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There were any number of reasons she might not need her possessions, the most likely, of course, being that she was dead.
I hadn’t thought most humans could mask such strong emotions so effectively—her face was absolutely expressionless.
If you haven’t been through it, I don’t think you can really imagine it.
Had they really been the ancillaries they sometimes pretended to be, that would have been the end of it. But they were not ancillaries. They were human, and consumingly curious.
Not quite willing to die, I suspected, but hoping in the back of her mind to meet with some fatal accident.
A song came into my mind—there was always a song, with me.
Push too hard, too fast, and the results would not be what I wanted, possibly disastrously so. Push too gently, take too long, and I would run out of time, and again results would not be what I wanted.
And like many Radchaai she assumed that thought and emotion were two easily separable things.
“I guess,” she said, slowly, thoughtfully, “I assume that real love doesn’t break for anything.”
I was angry, yes, but I was always angry, that was normal.
In the soldiers’ mess, the drinking, which had begun in a very focused, disciplined manner, each communal swallow accompanied by an invocation of one of the ship’s gods, the sting of the arrack carefully savored on the way down, had begun to degenerate.
“Water will wear away stone, sir.” It was a proverb. Or half of one. Water will wear away stone, but it won’t cook supper. Everything has its own strengths. Said with enough irony, it could also imply that since the gods surely had a purpose for everyone the person in question must be good for something, but the speaker couldn’t fathom what it might be.
There was no one here familiar to me, but anger I recognized. Anger was an old companion of mine by now.
It was always, from the beginning, going to fall apart at some point. Obvious, in retrospect. Obvious before, you’d think. But it’s so easy to just not see the obvious, even long past when it ought to be reasonable.
She was very beautiful and, I thought, aware of that fact, though not off-puttingly so.
So much is metaphor, an inadequately material way to speak of immaterial things.
I wasn’t actually a very good judge of what was normal or expected.
“You can admit the error and resolve never to repeat it, or you can refuse to admit error and throw every effort behind insisting you were right to do what you did, and would gladly do it again.”
Oh, how I missed the rest of myself.
“Eggs are so inadequate, don’t you think? I mean, they ought to be able to become anything, but instead you always get a chicken. Or a duck. Or whatever they’re programmed to be. You never get anything interesting, like regret, or the middle of the night last week.”
No Radchaai was immune to the suspicion of coincidence.
“How can an AI be unhappy when it’s doing exactly what it was made to do?” asked Station Administrator Celar. Not, thankfully, how it could possibly matter whether an AI was happy or not.
And it’s so easy to just go along. So easy not to see what’s happening. And the longer you don’t see it, the harder it becomes to see it, because then you have to admit that you ignored it all that time.
Piat scoffed, in a way that made it plain she was trying very hard not to cry.
Our fleet captain generally keeps out of trouble, but when she doesn’t, it’s never the insignificant sort.
Who only ever loved once? Who ever said “I will never love again” and kept their word? Not I.
“I don’t like children very much, to be honest,” replied Five. “Well, no. Children are all sorts of people, aren’t they, and I suppose if I knew more I’d find some I like and some I don’t, just like everyone else. But I’m glad nobody’s depending on me to have any, and I don’t really know what to do with them, if you know what I mean. Still, I know not to do things like that.”
I came to see her strangely serene manner as both a sign of just how much she expected to get whatever she wanted, and also an instrument by which she managed to do that, plain persistent saying what she wanted to be true in the expectation that it would eventually become so. It’s a method I’d found worked best for those who are already positioned to mostly get what they want.
The sort of thing I had always liked, in an officer. The willingness to admit she was in the wrong, when she realized it. The willingness to insist she was in the right, when she was sure of it, even when it might be safer not to.
Strange, how equally important, just different always seemed to translate into some “equally important” roles being more worthy of respect and reward than others.
“You are so civilized. So polite. So brave coming here alone when you know no one here would dare to touch you. So easy to be all those things, when all the power is on your side.”
“All of you! You take what you want at the end of a gun, you murder and rape and steal, and you call it bringing civilization. And what is civilization, to you, but us being properly grateful to be murdered and raped and stolen from? You said you knew justice when you heard it. Well, what is your justice but you allowed to treat us as you like, and us condemned for even attempting to defend ourselves?”
Memory is an event horizon What’s caught in it is gone but it’s always there.
At age nine and three quarters, Basnaaid Elming had been an ambitious poet, without a particularly delicate sense of language, but an abundance of melodrama and overwrought emotion.
“I wish I could show you what it’s like. I wish you could know what it’s like, to be in my position. But you never will, and that’s how I know there isn’t really any such thing as justice.”
“I’d rather have cut my right arm off than shown weakness, when I was seventeen.” And when she was twenty-seven, and thirty-seven. “I regret that, now.”
“Not mad,” I corrected. “When you’ve lost everything that matters to you, it makes perfect sense to run and hide and try to recover.”
It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t what I wanted, not really, wasn’t what I knew I would always reach for. But it would have to be enough.
