Ancillary Justice (16 page)

Seivarden looked away from me, down and to the left. She wasn’t going to say.

“Everything was wrong,” she said after nine seconds of silence.

“Bad dreams,” said Strigan. “Anxiety. Shaking, sometimes.”

“Unsteady,” I said. Translated it had very little sting, but
in Radchaai, for an officer like Seivarden, it said more. Weak, fearful, inadequate to the demands of her position. Fragile. If Seivarden was unsteady, she had never really deserved her assignment, never really been suited to the military, let alone to captain a ship. But of course Seivarden had taken the aptitudes, and the aptitudes had said she was what her house had always assumed she would be: steady, fit to command and conquer. Not prone to doubts or irrational fears.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Seivarden half-sneered, half-snarled. Arms still locked around her knees. “No one in my house is unsteady.”

Of course (I thought but did not say), the various cousins who had served a year or so during this annexation or that and retired to take ascetic vows or paint tea sets hadn’t done so because they had been unsteady. And the cousins who hadn’t tested as anticipated, but surprised their parents with assignments in the minor priesthoods, or the arts—this had not indicated any sort of unsteadiness inherent in the house, no, never. And Seivarden wasn’t the least bit afraid or worried about what new assignment a retake of the aptitudes would get her, and what that might say about her steadiness. Of
course
not.

“Unsteady?” asked Strigan, understanding the word, but not its context.

“The unsteady,” I explained, “lack a certain strength of character.”

“Character!” Strigan’s indignation was plain to read.

“Of course.” I didn’t alter my facial expression, but kept it bland and pleasant, as it had been for most of the past few days. “Lesser citizens break down in the face of enormous difficulties or stress and sometimes require medical attention for it. But some citizens are bred better. They never break
down. Though they may take early retirement, or spend a few years pursuing artistic or spiritual interests—prolonged meditation retreats are quite popular. This is how one knows the difference between highly placed families and lesser ones.”

“But you Radchaai are so good at brainwashing. Or so I hear.”

“Reeducation,” I corrected. “If she’d stayed, she’d have gotten help.”

“But she couldn’t face needing the help to begin with.” I said nothing to agree or disagree, though I thought Strigan was right. “How much can… reeducation do?”

“A great deal,” I said. “Though much of what you’ve probably heard is greatly exaggerated. It can’t turn you into someone you’re not. Not in any useful way.”

“Erase memories.”

“Suppress them, I think. Add new ones, maybe. You have to know what you’re doing or you could damage someone badly.”

“No doubt.”

Seivarden stared frowning at us, watching us talk, unable to understand what we were saying.

Strigan half-smiled. “
You
aren’t a product of reeducation.”

“No,” I acknowledged.

“It was surgery. Sever a few connections, make a few new ones. Install some implants.” She paused a moment, waiting for me to answer, but I didn’t. “You pass well enough. Mostly. Your expression, your tone of voice, it’s always right but it’s always… always studied. Always a performance.”

“You think you’ve solved the puzzle,” I guessed.

“
Solved
isn’t the right word. But you’re a corpse soldier, I’m certain of it. Do you remember anything?”

“Many things,” I said, still bland.

“No, I mean from before.”

It took me nearly five seconds to understand what she meant. “That person is dead.”

Seivarden suddenly, convulsively stood and walked out the inner door and, by the sound of it, through the outer as well.

Strigan watched her go, gave a quick, breathy
hm
, and then turned back to me. “Your sense of who you are has a neurological basis. One small change and you don’t believe you exist anymore. But you’re still there. I think you’re still there. Why the bizarre desire to kill Anaander Mianaai? Why else would you be so angry with
him
?” She tilted her head to indicate the exit, Seivarden outside in the cold with only one coat.

“He’ll take the crawler,” I warned. The girl and her mother had taken the flier, and left the crawler outside Strigan’s house.

“No he won’t. I disabled it.” I gestured my approval, and Strigan continued, returning to her previous subject. “And the music. I don’t suppose you were a singer, not with a voice like yours. But you must have been a musician, before, or loved music.”

I considered making the bitter laugh Strigan’s guess called for. “No,” I said, instead. “Not actually.”

“But you
are
a corpse soldier, I’m right about that.” I didn’t answer. “You escaped somehow or… are you from
his
ship? Captain Seivarden’s?”

“
Sword of Nathtas
was destroyed.” I had been there, been nearby. Relatively speaking. Seen it happen, nearly enough. “And that was a thousand years ago.”

Strigan looked toward the door, back at me. Then she frowned. “No. No, I think you’re Ghaonish, and they were only annexed a few centuries ago, weren’t they? I shouldn’t
have forgotten that, it’s why you’re passing as someone from the Gerentate, isn’t it? No, you escaped somehow.
I can bring you back.
I’m sure I can.”

“You can kill me, you mean. You can destroy my sense of self and replace it with one you approve of.”

Strigan didn’t like hearing that, I could see. The outer door opened, and then Seivarden came shivering through the inner. “Put on your outer coat next time,” I told her.

“Fuck off.” She grabbed a blanket off her pallet and wrapped it around her shoulders, and stood, still shivering.

“Very unbecoming language, citizen,” I said.

For a moment she looked as though she might lose her temper. Then she seemed to remember what might happen if she did. “Fuck.” She sat on the nearest bench, heavily. “Off.”

“Why didn’t you leave him where you found him?” asked Strigan.

“I wish I knew.” It was another puzzle for her, but not one I had made deliberately. I didn’t know myself. Didn’t know why I cared if Seivarden froze to death in the storm-swept snow, didn’t know why I had brought her with me, didn’t know why I cared if she took someone else’s crawler and fled, or walked off into the green-stained frozen waste and died.

“And why are you so angry with him?”

That I knew. And truth to tell, it wasn’t entirely fair to Seivarden that I was angry. Still, the facts remained what they were, and my anger as well.

“Why do you want to kill Anaander Mianaai?” Seivarden’s head turned slightly, her attention hooked by the familiar name.

“It’s personal.”

“
Personal.
” Strigan’s tone was incredulous.

“Yes.”

“You’re not a person anymore. You’ve said as much to me. You’re equipment. An appendage to a ship’s AI.” I said nothing, and waited for her to consider her own words. “Is there a ship that’s lost its mind? Recently, I mean.”

Insane Radchaai ships were a staple of melodrama, inside and outside Radchaai space. Though Radchaai entertainments in that direction were usually historicals. When Anaander Mianaai had taken control of the core of Radch space some few ships had destroyed themselves upon the death or captivity of their captains, and rumor said some others still wandered space in the three thousand years since, half-mad, despairing. “None I know of.”

She very likely followed news from the Radch—it was a matter of her own safety, considering what I was sure she was hiding, and what the consequences would be for her if Anaander Mianaai ever discovered that. She had, potentially, all the information she needed to identify me. But after half a minute she gestured doubtfully, disappointed. “You won’t just tell me.”

I smiled, calm and pleasant. “What fun would that be?”

She laughed, seeming truly amused at my answer. Which I thought a hopeful sign. “So when are you leaving?”

“When you give me the gun.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A lie. Manifestly a lie. “Your apartment, on Dras Annia Station. It’s untouched. Just as you left it, so far as I could tell.”

Every one of Strigan’s motions became deliberate, just slightly slowed—blinks, breaths. The hand carefully brushing dust from her coat sleeve. “That a fact.”

“It cost me a great deal to get in.”

“Where
did
a corpse soldier get all that money anyway?”
Strigan asked, still tense, still concealing it. But genuinely curious. Always that.

“Work,” I said.

“Lucrative work.”

“And dangerous.” I had risked my life to get that money.

“The icon?”

“Not unrelated.” But I didn’t want to talk about that. “What do I need to do, to convince you? Is the money insufficient?” I had more, elsewhere, but saying so would be foolish.

“What did you see in my apartment?” Strigan asked, curiosity and anger in her voice.

“A puzzle. With pieces missing.” I had deduced the existence and nature of those pieces correctly, I must have, because here I was, and here was Arilesperas Strigan.

Strigan laughed again. “Like you. Listen.” She leaned forward, hands on her thighs. “You can’t kill Anaander Mianaai. I wish to all that’s good it were possible, but it’s not. Even with… even if I had what you think I have you couldn’t do it. You told me that twenty-five of these guns were insufficient…”

“Twenty-four,” I corrected.

She waved that away. “Were insufficient to keep the Radchaai away from Garsedd. Why do you think
one
would be anything more than a minor irritant?”

She knew better, or she wouldn’t have run. Wouldn’t have asked the local toughs to take care of me before I got to her.

“And why are you so determined to do such a ridiculous thing? Everyone outside the Radch hates Anaander Mianaai. If by some miracle he died, the celebrations would last a hundred years. But it
won’t happen
. It certainly won’t happen because of one idiot with a gun. I’m sure you know that. You probably know it far better than I could.”

“True.”

“Then why?”

Information is power. Information is security. Plans made with imperfect information are fatally flawed, will fail or succeed on the toss of a coin. I had known, when I first knew I would have to find Strigan and obtain the gun from her, that this would be such a moment. If I answered Strigan’s question—if I answered it fully, as she would certainly demand—I would be giving her something she could use against me, a weapon. She would almost certainly hurt herself in the process, but that wasn’t always much of a deterrent, I knew.

“Sometimes,” I began, and then corrected myself. “Quite frequently, someone will learn a little bit about Radchaai religion, and ask,
If everything that happens is the will of Amaat, if nothing can happen that is not already designed by God, why bother to do anything?
”

“Good question.”

“Not particularly.”

“No? Why bother, then?”

“I am,” I said, “as Anaander Mianaai made me. Anaander Mianaai is as she was made. We will both of us do the things we are made to do. The things that are before us to do.”

“I doubt very much that Anaander Mianaai made you so that you would kill him.”

Any reply would reveal more than I wished, at the moment.

“And I,” continued Strigan, after a second and a half of silence, “am made to demand answers. It’s just God’s will.” She made a gesture with her left hand,
not my problem
.

“You admit you have the gun.”

“I admit nothing.”

I was left with blind chance, a step into unguessable dark,
waiting to live or die on the results of the toss, not knowing what the chances were of any result. My only other choice would be to give up, and how could I give up now? After so long, after so much? And I had risked as much, or more, before now, and gotten this far.

She had to have the gun.
Had to.
But how could I make her give it to me? What would make her choose to give it to me?

“
Tell me
,” Strigan said, watching me intently. No doubt seeing my frustration and doubt through her medical implants, fluctuations of my blood pressure and temperature and respiration. “Tell me why.”

I closed my eyes, felt the disorientation of not being able to see through other eyes that I knew I had once had. Opened them again, took a breath to begin, and told her.

I had thought that perhaps the morning’s temple attendants would (quite understandably) choose to stay home, but one small flower-bearer, awake before the adults in her household, arrived with a handful of pink-petaled weeds and stopped at the edge of the house, startled to see Anaander Mianaai kneeling in front of our small icon of Amaat.

Lieutenant Awn was dressing, on the upper floor. “I can’t serve today,” she said to me, her voice impassive as her emotions were not. The morning was already warm, and she was sweating.

“You didn’t touch any of the bodies,” I said as I adjusted her jacket collar, sure of the fact. It was the wrong thing to say.

Four of my segments, two on the northern edge of the Fore-Temple and two standing waist-deep in the lukewarm water and mud, lifted the body of Jen Taa’s niece onto the ledge, and carried her to the medic’s house.

On the ground floor of Lieutenant Awn’s house, I said to the frightened, frozen flower-bearer, “It’s all right.” There was no sign of the water-bearer, and I was ineligible.

“You’ll have to at least bring the water, Lieutenant,” I said, above, to Lieutenant Awn. “The flower-bearer is here, but the water-bearer isn’t.”

For a few moments Lieutenant Awn said nothing, while I finished wiping her face. “Right,” she said, and went downstairs and filled the bowl, and brought it to the flower-bearer, where she stood next to me, still frightened, clutching her handful of pink petals. Lieutenant Awn held the water out to her, and she set the flowers down and washed her hands. But before she could pick the flowers up again, Anaander Mianaai turned to look at her, and the child started back and grabbed my gloved hand with her bare one. “You’ll have to wash your hands again, citizen,” I whispered, and with a bit more encouragement she did so, and picked up the flowers again and performed her part of the morning’s ritual correctly, if nervously. No one else came. I was not surprised.