Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  It was time to be getting back. He dismantled the hoe and put it in his pack, reluctant to hold the handle tightly again in case he relived the moment when Shan began breaking bones and gloried in it.

  Whatever had driven her to torture rather than kill, her explosive, vengeful anger was now within his very cells.

  He would have to handle it carefully.

  6

  I care not for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Shan sat on the toilet with her chin resting in her hands, savoring a moment of privacy.

  It wasn’t a perfect lavatory bowl and there wasn’t a seat to speak of, but it was hers, and it worked, and it required no special technique or physical agility to make use of it as a wess’har latrine did. She’d had enough of going native. She was determined to be a good wess’har citizen but she drew the line at their plumbing and their furniture. She had her toilet: and now there was a half-built settee out on the terrace, which she would finish when she sorted out how to make proper mitered corners. Then she’d make a bed, a nice comfy bed.

  She heard the front door open and close.

  “Shan?”

  “In here, Aras.”

  A pause. She hoped he hadn’t taken it to mean come in. “I have yellow-leaf. Lots of it.”

  “Lovely. Great.”

  “Are you unwell?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you—”

  “Look, I’m fine,” she said. “I won’t be long. Give me a few minutes.”

  Poor sod: it wasn’t his fault. She felt bad about wanting a few moments to herself, but…her flash-to-bang time, as Ade Bennett called it, was perilously short these days. Josh had probably averted her meltdown by sending specs for a Constantine-style toilet bowl to an obliging wess’har craftsman.

  The bowl the jurej had fashioned was ice-clear aquamarine glass, and too disturbingly transparent to be ideal for a toilet. But she learned to look away. And now she had a real toilet door too, and suddenly she felt a lot less like rounding on Aras and snarling at him.

  Poor sod.

  The nightmares weren’t helping her mood either. She was still drowning, still being jerked awake by a searing pain in her back and a devastating sense of abandonment.

  “You were up early,” said Aras. He sounded as if he were moving around the room. “Are you still having problems sleeping?”

  Oh, please. Just a couple of minutes. “It’s probably c’naatat shaking down.” She stood up and took a deep breath. She could always retreat here again. “Bound to be a few glitches.”

  When she opened the door, Aras was standing at the spigot, peering into the bunch of yellow-leaf he was rinsing. He placed a finger carefully into the soft crumpled leaves, lifted something out with his claw and set it on the windowsill. “Just a banic,” he said. “It’ll go about its business when it dries out.”

  He seemed preoccupied. It was mainly the silence that told her so. In the few weeks they had been sharing a single, suffocating room, partitioned by curtains, silence had been one thing he wasn’t good at. Aras liked talking. He had been through five hundred years of solitary, relatively speaking, and now he had a listener who was just like him, except that he was from a species that needed to huddle and chatter, and she liked her own company.

  You can’t imagine what he’s been through, she told herself. Patience. Just a bit of patience.

  She found herself staring at his broad back and noting how nicely it tapered into his waist. The sudden realization that it wasn’t just xeno-anatomical curiosity made her face burn. She thought of Mestin warning her not to breed, and wondered if the matriarch had spotted what she had only just discovered.

  Oh no. Not that. Get a grip, you silly bitch.

  “You don’t look well, isan.”

  She reminded herself how much she despised Lindsay Neville for getting pregnant in a careless moment. “I’d rather you called me Shan,” she said.

  “Very well.” Aras put the bowl of yellow-leaf on the table and picked up his hoe from the corner. He hefted it in his hand, staring down the length of the handle as if something terrible were crawling up it towards him. “I need to ask you a question.”

  “Okay.”

  “When I grip this,” he said, “I have vivid recall of an incident. You had a weapon like this.”

  Shan nodded. Of course she did. “My baton,” she said. “A truncheon. I’ve still got one in my kit.”

  “You beat someone with it.”

  “Well, that doesn’t narrow it down much.” She was about to make a joke of it but Aras didn’t smell amused. He reeked of agitation. She tried again. “Yes, I used a baton, and I used it a lot. If you’re churning up my memories, you’ll know that.”

  “I see this one over and over again. You were very upset and a man was shouting at you to do something about it, and then you were looking at another man and you started beating him with the baton. You broke his bones. I heard it. He wasn’t armed.”

  It sounded like a rebuke. And it was an indictment of her approach to policing that she was genuinely having trouble pinning down what he was recalling, but she was embarrassed to say so. She struggled. “Sorry, I don’t recognize what you’ve remembered. Lots of blokes have shouted at me over the years. And I’ve smacked quite a few of them. Hard.”

  “But I keep picking up pieces of it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You were sitting on a bench in the dark when a man came in and told you not to sit there all fucking night.”

  For a few more seconds it was as much of a puzzle as before: and then it flooded back with a sickening wave of adrenaline.

  Shan knew exactly where she was, but she didn’t want to know.

  She’d battled to come to terms with the images from that night. After a few years of seeing them behind every locked door and trying to stop them crowding into her mind between the time she closed her eyes and the time she fell asleep, she had succeeded in burying the detail.

  The pervading dread of doors had never left her, though. Like all terrible things she had seen and couldn’t then erase, they became more persistent the more she tried to stop thinking of them.

  “I need to know…Shan.” Aras’s voice was quiet and almost apologetic now. “I need to know what marked you so, and I also need to know why you tortured a man. It bothers me. I find it hard to accommodate.”

  It was a shabby slate-blue door that had previously been dark green because she could see where the paint had flaked off. There were some doors you could kick in, cheap doors with fragile locks; there were others you needed a dynamic ram or a couple of plastic rounds to tackle. She preferred a good kick. It psyched you up for what followed.

  “I don’t think you’re in any position to judge me, Aras.”

  “Perhaps not, but I must know.”

  The lock took one all-out kick. The detective inspector with her said he was impressed that she could do the physical stuff as well as a bloke. He let her go ahead.

  She couldn’t see what was happening at first. It took her a few seconds to look down on the floor at what one of the two middle-aged men was recording on a top-of-the-line camera. It took another second to register what she was looking at and then she lost all professional control and slammed one of the men into the wall, face first.

  It was the wrong house. No credit and ID cloning kit, just fucking weirdo porn, said the DI. He was pissed off. It was a fucking bum tip, he said, but they might as well nick the lot of them, not that it would be worth the paperwork for the sentences they’d get. He looked into her face, and she didn’t want him to see the tears in her eyes. “Don’t be such a fucking girl,” he said. “You’ll see a lot worse.”

  But she never had.

  Now Aras was staring into her face. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You look—”

  “You’ve got no other memories of this? Nothing at all?”

  Aras was going to wring it out of her. She co
uldn’t even manage the words, not even twenty years later. She was as ever torn between unbearable pain and anger, and she chose anger because she knew how to wield that without crumbling. Her sympathetic sergeant, the man who’d found her sitting on the shaking edge of tears in the darkened locker room, knew that much about her. Go on, he’d said. Do something about it if you feel that strongly. It’s not as if it was a kid or anything, He’ll only get six months’ suspended, tops.

  Even the score.

  She did. She had never exhausted herself beating the shit out of someone before or since. She didn’t care if she was suspended, charged, sacked: all she cared about was justice. But nobody saw anything, even if the desk sergeant kept wandering by the holding cell to check that she was coping. The guy was decitizenized anyway. Unpleasant things could happen to people with sufficient criminal record. They’d offended once too often and their rights were formally abrogated. Nobody was going to stop her. No lawyer would take it on.

  Aras was still staring into her face, bewildered. If she looked anything like she did that night, he would be seeing her anew.

  “Here.” She handed him her swiss. He knew how to use it. She gathered herself up into the woman everyone seemed to think she was, the one who could cope because she didn’t have feelings like the rest of them. It was self-pitying, she knew, but she wanted Aras to understand she had her limits of endurance as well. “Read for yourself. Look up snuff and squish. I don’t imagine Josh kept material like that in his bloody little Eden, did he? I didn’t think so. Okay, here’s your primer in human depravity. There are humans who are entertained and aroused by watching children and animals tortured and killed, so they make movies of it. It’s quite an industry. Take a look at my files.”

  Aras said nothing. He held the swiss flat on his palm, and she had no doubt he would read it: wess’har weren’t squeamish. Perhaps he understood the very worst about humans anyway.

  “You wanted to know,” she said. “And I didn’t torture him. I crippled him, and I did it as efficiently as I could without killing him, because I wanted him to have plenty of time to think about it. And I’d do it again in an instant, just as you did at Mjat, because it needed doing. Now read those fucking files, and never mention it to me again.”

  Shan shut the front door behind her a little too hard, sending flakes of pearl shivering to the ground, and walked down onto the terraces. Mindless physical displacement sometimes helped put her back together again. A couple of wess’har nodded politely to her as she passed and she tried to smile back, but her scent must have told them she was in turmoil. Yeah, don’t be such a fucking girl. It was a lifetime ago.

  And it wasn’t Aras’s fault. Nothing was. He was just a bystander with her memories playing out in his head, when God only knew what pain of his own was already there. She wondered when some of that was going to well up unbidden in her. She wondered if it would be worse than the images that were resurrected and fresh in her mind now, and whether it would replace them and so in a way erase them, bury them, make them go away again.

  She got as far as the fields and busied herself inspecting the swelling peppers and the tops of the sweet potatoes. It wasn’t necessary to go to all this trouble. She could survive on just about anything, and knowing Aras had put so much effort into trying to provide her with familiar foods simply made her feel all the worse for taking out her frustrations on him.

  She squatted down. The smell of wet soil put her back in her recurring nightmare, the water flooding into her mouth and nose. She shook it off.

  No, she wasn’t losing it. She was adjusting. It was a life, a body, a future no human had ever had to face, and she was doing just fine, all things considered.

  “Chail, neretse?” said a double-voice behind her. Have you seen this? A wess’har male—one of Fersanye’s neighbors, she thought—beckoned to her. She was starting to recognize them all now. He led her over to another patch of soil a little distance away. Aras tended scattered plots everywhere, wess’har style, to make the planting look more random, less obtrusive. The biobarrier crackled against her skin as she stepped through the invisible bulwark between Wess’ej and a little piece of Earth.

  This plot was dotted with sapling bushes with glossy, emerald-green serrated leaves. They looked like camellias. She didn’t think Aras would grow anything as irrelevant as decorative flowers.

  The male—Tlasias? Tasilas?—was fascinated. “What is tea?” he asked.

  “It’s a drink,” she said.

  Her wess’u was serviceably fluent now. Tlasias appeared to understand her. He touched the leaves and inspected them. “But how? You extract the juices?”

  “You make…” She searched for a word for infusion. She didn’t know one yet. “A solution from the dried leaves.”

  Then the penny dropped. She was looking at tea plants. Camellia sinensis. Aras was growing tea for her, and he hadn’t told her. It was a surprise. Tlasias, like every other wess’har, had no concept of giving people surprises. He’d blown it.

  It didn’t diminish the pleasure one bit. She almost winced at the extra weight of guilt it placed on her, because she had not only given Aras a hard time for reminding her of her demons, but she had also bitched at him while he was making extraordinary efforts to please her. He knew how much she loved tea. She had enough left from Constantine to make a dozen more pots. She was eking it out, saving it for special occasions.

  She took a deep breath. “The Chinese say that it’s better to be deprived of food for three days than of tea for one. That’s how much gethes enjoy it.” She used the word almost without thinking. There was no wess’u alternative for human. It was the generic name they gave all things that ate carrion, a verb, a reflection of their world view that you were what you did, not what you believed or intended or looked like. “And it’s kind of Aras to grow it for me.”

  Tlasias gathered his tools and walked off towards the city. Shan brushed her hands against the leaves of the tea plants, disappointed that they didn’t emit that elusive, tarry perfume of the fermented leaf. She could wait. It was a singularly thoughtful gift.

  Guilt had never been a defining emotion for her, except for the gorilla and all the other victims she couldn’t—no, hadn’t—saved. She’d never felt guilty about anything she had done. It was things not done that ate away at her.

  She felt guilty now. She was guilty of impatience with Aras and of taking miracles for granted. There wasn’t a human being alive—or dead—who cared about her well-being as much as one misfit alien with a stack of problems of his own.

  When she walked back up the winding terraces to the house the sun was nearly overhead, and ferociously hot. Wess’har going about their business stopped to splash themselves with water from the open conduits that ran everywhere from terrace to terrace. Then they shook themselves unselfconsciously like dogs, spraying water everywhere and attracting a cloud of tem flies to the fresh puddles. The flies, for all their magnificent droppings, were insignificant, drab gray things with dull wing membranes. It didn’t seem right somehow.

  Shan didn’t think she could do that canine shake, but the cold water looked like a good idea. She stopped and stuck her head under the torrent. For the merest fraction of a second it was bliss.

  Then it was a dark room and every moment of misery and fear she had dreamed and half remembered on waking for the past few months. And she knew suddenly what it was.

  Like those optical illusions that only formed an image out of a random pattern when you stopped trying to focus on them, she could now see her newly inherited memories. She was in an isenj prison as clearly as if she had been there herself. Although she was aware it wasn’t happening to her, she was being held head down in water, trying not to gulp it into her lungs but unable to resist succumbing to the reflex to breathe.

  She knew what was coming next. She put her hands flat on the burning pearl wall to stop herself pitching forward as a ripping sensation tore up her back and forced a surprised cry from her.


  They said you couldn’t recreate pain in your memory. They were wrong.

  Someone stopped to trill concern at her but she waved them away without looking up. It took her a long time to draw herself together sufficiently to carry on walking. She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t made sense of it before. It was everything in Eddie’s interview, the material he cut and kept for her alone, except it was detailed and personal. She knew now exactly what the isenj had done to Aras while he was their prisoner.

  Her first instinct was to find the bastard who did it and sort them. But that bastard would be long dead by now. The second wave of emotion was to go to Aras and crush him to her chest and promise she’d make it right for him, just as she’d wanted to make it right for the mutilated rabbits and the kitten she’d stumbled on in that house behind the shabby blue door. But it was too late for them. And the unimaginable time stretching ahead of her was suddenly something she would have gladly traded for time stretching back to change the past.

  If she forgot the caged gorilla signing a mute plea for help and the house with the blue door and a thousand other things she had seen, then she wasn’t Shan Frankland any longer. It was time to come to terms with them. But it was hard. She wondered how Aras was going to handle the shit churning up from the mud in her memories. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough of his own.

  F’nar looked incongruously glamorous through the filter of her nightmare. It was full of unforgiving creatures who would wipe out a planet without debate but she knew that there was nothing to fear behind the few doors they had. The relief of that thought was so sudden and intense that it felt like finding something precious you were sure had been lost for good.

  Shit. Aras had her swiss. It was the first time it had left her hand or pocket in nearly thirty years except for repairs. It was like letting him browse through her soul, but he could do that anyway whether he wanted to or not, the poor sod. She’d make him a good strong cup of tea and get him to talk about his experiences. After five hundred years he probably needed catharsis more than she ever would.