Matriarch

  The warship had almost completely assembled itself. He looked around for the small survey vessel that had been the vanguard, Da Shapakti’s ship, and noticed it wasn’t there any longer. Maybe the destroyer had swallowed and absorbed it too. How did they route the services and the controls? How did they keep it vacuum-tight in space? He found he had a thousand questions whose answers would almost certainly be something along the lines of forget it, chimp.

  Esganikan Gai strode towards him. He could always ask her; it was her ship. She was the boss-woman.

  The visiting Eqbas wess’har might have looked different to their native Wess’ej cousins, but the females still had that same ability to make you crap yourself. No wonder Shan fitted in with them so well. Esganikan’s brilliant copper-red plume of hair bobbed as she stared down at him and cocked her head to get a better focus, four-lobed pupils snapping from open flower to tight cross-wires and back again in an instant, just like all the wess’har. Looking any of them in the eye was still hard. There was no single point to focus upon—just the uneasy sense of being the center of their aim.

  And Esganikan was tall. Eddie felt like a little kid lost in a towering forest of adult legs again.

  “What do you want?” She lacked charm but, unlike Shan, she was incapable of even feigning it. “We leave soon for Bezer’ej and Umeh.”

  “I know.” You owe me one. He’d lent her his database to learn English. He wasn’t sure yet of the Eqbas approach to repaying favors, but if it was the average wess’har one, it was unpredictable. “Can you take me to Jejeno?”

  “We have a presence to maintain.”

  “So can I get a ride with you?”

  The Eqbas matriarch—flat-faced compared to the elegant, long-muzzled wess’har he’d grown used to—glanced over her shoulder at the embarkation going on behind her. “Why?”

  Eddie found himself detaching from a recent, raw memory. “Now that Minister Ual’s dead, I need to make contacts within the government again.”

  “So do we.”

  “Yes, but can I come too?” You had to be direct with them; they had no concept of being abrupt. Eddie wondered if his natural diplomatic touch was being corrupted by close contact with species who were as outspoken as five-year-olds. “Please?”

  She cocked her head again. “Be here tomorrow when we leave.”

  “Thank you.”

  “At your own risk.”

  It always was. “I get it.”

  Esganikan turned and swept back to the ship. Eddie watched her go, still feeling sweaty and uncomfortable from running, and reminded himself what she was—an alien, the commander of an alien warship, a warship that was stunning in its size and technology and was just a small part of a much, much bigger fleet.

  Earth had nearly thirty years left to prepare for the invasion. The fact that the Australian government had invited the Eqbas guaranteed no happy endings. Eqbas wess’har were the guests who never knew when it was time to go.

  Eddie made his way back to F’nar at a sedate pace this time. He was used to the higher gravity, but it was still a long walk across the rolling plain of rock and tufts of sage green vegetation to the point where the terrain became lava buttes and the city was suddenly visible. Homes and terraces were carved into the cliff walls of a long-dead volcano. Whatever the weather, whatever the light, it was always beautiful, coated in a shimmering layer of nacre. It was, as the human Christian colonists called it, the City of Pearl.

  The pearl happened to be insect shit deposited by billions of tem flies, but Eddie didn’t let the reality spoil his sense of wonder one bit.

  Nor did he let the equally accurate word invasion sully his irregular news reports. Twenty-five light-years away on Earth, his BBChan colleagues had abandoned diplomatic euphemism and used it with B-movie relish; but now the panic had died down, and humans were fighting each other again.

  Okay, deep down, we all want to run the headline ALIENS INVADE EARTH. Admit it, you tourist.

  So Eddie admitted it. It was a journalist’s fantasy story, along with IMMORTALITY DISCOVERED and EARTH NUKES ALIENS. And he’d done those for real, too. But it wasn’t so mindlessly thrilling when you were part of the cause of it, and he still blamed himself. If he hadn’t started digging when Shan had survived a fatal head-wound, c’naatat’s extraordinary restorative powers would still have been a secret. And a lot of people would still be alive—

  No.

  I didn’t bring Actaeon here. That started the shooting. I didn’t make anyone nuke that bloody island to destroy c’naatat. All I did was…

  He could rationalize all he liked, but he knew he had played a hand in helping Minister Ual defy his own government. And, however accidental the shot that killed Ual, the isenj politician was still dead.

  Like Shan always said: dead’s dead. Doesn’t matter how or why in the end.

  Eddie was so lost in thought that he tripped and looked around instinctively out of embarrassment. But there was only a lone v’guy flapping slowly overhead and the occasional pop as one of the many creatures that lived in bubbles on the rocks ventured out to grab something smaller to eat. Wess’ej was a carefully preserved wilderness and the wess’har trod so lightly on it that they were nearly invisible.

  They’re not native to this planet. They’re invaders of a kind, too. Maybe this is how the Eqbas will behave on Earth.

  He could keep wishing, anyway.

  He walked on, feeling conspicuous, keeping his eyes on the uneven terrain beneath his feet. At the pillars of pearl-coated basalt plugs that formed a natural gateway to F’nar, a little alien seahorse waited for him.

  “Eddie!” Giyadas had that wess’har double-voice like a khoomei singer’s. She provided her own faint chorus even when speaking English. “You’re going to Umeh.”

  “Yes, sweetheart.” He ruffled the stiff mane that ran from front to back across the top of her head and she walked with him. “With Ual gone, I need to get to know other people in the government.”

  “You called them people.”

  “They are. Even if they’re isenj.”

  “I meant that gethes usually only call themselves people, so you must be learning to be civilized.”

  Gethes: carrion eaters. Wess’har were strictly vegan. Eddie didn’t mind being lectured in moral evolution by an alien child. Sometimes he preferred the company of cockroaches when he saw what humans could do. “Yeah, I hope so.”

  “I want to come too.”

  “Ask your mother.”

  “I have to learn an isan’s duties.”

  “Not my call.”

  Giyadas was the equivalent of a six-year-old, maybe. And it was too bloody dangerous for a little kid in the middle of—of what? Another invasion? Umeh was the dry run for Earth. What happened to the isenj homeworld now would happen to his home before too long.

  “The Eqbas containment field will protect us,” she said.

  “I’ve covered wars, sweetie. Lots of them. You’re never safe anywhere in a war zone.”

  “But you’re still alive.”

  Her logic was gnawing and inexorable. Like a human child, she was persistent; but she was also subtle and frequently two steps ahead of Eddie.

  He wasn’t used to that—not even from adults. “And Ual’s dead.”

  “That’s not your fault.”

  “I’m still getting the hang of the wess’har concept of responsibility.”

  “You helped him to what he wanted to do. He chose badly—for himself, anyway. For his planet, he chose well.”

  Her incongruously adult tone always unsettled him. “That’s true. But what if you know someone is doing something stupid, and you don’t stop them?”

  Giyadas cocked her head this way and that but didn’t look up at him. “He only harmed himself in the end. He has the right to choose to do that.”

  “Outcomes, eh? Always outcomes.” Wess’har didn’t care about motive. What was done mattered; what was thought was irrelevant. “You’re probably right.”
>
  Giyadas lapsed into silence. She spoke when she had something to say or ask, and beyond that she was content to observe. She spoke English with Eddie’s accent. And she would be the next leader of F’nar if and when she grew more dominant than her mother Nevyan.

  It was inevitable. They didn’t vote. It just happened, and there were never any wars about it. Eddie had a moment of wondering whether invasion by a species like that was such a bad idea after all.

  He reached the center of the city—one of a number of little self-governing states scattered discreetly across the planet—and began the punishing walk up the network of terraces that lined the caldera. Giyadas kept pace as if she was keeping an eye on an idiot.

  “Lindsay Neville is dead,” she said suddenly.

  Eddie’s calf muscles were coping better with the climb these days. But he almost missed his footing.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “And Mohan Rayat. I saw Aras and Ade return.”

  So they’d handed them over to the bezeri, or at least the few that were left. Eddie wondered how smart squid executed prisoners; he also wondered whether to change the subject, but wess’har didn’t deal in euphemism even to spare their children. Giyadas could take it. “I expect it was quick.”

  “Did you say goodbye to her?”

  That kid never misses the jugular. “No, I’m afraid I didn’t.”

  “Do you wish you had?”

  Yes. She was a friend. “What would I have said to her anyway? Serves you right? Trust in God? What do you say to someone who’s killed thousands of innocents?”

  “I thought you might know,” said Giyadas forlornly. “I know how the isenj treated Aras when they captured him after he had killed so many. Perhaps you might have told her to be brave.”

  She was suddenly both a child again and a wess’har, genuinely wanting to know things. It wasn’t rhetoric. Eddie was never certain if it was naïve candor or insight so profound that he didn’t quite grasp it. He suspected it was a blend of both. At the top of the steep steps that ran up the terrace, Giyadas slipped ahead of him and they walked in silence on pearl flagstones. Males followed, females led. The kid was falling into adult wess’har habits. So was he.

  Eddie’s view of wess’har went in cycles, unfathomable miracles one month and then almost family the next. Right then he felt like Uncle Eddie, and the thought crossed his mind that a trip to Umeh Station would mean human companionship again, humans in numbers, and human women. There were two female Royal Marines based on Wess’ej: incongruously pretty, slight Ismat Qureshi, who could probably take his head off without breaking a sweat, and Susan Webster, built more on the armored vehicle scale of things but pleasant enough company for a trained killer.

  And then there were the colonists, biding their time on Mar’an’cas Island, a long way north of pretty, temperate F’nar. Eddie didn’t fancy his chances of romance with the devout Christians there, not even with Sabine Mesevy.

  If he went back to Earth with them, it might not be home any longer. It probably wasn’t; nearly eighty years had elapsed.

  Giyadas pushed open the door of her family’s home and a wave of cooking smells and warbling voices spilled out. At the table in the big communal room, Dijuas—the youngest of Nevyan’s four recently acquired husbands—sat suckling his infant son. Two of her three other males, Lisik and Livaor, were preparing evem for lunch, their long multijointed fingers stained yellow from the sap.

  Nothing fazed Eddie now. Seahorses. Yeah, think seahorses. They had gold eyes, from citrine to topaz to amber, with four-lobed pupils that snapped shut into crosses. He sat down next to Dijuas and reached to stroke his fingertip across the child’s head, eliciting an approving rumble from the father. The baby looked less like a stick insect now: he was recognizably a little wess’har male, a bald one, and three times as big as the palm-sized creature that had spent most of its time in Dijuas’s gestational pouch.

  “Fulaor,” Dijuas said carefully in his double voice, tone on tone. “Fu—la—or.”

  Eddie pursed his lips and made a continuous humming sound before trying to add the second enunciated note. He’d practiced overtone singing for hours until his skull vibrated. He still couldn’t quite manage it. The wess’har larynx, or whatever passed for it, could shape sounds like human lips and tongues before it even reached the mouth to pile on more phonics. Wess’u was more of a complex song than a language.

  Eddie tried again. “Oooooooofffffffffff…”

  Dijuas trilled loudly and the chorus of amusement was taken up by Lisik and Livaor. They found it hilarious. Eddie dissolved into giggles too. There was something touchingly childlike about the wess’har zest for life, and it was easy to forget that they also switched instantly to a much uglier mode and waged total, destructive war without prisoners. Chilled or punching, as Shan Frankland described them; there was no middle ground.

  Nevyan appeared in the doorway.

  She was considered short for an isan—a matriarch—but she was as tall as Shan, a six-footer, and equally fearsome in her way. Her gold tufted mane bobbed, giving her the air of a Spartan soldier, and Giyadas watched her intently as if studying her style. This was how to be a seahorse warrior queen.

  “You mustn’t mock Eddie,” Nevyan said in English. She gave her males a quick glance and—Eddie knew, even if didn’t affect him—a quick burst of her dominance pheromone. I’m the boss. Shut up. “He tries hard.”

  “We’re just having a laugh,” said Eddie.

  God knew there were few of those around to be had lately. Every time he found something funny, or enjoyed food, or just realized that life was richly fascinating, he thought of dead bezeri on the irradiated shores of Ouzhari, and Par Paral Ual, killed by his own nervous troops.

  And dead Lindsay Neville. Unlike Shan, she wouldn’t return from the apparent dead and resume her strange life 150 trillion light years from home.

  “I want to visit Umeh after Esganikan has completed her talks with the isenj,” said Nevyan.

  “I think it’ll be a dangerous place.”

  “I’m the senior matriarch of F’nar, and I intend to meet the isenj government, dangerous or not.” Nevyan was still very young, but she had all the seasoned steel of her mother, Mestin. “They’re my neighbor and my enemy. Esganikan is just passing through this system. That makes the situation more critical for us, and we might well have different agendas.”

  Eddie was aware of Giyadas staring up at him in expectation. She could always smell a tense debate and it fascinated her.

  “I thought you two trusted each other,” said Eddie. “She’s one of your own.”

  “We both originate from the same species, but you might have noted that Eqbas Vorhi doesn’t conduct its affairs as Wess’ej does.”

  Yeah, I know, you’re the hippy dropouts and they’re the militaristic right-wingers. But you still took out an Earth warship without blinking, doll.

  The Wess’ej wess’har just wanted the humans punished and put back in their box, confined to quarters on the speck of rock at the galaxy’s edge, and no more: the Eqbas wess’har wanted to sort out Earth’s environmental excesses as well.

  “That means I can go to Jejeno,” said Giyadas, evidently satisfied. “I want to see it for myself.”

  “I made a right little reporter of you, didn’t I, doll?”

  “Knowing is very important.” Giyadas was more speculatively curious than any other wess’har Eddie had met. “And finding out for yourself is more important still. You taught me that I could only trust my own eyes.”

  Eddie worried what else he’d taught her without realizing it. He also worried how he had shaped her view of humans, because she would be a matriarch herself before too long, one with access to armies.

  “Sometimes you can’t even rely on that,” said Eddie.

  Humankind had kicked over an anthill far from home, and found that the ants were smarter, bigger and far more technologically advanced than they could ever imagine.

  And,
like disturbed ants, the wess’har were pissed off at the brutal intrusion. They would head for the source of the irritation and deal with it: and the source was Earth.

  3

  “Look, forget the bloody aliens. That’s thirty years away. I’m more worried about this government surviving the next thirty months. Australia and the rest of the Rim States aren’t going to pose any kind of threat unless they suck in the Africans by playing the Moslem card. Canada—well, I don’t know which way they’ll jump. Depends on what the Americas do. So leave the Foreign Office to deal with Eqbas Vorhi.”

  MARGIT HUBER,

  newly appointed Secretary of State for Defense,

  Federal European Union

  Bezer’ej: the Ouzhari shelf, depth unknown

  Mohan Rayat fought to stop trying to breathe. He thought of space for a long time, and concentrated on all the advantages of being at crush depth for humans instead of floating in hard vacuum in zero-g.

  He was far better off than Frankland had been.

  I’m oriented. I’ve got gravity. I can move.

  And I’m not alone.

  C’naatat had invaded his cells, and if he had any thoughts of suicide then he had no idea how to carry it out. He’d lost any sense of how long he had been submerged, but it couldn’t have been long. A few minutes; a few hours. Not days, not weeks, not years.

  Look around. Focus on something.

  What? There was no light except the bioluminescence of his captors, apparently waiting overhead. He concentrated hard on his arms as they rested on the satin-cold mud, spreading his fingers and raising one hand a few centimeters, then letting it fall back. The silt billowed up in slow clouds—he could taste it—and it dimmed the bezeri’s rainbow light-talk for a while.

  But…he had moved. He was oriented and he wasn’t actually in pain. He wasn’t dying: he was changing.

  He could feel it. The searing cold had now been replaced by real heat, a fever burning within him, and all his reflexes to breathe and struggle for his life had faded. They had been replaced by a desire to open his mouth and…almost swallow. He raised his head a little.