by Ann Leckie
Raughd froze, completely still for an instant, not even breathing. Then she said, with a coldness that nearly matched my own, “Did you accept my mother’s invitation just so you could come here and attack me? Obviously, you’ve come here with some sort of agenda. You turn up out of nowhere, produce some ridiculous order forbidding travel in the gates so the tea can’t get out of the system. I can’t see it as anything less than an attack on my house, and I will not stand for that! I’m going to speak to my mother about this!”
“You do that,” I said. Still calm. “Be sure to explain to her how that paint got on your gloves. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she already knows about it and invited me down here in the hope that I could be dissuaded from pressing the issue.” And I had accepted knowing that. And I had wanted to know what it was like, downwell. What Sirix had been so angry about.
Raughd turned and left the room without another word.
The morning sky was pale blue streaked with the silver traces of the weather grid, and here and there a wisp of cloud. The sun hadn’t yet cleared the mountain so the houses and the lake, the trees, were still in shadow. Sirix waited for me, at the water’s edge. “Thank you for the wake-up call, Fleet Captain,” she said, with an ironic bow of her head. “I’m sure I wouldn’t have wanted to sleep in.”
“Already used to the time difference?” It was early afternoon on the station. “I’m told there’s a path along the lakeside.”
“I don’t think I can keep up with you if you’re going to run.”
“I’m walking today.” I would have walked anyway, even if Sirix hadn’t needed to keep up. I set off in the direction of the lakeside trail, not turning my head to see if she followed, but hearing her step behind me, seeing her (and myself) as Five watched us out of sight from the corner of the arbor.
On Athoek Station, Lieutenant Tisarwat was in the sitting room in our Undergarden quarters, speaking to Basnaaid Elming. Who’d arrived not five minutes earlier while I’d been pulling on my boots, about to leave my room. I’d been briefly tempted to make Sirix wait, but in the end I decided that by now I could watch and walk at the same time.
I could see—almost feel, myself—the thrill thrumming through Tisarwat at Basnaaid’s presence. “Horticulturist,” Tisarwat was saying. She wasn’t long out of bed herself. “I’m at your service. But I must tell you, the fleet captain has ordered me to stay away from you.”
Basnaaid frowned, clearly puzzled and dismayed. “Why?”
Lieutenant Tisarwat took an unsteady breath. “You said you never wanted to speak to her again. She didn’t… she wanted to be sure you didn’t ever think she was…” She trailed off, at a loss, it seemed. “For your sister’s sake, she’ll do anything you ask.”
“She’s a bit high handed about it,” responded Basnaaid, with some acerbity.
“Fleet Captain,” said Sirix, walking beside me on the path alongside the lake. I realized she’d been speaking to me, and I had not responded.
“Forgive me, Citizen.” I forced my attention away from Basnaaid and Tisarwat. “I was distracted.”
“Plainly.” She sidestepped a branch that had fallen from one of the nearby trees. “I was trying to thank you for being patient with me yesterday. And for Kalr Eight’s help.” She frowned. “Do you not allow them to go by their names?”
“They’d much prefer I not use their names, at least my Kalrs would.” I gestured ambiguity, uncertainty. “She might tell you her name if you ask.” The house was well behind us by now, screened by a turn of the path, by trees with broad, oval leaves and small cascades of fringed white flowers. “Tell me, Citizen, is suspension failure a problem, among the field workers in the mountains here?” Transportees were shipped in suspension pods. Which generally worked very well, but sometimes failed, leaving their occupants dead or severely injured.
Sirix froze midstride, just an instant, and then kept walking. I had said something that had surprised her, but I thought I’d also seen recognition in her expression. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone thawed out. I don’t think anyone has been, for a while. But the Valskaayans, some of them, think that when the medics thawed people out, they didn’t let all of them live.”
“Do they say why?”
Sirix gestured ambiguity. “Not plainly. They think the medics dispose of anyone they consider unfit in some way, but they won’t say exactly what that means, at least they wouldn’t in my hearing. And they won’t go to a medic. Not for anything. Every bone in their body could be broken and they’d rather have their friends splint them up with sticks and old clothes.”
“Last night,” I said, by way of explanation, “I requested an account of the number of Valskaayans transported to this system.”
“Only Valskaayans?” asked Sirix, eyebrow raised. “Why not Samirend?”
Ah. “I’ve found something, have I?”
“I wouldn’t have thought there was much to find, that way, about the Valskaayans. Before I was born, though, before Valskaay was even annexed, something happened. About a hundred fifty years ago. I don’t know for certain—I doubt anyone but the parties actually involved know for certain. But I can tell you the rumor. Someone in charge of the transportees coming into the system was siphoning off a percentage of them and selling them to outsystem slavers. No,” she gestured, emphatic, seeing my doubt. “I know it sounds ridiculous. But before this place was civilized”—not even a trace of irony there—“debt indenture was quite common, and it was entirely legal to sell indentures away. No one cared much, unless someone had the bad taste to sell away a few Xhais. It was entirely natural and boring if it happened to a lot of Ychana.”
“Yes.” When I’d seen those numbers—how many Valskaayans had been transported here, how many brought out of suspension and assigned work, how many remaining—and, further, because I’d just seen that ancient tea set and heard Captain Hetnys’s story of selling it to Citizen Fosyf, I had queried the system histories. “Except that outsystem slave trade collapsed not long after the annexation and has never recovered.” Partly, I thought, because it had relied on cheap supply from Athoek, which the annexation had cut off. And partly because of problems internal to the slavers’ own home systems. “And that was, what, six hundred years ago? Surely this hadn’t been happening undetected all that time.”
“I’m only telling you what I’ve heard, Fleet Captain. The discrepancy in numbers was covered—very thinly, I might add, if the story is true—by an alarming rate of suspension failures. Nearly all of those were workers assigned to the mountain tea plantations. When the system governor found out—this was before Governor Giarod’s time, of course—she put a stop to it, but she also supposedly hushed it up. After all, the medics who’d signed off on those false reports had done so at the behest of some of Athoek’s most illustrious citizens. Not the sort of people who ever find themselves on the wrong side of Security. And if word of it ever got back to the palace, the Lord of the Radch would certainly want to know why the governor hadn’t noticed all this going on before now. So instead a number of highly placed citizens retired. Including Citizen Fosyf’s grandmother, who spent the rest of her life in prayer at a monastery on the other side of this continent.”
This was why I’d had this conversation away from the house. Just in case. “Faked suspension failure numbers won’t have been enough to cover it. There will have been more than just that.” This story hadn’t been in the information I’d received, when I’d queried the histories. But Sirix had said that it had been hushed up. It might have been kept out of any official accounts.
Sirix was silent a moment. Considering. “That may well be, Fleet Captain. I only ever heard rumors.”
“… very heartfelt poetry,” Basnaaid was saying, in my sitting room in the Undergarden. “I’m glad no one here has read any of it.” She and Tisarwat were drinking tea, now.
“Did you send any of your poetry to your sister, Citizen?” asked Tisarwat.
Basnaaid gave a small, breathy laugh. �
��Nearly all of it. She always said it was wonderful. Either she was being very kind, or she had terrible taste.”
Her words distressed Tisarwat for some reason, triggered an overpowering sense of shame and self-loathing. But of course, there was hardly a well-educated Radchaai alive who hadn’t written a quantity of poetry in her youth, and I could well imagine the quality of what the younger Tisarwat might have produced. And been proud of. And then seen through the eyes of Anaander Mianaai, three-thousand-year-old Lord of the Radch. I doubted the assessment had been kind. And if she was no longer Anaander Mianaai, what could she ever be but some reassembled version of Tisarwat, with all the bad poetry and frivolity that implied? How could she ever see that in herself without remembering the Lord of the Radch’s withering contempt? “If you sent your poetry to Lieutenant Awn,” Tisarwat said, with a sharp pang of yearning mixed still with that self-hatred, “then Fleet Captain Breq has seen it.”
Basnaaid blinked, began just barely to frown, but stopped herself. It might have been the idea of my having read her poetry that brought on the frown, or it may have been the tension in Lieutenant Tisarwat, in her voice, where before she had been relaxed and smiling. “I’m glad she didn’t throw that in my face.”
“She never would,” said Tisarwat, her voice still intense.
“Lieutenant.” Basnaaid put her bowl of tea down on the makeshift table beside her seat. “I meant what I said that day. And I wouldn’t be here, except it’s important. I hear it’s the fleet captain’s doing that the Undergarden is being repaired.”
“Y…” Tisarwat reconsidered the simple yes she’d been about to give as not entirely politic. “It is, of course, entirely at the order of Station Administrator Celar, Horticulturist, but the fleet captain has had a hand in it, yes.”
Basnaaid gestured acknowledgment, perfunctory. “The lake in the Gardens above—Station can’t see the supports that are holding that water up and keeping it from flooding the Undergarden. It’s supposed to be inspected regularly, but I don’t think that’s happening. And I can’t say anything to the chief horticulturist. It’s a cousin of hers who’s supposed to do it, and the last time I said something there was a lot of noise about me minding my own business and how dare I cast aspersions.” And likely if she went over the chief horticulturist’s head and straight to Station Administrator Celar, she’d find herself in difficulties. Which might be worth it if the station administrator would listen, but there were no guarantees there.
“Horticulturist!” Tisarwat exclaimed, just managing, with difficulty, not to shout her eagerness to help. “I’ll take care of it! All it wants is some diplomacy.”
Basnaaid blinked, taken a bit aback. “I don’t want… please understand, I really don’t want to be asking the fleet captain for favors. I wouldn’t be here, except it’s so dangerous. If those supports were to fail…”
“Fleet Captain Breq won’t be involved at all,” said Tisarwat, solemnly. Inwardly ecstatic. “Have you mentioned this to Citizen Piat?”
“She was there when I brought it up the first time. Not that it did any good. Lieutenant, I know that you and Piat have been friendly these past several days. And I don’t mean to criticize her…” She trailed off, looking for a way to say what she wanted to say.
“But,” said Tisarwat into the silence, “generally she doesn’t seem to care much about her job. Half the time Raughd is hanging around distracting her, and the other half she’s moping. But Raughd has been downwell for the past four or five days, and if Fleet Captain Breq has anything to say about it, she’s not coming back up anytime soon. I think you’re going to see a difference in Piat. I think,” she continued, “that she’s been made to feel that she’s not capable. That her own judgment is unreliable. I think she could use your support, at work.”
Basnaaid tilted her head and frowned further, looked intently at Tisarwat as though she’d seen something completely, puzzlingly unexpected. “Lieutenant, how old are you?”
Sudden confusion, in Tisarwat. Guilt, self-loathing, a thrill of… something like triumph or gratification. “Horticulturist. I’m seventeen.” A lie that wasn’t exactly a lie.
“You didn’t seem seventeen just now,” said Basnaaid. “Did Fleet Captain Breq bring you along so you could find the weaknesses of the daughters of the station’s most prominent citizens?”
“No,” Tisarwat said, openly mournful. Inwardly despairing. “I think she brought me along because she thought I’d get into trouble if she wasn’t watching me.”
“If you’d told me that five minutes ago,” said Basnaaid, “I wouldn’t have believed you.”
Downwell, on the path through the woods by the lake, the sky had brightened to a more vivid blue. The brightness in the east had intensified, leaving the peak blocking the sun a jagged black silhouette. Sirix still walked beside me, silent. Patient. When she had not struck me as a patient person, except by the necessity of her situation, unable as she was to express anger without considerable discomfort, likely some of it physical. So, almost certainly a pose. “You’re as good as a concert, Fleet Captain,” she said, slightly mocking, confirming my suspicion. “Do the songs you’re always humming have anything to do with what you’re thinking about, or is it random?”
“It depends.” I had been humming the song the Kalr had been singing the day before, in Medical. “Sometimes it’s just a song I recently heard. It’s an old habit. I apologize for annoying you.”
“I didn’t say I was annoyed. Though I wouldn’t have thought cousins of the Lord of the Radch cared much if they were annoying.”
“I didn’t say I would stop,” I pointed out. “Do you think all that happened—transportees being sold off, I mean—and the Lord of the Radch didn’t become aware of it?”
“If she’d known,” Sirix said, “if she’d truly understood what was happening, it would have been like Ime.” Where the system administration had been entirely corrupt, had murdered and enslaved citizens, nearly started a war with the alien Rrrrrr until the matter had been brought directly to Anaander Mianaai’s attention. Or at least, the attention of the right part of Anaander Mianaai. But Sirix didn’t know that part of the story. “The news would have been everywhere, and the people involved would have been held accountable.”
I wondered when Anaander Mianaai had become aware of it, of people, potential citizens, being sold away for profit here. It would not have surprised me at all to discover that part of Anaander knew, or that a part of her had continued or restarted it, hidden from the rest of herself. The question then became, which Anaander was it, and what use was she making of it? I couldn’t help but think of Anaander stripping ships of their ancillaries. Ships like Mercy of Kalr. Troop carriers like Justice of Ente, which Skaaiat Awer had served on. Human soldiers might not be relied on to fight for the side that wanted them replaced. Ancillaries, on the other hand, were just extensions of their ship, would do exactly what a ship was ordered to make them do. The Anaander who objected to her own dismantling of Radchaai military force might well find those bodies useful.
“You disagree,” Sirix said into my silence. “But isn’t justice the whole reason for civilization?”
And propriety, and benefit. “So if there is injustice here, it is only because the Lord of the Radch isn’t sufficiently present.”
“Can you imagine Radchaai, in the normal course of events, practicing indentured slavery, or selling indentures away, like the Xhai did?”
Behind us, in the building where we stayed, Captain Hetnys was likely eating breakfast, attended by a human body slaved to the warship Sword of Atagaris. One of dozens just like it. I myself had been one of thousands of such, before the rest of me had been destroyed. Sirix didn’t know that, but she surely knew of the existence of other, still surviving troop carriers, still crewed by ancillaries. And over the ridge lived dozens of Valskaayans, they or their parents or grandparents transported here for no better reason than to clear a planet for Radchaai occupation, and to provide cheap labor here.
Sirix herself was descended from transportees. “Ancillaries and transportees are of course an entirely different sort of thing,” I said drily.
“Well, my lord has stopped that, hasn’t she?” I said nothing. She continued, “So the suspension failure rate among Valskaayan transportees seems high to you?”
“It does.” I’d stored the thousands of bodies I’d once had in suspension pods. I had long, extensive experience with suspension failures. “Now I’m curious to know if the traffic in transportees stopped altogether, a hundred fifty years ago, or if it just seemed to.”
“I wish my lord had come with you,” Sirix said. “So she could see this for herself.”
Above us, in the Undergarden, Bo Nine came into the room where Tisarwat and Basnaaid sat drinking tea. “Sir,” said Bo, “there’s a difficulty.”
Tisarwat blinked. Swallowed her tea. Gestured Bo to explain.
“Sir, I went up to level one to get your br… your lunch, sir.” I had left instructions for the household to purchase as much of its food (and other supplies) as possible in the Undergarden itself. “There are a lot of people around the tea shop right now. They’re… they’re angry, sir, about the repairs the fleet captain has ordered.”
“Angry!” Tisarwat was taken completely aback. “At maybe having water, and light? And air?”
“I don’t know, sir. But there are more and more people coming to the tea shop, and nobody leaving. Not to speak of.”
Tisarwat stared up at Bo Nine. “But you’d think they’d be grateful!”
“I don’t know, sir.” Though I could tell, from what Ship showed me, that she agreed with her lieutenant.
Tisarwat looked at Basnaaid, still sitting across from her. Was suddenly struck by something that filled her with chagrin. “No,” she said, though in answer to what I couldn’t tell. “No.” She looked up again at Bo Nine. “What would the fleet captain do?”
“Something only Fleet Captain would do,” said Bo. And then, remembering Basnaaid’s presence, “Your indulgence, sir.”