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I had met quite a few priests in my long life, and found that they were, by and large, like anyone else—some generous, some grasping; some kind, some cruel; some humble, some self-aggrandizing. Most were all of those things, in various proportions, at various times. Like anyone else, as I said. But I had learned to be wary whenever a priest suggested that her personal aims were, in fact, God’s will.
“Faulty assumptions lead to faulty action.”
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.
“You guessed correctly that I have been in more than one annexation. And I’ve learned more than a few lessons from it, some of them at great cost. I will share one of them with you now: most people don’t want trouble, but frightened people are liable to do very dangerous things.” That included soldiers and Station Security, of course, but I didn’t say that.
“You ask me if I’ve really thought about this. Lieutenant, I have had twenty years to think about it. You say it went wrong. Ask yourself if the way it went wrong has anything to say about why it went wrong. If it was ever right to begin with.”
“Please, Tisarwat,” I replied, after a three-second pause, “don’t do that. Don’t say things like that. Don’t say to me, What if Lieutenant Awn hadn’t been Lieutenant Awn as though that might have been something good.
“Lieutenant Seivarden,” I said, “was accustomed to receiving the respect and admiration of anyone she thought mattered. Or at least accustomed to receiving the signs of it. In all the vast universe, she knew she had a place, and that place was surrounded and shored up by all the other people around her. And when she came out of that suspension pod, all of that was gone, and she had no place, no one around her to tell her who she was. Suddenly she was no one.”
“The thing I always liked the least,” I said, finally, after the last of the water, “was when an officer took me for granted. Just assumed that I would be there for her whenever she needed it, whatever it was she needed, and never stopped to even wonder what I might think. Or if I might be thinking anything to begin with.”
But there are two parts to reacting, aren’t there. How you feel, and what you do. And it’s the thing you do that’s the important one, isn’t it?
“Sir,” said Five. Really Five, not anyone else, I thought. “Why are you still crying?” Helpless to stop myself, I made a small, hiccupping sob. “My leg.” Five was genuinely puzzled. “Why did it have to be the good one? And not the one that hurts me all the time?”
Blood was rushing to her face, she wanted to flee, but of course there was nowhere she could go and be away from herself.
“What sort of games are you used to playing, Translator?” asked Seivarden, and then immediately regretted it, either because it got her the translator’s attention, or because she realized belatedly what kind of answer might be forthcoming.
That got the translator’s full attention. She looked up from the game, frowned intently at Tisarwat. “What’s it like? Does it hurt?” Tisarwat only blinked at her. “Sometimes I think I might like to get an idea, but then it occurs to me that it’s exactly the sort of thing Dlique would do.”
“What an excitable person that Lieutenant Tisarwat is,” said Translator Zeiat. “An idea. Just imagine!”
“And that thousand years will come, and another and another, to the end of the universe. Think of all the griefs and tragedies, and yes, the triumphs, buried in the past, millions of years of it. Everything for the people who lived them. Nothing now.” Ekalu swallowed. “I’ll have to remember, sir, if I’m ever feeling down, that you know how to cheer me right up.” I smiled. “The point is, there is no point. Choose your own.”
“When you’re doing something like this,” I said, “the odds are irrelevant. You don’t need to know the odds. You need to know how to do the thing you’re trying to do. And then you need to do it. What comes next”—I gestured, the tossing of a handful of omens—“isn’t something you have any control over.”
Two and Four went through the crates to see what we’d left behind. “Oh!” exclaimed Four, opening one. “Tea!” It was a packet of Daughter of Fishes. My Kalrs had known I wouldn’t care what happened to it. “Now we’ll be all right.”
“Drinking yourself insensible so you don’t go back to kef may not be a particularly good idea, but it does show a certain admirable determination.”
Oh, and next time you feel like getting hammered, message me. That was some damn good stuff you puked all over yourself, I think it’s only fair I should get some, too. That hasn’t already been through you, I mean.”
“Don’t be like that, Amaat,” I said. “I’m one soldier. Not even a whole one. What do I weigh, against all of Athoek Station?” And I had been in more desperate straits, and lived. Still, one day—perhaps this one—I would not. “I’ll never forgive her,” said Amaat Nine. Said Mercy of Kalr. “I never have,” I replied.
“I suspect the lieutenant is amused by the fact that the only person willing to tell the Usurper what had been going on was the one who didn’t care who got killed over it. Given the Usurper’s actions when she arrived here, that’s the only sort of person who’d be willing to tell her everything, but the Usurper refused to listen to her, for exactly that reason.”
Every ending is an arbitrary one. Every ending is, from another angle, not really an ending.
If nobody stops her we’re likely to end up with system official appointments determined by the results of a ball game! Or chosen by lot! Or popular elections!”
In the end it’s only ever been one step, and then the next.
