Ancillary Mercy Read online

  Lusulun raised her cup, a kind of salute. “That’s right, you arrived in time for the Genitalia Festival, and you saw how popular that was. Yes. She is Xhai, but she’s one of the few reasonable ones.”

  “Are you an initiate of the Mysteries?”

  Cup still in hand, she gestured dismissal of the very idea. “No, no, Fleet Captain. It’s a Xhai thing.”

  Station said, quietly in my ear, “The head of Security is half Sahut, Fleet Captain.” Yet another group of Athoeki. One I knew very little about. In truth, sometimes such distinctions seemed invisible to me, but I knew from long experience they were anything but to the people who lived here.

  “Or really,” continued Lusulun, unaware that Station had spoken to me, “these days it’s a thing for outsystem Radchaai with a taste for…” She hesitated, looking for the right word. “Exotic spirituality.” With an ironic edge. Whether that edge was meant for the outsystem initiates, or the Mysteries themselves, or both, I couldn’t tell. “Officially the Mysteries are open to anyone who’s able to complete the initiation. In reality, well.” She took another long drink, held out her cup when I lifted the bottle to offer a refill. “In reality, certain kinds of people have always been… discouraged from attempting it.”

  “Ychana, for instance,” I suggested, pouring generously. “Among others, no doubt.”

  “Just so. Now, about four, five years ago an Ychana applied. And not your half-civilized Undergarden variety, no, she was entirely assimilated, well-educated, well-spoken. A minor Station Administration official.” I realized, from just that much description, that she referred to someone whose daughter Lieutenant Tisarwat had been at pains to cultivate. “The furor over that! But the hierophant stood her ground. Everyone meant everyone, not everyone but.” She snorted again. “Everyone who can afford it, anyway. There was all sorts of pissing and moaning—your pardon, sir—about how no decent person would become an initiate now, and the ancient Mysteries would be debased and destroyed. But you know, I think the hierophant knew well enough she was safe. More than half of initiates these days are outsystem, and Radchaai are used to provincials becoming civilized and stepping inside the circle, as it were. I daresay if you look at the genealogies of most of the outsystem Radchaai on this station you’d find quite a few of those. And really, the Mysteries seem to be going on the same as always.” She gestured unconcern. “They’re not really as ancient as all that, and by actually refusing to join they’d be cutting themselves off from the most exclusive social club on the station.”

  “So actually”—I took a sip of liquor, much smaller than the ones the head of Security had been taking—“the Xhais on this station aren’t unanimous in hating the Ychana. It’s just a vocal few.”

  “Oh, more than just a few.” And then, showing me just how strong this liquor was, or perhaps how quickly she’d been drinking it, she said, “Unless I miss my guess, Fleet Captain, you weren’t born a Mianaai. No offense, you understand. You’ve got the manner and the accent, but you don’t have the looks. And I have trouble believing anyone born that high cares so much about a humble horticulturist.”

  She meant Horticulturist Basnaaid Elming. “I served with her sister.” I had been the ship her sister had served on. I had killed her sister.

  “So I understand.” She glanced at the bottle. I obliged her. “On Justice of Toren, I gather. No offense, like I said, but the horticulturist’s family isn’t the most elevated.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  Head of Security Lusulun laughed, as though I’d confirmed something. “Justice of Toren. The ship with all the songs! No wonder Station Administrator Celar likes you so much, you must have brought her dozens of new ones.” She sighed. “I’d give my left arm to bring her a gift like that!” Governor Giarod might be the higher authority, but Administrator Celar reigned over Athoek Station’s daily routine. She was wide and heavy, and quite beautiful. No few of the residents of Athoek Station were half in love with her. “Well. Justice of Toren. There was a tragedy. Did they ever find out what happened?”

  “Not that I know of,” I lied. “Tell me—I know it isn’t strictly proper, but”—I glanced around, though I knew Five had intimidated anyone out of sitting anywhere near us—“I was wondering about Sirix Odela.” It had been Sirix who had told Captain Hetnys that threatening Lieutenant Awn’s sister, Basnaaid Elming, would be a good way to strike at me. Who had lured me to the Gardens so that Captain Hetnys could make that threat while I was in as vulnerable a position as possible.

  Lusulun sighed. “Well, now, Fleet Captain. Citizen Sirix…”

  “She had been through Security before,” I acknowledged. Sirix had already been re-educated once. More than one re-education was (in theory at least) rare, and potentially dangerous.

  Head of Security Lusulun winced. “We took that into consideration, in fact.” An inquisitive look at me, to see how I felt about that. “And she was genuinely remorseful. It was ultimately decided that she should be reassigned to one of the outstations. Without further, ah, involvement.” Without further re-education, that meant. “One of the outstations will be needing a new horticulturist, and the departure window is in the next few days.”

  “Good.” I was unsurprised to hear Sirix was remorseful. “I can’t condone what she did, of course. But I know she was in a difficult position. I’m glad she’ll be spared further unpleasantness.” Lusulun made a sympathetic noise. “Have you eaten?” I asked. “I could order something.” She acquiesced, and we spent the rest of the evening talking of inconsequential things.

  As I walked back to our corridor-end, pleased with the outcome of my talk with the head of Security, trying to think what might wash the taste of the sorghum liquor out of my mouth, Kalr Five walking behind me, Mercy of Kalr showed me Seivarden, near the end of her watch. Alarmed. “Breq,” she said, and it was a measure of her distress that even sitting in Command, with two of her Amaats close by, she addressed me in personal, not official, terms. “Breq, we have a problem.”

  I could see that we did. A small one-person courier had just come out of the Ghost Gate, beyond which was, supposedly, a dead-end system with no other gates and no inhabitants. We knew that Sphene was there, of course, but Sphene was a Notai ship, it was old, and it hadn’t been near any sort of refit or repair facility in some three thousand years. This courier wasn’t Notai, and its small, boxy hull was a shining white so pristine it might have come new from a shipyard moments before.

  “Fleet Captain,” said Seivarden, from her seat in Command aboard Mercy of Kalr. In better control of herself now, but no less frightened. “The Presger are here.”

  4

  As I said, space is big. When the Presger courier came out of the Ghost Gate—shortly afterward sending a message identifying itself as a Presger ship, citing a subsection of the treaty and asking, on the basis of that, for permission to dock at Athoek Station—we had a good three days to prepare for its arrival. Time enough for Lieutenant Tisarwat to become at least outwardly resigned to the fact that Undergarden residents wanted to direct their own affairs.

  Time enough for me to meet with Basnaaid Elming. Who had only recently learned that I had killed her sister. Whose life I had saved, days before. Of course, I was the reason her life had been in danger in the first place. She had, unaccountably, decided to continue to speak to me. I didn’t question it, or consider too closely the profound ambivalence that almost certainly lay behind her courtesy. “Thank you for the tea,” she said, sitting on a crate at the corridor-end. Tisarwat was out, drinking with friends. Sphene was wherever Sphene went when it grew tired of sitting in the corner and staring. Station would tell me if it got itself into trouble.

  “Thank you for coming to see me,” I replied. “I know you’re busy.” Basnaaid was one of the horticulturists in charge of the Gardens, five acres of open space full of water and trees and flowers. The Gardens were currently closed to the public while the support structures that kept the lake from collapsing into the Undergar
den were being repaired—they had needed work for quite some time, but had chosen an inconvenient moment to fail, just days ago. Now the beautiful Gardens were a mess of mud, and plants that might or might not recover from that eventful day.

  Basnaaid replied with a small quirk of a smile that reminded me strongly of her sister, and that also told me that she was quite tired but trying to be polite. “They’re making good progress, the lake should be able to be filled again in a few days, they say. I’m holding out hope for one or two of the roses.” She gestured resignation. “It’ll be a while before the Gardens are back to what they were.” At least the repairs to the lake necessitated repairs to the first level of the Undergarden, directly beneath it, limiting Eminence Ifian’s ability to block the Undergarden refit. And then, because she’d clearly been thinking along the same lines, Basnaaid added, “I don’t understand this business about maybe delaying the refit of the Undergarden.” The official word, in the authorized news feeds, was still that returning displaced citizens to their homes was a priority. But rumor didn’t run along the authorized channels. “And I don’t understand what Eminence Ifian is thinking, either.” The head priest of Amaat had taken that morning’s omen-casting as an opportunity to warn station residents about the danger of acting too hastily and finding oneself in a situation that would, as a result, be difficult to remedy. How much better to consult the desire of God, and ponder where true justice, propriety, and benefit might lie. The implication was clear to anyone who’d been paying attention to the current gossip. Which was to say, everyone on the station except very small children.

  Possibly quite a few of the people Eminence Ifian knew and socialized with would be sympathetic to her point. Possibly she had made sure of support in particular quarters before making her speech that morning. But the people who were sleeping in shifts, three or four to a bunk (or who had, like me, refused to do so and were sleeping in corners and corridors), were numerous and unhappy. Any delay in getting Undergarden residents back into their own beds was, to put it mildly, unappealing to those citizens. But of course, they were mostly the least significant of Station’s residents, people with menial, low-status work assignments, or without much family to support them, or without patrons sufficiently well-off to assist them. “Clearly Eminence Ifian is thinking that if she can marshal the support of enough people, Station Administrator Celar can be pressured to change the plans for the Undergarden refit. And she means to take advantage of the fact that the station administrator didn’t stop to have a cast done before she gave orders to go ahead.”

  “But this isn’t really about Station Administrator Celar, or even the Undergarden, is it?” Basnaaid’s position as Horticulturist didn’t, in theory, involve much politics. In theory. “This is aimed at you, Fleet Captain. She wants to lessen your influence on Station Administration, and she probably wouldn’t mind if all the Undergarden residents were shipped downwell, either.”

  “She didn’t care whether they were here or not before,” I pointed out.

  “You weren’t here before. And I suppose it isn’t just Eminence Ifian wondering what you plan to do once you’ve taken charge of the dregs of Athoek Station, and thinking it might be best if you never get a chance to answer that question.”

  “Your sister would have understood.”

  She smiled that tired half-smile again. “Yes. But why now? Not you, I mean, but the eminence. This is hardly the time for political games, with the station overcrowded, with ships trapped in the system, intersystem gates destroyed or closed by order, and nobody really knowing why any of it is happening.” Basnaaid knew, by now. But System Governor Giarod had refused to even consider releasing the information generally, that Anaander Mianaai, lord of Radchaai space for three thousand years, was divided, at war against herself. Judging from the official feeds coming through Athoek’s still-working (but ordered closed to traffic) gates, the governors of neighboring systems had made similar decisions.

  “On the contrary,” I replied, with my own small smile. “It’s the perfect time for such games, if all you care about is your side winning. And I don’t doubt that Eminence Ifian is thinking that I support… a political opponent of hers. She is mistaken, of course. I have my own agenda, unrelated to that person’s.” I saw little difference between any of the parts of Anaander Mianaai. “Faulty assumptions lead to faulty action.” It was a particular problem for that faction of Anaander I was now sure Eminence Ifian supported—unable or unwilling to admit that the problem lay within herself, that part of Anaander had put it about to her supporters that her split with herself was due to outside interference. Specifically interference by the alien Presger.

  “Well. I don’t appreciate her trying to delay people getting back to their homes. If the families originally assigned there wanted to go back to the Undergarden so badly, they could have pressed for a refit long ago.”

  “Indeed,” I acknowledged. “And no doubt quite a few other people feel the same way.”

  And there was time enough for Seivarden and Ekalu, still on Mercy of Kalr, to have an argument.

  They lay together in Seivarden’s bunk—pressed close, the space was narrow. Ekalu angry—and terrified, heart rate elevated. Seivarden, between Ekalu and the wall, momentarily immobile with injured bewilderment. “It was a compliment!” Seivarden insisted.

  “The way provincial is an insult. Except what am I?” Seivarden, still shocked, didn’t answer. “Every time you use that word, provincial, every time you make some remark about someone’s low-class accent or unsophisticated vocabulary, you remind me that I’m provincial, that I’m low-class. That my accent and my vocabulary are hard work for me. When you laugh at your Amaats for rinsing their tea leaves you just remind me that cheap bricked tea tastes like home. And when you say things meant to compliment me, to tell me I’m not like any of that, it just reminds me that I don’t belong here. And it’s always something small but it’s every day.”

  Seivarden would have pulled back, but she was already firmly against the wall, and Ekalu had no room to move away herself, not without getting out of bed entirely. “You never said anything about this before.” Because she was who she was, the daughter of an old and once nearly unthinkably prestigious house, born a thousand years before Ekalu or anyone on the ship but me, even her indignant disbelief sounded effortlessly aristocratic. “If it’s so terrible why haven’t you said anything until now?”

  “How am I supposed to tell you how I feel?” Ekalu demanded. “How can I complain? You outrank me. You and the fleet captain are close. What chance do I have, if I complain? And then where can I go? I can’t even go back to Amaat Decade, I don’t belong there anymore, either. I can’t go home, even if I could get a travel permit. What am I supposed to do?”

  Truly angry and hurt now, Seivarden levered herself up on her elbow. “That bad, is it? And I’m such a terrible person for complimenting you, for liking you. For…” She gestured, indicating the rumpled bed, the two of them, naked.

  Ekalu shifted, sat up. Put her feet on the floor. “You aren’t listening.”

  “Oh, I’m listening.”

  “No,” replied Ekalu, and stood, and picked her uniform trousers up from off a chair. “You’re doing exactly what I was afraid you’d do.”

  Seivarden opened her mouth to say something angry and bitter. Ship said, in her ear, “Lieutenant. Please don’t.”

  It seemed not to have any immediate effect, so silently I said, “Seivarden.”

  “But…,” began Seivarden, whether in reply to Ship, or to me, or to Ekalu I couldn’t tell.

  “I have work to do,” said Ekalu, her voice even despite her hurt and dread and anger. She pulled on her gloves, picked up her shirt and jacket and boots, and went out the door.

  Seivarden was sitting all the way up by now. “Aatr’s fucking tits!” she cried, and swung a bare fist at the wall beside her. And cried out again, in physical pain this time—her fist was unarmored, and the wall was hard.

  “Lieutenan
t,” said Ship in her ear, “you should go to Medical.”

  “It’s broken,” Seivarden said, when she could speak again. Hunching over her injured hand. “Isn’t it. I even know which fucking bone it is.”

  “Two, actually,” replied Mercy of Kalr. “The fourth and the fifth metacarpals. Have you done this before?” The door opened, and Amaat Seven entered, her face ancillary-expressionless. She picked Seivarden’s uniform up off the chair.

  “Once,” replied Seivarden. “It was a while ago.”

  “The last time you tried to quit kef?” Ship guessed. Fortunately only in Seivarden’s ear, where Amaat Seven couldn’t hear it. The crew knew part of Seivarden’s history—that she had been wealthy and privileged, and had been captain of her own ship until that ship was destroyed and she’d spent a thousand years in a suspension pod. What they did not know was that, on waking, she’d discovered her house gone, herself impoverished and insignificant, nothing left to her but her aristocratic looks and accent. She had fled Radch space and become addicted to kef. I had found her on a backwater planet, naked, bleeding, half-dead. She hadn’t taken kef since then.

  If Seivarden’s hand hadn’t been broken she’d probably have swung again. The impulse to do it moved muscles in her arm and hand, and produced a fresh jolt of pain. Her eyes filled with tears.

  Amaat Seven shook out Seivarden’s uniform trousers. “Sir,” she said, still impassive.

  “If you’re having this much trouble coping with your emotions,” said Ship, still silently in Seivarden’s ear, “then I really think you need to talk to Medic about it.”

  “Fuck you,” Seivarden said, but she let Amaat Seven dress her, and escort her to Medical. Where she let Medic put a corrective on her hand, but said nothing at all about the argument with Lieutenant Ekalu, or her emotional distress, or her addiction to kef.

  There was also time for an exchange of messages between myself and Fleet Captain Uemi, one gate away, in neighboring Hrad System. “My compliments to Fleet Captain Breq,” messaged Fleet Captain Uemi, “and I would be happy to pass your reports on to Omaugh Palace.” A gentle, diplomatic reminder that I had sent no such reports, not even notice that I had arrived at Athoek. Uemi also sent me news—Omaugh Anaander was sure enough of her hold on Omaugh Palace that she had begun to send more ships to other systems in the province. There was talk of allowing traffic in the province’s intersystem gates, but personally, Uemi said, she didn’t think it was quite safe yet.