“Yes?”
“Yesterday evening my friend was fishing.” Denz Ay stopped again.
Lieutenant Awn waited three seconds, and when nothing further seemed forthcoming, she asked, “Did your friend catch much?” When the mood was on them, no amount of direct questioning, or begging an Orsian to come to the point, would avail.
“N-not much,” said Denz Ay. And then, irritation flashing across her face, just for an instant: “The best fishing, you know, is near the breeding areas, and those are all prohibited.”
“Yes,” said Lieutenant Awn. “I’m sure your friend would never fish illegally.”
“No, no, of course not,” Denz Ay protested. “But… I don’t want to get her in trouble… but maybe sometimes she digs tubers. Near the prohibited zones.”
There weren’t really any plants that produced edible tubers near the prohibited zones—they’d all been dug up months ago, if not longer. Poachers were more careful about the ones inside—if the plants decreased too noticeably, or disappeared entirely, we’d be forced to find out who was taking them, and guard them much more closely. Lieutenant Awn knew this. Everyone in the lower city knew it.
Lieutenant Awn waited for the rest of the story, not for the first time annoyed at the Orsian tendency to approach topics by stealth, but managing mostly not to show it. “I’ve heard they’re very good,” she ventured.
“Oh, yes!” agreed Denz Ay. “They’re best right out of the mud!” Lieutenant Awn suppressed a grimace. “But you can slice them and grill them too…” Denz Ay stopped, with a shrewd look. “Perhaps my friend can get some for you.”
I saw Lieutenant Awn’s dissatisfaction with her rations, the momentary desire to say, Yes, please, but instead she said, “Thank you, there’s no need. You were saying?”
“Saying?”
“Your… friend.” As she spoke Lieutenant Awn was asking me questions, with minute twitches of her fingers. “Was digging tubers near a prohibited zone. And?”
I showed Lieutenant Awn the spot this person was most likely to have been digging in—I patrolled all of Ors, saw the boats go in and out, saw where they were at night when they doused lights and maybe even thought they were running invisible to me.
“And,” said Denz Ay, “they found something.”
Anyone missing? Lieutenant Awn asked me, silently, alarmed. I replied in the negative. “What did they find?” Lieutenant Awn asked Denz Ay, aloud.
“Guns,” said Denz Ay, so quietly Lieutenant Awn almost didn’t hear. “A dozen, from before.” From before the annexation, she meant. All the Shis’urnan militaries had been relieved of their weapons, no one on the planet should have had any guns we didn’t already know about. The answer was so surprising that for a blinking two seconds Lieutenant Awn didn’t react at all.
Then came puzzlement, alarm, and confusion. Why is she telling me this? Lieutenant Awn asked me silently.
“There’s been some talk, Lieutenant,” said Denz Ay. “Perhaps you’ve heard it.”
“There’s always talk,” acknowledged Lieutenant Awn, the answer so formulaic I didn’t need to translate it for her, she could say it in the local dialect. “How else are people to pass the time?” Denz Ay conceded this conventional point with a gesture. Lieutenant Awn’s patience frayed, and she attacked directly. “They might have been put there before the annexation.”
Denz Ay made a negative motion with her left hand. “They weren’t there a month ago.”
Did someone find a pre-annexation cache, and hide them there? Lieutenant Awn asked me, silently. Aloud she asked, “When people talk, do they say things that might account for the appearance of a dozen guns underwater in a prohibited zone?”
“Such guns are no good against you.” Because of our armor, Denz Ay meant. Radchaai armor is an essentially impenetrable force shield. I could extend mine at a thought, the moment I desired to do so. The mechanism that generated it was implanted in each of my segments, and Lieutenant Awn had it as well—though hers was an externally worn unit. It didn’t make us completely invulnerable, and in combat we sometimes wore actual pieces of armor under it, lightweight and articulated, covering head and limbs and torso, but even without that a handful of guns wouldn’t do much damage to either of us.
“So who would those guns be meant for?” asked Lieutenant Awn.
Denz Ay considered, frowning, biting her lip, and then said, “The Tanmind are more like the Radchaai than we are.”
“Citizen,” said Lieutenant Awn, laying noticeable, deliberate stress on that word, which was only what Radchaai meant in the first place, “if we were going to shoot anyone here, we’d already have done it.” Had already done it, in fact. “We wouldn’t need secret stashes of weapons.”
“This is why I came to you,” said Denz Ay, emphatic, as though explaining something in very simple terms, for a child. “When you shoot a person, you say why and do it, without excuse. This is how the Radchaai are. But in the upper city, before you came, when they would shoot Orsians, they would always be careful to have an excuse. They wanted someone dead,” she explained, to Lieutenant Awn’s uncomprehending, appalled expression, “they did not say, You are trouble we want you gone and then shoot. They said, We are only defending ourselves and when the person was dead they would search the body or a house and discover weapons, or incriminating messages.” Not, the implication was clear, genuine ones.
“Then how are we alike?”
“Your gods are the same.” They weren’t, not explicitly so, but the fiction was encouraged, in the upper city and elsewhere. “You live in space, you go all wrapped up in clothes. You are rich, the Tanmind are rich. If someone in the upper city”—and by this I suspected she meant a specific someone—“cries out that some Orsian threatens them, most Radchaai will believe her, and not some Orsian who is surely lying to protect her own.”
And that was why she had come to Lieutenant Awn—so that, whatever happened, it would be plain and clear to Radchaai authorities that she—and by extension anyone else in the lower city—had in fact had nothing to do with that cache of weapons, if the accusation should materialize.
“These things,” said Lieutenant Awn. “Orsian, Tanmind, Moha, they mean nothing now. That’s done. Everyone here is Radchaai.”
“As you say, Lieutenant,” answered Denz Ay, voice quiet and nearly expressionless.
Lieutenant Awn had been in Ors long enough to recognize the unstated refusal to agree. She tried another angle. “No one is going to shoot anybody.”
“Of course not, Lieutenant,” said Denz Ay, but in that same quiet voice. She was old enough to know firsthand that we had, indeed, shot people in the past. She could hardly be blamed for fearing we might do so in the future.
After Denz Ay left, Lieutenant Awn sat thinking. No one interrupted; the day was quiet. In the green-lit temple interior, the head priest turned to me and said, “Once there would have been two choirs, a hundred voices each. You would have liked it.” I had seen recordings. Sometimes the children would bring me songs that were distant echoes of that music, five hundred years gone and more. “We’re not what we used to be,” said the head priest. “Everything passes, eventually.” I agreed that it was so.
“Take a boat tonight,” said Lieutenant Awn, stirring at last. “See if there’s anything to indicate where the weapons came from. I’ll decide what to do once I have a better idea of what’s going on.”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” I said.
Jen Shinnan lived in the upper city, across the Fore-Temple lake. Few Orsians lived there who weren’t servants. The houses there were built to a slightly different plan from those in the lower; hip-roofed, the central part of each floor walled in, though windows and doors were left open on mild nights. All of the upper city had been built over older ruins, and thus much more recently than the lower, within the last fifty or so years, and made much larger use of climate control. Many residents wore trousers and shirts, and even jackets. Radchaai immigrants who lived here tended to wear much
more conventional clothes, and Lieutenant Awn, when she visited, wore her uniform without too much discomfort.
But Lieutenant Awn was never comfortable, visiting Jen Shinnan. She didn’t like Jen Shinnan, and though of course it was never even hinted at, very likely Jen Shinnan didn’t like Lieutenant Awn much either. This sort of invitation was only extended out of social necessity, Lieutenant Awn being a local representative of Radchaai authority. The table this evening was unusually small, just Jen Shinnan, a cousin of hers, and Lieutenant Awn and Lieutenant Skaaiat. Lieutenant Skaaiat commanded Justice of Ente Seven Issa, and administered the territory between Ors and Kould Ves—farmland, mostly, where Jen Shinnan and her cousin had their holdings. Lieutenant Skaaiat and her troops assisted us during pilgrimage season, so she was nearly as well-known in Ors as Lieutenant Awn was.
“They confiscated my entire harvest.” This was the cousin of Jen Shinnan’s, the owner of several tamarind orchards not far from the upper city. She tapped her plate emphatically with her utensil. “The entire harvest.”
The center of the table was laden with trays and bowls filled with eggs, fish (not from the marshy lake, but from the sea beyond), spiced chicken, bread, braised vegetables, and half a dozen relishes of various types.
“Didn’t they pay you, citizen?” asked Lieutenant Awn, speaking slowly and carefully, as she always did when she was anxious her accent might slip. Jen Shinnan and her cousin both spoke Radchaai, so there was no need to translate, nor any anxiety over gender or status or anything else that would have been essential in Tanmind or Orsian.
“Well, but I would certainly have gotten more if I could have taken it to Kould Ves and sold it myself!”
There had been a time when a property owner like her would have been shot early on, so someone’s client could take over her plantation. Indeed, not a few Shis’urnans had died in the initial stages of the annexation simply because they were in the way, and in the way could mean any number of things.
“As I’m sure you understand, citizen,” said Lieutenant Awn, “food distribution is a problem we’re still solving, and we all need to endure some hardship while that’s accomplished.” Her sentences, when she was uncomfortable, became uncharacteristically formal, and sometimes dangerously convoluted.
Jen Shinnan gestured to a laden plate of fragile pale-pink glass. “Another stuffed egg, Lieutenant Awn?”
Lieutenant Awn held up one gloved hand. “They’re delicious, but no thank you, citizen.”
But the cousin had landed in a track she found it hard to deviate from, despite Jen Shinnan’s diplomatic attempt to derail her. “It’s not like fruit is a necessity. Tamarind, of all things! And it’s not like anyone is starving.”
“Indeed it isn’t!” agreed Lieutenant Skaaiat, heartily. She smiled brightly at Lieutenant Awn. Lieutenant Skaaiat—dark-skinned, amber-eyed, aristocratic as Lieutenant Awn was not. One of her Seven Issas stood near me, by the door of the dining room, as straight and still as I was.
Though Lieutenant Awn liked Lieutenant Skaaiat a good deal, and appreciated her sarcasm on this occasion, she could not bring herself to smile in response. “Not this year.”
“Your business is doing better than mine, Cousin,” said Jen Shinnan, voice placating. She too owned farmland not far from the upper city. But she had also owned those dredgers that sat, silent and still, in the marsh water. “Though I suppose I can’t be too regretful, it was a great deal of trouble for very little return.”
Lieutenant Awn opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again. Lieutenant Skaaiat saw it, and said, vowels effortlessly broad and refined, “What is it, another three years for the fishing prohibitions, Lieutenant?”
“Yes,” said Lieutenant Awn.
“Foolishness,” said Jen Shinnan. “Well-intentioned, but foolishness. You saw what it was like when you arrived. As soon as you open them, they’ll be fished out again. The Orsians may have been a great people once, but they’re no longer what their ancestors were. They have no ambition, no sense of anything beyond their short-term advantage. If you show them who’s boss, then they can be quite obedient, as I’m sure you’ve discovered, Lieutenant Awn, but in their natural state they are, with few exceptions, shiftless and superstitious. Though I suppose that’s what comes of living in the Underworld.” She smiled at her own joke. Her cousin laughed outright.
The space-dwelling nations of Shis’urna divided the universe into three parts. In the middle lay the natural environment of humans—space stations, ships, constructed habitats. Outside those was the Black—heaven, the home of God and everything holy. And within the gravity well of the planet Shis’urna itself—or for that matter any planet—lay the Underworld, the land of the dead from which humanity had had to escape in order to become fully free of its demonic influence.
You can see, perhaps, how the Radchaai conception of the universe as being God itself might seem the same as the Tanmind idea of the Black. You might also see why it seemed a bit odd, to Radchaai ears, to hear someone who believed gravity wells were the land of the dead call people superstitious for worshiping a lizard.
Lieutenant Awn managed a polite smile, and Lieutenant Skaaiat said, “And yet you live here too.”
“I don’t confuse abstract philosophical concepts with reality,” said Jen Shinnan. Though that too sounded odd, to a Radchaai who knew what it meant for a Tanmind stationer to descend to the Underworld and return. “Seriously. I have a theory.”
Lieutenant Awn, who had been exposed to several Tanmind theories about the Orsians, managed a neutral, even almost curious expression and said, blandly, “Oh?”
“Do share!” encouraged Lieutenant Skaaiat. The cousin, having scooped a quantity of spiced chicken into her mouth moments before, made a gesture of support with her utensil.
“It’s the way they live, all out in the open like that, with nothing but a roof,” Jen Shinnan said. “They can’t have any privacy, no sense of themselves as real individuals, you understand, no sense of any sort of separate identity.”
“Let alone private property,” said Jen Taa, having swallowed her chicken. “They think they can just walk in and take whatever they want.”
Actually, there were rules—if unstated ones—about entering a house uninvited, and theft was rarely a problem in the lower city. Occasionally during pilgrimage season, almost never otherwise.
Jen Shinnan gestured acknowledgment. “And no one here is ever really starving, Lieutenant. No one has to work, they just fish in the swamp. Or fleece visitors during pilgrimage season. They have no chance to develop any ambition, or any desire to improve themselves. And they don’t—can’t, really—develop any sort of sophistication, any kind of…” She trailed off, searching for the right word.
“Interiority?” suggested Lieutenant Skaaiat, who enjoyed this game much more than Lieutenant Awn did.
“That’s it exactly!” agreed Jen Shinnan. “Interiority, yes.”
“So your theory is,” said Lieutenant Awn, her tone dangerously even, “that the Orsians aren’t really people.”
“Well, not individuals.” Jen Shinnan seemed to sense, remotely, that she’d said something to make Lieutenant Awn angry, but didn’t seem entirely certain of it. “Not as such.”
“And of course,” interjected Jen Taa, oblivious, “they see what we have, and don’t understand that you have to work for that sort of life, and they’re envious and resentful and blame us for not letting them have it, when if they’d only work…”
“They send what money they have to support that half-broken-down temple, and then complain they’re poor,” said Jen Shinnan. “And they fish out the marsh and then blame us. They’ll do the same to you, Lieutenant, when you open the prohibited zones again.”
“Your dredging up the mud by the ton to sell as fertilizer didn’t have anything to do with the fish disappearing?” asked Lieutenant Awn, her voice edged. Actually, the fertilizer had been a by-product of the main business of selling the mud to space-dwelling Tanmind
for religious purposes. “That was due to irresponsible fishing on the part of the Orsians?”
“Well of course it had some effect,” said Jen Taa, “but if they’d only managed their resources properly…”
“Quite right,” agreed Jen Shinnan. “You blame me for ruining the fishing. But I gave those people jobs. Opportunities to improve their lives.”
Lieutenant Skaaiat must have sensed that Lieutenant Awn was at a dangerous point. “Security on a planet is very different from on a station,” she said, her voice cheerful. “On a planet there’s always going to be some… some slippage. Some things you don’t see.”
“Ah,” said Jen Shinnan, “but you’ve got everyone tagged so you always know where we are.”
“Yes,” agreed Lieutenant Skaaiat. “But we’re not always watching. I suppose you could grow an AI big enough to watch a whole planet, but I don’t think anyone has ever tried it. A station, though…”
I watched Lieutenant Awn see Lieutenant Skaaiat spring the trap Jen Shinnan had walked into moments ago. “On a station,” Lieutenant Awn said, “the AI sees everything.”
“So much easier to manage,” agreed Lieutenant Skaaiat happily. “Almost no need for security at all.” That wasn’t quite true, but this was no time to point that out.
Jen Taa set down her utensil. “Surely the AI doesn’t see everything.” Neither lieutenant said anything. “Even when you…?”
“Everything,” answered Lieutenant Awn. “I assure you, citizen.”
Silence, for nearly two seconds. Beside me, Lieutenant Skaaiat’s Seven Issa guard’s mouth twitched, something that might have been an itch or some unavoidable muscle spasm, but was, I suspected, the only outward manifestation of her amusement. Military ships possessed AIs just as stations did, and Radchaai soldiers lived utterly without privacy.
Lieutenant Skaaiat broke the silence. “Your niece, citizen, is taking the aptitudes this year?”