Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [317]
“A child who steals the cloak of some beloved other, to smell at night . . . they take away the choice to wear the cloak, but with respect, with a surfeit of respect.
“Other thefts, though, do not have even respect to mitigate them.
“To kill . . . not in war or defence, but to . . . murder . . . is to have such disrespect, such utter disrespect, that you take not only the choice of whether to live or die that moment . . . but every other choice for all of time that might be made. Choices beget choices . . . if they had been allowed their choice to live, they might have chosen to hunt for fish in a salt-swamp, or to play dice, or to tan hides, to write poesy or cook stew . . . and all those choices are taken from them in that one theft.
“That is choice-theft in the highest degree. But all choice-thefts steal from the future as well as the present.
“Yagharek’s was a heinous . . . a terrible forgetting. Theft in the second degree.”
“What did he do?” shouted Isaac, and Lin woke with a flutter of hands and a nervous twitching.
Kar’uchai spoke dispassionately.
“You would call it rape.”
Oh, I would call it rape, would I? thought Isaac in a molten, raging sneer; but the torrent of livid contempt was not enough to drown his horror.
I would call it rape.
Isaac could not but imagine. Immediately.
The act itself, of course, though that was a vague and nebulous brutality in his mind (did he beat her? Hold her down? Where was she? Did she curse and fight back?). What he saw most clearly, immediately, were all the vistas, the avenues of choice that Yagharek had stolen. Fleetingly, Isaac glimpsed the denied possibilities.
The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then . . . what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child?
The choice to look at Yagharek with respect?
Isaac’s mouth worked and Kar’uchai spoke again.
“It was my choice he stole.”
It took a few seconds, a ludicrously long time, for Isaac to understand what Kar’uchai meant. Then he gasped and stared at her, seeing for the first time the slight swell of her ornamental breasts, as useless as bird-of-paradise plumage. He struggled for something to say, but he did not know what he felt: there was nothing solid for words to express.
He murmured some appallingly loose apology, some solicitation.
“I thought you were . . . the garuda magister . . . or the militia, or something,” he said.
“We have none,” she replied.
“Yag . . . a fucking rapist,” he hissed, and she clucked.
“He stole choice,” she said flatly.
“He raped you,” he said, and instantly Kar’uchai clucked again.
“He stole my choice,” she said. She was not expanding on his words, Isaac realized: she was correcting him. “You cannot translate into your jurisprudence, Grimneb’lin,” she said. She seemed annoyed.
Isaac tried to speak, shook his head miserably, stared at her and again saw the crime committed, behind his eyes.
“You cannot translate, Grimneb’lin,” Kar’uchai repeated. “Stop. I can see . . . all the texts of your city’s laws and morals that I have read . . . in you.” Her tone sounded monotonous to him. The emotion in the pauses and cadences of her voice was opaque.
“I was not violated or ravaged, Grimneb’lin. I am not abused or defiled . . . or ravished or spoiled. You would call his actions rape, but I do not: that tells me nothing. He stole my choice, and that is why he was . . . judged. It was severe . . . the last sanction but one . . . There are many choice-thefts less heinous than his, and only a few more so . . . And there are others that are judged equal . . . many of those are actions utterly unlike Yagharek’s. Some, you would not deem crimes at all.
“The actions vary: the crime . . . is the theft of choice. Your magisters