Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  The Mountain to the Dry Above? the lights asked.

  I will visit Constantine later, Aras signaled back. First I need to speak to you all.

  Constantine was set on an island. For the bezeri, it was one of a number of steep peaks rising out of their marine territories and into the Dry Above, as alien and hostile to them as space was to a human. He waded out into the water and eased himself into the open sac of the pod before suspending his respiration and letting the water flood in and engulf him. It was the price he had to pay for getting a lift. It wasn’t pleasant, but he couldn’t drown. He had the isenj to thank for that.

  The pressure was uncomfortable in the depths of the bezeri settlement. The local sea tasted of dead pifanu and mud. Light danced everywhere, complex patterns and colors of conversations and songs between one bezeri and another. Aras could recognize a few concept sequences, but without the signaling lamp that interpreted for him, he was deaf and mute even after so many years. He turned it over in his hands.

  A group of massive fluid shapes eased out of an opening in a carefully molded tower of shell and mud and came to a halt a few meters from him, blue and lime points of brilliant light rippling across their mantles.

  There is something wrong, the lights said.

  More humans want to come here, said Aras.

  If they came, would they prevent the isenj returning?

  Their horizons might have been limited by the sea, but the bezeri understood political alliances. Aras chose his next signal-words carefully.

  Do you doubt we can keep you safe?

  The patterns of light now formed ornate orange and red concentric circles. There are too few of you and you must put yourselves first. We must choose the option that keeps the isenj at bay. If we could choose freely, we would like both humans and isenj to stay away.

  Aras calculated again. Do you understand the differences between the humans of the Mountain to the Dry Above and the newcomers?

  Clouds of silt billowed as one of the bezeri jerked its tentacles up to its body. What we understand is that the isenj fouled our cities with their excretions and that if they come again, we will all die.

  Aras paused to search for a neutral answer. He needed to know what they wanted, not what they would agree to, whatever Mestin had ordered. He signaled carefully. If more humans come to the Dry Above, they may find something here that will be used to cause trouble to other people in other worlds. We will create a barrier here that will stop both humans and isenj settling. We will remove the humans from the Dry Above and we will also remove the Temporary City in time.

  You will abandon us.

  No. You won’t need us here.

  You fear you will lose control of this system.

  Yes.

  Then our only choice is to rely on your science.

  The bezeri elders paused in the dark waters for a moment and then swept away in a burst of green light. Aras steadied himself against their expelled water by clutching an outcrop of esken and waited, but nobody else came to talk to him. The pilot shimmered scarlet and amber.

  I think you should go now.

  On the trip back to the surface, Aras wondered if he now contained the characteristics of so many life-forms that he had forgotten what it meant to be any one of them. Why should the bezeri care about what happened on dry land, let alone other planets? All they could rely on was their memories. All they remembered that the isenj had once had settlements here and that they had fouled the water. Asking them to address the problems of other species that they would never see when they perceived an immediate and very real threat to their daily lives was futile.

  Maybe wess’har spent too much time now worrying about their responsibilities. Perhaps they didn’t have as many duties as they thought. But that was human thinking: all rights, no responsibilities. He shook the idea off, disgusted.

  What had they said? If we could choose freely, we would like both humans and isenj to stay away. Mestin had given them what they wanted. In hindsight, Shan had acted correctly in donating her genes.

  Aras was still trying to define what had disturbed him so much about the sequence of events. Shan had not deceived him: she had simply taken the straightest path through a complex situation to arrive at the correct result. Intent was irrelevant. Only action mattered.

  It was the action that worried him. Wess’har had not been ideologically pure enough to destroy that knowledge of bio-weapons any more than they had declined the utility of c’naatat in a personal crisis.

  And he hadn’t had the will not to use it to save Shan’s life, because his wants mattered more in those few minutes than his principles.

  He headed up the beach and towards Constantine, wondering what had happened to his sense of right and wrong.

  Josh ladled more soup into Aras’s bowl than he thought he would ever be able to tackle. Huge butter beans broke the brilliant orange surface like fat white islands, and Aras prodded them with his spoon. There was a sense of relief about the Garrod family: the last time they had seen Aras was when Nevyan had arrested him. Excessive food was a substitute for expressing affection, so he accepted it as such. It was good to know they still welcomed him even if he brought bad news. Deborah and James simply smiled at him from time to time: Rachel, now six, studied him intently.

  “I realize how terrible this must be for you,” Aras said.

  Josh shrugged. Nothing seemed to panic him. “I feel a certain sense of relief that this world will be quarantined. I’ve been worried about access to c’naatat since the day your people detected Thetis for the first time.”

  “They can’t take it. They can’t land here now. They will always focus on access to me, or to Shan Chail.”

  Josh hadn’t mentioned Shan at all. The lack of reference to her was conspicuous, and Aras felt a pang of annoyance that the colonists might now resent or even hate his isan, but he knew she would say that she didn’t give a fuck.

  He tore off a chunk of bread and dipped it in the soup. The meal fell silent. Josh’s home was a perfect haven, cut into the rock just like a wess’har home, with soft filtered sunlight streaming down through the roof-dome that doubled as a solar panel. The thought of this place being abandoned and erased by nanites saddened Aras. But the colonists had never intended to stay here forever, just long enough to wait out the dark days until Earth was ready to be restored again.

  He suddenly thought they were insane to come here. The construction work had been backbreaking, and he had played his part. He’d looked very different in those days.

  “You must find this very sad after investing so much labor,” he said.

  “Material things can be remade,” said Josh. “And we will rebuild.”

  “If I can help, I will.”

  “I would rather you helped me tear down than build.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There are things we can take and things we can’t. I want to destroy everything in the church that we can’t take with us.”

  So much for material things having no meaning, Aras thought. The more he discussed their beliefs with them, the less sense they made. But it wasn’t the time to debate with them. Their faith would be the only thing that would keep them going through the crushing misery of being uprooted and having to start again on a world they didn’t know.

  “I know you have always told us to stay away from Christopher Island,” Josh said carefully. It was another island in the chain that was home to Constantine. Once it had been called Ouzhari. It was all black grass in spring, a plant unique to the island. “And that’s the only place c’naatat can be found, yes?”

  “I didn’t realize you knew,” Aras said.

  “I didn’t,” said Josh. “Not for sure.”

  It was the first time—the only time—that Josh had ever tricked him. The sensation was unpleasant. Josh was a decent man and Aras knew he had no reason to doubt his integrity. But it hurt. They sat in silence and busied themselves with the soup.

  They had named t
he island after St. Christopher, another of these not-quite-gods that they made out of men and women. They had beatified all six islands in the chain: Constantine, Catherine, Charity, Clare, Chad, and Christopher. Aras had learned about saints. He still thought it might have been more appropriate for the c’naatat island to be named St. Charity, given the nature of her martyrdom. Saints needed to suffer. It was one of those dark needs of humankind.

  The first robotic mission to Bezer’ej had landed on Christopher, and Aras had relocated it as far up the chain as possible with the help of wess’har comrades long since dead. The colonists knew exactly what c’naatat was. They had no interest in it, almost to the point of dread. Some of them regarded it as the devil’s temptation, whatever that meant. The kind of eternal life they were looking for involved something called the bliss of God, not resistance to disease and injury until you lost everyone you ever cared for. No, they were no threat. They pitied him. He would never go to heaven.

  Josh closed his eyes for a second. He might have been praying. Humans thought aloud to God, and Aras had never worked out how they expected their deity to pick its way between their billions of conflicting needs and desires.

  He opened his eyes. “You’ll hold on to the gene bank, of course.”

  “Whatever happens,” said Aras, “I will ensure the species bank is preserved. Whether it will ever return to Earth, I can’t say. But we won’t hand over any of those people or plants to Actaeon.”

  “Are you really removing the biobarrier?”

  “You know why we have to.”

  “They really would wipe us out too, then.”

  “Yes.”

  Josh looked him in the eye for several long seconds. Aras could see his ancestor Ben in him. Aras felt sorrow and fear for them all, but he didn’t feel guilty and he didn’t feel repentent. For a moment he thought that Josh had finally seen him for the alien he truly was: neither a miracle nor a guardian nor anything sent by divine providence to help them carry out their task, but an alien with a radically different morality.

  “I understand,” Josh said, and Aras knew he didn’t. A gulf had opened up between them. It had always been there, paper-thin, but now it was a canyon and widening fast.

  Aras stayed in Constantine for two more days. He made sure he visited the school and walked as many of the subterranean streets as he could. The spring crops were sprouting: two of the rats he had liberated from the Thetis’s pharmacologist had produced a litter because the colony’s children hadn’t quite worked out how to sex them, never having experienced live animals larger than insects before. It was all normal and full of unspecified hope.

  Josh’s son James was taking good care of Black and White, two of the lab rats that Aras had taken a particular liking to. Aras played hand-chasing games with them for a while, but they weren’t as nimble as they had been. Rats aged fast. Shan had warned him they would die in another year or so, and that he shouldn’t get upset because that was normal for rats.

  Above ground, all that was visible of the settlement were the discreet domes of skylights and the carefully arranged patches of crops. The air was scented with damp green fertility.

  He paid a visit to the church of St. Francis. GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD’S WORK.

  The inscription had been one of his earliest memories of the colony. He had watched bots carve it years before any humans arrived on the planet. They had been gethes then. He had stopped them using other creatures for food and turned them into acceptable humans.

  I had a choice. I was still the custodian of Bezer’ej. It would have been no trouble to kill them before they woke from chill-sleep.

  But he hadn’t. And he hadn’t let Shan die either. He didn’t regret either decision. Regret was pointless and human. It had nothing to do with reality.

  Aras would have to turn the reclamation nanites loose in the tunnels and galleries. They would reduce all artefacts to dust as efficiently as they had wiped out all traces of the shattered isenj settlements on Bezer’ej. It was a pity about the window, though.

  He walked up the aisle of the church and studied the stylized figure in a brown robe. He had assembled most of the image: he could take it apart again. The colonists would need something of this place to take with them, and it was as iconic and representative of their purpose as anything he could imagine.

  Shan came up behind him. He caught a pleasant breath of her distinctive skin-scent, a smooth, mouth-filling smell of sawn wood underlaid by a human bittersweet musk.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I am.”

  “I’m sorry. I really am. Not for them, but for you.”

  He sized up the window, working out how he would dismantle the many leaded pieces of glass and record their positions so he might reassemble them in F’nar. “It will further help them get to their heaven,” he said.

  “Are you taking the piss?”

  “Not at all. I mean it. The more they have to do things they find hard, the better their god loves them, it seems. I still don’t understand the value of suffering.”

  “Yeah, it beats me too.”

  “I shall stay and help them depart. It’s the right thing to do.”

  Shan slipped her arm through his and they stood looking at the stained glass saint who had loved all creation, and his entourage of animals, some of which might have eaten him had he fallen into their grasp. Aras suspected an alyat would have overlooked St. Francis’s respect for it if there had been a lean hunting season.

  Shan was looking intently at the window too. Aras didn’t have to ask why. It was the areas of blue glass that spoke to her. When she first saw them, they had looked white: humans couldn’t see the colors as wess’har did. Then she saw them for the color they were, and knew what he had done to save her. She’d been enraged and terrified.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. Clearly the association was no longer painful. “And I still don’t know how the sunlight gets down here.”

  “I could show you.”

  “Later.” Her eyes moved over the image. “You’re going to save it, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’m glad.” She squeezed his arm. “I’ll hang on here, then. If there’s any dissent, I’ll handle it.”

  “They’re taking it hard.” He was glad she would be around. She seemed to relish restoring compliance: he saw it only as a necessity. “It will make it easier having you here.”

  “I might have to do things that you’ll find hard to accept. I don’t want it to drive us apart.”

  “Shan, you’re my isan and I’m bound to you, whatever you do or say.”

  He felt all her muscles tense. “You sound as if you wish you weren’t.”

  “No. I’m perfectly content.”

  “Look, when the dust has settled, let’s take a few days out of F’nar and get ourselves straight again. Perhaps we could visit Baral.” She reached into her jacket, took out the small red cylinder of her swiss and pressed it into his hand. “No point my carrying this. Nevyan’s given me a new communications thing. I don’t think I’m ever going to get the hang of it somehow.”

  The antiquated swiss was no use to him either. And it was full of details of the demons that drove her, the terrible things that gethes did. But he knew how much it meant to her and that she was giving it to him as a gesture. He suspected she would never use the word love, but he understood nevertheless.

  “I shall take good care of it,” he said.

  A pause. “I’d better be off, then.” She gave him a brisk kiss on the cheek and strode back down the aisle, boots echoing.

  Yes. A few days of quiet—without matriarchs and Eddie and all the tension that had accompanied them since the day they met—might be good for them both. Aras watched her go and marveled at how unconcerned she seemed. Then he walked to the bell tower and took hold of the long ropes of hemp and efte attached to the six glass bells.

  Ben Garrod had never believed that bells could be made from glass. Humans had limited
technology in that area. But he had been delighted by the sound they made when struck. It was a wavering note rather than a low metallic gong, but it carried for miles and it had an ethereal quality that the humans liked.

  It was a sound that generations of colonists had grown up hearing. Aras had no idea why Josh insisted on destroying them now and not leaving them to the nanites.

  Aras glanced up into the top of the tower that housed the bells. In daylight the brilliant blue was visible, and if he stood at the right position in the aisle he could look up and see the curved transparent shapes through the beams of the roof. He was still staring up, remembering the effort of making them, when he scented Josh coming through the church.

  The man looked tired. “Let’s do it,” he said. “One last time.”

  “We could remove them,” Aras said.

  “No,” said Josh. “No nanites, either. I want to see them gone now. No looking back.”

  Josh took one rope in both hands and gave it an all-out downward tug, tipping the bell back on itself and drawing a long, plaintive note from it. Then he stopped and placed another rope in Aras’s hand.

  “Just pull this when I indicate,” he said.

  Aras had never cared to learn the complex sequences of ringing that the colonists took great care to practice. He rang now because Josh wanted him to; that was the least he could do for him, even though their friendship was now feeling strained. Using only two bells, the ringing had none of the magnificent tonal complexity of what they called plain hunt or rounds, but perhaps the tolling of two bells was more apt than peals that were celebratory in tone.

  The sound vibrated in Aras’s throat. He felt he could taste it.

  Josh paused for breath. “They used to use church bells as an alarm signal,” he said. “There was a war in Europe when they stopped churches ringing their bells for the whole six years of the war, because if the bells rang, it was a warning that England had been invaded.” He stared up the length of the thick beige rope, and Aras could have sworn he was in tears. “It’s just material, Aras. We don’t need these things to know God.”