“I hope I would never do anything like that,” said Governor Giarod.
“Life is unpredictable,” I said, “and we are not always the people we think we are. If we’re unlucky, that’s when we discover it. When something like that happens, you have two choices.” Or, more than two, but distilled, they came down to two. “You can admit the error and resolve never to repeat it, or you can refuse to admit error and throw every effort behind insisting you were right to do what you did, and would gladly do it again.”
“Yes. Yes, you’re right. But Garsedd was a thousand years ago. Surely that’s time to have resolved on one or another of those. And if you’d asked me before now, I’d have said my lord had chosen the first. Without, of course, publicly admitting error.”
“It must be more complicated than that,” I agreed. “I think there were already other issues that events at Garsedd exacerbated. What those were I can only guess. Certainly the Lord of the Radch couldn’t continue expanding forever.” And if expansion stopped, what to do with all those ships and ancillary soldiers? The officers that commanded them? Keeping them was a drain on resources, to no purpose. Dismantle them, and systems on the periphery of Radch space were vulnerable to attack. Or revolt. “I think it wasn’t merely admitting error that the Lord of the Radch has been resisting, but admitting her own mortality.”
Governor Giarod sat considering that, silent for twenty-four seconds. “I don’t like that thought, Fleet Captain. If you had asked me even ten minutes ago I’d have told you the Lord of the Radch was the next thing to immortal. How can she not be? Constantly growing new bodies to replace the old, how could she ever die?” Another frowning three seconds of silence. “And if she dies, what will be left of the Radch?”
“I don’t think we can concern ourselves with anything beyond Athoek.” Possibly the most dangerous thing I could say, just now, depending on the governor’s sympathies. “My orders only involve the safety of this system.”
“And if they were otherwise?” Governor Giarod was no fool. “If some other part of my lord ordered you to take one side or another, or use this system in some way for her advantage?” I didn’t reply. “No matter what you do it’s sedition, rebellion, so you may as well do as you like, is that it?”
“Something like that,” I agreed. “But I really do have orders.”
She shook her head, as though clearing away some obstruction. “But what else is there to do? You don’t think, do you, that there’s been any… outside interference?”
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.