That could pose a problem, far enough into the future. “We’ll see what we can do about that, if anything. Meantime, I suggest you continue as you have been—keeping calm, keeping order. We should let people know that the gates that are closed are down for the foreseeable future. And that travel through the remaining gates is too dangerous to allow.”

“Citizen Fosyf won’t like that! Or any of the other growers. By the end of the month there’ll be tonnes of top-grade handpicked Daughter of Fishes with nowhere to go. And that’s only Fosyf’s bit.”

“Well.” I smiled blandly. “At least we’ll all have very good tea to drink for the next long while.”

It was too late to visit Citizen Basnaaid with any sort of courtesy. And there were things I wanted to know that had not been in the information I’d received at Omaugh Palace. Politics from before an annexation were considered irrelevant, any old divisions wiped away by the arrival of civilization. Anything remaining—languages, perhaps, or art of some kind—might be preserved as quaint museum displays, but of course never figured into official records. Outside this system, Athoek looked like any other Radchaai system. Uniform. Wholly civilized. Inside it, you could see it wasn’t, if you looked—if you were forced to acknowledge it. But it was always a balancing act between the presumed complete success of the annexation and the need to deal with the ways in which that annexation had, perhaps, not been entirely complete, and one of the ways to achieve that balance was by ignoring what one didn’t have to see.

Station would know things. I’d best have a chat with Station anyway, best put myself in its good graces. A ship or station AI couldn’t, strictly speaking, do anything to oppose me, but I knew from very personal experience how much easier life was when one liked you, and wanted to help.

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