“You aren’t One Esk,” said the smaller child, and the older made an abortive motion as if to hush her.
“I am,” I said, and pointed to the insignia on my uniform jacket. “See? Only this is my number Fourteen segment.”
“I told you,” said the older child.
The younger considered this for a moment, and then said, “I have a song.” I waited in silence, and she took a deep breath, as though about to begin, and then halted, perplexed-seeming. “Do you want to hear it?” she asked, still doubtful of my identity, likely.
“Yes, citizen,” I said. I—that is, I–One Esk—first sang to amuse one of my lieutenants, when Justice of Toren had hardly been commissioned a hundred years. She enjoyed music, and had brought an instrument with her as part of her luggage allowance. She could never interest the other officers in her hobby and so she taught me the parts to the songs she played. I filed those away and went looking for more, to please her. By the time she was captain of her own ship I had collected a large library of vocal music—no one was going to give me an instrument, but I could sing anytime—and it was a matter of rumor and some indulgent smiles that Justice of Toren had an interest in singing. Which it didn’t—I—I–Justice of Toren—tolerated the habit because it was harmless, and because it was quite possible that one of my captains would appreciate it. Otherwise it would have been prevented.
If these children had stopped me on the street, they would have had no hesitation, but here in the house, seated as though for a formal conference, things were different. And I suspected this was an exploratory visit, that the youngest child meant to eventually ask for a chance to serve in the house’s makeshift temple—the prestige of being appointed flower-bearer to Amaat wasn’t a question here, in the stronghold of Ikkt, but the customary term-end gift of fruit and clothing was. And this child’s best friend was currently a flower-bearer, doubtless making the prospect more interesting.
No Orsian would make such a request immediately or directly, so likely the child had chosen this oblique approach, turning a casual encounter into something formal and intimidating. I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a handful of sweets and laid them on the floor between us.
The littler girl made an affirmative gesture, as though I had resolved all her doubts, and then took a breath and began.
My heart is a fish
Hiding in the water-grass
In the green, in the green.
The tune was an odd amalgam of a Radchaai song that played occasionally on broadcast and an Orsian one I already knew. The words were unfamiliar to me. She sang four verses in a clear, slightly wavering voice, and seemed ready to launch into a fifth, but stopped abruptly when Lieutenant Awn’s steps sounded outside the divider.
The smaller girl leaned forward and scooped up her payment. Both children bowed, still half-seated, and then rose and ran out the entranceway into the wider house, past Lieutenant Awn, past me following Lieutenant Awn.
“Thank you, citizens,” Lieutenant Awn said to their retreating backs, and they started, and then managed with a single movement to both bow slightly in her direction and continue running, out into the street.
“Anything new?” asked Lieutenant Awn, though she didn’t pay much attention to music, herself, not beyond what most people do.
“Sort of,” I said. Farther down the street I saw the two children, still running as they turned a corner around another house. They slowed to a halt, breathing hard. The littler girl opened her hand to show the older one her fistful of sweets. Surprisingly, she seemed not to have dropped any, small as her hand was, as quick as their flight had been. The older child took a sweet and put it in her mouth.
Five years ago I would have offered something more nutritious, before repairs had begun to the planet’s infrastructure, when supplies were chancy. Now every citizen was guaranteed enough to eat, but the rations were not luxurious, and often as not were unappealing.
Inside the temple all was green-lit silence. The head priest did not emerge from behind the screens in the temple residence, though junior priests came and went. Lieutenant Awn went to the second floor of her house and sat brooding on an Ors-style cushion, screened from the street, shirt thrown off. She refused the (genuine) tea I brought her. I transmitted a steady stream of information to her—everything normal, everything routine—and to Justice of Toren. “She should take that to the district magistrate,” Lieutenant Awn said of the citizen with the fishing dispute, slightly annoyed, eyes closed, the afternoon’s reports in her vision. “We don’t have jurisdiction over that.” I didn’t answer. No answer was required, or expected. She approved, with a quick twitch of her fingers, the message I had composed for the district magistrate, and then opened the most recent message from her young sister. Lieutenant Awn sent a percentage of her earnings home to her parents, who used it to buy their younger child poetry lessons. Poetry was a valuable, civilized accomplishment. I couldn’t judge if Lieutenant Awn’s sister had any particular talent, but then not many did, even among more elevated families. But her work and her letters pleased Lieutenant Awn, and took the edge off her present distress.
The children on the plaza ran away home, laughing. The adolescent sighed, heavily, the way adolescents do, and dropped a pebble in the water and stared at the ripples.
Ancillary units that only ever woke for annexations often wore nothing but a force shield generated by an implant in each body, rank on rank of featureless soldiers that might have been poured from mercury. But I was always out of the holds, and I wore the same uniform human soldiers did, now the fighting was done. My bodies sweated under my uniform jackets, and, bored, I opened three of my mouths, all in close proximity to each other on the temple plaza, and sang with those three voices, “My heart is a fish, hiding in the water-grass…” One person walking by looked at me, startled, but everyone else ignored me—they were used to me by now.
3
The next morning the correctives had fallen off, and the bruising on Seivarden’s face had faded. She seemed comfortable, but she still seemed high, so that was hardly surprising.
I unrolled the bundle of clothes I had bought for her—insulated underclothes, quilted shirt and trousers, undercoat and hooded overcoat, gloves—and laid them out. Then I took her chin and turned her head toward me. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes.” Her dark brown eyes stared somewhere distant over my left shoulder.
“Get up.” I tugged on her arm, and she blinked, lazily, and got as far as sitting up before the impulse deserted her. But I managed to dress her, in fits and starts, and then I stowed what few things were still out, shouldered my pack, took Seivarden by the arm, and left.
There was a flier rental at the edge of town, and predictably the proprietor wouldn’t rent to me unless I put down twice the advertised deposit. I told her I intended to fly northwest, to visit a herding camp—an outright lie, which she likely knew. “You’re an offworlder,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like away from the towns. Offworlders are always flying out to herding camps and getting lost. Sometimes we find them again, sometimes not.” I said nothing. “You’ll lose my flier and then where will I be? Out in the snow with my starving children, that’s where.” Beside me Seivarden stared vaguely off into the distance.
I was forced to put down the money. I had a strong suspicion I would never see it again. Then the proprietor demanded extra because I couldn’t display a local pilot certification—something I knew wasn’t required. If it had been, I would have forged one before I came.
In the end, though, she gave me the flier. I checked its engine, which seemed clean and in good repair, and made sure of the fuel. When I was satisfied, I put my pack in, seated Seivarden, and then climbed into the pilot’s seat.
Two days after the storm, the snowmoss was beginning to show again, sweeps of pale green with darker threads here and there. After two more hours we flew over a line of hills, and the green darkened dramatically, lined and irregularly veined in a d
ozen shades, like malachite. In some places the moss was smeared and trampled by the creatures that grazed on it, herds of long-haired bov making their way southward as spring advanced. And along those paths, on the edges here and there, ice devils lay in carefully tunneled lairs, waiting for a bov to put a foot wrong so they could drag it down. I saw no trace of them, but even the herders who lived their lives following the bov couldn’t always tell when one was near.
It was easy flying. Seivarden sat, half-lying and quiet beside me. How could she be alive? And how had she ended up here, now? It was beyond improbable. But improbable things happened. Nearly a thousand years before Lieutenant Awn was even born, Seivarden had captained a ship of her own, Sword of Nathtas, and had lost it. Most of the human crew, including Seivarden, had managed to get to an escape pod, but hers had never been found, that I had heard. Yet here she was. Someone must have found her relatively recently. She was lucky to be alive.
I was four billion miles away when Seivarden lost her ship. I was patrolling a city of glass and polished red stone, silent but for the sound of my own feet, and the conversation of my lieutenants, and, occasionally, me trying my voices against the echoing pentagonal plazas. Falls of flowers, red and yellow and blue, draped the walls surrounding houses with five-sided courtyards. The flowers were wilting; no one dared walk the streets except me and my officers, everyone knew the likely fate of any person placed under arrest. Instead they huddled in their houses, waiting for what would come next, wincing or shuddering at the sound of a lieutenant laughing, or my singing.
What trouble we’d run into, I and my lieutenants, had been sporadic. The Garseddai had put up only nominal resistance. Troop carriers had emptied, the Swords and Mercies were essentially on guard duty around the system. Representatives from the five zones of each of the five regions, twenty-five in all, speaking for the various moons, planets, and stations in the Garseddai system, had surrendered in the name of their constituents, and were separately on their way to Sword of Amaat to meet Anaander Mianaai, Lord of the Radch, and beg for the lives of their people. Hence that frightened, silent city.
In a narrow, diamond-shaped park, by a black granite monument inscribed with the Five Right Actions, and the name of the Garseddai patron who had wished to impress them on the local residents, one of my lieutenants passed another and complained that this annexation had been disappointingly dull. Three seconds later I received a message from Captain Seivarden’s Sword of Nathtas.
The three Garseddai electors she was carrying had killed two of her lieutenants, and twelve of Sword of Nathtas’s ancillary segments. They had damaged the ship—cut conduits, breached the hull. Accompanying the report, a recording from Sword of Nathtas—the gun that an ancillary segment saw, irrefutably, but that according to Sword of Nathtas’s other sensors just didn’t exist. A Garseddai elector, against all expectations surrounded by the gleaming silver of Radchaai-style armor that only the ancillary’s eyes could see, firing the gun, the bullet piercing the ancillary’s armor, killing the segment, and, with its eyes gone, the gun and armor flickering back into nonexistence.
All the electors had been searched before boarding, and Sword of Nathtas should have been able to detect any weapon or shield-generating device or implant. And while Radchaai-style armor had once been in common use in the regions surrounding the Radch itself, those regions had been absorbed a thousand years before. The Garseddai didn’t use it, didn’t know how to make it, let alone how to use it. And even if they had, that gun, and its bullet, were flatly impossible.
Three people armed with such a gun, and armored, could do a great deal of damage on a ship like Sword of Nathtas. Especially if even one Garseddai could reach the engine, and if such a gun could pierce the engine’s heat shield. Radchaai warship engines burned star-hot, and a failed heat shield meant instant vaporization, an entire ship dissolved in a brief, bright flash.
But there was nothing I could do, nothing anyone could do. The message was nearly four hours old, a signal from the past, a ghost. The issue had been decided even before it had reached me.
A harsh tone sounded, and a blue light blinked on the panel in front of me, beside the fuel indicator. An instant before the indicator had read nearly full. Now it read empty. The engine would shut down in a matter of minutes. Beside me Seivarden sprawled, relaxed and quiet.
I landed.
The fuel tank had been rigged in a way I hadn’t detected. It seemed three-quarters full, but it wasn’t, and the alarm that ought to have sounded when I’d used half of what I’d started with had been disconnected.
I thought of the double deposit I certainly wouldn’t see again. Of the proprietor, so concerned that she might lose her valuable flier. Of course there would be a transmitter, whether or not I triggered the emergency call. The proprietor wouldn’t want to lose the flier, just strand me alone in the middle of this plain of moss-streaked snow. I could call for help—I had disabled my communication implants, but I did have a handheld I could use. But we were very, very far from anyone who might be moved to send assistance. And even if help came, and came before the proprietor who clearly meant me no good, I wouldn’t get where I was going, a matter of great importance to me.
The air was minus eighteen degrees; the breeze from the south, at approximately eight kph, implied snow sometime in the near future. Nothing serious, if the morning’s weather report could be trusted.
My landing had left a green-edged smear of white in the snowmoss, easily visible from the air. The terrain seemed gently hilly, though the hills we’d flown over were no longer visible.
Had this been an ordinary emergency, the best course would have been to stay inside the flier until help came. But this was not an ordinary emergency, and I did not expect rescue.
Either they would come as soon as their transmitter told them we were grounded, prepared to murder, or they would wait. The rental had several other vehicles, the proprietor would likely not be inconvenienced if she waited even several weeks to retrieve her flier. As she herself had said, no one would be surprised if a foreigner lost herself in the snow.
I had two choices. I could wait here and hope to ambush anyone who came to murder and rob me, and take their transport. This would, of course, be futile in the event that they decided to wait for cold and hunger to do their job for them. Or I could pull Seivarden out of the flier, shoulder my pack, and walk. My intended destination was some sixty kilometers to the southeast. I could walk that in a day if I had to, ground and weather—and ice devils—permitting, but I would be lucky if Seivarden could do it in twice that time. And that course would be futile if the proprietor decided not to wait, but to retrieve her flier more or less immediately. Our trail through the moss-striated snow would be clear, they would need only to follow us and dispose of us. I would have lost any advantage of surprise I might have gained by hiding near the downed flier.
And I would be lucky if I found anything, once I reached my destination. I had spent the past nineteen years following the most tenuous of threads, weeks and months of searching or waiting, punctuated by moments like this, when success or even life hung on the toss of a coin. I had been lucky to come this far. I could not reasonably expect to go farther.
A Radchaai would have tossed that coin. Or more accurately a handful of them, a dozen disks, each with its meaning and import, the pattern of their fall a map of the universe as Amaat willed it to be. Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is. Or, as a Radchaai would say, the universe is the shape of the gods. Amaat conceived of light, and conceiving of light also necessarily conceived of not-light, and light and darkness sprang forth. This was the first Emanation, EtrepaBo; Light/Darkness. The other three, implied and necessitated by that first, are EskVar (Beginning/Ending), IssaInu (Movement/Stillness), and VahnItr (Existence/Nonexistence). These four Emanations variously split and recombined to create the universe. Everything that is, emanates from Amaat.
The smallest, most seemingly insignificant event is pa
rt of an intricate whole and to understand why one particular mote of dust falls in one particular path, and lands in one particular location, is to understand the will of Amaat. There is no such thing as “just a coincidence.” Nothing happens by chance, but only according to the mind of God.
Or so official Radchaai orthodoxy teaches. I myself have never understood religion very well. It was never required that I should. And though the Radchaai had made me, I was not Radchaai. I knew and cared nothing about the will of the gods. I only knew that I would land where I myself had been cast, wherever that would be.
I took my pack from the flier, opened it, and removed an extra magazine, which I stowed inside my coat near my gun. I shouldered the pack, went around to the other side of the flier, and opened the hatch there. “Seivarden,” I said.
She didn’t move, only breathed a quiet hmmm. I took her arm and pulled, and she half-slid, half-stepped out into the snow.
I had gotten this far by taking one step, and then another. I turned northeast, pulling Seivarden along, and walked.
Dr. Arilesperas Strigan, whose home I very much hoped I was walking toward, had been, at one time, a medic in private practice on Dras Annia Station, an aggregation of at least five different stations, one built onto another, at the intersection of two dozen different routes, well outside Radch territory. Nearly anything could end up there, given enough time, and in the course of her work she had met a wide variety of people, with a wide variety of antecedents. She had been paid in currency, in favors, in antiques, in nearly anything that might imaginably be said to have value.
I’d been there, seen the station and its convoluted, interpenetrating layers, seen where Strigan had worked and lived, seen the things she’d left behind when one day, for no reason anyone seemed to know, she’d bought passage on five different ships and then disappeared. A case full of stringed instruments, only three of which I could name. Five shelves of icons, a dizzying array of gods and saints worked in wood, in shell, in gold. A dozen guns, each one carefully labeled with its station permit number. These were collections that had begun as single items, received in payment, sparking her curiosity. Strigan’s lease had been paid in full for 150 years, and as a result station authorities had left her apartment untouched.