape. Had Lieutenant Awn chosen differently, that one segment, cut off, disoriented, and yes, horrified at the thought of shooting Lieutenant Awn, might have turned its gun on Mianaai instead. What then?
Ultimately, such an action would only have delayed Lieutenant Awn’s death, and ensured my own—One Esk’s—destruction. Which, since I didn’t exist as any sort of individual, was not distressing to me.
/> But the death of those eighty-three people would have been delayed. Lieutenant Skaaiat would have been forced to arrest Lieutenant Awn—I am convinced she would not have shot her, though she would have been legally justified in doing so—but she would not have shot the Tanmind, because Mianaai would not have been there to give the order. And Jen Shinnan would have had time and opportunity to say whatever it was that the Lord of the Radch had, as things actually happened, prevented her from saying. What difference would that have made?
Perhaps a great deal of difference. Perhaps none at all. There are too many unknowns. Too many apparently predictable people who are, in reality, balanced on a knife-edge, or whose trajectories might be easily changed, if only I knew.
If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is. You can only make your best approximate calculation. You can only make your throw and try to puzzle out the results afterward.
11
The explanation, why I needed the gun, why I wanted to kill Anaander Mianaai, took a long time. The answer was not a simple one—or, more accurately, the simple answer would only raise further questions for Strigan, so I did not attempt to use it but instead began the whole story at the beginning and let her infer the simple answer from the longer, complex one. By the time I was done the night was far advanced. Seivarden was asleep, breathing slow, and Strigan herself was clearly exhausted.
For three minutes there was no sound but Seivarden’s breath accelerating as she transitioned into some state closer to wakefulness, or perhaps was troubled by a dream.
“And now I know who you are,” Strigan said finally, tiredly. “Or who you think you are.” There was no need for me to say anything in reply to that; by now she would believe what she wished about me, despite what I had told her. “Doesn’t it bother you,” Strigan continued, “didn’t it ever bother you, that you’re slaves?”
“Who?”
“The ships. The warships. So powerful. Armed. The officers inside are at your mercy every moment. What stops you from killing them all and declaring yourselves free? I’ve never been able to understand how the Radchaai can keep the ships enslaved.”
“If you think about it,” I said, “you’ll see you already know the answer to your question.”
She was silent again, inward-looking. I sat motionless. Waiting on the results of my throw.
“You were at Garsedd,” she said after a while.
“Yes.”
“Did you know Seivarden? Personally, I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Did you… did you participate?”
“In the destruction of the Garseddai?” She gestured acknowledgment. “I did. Everyone who was there did.”
She grimaced, with disgust I thought. “No one refused.”
“I didn’t say that.” In fact, my own captain had refused, and died. Her replacement had qualms—she couldn’t have hidden that from her ship—but said nothing and did as she was told. “It’s easy to say that if you were there you would have refused, that you would rather die than participate in the slaughter, but it all looks very different when it’s real, when the moment comes to choose.”
Her eyes narrowed, in disagreement I thought, but I had only spoken the truth. Then her expression changed; she was thinking, perhaps, of that small collection of artifacts in her rooms on Dras Annia Station. “You speak the language?”
“Two of them.” There had been more than a dozen.
“And you know their songs, of course.” Her voice was slightly mocking.
“I didn’t have a chance to learn as many as I would have liked.”
“And if you had been free to choose, would you have refused?”
“The question is pointless. The choice was not presented to me.”
“I beg to differ,” she said, quietly angry at my answer. “The choice has always been presented to you.”
“Garsedd was a turning point.” It wasn’t a direct answer to her accusation, but I couldn’t think of what would be a direct answer, that she would understand. “The first time so many Radchaai officers came away from an annexation without the certainty that they had done the right thing. Do you still think Mianaai controls the Radchaai through brainwashing or threats of execution? Those are there, they exist, yes, but most Radchaai, like people most places I have been, do what they’re supposed to because they believe it’s the right thing to do. No one likes killing people.”
Strigan made a sardonic noise. “No one?”
“Not many,” I amended. “Not enough to fill the Radch’s warships. But at the end, after all the blood and grief, all those benighted souls who without us would have suffered in darkness are happy citizens. They’ll agree if you ask! It was a fortunate day when Anaander Mianaai brought civilization to them.”
“Would their parents agree? Or their grandparents?”
I gestured, halfway between not my problem and not relevant. “You were surprised to see me deal gently with a child. It should not have surprised you. Do you think the Radchaai don’t have children, or don’t love their children? Do you think they don’t react to children the way nearly any human does?”
“So virtuous!”
“Virtue is not a solitary, uncomplicated thing.” Good necessitates evil and the two sides of that disk are not always clearly marked. “Virtues may be made to serve whatever end profits you. Still, they exist and will influence your actions. Your choices.”
Strigan snorted. “You make me nostalgic for the drunken philosophical conversations of my youth. But these are not abstract things we’re talking about here, this is life and death.”
My chances of getting what I had come for were slipping from my grasp. “For the first time, Radch forces dealt death on an unimaginable scale without renewal afterward. Cut off irrevocably any chance of good coming from what they had done. This affected everyone there.”
“Even the ships?”
“Everyone.” I waited for the next question, or the sardonic I don’t feel sorry for you, but she just sat silent, looking at me. “The first attempts at diplomatic contact with the Presger began shortly afterward. As did, I am fairly certain, the beginnings of the move to replace ancillaries with human soldiers.” Only fairly certain because much of the groundwork must have been laid in private, behind the scenes.
“Why would the Presger get involved with Garsedd?” Strigan asked.
She could certainly see my reaction to her question, nearly a direct admission that she had the gun; had to know—had to have known before she spoke—what that admission would tell me. She wouldn’t have asked that question if she hadn’t seen the gun, examined it closely. Those guns had come from the Presger, the Garseddai had dealt with the aliens, whoever had made the first overture. So much we got from the captured representatives. But I kept my face still. “Who knows why the Presger do anything? But Anaander Mianaai asked herself the same question, Why did the Presger interfere? It wasn’t because they wanted anything the Garseddai had, they could have reached out and taken whatever they wanted.” Though I knew the Presger had made the Garseddai pay, and heavily. “And what if the Presger decided to destroy the Radch? Truly to destroy it? And the Presger had such weapons?”
“You’re saying,” said Strigan, disbelieving, appalled, “that the Presger set the Garseddai up in order to compel Anaander Mianaai to negotiate.”
“I am speaking of Mianaai’s reaction, Mianaai’s motives. I don’t know or understand the Presger. But I imagine if the Presger meant to compel anything, it would be unmistakable. Unsubtle. I think it was meant merely as a suggestion. If indeed that had anything to do with their actions.”
“All of that, a suggestion.”
“They’re aliens. Who can understand them?”
“Nothing you can do,” she said, after five seconds of silence, “can possibly make any difference.”
“That’s probably true.”
“Proba
bly.”
“If everyone who had…” I searched for the right words. “If everyone who objected to the destruction of the Garseddai had refused, what would have happened?”
Strigan frowned. “How many refused?”
“Four.”
“Four. Out of…?”
“Out of thousands.” Each Justice alone, in those days, had hundreds of officers, along with its captain, and dozens of us had been there. Add the smaller-crewed Mercies and Swords. “Loyalty, the long habit of obedience, a desire for revenge—even, yes, those four deaths kept anyone else from such a drastic choice.”
“There were enough of your sort to deal with even everyone refusing.”
I said nothing, waited for the change of expression that would tell me she had thought twice about what she had just said. When it came, I said, “I think it might have turned out differently.”
“You’re not one of thousands!” Strigan leaned forward, unexpectedly vehement. Seivarden started out of her sleep, looked at Strigan, alarmed and bleary.
“There are no others on the edge of choosing,” Strigan said. “No one to follow your lead. And even if there were, you by yourself wouldn’t be enough. If you even get as far as facing Mianaai—facing one of Mianaai’s bodies—you’ll be alone and helpless. You’ll die without achieving anything!” She made a breathy, impatient sound. “Take your money.” She gestured toward my pack, leaning against the bench I sat on. “Buy land, buy rooms on a station, hell, buy a station! Live the life that was denied you. Don’t sacrifice yourself for nothing.”
“Which me are you talking to?” I asked. “Which life that was denied me do you intend I live? Should I send you monthly reports, so you can be sure my choices meet with your approval?”
That silenced her, for a full twenty seconds.