Matriarch

  It was good to be back here. Even the Temporary City held some memories for her, but she wanted to walk on the blue plains again and recall a time when she thought her commitment was a year here and then she’d head home.

  She turned to Esganikan. Nevyan maintained a stony expression, head jiggling occasionally, and she smelled irritated. At least hear her out.

  Shan opted to talk in eqbas’u. “Don’t you think that giving the isenj a biological weapon is asking for trouble?”

  Conventional pressure didn’t work on wess’har, whether Targassati or Eqbas. There were no insecurities to play on and nothing they wanted to hide.

  “In what way?” Esganikan asked.

  “Are they going to reverse engineer it and develop an antidote to the bioagent here? If they get good at it, they could develop a counter-wess’har version.”

  “They have no expertise in genetic warfare and no chance of developing it. Their bioagents are designed to kill their neighbors.”

  “You’re very confident.”

  “If they could manage it, they’d have attempted it by now. They had access to tissue samples from your jurej many years ago, I understand.” Esganikan wasn’t being a smart-arse. Shan had to remind herself of that. She was just stating facts. “Nearly all of their resources are devoted to simply maintaining a survivable environment so research of that kind is beyond them, even if they had a core of expertise—which they don’t. And the pathogens are nonpersistent. They don’t have the dormancy that the bioagent here has.”

  “So it’s a black box for them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They can use it but they don’t know how it works, and they can’t open it to find out.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And are you going to have a meeting with the Jejeno cabinet about this? Can we come?” The good thing about Esganikan was that her default setting, while not naive, was yes-why-not. It was a striking reminder of the gulf between their cultures: Shan’s first reaction would have been to ask why.

  “I think that would be especially useful for Nevyan,” said Esganikan. “These are her reformed neighbors.”

  “You’re rather optimistic about rapid change in the isenj mindset,” said Nevyan, suddenly her old self again, earnest and unafraid. “In five years’ time, the main task force arrives and you embark for Earth leaving us to deal with whatever comes out of Umeh. They’ll be bitter and resentful. If all goes well they might even rebuild their fleet. Where does that leave us?”

  “We’ll maintain a permanent base here.”

  Shan caught a whiff of jask rising from Nevyan and she reached out to jog her arm. Don’t. A couple of Eqbas crew paused to look at them.

  “That’s new,” said Shan. “When did you decide to make it permanent?”

  “Curas Ti feels that Bezer’ej is a unique environment that needs protection. There are still bezeri and when Ouzhari is remediated, they might well let us help them.”

  “How many are there?”

  “The numbers have fallen, judging by the traces in the water samples. Possibly forty or so.”

  “What happened to the others?”

  “We don’t know.”

  It was wrong, Shan knew, but she had a personal task and this was as good a time as any to broach the subject. “And have you evidence that Lindsay Neville and Mohan Rayat are still with them?”

  “The Ouzhari remediation team saw Rayat in the shallows recently and we find traces of human DNA and excreta in our sampling.”

  “So you can locate them?”

  “Usually. Within a few thousand meters.”

  Nevyan, Umeh and a future with Eqbas neighbors were totally forgotten as Shan wondered what form Lin and Rayat had taken. Shit, she might not even recognize them now: she hadn’t thought enough about that. She could take a raft out and hunt them but they might be the first aquatic life she passed and she wouldn’t know it.

  But there were more ways of hunting them than by sight.

  “Just checking,” said Shan. “I want to be able to visit this place when I need to. Is there any problem with that?”

  “None. Shapakti is keen to talk to you on Earth habitats and the gene bank.”

  “I’ll make this a regular run, then.” Shan glanced at Nevyan. “Let us know when the meeting is scheduled with Eit.”

  Nevyan and Shan walked around the perimeter of the Temporary City and recalled old times that were only a year ago. There were no alyats flying but Shan spotted the outline of a stabtail wheeling high on a thermal; this was still a beautiful wilderness full of extraordinary wildlife and the bombing of Ouzhari hadn’t reached far beyond the southernmost islands.

  And they were walking on land that had been restored. It was easy to forget that. This had been Umeh overspill before Aras and the Wess’ej army had done here exactly what Esganikan had very nearly done to large parts of Umeh. The moral loop was hard to untangle; only the motive—that most fragile of concepts between human and wess’har—was different.

  But it wasn’t the time to tell Nevyan that, and Shan liked having friends at the moment. She shook aside a vaguely disoriented feeling like the start of a illness and wondered what the hell they put in the Eqbas snack she’d eaten.

  “It’ll work out fine, Nev.”

  “Statement or wish?”

  “Bit of both.”

  “Your preoccupation with Rayat and Lindsay is visible to say the least.” She looked into Shan’s face, blinking with concern. “You let it keep you awake too many nights. Even a c’naatat needs rest.”

  The grass ran into a shingle beach that fell away sharply, creating a low cliff. Shan and Nevyan watched the water for a while. There was a time when standing here and swinging a signal lamp would bring bezeri to the surface, and even summon a pilot in a podship.

  The sea looked as it always had, but something had vanished from it forever. The only lights to be seen now were coming from Shan’s own hands. She moved to the very edge of the cliff and stared out to sea, ignoring how hopelessly vast the search area was.

  They were out there somewhere, the last of the bezeri she’d failed to protect and the two humans who all but wiped them out.

  “I’m coming,” she said. “I’ll find you.”

  15

  Humans’ greatest asset is recognizing patterns. It gives them predictive minds, which is a great survival advantage. Unfortunately, it also makes them prone to see only what they want to see, and the patterns they are used to, and not what is actually in front of them. It makes it hard for them to analyze anything dispassionately: they are both the center of their world and the lens through which they see it.

  Matriarch Historian SIYYAS BUR

  Bezer’ej: January 2377

  Lindsay laid the glass petals on a slab of stone in her bezeri cone house and arranged them as they’d been before, a perfect rose.

  It had been worth the double agony of adapting to air and then enduring the few minutes of drowning again. The transition back to being aquatic had been much quicker. If she ever wanted to visit land again, she knew her body would do that faster, too.

  She might even make herself fully amphibious, although she wasn’t sure yet what use that might be.

  Pili drifted behind her. What’s that?

  Lindsay held one piece of glass up to the shaft of sunlight that pierced the roof of the chamber. It marked the grave where my son is buried. I’ll make a memorial to him down here, without the body.

  Pili flickered violet agreement patterns. It’s good to have something to help you remember.

  Rayat would probably tell her it was a shrine and that she was a fool. But maybe that was a harsh judgment. He seemed very subdued: the visit to Constantine had set him back just when she thought he was doing a good job of accepting his fate. But it wasn’t supposed to be fun. It was partly his punishment, and partly to help the bezeri.

  She laid the glass petal back on the slab in the space left for it, re-creating a whole rose, an
d wondered whether she would use her c’naatat if David were dying in her arms now. She’d been alternately sure that she would and sure that she wouldn’t, and now she was sure again that she would. It didn’t make it right or ecologically responsible: it would probably have brought him misery eventually, either as a freak and a source of samples for the pharmacorps or the military, or as a man who couldn’t have children of his own, or even a lover.

  But he was her child, and always would be. She knew she’d both save him and regret it.

  She went in search of Rayat.

  She found him in the old assembly chamber that the bezeri were now using as a storage facility for the maps. They were finding them in many places, and although the bezeri had been a small population clustered in a limited part of the ocean, they had certainly preserved a lot of history.

  Rayat was sitting on a shell stool, staring at a shell map. He had a thin instrument in one hand like a stylus.

  “Are you reading or writing?” she asked.

  He preferred to talk the old-fashioned way and seemed afraid to become like her and surrender to the metamorphosis. The host’s reaction to the changes their c’naatat brought about really did seem to influence it; it was almost as if it was listening to your wishes. Rayat seemed to think it was some sophisticated feedback system involving stress and pleasure hormones. Either way, c’naatat seemed uncomfortably like a genie, and equally hard to put back in its bottle.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  “I’m reading,” he said. “I actually understand this now. Pictograms. It’s not exactly The Rise and Fall, but they’ve catalogued millennia here. Extraordinary. They love keeping records.”

  “I guessed.”

  Rayat seemed totally caught up in it. Whatever had upset him when he went back to the ruins of the colony had been forgotten for the time being.

  “Look,” he said. He held up the map. “This isn’t just a chart. It records what happened when the isenj arrived. They were here for years before they overran the place.”

  “That’s what happens when you keep doubling numbers.”

  “This stuff goes back…oh, I reckon fifty thousand years. The isenj don’t show up in the records until about five thousand years ago.” He held up the map. “See that pictogram?” It looked like a black asterisk. “That’s how they depict the spiny ones.”

  Lindsay’s stomach could still churn, metamorphosed or not. She’d help wipe out a species that had been making records for longer than humankind. It made her feel even more of a monster. “Oh God.”

  “Want me to teach you to read this?”

  “Okay.”

  “Yeah, I know. It doesn’t make me feel any better either. But at least their culture can be preserved if we try to learn what we can.”

  Rayat was always up to something. Lindsay knew she would find out what it was the hard way, but he had a valid point. She could, if nothing else, ensure the bezeri weren’t totally erased if the last one died out. She was determined that neither would happen. Rayat began pointing out the recurring pictograms indicating clans, life events, places and seasons. The pictogram for the annual spawning—which seemed to produce nothing like the numbers of offspring of terrestrial squid—reminded her of an air force roundel, blue and red with a pearlescent center.

  “I think I’m going to start with the oldest ones and work forward,” said Rayat.

  Lindsay settled down with a pile of the shells to struggle through her maps like a kid, clutching a piece of weed for a snack, and the sheer bizarre irony of it made her want to weep although she didn’t seem to have the glands for that any longer. They sat in watery silence for an hour or more. She was starting to get a feel for the time cycles now; her body knew something that her human mind couldn’t detect.

  “Oh,” said Rayat.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  He drifted across to her and held out a more intricate azin shell record whose symbols seemed to suggest that their recording styles changed over the years. It was like looking at a medieval manuscript against text on smartpaper. It was also exceptionally beautiful, a riot of color even now.

  “What am I looking at?”

  She’d played this guessing game with him before back on Actaeon, when he showed her the original telemetry from the Christopher mission and where the ship had originally landed: Ouzhari. It usually meant he was about to make a shocking point.

  “This,” he said. “What does it look like to you?”

  She stared at the sand image, trying out her full range of perception from the visual spectrum to density changes. “A big lump.”

  “Not bad, not bad at all.” He traced the outlines with his little finger as he read them out. “This symbol means big, but this means food, and this means hunt. And this is an animal or very large fish, for want of a more taxonomically correct term.”

  “Just cut to the chase. I don’t mind being marked down as the dim kid at the back.”

  “I wondered what had happened to the big animals down here. No whale equivalent, no shark equivalent. Not that I’ve seen the whole ocean, but it’s quite striking that there’s nothing around here bigger than those killer whelks, as you call them.”

  “They died off too? The isenj pollution?”

  “No,” said Rayat. He had that look of detached fascination on his face. The lights in his hands shimmered and pulsed with each sound he made like some base line decoder at a high-school dance. “The bezeri hunted them. I think they hunted them to extinction.”

  F’nar, Wess’ej: January 2377

  Shan stood by the window looking onto the city, chewing her thumbnail and seeming lost in thought.

  “Isan, come back to bed,” Aras whispered. He worried about her. She hadn’t slept since they left for Bezer’ej and even with c’naatat, she could still look tired and drawn. “There’s nothing you can do about Vijissi right now.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk. You don’t sleep through either.”

  “I’m wess’har. You know we don’t sleep like that.”

  “I’m sorry. Did I disturb Ade?”

  “He’s asleep. He sleeps well whatever happens.”

  “Soldiers can sleep anywhere and eat anything. Good habit to have, I reckon.” She stepped back from the window and opened the cupboard very carefully. “Might as well have a cup of tea. Solves anything, a cup of tea.”

  Aras took the jar of dried leaves from her hand and motioned her to sit down at the table. This was his job: a proper jurej provided food and kept house and raised children. He could do two out of three, and that made him happy. She folded her arms on the table and let her chin rest on them.

  “Poor sod,” she said quietly. “What’s he going to do? He’s the only one of his kind. I have you.”

  “I was the only one of my kind for quite some time.”

  “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. That was thoughtless of me. Well, you know better than anyone what he’ll go through.”

  Aras knew all too well. It was no surprise that every other wess’har who had c’naatat—and who hadn’t been killed outright by explosion during the war with the isenj—had taken their own life. It was agony to see everyone you cared for age and die, especially if your culture emphasized the natural cycle of life and death.

  Five centuries in exile, most of them alone. No wonder I was happy to see the human colonists and be accepted by them. They thought I was a miracle sent by their god at first.

  “Did I tell you my first isan killed herself?”

  “Mestin told me. I must have put you through hell when I spaced myself. I really am sorry.”

  “But you’re back now. And you love me, and you love Ade, and we’re happy as a family.” He strained the liquid from the tea leaves and poured it into cups, then sat next to her on the bench. “The pain is forgotten.”

  “Which makes it even harder for me to imagine how Vijissi is going to cope. Ussissi are total pack animals.”

  “People.”

&nbs
p; “I count humans as animals. No offense meant.”

  “I agree that he’ll probably find it very hard to bear.” He eased her arms out of their folded position and wrapped her fingers around the cup. She always seemed to like a little extra fussing. “I’m not sure which is worse. Being unable to have oursan, or knowing everyone you care for will die before you do. An eternity of bereavement.”

  Shan sipped the tea. “So, they fired you as the resident stand-up comedian, then?”

  “I can tell how distressed you are by the speed at which you descend into tasteless jokes.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I wasn’t being critical. Just concerned for you. Feeling responsible for Vijissi’s death, and then feeling responsible for his isolation must be hard.”

  “Hey, I’m the one who got all the breaks. Don’t pity me.” She leaned against him and kissed him. Her mouth was warm and fragrant from the tea. “And drifting in space minus a suit is pure unadulterated fucking hell. I still have nightmares.”

  “Anyone else would have gone insane.”

  “Who’s to say I didn’t? Maybe he has.”

  “We can help him adjust.”

  “I’m up for that. Are you? Don’t take on my debts. I need to sort my own shit.”

  “There you go again. Please, don’t shut us out. Part of the joy of being a family is to support one another.”

  She looked away for a moment. “Okay. I know I’ve got a nasty mouth on me and I lose my rag way too often, but I think the world of you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “And I know I spend a lot of time with Ade. I don’t want you to feel I’ve pushed you aside.”

  “He’s your new jurej. That’s normal. And I don’t feel neglected, because I have a brother, and that’s a very precious thing too.”