Matriarch

by Karen Traviss

One child every six, seven years. Our eggs mature for many seasons. We must be thirty years or more before we can reproduce.

  “Yeah, think about that, you bastard,” said Lindsay.

  Bezeri had very little in their favor in survival terms. Against the fast-breeding isenj, they were the universe’s losers.

  Rayat thought of the impact that c’naatat would have on Earth. You did right. You didn’t have much choice. Yes, he still believed that.

  It was the nature of his job. Collateral damage was inevitable and it didn’t take away the need to get the job done. Rayat handed back the lamp and Saib directed him into one of the mud cones.

  Concrete might have been a better description than mud. When he ran his hand down the walls, they were smooth and hard, dotted with inlaid colored stone and fragments of shell. The floor wasn’t packed silt but the same hard material. He grounded himself and walked on it.

  He was so engrossed in wondering how they’d made these structures that he almost didn’t see the three bezeri huddled in an alcove until one uncoiled and its bioluminescence flared in a pulsing pattern like chaser lights. He flinched instinctively. Saib glided between them and wrapped his tentacles around one of them. The exchange of lights was a conversation that Rayat couldn’t understand.

  He wasn’t looking at cephalopods now: he was looking at people.

  Get out of my head, Frankland. Get out, you bitch.

  But it wasn’t a fragment of her memory; it was his own painful revelation, and it was different. He could feel it. He’d met aliens. He’d encountered four intelligent species and seen many more alien life-forms in this system. But each time his rational mind had noted them and their characteristics, he’d never had that pang of recognition, that visceral realization that there was someone just like him inside them.

  Rayat had too many questions now. He needed desperately to communicate without using the lamp. He had to. The more he knew, the better his chances of getting home.

  Lindsay squeezed through the opening and settled beside him. She had a firm grip on the device and didn’t look ready to surrender it.

  “Okay, you’ve got the talking stick,” said Rayat. The room had openings at apparently random points in the walls, some set high off the ground and he assumed they were connecting doors. Bezeri live in freefall, dummy; they swim. Think zero-g spaceship architecture. “Who are they? I need names.”

  Shafts of aquamarine light pierced the gloom of the chamber. Rayat looked up; the roof of the building was dotted with inserts of the same transparent shell that sandwiched the sand maps. He was getting a sense of how bezeri lived and what they liked. They liked light. But they could function at extreme depths, and they had bioluminescence, so they didn’t need light. It spoke to him of beings that wanted to explore, and he knew that was as much an emotional reaction as a scientific one.

  Rayat concentrated on everything but emotion. He wanted his scientific rationality, or his animal survival instincts; he didn’t want regret or empathy or any of the other unreliable, weakening elements of being human to make his time down here any harder than it had to be.

  “Take the bloody thing, then.” Lindsay thrust the lamp at him. “I need to eat.” She backed out of the chamber. Saib uncurled a tentacle in her direction. “Just going outside to find some seaweed, okay? I’m not running away. I’ve got nowhere to go.”

  Rayat took the lamp. “Rye-aht,” he said. “Rayat.” Nobody called him Mohan; he’d always been just Rayat. He couldn’t remember the last person who had called him by his first name, let alone Mo. For some reason that crushed him for a few seconds. “My name is Rayat.”

  “Ooorrrrrrrr,” said one of the bezeri in a stream of bubbles. “Oooorrrrrraaaaaa….”

  A talking squid. And I’m not even surprised.

  If bezeri could manipulate air and water in their body cavity, maybe he’d learn to use light—if he developed bioluminescence. They rippled with rainbows, living liquid opals, and the lamp’s translation systems took over.

  I am Pili, a mother. She is Seem, mother of mothers. He is Keet, father of fathers.

  “Where are your children?”

  Dead. All of them.

  Rayat laid the lamp aside as Saib deposited armfuls of azin maps in front of Pili and the others. They seemed far more interested in fondling the maps than in his questions. Their light patterns changed into repetitive concentric circles of violet, ruby and gold that welled up from bright central points all over their mantles. It was a pattern he hadn’t seen before.

  Their maps were their past. They were looking at their history. For a moment Rayat imagined browsing through a picture album of relatives long dead and had a brief, awful glimpse into what the bezeri might be thinking.

  He shook it off. You came here to secure c’naatat for the FEU and to stop any other government getting hold of it. That’s all: nothing else. Don’t forget that. Sentimentality was dangerous.

  The bezeri appeared to have forgotten him. He slid down the smooth wall and rested his head on his folded arms, knees drawn up, and the moment he closed his eyes, reality crowded in on him again and he was drowning.

  He jerked his eyes open again and found he had braced both hands on the floor of the chamber. The more he looked at his right hand, the more disoriented he felt.

  It didn’t look the same any longer. Something wasn’t quite right. He thought for a brief elated moment that he saw a colored spark, but it was something more bizarre even than that. The faint play of light came from the floor.

  His hand was becoming translucent.

  “I wanted lights,” he said. “Lights.”

  Maybe c’naatat could hear him. There was no harm trying.

  F’nar, Wess’ej: experimental rainforest habitat

  Shan had to hand it to Deborah Garrod. For a woman whose husband had been decapitated, she was being very polite to his executioner.

  Aras walked beside her, pointing out objects of interest on the plain as they approached F’nar. The transport could have taken them straight to the city, but Shan knew why Aras had opted to walk the last two kilometers. He wanted to see Deborah’s face when she caught sight of F’nar.

  The City of Pearl left humans stunned. Shan wasn’t steeped in Christian mythology, but it had left her reeling the first time she saw it; she could only guess what impact it had on people who thought their heaven looked like that.

  Deborah inhaled sharply and put both hands to her mouth.

  “It’s exquisite,” she said. She paused for a moment, eyes closed. Shan assumed she was praying. It didn’t seem the right time to tell her the nacre coating was insect shit. “I had no idea.”

  “You should see it on a nice summer evening.” Shan walked on, hands in pockets. Aras walked alongside Deborah. Her two kids hadn’t come with her. Shan’s last encounter with the teenaged son, James, had involved slamming him against a wall and backhanding him to get him to tell her what his dad was doing, so maybe that was just as well. Dad’s just helping Commander Neville bomb Ouzhari. Thanks, kid. “How does everyone feel about going back to Earth?”

  “Apprehensive, but happy.”

  “It’s an alien planet for you. Big upheaval.”

  “A sense of fulfillment, though. For both of us. This was your mission too.”

  “Yes.” I only thought it was. That’s what you get for trying to stitch me up, Perault. “Well, when you see the macaws, it’ll put it all in perspective.”

  Shan wanted to get it over with. Somehow it felt like taking a relative to identify a body, and she was more concerned with getting back to visit Vijissi to check on his progress.

  She didn’t mention him to Deborah. It couldn’t remain a secret forever, but the longer it took for the colonists or Eddie to find out, the more time she had to maneuver. Twenty-five light-years wasn’t distance enough to reassure her that c’naatat was out of reach of Earth.

  Deborah slowed down as she drew closer to the F’nar, and when the sun came out from behind thick cloud
and illuminated the top level of the terraces in fierce white light she stopped again. Shan and Aras waited, silent. Then Deborah gathered herself and walked on.

  Da Shapakti was waiting for them at the top of the flight of steps that led down into the tunnels beneath the city. He kept rolling his head slightly, a preening gesture almost like the re-created macaws he was so proud of: he’d even delayed his departure for Bezer’ej so that he could show off the birds to Deborah.

  Deborah peered down into the stairwell. “Just like Constantine. Everything’s underground.”

  Shan hung back to let Shapakti lead the way. The enclosed rainforest environment that he’d created was nestled between the dimly lit hangar bays of fighter craft, built thousands of years ago and maintained by nanotech, and still capable of taking out a FEU warship like Actaeon. The more intrusive aspects of city life—the utilities, generators, storage and manufacturing facilities—were housed down here. F’nar might have been less rigorous about making minimum visual impact on the natural landscape than the stricter Targassati wess’har further north, but it still kept its industrial side carefully concealed. Even a meticulously agrarian society needed some ugly technology. It was the only hidden aspect of this transparent culture that Shan had seen.

  Shapakti opened the double airlock that sealed the terrestrial environment. Warm, humid air rolled out and Deborah inhaled audibly as she stepped through the portal. Shan knew how she felt. The oxygen-rich air and smell of Earth, of familiar things, was almost shocking.

  But Deborah had never smelled the air of Earth, and she was the fourth generation of settlers habituated to lower oxygen levels on Bezer’ej. She wasn’t remembering. She was imagining.

  “You grew all this from the gene bank?” she asked.

  Shapakti held out his arm and the two macaws plummeted like raptors from their favored roost a few meters above him to land on it, squabbling over the best position. They were more than bright: they were luminous. Shan saw them in ultraviolet, as they saw themselves, with all their vivid patches.

  Deborah gasped, even though she saw only in a human’s narrow spectrum.

  “These birds, yes,” said Shapakti. His English was perfectly clear despite the overtone. “I get the plants from Umeh Station, already growing. I accelerate their development.”

  Deborah had never struck Shan as a demonstrative woman. As a guest in the Garrods’ house, Shan had catalogued her as the stoic sensible type, a frontier woman in every sense, a dispenser of tea and first aid when disaster struck. But now she burst into tears and stood staring at the macaws, one hand to her mouth. The birds shrieked at her.

  Shan felt a pang of embarrassment and for a moment she envied Deborah her loss of control. I had no idea how much emotion these people invested in the gene bank. But they think they’re doing it for God, don’t they? That must ring the bell for them, all right. But where Deborah saw pearls and the fruition of dreams, Shan saw insect shit and just the beginning of a long struggle—one she wasn’t going to be part of.

  “What are you going to do with them?” Deborah asked.

  “Take them back to Earth,” said Shapakti.

  “How many species are you going to revive before you reach Earth?”

  “Few. Only plants. The macaws are experimental.”

  “But you think you can do it?”

  “We restore ecosystems. We do this.”

  “Yeah, I think Shapakti knows what he’s doing.” Shan gave the macaws a wide berth in case they took a peck at her. C’naatat made her wary of every possible accidental contact. “Now all the Eqbas have to do is get the Earth governments to behave and let them do the restoration. That’s going to be the interesting bit.”

  Deborah raised her chin a fraction. “There’s no point my telling you to have faith, is there?”

  “I’ve got faith in Shapakti.”

  “I shall never see Earth,” he said. “My mission ends here. I go home.”

  He didn’t seem disappointed. Shan knew he missed his family; he had an image of his home on the bulkhead of his ship, a little indication of homesickness that was touchingly…human. Poor sod. But once you’d restored one world, maybe you’d restored them all. Even miracles palled in time.

  Deborah wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Josh would have been so happy to see this.”

  Aras didn’t react. Shan couldn’t smell any agitation. He seemed to be checking out the dimensions of the tropical hothouse, no doubt sizing it up for terrestrial crops.

  Deborah held her arm out and one of the macaws studied it for a moment before edging onto her hand a step at a time. Aras paused in his inspection of the raised beds of soil to watch. There was no sound either from macaw or woman. It eyed her, head cocked on one side in a disturbingly wess’har way.

  “Uk’alin’i che,” it said, almost with an overtone. Feed me. It rustled vivid turquoise feathers. Deborah laughed, but the tears were still welling in her eyes.

  “So what are you feeding them?” asked Shan.

  “Synthesized nutrient pellets. When we relocate to Bezer’ej, I will grow fruit and seeds for them.”

  “How much of the habitat are you removing?” Shan kept a careful eye on the parrot. “We could grow crops here.”

  “Your marines have already planted some. Look.” Shapakti reached into the raised bed and indicated small plants each with a pair of ovate glossy leaves. “I will avoid disturbing the seedlings when I remove the foliage plants.”

  Aras urrred. It was a sound like someone riffling through a wad of paper sheets, and he only did it when he was relaxed and happy. Shan hadn’t heard him do it for a long time; it was a good sign. Having Ade around as a housebrother and the prospect of interesting new crops seemed to settle him down. Aras was, at heart, as much of a pragmatist as she was. For the first time she felt that—with effort—her life might settle down too and become like anyone else’s, except for the fact she was light-years from Earth, living with two genetic chimeras and pretty well indestructible. But it was a lot more normal than her previous existence.

  As soon as she sorted the problems in hand—those two bastards on Bezer’ej, and Vijissi—she’d count her blessings as carefully as she could, and not look an inch beyond them.

  “Bananas,” said Aras. “And grapes.”

  “Not many grapes like tropical conditions.”

  “I didn’t realize you were so informed about grapes.”

  “I’m a mine of information,” said Shan. Her father had wanted to swap city life for a smallholding, but the only soil he got was a conventional burial. It was the best she could do. “And most of the horticultural stuff was useless up to now.”

  Deborah still stared at the macaw. “You’re not going back to Earth with us either, are you?”

  “No,” said Shan. “My home’s here now.”

  “After coming so far and giving up so much?”

  “You forget one small detail.” There was no point telling her that c’naatat could probably be removed from humans but not from wess’har. It couldn’t be removed from her mind, and that was where she had been changed most. The months she spent drifting in space, sporadically conscious, hardened further by every momentary realization that she was alone beyond imagining with only her inner animal core to rely upon, had left her a stranger to herself at times. And then there was Aras. She promised she wouldn’t abandon him, and her word was everything. “I think it’s best that c’naatat stays here.”

  If you’re not going back to Earth, then what are you going to do for Wess’ej? What’s going to become of Umeh?

  The macaw appeared to decide that Deborah wasn’t a source of food and swaggered back along her arm to climb onto Shapakti’s. Deborah let her hand drop to her side. “What happens to you at the end of time, Shan?”

  Don’t. Stop it. “Who says c’naatat hosts live that long?”

  “What if they do?”

  “I’ll have some interesting snapshots, then, won’t I?”

  Shap
akti interrupted, showing extraordinary tact for an Eqbas. “Let me show Deborah how I achieve these things. You go.”

  Shan took it as a hint to leave; maybe Shapakti was as sensitive to her discomfort as Aras. The parrots took off from the scientist’s arm in a flurry of bright feathers and settled on a branch again.

  Shan watched them and then took note of the small tree beneath. The leaves were green and glossy, rather like giant bay leaves, and the spikes of small cream flowers reminded her of bay laurel.

  “What’s that plant?” Shan asked, hoping for some kind of aromatic bay. Herbs mattered. They were right up there with chili and garlic in the familiar food league.

  “Dwarf avocado,” said Shapakti.

  The thought of a new and exotic addition to the menu temporarily erased any nagging worries about how c’naatat hosts finally met their maker. “I’ll definitely visit you on Bezer’ej, then. Can I take a cutting later?”

  “I leave this tree for you.”

  “Thank you.” Vijissi. Ask him now. “One more thing—would you mind taking a look at a tissue sample for me some time?”

  “Which time?”

  Be specific. “When are you leaving for Bezer’ej?”

  “Perhaps two more days.”

  “I’ll bring it to you.” She managed a smile and didn’t expect one back. Like Aras, all wess’har struggled to mimic that distinctly simian expression. “You’re a star, Shapakti. Thanks.”

  He understood the meaning if not the phrase, because he urrred just like Aras—praised, pleased—and beckoned Deborah to follow him deeper into the forest habitat that extended thirty meters into the tunnels.

  “I don’t know if Ade even likes avocado, but I bloody well do.” Shan walked back up the tunnels with Aras and climbed the steps towards real daylight. “And they produce lovely green oil. Think of it. Soap. Salad dressing. Fry-ups.”

  “Shapakti’s tissue sample.”

  “So, I was thinking of dispensing with speech completely and just relying on telepathy,” said Shan. “Am I that bloody obvious?”

  “You once told me that police are very good at getting people to do things for them. You appear to have two modes of doing that—violence and exaggerated charm.”