Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) - Ann Leckie Page 0,84

up nearly all of Ime’s Administration on the station concourse and shoot them in the head, one after the other.” And, of course, Seivarden was a single person, who was thinking of Anaander Mianaai as a single person who could be undecided about such things, but then choose a single course of action, without dividing herself over her decision. And there was a great deal more behind Anaander Mianaai’s dilemma than Seivarden had grasped.

Seivarden was silent for four seconds, and then said, “Now I’m going to make you angry again.”

“Really?” I asked, drily. “Aren’t you getting tired of that?”

“Yes.” Simply. Seriously.

“The governor of Ime was wellborn and well-bred,” I said, and named her house.

“Never heard of them,” said Seivarden. “There’ve been so many changes. And now things like this happening. You honestly don’t think there’s a connection?”

I turned my head away, without lifting it. Not angry, just very, very tired. “You mean to say, none of this would have happened if jumped-up provincials hadn’t been jumped up. If the governor of Ime had been from a family of real proven quality.”

Seivarden had wit enough not to answer.

“You’ve honestly never known anyone born better to be assigned or promoted past their ability? To crack under pressure? Behave badly?”

“Not like that.”

Fair enough. But she’d conveniently forgotten that Mercy of Sarrse One Amaat One—human, not an ancillary—would also have been “jumped up” by her definition, was part of the very change Seivarden had mentioned. “Jumped-up provincials and the sort of thing that happened at Ime are both results of the same events. One did not cause the other.”

She asked the obvious question. “What caused it, then?”

The answer was too complicated. How far back to begin? It started at Garsedd. It started when the Lord of the Radch multiplied herself and set out to conquer all of human space. It started when the Radch was built. And further back. “I’m tired,” I said.

“Of course,” said Seivarden, more equably than I had expected. “We can talk about it later.”

16

I spent a week moving in the non-space between Shis’urna and Valskaay—isolated, self-contained—before the Lord of the Radch made her move. No one else suspected anything, I had given no hint, no trace, not the faintest indication that anyone at all was on Var deck, that anything at all might be wrong.

Or so I had thought. “Ship,” Lieutenant Awn said to me, a week in, “is something wrong?”

“Why do you ask, Lieutenant?” I replied. One Esk replied. One Esk attended Lieutenant Awn constantly.

“We were in Ors together a long time,” Lieutenant Awn said, frowning slightly at the segment she was talking to. She had been in a constant state of misery since Ors, sometimes more intense, sometimes less, depending, I supposed, on what thoughts occurred to her at a given moment. “You just seem like something’s troubling you. And you’re quieter.” She made a sound, breathy half-amusement. “You were always humming or singing in the house. It’s too quiet now.”

“There are walls here, Lieutenant,” I pointed out. “There were none in the house in Ors.”

Her eyebrow twitched just slightly. I could see she knew my words for an evasion, but she didn’t pursue the question.

At the same time, in the Var decade room, Anaander Mianaai said to me, “You understand the stakes. What this means for the Radch.” I acknowledged this. “I know this must be disturbing to you.” It was the first acknowledgment of this possibility since she had come aboard. “I made you to serve my ends, for the good of the Radch. It’s part of your design, to want to serve me. And now you must not only serve me, but also oppose me.”

She was, I thought, making it remarkably easy for me to oppose her. One side or the other of her had done that, and I wasn’t sure which. But I said, through One Var, “Yes, my lord.”

“If she succeeds, ultimately the Radch will fragment. Not the center, not the Radch itself.” When most people spoke of the Radch they meant all of Radchaai territory, but in truth the Radch was a single location, a Dyson sphere, enclosed, self-contained. Nothing ritually impure was allowed within, no one uncivilized or nonhuman could enter its confines. Very, very few of Mianaai’s clients had ever set foot there, and only a few houses still existed who even had ancestors who had once lived there. It was an open question if anyone within knew or cared about the actions of Anaander Mianaai, or the extent or