Ally

  “Dead or alive?”

  “Alive is always better.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Shan walked out of the maze of corridors and chambers that formed the Temporary City, passing knots of ussissi displaced from Umeh by the fighting—not almost-appealing meerkats now, but irritable, anxious, pack-fighting animals. There was also the Eqbas crew working on the decontamination of Ouzhari island, around a hundred of them in this former wess’har garrison. The rest of the 2,000-strong force was split between Umeh and the surrounding camp, and they were marking time on those duties until the rest of the Eqbas task force joined them for the journey to Earth.

  Shan found a sheltered spot on the shingle beach and sat in the lee of a twenty-meter long mat of some tufted lavender-gray succulents. This was where Ade and Aras would land the boat. She’d see them coming.

  Umeh is not your problem. Leave it alone.

  But Umeh was tearing itself apart. The Eqbas were giving them a hand in making a bang-up thorough job of it, too.

  None of this is your problem. Stop looking for more fights to keep yourself occupied.

  From the beach she could see the first island in the chain that ran south, about six kilometers across the channel. She realized she didn’t actually know the local name for it; to her, it had always been Constantine. That was the name of the religious colony that had lived there for nearly two centuries, and so in the proprietorial way of foreign empires the island’s identity had been subsumed by it. The chain of islands ran south, decreasing in size like a bunch of stylized grapes—Catherine, Charity, Clare, Chad, and Christopher, named for saints who hadn’t been on hand here to perform any miracles when they were really needed.

  Christopher had a local name: Ouzhari. Shan wondered if it would go down in history like Hiroshima or Istanbul, an icon of destruction. It had been idyllic white sand and black grass set in a vivid blue sea, but the grass was gone, and only c’naatat survived in the soil of the irradiated wasteland.

  So the bezeri were as rotten and profligate as humans. They’d wiped out a rival race long before the wess’har came to the Cavanagh system, and—according to Rayat—they didn’t feel the least bit guilty, and they didn’t deny it. They seemed bullish: proud, even. Shan realized she’d been hoping that the unifying principle of non-human life across the galaxy would be compassion, and that Homo sapiens was the bad apple in the galactic barrel. Deep down, though, her rational self had long suspected that gang-banging dolphins and murdering chimps were just evidence that all life was brutal and opportunistic in its way, and that people by the wess’har definition of sentience—human or cephalopod, in-sectoid or un-cute meerkat—were equal, both in their right to life and their complete disregard for it.

  But she liked the wess’har. They killed too, but she understood their rules: vegan, cooperative, frugal, and utterly remorseless. They didn’t pick on the small and the weak. They swaggered up to the biggest bully in the playground, tapped them on the shoulder, and punched them out. That was how she did things too. She fitted in fine with the local wess’har. She also fitted in with the Eqbas wess’har, up to a point, and that was the part that worried her, because the cultural and ethical rift between the two branches was big. She watched it growing bigger each day.

  They all think it’s perfectly okay for me to betray my duty and help eco-terrorists, though. Normal, decent, wess’har thing to do.

  If only she embraced the Wess’ej Targassati philosophy of non-intervention as well, she might have been a lot happier. But her gut still told her to do as the Eqbas branch of the family did; wade into trouble to sort things out, unasked and uninvited.

  Across the channel, a pinpoint of reflection wreathed in a bow wave of white foam was heading her way. As she watched, it resolved into a rigid inflatable. Two figures sat forward, leaning on the gunwales, one the dark and heavily muscled shape of a once wess’har rendered almost unrecognizable by the changes c’naatat had made to him, the other a smaller blur of lovat green combats, a human male.

  How will we ever get back to normal after all this?

  Normal was relative; other people’s normal had never been hers anyway, but the last few years had shifted it much further along the spectrum. Now she wondered if she was actually irreparably damaged by accepting that you could suck hard vacuum or cut your guts open and still carry on as if you were human. The only reference point of sanity that she had was two lovers who were as altered as she was, and probably about as well adjusted. Their shared purdah seemed a powerful bond. Now, after the abortion, it seemed fragile.

  Yeah, maybe a bit of discussion beforehand would have been a good idea. But what if you’d talked me into keeping it?

  It could never be. It was a girl, but Shan hung on to the neuter, the nameless, and made damn sure she didn’t start sentimentalizing. It wouldn’t change a thing. As she focused on Ade, she also made sure she didn’t wonder if the kid would have looked like him. That was the path to becoming a fucking lunatic like Lindsay.

  By the time the inflatable slowed down in the shallows Shan could see that neither Ade nor Aras were happy. If the wind had been in the right direction, she was sure she could have smelled them. Ade jumped out of the boat as it ran up onto the beach, and lifted its outboard clear to haul up the pebbles for Aras to step out.

  Now Shan could see why. Aras was cradling something in his arms. It was a makeshift container of folded plastic, full of vegetation and soil.

  He’s rescued something. He’s found some animal. He’s so bloody soft.

  Wess’har generally expressed their strict vegan outlook by unsentimental avoidance of other species, but Aras had insisted on looking after the lab rat colony he’d liberated from Rayat before surrendering them to Shapakti. He found their little paws fascinatingly like human hands. Shan got to her feet and walked towards him, expecting to see something helpless and rare in the container, something Aras wanted to nurture.

  She peered in. It was just wet earth and vegetation coated in what looked like raw albumen.

  “Where is it?” she said. “Come to that, what is it?”

  Ade had that studied lack of expression that said he had bad news, but his acid scent of anxiety conveyed the real message just fine. “I think we need to get Shapakti to take a look.”

  “Why?”

  Aras—far from the seahorse-like elegant wess’har he had been, now more a heraldic beast overlaid on a man, magical and tragic—still had that tendency to tilt his head to indicate intense interest. “I believe there are trace cells on this piece of riverbank that are from a bezeri.”

  Shan heard riverbank and bezeri. She was no biologist, but bezeri were ocean dwellers, saltwater animals. “What’s driven them inshore? Are they beaching themselves?”

  She expected more bad news about their numbers. They were down to the last forty or so individuals of a population that had already declined to tens of thousands before the cobalt-salted neutron devices scoured Ouzhari and contaminated the sea round it. They would never recover.

  Aras tilted the container. Shan reached out automatically and the lights in her fingertips sparkled in a complex pattern of blue and amber pinpricks. The display distracted her briefly from the wet mess in the plastic box.

  “What’s in there?” she asked.

  “Traces of mucus from the mantle of a bezeri,” said Aras. “From the banks of the estuary.”

  Another dead one. They beached themselves in their thousands after the fallout hit them. “The body’s still there, then.”

  “No.” Ade folded his arms and stared down at the pebbles for a few moments. He looked up, eyes wide and wary. “It ran off.”

  Northern Assembly, Ebj continent, Umeh, Cavanagh’s Star system: near the Maritime Fringe border

  Minister Rit picked her way between rubble on the construction site and wondered when the Maritime Fringe forces would pour across the border again.

  The Eqbas had withdrawn their ship and she didn’t know if they?
??d be back. They’d agreed to help Umeh restore its ecology: her husband, Par Paral Ual, had lost his life for asking them to intervene, and she expected that sacrifice not to be wasted. Once invited, Eqbas didn’t walk away, but they seemed to have walked away now, as if Umeh was so far beyond their help that they’d lost interest in reshaping it.

  It was still Rit’s duty to see that her husband’s wishes were honored. She didn’t know how to cope if they weren’t.

  “I expect them to come back to discuss the bioweapons,” said Rit.

  Ralassi, her ussissi aide, half closed his eyes in faint disapproval. “They always keep their word.”

  “Meanwhile, then, we rebuild.” Humans, her late husband used to tell her, were prone to descend into anarchy in wartime. They abandoned their sense of community. “Are your people going to return?”

  “Perhaps.” Ralassi trotted on, inspecting the progress. He was one of the few ussissi who seemed not to run with the pack. “But they seem to be settling into life on Wess’ej. Whatever happens, that’s home. We evolved with the wess’har, regardless of what other partnerships we might form. Never forget that.”

  Buildings along the route of the Maritime Fringe’s abortive advance stood smashed to the first and second floors, their colored fascias blackened and peeling. Most of the fallen masonry had been cleared, at least the length of the road ahead. The dead had been taken away and cremated long before. Joists and scaffold crisscrossed Rit’s field of view like a web.

  Nothing in her genetic memory, no voice or recollection of her many ancestors, could tell her what move to make now. Isenj rarely fought among themselves. It had taken an external threat—the wess’har and their cousins from Eqbas Vorhi—to tip them into brief, destructive skirmishes, and then—then they paused, bewildered, and looked around at what they had done, and tried to repair it.

  “We still have a tree,” said Ralassi.

  Yes, they still had a tree. In the crater gouged by an explosion, a dalf was growing in the exposed soil, soil that hadn’t seen the light of day for centuries until the brief battle—if the rout of the Fringe armored column could be called that—ripped foundations out of the ground. Long feathery projections, translucent gold in the hazy sun, had unfurled from three slim stalks at the tree’s head.

  Esganikan Gai said it was important that the utter sterility of Umeh should be broken by a living tree planted in that rarest of things, a patch of bare soil. She insisted on it.

  The humans called it a park, except parks had more trees and a variety of other plants. The dalf would have been better off staying on Tasir Var, where it came from; but Esganikan, in that wess’har way of hers, carried on regardless and imposed a park upon the Northern Assembly.

  Rit remembered trees, or at least her ancestors did; that meant they were significant memories. Rit’s ancestral memory also recalled a time when the wess’har were simply newcomers to the system, settlers with impossibly advanced technology who were happy to settle on Asht’s uninhabited twin planet and trouble nobody.

  “How did we live in peace with wess’har for more than nine thousand years,” said Rit, “and then end up fighting so bitterly?”

  “Because the bezeri asked them to intervene to throw you off Bezer’ej.” Ralassi dodged a loader sagging under the weight of chunks of shattered rubble. “Had they been Eqbas wess’har, they would have stopped you colonizing Asht to begin with.”

  This was the concept that gave Rit the most trouble, this idea that wess’har felt obligated to render aid—and carry on rendering it even when they were no longer wanted. She searched her inherited memories and found no hint that any of her forebears had understood that. All they had known was that wess’har didn’t attack Umeh. That had left Umeh unprepared for the aggressively interventionist Eqbas Vorhi.

  “How do humans cope?” she asked Ralassi.

  The ussissi aide reached out and touched the dalf’s fronds carefully as if expecting pain from them. “With parks?”

  “With having to learn everything anew in each generation.”

  “They don’t,” said Ralassi. “They make the same mistakes each time.”

  “No wonder they’re so possessive about information. It’s hard won for them.” They did learn, though. They didn’t seem at all surprised by the Eqbas. “What are they doing now?”

  “They seem happy to have an outgoing ITX link to Earth, even if they have to queue to make their transmissions and even though they have nothing to say.”

  It took one authorization from Rit to lift the block on outgoing messages. Her ministry could have done it sooner, but they hadn’t, and now it had been done that day, after requests had been countersigned and permissions passed down the line. The humans thought there was some strategy to it. But they had simply been forgotten in the unfolding crisis. They didn’t seem used to being a small detail in the galaxy.

  “I see no point continuing the embargo,” said Rit. “There’s no harm that they can do, now that they’re leaving.”

  “And now that the problem isn’t humans provoking wess’har any longer. Minister, what will you do about the Eqbas?”

  “I have to reach an understanding with them, of course.”

  “Shomen Eit says this is now an infrastructure matter, and so his responsibility.”

  The park and the restoration was—strictly speaking—the preserve of Shomen Eit too. Rit, whose ministry handled alien relations, was making a statement by being here at all, even if she had planted the tree because it was, technically, alien.

  And that statement was that she was moving into Shomen Eit’s fiefdom.

  My husband died for this. He wanted Umeh to be restored. And all Eit wants is more power for the Assembly. I can’t let it stop at that.

  “Until he relieves me of my post,” said Rit, measuring every word, “then I carry on doing my duty to the state.”

  Two isenj who had been inspecting the dalf paused to stare at her. For a moment she thought they might speak to her: unlike human politicians, isenj didn’t fear their electorate enough to want constant protection from them. But they simply acknowledged her office with a rattle of quills, stared at the tree for a moment longer, and then moved away.

  She waited for them to pass. “Where is our army now?”

  Ralassi checked the latest deployment on his data cube. “Those who’ve remained loyal to the Assembly are still surrounding the administration buildings, and there are units holding out along the border.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Minister, I’m not a military tactician.”

  “I meant politically.”

  Ralassi had those same spherical eyes as all the fur-things—wess’har, Eqbas, human—except they had none of that disturbing wet glaze that made them look like internal organs protruding through wounds. They were matte black. Even the changing patterns of electrical activity in the cells didn’t give Rit much idea of where those eyes were focused. She had met her first ussissi when she came to Jejeno as a child, and she still sought some pattern in their eyes like she did in the receptors of her own kind. She never found it. She always felt there was something unsaid when she spoke with ussissi.

  “I’m not here to advise,” said Ralassi carefully. “Not about direction. Execution, yes. But the direction can only come from you and your colleagues.”

  “Shomen Eit must be displaced.”

  Rit paused and waited for a reaction. Ralassi’s head bobbed as if he didn’t quite understand what she’d said. He did, of course: it was just that no isenj minister would even suggest a coup. Isenj were largely cooperative, their ambitions held in check by shared memories and the orderly society they inherited from their colony-dwelling ancestors. Rit could recall that ancient sense of purpose for the common good, the sense of knowing where she fitted into the greater scheme and what she had to do.

  But this act was for that greater good of the colony. Defending the colony transcended the need for narrow bureaucratic order. She had to do it.

/>   “The elections are still a year away.” Ralassi’s flat tone betrayed his reluctance to discuss the unthinkable. “Time for any number of crises before then.”

  “I didn’t mean that we should wait for elections.” But there was no “we” for ussissi, not on Umeh at least. “You were born and raised here, Ralassi. Do you not feel any sense of a stake in this society?”

  He blinked. It made him look like the soft, smooth humans again, whose eyes were in constant movement. “This is still not my world. And we can only involve ourselves so far in your affairs. We serve while we can remain neutral.”

  So she’d be removing Shomen Eit on her own, then. She turned her back on the dalf and made her way back to the groundcar, still uncertain of how much support she might get from her cabinet colleagues. Ralassi trotted behind her, his silence telling her that he found her machinations distasteful. Right then it seemed not the prospect of further war that was the greatest threat to her children, but her own government—her own colleagues—seeing the Eqbas intervention solely as a chance to emerge as a global power.

  A global power on a dying planet. A poor prize.

  “There’s no room for old politics,” she said. The driver couldn’t hear them in the sealed cab. “My husband wanted change, and change we’ll have.”

  “You’ll never get Bedoi’s support for this. You need Bedoi to carry the whole cabinet. You know you do.”

  “Maybe I’ll have the army’s.”

  Ralassi didn’t protest. It was, as he said, not his world. Rit had no grasp of what it meant to know no other home and yet not feel part of it. But ussissi, like humans and wess’har, had no genetic memory, and so they couldn’t possibly have a true sense of home and heritage.

  “You’re not a general,” Ralassi said.

  “My ancestors were conquerors.” She wondered if anyone had the skills needed to fight a civil war, a rare thing indeed among isenj. She searched her ancient memories again, seeking something to guide or inspire her. “All I need is Shomen Eit’s influence to be removed, and a weapon that another’s skills can deploy. None of us know how to use a bioweapon except the wess’har. So I have as good a chance as anyone else of using it to advantage.”