Crossing the Line

  “Aras is detained.”

  “I know. But it’s me you want. I’m the gethes.” Shan stepped closer. Chayyas probably didn’t know how humans smelled at the best of times. Could the matriarch know she was gambling? More to the point, did she know herself whether she was gambling? “Well, I’m here. That solves the problem of the biohazard getting into the human population. Let Aras go.”

  “We have already neutralized you by confining you to Wess’ej. Why should I make concessions?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do. He did it for me. I’m the risk, not him.”

  “That is the problem. He doesn’t behave as a wess’har. He puts personal and individual whims above the common good.”

  “Okay, let me put it another way. You have one chance to learn what it takes to deal with humankind and I’m it.” Shan reached behind her back and down her spine into her waistband the way she had a thousand times before, feeling the body-warmed composite and wrapping her fingers round it. She pulled the gun out in a practiced arc and held it two-handed to Chayyas’s left temple. Chayyas didn’t move. There was no reason why she should know what a gun looked like.

  “You have lights in your skin,” said the matriarch.

  “It’s the gun you need to look at, sweetheart.”

  “Will that kill me?”

  “Indeed it could.”

  “Why do you want to do that?”

  “It’s the sort of thing humans do if they want to achieve an end. I want you to let Aras go.”

  “Or you’ll kill me.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “My bloodline lives on. I don’t fear death.”

  The safety was off. “Neither do I. But you know you need the intelligence I can provide. Leave Aras out of it and you have my full cooperation. Harm him, and you’re going to have to guess your way out of this. You can’t even stop me bringing a weapon into your home. How are you going to cope with an army?”

  Chayyas’s scent began to take on a more acidic note. “I don’t bargain with gethes.”

  “I’m the one who might spread this thing to humans. Without me, there’s no threat.”

  Chayyas didn’t quite smell of fear. The pupils of her amber eyes were just slits, a faint black cross on a cabochon topaz. “Is that weapon less powerful than the isenj one that struck you?”

  “Probably,” said Shan, listening to herself as if she were standing outside her own body. Where the hell am I going with this? She sat down and put the gun on the table, safety still off, within easy reach. Then she took the grenade from her jacket and turned it round so Chayyas could see it. “But this isn’t. Once I pull this pin, you have a count of ten to get out of this room before it blows. This will fragment me. You know what that means. Not even c’naatat can repair me then. Problem solved.”

  What the hell am I saying?

  Chayyas said nothing and looked at the grenade as if it was just a fascinating toy. She thinks I’m bluffing. Shan flicked her thumb under the cap, suddenly struck by the completely irrelevant fact that her claws were looking almost like normal nails now. Am I? And bluffing was something she couldn’t afford to do, not with a matriarch.

  It was all happening too fast. She hadn’t planned this at all well.

  I have to mean it.

  She drew the pin out all the way. “Ten,” she said. “Nine.” Chayyas still stared. “Eight.” Shan shut her eyes. “Seven.” And then it seemed that Chayyas suddenly understood, because there was a rush of air and acid and a massively powerful grip closed round her hand and the grenade, pinning both to the table, and almost crushed bone. Shan opened her eyes in shock and pain.

  Chayyas held on grimly. “Replace that pin,” she said. “Now.” The matriarch’s anger seethed like boiling vinegar in the air. The pain was all-consuming but Shan held her position.

  “Let Aras go.” Jesus, I can’t hold this thing much longer. “Let him go.”

  The matriarch’s pupils snapped from flower to cross and back again.

  Shan held on and Chayyas held on. Shan hoped her eyes wouldn’t start watering from the pain. If her hand went numb and she dropped the damn thing…

  Chayyas stared at the little dial on the cap of the grenade. “Reset the pin.”

  “I thought you weren’t afraid to die.”

  “I have children in this house.”

  Chayyas had her eyes fixed on Shan’s and Shan didn’t break the gaze. The matriarch’s grip slackened a fraction, but it still held. And so did Shan’s stare.

  You look away first—you’re dead. Her old sergeant’s voice spoke up, unbidden: don’t step aside, don’t blink, don’t apologize. Shan had stopped bar brawls just by walking into the room in the right way. But her sergeant hadn’t taught her any wisdom that dealt with aliens. She fell back on instinct.

  “We could be here a long time,” said Chayyas.

  “If that’s what it takes,” said Shan, eyes beginning to water with the effort. Jesus, it hurt. “Punishing Aras won’t serve any useful purpose.”

  And then Chayyas blinked, as if distracted by the mention of Aras. She looked away. Shan felt an exultant surge of animal triumph and pulled both hand and grenade clear. For a second she could have sworn she smelled something like ripe mangoes—both heady-sweet and grassy at once—filling the space between them. It took all the effort she could muster to hold the grenade steady enough to replace the pin. The violet lights rippled, exaggerating the tremor.

  “There’s no purpose I can think of,” said Chayyas.

  Shan stood up and pocketed the grenade, hoping that the c’naatat would deal quickly with any bruising. She didn’t want Chayyas to know how much pain she had put her through. “I want custody of him,” she said, nursing her crushed hand in her pocket.

  Chayyas, still seated, was staring alternately at the gun and at Shan. She was holding her fingers tip to tip, flexing them: they were all the same length, with three knuckles in each, giving them an arachnid look. “He’s your jurej. Take him.”

  “What’s that? Jurej?”

  “Male.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Chayyas blinked flowers. Shan, in control of the universe for a few brief moments, fell back into the confused world of the visiting alien.

  “Neither of you can have another,” said Chayyas. “And there are no unmated adults in wess’har society. He’s your responsibility.”

  “Hang on, I’m not sure I—”

  Chayyas was fixed on the gun. “You wanted our asylum. You behave wess’har. Therefore you are wess’har.” She reached her thin many-jointed hand towards the 9mm and picked it up. “This won’t kill you?”

  “Steady on,” said Shan. “The safety’s off.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  The challenge was unintended, she knew, but she couldn’t back down. Something foreign and primeval was overriding her common sense. She’d seen it too often in drunks, in flashpoint fights, in murders.

  “No,” she said, suddenly completely unable to say that enough was enough and that they should all go about their business.

  She had no reason to fear death now. It was life—this out-of-control, alien life—that was starting to scare her.

  Chayyas took the gun in her hand, and Shan wondered how she knew how to aim. The she wondered how she knew how to start squeezing the trigger. Something said you’re okay, it’s only pain, and despite all her hard-wired instinct to fling herself to the floor, Shan managed to brace herself before a point-blank shot deafened her.

  She fell.

  The isenj city of Jejeno, capital of the Ebj landmass, was all that there was.

  From the time that Eddie Michallat looked out of the shuttle hatch when the vessel landed on Umeh to the time he reached the center of the city, he saw nothing—nothing—but buildings speckled with pinpricks of light that were winking out as the sun came up.

  The complete absence of any open space disoriented him. He had grown used to unbroken horizons on Bezer’ej even in a year. It
spoke to something primeval in him; he wanted to miss the wilderness.

  He let his bee-cam capture it all. It danced close to his head as he leaned out of the open door of the ground transport, because there were no windows. Isenj didn’t appear to like watching the scenery go by. Maybe it was too depressingly monotonous for them.

  Still, they were enough like humans to need light when it got dark, and to make buildings, and to use a language. And that was close enough.

  The isenj did indeed like Eddie. He made sure of it. Eddie listened to them politely and didn’t dismiss them. He relayed what they said and felt, no more, no less. He didn’t stare at them as if they were monsters, and they responded by letting him visit their world and see what they’d built, the first civilian to set foot on Umeh after the Actaeon advance party had landed.

  They even let him file a live piece at the shuttleport to record the moment. It was the first rule of journalism: look after your contacts, and they’d look after you. He applied it with relish.

  Jejeno boiled with isenj. They parted in front of the transport like shoals of fish and closed again behind it, apparently unconcerned and intent on whatever business they were about. As Eddie watched, one of them tripped and fell, and a small depression opened in the living sea for just a second; then it was filled again. He never saw the isenj get up. He never saw any other isenj take any notice either. Maybe he was mistaken.

  He craned his neck as far as he could, until the imagined point in the crowd was far behind him and the ussissi interpreter, Serrimissani, tugged on his sleeve.

  “It happens,” she said. “Concentrate on your task.”

  Eddie wished himself into a state of belief that the fallen isenj had picked itself up and carried on walking, but something told him that was not the case. Forget it. This isn’t Earth. He adjusted his respirator and wondered if he was wasting the bee-cam’s memory on this unchanging vista. Just how much cityscape did people need to see?

  But it was all there was. Viewers needed to know that. On the other hand, it might have been rush hour, or Mardi Gras, and he had no way of knowing if these crowds were a permanent event or not. All he knew was that he felt suffocated.

  He pulled back from the open door and turned to Serrimissani, who looked for all the world like a malevolent Riki-Tiki-Tavi.

  “Crowded,” said Eddie. It was a gross understatement. “Where do they grow their food?”

  “Everywhere they can,” said the ussissi. Her voice was muffled by the mask she was wearing over her snout. It looked like a piece of clear plastic and reminded Eddie rather too much of the various transparent carnivores of Bezer’ej, sheets of clear film that would fall on you from the sky, or drag you down into water, and digest you. “In buildings. Revolting.”

  “Vegetables?”

  “Growths. Fungus.”

  She might have meant truffles, Eddie thought, trying to put the visit in the brightest context. He had a feeling she didn’t. He settled for nutritional yeast.

  The buildings pressing in on him gradually changed from low-rises to tower blocks, a fact he took as an indication that he was getting closer to the center of the city. It was a dangerous assumption to make in an alien culture, but building high meant some sort of priority: it certainly wasn’t a matter of getting a prettier view of the landscape.

  The tight-packed crowds moved past him at a more sedate pace, slow enough for isenj to stop and stare in at him, and he waved and then wondered if the gesture had another meaning here. Their piranha-spider faces betrayed nothing. Looking past them, he could recognize nothing in the built environment that suggested shops or offices. There were just façades intricately decorated with symbols and patterns, carved and painted.

  In front of one of the buildings there was an island in the river of streaming isenj: some appeared to be standing still, pressed together and waiting by a doorway. It was closed. He turned to the interpreter.

  “Queuing for food,” said Serrimissani, without waiting for his question. “There’s sufficient, but the logistics of distribution are unwieldy.”

  “What do the isenj make of humans?”

  Serrimissani fixed him with a predator’s expressionless black eyes. He could almost see her digging for scorpions and crunching them up between those needle teeth. “They can see kinship with you. They enjoy complex organizations.”

  “What do you think of them?”

  “They honor their debts.”

  “How much do you get paid for interpreting? Sorry. Is that a rude question?”

  “They do not employ me. I have food and somewhere to rest, just as I have on Wess’ej.”

  “You work both sides of the line? And the isenj trust you to be here?”

  “What could I do that they would not trust? This is not a conflict of knowledge, so I cannot spy. Nor is it a war where the wess’har take the conflict into their enemies’ territory. So I do my job and threaten no one. How do you get paid?”

  It was a good question. Eddie hadn’t had a raise in seventy-six years, and it still irritated him that the BBChan personnel department had decided that he wasn’t entitled to service increments because he’d been in cryosuspension for most of that time. Hell, he’d worked with people who seemed to spend their whole career in comas and they still got raises.

  But then he hadn’t been around to spend his pay, and it had earned plenty of interest. He was surprised how little it suddenly meant to him. Perhaps that was how rich people felt all the time. His stomach felt oddly displaced. “I get tokens that I can exchange for food and other things that I need.”

  “Want.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Humans want many things but they need much less than they think,” said the ussissi. “I accept the philosophy of Targassat, having lived among the wess’har. Beware acquisitiveness, Mr. Michallat. It will take you hostage.”

  Eddie savored the moment of being lectured in asceticism by a mongoose. It almost dispelled the aching bewilderment at realizing he was rich and none the better for it. The transport came to a halt.

  Serrimissani turned her head very slowly. There was no wet gloss to her eyes; they looked matte as velvet, sinister, utterly void. “Are you ready?”

  Eddie caught the bee-cam and pocketed it. “I’ve interviewed Minister Ual before. I’m ready.”

  The ministry—and Eddie had no other word for it—was conspicuous in the unbroken wall of buildings by the fact that it was very, very plain. There were no extravagant designs, either painted or carved. As he walked through the door and into the reception hall, the first thing that struck him was that it was empty. It was also vast. It was at least twelve meters high and lined with smooth aquamarine stone, a stark and cool contrast to the hot rusts and ambers and purples outside.

  There seemed to be nobody around. Then he heard movement, and Serrimissani tugged at his sleeve and bobbed her head in the direction of one of the archways off to one side. An isenj appeared. There was an exchange of high-pitched sounds.

  Eddie occupied himself by letting the bee-cam wander around the hall. So status bought you space, did it? Yes, isenj were a lot like humans.

  “Ual is ready to see you and asks if you would like refreshment,” Serrimissani said.

  “Not the fungus.”

  “Water flavored with something that the Actaeon provided.”

  “God, I hope it’s coffee.”

  There were moments when Eddie knew he had touched common ground with the isenj. It was easy to expect them to be utterly alien because they looked unlike anything he’d ever imagined. But their attitudes seemed much less alien than those of the wess’har.

  He sat and waited. A thought struck him. What about snakes? What about jellyfish? Here he was mentally arguing the finer points of difference with himself: but he was talking, yes talking, with aliens who had communal lives and built cities and had wars over concepts he understood. The only reason he could even begin to misunderstand them was that they were so very similar to him and that th
ey could exist in an environment so like his own in universal terms as to be identical. So he had no chance of even starting to grasp the nature of other forms of alien life. And he was suddenly gripped with sadness at his own limitations.

  Serrimissani nudged him irritably. “You are distracted,” she said. “Ual is waiting.”

  Eddie struggled to regain excitement. Chin up. You’re talking to your third species of alien interviewee. Be glad.

  “Sorry,” he said. “A tear for all the things that are beyond me.” And he ached to recall who said that. It defined humanity.

  An isenj aide showed them into another polished water-colored chamber, and Minister Ual was seated on a dais in the center of it, as if to emphasize the luxurious, privileged distance around him. Eddie was ushered to a box covered with layers of something soft and yielding; as near, he thought, as they could get to a chair. He smiled at Ual.

  Isenj were as appealing as only spiders with piranha faces could be. But they were sociable and polite and generous. Minister Ual was enjoying a cup of something fluid, lapping it from a shallow vessel with the ease of a Mandarin potentate. His ovoid bulk glittered with hundreds of smooth, transparent green beads strung on quill-like projections from his body, and he rattled like a chandelier when he moved. Eddie hoped the noise wouldn’t play hell with the mike.

  Ual had one other characteristic that Eddie could not ignore. He had a vague scent of the woods, like a forest floor after rain. It was not unpleasant, but neither was it a fragrance that Eddie associated with government ministers.

  Serrimissani wasn’t needed. Ual had made speaking English his priority, despite the effort it took to control his breathing enough to force out recognizable English words. The ussissi stayed in the room nonetheless, watching the bee-cam wander round the interviewee, and Eddie tried to crush the fear that she might pounce on it and crunch it up. She reminded him too much of snakes and Kipling. He looked back at Ual. There were no eyes that he could see to make contact with.

  “The enclosed environment outside Jejeno is small, but I believe it will be more comfortable for your fellows than living on board Actaeon indefinitely,” Ual said. There was a rhythmic gulping between every word, like someone learning to speak again after a crude laryngectomy. Eddie struggled silently for him with every syllable. “Once it is established, the environment will be cooler, more moist and more breathable. It will be soothing for you, and we will learn a great deal about biospheres into the bargain.”