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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.
Falling didn’t bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It’s stopping that’s the problem.
Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?
I lay in a bed, and on a bench beside it Seivarden sat, leaning against the wall, looking as though she hadn’t slept recently. Or, that is to say, even more as though she hadn’t slept recently than she usually did.
“Were any of the ships you served on particularly fond of you?” I asked, voice carefully even. Neutral. She blinked. Straightened. “That’s an odd question. Do you have any experience with ships?” “Yes,” I said. “Actually.”
And whatever happened between here and there, it was a near-certainty I would die shortly after I reached Valskaay, if not before. But I would not die without explaining myself.
Waiting for the airlock to cycle, I felt my aloneness like an impenetrable wall pressing around me.
The guilt and helpless anger that had overwhelmed me had receded at that moment, overcome by more urgent necessity, but now I had time to remember. My next three breaths were ragged and sobbing. For a moment I was perversely glad I was hidden from myself.
In the nineteen years since then, I had learned eleven languages and 713 songs. I had found ways to conceal what I was—even, I was fairly sure, from the Lord of the Radch herself. I had worked as a cook, a janitor, a pilot. I had settled on a plan of action. I had joined a religious order, and made a great deal of money. In all that time I only killed a dozen people.
I had thought she was too young to have such strong feelings about the event. “Why are you crying?” “I’m scared.” Not taking her eyes off Anaander Mianaai, or lowering the stick. That struck me as very sensible.
“If you’ve got power and money and connections, some differences won’t change anything. Or if you’re resigned to dying in the near future, which I gather is your position at the moment. It’s the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren’t small at all. What you call no difference is life and death to them.”
Choose my aim, take one step and then the next. It had never been anything else.
