I outlive everyone. My first isan, my human friends, my wess’har neighbors. And these rats.
It never got any easier.
He glanced up at the divided cage that housed the rat colony. Several small whiskered faces were staring at him. One rat had its paw flat on the softglass side of the cage, and it looked so much like a human hand that Aras expected the animal to gesture to him.
Black would recover if I gave him a little of my blood.
But it was wrong, and unnatural, and fraught with consequences; not ’least for Black, living forever while his comrades died, deprived of mate and offspring. It was a lonely life sentence. Aras had succumbed once and taken that step to save Shan’s life. Would he have done it again so that the bezeri could have their penance from Lindsay and Rayat? He came close. Ade had made the choice in the end. It was a decision you could take in a second and regret—or not—forever.
As soon as he could, he’d return to Bezer’ej and find the remnant of the bezeri. He had to know what was happening there. After five hundred years, the world was still part of him.
Black stirred and Aras ran his fingers over the rat’s head. Eventually, Black’s flanks stopped heaving and he gave a little twitch, eyes still half open. Aras could feel a fluttering heartbeat and then nothing, and for a while he pondered the line between life and death and found it harder to define than ever. When he looked up, White—Black’s constant companion—had thrust his muzzle through the grid of plastic that formed the cage door.
The rat knew what had happened to his friend. Aras had no idea how to communicate with a rat, but he assumed they grieved, grieving being part of the instinct of any communal animal. All creatures responded to the death of their offspring or the comrades on whom they depended; it was a necessary reaction, the organism’s way of ensuring that essential bonds were maintained. Why humans thought it was a spiritual act peculiar to them, Aras had never understood. They had no idea about the nature of emotions and brain chemistry at all.
I miss Shan.
She had been away less than a day. But she was coming back, and he reminded himself how it had felt to think she was dead. The longing eased a little. He wondered if he was not so much missing her as regretting the loss of his exclusive relationship with her. But that was human. It was…jealousy.
You wanted a housebrother badly. You wanted a normal wess’har life again— isan, housebrothers, children. You can’t have children, but you have everything else. Be grateful.
Aras took Black’s corpse in his hands and laid it on the table. The he pulled on his tunic and took his tilgir from the hook on the wall.
The bluff outside the city was a hard climb or a long walk, and Aras opted for the walk because it was easier with tools in his belt and a dead rat in his pocket. At the top of the lava cliff, the cairn of pearl-coated rocks that Ade had built as a memorial for Shan still stood intact. Shan didn’t seem to mind seeing it there, although it must have been strange to gaze upon your own headstone. Aras surveyed the winter landscape for a few minutes, noting the fine haze of low-growing foliage that had sprung up after the rain, and then made his way up the long steep incline that wound its way up to the top.
He hadn’t expected to run into Nevyan at the summit.
The young matriarch knelt on her heels, hands clasped in her lap as she contemplated the view.
“I didn’t know you came here,” said Aras.
Nevyan looked up at him. “I followed Ade Bennett here once. The view is soothing. Why have you come?”
“I have to bury someone.” Aras took Black’s body from his pocket and cupped it in his hands. The little animal felt heavier than he had been in life. “One of the rats has died.”
“Are the others upset?”
“I think so.”
“Can you comfort them?”
“I don’t know how.”
Nevyan held out her hands to take Black while Aras drew his tilgir to hack a shallow grave in the thin layer of soil. A srebil might scavenge the rat’s body, alien though its biochemistry was. Few humans liked the idea of disposal by predation, but it was the wess’har way. Did srebil’ve know how to dig? Aras knew they had long, hard proboscises and single sharp claws, so they would find a way.
Do I tell Nevyan about Lindsay and Rayat?
Aras decided to stay silent. He wasn’t deceiving her or even concealing the fact. It was simply irrelevant; she could do nothing, and it was no threat to her. The problem was one for Esganikan to consider and deal with.
“Shan surprises me,” said Nevyan.
“How?” Aras judged the depth of the tiny grave, even smaller than the one he had dug on Bezer’ej for Lindsay Neville’s baby son. “You seem anxious.”
“I didn’t expect her to share the Eqbas view of interference.”
“Shan believes she has to act. Targassat does say that those having choices must make them.”
Nevyan turned her head slowly. She was very much Mestin’s daughter, but he could see the echo of her father in her too, even though she had the genes of all of Mestin’s husbands. “I expected her to be like us because she’s my friend. Perhaps that was naive.”
“You mean that you like what’s like yourself.”
“I thought she chose us because she agreed with us.”
Did she have that choice? I infected her. She thought she had to stay, and so did I. “It’s hard to tell with humans. They tend to comply with their social group. That isn’t quite the same as consensus.”
“But she believes in ecological balance. Every decision she’s ever made has been based on that. She put it before her own life.”
Aras laid Black in the grave. The body was cool and growing rigid now. Aras wanted to know what a rat thought and how it saw the world and those who persecuted its kind, but he didn’t know how he might discover that. He covered the body with soil and pebbles as carefully as he could and stood back to consider the nature of death again.
“Shan believes that walking away is not the way to deal with problems,” he said. “She intervenes.”
“But as wess’har we confront threats to ourselves and others. We do not walk away.”
“But we do as Targassat advised. We don’t seek out wrongs to put them right, we just respond to pleas. Our forebears left Eqbas Vorhi because they disliked interventionist policies, but we didn’t actually improve the universe a great deal by doing that. We just salved our consciences.”
Nevyan now smelled deeply, acidly unhappy. The warm powdery scent of contentment that she normally exuded these days had vanished. Unlike Shan, she wasn’t able to suppress her scent signals. It wasn’t surprising she was under stress; she was very young, the dominant matriarch due to an accidental burst of dominance hormone—of jask—when she heard Shan was dead. She had inadvertently displaced her mother in the pecking order of isan’ve, but the fact that Shan had survived couldn’t alter what had happened. Nevyan, as Ade put it, had the ball. And she had summoned the Eqbas to help deal with the human threat.
And now she was regretting it, Aras suspected. Events were overtaking her. It was a feeling he found all too familiar.
“Do you resent Shan?” he asked.
“No.”
“But you’re concerned that she seems to be friendly with Esganikan Gai.”
“I fear losing my friend again, but she will be more than dead this time. She’ll be an instrument of enforced ideology.”
“And you want her to adopt the ideology of Targassat. Of non-intervention.” Aras enjoyed these logic loops. He’d spent five hundred years in exile, more than three hundred of them entirely on his own except for the occasional encounter with bezeri. He’d had plenty of time to think himself in circles. “Your own enforcement of ideology, in fact.”
“I can’t fault your argument.”
“You’re afraid of the Eqbas and you’re worried that Shan will return to Earth with them.”
“Yes.”
“Shan won’t leave me. I know that now. And s
he feels responsibility for the fate of her homeworld much as I still feel for Bezer’ej. Neither of us is good at walking away.”
“Preventing Earth being a threat is one thing. Adjusting its environment is another entirely.”
“But they requested it. Even Targassat would have agreed that the planet is in need of adjustment.”
Nevyan got to her feet and dusted down her opalescent white dhren, the traditional isan’s robe that Shan declined to wear. “I suspect I feel afraid because Giyadas is interested in Shan’s ideas. We’ve maintained our position for ten thousand years and change is alarming.”
“F’nar is just one city. And we can handle new ideas.”
“Tell me, Aras. Have I made a serious mistake?”
The rest of Wess’ej took no part in relations with aliens, although their military backing was there if Nevyan called for it. They were a small population—too small to handle peacekeeping across the system indefinitely and deal with humans once and for all.
“I don’t think you had any other choice,” said Aras.
They set off down the slope. Life had changed out of all recognition for both of them since he had been the custodian of the bezeri and Nevyan’s mother Mestin had been garrison commander of Bezer’ej.
But neither Matriarch would be around when the consequences of the Eqbas expansion into new systems were felt. That would be many, many years in the future.
He’d still be here, though. And so would Nevyan’s descendants.
Umeh Station: plant and machinery level
The thrum of the generator was hypnotic.
Shan drifted in a pleasant drowsy haze and wondered how a piece of machinery could produce such a soothing white noise effect. Somehow it erased all her worries, and there were a lot of them jostling for attention lately.
But maybe it was Ade’s influence, the simple normality of a male of her own species. She rested her chin on the top of his head, enjoying the brushlike sensation of short hair and the scent of male skin and lemon soap. She couldn’t get up because he’d wrapped himself around her, and she didn’t really want to move anyway.
“Don’t fall asleep,” she said. “I need to go to the toilet.”
“Not falling asleep…”
“Are.”
“I’m comfortable, ’s’ all…”
“Yeah.” He was playing with the ring on her finger, turning it slowly around her knuckle. That’s how he copes. He focuses on normal things. If he can’t find any, he creates them. “It is, isn’t it?”
Ade reminded her that she was human. However strongly she was bonded to Aras, however enjoyable she found his body, Ade was exactly what she had evolved to want; a human male. Everything in her that was still human said yes, this is right, this is what you should be doing. She found him comfortable in every sense of the word. He stopped fidgeting with the ring and she put her hand on his biceps. Human skin felt hotter than a wess’har’s, warm satin rather than cool delicate suede. She hoped she wouldn’t see Aras any differently now.
“Look at your hands,” Ade whispered.
“Uh?”
“Hands.”
She opened her eyes and focused. Violet and blue lights rippled in her skin and made her fingers appear backlit. It was only when she moved her hand that she realized light was also coming from the tattoo on his upper arm. The lines of pigment seemed to float in a violet glow. She’d seen the effect before; Ade had tattoos in some intriguing places.
He twisted his arm to peer at it. “Why does it do that?”
“No idea. Communicating, maybe.” She thought of the illuminated bulkhead display in Esganikan’s ship, and how her hands had flared into light when she touched it as if somehow answering it. “Funny how it gravitates towards your tattoos and not your hands.”
“What’s it saying?”
“Possibly nothing. Might just be a reflex.”
“See, I asked Nevyan if c’naatat could think. And she didn’t seem to want to know if it did. I do.”
Shan tried to think of her parasite as bacteria. If she started ascribing sentience to it, then it said things like tapeworm and fetus to her. She didn’t like the idea of either. That was invasion, violation, possession.
“One way or the other, it makes optimal choices. And some bloody weird ones.”
Ade settled his head back on her chest. “Does it scare you wondering what it’s going to do next?”
“It used to. Sometimes it tries something out and then removes it. Aras said he had vestigial wings once.”
“No shit?”
“Seriously.”
“Jesus. A glow-in-the-dark dick doesn’t seem too bad by comparison.”
“It even seems to give you what you want, sometimes.”
“I never wanted landing lights.”
“It totally redesigned Aras. Maybe he felt more at home being human.”
“He was stuck with a bunch of humans. He likes to belong.”
“He was stuck with the bezeri, but he never turned into a squid.”
Ade appeared to ponder that for a while. She could see him frowning slightly. C’naatat had given her wess’har vision; she saw in very low light and there were blues in her spectrum that she had never seen before as a human, as well as ultraviolet. Sometimes she could see infrared. And she wasn’t aware of switching between modes. It just…happened. She didn’t like her body doing things without her consent. She’d have to work out how to control it.
“How do we make this work?” Ade asked.
“What?”
“When we go home. Me and Aras. You.”
Yes, she’d thought about it. Her brain said rota and that appalled her. “How do you want it to work?”
“Sundays off?”
“Ha bloody ha. I’m sure we’ll think of something.”
“And you don’t have to suppress your scent.”
“Is this a list?”
“Sort of. You don’t need to hide what you feel. Not with me and Aras, anyway. We can work it out for ourselves.”
“Go on.”
“And don’t feel you owe me anything, Boss.”
She knew she ought to be angry with him. Something kept tapping her on the shoulder and reminding her that he’d handed over c’naatat and that she had to fret about it. Another part of her brain said so what—you’ll deal with it.
Of course she owed him something. If she hadn’t head-butted him, he wouldn’t have caught the bloody thing. And he made her feel as good about herself as she ever had. She owed him a lot.
“Do you have to call me Boss?”
“Guv’nor?”
“I don’t want to be Superintendent Frankland when I’m on my back, to be honest.”
“Okay, Mrs. Bennett.” He raised his head and gave her a noisily enthusiastic kiss. “And I bet you don’t like that name, either.”
“Fine by me,” she said. Yes, it was. “No problem at all.”
Ade made a satisfied rumble in his throat and rolled over, pulling her into his side. Something itched at the back of her mind. It felt almost like the Suppressed Briefing she’d been given three years ago, anamnesis chemically locked out of reach of her conscious mind until triggered by events. Now others’ headline memories sometimes intruded on her own recollections: Aras’s time as a prisoner of the isenj, Ade’s brutal father, his comrade Dave getting shot beside him and the warm splash of greasy brain tissue on his face as if it were her own skin. It was impossible to know anyone better than that. Maybe that was what was making her more tolerant of Ade and Aras right now; she lived out the worst parts of their lives.
Would I have been a more sympathetic copper if I’d lived criminals’ lives? Whoa, forget that. Crime, not motivation. Think of the victims. Dead’s dead, raped is raped, and if your assailant puts you in a coma, his apology won’t revive you. Outcomes, like the wess’har say. Only outcomes.
So it didn’t matter what Ade or Aras had done if c’naatat was confined to Bezer’ej, and the bezeri had what they
wanted.
Why can’t I actually remember being an isenj or any of the other hosts this bloody thing has been through?
Ade’s breathing settled into the slow rhythm of sleep, and the generator’s murmur washed away the day. Shan wondered what Eddie was up to and what Esganikan was going to do when the rest of the isenj balked at the idea of reducing their population, as they surely would.
Bloody lights. She stared at her glowing hand in increasing defocus. The wreathed globe tattoo on Ade’s arm flickered a response to it.
Could be worse.
Could be…worse.
Umeh Station vanished. She found herself having a conversation with Baz-the-Bastard, dead for decades, an old colleague. He watched her bite the end off the soya-dog.
“Shan, you got to do it gently,” he said. “This is why you never get lucky. No technique.”
“Piss off,” she murmured. For some reason it was daytime Reading Metro outside the unmarked squad car but the interior was in semi-darkness. They were on obbo on observation duty, waiting for signs of activity in the house opposite, which she knew was there but still couldn’t see.
“Why didn’t you listen to me when I told you not to drive drunk?” Yes, she knew he was long dead; but it was the unreadable readout on the dashboard display that told her she was dreaming and it was too late to talk sense into Baz. “Daft fucker. You should know better.”
“You’re okay,” he said, ignoring her scolding. “You’ll do fine.”
Then the windscreen dissolved into black, open, star-speckled space and the absolute cold and vacuum swallowed her and silenced her scream. A weight pressed on her shoulder. She thought it was Baz and wondered how he’d managed to follow her into the void, just like Vijissi did.
A distant explosion in her head jerked her awake and she found she was sitting upright, wide awake.
“Shit,” said Ade.
He was sitting bolt upright too. Without conversation they scrambled to their feet at the same time and began dressing. They both knew what an explosion sounded like. It wasn’t in her dream; it had happened.
Matriarch Page 9
