by Ann Leckie
The question was depressingly familiar. “The Presger would not require subterfuge in order to destroy the Radch. And there is the treaty, which I’m given to understand they take very seriously.”
“They don’t use words, do they? They’re completely alien. How could the word treaty mean anything to them? How could any agreement mean anything?”
“Are the Presger nearby? A potential threat?”
A tiny frown. The question troubled her for some reason. Perhaps because the very idea of the Presger nearby was frightening. “They pass through Prid Presger, sometimes, on their way to Tstur Palace.” Prid Presger was a few gates from here, nearby only in the sense that it would take a month or so to get here from there, instead of a year or more. “By agreement, they can only travel by gate, within the Radch. But…”
“The treaty isn’t with the Radch,” I pointed out. “It’s with all humans.” Governor Giarod looked puzzled at that—to most Radchaai, human was who they were, and everyone else was… something other. “I mean to say, whether Anaander Mianaai exists at all does not affect it. It is still in force.” Still, for more than a thousand years before the treaty, Presger had seized human ships. Boarded human stations. Dismantled them—and their crews, passengers, and residents. Apparently for amusement. No one had any way of preventing it. They had ceased only because of the treaty. And the thought of them still sent a shiver down a good many human backs. Including, it seemed, Governor Giarod’s. “Unless you have some specific reason, I don’t think we should worry about them just now.”
“No, of course, you’re right.” But the governor still seemed troubled.
“We produce enough food for the whole system?”
“Certainly. Though we do import some luxuries—we don’t make much arrack, and various other things. We import some number of medical supplies. That could be a problem.”
“You don’t make correctives here?”
“Not many. Not all kinds.”
That could pose a problem, far enough into the future. “We’ll see what we can do about that, if anything. Meantime, I suggest you continue as you have been—keeping calm, keeping order. We should let people know that the gates that are closed are down for the foreseeable future. And that travel through the remaining gates is too dangerous to allow.”
“Citizen Fosyf won’t like that! Or any of the other growers. By the end of the month there’ll be tonnes of top-grade handpicked Daughter of Fishes with nowhere to go. And that’s only Fosyf’s bit.”
“Well.” I smiled blandly. “At least we’ll all have very good tea to drink for the next long while.”
It was too late to visit Citizen Basnaaid with any sort of courtesy. And there were things I wanted to know that had not been in the information I’d received at Omaugh Palace. Politics from before an annexation were considered irrelevant, any old divisions wiped away by the arrival of civilization. Anything remaining—languages, perhaps, or art of some kind—might be preserved as quaint museum displays, but of course never figured into official records. Outside this system, Athoek looked like any other Radchaai system. Uniform. Wholly civilized. Inside it, you could see it wasn’t, if you looked—if you were forced to acknowledge it. But it was always a balancing act between the presumed complete success of the annexation and the need to deal with the ways in which that annexation had, perhaps, not been entirely complete, and one of the ways to achieve that balance was by ignoring what one didn’t have to see.
Station would know things. I’d best have a chat with Station anyway, best put myself in its good graces. A ship or station AI couldn’t, strictly speaking, do anything to oppose me, but I knew from very personal experience how much easier life was when one liked you, and wanted to help.
9
Despite the fact that the Undergarden wasn’t terribly well ventilated, and my bed was little more than a pile of blankets on the floor, I slept comfortably. Made a point of saying so to Kalr Five, when she brought me tea, because I could see that she, that all my Mercy of Kalrs, were vain of what they’d achieved while I sat at supper with Citizen Fosyf. They’d managed to clean our several rooms to an almost military level of spotlessness, rig lights, get doors working, and pile luggage and miscellaneous boxes into something approximating tables and chairs. Five brought me breakfast—more porridge tea, though thicker than what I’d drunk in the tea shop, bland but filling—and Lieutenant Tisarwat and I ate in silence, she in a state of suppressed self-loathing. It had been barely noticeable aboard Mercy of Kalr. Her duties there, and the self-contained isolation of our travel, had made it easy for her to almost forget what Anaander Mianaai had done to her. What I had done to Anaander Mianaai. But now, here at Athoek Station, the chaos of cleaning and unpacking past, she must be thinking of what the Lord of the Radch had meant to do when we’d arrived here.
I considered asking her. I already knew Anaander Mianaai’s assessment of the system governor and of the ships and captains stationed here. Knew that she considered most of the tea-growing houses to be almost entirely preoccupied with their tea and likely unthreatened by the changes the Lord of the Radch had set in motion over the past hundred years. After all, upstart houses drank tea just as much as anciently aristocratic ones, and (aside from captains who demanded their soldiers play ancillary) human soldiers did, too.
Athoek was probably not fertile ground for the other Anaander. And most of the fighting would probably center round the palaces for now. Then again, a planet was a valuable resource. If fighting lasted long enough, Athoek could draw unwelcome attention. And in a game with such high stakes, neither Anaander would have failed to place a few counters here.
Kalr Five left the room, and Lieutenant Tisarwat looked up from her porridge, her lilac eyes serious. “She’s very angry with you, sir.”
“Who is that, Lieutenant?” But of course she meant Anaander Mianaai.
“The other one, sir. I mean, they both are, really. But the other one. If she gains the upper hand at any point, she’ll come after you if she possibly can. Because she’s just that angry. And…”
And that was the part of the Lord of the Radch who dealt with her reaction to Garsedd by insisting she had been right to lose her temper so extravagantly. “Yes, thank you, Lieutenant. I’d already worked that out.” Much as I’d wanted to know what the Lord of the Radch was up to, I hadn’t wanted to make Tisarwat talk about it. But she had volunteered. “I take it you have access codes for all the AIs in the system.”
She looked quickly down at her bowl. Mortified. “Yes, sir.”
“Are they only good for specific AIs, or can you potentially control any one you come across?”
That startled her. And, oddly, disappointed her. She looked up, distress plain in her expression. “Sir! She’s not stupid.”
“Don’t use them,” I said, voice pleasant. “Or you’ll find yourself in difficulty.”
“Yes, sir.” Struggling to keep her feelings off her face—a painful mix of shame and humiliation. A hint of relief. A fresh surge of unhappiness and self-hatred.
It was among the things I’d wanted to avoid, in avoiding asking her about Anaander’s aims in sending Tisarwat with me. I certainly didn’t want her to indulge in her current emotions.
And I found I was unwilling to wait much longer to find Lieutenant Awn’s sister. I took a last mouthful of porridge. “Lieutenant,” I said, “let’s visit the Gardens.”
Surprise, that almost distracted her. “Begging the fleet captain’s indulgence, sir. Aren’t you meeting with Captain Hetnys?”
“Kalr Five will desire her to wait until I get back.” I saw a flash of trepidation from her. And an undercurrent of… admiration, was it? And envy. That was curious.
Raughd Denche had said the Gardens were a tourist attraction, and I could see why. They took up a good portion of the station’s upper level, more than five acres, sunlit, open, and undivided under a high, clear dome. Entering, that was all I could see beyond a heavy-smelling bank of red and yellow roses
—that high, black sky cut into barely visible hexagonal sections, Athoek itself hanging, jewellike, beyond. A spectacular view, but this close to vacuum there ought to have been smaller partitions, section doors. I saw no sign of them.
The ground had been built to slope downward from where we entered. Past the roses the path meandered around shrubs with glossy green leaves and thick clusters of purple berries, around beds of something pungent-smelling with silvery, needle-shaped leaves. Small trees and more shrubs, even jutting rocks, the path winding around, every now and then affording a glimpse of water, of broad lily-pads, flowers white and deep pink. It was warm, but a slight breeze disturbed the leaves—no ventilation problems here, though I found myself waiting for a pressure drop, still disturbed by that huge open space. The path crossed over a tiny stream, rushing down a rock-built channel to somewhere below. We might almost have been on a planet but for that black expanse above.
Lieutenant Tisarwat, behind me, seemed unconcerned. This station had been here for several hundred years. And if something happened now there was very little either of us could do about it. There was nothing for it but to continue on. At the next turn we came into a copse of small trees with gnarled and twisted branches, and under them a small, still pool that trickled into another on a level below, and on down the slope into a succession of such pools, slowly but inexorably to a patch of lily-blooming water below. Lieutenant Tisarwat stopped, blinked, smiled at the tiny brown and orange fish darting in the clear water at our feet, a sudden bright, startling moment of pleasure. Then she looked up at me, and it was gone, and she was unhappy again, and self-conscious.
The next turn of the path revealed a stretch of open water, nearly three acres of it. Nothing on a planet, but on a station it was unheard of. The nearest edge was lined with the lilies we’d glimpsed as we’d come down the slope. Some meters to the left of that a slight, arched bridge led to a tiny island with a large stone in the middle, a one-and-a-half-meter cylinder with fluted sides, as high as it was wide. Elsewhere, here and there, rocks jutted out of the water. And away on the opposite side of the pond, up against the wall—up, so far as I could see, against hard vacuum—a waterfall. Not the trickles we’d seen on the way in, but a rushing, noisy mass of it foaming and spilling down a rock wall, churning the bit of lake below it. That rock wall stretched across the far side of the lake, ledged and irregular. There was another entrance there, which gave onto the ledges, and a path that led from there around the water.
It had been laid out to make that sudden full view as beautiful and dramatic as possible, after those flashes of water through branches on the path down, the runnels and tiny waterfalls. And dramatic it was. All that open water—usually, on a station, a large volume of water like this was kept in partitioned tanks, so that if there was a leak it could be sectioned off. So that if anything happened to the gravity it could be quickly enclosed. I wondered how deep this pond was, did some quick guesses and calculations that told me a failure in containment would mean disaster for the levels below. What, I wondered, had the station architects put below this?
Of course. The Undergarden.
Someone in a green coverall stood knee-deep in the water at one end of the stretch of lily pads, bent over, reaching under the surface. Not Basnaaid. I nearly dismissed her with that realization, bent on that one aim, on finding Basnaaid Elming. No, the person working near the lilies wasn’t Basnaaid. But I recognized her. I stepped off the still twisting path, walked straight down the slope to the edge of the water. The person there looked up, stood, sleeves and gloves muddy and dripping. The person I’d spoken to in the Undergarden tea shop, yesterday. Her anger was banked, hidden. It flared to life again as she recognized me. Along with, I thought, a trace of fear. “Good morning, Citizen,” I said. “What a pleasant surprise to meet you here.”
“Good morning, Fleet Captain,” she replied, pleasantly. Ostensibly calm and unconcerned, but I could see that very small, nearly invisible tightening of her jaw. “How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Horticulturist Basnaaid,” I said, with as unthreatening a smile as I could produce.
She frowned slightly, speculatively. Then looked at my single piece of jewelry, that one gold memorial tag. I didn’t think she was close enough to read it, and it was a mass-produced thing, but for the name identical to thousands, if not millions, of others. “You have but to wait,” she said, clearing away that tiny frown. “She’ll be along in a few moments.”
“Your Gardens are beautiful, Citizen,” I said. “Though I admit this very lovely lake strikes me as unsafe.”
“It’s not my garden.” That anger again, strongly, carefully suppressed. “I only work here.”
“It would not be what it is without the people who work here,” I answered. She acknowledged that with a small, ironic gesture. “I think,” I said, “that you were too young to have been one of the leaders of those strikes on the tea plantations, twenty years ago.” The word for “strike” existed in Radchaai, but it was very old, and obscure. I used a Liost term I’d learned from Station last night. The Samirend that had been brought to Athoek had spoken Liost, sometimes still did. This person was Samirend, I’d learned enough from Station to know that. And learned enough from Citizen Fosyf to know that Samirend overseers had been involved in those strikes. “You’d have been, maybe, sixteen? Seventeen? If you’d been important, you’d be dead now, or in some other system entirely, where you didn’t have the sort of social network that would let you cause trouble.” Her expression became fixed, and she breathed, very carefully, through her mouth. “They were lenient on account of your youth and your marginal position, but they made sure to make some sort of an example of you.” Unjust, as I’d guessed yesterday.
She didn’t answer at first. Her distress was too strong, but it told me I’d been right. Her reeducation would have made the contemplation of certain actions strongly, viscerally unpleasant for her, and I’d reminded her directly of exactly the events that had brought her through Security. And of course any Radchaai found the bare mention of reeducation deeply distasteful. “If the fleet captain’s remarks are complete,” she said finally, tense but just a bit fainter than her usual tone, “I have work to do.”
“Of course. I apologize.” She blinked, surprised, I thought. “You’re trimming dead leaves from the lilies?”
“And dead flowers.” She bent, reached under the water, pulled up a slimy, withered stem.
“How deep is the lake?” She looked at me, looked down at the water she was standing in. Up again at me. “Yes,” I agreed, “I can see how deep it is here. Is it all the same?”
“About two meters at its deepest.” Her voice had steadied, she had recovered her earlier composure, it seemed.
“Are there partitions under the water?”
“There are not.” As though to confirm her words, a purple and green fish swam into the lily-free space where she was standing, a broad, bright-scaled thing that must have been nearly three quarters of a meter long. It hung under the water, seeming to look up at us, gaping. “I don’t have anything,” she said to the fish, and held her sodden-gloved hands out. “Go wait by the bridge, someone will come. They always do.” The fish only gaped and gaped again. “Look, here they come now.”
Two children rounded a bush, came running down the path to the bridge. The smaller jumped from the land to the bridge with a resounding thump. The water alongside the bridge began to roil, and the purple and green fish turned and glided away. “There’s a food dispenser at the bridge,” explained the person standing in the water. “It’ll be quite crowded in an hour or so.”
“Then I’m glad to have come early,” I said. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could you tell me what safety measures are in place here?”
She gave a short, sharp laugh. “It makes you nervous, Fleet Captain?” She gestured toward the dome overhead. “And that?”
“And that,” I admitted. “They’re both alarming.”
“You nee
dn’t worry. It’s not Athoeki built, it’s all good, solid Radchaai construction. No embezzling, no bribes, no replacing components with cheaper materials and pocketing the difference, no shirking on the job.” She said this with every appearance of sincerity, not even traces of the sarcasm I might have expected. She meant it. “And of course Station’s always watching and would let us know at the slightest sign of trouble.”
“But Station can’t see under the Gardens, can it?”
Before she could answer, a voice called out, “How is it coming along, Sirix?”
I knew that voice. Had heard recordings of it, childish, years ago. It was like her sister’s, but not the same. I turned to see her. She was like her sister, her relationship to Lieutenant Awn obvious in her face, her voice, the way she stood, a bit stiff in the green Horticulture uniform. Her skin was a bit darker than Lieutenant Awn’s had been, her face rounder, not a surprise. I had seen recordings of Basnaaid Elming as a child, messages for her sister. I had known what she looked like now. And it had been twenty years since I had lost Lieutenant Awn. Since I had killed Lieutenant Awn.
“Almost finished, Horticulturist,” said the person from the tea shop, still knee-deep in the water. Or I presumed she was, I was still looking at Basnaaid Elming. “This fleet captain is here to see you.”
Basnaaid looked directly at me. Took in the brown and black uniform, frowned slightly in puzzlement, and then saw the gold tag. The frown disappeared, replaced with an expression of cold disapproval. “I don’t know you, Fleet Captain.”
“No,” I said. “We’ve never met. I was a friend of Lieutenant Awn’s.” An awkward way to say it, an awkward way to refer to her, for a friend. “I was hoping you might have tea with me sometime. When it’s convenient for you.” Stupid, nearly rude to be so direct. But she didn’t seem to be in a mood to stand and chat, and Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat had warned me she wouldn’t be happy to see me. “Begging your indulgence, there are some things I’d like to discuss with you.”