The cousin gestured yes. So long as her own farming provided income, she wouldn’t need an assignment, and neither would her heir—however many heirs the land might support. The niece, however, had lost her parents during the annexation.
“These aptitudes,” said Jen Shinnan. “You took them, Lieutenants?” Both indicated affirmatively. The aptitudes were the only way into the military, or any government post—though that didn’t encompass all assignments available.
“No doubt,” said Jen Shinnan, “the test works well for you, but I wonder if it’s suited to us Shis’urnans.”
“Why is that?” asked Lieutenant Skaaiat, with slightly frowning amusement.
“Has there been a problem?” asked Lieutenant Awn, still stiff, still annoyed with Jen Shinnan.
“Well.” Jen Shinnan picked up a napkin, soft and bleached a snowy white, and wiped her mouth. “Word is, last month in Kould Ves all the candidates for civil service were ethnic Orsians.”
Lieutenant Awn blinked in confusion. Lieutenant Skaaiat smiled. “You mean to say,” she said, looking at Jen Shinnan but also directing her words to Lieutenant Awn, “that you think the testing is biased.”
Jen Shinnan folded her napkin and set it down on the table beside her bowl. “Come now, Lieutenant. Let us be honest. There’s a reason so few Orsians occupied such posts before you arrived. Every now and then you find an exception—the Divine is a very respectable person, I grant you. But she’s an exception. So when I see twenty Orsians destined for civil service posts, and not a single Tanmind, I can’t help but think either the test is flawed, or… well. I can’t help but remember that it was the Orsians who first surrendered, when you arrived. I can’t blame you for appreciating that, for wanting to… acknowledge that. But it’s a mistake.”
Lieutenant Awn said nothing. Lieutenant Skaaiat asked, “Assuming you’re correct, why would that be a mistake?”
“It’s as I said before. They just aren’t suited to positions of authority. Some exceptions, yes, but…” She waved a gloved hand. “And with the bias of the assignments being so obvious, people won’t have confidence in it.”
Lieutenant Skaaiat’s smile grew broader in proportion to Lieutenant Awn’s silent, indignant anger. “Your niece is nervous?”
“A bit!” admitted the cousin.
“Understandably,” drawled Lieutenant Skaaiat. “It’s a momentous event in any citizen’s life. But she needn’t fear.”
Jen Shinnan laughed, sardonic. “Needn’t fear? The lower city resents us, always has, and now we can’t make any legal contracts without either taking transport to Kould Ves or going through the lower city to your house, Lieutenant.” Any legally binding contract had to be made in the temple of Amaat. Or, a recent (and extremely controversial) concession, on its steps, if one of the parties was an exclusive monotheist. “During that pilgrimage thing it’s nearly impossible. We either lose an entire day traveling to Kould Ves, or endanger ourselves.”
Jen Shinnan visited Kould Ves quite frequently, often merely to visit friends, or shop. All the Tanmind in the upper city did, and had done so before the annexation. “Has there been some unreported difficulty?” asked Lieutenant Awn, stiff, angry. Utterly polite.
“Well,” said Jen Taa. “In fact, Lieutenant, I’ve been wanting to mention. We’ve been here a few days, and my niece seems to have had a bit of trouble in the lower city. I told her it was better not to go, but you know how teenagers are when you tell them not to do something.”
“What sort of trouble?” asked Lieutenant Awn.
“Oh,” said Jen Shinnan, “you know the sort of thing. Rude words, threats—empty, no doubt, and of course nothing next to what things will be like in a week or two, but the child was quite shaken.”
The child in question had spent the past two afternoons staring at the Fore-Temple water and sighing. I had spoken to her once and she had turned her head away without answering. After that I had left her alone. No one had troubled her. No problems that I saw, I messaged Lieutenant Awn.
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” said Lieutenant Awn, silently acknowledging my information with a twitch of her fingers.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Jen Shinnan. “I know we can count on you.”
“You think it’s funny.” Lieutenant Awn tried to relax her too-tight jaw. I could tell from the increasing tension of her facial muscles that without intervention she would soon have a headache.
Lieutenant Skaaiat, walking beside her, laughed outright. “It’s pure comedy. Forgive me, my dear, but the angrier you get the more painstakingly correct your speech becomes, and the more Jen Shinnan mistakes you.”
“Surely not. Surely she’s asked about me.”
“You’re still angry. Worse,” said Lieutenant Skaaiat, hooking her arm around Lieutenant Awn’s, “you’re angry with me. I’m sorry. And she has asked. Very obliquely, just interested in you, only natural, of course.”
“And you answered,” suggested Lieutenant Awn, “equally obliquely.”
I walked behind them, alongside the Seven Issa who had stood with me in Jen Shinnan’s dining room. Directly ahead, along the street and across the Fore-Temple water, I could see myself where I stood in the plaza.
Lieutenant Skaaiat said, “I said nothing untrue. I told her that lieutenants on ships with ancillaries tended to be from old, high-ranking families with lots of money and clients. Her connections in Kould Ves might have said a bit more, but not much. On the one hand, since you aren’t such a person, they have cause to resent you. On the other hand, you do command ancillaries and not vulgar human troops, which the old-fashioned deplore just as much as they deplore the scions of obscure, nobody houses getting assigned as officers. They approve of your ancillaries and disapprove of your antecedents. Jen Shinnan gets a very ambivalent picture of you.” Her voice was quiet, pitched so that only someone standing very near could hear it, though the houses we passed were closed up, and dark on the lower levels. It was very unlike the lower city, where even late into the night people sat nearly in the street, even small children.
“Besides,” Lieutenant Skaaiat said, “she’s right. Oh, not that foolishness about Orsians, no, but she’s right to be suspicious about the aptitudes. You know yourself the tests are susceptible to manipulation.” Lieutenant Awn felt a sick, betrayed indignation at Lieutenant Skaaiat’s words, but said nothing, and Lieutenant Skaaiat continued. “For centuries only the wealthy and well-connected tested as suitable for certain jobs. Like, say, officers in the military. In the last, what, fifty, seventy-five years, that hasn’t been true. Have the lesser houses suddenly begun to produce officer candidates where they didn’t before?”
“I don’t like where you’re headed with this,” snapped Lieutenant Awn, tugging slightly at their linked arms, trying to pull away. “I didn’t expect it from you.”
“No, no,” protested Lieutenant Skaaiat, and didn’t let go, drew her closer. “The question is the right one, and the answer the same. The answer is no, of course. But does that mean the tests were rigged before, or rigged now?”
“And your opinion?”
“Both. Before and now. And our friend Jen Shinnan doesn’t fully understand that the question can even be asked—she just knows that if you’re going to succeed you’ve got to have the right connections, and she knows the aptitudes are part of that. And she’s utterly shameless—you heard her imply the Orsians were being rewarded for collaboration, and in nearly the same breath imply her people would be even better collaborators! And you notice neither she nor her cousin are sending their own children for testing, just this orphaned niece. Still, they’re invested in her doing well. If we’d asked for a bribe to ensure it, she’d have handed it over, no question. I’m surprised she didn’t offer one, actually.”
“You wouldn’t,” protested Lieutenant Awn. “You won’t. You can’t deliver anyway.”
“I won’t need to. The child will test well, likely get herself sent to the territorial capital for training to tak
e a nice civil service post. If you ask me, the Orsians are being rewarded for collaborating—but they’re a minority in this system. And now the unavoidable unpleasantness of the annexation is over, we want people to start realizing that being Radchaai will benefit them. Punishing local houses for not being quick enough to surrender won’t help.”
They walked in silence for a bit, and stopped at the edge of the water, arms still linked.
“Walk you home?” asked Lieutenant Skaaiat. Lieutenant Awn didn’t answer, but looked away over the water, still angry. The green skylights in the temple’s slanted roof shone, and light poured out the open doors onto the plaza and reflected on the water—this was a season of nightly vigils. Lieutenant Skaaiat said, with an apologetic half-smile, “I’ve upset you, let me make it up to you.”
“Sure,” said Lieutenant Awn, with a small sigh. She never could resist Lieutenant Skaaiat, and indeed there was no real reason to do so. They turned and walked along the water’s edge.
“What’s the difference,” Lieutenant Awn said, so quietly it didn’t seem like a break in the silence, “between citizens and noncitizens?”
“One is civilized,” said Lieutenant Skaaiat with a laugh, “and the other isn’t.” The joke only made sense in Radchaai—citizen and civilized are the same word. To be Radchaai is to be civilized.
“So in the moment the Lord of Mianaai bestowed citizenship on the Shis’urnans, in that very instant they became civilized.” The sentence was a circular one—the question Lieutenant Awn was asking is a difficult one in that language. “I mean, one day your Issas are shooting people for failing to speak respectfully enough—don’t tell me it didn’t happen, because I know it did, and worse—and it doesn’t matter because they’re not Radchaai, not civilized.” Lieutenant Awn had switched momentarily into the bit of the local Orsian language she knew, because the Radchaai words refused to let her mean what she wished to say. “And any measures are justified in the name of civilization.”
“Well,” said Lieutenant Skaaiat, “it was effective, you have to admit. Everyone speaks very respectfully to us these days.” Lieutenant Awn was silent. Unamused. “What brought this on?” Lieutenant Awn told her about her conversation with the head priest the day before.
“Ah. Well. You didn’t protest at the time.”
“What good would it have done?”
“Absolutely none,” answered Lieutenant Skaaiat. “But that’s not why you didn’t. Besides, even if ancillaries don’t beat people, or take bribes, or rape, or shoot people out of pique—those people human troops shot… a hundred years ago they’d have been stored in suspension for future use as ancillary segments. Do you know how many we still have stockpiled? Justice of Toren’s holds will be full of ancillaries for the next million years. If not longer. Those people are effectively dead. So what’s the difference? And you don’t like my saying that, but here’s the truth: luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.”
“It doesn’t trouble yours?”
Lieutenant Skaaiat laughed, gaily, as though they were discussing something completely different, a game of counters or a good tea shop. “When you grow up knowing that you deserve to be on top, that the lesser houses exist to serve your house’s glorious destiny, you take such things for granted. You’re born assuming that someone else is paying the cost of your life. It’s just the way things are. What happens during annexation—it’s a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.”
“It doesn’t seem that way to me,” answered Lieutenant Awn, short and bitter.
“No, of course it doesn’t,” answered Lieutenant Skaaiat, her voice kinder. I’m quite sure she genuinely liked Lieutenant Awn. I know that Lieutenant Awn liked her, even if Lieutenant Skaaiat sometimes said things that upset her, like this evening. “Your family has been paying some of that cost, however small. Maybe that makes it easier to sympathize with whoever might be paying for you. And I’m sure it’s hard not to think of what your own ancestors went through when they were annexed.”
“Your ancestors were never annexed.” Lieutenant Awn’s voice was biting.
“Well, some of them probably were,” admitted Lieutenant Skaaiat. “But they’re not in the official genealogy.” She stopped, pulling Lieutenant Awn to a halt beside her. “Awn, my good friend. Don’t trouble yourself over things you can’t help. Things are as they are. You have nothing to reproach yourself with.”
“You’ve just said we all do.”
“That wasn’t what I said.” Lieutenant Skaaiat’s voice was gentle. “But you’ll take it that way all the same, won’t you? Listen—life will be better here, because we’re here. It already is, not just for the people here but for those who were transported. And even for Jen Shinnan, even though just now she’s preoccupied with her own resentment at no longer being the highest authority in Ors. She’ll come around in time. They all will.”
“And the dead?”
“Are dead. No use fretting over them.”
5
When Seivarden woke, she was fidgety and irritable. She asked me twice who I was, and complained three times that my answer—which was a lie in any event—conveyed no meaningful information to her. “I don’t know anyone named Breq. I’ve never seen you before in my life. Where am I?”
Nowhere with a name. “You’re on Nilt.”
She drew a blanket around her bare shoulders, and then, sulkily, shoved it off again and folded her arms across her chest. “I’ve never even heard of Nilt. How did I end up here?”
“I have no idea.” I set the food I was holding down on the floor in front of her.
She reached for the blanket again. “I don’t want that.”
I gestured my indifference. I had eaten and rested while she slept. “Does this happen to you often?”
“What?”
“Waking up and finding you don’t know where you are, who you’re with, or how you got there?”
She fidgeted the blanket on and off again, and rubbed her arms and wrists together. “A couple of times.”
“I’m Breq, from the Gerentate.” I had already told her, but I knew she would ask me again. “I found you two days ago in front of a tavern. I don’t know how you got there. You would have died if I’d left you. I’m sorry if that’s what you wanted.”
For some reason that angered her. “How very charming you are, Breq from the Gerentate.” She sneered slightly as she said it. It was mildly, irrationally surprising to hear that tone from her, naked and disheveled as she was, and not in uniform.
That tone made me angry. I knew very precisely why I was angry, and knew as well that if I dared to explain my anger to Seivarden she would respond with nothing but contempt, and that made me even angrier. I held my face in the neutral, slightly interested expression I had used with her from the moment she’d awakened, and made the same indifferent gesture I had made moments before.
I had been the first ship Seivarden ever served on. She’d arrived fresh out of training, seventeen years old, plunged straight into the tail end of an annexation. In a tunnel carved through red-brown stone under the surface of a small moon she had been ordered to guard a line of prisoners, nineteen of them, crouched naked and shivering along the chill passageway, waiting to be evaluated.
Actually I was doing the guarding, seven of me ranged along the corridor, weapons ready. Seivarden—so young then, still slight, dark hair, brown skin, and brown eyes unremarkable, unlike the aristocratic lines of her face, including a nose she hadn’t quite grown into yet. Nervous, yes, left in charge here just days after arriving, but also proud of herself and her sudden, small authority. Proud of that dark-brown uniform jacket, trousers, and gloves, that lieutenant’s insignia. And, I thought, a tiny bit too excited at holding an actual gun in what certainly wasn’t a training exercise.
One of the people along
the wall—broad-shouldered, muscled, cradling a broken arm against her torso—wept noisily, moaning each exhale, gasping every inhale. She knew, everyone in this line knew, that they would either be stored for future use as ancillaries—like the ancillaries of mine that stood before them even now, identities gone, bodies appendages to a Radchaai warship—or else they would be disposed of.
Seivarden, pacing importantly up and down the line, grew more irritated with this piteous captive’s every convulsive breath, until finally she halted in front of her. “Aatr’s tits! Stop that noise!” Small movements of Seivarden’s arm muscles told me she was about to raise her weapon. No one would have cared if she’d taken the butt of her gun and beaten the prisoner senseless. No one would have cared if she’d shot the prisoner in the head, so long as no vital equipment was damaged in the process. Human bodies to make into ancillaries weren’t exactly a scarce resource.
I stepped in front of her. “Lieutenant,” I said, flat and toneless. “The tea you asked for is ready.” Actually it had been ready five minutes before but I’d said nothing, held it in reserve.
In the readings coming from that terribly young Lieutenant Seivarden I saw startlement, frustration, anger. Irritation. “That was fifteen minutes ago,” she snapped. I didn’t answer. Behind me the prisoner still sobbed and moaned. “Can’t you shut her up?”
“I’ll do my best, Lieutenant,” I said, though I knew there was only one way to really do that, only one thing that would silence that captive’s grief. The newly minted Lieutenant Seivarden seemed unaware of that.
Twenty-one years after arriving on Justice of Toren—just over a thousand years before I found her in the snow—Seivarden was senior Esk lieutenant. Thirty-eight, still quite young by Radchaai standards. A citizen could live some two hundred years.
Her last day, she sat drinking tea on her bunk in her quarters, three meters by two meters by two, white-walled, severely neat. She was grown into that aristocratic nose by now, grown into herself. No longer awkward or unsure.