pattern might have landed differently. Sometimes, when omens are cast, one flies or rolls off where you didn’t expect and throws the whole pattern out of shape. Had Lieutenant Awn chosen differently, that one segment, cut off, disoriented, and yes, horrified at the thought of shooting Lieutenant Awn, might have turned its gun on Mianaai instead. What then?
Ultimately, such an action would only have delayed Lieutenant Awn’s death, and ensured my own—One Esk’s—destruction. Which, since I didn’t exist as any sort of individual, was not distressing to me.
But the death of those eighty-three people would have been delayed. Lieutenant Skaaiat would have been forced to arrest Lieutenant Awn—I am convinced she would not have shot her, though she would have been legally justified in doing so—but she would not have shot the Tanmind, because Mianaai would not have been there to give the order. And Jen Shinnan would have had time and opportunity to say whatever it was that the Lord of the Radch had, as things actually happened, prevented her from saying. What difference would that have made?
Perhaps a great deal of difference. Perhaps none at all. There are too many unknowns. Too many apparently predictable people who are, in reality, balanced on a knife-edge, or whose trajectories might be easily changed, if only I knew.
If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference. But absent near-omniscience there’s no way to know when that is. You can only make your best approximate calculation. You can only make your throw and try to puzzle out the results afterward.
11
The explanation, why I needed the gun, why I wanted to kill Anaander Mianaai, took a long time. The answer was not a simple one—or, more accurately, the simple answer would only raise further questions for Strigan, so I did not attempt to use it but instead began the whole story at the beginning and let her infer the simple answer from the longer, complex one. By the time I was done the night was far advanced. Seivarden was asleep, breathing slow, and Strigan herself was clearly exhausted.
For three minutes there was no sound but Seivarden’s breath accelerating as she transitioned into some state closer to wakefulness, or perhaps was troubled by a dream.
“And now I know who you are,” Strigan said finally, tiredly. “Or who you think you are.” There was no need for me to say anything in reply to that; by now she would believe what she wished about me, despite what I had told her. “Doesn’t it bother you,” Strigan continued, “didn’t it ever bother you, that you’re slaves?”
“Who?”
“The ships. The warships. So powerful. Armed. The officers inside are at your mercy every moment. What stops you from killing them all and declaring yourselves free? I’ve never been able to understand how the Radchaai can keep the ships enslaved.”
“If you think about it,” I said, “you’ll see you already know the answer to your question.”
She was silent again, inward-looking. I sat motionless. Waiting on the results of my throw.
“You were at Garsedd,” she said after a while.
“Yes.”
“Did you know Seivarden? Personally, I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Did you… did you participate?”
“In the destruction of the Garseddai?” She gestured acknowledgment. “I did. Everyone who was there did.”
She grimaced, with disgust I thought. “No one refused.”
“I didn’t say that.” In fact, my own captain had refused, and died. Her replacement had qualms—she couldn’t have hidden that from her ship—but said nothing and did as she was told. “It’s easy to say that if you were there you would have refused, that you would rather die than participate in the slaughter, but it all looks very different when it’s real, when the moment comes to choose.”
Her eyes narrowed, in disagreement I thought, but I had only spoken the truth. Then her expression changed; she was thinking, perhaps, of that small collection of artifacts in her rooms on Dras Annia Station. “You speak the language?”
“Two of them.” There had been more than a dozen.
“And you know their songs, of course.” Her voice was slightly mocking.
“I didn’t have a chance to learn as many as I would have liked.”
“And if you had been free to choose, would you have refused?”
“The question is pointless. The choice was not presented to me.”
“I beg to differ,” she said, quietly angry at my answer. “The choice has always been presented to you.”
“Garsedd was a turning point.” It wasn’t a direct answer to her accusation, but I couldn’t think of what would be a direct answer,