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.