He’s leaving me.
Shan fought to steady her voice. “So you’re going.”
“Yes.”
“It’s not because of Ade, is it? It’s not because you feel left out?”
“No.” There was a rustle of fabric and rush of air as if he was going to put his hand on her arm, but she turned and took a step back. “I don’t feel neglected. I never have. There was a time when I felt I made life difficult for Ade, because humans value monogamy, but I have never felt jealousy or pain. This isn’t how wess’har think. You must know that by now.”
“Okay.”
“You’re upset.”
Shan was damned if she’d cry in front of him. “Well, when your old man walks out on you, you tend to feel a bit pissed off. It’s a monkey thing. It’s okay. I always pack a spare.”
“Shan, please don’t do this.”
“What, end on a sour note?”
“Put on this act.”
“I think,” she said, in a moment of agonizing clarity, “that you’re far braver than I’ll ever be because you can face yourself. Your real self. Me, I’m still avoiding everything that makes me me. And maybe that’s why I clung to this fucking parasite after all, because it made me someone else.”
“No,” said Aras patiently. “I think you did what you always do. You were stuck with it, so you made the best of a bad job.”
“And now I don’t have to. Rayat’s right. I just won’t deal with it.”
She thought she was doing pretty well, all things considered. She hadn’t shouted at him, or accused him, or even started crying or pleading. She’d never plead, even though he was precious to her and might well heed the appeal. She wanted him to be happy. She’d put her own needs aside all her life out of duty, out of what she suspected was a perverted instinct to be declared a clever, brave girl, and thus worthy of her parents’ attention, but this was the first time she’d done anything without factoring in her own sense of self-worth.
Aras deserved to be happy.
“I would like to do this alone,” Aras said. “This is hard for you and Ade. I know the process, and I’ll go back to Baral.”
“You should have someone with you. I’ll—”
“It’s not like dying, Shan. I can still see you both whenever I want, even if I’m different then.”
But it was like dying. Once the parasite was neutralized, Aras was on borrowed time like every other wess’har—like every human.
“It might be frightening,” she said. “Let us go with you.”
“Lindsay could endure it, and I’m far more secure in my self than she ever was.”
“You’d rather be alone?”
“I think so.”
He was right. He wasn’t playing games or being self-effacing because he was wess’har, however much human or isenj or whatever was in him. They didn’t do that. But she still felt she was letting him give her an easy way out.
How can I forget him? He’s in me. And he was the last thought I had when I was dying. That’s where the truth is. That’s when you know what your soul is made of, if any of us have one.
“Okay. Okay, we’ve made up our minds.” She couldn’t see well enough to carry on with the careful chipping away of stone to make Becken and Qureshi immortal in a more ecologically acceptable, less ethically fraught way. “Funny. We think we’re bonded for eternity, and then we can walk away from each other in a matter of minutes.”
“I haven’t shocked you,” Aras said quietly. “You could see this was coming.”
“Yes.” Could she blame him? If she’d been a less troubled soul and removing c’naatat could have given her a second chance of younger adulthood, she might not have been as torn as she was. Like she told Lindsay, this was that rarest of things, a second chance. All that removing c’naatat would do for her would be to restore her to a time when she’d made all her mistakes and lived with them grudgingly. “And I think you’ll be a wonderful father. You should do it. I want you to do whatever makes you happy.”
Aras turned and took a few steps, but then spun around, caught her by her shoulders and gave her an ordinary human kiss that broke her heart.
She thought of all the people she’d put a poor second to some goal that was far less important than being a normal creature of your own species. She had no right to sentence Aras to live his life as a freak to satisfy her own needs.
He’d do whatever I told him to. Wouldn’t he?
That was no way to live.
“If I avoid you for a while,” she said, “it’ll be because I’m coming to terms with it. Be patient with me.”
“You always were a bad liar, Shan Chail.”
She was no longer isan, then. She turned back to the carving so she wouldn’t have to watch him go, and worked on it even though she couldn’t see the bloody shape any longer. Eventually she stopped rather than ruin the inscription, and thought that at least she wasn’t so distraught that she couldn’t think rationally. She never was. The lights in her hands rippled with shades of violet for a few seconds and then vanished again
“Sod it,” she said.
When she got home, Ade was waiting, expression like a kid awaiting a thrashing, and started making the universal remedy of tea in total silence.
“Do we want to discuss this?” she said, flopping down on the sofa she’d built herself. It was still rock-solid. “He’s gone.”
Ade put her cup on the low table within reach and leaned over the back of the sofa to cup her face in his hands and look down at her.
“I bloody well love you, woman, and I always will,” he said quietly. “And we’ll cope. Shit, we’ll even be happy again. I promise you.”
That was Ade—dog-loyal, grateful for small kindnesses because he’d known so few, and able to snatch contentment and normality wherever he found it. He was totally admirable. He could also go after Kiir with a saber, intent on cutting him to ribbons.
“Ade, what happens to us if we revert back to normal?”
He pulled a face at her. It was hard to read expressions upside down. “I’d still want you, Boss. I fancied you something rotten when we were both ordinary, didn’t I?”
“You did.” She took a shine to him from day one, too. He was a choice rather than an accident made happy, whatever she’d once told herself. “I feel wrong carrying on with this thing when there’s no justifiable need.”
Ade walked around the sofa and sat down next to her. “I need us, though. Aras told me that doing a self-indulgent thing that wasn’t harmful to anyone else was something everyone had to do. I’ve had a very short time of happiness in a life of shit. I want more. Is that good enough reason? I don’t know. We could all have eaten a grenade and solved this once and for all, but none of us did.”
“You always get to the balls of the argument, sweetheart.” Shan ruffled his hair. Ade didn’t make that contented urrring noise like a wess’har, but he lit up. “I’m going to do as my old man says for once.”
They acted happy and acted eating a normal dinner with just the two of them. It was strained, but they would come through it, as they always had so far. If they could act it long enough, it would become habit, and then reality.
Ade had taught her that much. There were times when he showed her how intelligent she was but how very little she knew. She’d give it a few days to settle in her head, then go and tell Giyadas they’d reached their decision.
It was the right thing, but her guts were screaming that it just wasn’t fair, not after she and Ade had both been through so much.
For the first time in her life, she wanted someone else to make the decisions for her.
Baral, northern Wess’ej.
Shan had told Aras that he shouldn’t do this alone, but he wasn’t. He was among family, and when he got to know everyone better, then he’d also be among friends.
“Will you require help?” asked Jesenkis. This male was his kin, even more distant than Nevyan’s uncle Sevaor, but definitely kin. When this parasite left Ar
as, he would value that. “Is it painful?”
“A fever,” said Aras. Please, just check on me and give me water for a few days. I would rather go through this alone.”
“Will you look normal afterwards?”
Aras had been so used to being regarded as exotically beautiful by Shan that he’d forgotten how utterly alien he appeared to his own kind.
My own kind.
“I will,” he said.
Now he could think of his dead comrades with a greater degree of honor. His was a choice they’d never had, so would they have taken it? Of course they would. They chose to die rather than carry on as he did. Whether that made him stronger or more of a coward he didn’t know. He lay down on the thin mattress, spread on the floor Baral-style, and stared up into the domed light above him. It was just a matter of inserting the needle into a muscle. He took a careless stab at his thigh and waited.
For the first few hours, Aras felt nothing. He wondered if c’naatat had yet again found a way to evade the countermeasure, a trick it had played before in wess’har tissue. But then he began to feel hot and feverish, and memories—truly forgotten memories, in detail he had never experienced before—began roiling in his mind: isenj cities, military barracks on Earth, scenes from high above the land and from beneath the sea, even the terrifying pain and cold of deep space—Shan’s lonely space—and the dark cell where the smell of wet leaves meant his isenj captors were coming back to torture him again. Nobody was coming to rescue him.
It might have been hours. He wanted it to end. He wanted, and not for the first time in his life, to die.
Footsteps echoed outside in the passages and he even recalled Jesenkis bringing in water, staring down at him with a sharply tilted head and strong scent of agitation, then leaving again.
It was all Aras deserved. He was a killer of isenj civilians, betrayer of better wess’har who took the honorable way out, abandoner of his isan. He got what he had coming, as Eddie might have said. He was dying. Shapakti had got something wrong.
“Hang in there, mate,” said a voice. Aras thought it was his disrupted mind, struggling to process the welter of recollections as he sweated out this fever, but a hand took his arm and someone wiped his face with a blissfully cold wet cloth. “Bloody daft. Who do you think you are, Captain Oates?”
It was Ade. Aras made sure he was real, grabbing his arm. “Is Shan here too?”
“No, I made her stay at home. It’s better that way, mate.”
Aras tried to sit up but Ade made him lie still. My brother came for me. My brother came when I needed him. Aras had lost any sense of the passage of time, but it was a long and painful fever made more bearable by the knowledge that Ade was always there, one soldier determined not to leave his comrade scared and alone to face his fate, and that was all Aras needed to get through this.
Am I really dying? Is Ade here because he knows that?
When c’naatat made changes to its host, there was always a fever. This was far worse. The parasite seemed determined not to let go. It was struggling to save its world just as he had struggled to save Bezer’ej.
I’m sorry, but I have to do this.
He was no longer sure who the apology was aimed at.
Now he was back on Ouzhari, an island that had once been a mass of black grass and white powder beaches, and then became a scene of destruction and black vitrified sand. He’d walked through snow there, watching the first gethes’ bots, their mechanical vanguard sent to build a home for them, and made the decision to move them to an island where they wouldn’t encounter c’naatat. The bots had carved a stone section of a building with words that had bewildered him, and even now he was no closer to fully understanding them: GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD’S WORK.
The young navigator—long since food for the scavengers—asked if he should fear the arrival of the gethes. Aras had told him he would be long dead if the worst happened, and he was.
But I’ll live to see it. He would live to see it all.
And he had.
F’nar, upper terraces.
Ade hadn’t mentioned Aras at all since he returned from Baral and simply said: “It went okay.”
After that, it was as if Aras never existed, although they both knew damn well that they thought about him all the time, and set one plate too many on the table, with that catch in the throat that normally came with realizing someone was dead and never coming back for a meal again. And it was a lonely bed, too. When Ade was in the mood again, the memories swapped during sex would simply fill in the awful gaps and nothing would need to be said or discussed. Genetic memory might have been a sketchy record of detail, but it was meticulous about the intensity of emotions.
He’d miss that layer of subtle communication. He’d missed it when they had to use a condom. But he could get used to being without it again. There were no more excuses. Aras had shamed him.
“You coming to see Giyadas with me?” Shan said.
“Whatever we do, we do together.” He tried to find respite in harsh banter, just as he used to with the marine detachment. “I wouldn’t have spent so much on that bloody ring if I didn’t want to be chained to you.”
Walking to Giyadas’s house felt just like the hours that melted into minutes when he finally had to say goodbye to his mates on Earth. The finality felt like an execution, even if there were plenty of years ahead of them both, if Eddie’s innings were anything to go by. But somehow, it was like opening a wonderful gift as a kid only to have it snatched away from you and a smaller, less amazing toy thrust in its place.
Grow up. Izzy and Jon didn’t even get this far. You selfish bastard.
It was a full house. Giyadas’s kids and grandkids, Nevyan, the usual domestic crowd. Ade squirmed. Taking the countermeasure would be like having to pee in front of the doctor, a loss of dignity at a vulnerable moment.
“Shapakti’s here,” Giyadas said. “You’re sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure I have to,” said Shan.
Ade saw Nevyan’s pupils snap open and shut. She probably felt bad about it. She adored Shan; they were best mates. She’d saved her life, found her drifting in that terrible mummified state when nobody else was looking for her because she had to be dead. Nothing could survive spacing.
But c’naatat did.
At least he wouldn’t have to worry about a hull breach. If it ever happened, it’d all be over fast now. There were plenty of good things about not being c’naatat.
“I have to do this, too,” he said. “Bring it on, doc.”
Ade counted when things stopped happening. It was a habit. He couldn’t remember when it started, or even if it had been quite this automatic before he got the parasite, but he counted the pauses in seconds. Nobody did anything or said a word for four seconds.
Nevyan just stared at Shan. Shan, usually a woman could make any bastard blink first, looked down at the floor. That wasn’t like her at all.
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
“I have a concern,” said Nevyan. “The matriarchs all have, in fact. This is not something we want to force upon you, just as we never took your DNA for the weapons program against your will, but it concerns us. We no longer have a source of c’naatat should we ever be in dire circumstances again.”
“There’s Ouzhari,” said Shan. “Plenty of it there.”
Giyadas cut in. “We don’t know if the organisms there have ever passed through a host, or what they might transmit to a wess’har host if they had. But we know what yours has acquired. It’s a known quantity. It’s been through our own troops before, and yourselves. And then we also gain whatever extra experience you acquire in living your life.”
“And it’s Rayat-free.” Shan shifted to the other foot, looking like she was getting ready to move. She’d made up her mind. Ade knew how she hated last-minute changes. “So that’s a bonus. But you could easily bottle my tissue samples, and Ade’s. This is bullshit.”
“Who are you trying to convince?”
Shan put her hands on her hips and looked down at the floor in silence again. Ade found himself counting.
“Aras wanted to have children, Shan. He was frank about that. His reasons were very different from yours.” said Giyadas. “And what about Ade?”
“I do what the Boss does,” he said. But he didn’t want to, not at all; he wanted much more time with her. He felt resentful that he’d had a taste of a life he’d craved and now it was being taken away from him. For a moment he reminded himself that he never gave Qureshi the chance, so maybe this was his punishment for being a stupid selfish bastard, but that voice inside wouldn’t be silenced. It was childish, selfish and needy.
“What do you want, Ade Bennett?”
He couldn’t bring himself to say it. Shan turned and looked into his face, and she knew. She just knew he didn’t want to go through with it. He could see it.
Ade did what he always had. He stayed loyal. “Like I said, what the Boss says, goes.”
It was an awful moment. He’d put Shan in the position of taking something from him that he wanted. Nevyan tugged at the collar of her dhren, her little nervous gesture—rare for a wess’har—and stepped so close to Shan that Ade thought she was going to take hold of her.
“You’ll never admit what you want,” she said. “But I know what this choice is not Ade’s, and he deserves better from you than to be dragged in the wake of your principled stands. So I’m going to do something you may never forgive me for.”
Ade didn’t notice it at first, but Shan did. She inhaled sharply. The scent of cut mango suddenly filled the room; jask. Nevyan and Giyadas had ganged up on Shan in pheromone terms, and asserted their dominance over Shan. That was how wess’har matriarchs enforced consensus in the group. Shan looked furious for a moment and then stepped back a pace or two. She’d been caught on the hop, and she was as susceptible to jask as any wess’har female.
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