Ancillary Justice (6 page)

Every morning, in every official temple throughout Radchaai space, a priest (who doubles as a registrar of births and deaths and contracts of all kinds) casts the day’s omens. Households and individuals sometimes cast their own as well, and there’s no obligation to attend the official casting—but it’s as good an excuse as any to be seen, and speak to friends and neighbors, and hear gossip.

There was, as yet, no official temple in Ors—these are all primarily dedicated to Amaat, any other gods on the premises take lesser places, and the head priest of Ikkt had not seen her way clear to demoting her god in its own temple, or identifying Ikkt with Amaat closely enough to add Radchaai rites to her own. So for the moment Lieutenant Awn’s house served. Each morning the makeshift temple’s flower-bearers removed dead flowers from around the icon of Amaat and replaced them with fresh ones—usually a local species with small, bright-pink, triple-lobed petals that grew in the dirt that collected on the outside corners of buildings, or cracks in slabs, and was the nearest thing to a weed but greatly admired by the children. And lately small cupped blue-and-white lilies had been blooming in the lake, especially near the buoy-barricaded prohibited areas.

Then Lieutenant Awn would lay out the cloth for the omen-casting and the omens themselves, a handful of weighty metal disks. These, and the icons, were Lieutenant Awn’s personal possessions, gifts from her parents when she had taken the aptitudes and received her assignment.

Occasionally only Lieutenant Awn and the day’s attendants came to the morning ritual, but usually others were present. The town’s medic, a few of the Radchaai who had been granted property here, other Orsian children who could not be persuaded to go to school, or care about being on time for it, and liked the glitter and ring of the disks as they fell. Sometimes even the head priest of Ikkt would come—that god, like Amaat, not demanding that its followers refuse to acknowledge other gods.

Once the omens fell, and came to rest on the cloth (or, to any spectators’ dread, rolled off the cloth and away somewhere harder to interpret), the priest officiating was supposed to identify the pattern, match it with its associated passage of scripture, and recite that for those present. It wasn’t something Lieutenant Awn was always able to do. So instead she tossed the omens, I observed their fall, and then I transmitted the appropriate words to her.
Justice of Toren
was, after all, nearly two thousand years old, and had seen nearly every possible configuration.

The ritual done, she would have breakfast—usually a round of bread from whatever local grain was available, and (real) tea—and then take her place on the mat and platform and wait for the day’s requests and complaints.

“Jen Shinnan invites you to supper this evening,” I told her, that next morning. I also ate breakfast, cleaned weapons, walked the streets, and greeted those who spoke to me.

Jen Shinnan lived in the upper city, and before the
annexation she had been the wealthiest person in Ors, in influence second only to the head priest of Ikkt. Lieutenant Awn disliked her. “I suppose I don’t have a good excuse to refuse.”

“Not that I can see,” I said. I also stood at the perimeter of the house, nearly on the street, and watched. An Orsian approached, saw me, slowed. Stopped about eight meters away, pretending to look above me, at something else.

“Anything else?” asked Lieutenant Awn.

“The district magistrate reiterates the official policy regarding fishing reserves in the Ors Marshes…”

Lieutenant Awn sighed. “Yes, of course she does.”

“Can I help you, citizen?” I asked the person still hesitating in the street. The impending arrival of her first grandchild hadn’t yet been announced to the neighbors, so I pretended I didn’t know either, and used only the simple respectful address toward a male person.

“I wish,” Lieutenant Awn continued, “the magistrate would come here herself and try living on stale bread and those disgusting pickled vegetables they send, and see how she likes being forbidden to fish where all the fish actually are.”

The Orsian in the street started, looked for a moment as if she were going to turn around and walk away, and changed her mind. “Good morning, Radchaai,” she said, quietly, coming closer. “And to the lieutenant as well.” Orsians were blunt when it suited them, and at other times oddly, frustratingly reticent.

“I know there’s a reason for it,” said Lieutenant Awn to me. “And she’s right, but still.” She sighed again. “Anything else?”

“Denz Ay is outside and wishes to speak to you.” As I spoke, I invited Denz Ay to step within the house.

“What about?”

“Something she seems unwilling to mention.” Lieutenant Awn gestured acknowledgment and I brought Denz Ay around the screens. She bowed, and sat on the mat in front of Lieutenant Awn.

“Good morning, citizen,” said Lieutenant Awn. I translated.

“Good morning, Lieutenant.” And by slow, careful degrees, beginning with an observation on the heat and the cloudless sky, progressing through inquiries about Lieutenant Awn’s health to mild local gossip, she finally came around to hinting at her reason for coming. “I… I have a friend, Lieutenant.” She stopped.

“Yes?”

“Yesterday evening my friend was fishing.” Denz Ay stopped again.

Lieutenant Awn waited three seconds, and when nothing further seemed forthcoming, she asked, “Did your friend catch much?” When the mood was on them, no amount of direct questioning, or begging an Orsian to come to the point, would avail.

“N-not much,” said Denz Ay. And then, irritation flashing across her face, just for an instant: “The best fishing, you know, is near the breeding areas, and those are all prohibited.”

“Yes,” said Lieutenant Awn. “I’m sure your friend would never fish illegally.”

“No, no, of course not,” Denz Ay protested. “But… I don’t want to get her in trouble… but maybe sometimes she digs tubers.
Near
the prohibited zones.”

There weren’t really any plants that produced edible tubers near the prohibited zones—they’d all been dug up months
ago, if not longer. Poachers were more careful about the ones inside—if the plants decreased too noticeably, or disappeared entirely, we’d be forced to find out who was taking them, and guard them much more closely. Lieutenant Awn knew this. Everyone in the lower city knew it.

Lieutenant Awn waited for the rest of the story, not for the first time annoyed at the Orsian tendency to approach topics by stealth, but managing mostly not to show it. “I’ve heard they’re very good,” she ventured.

“Oh, yes!” agreed Denz Ay. “They’re best right out of the mud!” Lieutenant Awn suppressed a grimace. “But you can slice them and grill them too…” Denz Ay stopped, with a shrewd look. “Perhaps my friend can get some for you.”

I saw Lieutenant Awn’s dissatisfaction with her rations, the momentary desire to say,
Yes, please
, but instead she said, “Thank you, there’s no need. You were saying?”

“Saying?”

“Your… friend.” As she spoke Lieutenant Awn was asking me questions, with minute twitches of her fingers. “Was digging tubers
near
a prohibited zone. And?”

I showed Lieutenant Awn the spot this person was most likely to have been digging in—I patrolled all of Ors, saw the boats go in and out, saw where they were at night when they doused lights and maybe even thought they were running invisible to me.

“And,” said Denz Ay, “they found something.”

Anyone missing?
Lieutenant Awn asked me, silently, alarmed. I replied in the negative. “What did they find?” Lieutenant Awn asked Denz Ay, aloud.

“Guns,” said Denz Ay, so quietly Lieutenant Awn almost didn’t hear. “A dozen, from before.” From before the annexation, she meant. All the Shis’urnan militaries had been
relieved of their weapons, no one on the planet should have had any guns we didn’t already know about. The answer was so surprising that for a blinking two seconds Lieutenant Awn didn’t react at all.

Then came puzzlement, alarm, and confusion.
Why is she telling me this?
Lieutenant Awn asked me silently.

“There’s been some talk, Lieutenant,” said Denz Ay. “Perhaps you’ve heard it.”

“There’s always talk,” acknowledged Lieutenant Awn, the answer so formulaic I didn’t need to translate it for her, she could say it in the local dialect. “How else are people to pass the time?” Denz Ay conceded this conventional point with a gesture. Lieutenant Awn’s patience frayed, and she attacked directly. “They might have been put there before the annexation.”

Denz Ay made a negative motion with her left hand. “They weren’t there a month ago.”

Did someone find a pre-annexation cache, and hide them there?
Lieutenant Awn asked me, silently. Aloud she asked, “When people talk, do they say things that might account for the appearance of a dozen guns underwater in a prohibited zone?”

“Such guns are no good against
you
.” Because of our armor, Denz Ay meant. Radchaai armor is an essentially impenetrable force shield. I could extend mine at a thought, the moment I desired to do so. The mechanism that generated it was implanted in each of my segments, and Lieutenant Awn had it as well—though hers was an externally worn unit. It didn’t make us completely invulnerable, and in combat we sometimes wore actual pieces of armor under it, lightweight and articulated, covering head and limbs and torso, but even without that a handful of guns wouldn’t do much damage to either of us.

“So who would those guns be meant for?” asked Lieutenant Awn.

Denz Ay considered, frowning, biting her lip, and then said, “The Tanmind are more like the Radchaai than we are.”

“Citizen,” said Lieutenant Awn, laying noticeable, deliberate stress on that word, which was only what
Radchaai
meant in the first place, “if we were going to shoot anyone here, we’d already have done it.” Had already done it, in fact. “We wouldn’t need secret stashes of weapons.”

“This is why I came to you,” said Denz Ay, emphatic, as though explaining something in very simple terms, for a child. “When you shoot a person, you say why and do it, without excuse. This is how the Radchaai are. But in the upper city, before you came, when they would shoot Orsians, they would always be careful to have an excuse. They wanted someone dead,” she explained, to Lieutenant Awn’s uncomprehending, appalled expression, “they did not say,
You are trouble we want you gone
and then shoot. They said,
We are only defending ourselves
and when the person was dead they would search the body or a house and discover weapons, or incriminating messages.” Not, the implication was clear, genuine ones.

“Then how are we alike?”

“Your gods are the same.” They weren’t, not explicitly so, but the fiction was encouraged, in the upper city and elsewhere. “You live in space, you go all wrapped up in clothes. You are rich, the Tanmind are rich. If someone in the upper city”—and by this I suspected she meant a specific someone—“cries out that some Orsian threatens them, most Radchaai will believe her, and not some Orsian who is surely lying to protect her own.”

And that was why she had come to Lieutenant Awn—so
that, whatever happened, it would be plain and clear to Radchaai authorities that she—and by extension anyone else in the lower city—had in fact had nothing to do with that cache of weapons, if the accusation should materialize.

“These things,” said Lieutenant Awn. “Orsian, Tanmind, Moha, they mean nothing now. That’s done. Everyone here is Radchaai.”

“As you say, Lieutenant,” answered Denz Ay, voice quiet and nearly expressionless.

Lieutenant Awn had been in Ors long enough to recognize the unstated refusal to agree. She tried another angle. “No one is going to shoot anybody.”

“Of course not, Lieutenant,” said Denz Ay, but in that same quiet voice. She was old enough to know firsthand that we had, indeed, shot people in the past. She could hardly be blamed for fearing we might do so in the future.

After Denz Ay left, Lieutenant Awn sat thinking. No one interrupted; the day was quiet. In the green-lit temple interior, the head priest turned to me and said, “Once there would have been two choirs, a hundred voices each. You would have liked it.” I had seen recordings. Sometimes the children would bring me songs that were distant echoes of that music, five hundred years gone and more. “We’re not what we used to be,” said the head priest. “Everything passes, eventually.” I agreed that it was so.

“Take a boat tonight,” said Lieutenant Awn, stirring at last. “See if there’s anything to indicate where the weapons came from. I’ll decide what to do once I have a better idea of what’s going on.”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” I said.

Jen Shinnan lived in the upper city, across the Fore-Temple lake. Few Orsians lived there who weren’t servants. The houses there were built to a slightly different plan from those in the lower; hip-roofed, the central part of each floor walled in, though windows and doors were left open on mild nights. All of the upper city had been built over older ruins, and thus much more recently than the lower, within the last fifty or so years, and made much larger use of climate control. Many residents wore trousers and shirts, and even jackets. Radchaai immigrants who lived here tended to wear much more conventional clothes, and Lieutenant Awn, when she visited, wore her uniform without too much discomfort.

But Lieutenant Awn was never comfortable, visiting Jen Shinnan. She didn’t like Jen Shinnan, and though of course it was never even hinted at, very likely Jen Shinnan didn’t like Lieutenant Awn much either. This sort of invitation was only extended out of social necessity, Lieutenant Awn being a local representative of Radchaai authority. The table this evening was unusually small, just Jen Shinnan, a cousin of hers, and Lieutenant Awn and Lieutenant Skaaiat. Lieutenant Skaaiat commanded
Justice of Ente
Seven Issa, and administered the territory between Ors and Kould Ves—farmland, mostly, where Jen Shinnan and her cousin had their holdings. Lieutenant Skaaiat and her troops assisted us during pilgrimage season, so she was nearly as well-known in Ors as Lieutenant Awn was.