Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  “I am Nevyan.” The junior matriarch blinked rapidly and Shan was momentarily distracted by those unnerving four-lobed pupils set in gold irises. “You will come with us. The matriarchs know you are infected.”

  “Where’s Aras?”

  “In the Temporary City.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “Ask Mestin.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Ask Mestin.” Nevyan was frozen in that characteristic wess’har wait-and-see reaction. Her irises snapped open and shut again. She smelled intimidated but she was holding her ground pretty well. “She is senior matriarch here.”

  “Okay, then we’ll go to see Mestin.” They stood and looked at each other, and Shan took a guess that Nevyan had absolutely no idea about humans, and knew even less about her. “And this has nothing to do with any of the people here. You understand? You leave them out of this.”

  “I was told to find you and Aras Sar Iussan. I have no orders regarding the colony.”

  The two males had wandered up behind Nevyan now, watching. Weapons at their sides, they appeared satisfied there was going to be no violence. Shan kept her eyes fixed on Nevyan’s until the junior matriarch broke the gaze and began walking towards the ramp that led up and out of the subterranean settlement. Shan fell in behind her. How old was she in human terms? A teenager, a young woman? Shan couldn’t tell yet.

  One thing was for sure.

  She hadn’t been around long enough to know that prisoners—even compliant ones—needed searching.

  Mestin decided she would hand over command of the Temporary City with not one pang of regret.

  The last year had been a hard one. She had not expected it to be so difficult; Bezer’ej was normally a quiet tour of duty, somewhere to contemplate and study while the business of maintaining the cordon around the planet went on unnoticed, carried out by her husbands and children. And four years of her service had been just that, until the new humans came, and the isenj tried to follow them, and the fighting had started.

  We will be home soon, she thought. Home, and maybe nothing more arduous to do than making decisions for the city of F’nar and educating her children. If the gethes stay away.

  She sat out in the garden, well-wrapped against the cold with her dhren pulled up over her head and shoulders. The opalescent fabric shaped itself obligingly around her jaw to shut out the wind. The first thing I shall do is walk around the whole perimeter of F’nar, right around the city. It was not that she disliked Bezer’ej. It was unspoiled and exotic and beautiful, but it was not home, and she needed home very badly right then.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off the moon, off Wess’ej. Somewhere—right on the limb of the illuminated part, right there—was home, F’nar, one of the thousand modest city states of Wess’ej, warm and peaceful and in balance with the world.

  Mestin stared at the imagined point until F’nar slipped into the darkness and night fell on it. She had done this every evening, cloud cover allowing, waiting for the time that her tour of duty would be over. She wondered how Aras had managed to spend so many years here without the comfort of fellow wess’har. At least she had all her clan with her, working together.

  Aras had nothing.

  There was no point putting it off any longer. He was sitting alone in a room in the depths of the Temporary City, under arrest, waiting for her. In another room sat Shan Frankland, the gethes matriarch. Mestin didn’t know quite what to make of Frankland.

  The woman had stayed here before for two days, in hiding from the rest of the humans. The matriarchs on Wess’ej had even held a meeting with her and judged her a useful ally. Yes, a gethes had been to Mestin’s city while she and her family stayed here fending off isenj attacks. It galled her.

  But that was before they realized why her fellow humans wanted her so badly.

  So Frankland was now c’naatat. It was something the gethes found very desirable, in that greedy and desperate way of theirs, and something that Shan Chail would apparently not surrender to them. They said she feared what it would do to human society: Mestin wondered if she simply wanted a higher price.

  The wind was biting and she felt the peck of ice crystals on her face. Nevyan, her daughter, walked up to her clutching her dhren tight around her. It was a nervous tic. The fabric would shape itself to whatever garment Nevyan arranged it to be, and needed no clutching or pinning.

  “They’re waiting,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “They offered no resistance.”

  “I didn’t think Aras would try to avoid facing the consequences. But I’m surprised the gethes was so cooperative.”

  “She was more concerned about Aras.” Nevyan said. There was a long pause: Mestin didn’t fill it. “It surprises me. And she has just one bag of possessions, like us. She doesn’t seem like…a gethes.”

  The light from the open hatchway created a pool of yellow illumination across the ground. Mestin stood watching the silver grasses shaking as some creature—probably an udza, in this weather—prowled in search of prey driven to ground level by the winds. There was a brief frozen silence, then a sudden yip from something that had not escaped the udza. Everything here seemed to devour everything else. It was a violent and unforgiving world for all its beauty.

  “They’ll kill him,” Nevyan said. She smelled of agitation: she was competent, promising, but she was still very young and unused to hard decisions. That would have to change. “But how can you kill a c’naatat? Didn’t they survive terrible—”

  “That’s not our problem. All we’re to do is to take them back to Wess’ej, to F’nar, and let Chayyas decide what happens next. It’s her responsibility. Neither mine nor yours.”

  “But he’s the last of the c’naatat troops, even if he’s been foolish. They saved us.”

  Mestin hadn’t actively disliked humans before the Thetis arrived. The small colony that had been allowed to live here since before she was born had proved passive and harmless, a curiosity set on creating a society that honored something called God. But their benign nature had ill-prepared her for the humans who had come in the Thetis with their weapons and their greed.

  They’ll bring another war upon us, she thought. In the end, humans were all gethes, all carrion-eaters. Aras Sar Iussan might have found them less repellent, but perhaps he had now become too like them to be objective.

  “I’ll talk to them now.” Mestin threw her dhren back and walked down into the Temporary City, Nevyan at her heels.

  Aras seemed unrepentant. He sat on the resting ledge cut out of the wall of the room Nevyan had set aside to hold him, smelling of no emotion in particular. His hands were folded in his lap. Mestin wondered if there was anything that could really frighten him any more. Perhaps he was looking forward to the end, having lived alone far too long, because that was surely what would happen to him: Chayyas would have him killed—somehow.

  Nevyan was right. He was the last of the c’naatat troops, and—war hero or not—the unending problem of isolating the symbiont would die with him. It was for the best. She thought it would be the kindest solution for the gethes female too.

  Aras looked up at Mestin and said nothing, and carried on saying nothing until she turned and left. What would she have asked him, anyway? Why he had committed such an act of madness? It was irrelevant. Wess’har cared only about what was done, not what was intended. Motivation was a human excuse, a sophistry, a lie. But she could think of no reason why a wess’har who had spent his whole life ensuring that c’naatat didn’t spread would suddenly give it willingly to an alien.

  Outside the room that held Shan Frankland, Mestin hesitated before stepping over the threshold. There was a scent, but she was too unfamiliar with gethes to identify a state of mind from it.

  This gethes had changed. Mestin had seen her when she had been brought in for brief sanctuary, and at the time she had struck her as much taller and more aggressive than the colonists, but a human nonetheless—fidgeting, soft and
confused. She didn’t match the self-assured picture that conversations with Aras had created. But now she seemed still and purposeful. She was leaning casually against the wall of the room, but she straightened up slowly when Mestin came in and thrust her hands into her garments. Her long black hair was pulled back and tied with a length of rough brown fabric. She didn’t seem afraid either.

  “This is the only cell I’ve ever been in that hasn’t got a door,” Shan said.

  “Do you remember me, Shan Chail?”

  “Mestin. Yes. And that’s your daughter? The youngster who brought us in?”

  “Nevyan. Yes.”

  “Where’s Aras? Is he all right?”

  “He’s unharmed.”

  “What’s going to happen to him?”

  “Shouldn’t you be concerned about what will happen to you?”

  Shan appeared unmoved and made that quick hunching action with her shoulders. Mestin had seen Aras do the same. “If you have me, then you don’t need him, do you?”

  “He has committed a foolish act. You’re a different matter.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You have uses. You know that. That’s why you were allowed to remain.”

  “How did you find out about me?”

  “We can monitor gethes voice transmissions between the Actaeon and your homeworld. There’s been much talk of your condition. Is it true it would give you great status and wealth in your society?”

  “You know perfectly well that Actaeon’s skipper was ordered to detain me as a biohazard. Does that sound like status to you?”

  Mestin still couldn’t work out if Shan was afraid. She tried to stare into her gray alien eyes: apparently you could judge a human’s condition that way, but she looked and saw only single, empty, black pupils that told her nothing. “You made no attempt to evade us.”

  “Where would I run? And what would you have done to the colonists if I had? Back home we’d say you had me bang to rights.”

  Mestin gave up trying to understand and turned towards the door. Chayyas would have to sort it out in the next few days.

  “Hey, what happens now?” Shan called after her.

  Mestin turned round. “I have no idea,” she said. “And I imagine nobody else has either. We have no deviance so we don’t know how to punish. And we’ve never found an alien infected with c’naatat—not in our lifetimes.”

  There was a pause. “Yeah, I think I know what happened the last time you did,” said Shan.

  “You’d know more about Aras’s actions at Mjat than I would.”

  “Look, he’s not going to make a habit of this, is he? Let him go.”

  All the gethes seemed to worry about was Aras. Her protectiveness towards males almost made Mestin warm to her, but she decided to end the debate. She had a suspicion she was being dragged into a bargaining session. “You have been fed, yes? Now do you have everything you need?”

  Shan gave her an odd flash of her teeth: no wonder ussissi were wary of humans. She indicated her bag in the corner of the cell, a shapeless dark blue fabric sack with straps that attached to the shoulders very much like a wess’har pack. Nevyan was right. If it contained everything she owned, it was an oddly modest amount for an acquisitive gethes.

  “I always travel well-equipped,” she said, and her occasional blinking had stopped completely. Her eyes were disturbingly pale and liquid. “I’ve got everything I need.”

  Mestin held her fixed gaze for a few more seconds and thought for once that she had understood everything the gethes had said.

  Aras had a dream again, of fire and of hatred and of angry sorrow. It wasn’t his own. It wasn’t even the inherited memory of the victims of Mjat, because that was a waking recollection, a real event from his captors’ experience that he could verify because he had been part of it. This was another sort of fire and emotion altogether.

  Dreaming was not a wess’har characteristic and neither were long periods of sleep. But when he dozed briefly, vivid dreams came to him from his altered genome, sometimes the almost-human face of an Earth ape, sometimes a closed door, and sometimes red and gold fire. And the alien emotion that accompanied it all was throat-stopping rage.

  This time he was looking through a distorted frame, like a heat haze or clear shallow water, and the fire came towards him in a great arc and filled his field of vision. There was no burning. But a gut-panic almost took his legs from underneath him. Then he woke.

  He was leaning against the polished wall of a chamber in Chayyas’s home in F’nar, where Mestin had brought him to await the senior matriarch’s judgement. The images and feelings were still vivid in his head and his throat. It was the anger that disturbed him most.

  This had to be Shan’s memories. He was behind her eyes. He had no sense of location, only a vague darkness, but he could feel a great racking sob fighting to be free of his chest and the pressure of something smooth and hard gripped fiercely in his hand—her hand—and a painful constriction in his throat and eyes. And then he heard a man’s voice.

  Are you going to sit there all fucking night or are you going to frigging well go and do something about it?

  They were angry, violent words but he had no sense of them being wielded to wound her. Then the pressure in his chest and throat burst and there was a massive rush of cold and energy into his limbs. Then, nothing. It left him feeling as if he had been jerked out of the world and dumped in a void.

  Aras had gone through this sequence, waking and sleeping, at least a dozen times since he had contaminated Shan and had in turn been contaminated by her. Whatever else c’naatat had snatched from her, it seemed to think this was useful. It was an angry and violent event. It was consistent too, and from what he knew of humans’ fluid, inaccurate, ever-rewriting memories, that meant she had replayed it many times to herself.

  He hoped he would be able to ask her about the events that had burned it into her. But the chances were that he would not see her again, and the thought left him aching with desolation.

  He straightened up and looked out the window onto the terraced slopes of the caldera that cradled F’nar. The sun had not yet risen above the horizon but the nacreous coating on all the deliberately irregular little houses built into the west-facing slope looked luminous.

  The City of Pearl, the humans called it; the few colonists from Constantine who had seen F’nar had viewed it through religious eyes and pronounced it a miracle, and named it accordingly after a passage in one of their holy books. But Shan, in her pragmatic way, had called it insect shit, for that was what the coating actually was. He liked her pragmatism.

  It was all a matter of perception.

  Aras didn’t believe in miracles, although if one were about to present itself its timing would have been excellent. He was not afraid of dying. At several points in his artificially long life he had bitterly regretted being unable to die. What he feared most now was loss. He had put Shan in this position without her consent, and now she would be left alone to suffer the same loneliness that he had, and he would lose the one close relationship he had felt able to form in centuries. It was…unfair.

  Aras paced slowly round the room, measuring the dimensions in footsteps. Whatever happened to him, they would not harm Shan. She was too useful. She would be fine. She would be safe. He took some comfort from that, but not much. Would he have to advise Chayyas on how to have him killed? Human explosives might do the job best. Anything less immediate and catastrophic would only give his c’naatat time to regroup and keep him alive.

  He heard Chayyas coming a full minute before she appeared in the room. He could hear the swish of her long dhren against the flagstones and the scrabbling footsteps of the ussissi aide trying to keep pace with her. When she entered the room, she filled it, and not only with her size and presence: she exuded the sharp scent of agitation. A human would have tried to present a controlled façade, but any wess’har could smell another’s state of mind. There was no point in putting on a brave face.

  “
Aras, you put me in an impossible position,” she said, without greeting. She shimmered. She had a very fine dhren, as luminous as the city itself. “I have no idea what to do with you.”

  “Is Shan Frankland well? Is she still at Fersanye’s home?”

  “She has eaten this morning and asks after you repeatedly.”

  That made him feel much worse. “I didn’t plan this.”

  “Why did you do it, then? Why did you corrupt the order of things? Did you want a companion that badly?”

  “She was dying. The isenj fired on her, and that was a conflict of my making so I couldn’t stand by and let her die.” He paused. It was a cheap shot to raise the matter, but it was relevant. “And it never troubled your forebears to alter the balance when you needed us as soldiers to defend this world.”

  “What was done in the past isn’t a justification for doing it in the present.”

  “Then you must look at the circumstances,” he said. “And I will not plead for my life. Do what you judge best.”

  “Aras, nobody has ever deliberately harmed the common good. I have no idea whether a penalty is appropriate. But if we were to destroy all traces of c’naatat, it would save much harm in the future, and not just for us.”

  Even now that angered him, although he had a random thought that his anger—his wess’har anger—was mere irritation compared to Shan’s inner rage. “I can’t accept that. You can destroy me, and you can even destroy Shan Chail, but how can you justify wiping out the life-form in its natural place? It’s part of Bezer’ej. We have no right to end its existence because it’s inconvenient for us. That makes us no better than the isenj. Or the gethes.”

  “Then I would have to weigh one people’s welfare against the benefits to all the other species,” said Chayyas. “Just as I might have to with the gethes.”

  “And you might want to utilize c’naatat again one day—for the benefit of all other species, of course.”

  Sarcasm was lost on a wess’har. Aras had learned it from humans. There was a part of him, the part gleaned from alien genes, that found it very satisfying. Chayyas took the comment at its literal face value and turned to the ussissi who was shuffling from foot to foot at the entrance to the chamber.