Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) - Ann Leckie Page 0,19

had been a time when a property owner like her would have been shot early on, so someone’s client could take over her plantation. Indeed, not a few Shis’urnans had died in the initial stages of the annexation simply because they were in the way, and in the way could mean any number of things.

“As I’m sure you understand, citizen,” said Lieutenant Awn, “food distribution is a problem we’re still solving, and we all need to endure some hardship while that’s accomplished.” Her sentences, when she was uncomfortable, became uncharacteristically formal, and sometimes dangerously convoluted.

Jen Shinnan gestured to a laden plate of fragile pale-pink glass. “Another stuffed egg, Lieutenant Awn?”

Lieutenant Awn held up one gloved hand. “They’re delicious, but no thank you, citizen.”

But the cousin had landed in a track she found it hard to deviate from, despite Jen Shinnan’s diplomatic attempt to derail her. “It’s not like fruit is a necessity. Tamarind, of all things! And it’s not like anyone is starving.”

“Indeed it isn’t!” agreed Lieutenant Skaaiat, heartily. She smiled brightly at Lieutenant Awn. Lieutenant Skaaiat—dark-skinned, amber-eyed, aristocratic as Lieutenant Awn was not. One of her Seven Issas stood near me, by the door of the dining room, as straight and still as I was.

Though Lieutenant Awn liked Lieutenant Skaaiat a good deal, and appreciated her sarcasm on this occasion, she could not bring herself to smile in response. “Not this year.”

“Your business is doing better than mine, Cousin,” said Jen Shinnan, voice placating. She too owned farmland not far from the upper city. But she had also owned those dredgers that sat, silent and still, in the marsh water. “Though I suppose I can’t be too regretful, it was a great deal of trouble for very little return.”

Lieutenant Awn opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again. Lieutenant Skaaiat saw it, and said, vowels effortlessly broad and refined, “What is it, another three years for the fishing prohibitions, Lieutenant?”

“Yes,” said Lieutenant Awn.

“Foolishness,” said Jen Shinnan. “Well-intentioned, but foolishness. You saw what it was like when you arrived. As soon as you open them, they’ll be fished out again. The Orsians may have been a great people once, but they’re no longer what their ancestors were. They have no ambition, no sense of anything beyond their short-term advantage. If you show them who’s boss, then they can be quite obedient, as I’m sure you’ve discovered, Lieutenant Awn, but in their natural state they are, with few exceptions, shiftless and superstitious. Though I suppose that’s what comes of living in the Underworld.” She smiled at her own joke. Her cousin laughed outright.

The space-dwelling nations of Shis’urna divided the universe into three parts. In the middle lay the natural environment of humans—space stations, ships, constructed habitats. Outside those was the Black—heaven, the home of God and everything holy. And within the gravity well of the planet Shis’urna itself—or for that matter any planet—lay the Underworld, the land of the dead from which humanity had had to escape in order to become fully free of its demonic influence.

You can see, perhaps, how the Radchaai conception of the universe as being God itself might seem the same as the Tanmind idea of the Black. You might also see why it seemed a bit odd, to Radchaai ears, to hear someone who believed gravity wells were the land of the dead call people superstitious for worshiping a lizard.

Lieutenant Awn managed a polite smile, and Lieutenant Skaaiat said, “And yet you live here too.”

“I don’t confuse abstract philosophical concepts with reality,” said Jen Shinnan. Though that too sounded odd, to a Radchaai who knew what it meant for a Tanmind stationer to descend to the Underworld and return. “Seriously. I have a theory.”

Lieutenant Awn, who had been exposed to several Tanmind theories about the Orsians, managed a neutral, even almost curious expression and said, blandly, “Oh?”

“Do share!” encouraged Lieutenant Skaaiat. The cousin, having scooped a quantity of spiced chicken into her mouth moments before, made a gesture of support with her utensil.

“It’s the way they live, all out in the open like that, with nothing but a roof,” Jen Shinnan said. “They can’t have any privacy, no sense of themselves as real individuals, you understand, no sense of any sort of separate identity.”

“Let alone private property,” said Jen Taa, having swallowed her chicken. “They think they can just walk in and take whatever they want.”

Actually, there were rules—if unstated ones—about entering a house uninvited, and theft was rarely a problem in the lower