Matriarch

  But Rayat could wait. He tried again.

  “What are these?”

  Maps and histories, said Saib.

  “How do you make glass?”

  These are layers of azin shell. They are ancient, the oldest of our records. Clans and territories, all their names and deeds.

  “You commemorate them.”

  Without these records, there is nothing to show we have ever existed. They may yet be all that remains of us.

  “We do the same thing.” Rayat thought of all the memorials on Earth, the painstaking records of genocide and cenotaphs and gravestones. Yes, names mattered. “I understand.”

  Now you will answer my questions. What is this contagion? Why was it worth more than our lives?

  “Because it’s dangerous. It would end up destroying whole worlds.”

  Our world is destroyed. And the contagion still exists. We died for nothing.

  Rayat wanted to say that the end had been achieved, that Bezer’ej was now quarantined, and that c’naatat was now effectively safe in the hands of the FEU; but it wouldn’t have made sense to a bezeri. He wasn’t sure right then that it made sense to him.

  He picked up one of the azin shells and wondered how they managed to make the seal watertight and place the colored sand so accurately. The shades were graduated so finely that they appeared almost like a painting; the maps clear and crisp, with vividly colored symbols and lines. The next one he examined was a very accurate representation of the underwater landscape.

  Rayat recognized it. He recognized the type of weed and the dark red things clinging to the rocks that might have been plants or shellfish or anything in between.

  So they see the world pretty well as I can see it.

  Rayat experienced a disturbing and profound sense of connection. His scalp tightened and he found himself looking into the bezeri’s mantle to seek eyes. Terrestrial cephalopods had eyes, eyes made the same way as a human’s.

  Oh God. It was hard to tell in a creature that was almost transparent and full of swirling lights. Oh God I have to stop thinking this way.

  Rayat’s next thought was that this was a remnant of Shan Frankland’s memories, her unsettling ability to blur the line between the value of man and cockroach, the same worldview that the wess’har shared. And c’naatat had brought with it elements of every host it had passed through.

  She’s in my bloody head. Bitch. The bitch is in my brain. I don’t even know which thoughts are my own anymore. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

  He found he was gripping the azin shell map far too tightly and he slackened his grip, struggling to keep calm. If he didn’t have his inner core of certainty, he had nothing—and he would never last down here.

  But he couldn’t die; he’d end up insane.

  It was the first time in his life as an intelligence agent that he’d come adrift from the internal anchor that he had learned to seize when he was alone and terrified and in pain. You had to have that core. Without it, you broke.

  He concentrated on his fear and reminded himself that if Frankland could survive in space—and that had to be far, far worse—then he could handle an existence like this. Humans had evolved from the sea. He’d simply come home for a while.

  The bezeri examined the maps with slow, elegant care. One of them picked up two shell sheets in its tentacles and appeared to gaze at them, and Saib reached out and stroked one almost lovingly.

  Our map makers are gone, said Saib. We are the last of the clans. We shall be gone when the last of us dies, because we have found no others.

  “You’ve survived this far,” said Lindsay. “You have enough of a population to start over. Humans nearly died out completely too. We bounced back.”

  Sometimes Rayat just wanted to slap her. “We declined to a few thousand,” he said wearily. “You’re thinking of cheetahs. They’re the ones who got down to single figures.”

  “But they still bred.” Lindsay stood her ground. “God, all the things c’naatat can change, but it lets you carry on talking. Now tell me it’s smart. Just shut up, will you?”

  Saib rippled with deep blue light so saturated that it almost became black.

  But he is right. We cannot produce young ones among ourselves.

  “Why?” asked Lindsay.

  Most of us are old. We escaped the contamination because we did not go to the spawning grounds near Ouzhari.

  “Are none of you young enough to reproduce?”

  A few. But they are all of one family. They cannot breed. It is unthinkable.

  Rayat hadn’t even thought about the bezeri when he decided to salt the tactical neutron bombs with cobalt. He knew next to nothing about the species. There was a certain irony in the fact that Surendra Parekh had been executed for causing the death of just one of them, but his actions had led to the deaths of thousands—and here he was helping the survivors file their archives, like a murderer allowed to work in the prison library for good behavior.

  Saib gathered up a stack of azin shell maps in two of his tentacles and held them against his body.

  We have many maps to collect, from many locations. If nothing else, we will have our history.

  Rayat thought of terrestrial octopuses opening jars and solving puzzles, and his solid view of the universe began to tilt and tear like a quake zone. He wondered if Earth’s squid had histories, and if he had simply never seen the obvious.

  Jejeno, Umeh

  In daylight, the scale of the damage to Jejeno was visible even from the ground. Eddie opened the airlock and stood outside Umeh Station, surprised at the relative quiet.

  “Off you go.” He took the bee cam from his pocket and flicked it into the air, sending it out on its own beyond the defense shield. “Urban damage, bodies, emergency measures. Go get it.”

  He prayed that the isenj weren’t jumpy enough to shoot it down. It was only the size of a tennis ball but he didn’t know if their systems could detect it. He didn’t even know if it could pass through the Eqbas defense shield that formed a network of invisible corridors linking the ship to Umeh Station and parts of Jejeno itself.

  Yeah, I’m trapped under an upturned glass. Like a spider.

  Eddie couldn’t shake the analogy. Spiders seemed to form a sizeable chunk of his mental imagery at the moment. Isenj were spiders with piranha mouths, and he was a spider too, a soft pink one, and he wasn’t sure who was outside the glass or within it, and whether the glass was a trap or a haven.

  But there was one significant improvement in his situation: and that was a negotiated time slot on the ITX, thanks to Esganikan, or—to be more specific—thanks to the efforts of the Australians at the UN. He could guarantee getting hold of the BBChan news desk at least once a day. In Jejeno, that meant sunrise for the time being. It was nauseatingly early and his stomach churned with fatigue.

  Silly bastards. Anyone in the FEU with three brain cells should have realized that he was the only neutral out here and attempted to sweet-talk him into a spot of informal intelligence gathering. It wouldn’t have been the first time. But they hadn’t even tried. He had his price ready if they ever did; unlimited ITX access.

  He opened the ITX link that Livaor had managed to build into his handheld and comforted himself with the knowledge that he could at least conduct his business in private now—or at least as private as a shared comms link could ever be. None of the species in the Cavanagh’s Star system had any concept of secrecy or encryption.

  “’Morning, Mick.” Eddie doubted if the duty news editor slept much these days. He was gray-faced and unshaven. “You doing double shifts?”

  “Might as well make the most of it.” Behind Mick, the newsroom looked as if the cleaning staff hadn’t been around for a while. Cups and other detritus littered the desks. “I’ll be retired by the time the Eqbas show up. Dead, even.”

  “You’re always so upbeat.”

  “Have you been watching the output at all?”

  “I’ve been a bit busy with an air raid.”

&nbs
p; Mick rolled over his comment, oblivious. “We had another hurricane. We lost backup power for six hours and the roof came off the staff restaurant.”

  “Okay, you win. That trumps my personal disaster.” It was a few weeks before Christmas back home. The climate had shifted an awful lot since he’d left Earth. “Look, things are going pear-shaped. Are you up to speed with the geopolitics here?”

  “I have a hard time keeping up with the Earth side of things at the moment, mate.”

  “Well, it looks like we’ve got a real shooting war. One of the neighboring states took exception to the Eqbas arriving in Jejeno and sent fighters into Northern Assembly airspace to take a crack at them.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve got the footage. And in retaliation the Eqbas wiped a town off the map. Buyg.”

  “You got footage of that?”

  “No, just the dogfight over Jejeno, but—”

  “Oh.” Mick’s personal amazement threshold seemed to have racked up a few notches overnight. Alien dogfights in the skies of exotic distant planets weren’t big enough to shift his needle now. “Okay, send it down the line.”

  It was a challenge. “If I can get some footage of Buyg…”

  “Great.”

  “Mick, are you listening? The Eqbas are heading our way in a few years and it’ll be sobering to show the viewer what they can do.”

  “We had anti-European riots over that last Eqbas piece we ran.”

  “Are you being leaned on by the Foreign Office again?”

  “Not anymore. It’s just that we’ve got an immediate killer weather story with a domestic body count and something that might happen in thirty years is way down the menu today.”

  “Point taken,” said Eddie, teeth gritted. Sod you, mate. But it had taken decades for the media to get excited about climate change, too, and by then it was too late: the seeds of inevitability were sown early. The Eqbas were coming. Nothing would divert them. “Look, the new Defense Secretary is going to want to see this. You might be able to trade it for a favor sometime.”

  Eddie had done this before; he’d shared footage of wess’har vessels with the FEU. Somehow they felt they were getting something useful beyond a warning, but he doubted it after what he’d seen last night. It was just a reminder that they had thirty years to catch up technologically on a million-year-old civilization.

  Mick’s mind obviously wasn’t set on receive today. “Are you okay, Eddie? Generally, I mean.”

  “Well, if I’m not, you can’t exactly send a car for me, can you?”

  “Just checking. Manager’s duty of care and all that.”

  “I’m fine.” I’m scared and I’m lonely and I’m excited and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now. “Don’t worry about me. I’m a local celeb. They even give me decent coffee. Do you want this footage or not?”

  “Check in tomorrow. Jan’s on duty.”

  Eddie closed the link and marveled at how short the attention span of a news editor could be. But the isenj war was 150 trillion miles away, and its consequences decades in the future, and the problems of Europe were happening to Mick right now.

  Eddie would have made the same call.

  He recalled the bee cam and tracked it all the way back to the dome, watching what it could see via his handheld. He caught a glimpse of blackened buildings. The cam was programmed to search for specific shots, matching them against typical templates—large areas of certain colors and shapes—so it was a relief to find that bomb damage looked the same across the galaxy. The cam knew what to go for.

  But it wasn’t bomb damage. It was the destruction caused by a military vessel exploding and sending debris, hot metal and undischarged ordnance ripping through a heavily populated city.

  It was an academic point. It was a politician’s point.

  The bee cam appeared in the distance, a dull gray sphere streaking head-on towards him through the heat haze tunnel of the defense shield, looking disturbingly like an incoming missile trailing turbulence. It slowed and he caught it in a practiced move.

  “Well held, that man,” said a woman’s voice.

  It was Sofia Cargill from Actaeon, a lieutenant who was now the ranking officer in Umeh Station. The senior officers had died when Nevyan had launched the attack on the ship: Lindsay was dismissed the service for her actions on Bezer’ej. That left Cargill, a conspicuously young, sturdy redhead who had accepted responsibility without a murmur.

  “I’m up for the first eleven if we can make enough room to play a game,” said Eddie.

  “The lads are talking about clearing some space in the dome.” “Lads” was a unisex term they all used. Cargill stood at the airlock and squinted against the rising sun, Ceret, a star the isenj called Nir, and humans, in their erasing way, called Cavanagh’s Star. The politics of names fascinated Eddie. He opted to call it Nir for the time being. “So what’s happening out there?”

  “Aftermath.” He thumbed the bee cam’s controls and tilted his handheld for her to look at the screen. “But it just bounced off us.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Better to have the Eqbas on side than not.”

  “I hate sitting here not knowing what’s going on.”

  “I’d lie low and say nothing, love. Leave it to Shan and Esganikan.”

  “Not much choice.”

  “Anyway, you’ve got more to worry about—keeping that dome in order.”

  “Only for a few more months.”

  “Something you’re not telling, me?”

  Cargill shrugged. “No secret. Thetis picks us up in ten months and fifteen days. We turned her back by remote.”

  “Oh, that. You’re going home, then?” Thetis, the ship that had brought him to Bezer’ej, was much slower than Actaeon, which had been built nearly fifty years later. “Bit of a disappointment for the ussissi and isenj embarked in her when they wake up.”

  “They decided to cancel the Earth trip anyway. We’re evacuating—well, some of us.”

  “But it’ll take seventy-five years to get back. You know what home is going to be like then, after the Eqbas have finished with it?” Eddie calculated, boggled by relative velocities and light-years. “They’ll still get there more than forty years before Thetis.”

  “Might be better.”

  “Might be worse.”

  “Whatever it is, it’ll all be over.” Cargill looked remarkably cheerful. It seemed to be the navy way of coping. “Seventy-five years, twenty-five. We’ll sleep through the lot, and it’s a case of ten months here or nearly five. A lot of people have opted to go sooner rather than later.” She rubbed her eyes. “And it’ll relieve the pressure on the station’s systems. Good compromise all round.”

  It removed leverage, too. But Eddie suspected the public didn’t give a shit what happened to a few hundred FEU and Sinostates citizens out here. They were old news. They were a long way from practical assistance: a minimum of twenty-five years, in fact.

  “I’m going for a walk,” said Eddie.

  “You be careful, then,” said Cargill, and Eddie regretted that she was not his type.

  He began walking down the invisible corridor, crossing the service road that ringed Umeh Station like a moat, and glanced up to check that the incongruously pretty Eqbas vessel was still on station above him. It gleamed bronze in the early morning sun, a little lower than it had hovered last night when it batted away incoming missiles like a casual pre-game badminton knockabout. Jejeno looked unnaturally deserted.

  The last time he’d walked alone in this city, he’d nearly been killed in the crush. There were traffic rules for pedestrians here, and very few vehicles. That was a measure of the crowding. He paused on the perimeter that shimmered faintly like a very clean sheet of glass in front of him, only visible as a hint of substance at certain angles.

  Eddie slipped on his transparent breather mask and reached out cautiously. He wasn’t sure what he’d touch. But his fingers penetrated the barrier with a slight resistance, l
ike pressing through water.

  “Ah, sod it.” He stepped through.

  When he crossed the first block and turned the corner, he found himself among crowds of isenj; not as tight-packed as he had seen before, but busy and moving fast enough for him to have to match their pace and stick to the pedestrian traffic rules.

  Isenj had quills. That made him careful, too. But he had walked much more dangerous streets on Earth, feeling somehow safer than he really was because he had a camera and a tabard marked MEDIA.

  He stood at least a head taller than everyone else, looking down on dark heads. Isenj were subtly different shades of chocolate and umber and charcoal, and the clicking and whirring sounds—conversation, or just movement?—made him strain to hear patterns and understand them. Their scent of damp wood and the continuous movement only served to reinforce the impression of a living, dark forest floor alive with insects.

  Eddie went with the flow of pedestrians, mindful not to make a sudden change of direction this time, and recorded a few landmarks to help him find his way back. A run of burned-out buildings and a deep crater that ran fifteen meters at an angle across the road told him exactly where last night’s debris had landed. In the blackened rubble, water still fountained from a burst pipe, surrounded by isenj clutching tools.

  Could the Eqbas protect the whole of Jejeno? Would they even want to? He hadn’t worked out their mindset yet. If they were anything like their wess’har cousins, he suspected he might get a few unpleasant surprises.

  This is not your species, and it’s not your morality. Stop judging them. You intruded here.

  Ahead of him, isenj started moving to the sides of the road, crowding together with sporadic shrill sounds, but the pace remained constant. He couldn’t see why they were parting. Then he risked a glance behind him—no simple feat while trying to keep pace—and saw the top of an official isenj ground car just visible above the carpet of dark velvet heads.

  The vehicle managed to make progress. As the sea of isenj parted, Eddie was suddenly aware that the road surface wasn’t a uniform color, but covered in intricate, vivid designs like the ones that covered many of the buildings. Just as he was wondering if it was some kind of traffic sign or merely decoration, the vehicle drew level with him and he heard, “Eddie!”