This seemed to mollify her. She watched me a moment, doubtless seeing my heart rate, my breathing. “If you can’t settle, I can give you medication.” An offer, a question, a threat. “I can make him”—with a glance at Seivarden—“leave.”
“I don’t need it. Either one.”
The doctor gave a skeptical hmph, and turned and left the room.
“I’m sorry,” said Seivarden when the doctor was gone. “That was stupid. I should have thought before I spoke.” I didn’t answer. “When we got to the bottom,” she continued, as though it was logically connected to what she had said before, “you were unconscious. And obviously badly injured, and I was afraid to move you much, because I couldn’t see if maybe bones were broken. I didn’t have any way to call for help, but I thought maybe you had something I could use to help climb out, or maybe some first-aid correctives I could use, but of course that was foolish, your armor was still up, which was how I knew you were still alive. I did take your handheld out of your coat, but there was no signal, I had to climb up to the top before I could reach anyone. When I got back your armor was down and I was afraid you were dead. Everything’s still in there.”
“If the gun is gone,” I said, voice calm and neutral, “I won’t just break your legs.”
“It’s there,” she insisted. “But this can’t possibly be personal business, can it?”
“It’s personal.” It was just that with me personal affected a great many others. But how could I explain that, without revealing more than I wanted to just now?
“Tell me.”
This was not a good time. Not a good moment. But there was a great deal to explain, especially since Seivarden’s knowledge of the past thousand years of history was sure to be patchy and superficial. Years of previous events leading up to this, which she would almost certainly be ignorant of, which would take time to explain, before I ever got to who I was and what I intended.
And that history would make a difference. Without understanding it, how could Seivarden understand anything? Without that context, how could she understand why anyone had acted as they did? If Anaander Mianaai had not reacted with such fury to the Garseddai, would she have done the things she’d done in the thousand years since then? If Lieutenant Awn had never heard of the events at Ime five years before, twenty-five years ago now, would she have acted as she did?
When I imagined it, the moment that Mercy of Sarrse soldier had chosen to defy her orders, I saw her as a segment of an ancillary unit. She had been number One of Mercy of Sarrse’s Amaat unit, its senior member. Even though she had been human, had had a name beyond her place on her ship, beyond Mercy of Sarrse One Amaat One. But I had never seen a recording, had never seen her face.
She had been human. She had endured events at Ime—perhaps even enforced the corrupt dictates of the governor herself, when ordered. But something about that particular moment had changed things. Something had been too much for her.
What had it been? The sight, perhaps, of a Rrrrrr, dead or dying? I’d seen pictures of the Rrrrrr, snake-long, furred, multi-limbed, speaking in growls and barks; and the humans associated with them, who could speak that language and understand it. Had it been the Rrrrrr who had knocked Mercy of Sarrse One Amaat One off her expected path? Did she care so much for the threat of breaking the treaty with the Presger? Or had it been the thought of killing so many helpless human beings? If I had known more about her, perhaps I could have seen why in that moment she had decided that she would rather die.
I knew almost nothing about her. Probably by design. But even the little I had known, the little Lieutenant Awn had known, had made a difference. “Did anyone tell you about what happened at Ime Station?”
Seivarden frowned. “No. Tell me.”
I told her. About the governor’s corruption, her preventing Ime Station or any of the ships from reporting what she was doing, so far from anywhere else in Radch space. About the ship that had arrived one day—they’d assumed it was human, no one knew of any aliens anywhere nearby, and it obviously wasn’t Radchaai and so it was fair game. I told Seivarden as much as I knew about the soldiers from Mercy of Sarrse who boarded the unknown ship with orders to take it and kill anyone aboard who resisted, or who obviously couldn’t be made into ancillaries. I didn’t know much—only that once the One Amaat unit had boarded the alien ship, its One had refused to continue to follow orders. She had convinced the rest of One Amaat to follow her, and they had defected to the Rrrrrr and taken the ship out of reach.
Seivarden’s frown only deepened, and when I was done she said, “So, you’re telling me the governor of Ime was completely corrupt. And somehow had the accesses to prevent Ime Station from reporting her? How does that happen?” I didn’t answer. Either the obvious conclusion would occur to her, or she would be unable to see it. “And how could the aptitudes have put her in such a position, if she was capable of that? It isn’t possible.
“Of course,” Seivarden continued, “everything else follows from that, doesn’t it? A corrupt governor appoints corrupt officials, never mind the aptitudes. But the captains stationed there… no, it isn’t possible.”
She wouldn’t be able to see it. I shouldn’t have said anything at all. “When that soldier refused to kill the Rrrrrr who had come into the system, when she convinced the rest of her unit to do likewise, she created a situation that could not be concealed for long. The Rrrrrr could generate their own gate, so the governor couldn’t prevent them from leaving. They had only to make a single jump to the next inhabited system and tell their story. Which was exactly what they did.”
“Why did anyone care about the Rrrrrr?” Seivarden couldn’t quite get her throat around the sound. “Seriously? They’re called that?”
“It’s what they call themselves,” I explained, in my most patient voice. When a Rrrrrr said it, or one of their human translators, it sounded like a sustained growl, not much different from any other Rrrrrr speech. “It’s kind of hard to say. Most people I’ve heard just say a long r sound.”
“Rrrrrr,” Seivarden said, experimentally. “Still sounds funny. So why did anyone care about the Rrrrrr?”
“Because the Presger had made a treaty with us on the basis of their having decided humans were Significant. Killing the Insignificant is nothing, to the Presger, and violence between members of the same species means nothing to them, but indiscriminate violence toward other Significant species is unacceptable.” Not to say no violence is allowed, but it’s subject to certain conditions, none of which make obvious sense to most humans so it’s safest just to avoid it altogether.
Seivarden made a breathy huh, pieces falling into place.
“So then,” I continued, “the entire One Amaat unit of Mercy of Sarrse had defected to the Rrrrrr. They were out of reach, safe with the aliens, but to the Radchaai they were guilty of treason. It might have been better just to leave them where they were, but instead the Radch demanded them back, so they could be executed. And of course the Rrrrrr didn’t want to do that. The One Amaat unit had saved their lives. Things were very tense for several years, but eventually they compromised. The Rrrrrr handed over the unit leader, the one who’d started the mutiny, in exchange for immunity for the others.”
“But…” Seivarden stopped.
After seven seconds of silence, I said, “You’re thinking that of course she had to die, no disobedience can be tolerated, for very good reasons. But at the same time, her treason exposed the governor of Ime’s corruption, which otherwise would have continued unabated, so ultimately she did the Radch a service. You’re thinking that any fool knows better than to speak up and criticize a government official for any reason. And you’re thinking that if anyone who speaks up to criticize something obviously evil is punished merely for speaking, civilization will be in a bad way. No one will speak who isn’t willing to die for her speech, and…” I hesitated. Swallowed. “There aren’t many willing to do that. You’re probably thinking that the Lord of the Radch was in a difficult spot, deciding how
to handle the situation. But also that these particular circumstances were extraordinary, and Anaander Mianaai is, in the end, the ultimate authority and might have pardoned her if she wished.”
“I’m thinking,” said Seivarden, “that the Lord of the Radch could have just let them stay with the Rrrrrr and been free of the whole mess.”
“She could have,” I agreed.
“I’m also thinking that if I were the Lord of the Radch, I would never have let that news get much farther than Ime.”
“You’d use accesses to prevent ships and stations from talking about it, maybe. You’d forbid any citizens who knew to say anything.”
“Yes. I would.”
“But it would still spread by rumor.” Though that rumor would of necessity be vague and slow-moving. “And you’d lose the very instructive example you could make, letting everyone watch you line up nearly all of Ime’s Administration on the station concourse and shoot them in the head, one after the other.” And, of course, Seivarden was a single person, who was thinking of Anaander Mianaai as a single person who could be undecided about such things, but then choose a single course of action, without dividing herself over her decision. And there was a great deal more behind Anaander Mianaai’s dilemma than Seivarden had grasped.
Seivarden was silent for four seconds, and then said, “Now I’m going to make you angry again.”
“Really?” I asked, drily. “Aren’t you getting tired of that?”
“Yes.” Simply. Seriously.
“The governor of Ime was wellborn and well-bred,” I said, and named her house.
“Never heard of them,” said Seivarden. “There’ve been so many changes. And now things like this happening. You honestly don’t think there’s a connection?”
I turned my head away, without lifting it. Not angry, just very, very tired. “You mean to say, none of this would have happened if jumped-up provincials hadn’t been jumped up. If the governor of Ime had been from a family of real proven quality.”
Seivarden had wit enough not to answer.
“You’ve honestly never known anyone born better to be assigned or promoted past their ability? To crack under pressure? Behave badly?”
“Not like that.”
Fair enough. But she’d conveniently forgotten that Mercy of Sarrse One Amaat One—human, not an ancillary—would also have been “jumped up” by her definition, was part of the very change Seivarden had mentioned. “Jumped-up provincials and the sort of thing that happened at Ime are both results of the same events. One did not cause the other.”
She asked the obvious question. “What caused it, then?”
The answer was too complicated. How far back to begin? It started at Garsedd. It started when the Lord of the Radch multiplied herself and set out to conquer all of human space. It started when the Radch was built. And further back. “I’m tired,” I said.
“Of course,” said Seivarden, more equably than I had expected. “We can talk about it later.”
16
I spent a week moving in the non-space between Shis’urna and Valskaay—isolated, self-contained—before the Lord of the Radch made her move. No one else suspected anything, I had given no hint, no trace, not the faintest indication that anyone at all was on Var deck, that anything at all might be wrong.
Or so I had thought. “Ship,” Lieutenant Awn said to me, a week in, “is something wrong?”
“Why do you ask, Lieutenant?” I replied. One Esk replied. One Esk attended Lieutenant Awn constantly.
“We were in Ors together a long time,” Lieutenant Awn said, frowning slightly at the segment she was talking to. She had been in a constant state of misery since Ors, sometimes more intense, sometimes less, depending, I supposed, on what thoughts occurred to her at a given moment. “You just seem like something’s troubling you. And you’re quieter.” She made a sound, breathy half-amusement. “You were always humming or singing in the house. It’s too quiet now.”
“There are walls here, Lieutenant,” I pointed out. “There were none in the house in Ors.”
Her eyebrow twitched just slightly. I could see she knew my words for an evasion, but she didn’t pursue the question.
At the same time, in the Var decade room, Anaander Mianaai said to me, “You understand the stakes. What this means for the Radch.” I acknowledged this. “I know this must be disturbing to you.” It was the first acknowledgment of this possibility since she had come aboard. “I made you to serve my ends, for the good of the Radch. It’s part of your design, to want to serve me. And now you must not only serve me, but also oppose me.”
She was, I thought, making it remarkably easy for me to oppose her. One side or the other of her had done that, and I wasn’t sure which. But I said, through One Var, “Yes, my lord.”
“If she succeeds, ultimately the Radch will fragment. Not the center, not the Radch itself.” When most people spoke of the Radch they meant all of Radchaai territory, but in truth the Radch was a single location, a Dyson sphere, enclosed, self-contained. Nothing ritually impure was allowed within, no one uncivilized or nonhuman could enter its confines. Very, very few of Mianaai’s clients had ever set foot there, and only a few houses still existed who even had ancestors who had once lived there. It was an open question if anyone within knew or cared about the actions of Anaander Mianaai, or the extent or even existence of Radch territory. “The Radch itself, as the Radch, will survive longer. But my territory, that I built to protect it, to keep it pure, will shatter. I made myself into what I am, built all this”—she gestured sweepingly, the walls of the decade room encompassing, for her purposes, the entirety of Radch space—“all this, to keep that center safe. Uncontaminated. I couldn’t trust it to anyone else. Now, it seems, I can’t trust it to myself.”
“Surely not, my lord,” I said, at a loss for what else to say, not sure exactly what I was protesting.
“Billions of citizens will die in the process,” she continued, as though I had not spoken. “Through war, or lack of resources. And I…”
She hesitated. Unity, I thought, implies the possibility of disunity. Beginnings imply and require endings. But I did not say so. The most powerful person in the universe didn’t need me to lecture her on religion or philosophy.
“But I am already broken,” she finished. “I can only fight to prevent my breaking further. Remove what is no longer myself.”
I wasn’t sure what I should, or could, say. I had no conscious memory of having this conversation previously, though I was certain now I must have, must have listened to Anaander Mianaai explain and justify her actions, after she used the overrides and changed… something. It must have been quite similar, perhaps even the same words. It had, after all, been the same person.
“And,” Anaander Mianaai continued, “I must remove my enemy’s weapons wherever I find them. Send Lieutenant Awn to me.”
Lieutenant Awn approached the Var decade room with trepidation, not knowing why I had sent her there. I had refused to answer her questions, which had only fed a growing feeling on her part that something was very wrong. Her boots on the white floor echoed emptily, despite One Var’s presence. As she reached it the decade room door slid open, nearly noiseless.
The sight of Anaander Mianaai within hit Lieutenant Awn like a blow, a vicious spike of fear, surprise, dread, shock, doubt, and bewilderment. Lieutenant Awn took three breaths, shallower, I could see, than she liked, and then hitched her shoulders just the slightest bit, stepped in, and prostrated herself.
“Lieutenant,” said Anaander Mianaai. Her accent, and tone, were the prototype of Lieutenant Skaaiat’s elegant vowels, of Lieutenant Issaaia’s thoughtless, slightly sneering arrogance. Lieutenant Awn lay facedown, waiting. Frightened.
As before I received no data from Mianaai that she did not deliberately send me. I had no information about her internal state. She seemed calm. Impassive, emotionless. I was sure that surface impression was a lie, though I didn’t understand why I thought that, except that she
had yet to speak favorably of Lieutenant Awn, when in my opinion she should have. “Tell me, Lieutenant,” said Mianaai, after a long silence, “where those guns came from, and what you think happened in the temple of Ikkt.”
A combination of relief and fear washed through Lieutenant Awn. She had, in the moments available to process Anaander Mianaai’s presence here, formed an expectation that this question would be asked. “My lord, the guns could only have come from someone with sufficient authority to divert them and prevent their destruction.”
“You, for instance.”
A sharp stab of startlement and terror. “No, my lord, I assure you. I did disarm noncitizens local to my assignment, and some of them were Tanmind military.” The police station in the upper city had been quite well-armed, in fact. “But I had those disabled on the spot, before I sent them on. And according to their inventory numbers, these had been collected in Kould Ves.”
“By Justice of Toren troops?”
“So I understand, my lord.”
“Ship?”
I answered with one of One Var’s mouths. “My lord, the guns in question were collected by Sixteen and Seventeen Inu.” I named their lieutenant at the time, who had since been reassigned.
Anaander Mianaai made the barest hint of a frown. “So as far back as five years ago, someone with access—perhaps this Inu lieutenant, perhaps someone else, prevented these weapons from being destroyed, and hid them. For five years. And then, what, planted them in the Orsian swamp? To what end?”
Face still to the floor, blinking in confusion, Lieutenant Awn took one second to frame a reply. “I don’t know, my lord.”
“You’re lying,” said Mianaai, still sitting, leaning back in her chair as though quite relaxed and unconcerned, but her eyes had not left Lieutenant Awn. “I can see plainly that you are. And I’ve heard every conversation you’ve had, since the incident. Who did you mean when you spoke of someone else who would benefit from the situation?”
“If I’d known what name to put there, my lord, I would have used it. I only meant by it that there must be a specific person who acted, who caused it…” She stopped, took a breath, abandoned that sentence. “Someone conspired with the Tanmind, someone who had access to those guns. Whoever it was, they wanted trouble between the upper city and the lower. It was my job to prevent that. I did my best to prevent that.” Certainly an evasion. From the moment Anaander Mianaai had ordered the hasty execution of those Tanmind citizens in the temple, the first, most obvious suspect had been the Lord of the Radch herself.