Excerpt: Justice of Toren

By the time we reached the foot of the ribbon, Seivarden was fidgety and irritable. She'd asked me twice who I was, and complained three times that my answer conveyed no meaningful information to her.

"This is Eniaqt," I told her as we stepped off the transport. Ranks of houses, blue, yellow, pale green, stretched above and below us on the mountainside, pooled down in the valley below. The ribbon made a bright line in the sky. "Are you staying here?"

"I've never even heard of Eniaqt," Seivarden complained.

A trickle of sweat ran down my back--it was -3.6 degrees Celsius, far warmer than the northern regions we'd come from. I was uncomfortable even with both coats unfastened. "It's on Nilt," I told her. I settled my pack more securely on my shoulder and started uphill.

After a moment, Seivarden followed me. "How did I end up on Nilt?" she asked.

"I have no idea. Unless you're going back north, you can sell your coats. You won't need them here." The pavement steepened, and turned to stone steps.

"How much will that get me?"

Half as much kef as you took the other day, I thought, but said, "Not quite enough to ride the ribbon up to the station." I shrugged. "Or food for about three days. Five if you don't eat a lot."

"Where are you going?"

I stopped, and turned to look at her, three steps behind me. Her breathing was labored, but she struggled to hide it. In the valley below lights flickered on here and there as the sun went behind the mountain. "I'm going to the oracle of Zhur."

She frowned. "Where is that?"

"I don't know." I turned and went up the steps again. I couldn't have left her at Strigan's. Or up north--she'd just end up where I'd found her to begin with. Leaving her here probably wasn't much better. I should have just walked past, when I saw her lying there in the snow, never stopped to look at her face. "Are you staying here, or are you coming with me?"

"Do I know you?" She was still out of breath.

That was a question I didn't want to answer. "Does this happen to you often?"

"What?"

"Waking up and finding you don't know where you are, who you're with, or how you got there?"

"A couple of times." A pause, while she fell further behind me. "You seem familiar."

"I'm Breq, from the Gerentate," I said, and slowed to let her catch up. "I found you six days ago, half dead in front of a tavern." I'd already told her five times. "I don't know how you got there."

She hugged her arms around herself as though she was cold, and sat down heavily on the steps, right where she was. "Get up," I said, sternly. "If we miss tonight's lift, we'll have to find somewhere to sleep."

"Fuck off."

Relief. Mostly. Something else mixed in I didn't trouble to identify. I turned and started up the steps again. Forty six seconds later I heard her behind me. I didn't slow.

She trailed me all the way to where the stairs stopped and the incline leveled off for 28.3 meters. I heard her step quicken when she reached the level ground, heard her come up behind me.

"If you stay here you'll be dead in a month," I said, without looking around to see her response. "Maybe sooner. If that's what you want, there's no point wasting my time."

"How very charming you are, Breq from the Gerentate." I knew that she was sneering slightly, could hear it in her voice. If I turned I would be slightly, irrationally surprised to see her out of uniform, disheveled and sweating.

I didn't turn, but I stopped. I was angry. I knew very precisely why I was angry, and knew as well that if I dared to explain my anger to Seivarden she would respond with nothing but contempt, and that made me even angrier. The sky was still too light for me to see the stars, the only sign that anything lay beyond it was that shining ribbon. "Do as you like," I said, and didn't add, you will anyway. And I walked on and left her standing alone in the empty street.

When she caught up with me eight minutes later, I was still angry and said nothing.
#

Things happen the way they happen because the world is the way it is. Or, as a Radchaai would say, the universe is the shape of the gods. Amaat conceived of light, and conceiving of light also necessarily conceived of not-light, and light and darkness sprang forth. This was the first Emanation, EtrepaBo; Light/Darkness. The other three, implied and necessitated by that first, are IssaInu (Movement/Stillness), EskVar (Beginning/Ending), and VahnItr (Existence/Nonexistence). These four emanations variously split and recombined, to create the universe. Everything that is emanates from Amaat.

The smallest, most seemingly insignificant event is part of an intricate whole and understanding why one particular mote of dust falls in one particular path, and lands in one particular location, is to understand the will of Amaat. There is no such thing as "just a coincidence." Nothing happens by chance, but only according to the mind of God.

Or so official Radchaai orthodoxy teaches. I myself have never understood religion very well. It was never required that I should.

When the lift reached the station at the other end of the ribbon, my anger had mostly subsided, and I had decided on a course of action. Both Seivarden and I needed to bathe (preferably somewhere warmer than the station's steady 3.1 degrees Celsius), and to sleep somewhere besides a bench or the floor. And Seivarden would be sick soon. I could spend money on lodging until she was better, or I could find a ship and let her recover while we traveled. The latter was the better option. But choosing a ship would be difficult--I didn't know where or even what the oracle of Zhur was. I didn't even know where to begin an inquiry.

When we stepped onto the station, I headed immediately for the docks. Seivarden followed me silently. She had said nothing since that moment on the street, had said nothing when I sold our coats and pocketed the chits I got in exchange, when I'd retrieved the money I'd placed in a locker at the foot of the ribbon, when I paid our fares on the lift, or when I shared out food from my pack.

Forty-ninth on the list of ships currently docked was Aturo Waran Combine Cargo Carrier Painted Blue, a Ki ship to judge by the name, with limited room for passengers. We found a crewman sitting outside the lock where it was docked. Her face was scored with ritual scars, and she had no hair. The worn, green blanket wrapped around her shoulders told me that the ship would be blessedly warmer than the station. "Good day," I said, without bowing. "We're looking for passage."

The crewman stood. She was tall, and I had to look up. She looked at me for three seconds, and then at Seivarden, standing behind me and shifting uncomfortably as though her clothes bothered her. "No drugs on Aturo Waran Blue."

"That suits me," I said. I had hoped as much, when I'd seen the ship name.

"Not even tea." Her mouth twisted, as though she'd tasted something sour. "No Radchaai either."

I feigned puzzlement, and was glad I'd sold our gloves as well as our coats. "I'm from the Gerentate."

The crewman considered my lie for a moment. I knew they were undocking in a matter of hours, and passengers would bring in extra money. "Aturo Waran Blue isn't fast. We'll spend three weeks traversing the gate."

Also as I had hoped. "How much?" She named an outrageous sum, which I managed to talk down to something more reasonable though still high, and within the next ten minutes I was stowing both my pack and Seivarden in the tiny passenger quarters.
#

The next week was unpleasant. Seivarden needed constant looking-after, and frequent cleaning up. She ate very little (which in some respects was fortunate), and I had to work to make sure she didn't get dehydrated. But by the end of the week she was keeping her food down, and sleeping more or less comfortably--though when she was awake she complained that everything was too harsh, too rough, too loud, too bright. The plain blocks of bland nutrients that fed Aturo Waran's crew and passengers were too strongly flavored. But I thought she had safely passed the point where she would want to injure herself, as so many kef addicts do when coming down.

I left her sleeping and went to the galley. Like everywhere on Aturo Waran Blue, it was dimly lit and painted in dark colors, brown, gray, and maroon. The space was cramped, barely three meters square, but no one else was there, so I took my ration from a cabinet, and sat at the small table. It was the first time I had eaten away from our quarters, and I felt suddenly as though I had set down a weight, one I knew I would pick up again soon, but for now was blessedly gone.

I was half-finished when a crewman entered the galley--the same woman who had sat at the airlock when I'd taken passage. I had seen other crewmen occasionally over the previous week, but none had spoken to me.

The Ki will tell you they make no distinctions among themselves, have no hierarchies, no ranks. They are certainly sincere when they say it, and it is just as certainly untrue. But they use no titles, no courtesies in speech. This crewman might well have authority over the ship, though her shipmates would never acknowledge it openly. She sat across from me, saying nothing.

"Good day," I said, as polite as her own customs would allow me to be. I had no name to give her--a personal name would be what the Ki call a "made distinction," an unnatural difference imposed by outside forces. Instead they use "designations," though the exact difference between a name and a designation was somewhat opaque to me.

She didn't return my greeting, only watched me eat, three carefully chewed bites. "The Gerentate," she said, and looked at me measuringly. "That's a long way off."

"Yes." The Gerentate was far enough from where I'd been for the last nineteen years to conceal any small mistakes I might make. "I was selected by the regional elders as a candidate for study at the capital, and I got a certification in accounting. That led to a job with a merchant out of Belashe Station. I got to do a little traveling, and I decided I wanted to see more of the world."

"How long ago was that?"

"About twenty years." I took another bite.

She raised one scarred and hairless eyebrow. "Didn't like accounting?"

I shrugged. "Accounting was fine. It's staying in one place all the time that I didn't like."

She watched me finish the last few bits of my meal. "So what's the interest?" she asked, as I was about to rise and clean my dish and utensil.

"I don't know what you mean." Though I did.

"Is it a sexual attraction?"

"Is yours?" I asked, knowing it was a dangerous move.

She ignored my jab. "I've met people who feed stray animals. Maybe this one looked like it needed rescuing." She leaned an elbow on the table. "But I don't think you're one of those. There's something too cold about you."

I pondered a variety of answers, wondered when I'd let my facial expression slip, or my tone of voice. "You remind me of my uncle, only the word he used was unsteady."

"They aren't human," she said. "Maybe it looked pitiful, wherever it was you found it."

"Not human?" I made my face look mildly surprised. "I never thought to examine his DNA." Which was actually no indication of anything--I'd be human, by that measure.

The crewman frowned, and her nostrils flared. "They're like insects. Every one of them is born to fit into a waiting spot, educated from birth to play its role. The ones who won't are re-educated." She made a final gesture with her left hand. "Or disposed of."

"Like insects." I gave my face a musing expression. "Would that be an inherent distinction, or a made one?" She didn't answer. "How do you know the difference?"

"What, between humans and not humans?"

"Between made and inherent distinctions."

"Observation," she said. "What arises out of a person's nature is inherent. You don't teach a stone to be a stone. You don't plant beans and get garlic."

"In which case," I said, "made distinctions should be impossible."

"Made distinctions don't change what a thing is. They deceive."

"A sculpted stone is still a stone."

"Of course," she said. "But not the same stone. The Radchaai have destroyed their own humanity, themselves. They have no individual existence. All those billions of people over all that space and no dissent, no rebellion--do you think that's human? They take over a world, and within a few years you'd hardly guess it had ever been not Radchaai. Re-education--brainwashing. It might not be his fault that he is what he is. But that doesn't change facts."

"What if your observation is faulty? You're looking from the wrong angle, you lack crucial information? Then you'd be making a distinction that wasn't there."

"I know what I'm talking about." She shook her head. "I'm speaking for your good, not mine."

"You are like my uncle. Thank you for reminding me of home."

"I can't see anyone calling you unsteady," she said. "You're far too self-possessed. Either your uncle was utterly deceived, or he's as determined as you and couldn't make you do what he wanted."

"That's what unsteady means, in the Gerentate." I rose, took my plate. "Where is the Oracle of Zhur?"

She frowned. "The what?"

"I need to ask a question of the Oracle of Zhur. Do you know where it is?"

"It sounds Ooroian. But there are oracles everywhere." She waved indefinitely, eyed me curiously, and then shrugged. "I suppose you have a good reason for wanting that one in particular. What's the question? On second thought," she continued, eyebrow lifted, "maybe I don't want to know."

I'd never heard of Ooroian, didn't know if it was a people, or a language, or a place, but any sort of association would help, would give me a direction to look if nothing else. "Why should I help my enemy?"

For a moment she looked puzzled, as though my question had been nonsense. Then she laughed.

"I'm entirely serious," I said. "That's the question."

"There's no need to travel to find the answer," she said, sobering. "I can tell you now: you shouldn't. Unless you're helping your enemy to his death."

I said nothing, knowing I would leave her with a false impression.

She frowned. "Don't your own people say, there's no cure for hatred?"

It was indeed a popular Gerentate proverb. She had taken the bait I'd left, assumed that my question and the reason for my interest in Seivarden were connected. "I thought they were insects."

"Even so. I dislike deliberate cruelty."

"Have you observed any?"

She opened her mouth, hesitated, and then spoke. "Perhaps your family is relieved you're gone. I think I would be afraid to be the object of your undivided attention."

"Once we dock," I said, "I have no intention of troubling you further."

She didn't answer, only rose from her seat and left the galley.