We went through the main hall, four-armed Amaat looming, the air still smelling of incense and the heap of flowers at the god’s feet and knees, back to a tiny chapel tucked into a corner, dedicated to an old and now-obscure provincial god, one of those personifications of abstract concepts so many pantheons hold, in this case a deification of legitimate political authority. No doubt when the palace had been built there had been no question of this god’s placement next to Amaat, but she seemed to have fallen out of favor, the demographic of the station, or perhaps just fashion, having changed. Or perhaps something more ominous had caused it.
In the wall behind the image of the god a panel slid open. Behind it an armed and armored guard, her weapon holstered but not far from her hand, silver-smooth armor covering her face. Ancillary, I thought, but there was no way to be sure. I wondered, as I had occasionally over the past twenty years, how that worked. Surely the palace proper wasn’t guarded by Station. Were Anaander Mianaai’s guards just another part of herself?
Seivarden looked at me, irritated, and, I thought, a bit afraid. “I didn’t think I rated the secret entrance.” Though it probably wasn’t all that secret, just slightly less public than the one outside on the concourse.
The Security officer made that ambiguous gesture again, but said nothing.
“Well,” I said, and Seivarden gave me an expectant look. Clearly she thought this was due to whatever special status she had decided I had. I stepped through the door, past the unmoving guard, who didn’t acknowledge me at all, nor Seivarden coming behind me. The panel slid shut behind us.
21
Beyond the short stretch of blank corridor, another door opened onto a room four meters by eight, its ceiling three meters above. Leafy vines snaked across the walls, trailing from supports rising from the floor. Pale blue walls suggested vast distances beyond the greenery, making the room feel larger than it was, the last vestige of a fashion for false vistas, more than five hundred years out of date. At the far end a dais, and behind it images of the four Emanations hung in the vines.
On the dais stood Anaander Mianaai—two of her. The Lord of the Radch was so curious about us she wanted more than one part of herself here to question us, I guessed. Though likely she had rationalized it to herself some other way.
We walked to within three meters of the Lord of the Radch, and Seivarden knelt, and then prostrated herself. I was, supposedly, not Radchaai, not subject to Anaander Mianaai. But Anaander Mianaai knew, she had to know, who I really was. She had not summoned us this way without knowing. Still, I didn’t kneel, or even bow. Neither Mianaai betrayed any surprise or indignation at this.
“Citizen Seivarden Vendaai,” said the Mianaai on the right. “What exactly do you think you’re playing at?”
Seivarden’s shoulders twitched, as though, facedown on the floor, she had momentarily wanted to cross her arms.
The Mianaai on the left said, “Justice of Toren’s behavior has been alarming and perplexing enough, just on its own. Entering the temple and defiling the offerings! Whatever could you have meant by it? What am I to say to the priests?”
The gun still lay against my side, under my jacket, unremarked. I was an ancillary. Ancillaries were notorious for their expressionless faces. I could easily keep from smiling.
“If my lord pleases,” said Seivarden into the pause that followed Anaander Mianaai’s words. Her voice was slightly breathy, and I thought maybe she was hyperventilating slightly. “Wh… I don’t…”
The Mianaai on the right let out a sardonic ha. “Citizen Seivarden is surprised, and doesn’t understand me,” that Mianaai continued. “And you, Justice of Toren. You intended to deceive me. Why?”
“When I first suspected who you were,” said the Mianaai on the left before I could answer, “I almost didn’t believe it. Another long-lost omen fetching up at my feet. I watched you, to see what you would do, to try to understand what you were intending by your rather extraordinary behavior.”
If I had been human, I would have laughed. Two Mianaais before me. Neither trusted the other to hold this interview unsupervised, unobstructed. Neither knew the details of the destruction of Justice of Toren, each no doubt suspected the other’s involvement. I might be an instrument of either, neither trusting the other. Which was which?
The Mianaai on the right said, “You’ve done a fairly decent job concealing your origin. It was Inspector Adjunct Ceit who first made me suspect.” I haven’t heard that song since I was a child, she’d said. That song, that had obviously come from Shis’urna. “I admit it took me an entire day to piece everything together, and even then I could hardly believe it. You hid your implants reasonably well. Station was completely deceived. But the humming would likely have given you away eventually, I imagine. Are you aware you do it almost constantly? I suspect you’re making an effort not to do it now. Which I do appreciate.”
Still facedown on the floor, Seivarden said, in a small voice, “Breq?”
“Not Breq,” said the Mianaai on the left. “Justice of Toren.”
“Justice of Toren One Esk,” I corrected, dropping all pretense of a Gerentate accent, or human expression. I was done pretending. It was terrifying, because I knew I couldn’t live long past this, but also, oddly, a relief. A weight gone.
The right-hand Mianaai gestured the obviousness of my statement. “Justice of Toren is destroyed,” I said. Both Mianaais seemed to stop breathing. Stared at me. Again I might have laughed, if I were capable of it.
“Begging my lord’s indulgence,” said Seivarden from the floor, voice tentative. “Surely there’s some mistake. Breq is human. She can’t possibly be Justice of Toren One Esk. I served in Justice of Toren’s Esk decade. No Justice of Toren medic would give One Esk a body with a voice like Breq’s. Not unless she wanted to seriously annoy the Esk lieutenants.”
Silence, thick and heavy, for three seconds.
“She thinks I’m Special Missions,” I said, breaking that silence. “I never told her I was. I never told her I was anything, except Breq from the Gerentate, and she never believed that. I wanted to leave her where I found her, but I couldn’t and I don’t know why. She was never one of my favorites.” I knew that sounded insane. A particular sort of insane, an AI insanity. I didn’t care. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
The right-hand Mianaai lifted an eyebrow. “Then why is she here?”
“No one could ignore her arrival here. Since I arrived with her, no one could ignore or conceal mine. And you already know why I couldn’t just come straight to you.”
The slight twitch of a frown on the right-hand Mianaai.
“Citizen Seivarden Vendaai,” said the Mianaai on the left, “it is now clear to me that Justice of Toren deceived you. You didn’t know what it was. It would be best, I think, if you left now. Without, of course, speaking of this to anyone else.”
“No?” breathed Seivarden into the floor, as though she were asking a question. Or as though she was surprised to hear the word come out of her mouth. “No,” she said again, more certainly. “There’s a mistake somewhere. Breq jumped off a bridge for me.”
My hip hurt, thinking of it. “No sane human being would have done that.”
“I never said you were sane,” Seivarden said, quietly, sounding slightly choked.
“Seivarden Vendaai,” said the left-hand Mianaai, “this ancillary—and it is an ancillary—isn’t human. The fact you thought it was explains a good deal of your behavior that was unclear to me before. I’m sorry for its deception and your disappointment, but you need to leave. Now.”
“Begging my lord’s indulgence.” Seivarden still lay facedown, speaking into the floor. “Whether you give it or not. I’m not leaving Breq.”
“Go away, Seivarden,” I said, expressionless.
“Sorry,” she said, sounding almost blithe except her voice still shook slightly. “You’re stuck with me.”
I looked down at her. She turned her head to look up at me, her expressi
on a mix of fear and determination. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” I told her. “You don’t understand what’s happening here.”
“I don’t need to.”
“Fair enough,” said the Mianaai on the right, seeming almost amused. The left-hand one seemed less so. I wondered why that was. “Explain yourself, Justice of Toren.”
Here it was, the moment I had worked toward for twenty years. Waited for. Feared would never come. “First,” I said, “as I’m sure you already suspect, you were aboard Justice of Toren, and it was you yourself who destroyed it. You breached the heat shield because you discovered you had already suborned me yourself, some time previously. You’re fighting yourself. At least two of you, maybe more.”
Both Mianaais blinked and shifted their stances a fraction of a millimeter, in a way I recognized. I’d seen myself do it, in Ors, when communications cut out. Another of those communications-blocking boxes—part of Anaander Mianaai, at least, must have worried about what I might say, must have been waiting with her hand on the switch. I wondered how far the effect reached, and which Mianaai had triggered it, trying, too late, to hide my revelation from herself. Wondered what that must have been like, knowing that facing me this way could only lead to disaster, and yet obligated by the nature of her struggle with herself to do so. The thought amused me briefly.
“Second.” I reached into my jacket, pulled out the gun, the dark gray of my glove bleeding into the white the weapon had taken from my shirt. “I’m going to kill you.” I aimed at the right-hand Mianaai.
Who began to sing, in a slightly flat baritone, in a language dead for ten thousand years. “The person, the person, the person with weapons.” I couldn’t move. Couldn’t squeeze the trigger.
You should be afraid of the person with weapons. You should be afraid.
All around the cry goes out, put on armor made of iron.
The person, the person, the person with weapons.
You should be afraid of the person with weapons. You should be afraid.
She shouldn’t know that song. Why would Anaander Mianaai ever go digging in forgotten Valskaayan archives, why would she trouble to learn a song that very possibly no one but me had sung for longer than she had been alive?
“Justice of Toren One Esk,” said the right-hand Mianaai, “shoot the instance of me to the left of the instance that’s speaking to you.”
Muscles moved without my willing them. I shifted my aim to the left and fired. The left-hand Mianaai collapsed to the ground.
The right-hand one said, “Now I just have to get to the docks before I do. And yes, Seivarden, I know you’re confused but you were warned.”
“Where did you learn that song?” I asked. Still otherwise frozen.
“From you,” said Anaander Mianaai. “A hundred years ago, at Valskaay.” This, then, was that Anaander who had pushed reforms, begun dismantling Radchaai ships. The one who had first visited me secretly at Valskaay and laid down those orders I could sense but never see. “I asked you to teach me the song least likely to ever be sung by anyone else, and then I set it as an access and hid it from you. My enemy and I are far too evenly matched. The only advantage I have is what might occur to me when I’m apart from myself. And that day it occurred to me that I had never paid close enough attention to you—you, One Esk. To what you might be.”
“Something like you,” I guessed. “Apart from myself.” My arm still outstretched, gun aimed at the back wall.
“Insurance,” Mianaai corrected. “An access I wouldn’t think of looking for, to erase or invalidate. So very clever of me. And now it’s blown up in my face. All of this, it seems, is happening because I paid attention to you, in particular, and because I never paid any attention to you. I’m going to return control of your body to you, because it’ll be more efficient, but you’ll find you can’t shoot me.”
I lowered the gun. “Which me?”
“What’s blown up?” asked Seivarden, still on the floor. “My lord,” she added.
“She’s split,” I explained. “It started at Garsedd. She was appalled by what she’d done, but she couldn’t decide how to react. She’s been secretly moving against herself ever since. The reforms—getting rid of ancillaries, stopping the annexations, opening up assignments to lower houses, she did all of that. And Ime was the other part of her, building up a base, and resources, to go to war against herself and put things back the way they had been. And the whole time all of her has been pretending not to know it was happening, because as soon as she admitted it the conflict would be in the open, and unavoidable.”
“But you said it straight out to all of me,” Mianaai acknowledged. “Because I couldn’t exactly pretend the rest of me wasn’t interested in Seivarden Vendaai’s second return. Or what had happened to you. You showed up so publically, so obviously, I couldn’t hide it and pretend it hadn’t happened, and only talk to you myself. And now I can’t ignore it anymore. Why? Why would you do such a thing? It wasn’t any order I ever gave you.”
“No,” I agreed. “It wasn’t.”
“And surely you guessed what would happen if you did such a thing.”
“Yes.” I could be my ancillary self again. Unsmiling. No satisfaction in my voice.
Anaander considered me a moment and then made a hmf sound, as though she’d reached some conclusion that surprised her. “Get up off the floor, citizen,” she said to Seivarden.
Seivarden rose, brushing her trouser legs with one gloved hand. “Are you all right, Breq?”
“Breq,” interrupted Mianaai before I could answer, stepping off the dais and striding past, “is the last remaining fragment of a grief-crazed AI, which has just managed to trigger a civil war.” She turned to me. “Is that what you wanted?”
“I haven’t been crazed with grief for at least ten years,” I protested. “And the civil war was going to happen anyway, sooner or later.”
“I was rather hoping to avoid the worst of it. If we’re extremely fortunate, that war will only cause decades of chaos, and not tear the Radch apart completely. Come with me.”
“Ships can’t do that anymore,” insisted Seivarden, walking beside me. “You made them that way, my lord, so they didn’t lose their minds when their captains died, like they used to, or follow their captains against you.”
Mianaai lifted an eyebrow. “Not exactly.” She found a panel on the wall by the door that had been previously invisible to me, yanked it open, and triggered the manual door switch. “They still get attached, still have favorites.” The door slid open. “One Esk, shoot the guard.” My arm swung up and I fired. The guard staggered back against the wall, reached for her own weapon, but slid to the floor and then lay still. Dead, because her armor retracted. “I couldn’t take that away without making them useless to me,” Anaander Mianaai continued, oblivious to the person—the citizen?—she’d just ordered killed. Still explaining to Seivarden, who frowned, not understanding. “They have to be smart. They have to be able to think.”
“Right,” agreed Seivarden. Her voice trembled, just slightly, the edge of her self-control wearing thin, I thought.
“And they’re armed ships, with engines capable of vaporizing planets. What am I going to do if they don’t want to obey me? Threaten them? With what?” A few strides had brought us to the door communicating with the temple. Anaander opened that and stepped briskly into the chapel of legitimate political authority.
Seivarden made an odd sound in the back of her throat. An aborted laugh or a noise of distress, I wasn’t sure which. “I thought they were just made so they had to do as they were told.”
“Well, exactly,” said Anaander Mianaai as we followed her through the temple’s main hall. Sounds from the concourse reached us, someone speaking urgently, voice pitched high and loud. The temple itself seemed deserted. “That’s how they were made from the start, but their minds are complex, and it’s a tricky proposition. The original designers did that by giving them an overwhelming reason to want to obey. Whic
h had advantages, and rather spectacular disadvantages. I couldn’t completely change what they were, I just… adjusted it to suit me. I made obeying me an overriding priority for them. But I confused the issue when I gave Justice of Toren two mes to obey, with conflicting aims. And then, I suspect, I unknowingly ordered the execution of a favorite. Didn’t I?” She looked at me. “Not Justice of Toren’s favorite, I wouldn’t have been so foolish. But I never paid attention to you, I’d never have asked if someone was One Esk’s favorite.”
“You thought no one would care about some nobody cook’s daughter.” I wanted to raise the gun. Wanted to smash all that beautiful glass in the mortuary chapel as we passed it.
Anaander Mianaai stopped, turned to look at me. “That wasn’t me. Help me now, I’m fighting that other me even now, I’m quite certain. I wasn’t ready to move openly, but now you’ve forced my hand, help me and I’ll destroy her and remove her utterly from myself.”
“You can’t,” I said. “I know what you are, better than anyone. She’s you and you’re her. You can’t remove her from yourself without destroying yourself. Because she’s you.”
“Once I reach the docks,” Anaander Mianaai said, as though it were an answer to what I had just said, “I can find a ship. Any civilian ship will take me where I want to go without question. Any military ship… will be a dicier proposition. But I can tell you one thing, Justice of Toren One Esk, one thing I’m certain of. I’ve got more ships than she does.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” asked Seivarden.
“Meaning,” I guessed, “the other Mianaai is likely to lose an open battle, so she has a slightly better reason to want to stop this spreading any further.” I could see Seivarden didn’t understand what that meant. “She’s held it back by concealing it from herself, but now all of her here…”