Ally

  Lindsay seemed to be struggling with Shan’s revelation. “There’s still nothing in it for them.”

  “If the Eqbas succeed in finding a way to remove c’naatat from hosts, then there is a solution,” said Nevyan. “In time, when the solution is found, the bezeri can breed, restore their numbers, and then the parasite can be removed. But until that happens, they must stop.”

  Lindsay stood silent for a long time. Aras judged this was the point to wander off. He heard her say, “Let me discuss this with Saib and the others,” before her voice faded and was swept away by the breeze. In the foliage, clustered on a stalk in the cool moist shadow, a clutch of eggs that couldn’t be allowed to hatch did indeed look like exotic fruits. As he dug out a pit and laid the small charge, it occurred to him that grinding or mincing would have done the fragmentation job a lot more tidily. But he only had explosives to hand, and that would do the job. He set the fuse and withdrew to squat in the shelter of a tree.

  The blast deafened him for a moment and in the seconds of absolute silence that followed, he saw movement and sparkling light. A couple of bezeri were rushing towards the detonation, bounding on limblike tentacles, clearing the bushes in great leaps. The nearest they had ever come to encountering explosives was—if they could detect it at all—the distant sound of wess’har skirmishes during the abortive attempt at an isenj landing. The bezeri had no idea what had happened.

  Aras recognized one of the bezeri heading his way as the one who’d been searching for sheven in the bog. It was only when the creature rushed to the exact spot where the eggs had been that Aras realized this might be the mother.

  He felt he guessed correctly. She thrashed around the bushes, making an incoherent bubbling growl, and saw only a shallow crater where her eggs had been. Her mantle lit instantly with the most vivid green light, no other color at all. She became an emerald beacon.

  Aras no longer had his signal lamp, and so he couldn’t interpret the language of bioluminescence. But he’d seen that green light before, and he needed no lamp to interpret it. He’d seen it when the bezeri were dying in the shallows after Mohan Rayat, Lindsay Neville, Josh Garrod and Jonathan Burgh had detonated cobalt-slated nuclear devices on Ouzhari island.

  It was a scream of agony.

  Now, perhaps, a deal might be discussed. Aras stumbled far from the green-screaming mother, bent double, and vomited.

  “You’re going to regret that,” said Lindsay Neville’s voice.

  The Temporary City, Bezer’ej

  Shapakti and Rayat were hunched over an examination tray whose magnified image was now a familiar one: the radial brush pattern of c’naatat. In he corner, behind a loose mesh, were the two blue and gold macaws.

  “You don’t allow them to fly free now,” Esganikan said. Shapakti looked up, startled. When engrossed in work, he didn’t even smell her coming. Not even the noise of the macaws distracted him.

  “It’s for their own safety,” Shapakti explained. “They like having company, but they seem to get bored…and then they become disruptive.”

  Rayat looked up at nothing in particular as if he was listening. Esganikan thought about his insinuating human trick of planting ideas in minds with apparently casual statements, and realized that she’d learned a valuable lesson that would stand her in good stead on Earth.

  “You missed my conversation with Sarmatakian in the command center,” she said. “We’re leaving for Earth as soon as we can make arrangements. A few weeks at most. The Skavu are making up the shortfall in the fleet.”

  Shapakti took the news in stunned silence.

  “Some of your people have very lurid descriptions of their…environmental correctness,” said Rayat.

  “Nothing we say is lurid,” Esganikan explained. “It is accurate.”

  “They massacre populations for the smallest infringement, I hear.”

  “Their own as well as their neighbors’, yes.”

  “Right.” Rayat nodded to himself a few times, as if distracted. The color of his face changed—blood diminishing, a more yellow tone—and his pupils dilated. “Well, I can predict the outcome, I think.”

  “What about my research?” Shapakti said at last. “I can’t complete it in weeks, and probably not even months. I thought I had at least four years.”

  Rayat appeared to take great interest in that. He showed some agitation or excitement: she wasn’t sure which. But his blinking became rapid. “So what happens to me? Does that mean you’re taking me with you?”

  Esganikan read his reaction. Now she was sure how he operated. He’d got her thinking about the benefits of c’naatat. He was now hoping he might go home to Earth as her prisoner. Shan Frankland had been right: he was still set on getting the parasite back to Earth for his government by one vector or another.

  It would reach Earth, but not as he intended. And when it did, it would remain beyond the reach and use of his masters.

  Esganikan leaned over to look at Shapakti’s images of the parasite—or symbiont, depending on how benign its host felt towards it—that had caused so much grief. Shapakti held the microscope tray so she could see the enlarged image better. Shan called it a fractal hairbrush.

  “Few biological problems have ever defeated you, Shapakti.” Esganikan found herself considering delivery systems for agents to counter c’naatat infection. They would have been a great deal more efficient than the obliteration bombing the wess’har had been forced to use on this planet. “Do you lack resources here?”

  “Yes—for this project, anyway.”

  “You return home now, then. When we can manage c’naatat, it opens up many possibilities.”

  “Gai Chail, I do believe that same thought was what started this cascade of problems here in the wess’har wars.”

  “F’nar is a culture from history, Shapakti. They live a carefully preserved agrarian lifestyle that we didn’t even live centuries ago. They don’t have the technology. We stand the best chance of understanding this organism.”

  The macaws started a noisy destruction of something metallic in their temporary prison. Shapakti glanced at Rayat as if seeking a reaction. “And then what do we do with that understanding, other than having a way of removing it from its host in the event of contamination?”

  “That alone would solve most of the problems it presents.”

  “My friend Rayat says that makes it more dangerous, because of its potential then to be used at will as a military enhancement.”

  Esganikan noted the word friend, which wasn’t ironic. “It’s only dangerous if others like the gethes have that technology, and they don’t, and they never will. But consider what flexibility it would offer us for missions.”

  “Don’t you think I haven’t?” Shapakti made a gesture towards the far wall of his laboratory, where he had an image of his home in real time, linked by the instantaneous communications system. “My family is in a conscious phase now. I can talk to them. Then when I embark on the next journey, they go into suspension again. I spend a great deal of time thinking how life extension might work with the time-displaced like us. But I doubt if being able to live consciously through centuries of separation from loved ones is any advantage at all.”

  It was inevitable: he had a family waiting for him, and the painful difficulty of managing that was the main reason why mission crew were almost always single, either the very young or those—like her—who had delayed bonding and children for the duration of their career.

  There was only so much time you could buy with a combination of cryo-suspension and time dilation. Sooner or later, the days and months you lived in the conscious now added up to become a spent life. Esganikan counted them with increasing anxiety that had now reached the point where she had to take a calculated risk.

  I need to buy myself time.

  I have a small force, a long way from home, and I might need to manage casualties.

  If the wess’har here could use c’naatat and not be controlled by it, even with their obsolete
technology, then so can we.

  “If we could manage c’naatat, we could enhance our military capability,” she said.

  “Do we even need to?”

  “And families would have an alternative to cryo-suspension.”

  “We could, of course, just be more strict about who crews missions.”

  “And that means we never deploy the experienced and the mature, and we need to do that, Shapakti.” Esganikan paused and looked Rayat up and down. His hair was streaked with gray, which indicated maturity in a human. He was utterly alone and everyone he held dear on his homeworld—if he held anyone dear at all—was dead. She saw her future in him. “I want to suggest something to you.”

  “Chail, I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Send your data back to your colleagues on Eqbas Vorhi now, and take your bonded team members home with this gethes. In the five years of dilation, they’ll have made progress on modeling, and you can begin work on a removal method with the best facilities as soon as you arrive home.”

  Shapakti exuded relief, a faint burst of musk, and his muscles relaxed. “I thought you were going to suggest an experiment that I would find ill-advised.”

  It was her life, and if things went wrong, then she knew how to bring the experiment to an end. “I’m going to do it. Do you have live tissue samples from Shan Frankland?”

  “Yes. But don’t do this. You can’t be serious.”

  Rayat had been watching the exchange with interest. It seemed that he’d suddenly realized the implications of what was being discussed. “Hang on, that’s insane. You can’t do that. You’re going to infect yourself?”

  “Each host adds something to the next, if only memories. I wonder if it might be worth having yours, Dr. Rayat.”

  Shan had warned her he was slippery and manipulative, but understanding that way of thinking would make a difference in how she handled the Earth mission. Not all gethes were the loyal Ade Bennett or rigorously moral Shan Frankland. A normal, selfish, deceptive human psyche would be a valuable reference.

  “Give me an infectious sample from this man,” she said.

  “Don’t do this,” said Rayat. “Don’t take this to Earth. I’m begging you. You can’t take the risk.”

  “But I thought that was your mission,” she said. “And why you seeded that idea in me. So your government could find a way of harvesting it once we get to Earth, whether it comes from me…or you.”

  “I swear I didn’t.” It was the first time she’d seen Rayat react so violently. His scent had changed; if he could hide it like Shan, he’d abandoned that now, maybe to make his point. “It absolutely mustn’t get into human hands. This isn’t a game. I mean it.”

  She’d misread him, then. He was as distressed as any human she’d seen. A lesson learned; humans often gave out misleading signals to each other, so it wasn’t surprising that he’d sent the wrong ones to her. But that didn’t matter now.

  Shapakti wasn’t happy about it either. “And what if we never manage to find a removal method?” His scent was acid and anxious now, even afraid. “Close isn’t good enough. We came close before.”

  “Then I have explosive ordnance, which I understand as well as you understand anatomy. I will do what so many wess’har troops did if it becomes clear we’ll never be able to remove it.”

  “You have to warn the crew you’re a biohazard, and the wess’har, too.”

  And I’ll have to tell Shan Frankland. And that will be…interesting.

  “Prepare to go home, Shapakti, and give me the infectious material in a form that I can use.”

  “I strongly advise against this.”

  “And then you can have infected Eqbas samples to take home for your research.”

  Shapakti’s expression changed. “Ah, and gethes say we know nothing about trade.”

  “An infusion of blood.”

  “That would be simplest.”

  Hard decisions were only ones that you hadn’t yet made, and Esganikan had made hers. It felt easy now. She looked into Rayat’s face and wondered what she would find in his mind.

  “Do you want to visit Surang, Doctor? On Eqbas Vorhi?”

  Rayat’s face was increasingly readable. He was far less expressive than men like Ade or Barencoin, but the muscle movement, dilation of blood vessels and skin changes were still visible to a wess’har. Rayat went from a flash of alarm—the eyes, those were the indicators in humans, she decided—to something like excitement. She’d seen that in youngsters and in Shapakti when offered new learning.

  “You’re sending me to Surang for safe keeping and further investigation,” he said. “Fine. Do that. Keep me out of the hands of my own people. But don’t give c’naatat to them gift-wrapped. You don’t understand humans at all.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  “I would love to go. I’d love to see your world. But I beg you, don’t take c’naatat to Earth.”

  “Shapakti,” she said, “do this.”

  “Oh God, no…” said Rayat.

  Shapakti took a plain white metal tube that was cool to the touch and had a subcutaneous injector on one end. It didn’t even need Rayat’s cooperation. There were samples of his blood and tissue in conservation. Esganikan looked at the tube, and somehow it didn’t look like the most dangerous thing she had ever attempted.

  C’naatat had shifted from being a risky experiment to something she now thought she would actually need. She had to assume the Earth mission would take longer than planned. She had to plan for the Skavu compromising her, and possibly leaving her short of personnel. She had to assume the worst, and hope that Shapakti and the team he would work with eventually could remove the parasite from her system in time. Shan would have said her faith in providence was just like the god-botherers.

  “You really don’t get it, do you?” said Rayat, a sob in his voice.

  Time was what she didn’t have. Threat is now. Esganikan rolled up her sleeve, and took the step into a world of other people’s memories, and a wholly uncertain and deathless future.

  Landing area, outside the Temporary City, Bezer’ej

  “Lin can rant as much as she wants,” Shan said, “but she’s got more sense than to mess with Wess’ej. Or give the Skavu an excuse to go after her little squid gang.”

  Shan was more worried about Aras right then than about Lindsay’s reaction to the destruction of the eggs, and the ultimatum she’d been given. Only a wess’har could understand his self-loathing at taking a life that had genuinely done nothing, something as repugnant to him as eating flesh. He didn’t discuss it, but destroying the eggs must have had a particularly painful significance for him.

  “She knows what must happen if she fails to keep the bezeri in check,” said Nevyan. “If she doesn’t, at least our choice is clear. She understands the stakes very well.”

  Giyadas clung to Nevyan’s side, annoyed that she hadn’t been allowed into the bezeri camp, and wanting to know what had happened. Serrimissani, ever the little ray of sunshine, was pacing around impatiently, anxious to return to Wess’ej.

  “You’d make a lousy taxi driver,” Shan observed. “Stick it on the meter.”

  “Esganikan Gai is late.”

  “Wess’har don’t care about late, so why do you?” Shan wanted to get Aras home, but a little while longer wouldn’t make any difference. “Relax. We’ve all had a shitty few weeks and now we might get a little respite.”

  Shan passed the time waiting for the Eqbas commander to come by examining some vivid pink blooms on a flat rosette of vegetation. They looked like physalis husks, papery and fragile, but when she touched them they had the moist, fleshy feel of orchid petals.

  Yeah, Esganikan was taking her time.

  “You adapt to so much,” said Nevyan. “And yet you still find it hard to accept that disputes can be resolved between wess’har without violence, consultation or long negotiations. Either something is resolvable or it isn’t.”

  “Has there ever been an isn’t?” br />
  “Yes, and it’s Wess’ej. The followers of Targassat left.”

  “Ah, we’d have taken entrenched positions, embarked on a long and fruitless ideological war, killed millions, and poisoned half the planet.”

  “You see my point.”

  “I’ll just swing from the trees, scratch a bit and keep quiet, eh?” At least Nevyan understood what human jokes looked like now. “Ade and Aras will be proud of me. I managed to walk away from another ruck without belting anyone.”

  Nevyan let out a breath of impatience. She was a teenager who ran a superpower as far as humans were concerned. No, wess’har were not like gethes. They ran on a different clock and a different world view. Shan still felt happier among them.

  “Here she comes,” said Nevyan.

  Esganikan covered the ground like a race-walker. She was a big woman. As she got closer, Shan could see—and smell—something wasn’t quite right. “Shit, she’s had a row with the boss. Look. Maybe she’s had some flak for sending the Skavu home after they bothered to come all this way.”

  If anything, Esganikan looked hot and flustered. And that was just not Eqbas. She might have been unwell; Shan was used to permanent rude health now and it had become a habit to blanket everyone with the expectation that they were as bulletproof as her.

  “What’s wrong?” Nevyan asked, inhaling with a sharp sniff.

  “I’ve been ordered to divert the Skavu fleet to Earth,” said Esganikan.

  Shan’s gut flipped over. She thought she’d misheard in her preoccupation with the confrontation with the bezeri, but she’d heard right. The first thing she did was consciously batten down the jask. No, she wasn’t going to get caught that way, not now. But the news appalled her. She felt her scalp prickle and tighten with anger.

  “You can’t seriously send those bastards to Earth. Whatever happened to your mighty million-year-old civilization? Overstretch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus Christ. And now you’re going to unleash them on my bloody planet?”

  “Wess’ej is your planet now.”

  “You’ll just have to pardon my sentimentality, then. Look, Earth might have its problems, but it’s not a wall-to-wall ecological disaster that you can sort with shocktroops.”