“Okay, but this is between you and me.”
“Whoa. This is where I don’t do off-the-record. When people say that, they really want to leak something without taking responsibility for it. And even if I do keep it to myself, once I know something it colors all my decisions from then on, doesn’t it? So think hard before you open your mouth.”
Lindsay paused three beats. He counted them. “Okay. Rayat claims he’s working for the Treasury and he says he wants to prevent access to the biotech as well.”
“Really?”
“I checked.”
“Makes sense. All we need is a plummeting death rate and we’ve got an economic crisis that’s going to make the pensions collapse of 2136 look like a small overdraft.”
Lindsay seemed diverted by the comment for a moment. “I’m telling you the truth.”
“Maybe, but isn’t there something you left out?”
She fidgeted with her shoulder boards again as if her rank was bothering her. “There’s always detail, Eddie.”
“Try Hereward.”
She looked genuinely blank. “I honestly haven’t a clue what you mean.”
“Really. You’re a senior officer here and you didn’t know that we’ve diverted a logistics support vessel, probably armed, to this sector?”
“No, I bloody well didn’t.” She couldn’t fake that reddening face. Okurt was going to get a stream of high-grade vitriol, that much was clear. “How do you know?”
“Don’t make me say it. It’s the one ethic we still hold dear in my trade.”
“Bastard,” she said, but she was looking away and it was obvious she didn’t mean him. “What the hell is he playing at? He didn’t bother to tell me he was looking for ways to exhume David’s body for research either. You’ll forgive me if I have a tantrum at being left out of the loop again.”
“You really didn’t know, did you?”
“ ’Course I bloody didn’t.”
“I don’t think the aliens have been told either. Any of them. How to piss off two opposing technologically advanced powers in one go—it’s economy of stupidity, anyway. What if they gang up on us?”
“We might realize that, and I think even Okurt might, but he’s not calling the shots, remember. He’s on the Foreign Office choke-chain.”
“And what are you going to do when the locals find out?”
“How are they going to hear about it?”
“There’s no such thing as monopoly of information. Lots of people have to be involved with diverting a ship. Victualling, fueling, canceling other deployments, you name it. It’ll leak Earth-side through families, and then it’ll be on the news, and either the wess’har or the isenj will pick it up off an intercepted feed.”
“We’ll see.”
“I hate to use words like gunboat diplomacy, but surely someone’s noticed we’re not the most powerful species in the universe any longer?”
“Don’t ask me to fathom politicians.”
“Okay. If you can get me clearance to visit Wess’ej, I’ll see what I can see. But just be aware I’m not working for you or anyone else. I’m doing this for me and I’ll make the call based on what I think is right.”
Lindsay looked studiously blank. “Shan would be proud of you.”
“Call me,” he said, and walked away wondering if she had stitched him up. He was damned if he was going to be manipulated. He slid down the ladder to the next deck below, just like a seasoned spacefarer, and caught his hand on a rail. “Bitch,” he said, not sure if he was referring to his scraped hand or Lindsay. She had made him feel guilty.
But she was right about one thing. He was neutral, more or less. He liked the isenj and he liked the wess’har and he was hard-wired to attack his own government; but he trusted nobody. Suspicion was a great leveler.
And he pondered on what he had done with information in the past, and what he continued to do with it, and he thought of a little known place called San Carlos Water with a heavy heart.
9
There was a time when wess’har made their soldiers immortal. They have not done it for many years. But they can do it again, and that is why you should not underestimate a small army. Make friends with them while you can.
MINISTER UAL, in an explanatory note
to the FEU Foreign Office.
Something small and wet thudded onto Shan’s back like someone had gobbed on her.
Her hand reached for her gun without her conscious brain getting involved. The last time someone had spat at her while she was on duty, she’d rounded on the perpetrator, dragged him bodily from the crowd and introduced him to the business end of her truncheon. She hated anyone messing up her uniform; and she certainly didn’t like anyone coming up behind her. But when she looked back there was nobody, just the empty alleyway washed and beaded in pearl. She let go of the gun.
She strained to look over her shoulder and pulled up her shirt to check what had hit her. She couldn’t see anything. She could smell a sweet almondlike scent and wondered if it was sap from a plant higher up the terraces.
Come on, nobody’s going to gob on you here. It was something she was going to have to get used to, and she found it hard to accustom herself to pleasant things. She was always waiting for them to peel back their deceptive skins and reveal their teeth.
It was a shame Aras wasn’t comfortable in F’nar. He just seemed to be getting more and more agitated each day. Shan was starting to like the place, and not just because she had no choice. She could walk down the terraces and alleys and everyone acknowledged her: they knew who she was, and why she was there, and she was starting to know them. It was like being the beat bobby in an idyllic village.
The only difference was that she was never going to be called upon to rattle door handles or break up a pub brawl. Apart from their abrupt tone—and that was only unedited frankness—there was nothing personally violent or antisocial about individual wess’har. How they made that sudden leap from peaceful citizen to apparent psychopath still bewildered her.
As she walked round the curve of the caldera, clutching a gift for newlywed Nevyan, she passed two young males utterly engrossed in playing with their children, rumbling and purring as the little ones tried their hand at planting tufts of red grass in the gaps between the paving. The males were taking sporadic bites from chunks of lurisj, the closest that wess’har had to a mood-altering narcotic. They were simply relaxed and happy, a world away from human drunks and junkies and all the violence that accompanied them.
Then Shan thought about Mjat, and the whole coast around Constantine scoured clean of isenj, and tried to reconcile the two images. She thought briefly of the ease with which Aras had put two rounds through Parekh’s head, and then how he had rescued a tiny banic from drowning in the washed vegetables. He was an alien all right.
An alien. And there she was, catching herself looking at him in the way she had once looked at Ade Bennett. It was getting more insistent. It wasn’t like her at all.
She was still conscious of moisture on her back and twitching her shoulders involuntarily when she got to Nevyan’s new house, a warren of excavated rooms that previously had been Asajin’s. She looked down at the woven container of netun jay in her hand and took a breath. Wess’har didn’t give gifts. But they liked their food, and it seemed as good a way as any to wish Nevyan well in her new life. Besides, she had questions to ask her that she didn’t feel she could put to Mestin.
Shan raised her hand to knock on the door, but wess’har didn’t knock so neither would she. It didn’t feel right, though. You only barged in like that with a warrant, or sometimes without one if you felt like it. Fit in, she told herself, and pressed silently on the pearl-encrusted door. It swung open and she walked in.
Her gaze went instinctively to the point in the frozen scene where she least wanted it to go.
“O-oh shit,” she said. “Shit. Sorry!”
She came out a lot faster than she went in, slammed the door and stood against it w
ith her free hand to her mouth in an involuntary spasm of sheer animal embarrassment. She really should have knocked. She shook herself back into a semblance of composure and waited outside.
The door opened again. Nevyan, now in her matriarch’s dhren, wafted not a trace of agitation and simply cocked her head in that canine gesture of concentration. It was down to the shape of wess’har pupils, Aras said. They did it automatically to get a better focus on the object of their curiosity, and Shan—red-faced and uncharacteristically embarrassed—was apparently worth extra scrutiny.
“What’s wrong?” said Nevyan. There was absolutely no indication whatsoever that she was offended by being disturbed during an intimate moment with her new males. Yeah, and all four of them, Shan thought. Jesus H. Christ.
“I’ll knock in future,” Shan said, finding it painful to meet her eyes. They were vivid citrine, quite unlike her mother’s.
“You’re upset. Why?”
“You’re not bothered by…um…”
“By what?” Nevyan was now starting to smell agitated. Shan wasn’t sure whether it was because she wanted badly to understand or because Nevyan wanted her approval. She was painfully aware of the kid’s deference to her. “Have I done something wrong?”
Shan shook her head rapidly. “No. Don’t worry. Human thing. Not your problem.” She lapsed into English, because wess’u just didn’t have the words for it. She held out the netun jay. “I came to wish you well. You know. Wedding?”
Nevyan took the cakes and bobbed her head enthusiastically. “This is kind, this is very kind. I know how important this is to humans.”
“You’re welcome,” Shan said. Nevyan seized her arm and led her back into the house. Her males—her jurej’ve—didn’t seem at all offended by being interrupted at a critical moment. It was as if she had walked in while they were watching their favorite TV show, a minor interruption to an entertainment that could be resumed later.
In the kitchen the jurej’ve trilled and fluted as they prepared a meal, no more transfixed by her than the kids were. Time was when she could gather a crowd just by walking along the terraces. I’m one of the tribe now, she thought. One looked up. “Shan g’san,” he said, cocking his head in amusement. A wess’har joke. It was the first she’d heard, or at least the first she’d understood. She smiled. They now seemed unperturbed by her display of teeth.
But their scent of cedar and sandalwood put her on edge, and she wasn’t sure why, although she was damned certain that what she’d seen of their anatomy was alarming enough. One of the males wrapped himself around Nevyan, trilling enthusiastically.
“Later, Lisik,” she snapped, and cuffed him. Shan looked away. Nevyan turned back to her. “He’ll make a good and useful husband when he calms down.”
Shan rapidly revised her estimate that Nevyan was going on seventeen. Wess’har didn’t appear to grow up; they switched almost overnight from one life phase to another, and Nevyan was now the complete matriarch. It was disturbing to think of her having husbands who needed a good slap to stop them mounting her in front of house guests. “How unlike the life of our own dear queen,” Shan muttered, and sat down at the long table in the kitchen, careful to keep her elbows clear of the exquisite rainbow glass bowls and pots.
Nevyan thrust the basket of cakes towards her. “Eat, then,” she said, and placed a couple of netun on a plate in front of them. It was a gesture you made to family, and Shan liked the feel of that. She bit into the cake with a careful eye on the new males. Yes, she’d seen too much now to ever think of them as harmless seahorses again.
The netun were crisp, and the runny, clove-scented filling escaped down her chin with an audible pop. Lisik was at her side immediately, clutching a cloth as if to wipe her face, and she held up her hand defensively.
“Thanks. I can do it myself.”
Lisik made a noncommittal chik sound and went back to pressing some sticky yellow mixture into flat trays.
Another male was preoccupied with suckling a tiny infant no longer than Shan’s hand.
It reminded her of a stick insect. The male had slipped his garment off his shoulders to feed it, and what flesh she could see looked smooth and lightly muscled. The baby was clinging to his skin with those long jointed fingers.
She knew that wess’har males gestated and suckled but she hadn’t actually seen it, and that made it very different. Her mouth filled with saliva as if she were going to be sick. Her stomach somersaulted. She had once again been punched hard with the reminder that this was not Earth, and these were not humans, and that what she was seeing was the reality of Aras Sar Iussan, who she had almost thought of as a man.
She wiped her lips and chin carefully, wondering what it was like to sleep with a man who could breast-feed. It was a thought she hadn’t invited and didn’t want to entertain.
Perhaps Aras couldn’t. C’naatat had made a lot of changes to him.
Nevyan’s husband adjusted his position and ran a careful finger over the infant’s head while it suckled, oblivious of Shan’s attention. It squirmed closer to him. Shan wondered if she had any real understanding of Aras, whether she had his memories or not. It was amazing how much you couldn’t see when you were absolutely determined not to, even in one room.
It was equally hard not to look at these males, even though they had no physical features she found consciously attractive beyond the aesthetic. She inhaled that seductive scent of sandalwood and now cedar, suddenly aware of the pressure of the hard bench against parts of her anatomy that hadn’t seen much action in a while. Seductive. That was exactly what it was; pheromones.
“Are they bothering you?” Nevyan asked, making a chin-jutting gesture in her husbands’ direction. “You seem very upset.”
“Not at all,” Shan said, and finally accepted that her talent for ducking behind a veneer of disinterested menace was sod all use on Wess’ej. “I need to ask you some questions.”
“Police questions?”
“God, no.”
“I can’t follow all your English. Please—”
“Sorry. It’s personal. I need advice.”
Nevyan’s pupils flashed cross-flower-cross as the penny dropped and she realized she could be helpful to what she regarded as the alpha female. Shan had seen her do exactly the same to Mestin in the past. “Ask, if you think I can be of use.”
“Okay. I’m disturbed by changes in my body.”
“C’naatat?”
“Specifically, urges.”
“To do what?”
“What you were doing when I came in.”
“I don’t understand why that disturbs you.”
“Because Aras is—different. Not my species.”
“Then he didn’t infect you by copulation. My mistake.”
“I was unconscious at the time,” Shan said stiffly, ambushed by her copper’s hard-wired suspicion. “He told me he transferred blood from his hand into my wound.”
“Then that is what he did,” said Nevyan.
Shan fought down a flush of adrenal panic. She was a copper, and she thought the worst before she thought the best. Rape, child abuse, and bestiality: all rapists, nonces and sheep-shaggers wanted hanging, garroting, and gassing, the bastards. But what did that make her, wondering what it would be like to fuck an alien? Where was that nice safe line between human and everything else? Oh God.
“I’m not someone who gives in to my body,” Shan said. “It does what I tell it. I need to know how to stop these thoughts.”
Nevyan made a long, low trilling sound. “Why do you have to?”
“Because it’s getting on my nerves and we don’t have that sort of relationship. I don’t want to worry about offspring and I don’t want—” She was going to say love. Love was dependence, and dependence weakened you. “We’re friends. I think he’d be appalled if he knew.”
Nevyan was absolutely immobile. She didn’t even blink. Whatever Shan had said, it had put her in that alarmed, uncertain, frozen state.
?
??What?” said Shan, irritated.
“Mestin explained to you about hormonal dominance. You smell like a wess’har, enough to provoke reaction from us.”
“I don’t like where this is going.”
“I suspect you’re reacting to each other. Aras is certainly reacting to you. Everyone knows that.”
“Well, I bloody well didn’t.” Shan folded her arms and remembered just in time that there was no chair back to lean against. “He’s agitated and irritable, I know that.”
Nevyan looked at Shan and Shan looked back at Nevyan. Shan struggled with the baffled silence, then rolled a netun back and forth on the plate with her forefinger like a game of table soccer. She knew the kid wasn’t trying to drag an embarrassing admission of further ignorance out of her, but it felt like it.
“I don’t even look wess’har,” she said at last.
“You behave like us in many ways and you smell like us. How you appear is largely irrelevant, even to Aras, I suspect.”
“And how do I smell?”
“Like a dominant isan.”
“Do your males react to me?”
“No, because they’re now bonded to me. But they know you’re receptive.”
“I’m not some bloody brood mare.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, never mind. Is all this obvious to Aras?”
“Yes.”
“Oh shit.”
Nevyan made that impatient side-to-side head movement. “I don’t know why you have so much difficulty with this. Do what you need to do. After that, you will both be perfectly content. Unmated adults don’t exist in our society.”
Shan would never have tolerated that amount of lip from any human subordinate. Her annoyance must have hit Nevyan’s olfactory system pretty hard, because the junior matriarch locked position again. “Is that why you took on Asajin’s family?” Shan asked.
“Yes, because they would have died without an isan,” Nevyan said. Her tilted head rather than her tone told Shan it was the proverbial bleedin’ obvious answer. “Do you not understand oursan?”