Ally

by Karen Traviss

  “Gethes don’t learn, do they, Eddie?”

  “We never seem to.” The wess’har can take out one of our warships with ten-thousand-year-old tech. The Eqbas can scour whole planets. “And we don’t have long to change that.”

  “Are you all right, Eddie?”

  Yeah, I’m fine for a man who’s watching galactic war unfolding. “Never better, doll.”

  “We know this is hard for you. You’re doing very well for a human.”

  Talking squid. Talking meerkats. Talking spiders. Seahorse aliens with two voices and two dicks. And they’re the normal ones compared to Shan and her menagerie.

  “I try,” said Eddie, and gestured to her for his handheld. “For a monkey boy, I’m not doing so bad.”

  The two crazy bitches, Shan and Helen, should have been dead by now, of course, and they weren’t—Helen Marchant because she’d been on ice for the best part of seventy years, and Shan because her c’naatat parasite wouldn’t let her die. Jesus, it was so easy to think that now. But once he’d seen one immortal, he’d seen them all.

  Marchant—small-boned, bobbed light brown hair—was in full flood, addressing a rally on population control.

  “We’ll go to war over oil, over water, over fish stocks and over any religious or political ideology you care to name.” She had that quietly reasonable tone and benign, rarely blinking gaze of all really dangerous demagogues. “But we won’t fight to preserve the planet. It’s all we’ve got—and that has to be worth military action.”

  Eddie responded with the frustration of a journalist who hadn’t had a crack at a ripe interviewee. “You’re going to get all the military intervention you want, doll,” he muttered. “In about twenty-nine years, when the Eqbas show up with a frigging task force.”

  But Helen Marchant was talking about here and now—as it applied to Earth, anyway—and she was urging the Pacific Rim States to intervene to stop clearance of restored forests for human use.

  Earth, short of land and swamped by inexorably rising seas, needed the space for people, which it was still producing at a brisk rate despite all the evidence that it was a bad idea. The wess’har—whether the militarized Eqbas or the agrarian Wess’ej variety—didn’t give a shit about humans. Marchant would get on with them just fine, if she was still alive when they reached Earth. They could purge the planet together.

  “Why don’t you interview her?” asked Giyadas.

  Marchant was 25 light-years away. It was definitely a case of doing it down the line. “Because everyone else has. What could I add?”

  “You know a lot more than she does. You could ask her better questions.”

  “You really have got a journo’s brain in that little head of yours, haven’t you?” Giyadas was ferociously smart. Perhaps all wess’har kids were, but he didn’t have that much contact with the rest of them, and he chose—yes, almost like a doting dad—to think of her as exceptional. “Besides, I can’t call her up any time I want to. The UN is still controlling access to the ITX link.”

  “Controlling who hears things doesn’t change what’s said. Gethes need to learn that.”

  “Well, seeing as we had to scrape up chunks of Actaeon last time we pissed off the wess’har, everyone’s understandably cautious.”

  “Do you miss your friends?”

  Damn, he’d almost forgotten Actaeon. Sometimes the memory ambushed him. Barry Yung, Malcolm Okurt. They were nice blokes one minute and dead naval officers the next. The wess’har had a very clean sense of reprisal. Actaeon, the best technology that Earth could manage, was fragmented by three missiles whose design was ten thousand years old.

  Our best is their equivalent of a stone axe.

  “I didn’t know them well enough to really miss them,” said Eddie. “But I remember them, and I still think it’s a bad thing to die so far from home.”

  “I agree.” Giyadas ran spidery, multijointed fingers across the soft fabric keyboard and screen that made up Eddie’s edit suite on the road. “Everyone should return to the cycle of life in the place where they were born.”

  “Good point…Giyadas, what are you doing with that?”

  “Making a record.”

  She wasn’t playing with his kit. She was editing. She really was. He was fascinated to see what she might make of the footage the bee cam had recorded on Umeh.

  “What have you done, then, doll? Show me.”

  She held the screen between her fingertips as if she was showing off clean linen. Eddie leaned forward and touched the icon to roll the footage. It was the attack on the Maritime Fringe armored column as it rolled over the border into the Northern Assembly, jarringly disjointed and—he thought—full of flash frames. It ran for exactly one minute. It was one short clip after the next with no apparent judgment exercised on shots or sequences. It was chronological, though, so she could certainly follow a time code.

  “That’s very good,” he said. Well, she’d mastered the technology even if the visual grammar left a lot to be desired. Not bad for a little kid. “Want me to show you how we’d do it?”

  “Like this?” she said.

  Giyadas laid the screen back down on the table and began working her fingertips over the surface again at high speed. She was utterly fixed on it. Her pupils snapped open and closed, flower to crosshairs and back again, and her head tilted to get the best focus. She seemed all movement; wess’har were usually remarkable for their lack of fidgeting. Their controlled motion could look glacial to a human, even more so when they went into that freeze reaction when startled. Eventually she paused.

  “This is how humans see the world,” she said gravely. “Look. Am I right, Eddie?”

  It certainly wasn’t how Eddie would have cut it.

  She’d spliced together a perfectly lyrical sequence that showed none of the carnage—the body parts and isenj rushing for cover—but only the aerial shots, explosions and billowing clouds of dust and flame. At first he thought she’d spotted that some images wouldn’t be shown because they were too graphic. It was a sensitivity that came into fashion and waned again from time to time. He hadn’t explained it to her; but she’d seen enough somehow to know that what made it to air was a fraction of what was shot.

  “Yes, we have to be selective sometimes,” he said. Was there anything about her other than her size that made her different from an adult wess’har? He was damned if he could see it. “Blood and guts upset the viewers.”

  “You don’t understand.” It was a comment, not a rebuke. “I meant that gethes don’t see beings involved in these acts. When you look at something, you remove all that doesn’t affect you. You see what you need and feel, nothing else. You see nobody else.”

  Giyadas had a way of slapping him down without intending to. She had that external perspective that he believed all journalists needed, while he now struggled to maintain his own professional distance as he veered between intensely partisan feelings and brief forays back into detachment. But Giyadas really could stand outside humanity: she was an alien.

  Eddie paused and took the verdict like a man. He was used to it. “Do we do anything right, doll?”

  “I don’t know if you’re wrong or right, only that you’re different, and you don’t behave the way we do, and we choose not to do what you do.”

  “Is there any point to Esganikan restoring Earth, then, if humans can’t behave right?” At times a voice told him he was insane to attach any importance to the world view of a child, but most of the time the other inner voice said that this was the raw wess’har heart, and a bloody good guide to their attitudes. The adults would have said exactly the same thing; unfiltered, undiplomatic, and blisteringly honest. He thought of the isenj and Esganikan’s view of them as numbers to be reduced. “I know the Eqbas aren’t quite the same as you, but they’re still wess’har. Would you wipe us out?”

  “Not all of you.”

  “That’s nice to know.”

  “The woman you called the cow sees the world as we do. Shan does to
o. There seem to be many.”

  “How would you choose? Who’s guilty? Who’s not?”

  Giyadas tilted her head to one side very slowly as if trying to work something out. “Who lives extravagantly with no thought of balance? Who kills other beings without provocation? Who eats carrion?”

  “Probably a few billion people.”

  “Then they’ll answer to the Eqbas. As well as those who let the gethes contaminate Ouzhari.”

  Eddie always felt like a kid edging across a frozen pond at this stage, desperate for the adventure but dreading what might happen. “They might be very old people by the time the Eqbas get there. Is it worth punishing them?”

  “What difference does age make?”

  No statute of limitation on war crimes, then: that was much the same as human morality. He felt a slight cracking and the threat of breath-stopping icy water. “Okay, Rayat and Lindsay set the cobalt bombs. Why are the people who authorized it guilty too? Wess’har logic says that they didn’t carry out the act. Intent doesn’t matter.”

  “Does Rayat have orders? Like Ade? Orders he has to follow?”

  Eddie considered what he knew of spooks. “Yes. More or less.”

  “Then the person giving the orders knew that, and so is guilty.”

  Eddie pondered the thought process. He’d moved from cracking ice to a maze from which he might not find his way out. Wess’har seemed to regard those given orders as mere buttons to be pushed, and yet they also regarded following bad orders—orders they considered immoral—as worse than giving them, because of the redemptive chance to refuse, and prevent the act.

  And yet they didn’t hold the Royal Marines responsible for helping Lindsay transport the bombs to Bezer’ej. They hadn’t taken part in setting them, and—Barencoin had told him—they’d reminded her that nuking Ouzhari wasn’t within the rules of engagement.

  Giyadas stared at him, pupils snapping. Eddie stared back, not quite seeing her.

  Then it dawned on him: responsibility was about proximity. It wasn’t just about breaking the chain of events.

  “So, the government that had Actaeon carry nuclear weapons wasn’t responsible.”

  She considered that for a second. “No. Where would this end if it was? All humans would be responsible. And all humans don’t have the ability to prevent this. There’s always a line to draw.”

  “Do you understand why we don’t get it?”

  “I know you don’t think like us.”

  “We’re going to have to learn.”

  “We might try to think like you, too,” said Giyadas. “But as we’ve made up our minds about what we think is the right way for us to behave, that would be no use.”

  She gave him a very adult nod and walked off, every inch the matriarch she would be one day. Just when he thought he’d nailed the wess’har mindset, there was one final twist that jerked it out of his reach again. Face it, Monkey Boy, we’re always going to be wrong unless we behave like they do. They didn’t even agree with the Eqbas side of the family some of the time. He could see that Earth’s diplomats were going to crash and burn on the first day.

  Shan thought a lot like a wess’har long before she’d been pumped full of their DNA, even if she didn’t hold with their line on guilt. No wonder she liked it here. She wasn’t an alien like she’d been on Earth. He sat back in the makeshift seat he’d built out of crates and suddenly understood why Shan had spent so much time building a sofa 150 trillion light-years from home. He scrolled back to the first package Giyadas had edited, running his fingertip over the reactive pigment embedded in the smartfabric, and replayed the sequence.

  It was a moving screen print, just like the marines’ chameleon camouflage battledress that detected the terrain and mimicked it. Once, the technology had provided trivial but fascinating shirts that played movies. Like the organic computers grown into the marines’ palms, and the implants that gave them head-up displays in their eyes, it was all technology from the entertainment industry.

  As are we all: a distant diversion for the folks back home, aliens in your living room.

  Eddie watched.

  The sequence was a glimpse into the wess’har mind. Giyadas had cut the shots together scrupulously: every angle, every scene, every separate shot was included in some form, even if it was wobbly and canted. It was a representative sample of what the Eqbas fighter’s on-board cam had recorded during the bombing run. The steady shots had been cut proportionally too: effectively, nothing had been omitted. Wess’har had a literal eye. They saw the world as it was.

  “We’re fucked,” he said aloud. “Fucked, fucked, fucked.”

  Eddie got up and walked through the maze of interconnecting passages that made up Nevyan’s home and led to the terraced walkway circling the caldera that housed F’nar. The wess’har’s warren-dwelling heritage was visible in the way they’d cut into the natural landscape, lining the bowl of the dead volcano with row upon row of terraces and tunneled homes. That alone was spectacular enough; but the most extraordinary aspect of the city was the uniform coating of nacre that covered every smooth surface. Ashlars, paths, doors and the roofs of the small buildings in the basin were all covered in the natural pearl fecal deposits laid by the surprisingly drab tem flies that swarmed in hot weather.

  It was, as Shan put it, only insect shit. But it was exquisite and magical, and there was never a day that Eddie didn’t find it mesmerizing. The city changed constantly as the light varied: it was an iconic view, a studio backdrop, a souvenir shot, the essence of F’nar. Just as Surang on Eqbas Vorhi was a billowing cityscape of sinuous, almost organic-looking buildings like an outcrop of exotic fungi, F’nar was a wedding cake in a near desert.

  Shit, I even see in headlines. Another gulf.

  He wa five light-years from the Eqbas homeworld and twenty-five from his own. He thought of Surang, and wondered how he could ever go back to Earth now when there were so many new things to be seen and discovered closer to—

  Home. Yes, home.

  The thought didn’t shock him half as much as he expected.

  The Temporary City, Bezer’ej

  Shan stood opposite Rayat. She folded her arms, feet slightly spread, the width of the table between them.

  “Okay, Superintendent.” Rayat was annoyingly calm, but if he thought he was going to provoke her, he had another thing coming. “Decided my fate yet? Experimental subject for the removal of c’naatat, or grenade practice?”

  “Don’t piss me about,” she said. She never thought she could tire of anger, but she very nearly had. “I don’t suppose you recall seeing any infected bezeri during your stay down below, do you?”

  She caught a whiff of acid. Rayat had reacted; it was the scent equivalent of a surprised flinch. He might have been posed for a poker match, but he didn’t know how to control his skin chemistry like Shan did. Whatever scrap of her he’d inherited with c’naatat, he hadn’t mastered that one yet.

  “I take it you found one, then.”

  “Possibly.”

  “I took a lot of care not to contaminate them. The only tissue contact either Lindsay or I had was with a cadaver.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “I introduced some of its mantle tissue into open wounds to encourage c’naatat to develop bioluminescence for signaling.” Rayat held out his hand to Shan as if offering to shake it: green light danced under the skin. Shan had her facial muscles locked into I-don-t-give-a-shit, but her hands responded whether she wanted them to or not. Green light sparkled in her fingers, making them look backlit as they rested on her sleeve. She glanced at them and they stopped. It troubled her that she didn’t know why they did it or how she could control it consistently. “How did you get your lights, Superintendent?”

  That was a mystery too. She hated mysteries. “Free with a dose of seawater, I expect.”

  “Extraordinary, bezeri signaling. Photophores and light-producing cells combined. Bright colors even in daylight. You can imagine the applications i
n bioengineering—”

  “That’s fascinating, but we’ve got a bezeri strolling around on dry land now.” She managed to resist the bait. He was slipping if he thought he could rile her by pressing the old EnHaz buttons. “Anything you want to tell me?”

  “Well, Superintendent, if it’s strolling, it’s probably Lindsay Neville.”

  “Aras said it was large and shapeless as far as he could see.”

  “She’s let herself go a little.”

  “Look, maybe you get a hard on from verbal fencing, sunshine, but it doesn’t do a thing for me. What happened?”

  Shan didn’t move a muscle, and she didn’t blink. She counted to six before Rayat leaned back slightly and looked away, but it might have been a maneuver rather than a concession. Rayat was as much of a gamesman as she was.

  “Last time I saw Lin, she was still humanoid in shape, but composed of gelatinous tissue,” he said. “Human-shaped bezeri.”

  “How come you’re still a Rayat-shaped arsehole?”

  “You know c’naatat doesn’t produce the same result twice. Look at you and your…family, for a start.” He gave the impression of being genuinely fascinated by it. “Are you aware of toxoplasma gondii? Protozoan that alters rodent behavior and makes them easier prey so it can continue its reproductive cycle in predators.”

  “I am,” Shan said. “And, yes, I’ve wondered if c’naatat influences me. We all have. So Lin wants to be a bezeri. Or c’naatat wants bezeri to take up hiking. Or maybe both. Right now all I want to do is to gauge the size of the problem. You say there’s forty-four bezeri left, one complete family and the rest too old to breed. Right?”

  “Correct.”

  “So many of those are now carrying c’naatat?”

  “When I got out, none of them were.”

  Shan leaned a fraction closer. “Aras has had contact with bezeri for centuries, and they never picked it up from him, and they never got it from me, either, so they’re not easy to infect. So what’s Lindsay been up to?”

  “She seems to feel she has to be their savior to atone for killing so many of them. Their numbers won’t ever recover now. They have no breeding population.”