Crossing the Line

  There’s no such thing as confidential. Another fragment of Shan’s rough-and-ready political analysis surfaced in Lindsay’s memory. “Either Warrenders or Holbein or whoever are better informed than we think, or the Defense Ministry is talking to the Treasury.”

  “Yes, but are they telling each other the truth?” said Bennett.

  There were always divisions within governments, between departments, onion-skinned and Byzantine, sometimes openly hostile and sometimes waging covert cold wars with each other. If Rayat was telling the truth about his paymaster, Lindsay still couldn’t assume they were all on the same side.

  She went back to her cabin to barricade herself in her bunk and ponder the missing elements of her puzzle. Treasury? It had to be a patents thing. The biotech would be a massively profitable commodity. Governments needed revenue: there was only so much tax you could levy on an aging population and companies that could up sticks and move to a cheaper tax zone at will, leaving more unemployment in their wake.

  But they could have secured ownership through the Defense Ministry. Why did they need Rayat? Why wasn’t he talking directly to Okurt instead of her? It had to be another of his scams.

  It was the sort of puzzle that Shan Frankland would have shaken apart in no time at all. It was a complete sod, as Becken would say, that Lindsay couldn’t ask her to help her plan her own destruction.

  The little red swiss sat on the table and Aras wondered if he dared pick it up again.

  He didn’t know humans at all. He was certain of that now.

  Shan always carried the instrument even though it couldn’t link with any of the data devices on Wess’ej. She said its blades, probes and various devices were still useful. Aras suspected she carried it much as little Rachel Garrod had clutched a frayed piece of her baby blanket until she was five, and nobody could part her from it. Given the material that was stored in the swiss, he found Shan’s attachment to it disturbing. He would have wanted to throw it as far from him as possible and never look into it again.

  It wasn’t just the file on the men who made entertainment of suffering women, children and animals. There was more deviance and misery in Shan’s files than he could take in at one sitting. There were people who tortured their own children to death, or raped them; there were those who mutilated total strangers for unfathomable reasons; and there were so many different forms of murder that he simply stopped running the files long before he got to the robberies and thefts and frauds and something called public disorder.

  Shan had done many different things in her career. She told him they moved police officers from department to department frequently, because there were some duties that could destroy you in time. Aras wondered if it was already too late for her. He laid the swiss down on the table.

  He knew humans did most of those things. But crime had been historic generality in Constantine’s archives. It hadn’t been the personal and detailed experience of a woman he knew and cared about. He thought of Mjat, and although that had been a terrible time, it was exceptional: it was also necessary. He hadn’t done it for amusement or because he had abdicated responsibility for his actions. The wess’har in him said motive didn’t matter, but his human influence said it mattered very much indeed.

  Eventually he picked up the swiss again and opened files at random on its fragile bubble screen. There was very little in there that told him anything personal about Shan Frankland. He found some music and a few images of what appeared to be comrades of hers in dark uniforms, laughing and shouting, brandishing glasses of yellow foaming liquid at whoever was recording the image. There was nothing that looked like family or lovers. There were a lot of lists too: lists of tasks to complete, and lists of names and numbers.

  Then it struck him that it told him exactly what she was. What wasn’t in there hadn’t happened, or hadn’t mattered to her.

  Aras now knew what the flames in his dreams were. Riots. He was astonished that she and others had to deal with them face-to-face, with only a transparent shield and small weapons. It was war: the obvious response was to wipe out the source population completely and stop the threat for all time. But humans seemed not to want to find absolute ends to their problems.

  Shan’s footsteps outside grew louder, distinctive and unlike anyone else’s in F’nar. He put the swiss down and waited for her to open the door. She had stormed out angry, and he expected her to return in the same state because she seemed to be perpetually irritated lately. An angry isan was something that still made him cower. Whatever c’naatat had made of him, he would always be at his core a wess’har male, a provider and a carer and a seeker of approval, nothing without an isan to focus upon.

  The door made a slight sigh of air as it opened. Shan came up behind him, smelling of no emotion in particular—just pleasantly female—and put her hands on his shoulders and squeezed gently. He held his breath. It wasn’t the sort of gesture he had come to expect from her at all.

  “Sorry,” she said quietly. “I don’t normally lose my rag like that.”

  No anger, then. Aras had no idea whether to reach up and clasp her hands or just sit very, very still. Eventually he slid one hand up from his lap and placed it over hers. She didn’t react.

  “You’ve seen some very ugly things,” he said. “I think I understand your reaction.”

  She made a small puff of contempt. “Why didn’t you tell me what happened to you as a POW?” She pronounced it pee-oh-double-you, a phrase he had never heard said aloud, but he knew what it meant. “I’ve got your memories. They’re…well…”

  “I tried. You were preoccupied with c’naatat at the time.”

  “I’m sorry. Really I am. I had no idea. I would have handled things a bit more sensitively.”

  “I have your memories too. Riots. You were truly frightened of the petrol bombs.”

  “Yeah.” She shifted slightly. “That’s the problem with a transparent shield. You see the flames hit. However many times it happened, I never lost the feeling I was going to shit myself. I suppose the most vivid memories surface first.” Suddenly she slid her hand free of his and stepped back, as if she’d woken up to something she was doing in a dream. “I’m sorry if I’ve added to your problems.”

  “I think we’re even. Is that the right phrase?”

  “Very apt. What else is bubbling up?”

  “I find lot of regret and anger. And violence, much of which you don’t regret.”

  “Now you know me for what I am, then.”

  “I have no difficulties with that. Do you?”

  “It’s what I had to do,” she said. “Come on. Cup of tea. That’ll sort anything out.” She took her precious supply of dried tea from the shelf and put some water to boil on the range. “Kind of you to plant the tea bushes, by the way. Some bloke down in the fields showed them to me. I don’t think he meant to spoil the surprise.”

  “There are some things you seem to need in order to be happy. I’ll obtain them for you if I can.”

  “Are you happy, Aras?”

  “I find F’nar a difficult place to be.”

  Shan paused with the jug in one hand and the glass jar of broken dead leaves in the other. She looked unusually soft and sad for once. For a moment he thought he might ask the one question that had been on his mind, whether he liked it or not, for the last few weeks. No. It wasn’t fair. She couldn’t even tell what she was picking up on his scent. She mistook it for anxiety.

  “How do wess’har react when you tell them what happened to you?” she asked.

  “I’ve never told them. Not the details.”

  “Why not?”

  “Embarrassment. Shame.”

  “Have you never told anyone?”

  “No. There are too many things I wouldn’t want them to know.”

  “That’s not very wess’har.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Look, I’m going to live out most of it in my head anyway, aren’t I? You need to get it out of your system. Tell me.”
>
  “I did shameful things.” It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to know. He didn’t want to hear himself say it. “Things I regret.”

  “We all have. Jesus, you know what I’ve done. We can swap horror stories later. Come on. I need to hear everything.”

  She said everything, and so he took her at her word. Wess’har were nothing if not literal. He glanced at her swiss, still propped on the table, and noted the time when he started. Shan seemed to be struggling to keep her eyes focused on his and from time to time she blinked rapidly. She was still holding the jar in one hand.

  The isenj were not especially inventive torturers compared to humans but they made up for a lack of originality with persistence. Aras described flayings and brandings and beatings. He described broken bones and asphyxiation and freezing. It was random and angry violence rather than a strategy calculated to achieve an end, just outpourings of communal rage concentrated on one man, the destroyer of Mjat, because they couldn’t get at the whole wess’har race. But she had seen it, and experienced it, and that somehow made it far easier to pour out a history he had kept secret for generations.

  He didn’t break down until he described his attempts at hunger strikes and how they’d force-fed him.

  “They made me eat flesh,” he said. His throat was closing, tightening, thinning out the overtones from his voice. He envied humans their ability to surrender totally to sobbing, but wess’har couldn’t weep.

  “Is that what hurt you most?” said Shan. Her voice was hoarse. “Is that your shame, Aras?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wess’har flesh?”

  “No.”

  It had been meat—animal meat. It was only a small concern to gethes, but not to wess’har. He raised his eyes from the swiss, where he had been focusing his concentration, and looked at Shan.

  Their combined scents of agitation were too overwhelming for him to pick out any cues and all he had to go by was her facial expression. But she just looked surprised. He wondered if it was shared revulsion, but it wasn’t; she simply could not see why that had gnawed at his conscience for so many years.

  It wounded him. Surely she of all humans would understand why it was a terrible, disgusting thing to live with. Any wess’har would. It was why he could never tell them.

  He checked the chronometer on the swiss. He had been talking without pause for nearly two hours.

  “You didn’t have a choice,” she said. No, there was no revulsion there at all. She might have been exceptional, but her instincts were still gethes. “You didn’t kill to eat, and you didn’t give the isenj information. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” She put down the jar and took his hands in hers. “What do you need to hear, Aras?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What would you most like to have someone say to you now, and mean it, to make you feel better about yourself?”

  His jaw worked uncertainly. And there was Ben Garrod in his head again, Josh’s first ancestor, talking of sin and repentance and forgiveness. Ben said Aras needed to repent for things like Mjat, but he thought of the bezeri and couldn’t find that in himself at all. But there was a vivid taste of death in his mouth, not from Mjat so much as the anonymous being whose flesh had been forced into his mouth.

  “I want to be forgiven,” he said at last. “Ben Garrod said his god could do that.”

  “I don’t think his god’s going to be able to get back to you any time soon,” she said quietly. “So I’ll do it. I forgive you, Aras Sar Iussan. Now let it go.” She tidied his hair back from his face where a few strands had worked loose from his braid. “Where I come from, you’d be a hero.”

  “Not being able to die isn’t heroism. And I had no information to give the isenj, so there’s no glory in that.” He felt a little better now. “Anyway, as you might say, the things they did to me made me stronger. They tried to drown me, and my c’naatat adapted me, and now I can walk under water with the bezeri.”

  “Did your people try to rescue you?”

  “No. The isenj liked to say that even savages like them went back for their own.”

  That revelation really did appear to distress her. Her pupils grew wide and black. “God, you people have an incredibly ruthless streak. Even by my standards.”

  “Perhaps now you understand why I wish you hadn’t made yourself available to the matriarchs. You’ll be used.”

  “Hey, I’ve worked for politicians before. Twenty-four-carat grade A liars and megalomaniacs. You think your matriarchs can top that? Piece of piss, believe me.”

  “No, it won’t be.” He’d worked out that dismissal of difficulty from its context. “And I know you dislike being told you don’t understand, but you really don’t. Perhaps as more of my memories filter through, you’ll regret volunteering for slavery.”

  Shan had that pained-patience look that he had seen her adopt when Lindsay Neville had made errors. “Aras, when you start getting more of my memories bubbling to the surface, you’ll know what fuels me and why I had no other option.” She paused, jaw muscles twitching, as if she were reluctant to let the words escape. “And it’s not just because I’m attached to you, although God knows that was near the top of the list. It’s responsibility. I can’t walk away when I know I can do something, because I’d tear myself apart afterwards. I don’t have another option.”

  Yes, he’d known that early on, even before the c’naatat had snatched components from her blood and brain and bone and buried them in him. He knew she was angry and trying very, very hard to be perfect and put the world right for somebody. Who? He didn’t know.

  She smelled good. What would happen if she put the world right for him? Would she fall apart without her impossible objective, or would she become satisfied with life, undriven, alive for the moment? No. He needed to stop thinking that way.

  “This is depressing,” he said, and stood up. “Work it off, that’s what you say, isn’t it? Stay busy.”

  They went out to the terrace to inspect the half-finished sofa. Shan shook out the blue material, ahhing in delight at the color. “Wonderful peacock blue,” she said. To an unaltered human it would have looked white. “Is this the same stuff dhrens are made from?”

  “No, it won’t automatically shape or clean itself. It’s just inert fabric.”

  “That’s the best thing about having some wess’har genes. Every shade of blue looks more amazing.” She gave him a sad smile, the sort that said she was remembering something else she regretted. “Yeah, I went completely ballistic when I found my eyesight had changed, didn’t I? I’m really sorry I tore into you.”

  “I should have told you that I’d infected you instead of letting you find out for yourself.”

  “It doesn’t matter any more. Don’t even think about it.”

  They worked on the sofa together. It was a very unwess’har thing, a sofa, but Shan insisted she would adopt any custom they asked except put up with their hard, unforgiving furniture. The next item on her list was a mattress. They stretched the fabric taut over the layers of sek wadding and pinned it to the frame, then stood back to admire it.

  “Chippendale might be spinning in his grave,” she said. “But my arse will be the judge of quality.” She sank down into the cushioned seat and let her head loll back on the padded backboard, eyes shut. It was as if they had never discussed torture and their shared nightmares. “Oh. Bliss. This, and a cup of tea, and a good movie. Heaven.”

  Aras wasn’t sure where he could acquire a good movie. They sat side by side on the sofa and stared out across the basin of F’nar, dazzled by the pearl roofs and hazy gold walls. There was the tinkle of water from the irrigation conduits.

  “Lovely,” said Shan. She slipped her arm through his.

  “Lovely,” Aras echoed, and wondered what it was like to be able to eat other beings and not be scarred by it.

  8

  Why have the humans abandoned our comrades and the isenj on their ship Thetis? They have not admitted they have done
this, but we know. We fear they plan to harm us, whether by neglect or active violence. Shall we tell the matriarchs? And if they cannot deal with the humans, shall we ask the World Before for their aid? The humans must learn that if you harm one ussissi, you harm us all, and we will fight.

  CALITISSATI,

  interpreter to Jejeno consulate,

  to F’nar ussissi colony

  The cabin hatch swung open and Lindsay’s smartpapers fluttered briefly against the bulkhead where she had tacked them. She was close enough to reach out and tap the privacy icon just in time to stop Natalie Cho seeing what she’d written. Detailed options for assassination weren’t the sort of thing that made people comfortable about sharing cabin space with you.

  “Am I interrupting?” Cho asked.

  “Not at all,” said Lindsay, and decided these things might be better done in one of the engineering deck lobbies. If she took the notes down now and scurried away with them, she would look even more secretive. She forced a smile and carried on staring at the progression of scribbled ideas that marched across each sheet. They were literally for her eyes alone: the smartpaper would activate its pixels only in direct line of sight to a pair of retinas that it recognized. If Cho cared to look, she would only see a white sheet unless she was right on Lindsay’s shoulder. The security setting still said mind your own business, of course, but not so provocatively.

  “Are you okay?” Cho asked. “I’m not prying, but if you need to talk—”

  She wanted to scream that she didn’t need counseling or sympathy, but she thought of Shan and appropriated her resolve. She had to look all business if she was going to get access to the hardware she needed.

  “I appreciate your concern,” she said. “I’ll be okay.”

  No, she wouldn’t be. She knew that. I haven’t even got a picture of David. There was just a task ahead to complete, because if she didn’t do it she had no idea where the spiral would end. She peeled her notes off the wall with slow deliberation so as not to look defensive and went in search of sanctuary.