Ally

  And now she was Prometheus, the cocky Titan who decided he knew better than Zeus, and gave mankind a helping hand with technology and art, and so pissed off the boss that his punishment was a perpetual round of having his liver torn out and healed each night. She was living one big Greek in-joke about c’naatat. And Prometheus’s brother—she never could remember his name—fell under the spell of some girl called Pandora.

  “Okay,” she said. “Funny. I get it. Now tell me something useful. Like—”

  Pili nudged her roughly, as a bezeri would do to another. “Who do you talk to?”

  “I wish I knew.” Lindsay stared at the plate with its dwindling pile of shellfish and gelatinous tripe-like sheven. “I thought it was myself, but I never know these days.”

  Pili and Loc were happy, and the bezeri would now survive. Objective achieved: all Lindsay had to do now was to turn them into a civilization that could repel invaders.

  She didn’t have a Greek myth for that.

  “Leeenz…” Saib rumbled. “See what Maipay can do.”

  Bezeri liked novelty. It seemed to be so overwhelming for them that they stopped mentioning the recent holocaust, and Lindsay didn’t ask why. She felt she knew. No, she did know: she had enough bezeri in her to feel that odd sense of entitlement that if you were alive, then you deserved to be, and that made you stronger. It fitted their Nietzschean mindset very well.

  The bioluminescence was a harmless legacy, but the attitudes she feared she was inheriting troubled her. She wondered how long it would be before she felt this was all her right, and could think no other way, and forgot David.

  “Okay,” she said. “Show me, Maipay. Do a trick.”

  “Come to the wetland.”

  “Does this involve killing sheven?”

  “Not this time.”

  “Good. You’ll run out of sheven if you don’t let some of them breed.”

  “Never run out of sheven now…”

  Lindsay and a few of the bezeri males trooped after Maipay and stood on the edge of the bog, feeling the faint vibration like standing on a very large ship that only occasionally reminded you that it was moving on waves. Water that pooled on the surface reflected the light of Wess’ej, a nearly full moon.

  “It is better in day,” Maipay said gravely. “But I light up so you see me better.”

  He stood back, raised slightly on his back tentacles, and spread what would have been his arms to form a shape that reminded her of a flying squirrel. His flesh lit up in a range of blue from cyan to royal, and then he seemed to…thin out. She had no other words for it.

  Maipay stretched into a enormous sheet of blue light, maybe six meters across, and then dived head first into the bog, and vanished into the blackness.

  “Holy shit,” said Lindsay.

  “Is clever,” said one of the males.

  “Is scary,” Lindsay said. Well, if he met a sheven down there, Maipay was big enough and crazy enough to eat the damn thing. “What’s he doing?”

  And as if on cue, a brilliant blue sheet of light burst through the surface of the bog and reared in the characteristic menacing iceberg pose of a sheven. He hung there, like the real thing.

  “I make sheven,” he said. His voice seemed very different, but he’d deformed his body so much that the air pockets and diaphragms bezeri used to make sound had changed shape, and the vocal tone with it. “Do I look sheven?”

  “Like a native,” said Lindsay, shocked.

  “I like this. I stay this way for a while.”

  She had to ask. “Did you find any sheven down there?”

  “No,” he said sadly. “All gone. But more to hunt on the next dryness. On Clare.”

  Saib seemed very pleased, all amber and violet smugness as he watched the display. All that Lindsay could think was that she was again aping Prometheus with a repeating cycle, but this was not a renewed daily torture but a past where bezeri hunted species to extinction, understood that, felt no shame, and did it again.

  Just like us, Lindsay thought. When us was human.

  “I can do this too,” said Saib.

  They practiced like athletes. Before long, Lindsay had a multicolored lightshow of shevenlike bezeri diving into the bog and emerging, looking like sheet lightning in an inverted night sky.

  Saib reared and dived with abandon. They were so bloody happy to be alive. However much it appalled her, she envied them.

  “We can defend ourselves.” Saib flopped onto a patch of solid ground and gradually metamorphosed into a rounded cone to sit watching her. “One day we may build like the wess’har, but now we can hunt like sheven, and none will come here.”

  It took a few seconds for the penny to drop. Saib suddenly slid into a horizontal shape and flowed towards a tree. Then he inched up it, projecting limbs and climbing. At the top of the tree, like some excessively showy Christmas lights, he draped himself over the branches and then shook loose and glided on a long shallow path to the ground. He made the climb three more times and then on the fourth, he flew a respectable distance like an alyat.

  “Cleverrrrrr!” the other bezeri cheered, ablaze with light. “Saib is clever!”

  He had found an elegant solution to dealing with invaders for the time being. He was sheven, and he was alyat: he could swim, and climb, and run, and fly. He was the ultimate predator.

  Saib began trying his new trick carrying a stone knife. It wouldn’t be long before there were quite a few like him.

  “Saib is clever,” Lindsay said.

  The goal that she thought would take years had been achieved in accidental days. It also forced a choice on her that she’d known would come, but that had happened far, far too soon for her. The bezeri had found their own protection: to become multiform predators, adapting to any environment, and when their remarkable evolution became known, Bezer’ej would be avoided, Lindsay had no doubt.

  She had to join them. There was now nothing else she could be.

  But before she changed so much that she forgot she used to be a woman, she would visit Constantine and recover what was left of David’s grave and his body.

  “Let me try that,” she said. “I can fly. I’m sure I can.”

  Mar’an’cas, Pajat coast

  Aras never thought that the island could accommodate so much extra equipment, but somehow it did.

  Umeh Station—personnel, everything that had use, everything that could be removed—had now been squeezed onto Mar’an’cas. The blue and green tents were pitched far closer together and the camp stretched into rockier ground. Fifty meters ahead, a queue of chattering, excited Umeh crew members snaked out of a tent.

  “I think we might need to get another ITX link,” said Deborah Garrod.

  The ITX relay meant the crew could check bank accounts. That was one of the first things they did when it was restored. Wess’har didn’t have monetary economies, but Aras felt he understood the fascination. Money multiplied if you left it in a bank for long enough. Humans could never have too much of it.

  A few crew, though, were trying to send messages to living relatives and friends, twenty-five years older but still there, still waiting.

  Shan’s journey had taken seventy-five years. Everyone she knew on Earth was dead except for Helen Marchant. Aras wondered if she still grieved about goodbyes never said to people she cared about. There’d been a few, even if she rarely mentioned them.

  Deborah surveyed the camp with one hand to her brow to block the sun. “Apart from the Thetis crew, we’ve never met anyone from outside the colony,” she said. “It’s no bad thing to see new faces.”

  “Time to start practicing socialization with the godless and profane.”

  “Is that a quotation?”

  “No,” said Aras. “That’s who you’ll be living next door to on Earth.”

  “More alien than any…alien.”

  “Do you worry at all about going to Earth? Did you not see the news on the ITX link? War, corruption, strife, crowded cities.”

>   “I know,” she said. “But that’s now. When we get there, it’ll be a new generation, and they’ll have grown up knowing that a change is coming, one that they can’t avoid.”

  “But you’re going to land in Australia, in a predominantly Moslem country that’s already worried about the rise of Christianity.”

  “I have faith in God to shape the path, as he’s done every step of our way. No, Aras, I have no doubts.”

  “They think you own the gene bank, and that it’s a Christian privilege.”

  “Well, Esganikan needs to explain that God owns it, and we’re taking it back to where he intended it to be. Because I doubt that I’ll be making the decisions.” She stopped to watch Becken, Qureshi and Chahal assembling a habitation cube and apparently enjoying it enormously. “See? We’re all transformed. The Lord does that. And…Aras, he’s done that for you too. You faced your past on Umeh. Do you feel cleansed? Have you forgiven the isenj?”

  Aras was distracted by her son, James, now a man in build, as he cut through the avenues of tents and cubes. He glanced at Aras with blank disregard, nothing more, and that summed up their relationship now: James had reached his understanding of Aras’s execution of his father in a more silent way than his mother. Little Rachel, who’d once adored Aras and would run laughing to him, was nowhere to be seen.

  “I can’t forgive someone who’s dead,” Aras said. “The isenj who tortured me is in my memories anyway—I recall what he recalled. And that’s both good and bad, because I understand why he did what he did to me, but I also feel he’s taking away my present.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t erase the memories, and I can’t reach him to talk about them, or do something different with the future. That’s forgiveness, isn’t it?” Some human concepts eluded him even now. “I also recall what I was before he captured me, and what I can never have.” He stared into Deborah’s face and saw wide baffled brown eyes and the faint, fine blue veins around them. “Is this Hell?”

  “What?”

  “As long as I live, I can’t escape him. It strikes me that being trapped with your victim is the kind of elaborate punishment that your god would choose.”

  “It’s not like that, Aras.”

  “I know. God is not there for me. I was only curious.” No, he was disturbed, and he wanted to get back to the self he was when Shan came back from the dead, when for a brief few days—just days, that was all it was, in so long a life—all he and Ade and Shan were happy. “And this judgment day…”

  “We’ll all be judged, Aras, and you mustn’t worry. I’ve wondered how the glimpse of God we get from Earth can give us a full picture of his plan, and now I’ve been allowed to see you and so many different species, I think that’s to teach us that we haven’t seen all that God intends to show us. And so we can’t judge you.”

  It was—finally—some kind of acceptance that humans weren’t special. “Esganikan is going to fulfill that role for Earth, Deborah. That’s your judge.”

  “We’re given more glimpses of the picture each day. Esganikan is another instrument of God’s will. I can accept that.”

  This was the point where Aras struggled with Deborah’s logic. He knew what Esganikan was. She was a military commander, an isan with special skills: she subdued planets and remade them. She was the instrument of an ancient culture—his, however distant in form and place—that wanted a balanced, fair, ecologically sustainable galaxy. There was no mystery, divine or otherwise. This was consequence and fair play, as Shan called it. If Deborah couldn’t see God’s purpose, Aras could certainly see Esganikan’s.

  “What if she has to kill humans as part of this plan, like she’s killed isenj on Umeh?” he asked.

  Now it was Deborah’s turn to struggle. “Aras, we reach Earth in less than thirty years. A great deal can change in that time. Something will happen.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Knowing that a hugely powerful army is coming that will enforce change forces change.” She was a pattern-recognizing human: the extreme events she’d lived through were rationalized into some divine plan, but there was at least some logic in the deterrent effect of an Eqbas fleet. “It’s called seeing sense.”

  But humans never saw sense when they were warned about impending environmental disaster. Was it worth saying that? Aras never knew whether pointing out the error in her logic achieved anything, and if something had no bearing on an outcome then it wasn’t worth saying. He stayed silent. Humans called that diplomacy.

  “Did the isenj forgive you, Aras?”

  “I didn’t ask,” he said. “And it doesn’t matter.”

  He walked off in search of Barencoin and Ade, who’d shown up with tools and were helping Webster get a bank of generators running on human waste. It was an inventive adaptation from the recycling system in Umeh Station. Webster was head-down in a square tank, legs visible over the edge, all dappled combat pants and solid boots. Rhythmic banging reverberated in the tank. Ade and Barencoin, stripped to the waist, were feeding pipes through apertures, squatting down and bobbing up to check where the alignment was. Barencoin saw him and straightened up.

  “We’re really cooking with shit now, ’Ras,” he said, grinning. “You don’t look too happy.”

  “I’ve been discussing God’s plans with Deborah.”

  Ade bounced up from the ground and his attention was immediately on his house-brother. He gave Aras a boisterous shove that was clearly designed to meet Barencoin’s standards of what was acceptable contact in adult males. There was no hug. “Just nod and smile, mate.”

  “She keeps saying they have thirty years to achieve some change on Earth before the Eqbas arrive.”

  Webster reversed out of the tank, kicking her legs to get upright. Her face was red and shiny from effort. “Well, a bit short of that, but as near as damn it in round figures.”

  “She thinks that means thirty years to talk.”

  “Oh shit, you didn’t explain relativity to her, did you?”

  “No.”

  “If they don’t sort it in the next four years, then they won’t be doing much more talking until they land,” said Ade. “With a big gap to catch up on.”

  “A place can really go downhill in that time.” Barencoin picked up a sawn length of pipe and blew across it, producing a plaintive note. “I love a surprise.”

  “Give us a hand, Aras.” Webster offered him a metal tool. “Big strong lad like you shouldn’t be standing around idle.”

  Aras knew they didn’t need his help. It was just a friendly gesture to make him feel accepted. He helped manhandle the tank into position and they spent the next few hours connecting pipes, separators, catalysts and extractors to create an impressive, bright yellow arrangement of rectangular boxes. There was, he agreed, a fundamental satisfaction in getting a job done.

  “I claim the inaugural shit,” said Webster, standing back to admire her work. “And I declare this shit-powered generator officially online.”

  “Ladies first,” said Barencoin. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Ade stood with hands on hips, looking much as he did when he first arrived on Bezer’ej. Only the bioluminescence that was concentrated around the tattoos on his upper arms, a blue backlight to symbol of a globe circled with leaves, gave any hint of his vastly altered physiology.

  He turned and smiled at Aras. “We better get back soon,” he said. “Shan will never forgive us if we miss dinner. Jesus, mate, I love that woman more than my own life, but she’s a fucking awful cook. Just nod and smile, remember. Works with anyone.”

  Everyone was concerned with forgiveness lately. Ben Garrod, Josh’s ancestor and Aras’s first human friend, said his god forgave transgressions. Aras pondered the nature of forgiveness—acceptance, getting on with the future, not letting the past consume you—and wondered how God could take personal umbrage at so many things done to others, and why the deity had the right to forgive the perpetrator if the victims didn’t want to
.

  It was none of his business. The more Aras thought about the concept, the more it struck him that God was the distillation of humankind’s worst tendencies, not its best. God, like humans, presumed too much.

  Bezer’ej: Esganikan Gai’s cabin, outside the Temporary City

  “We’ve found them.”

  Esganikan looked up from the image of Earth’s rising oceans re-created in the bulkhead of her detached section of ship. The Ouzhari remediation team leader stood in the open hatch.

  “Come in, Cilan.” She gestured to him to join her on the deck. He knelt down and took out his virin. “So, how many?”

  “All of them.” Cilan projected the recording from his virin onto the bulkhead. “Forty-five. They’re all living on dry land. It’s extraordinary. They’ve adapted, and that confirms they all carry the parasite.”

  “Rayat said there were forty-four. Does this mean they’ve reproduced already?”

  “No, we think the extra bezeri is the human female in a metamorphosed state. Look.”

  The images were an aerial view of the islands south of the Temporary City. Greatly magnified, they showed a clearing and a number of large gelatinous shapes moving around: and there was one much smaller figure, bipedal, and very humanoid in form. “We thought it was worth trying a search on land, and we used remotes rather than overflying the area. They appear to have built a settlement on Nazel.”

  “We need to monitor their movements. We can’t afford to lose them again.”

  “That’s being done.”

  Esganikan felt delicious relief. She hadn’t experienced that in a long time, and she savored it. The bezeri could be tracked, studied, and, if absolutely necessary, eliminated. She would tell Shan Frankland the situation was now under control, and forbid her to take any action. It was one problem removed.