“Level four?” someone cried. “Not all of us can get up and down those ladders!”
“I don’t think there’s room on level one, Citizen,” said Tisarwat. “Except maybe right here, but that would be very inconvenient for Citizen Emer’s customers, or anyone who walks through here.” Which was nearly everyone in the Undergarden. “So maybe when this good citizen and I”—she gestured toward the person in front of her—“visit Administration today, after we talk here, we’ll let them know that repairing the lifts needs to be a priority.”
Silence. People had begun to come, slowly, cautiously, out of the shop and into the tiny, makeshift concourse. Now one of them said, “The way we usually do this sort of thing, Lieutenant, is we all sit down, and whoever is speaking stands up.” In a tone that was almost a challenge. “We leave the bench for those who can’t sit on the ground.”
Tisarwat looked down at the bench she was standing on. Looked out at the people before her—a good fifty or sixty, and more still coming out of the tea shop. “Right,” she said. “Then I’ll get down.”
As Sirix and I returned to the house, Fleet Captain Uemi’s message reached Mercy of Kalr. Medic was on watch. “All respect to Fleet Captain Breq,” came the words into Medic’s ear. “Does she desire some sort of firsthand or personal information? I assure you that I was the only person on Sword of Inil to spend more than a few minutes on Omaugh.”
Medic, unlike Seivarden or Ekalu, understood the import of the questions I had been asking of Fleet Captain Uemi. And so she was horrified rather than puzzled when she spoke the reply I’d left, in case the answers to my questions had been what they were. “Fleet Captain Breq begs Fleet Captain Uemi’s very generous indulgence and would like to know if Fleet Captain Uemi is feeling quite entirely herself lately.”
I didn’t expect a reply to that, and never did receive one.
15
Fosyf’s servants spoke quite freely in the presence of my silent and expressionless Kalrs. Raughd had not, in fact, gone immediately to her mother, as she had threatened, but ordered a servant to pack her things and fly her to the elevator that would take her upwell, to a shuttle that would bring her to Athoek Station.
Most of the servants did not like me, and said so outside the house where we were staying, or in the kitchen of the main building, where Five and Six went on various errands. I was arrogant and cold. The humming would drive anyone to distraction, and I was lucky my personal attendants were ancillaries (that always gave Five and Eight a little frisson of satisfaction) who didn’t care about such things. My bringing Sirix Odela here could be nothing but a calculated insult—they knew who she was, knew her history. And I had been cruel to the daughter of the house. None of them knew exactly what had happened, but they understood the outlines of it.
Some of the servants went silent hearing such opinions expressed, their faces nearly masks, the twitch of an eyebrow or the corner of a mouth betraying what they’d have liked to say. A few of the more forthcoming pointed out (very quietly) that Raughd herself had a history of cruelty, of rages when she didn’t get what she wanted. Like her mother that way, muttered one of the dissenters, where only Kalr Five could hear it.
“The nurse left when Raughd was only three,” Five told Eight, while I was out on one of my walks and Sirix still slept. “Couldn’t take the mother any longer.”
“Where were the other parents?” asked Eight.
“Oh, the mother wouldn’t have any other parents. Or they wouldn’t have her. The daughter of the house is a clone. She’s meant to be exactly like the mother. And hears about it when she isn’t, I gather. That’s why they feel so sorry for her, some of them.”
“The mother doesn’t like children very much, does she?” observed Eight, who had noticed that the household’s children were kept well away from Fosyf and her guests.
“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.”
Two days after she’d left, Raughd was back. When she’d arrived at the foot of the elevator, she hadn’t been allowed to board. She’d insisted that she always had permission to travel to the station, but in vain. She was not on the list, did not have a permit, and her messages to the station administrator went unanswered. Citizen Piat was similarly unresponsive. Security arrived, suggested with extreme courtesy and deference that perhaps Raughd might want to return to the house by the lake.
Somewhat surprisingly, that was exactly what she’d done. I would have guessed she’d have stayed in the city at the foot of the elevator, where surely she’d have found company for the sort of games she enjoyed, but instead she returned to the mountains.
She arrived in the middle of the night. Just before breakfast, while the account of her fruitless attempt to leave the planet was only just beginning to reach the servants outside the kitchen in the main building, Raughd ordered her personal attendant to go to Fosyf as soon as she woke and demand a meeting. Most of the kitchen servants didn’t like Raughd’s personal attendant much—she derived, they felt, a bit too much satisfaction from her status as the personal servant of the daughter of the house. Still (one assistant cook said to another, in the hearing of Kalr Five), her worst enemies would not have wished to force her to confront Fosyf Denche with such a message.
The subsequent meeting was private. Which in that household meant in earshot of only three or four servants. Or, when Fosyf shouted, half a dozen. And shout she did. This entire situation was of Raughd’s making. In attempting to remedy it, she had only made it worse, had set out to make me an ally but through her own ineptness had made me an enemy instead. It was no wonder I had turned Raughd down flat, inadequate and worthless as she was. Fosyf was ashamed to admit that they had even the slightest relationship to each other. Raughd had clearly also mishandled Station Administrator Celar. Fosyf herself would never have made such mistakes, and clearly there had been some sort of flaw in the cloning process because no one with Fosyf’s DNA could possibly be such a useless waste of food and air. One word, one breath from Raughd in protest of these obvious truths, and she would be cast out of the house. There was time yet to grow a new, better heir. Hearing this, Raughd did not protest, but returned, silent, to her room.
Just before lunch, as I was leaving my own room in our smaller house, Raughd’s personal attendant walked into the middle of the main kitchen and stood, silent and trembling, her gaze fixed, off somewhere distant and overhead. Eight was there seeing after something for Sirix. At first no one noticed the attendant, everyone was working busily on getting the last of the food prepared, but after a few moments one of the assistant cooks looked up, saw the attendant standing there shaking, and gave a loud gasp. “The honey!” the assistant cook cried. “Where’s the honey?”