“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.”