“Miracles happen,” said Lindsay, and hoped there would be another one along shortly for David.
“You have to tell her,” Josh said.
“I will,” said Aras.
“I mean it. What if she decides to go back to the camp and that doctor wants to check her over? You can’t stall her forever.”
Aras fixed Josh with a warning stare. Deborah was at the infirmary and Rachel and James were at classes. They could now shout at each other without fear of being overheard. “You have no idea what forever means.”
“I’m sorry. But what were you thinking of? You spent lifetimes keeping c’naatat isolated.”
“I don’t have your heaven in my head. When the people I care about die, they’re gone, no eternity, no second chance.”
“But you’ve condemned her.”
“To what? Life as a freak? Life like me?”
Josh was as unafraid of Aras as Shan was, or perhaps he was more afraid of his god’s wrath than the wess’har’s displeasure. “She will never be left in peace now. Sooner or later, someone will find out and she’ll become a commodity. And you had no right to do that.”
“Do not lecture me on rights or responsibilities.”
“But why now? You’ve known her seven months. You’ve lived with us for generations and never been tempted.”
“Because she cares about me.”
“We care about you too. We always have.”
“No, you care about the idea of me, the icon. There is this communal respect for me, but at the end of the day you go back to your families and I’m alone again. You won’t even touch me. I’m an idea. I’m not a man.”
“I think that’s very harsh.”
“Would you give up your life for me?”
“That’s unfair.”
“Your fables say that a man should lay down his life for his friend.”
“The word of Christ is not a fable.”
“It will remain a fable as long as you don’t live it as a reality.” Aras stood up and made a move towards the door. His anger was getting the better of him. “Shan Chail risked death for me without thinking, foolish or not. And I stopped that death, maybe foolishly too. But I will look after her because she is my responsibility now. If she can live with the consequences, then so can I.”
“That’s selfish.”
“Yes, it’s about me. However I appear, I am a wess’har male. I am bred to need people to care for and look after. I need to belong to someone. After five hundred years without that, one act of unconditional kindness reminds me what I truly am.”
“You still shouldn’t interfere with the natural course of things.”
“If I had honored that tenet then none of you would be here now. If I had stood back and let your forefathers die, there would be no Thetis or Actaeon here now. Think on that, gethes.”
Aras swept out. He was halfway up the steps but he still heard Josh calling after him. “What will you do if she can’t live with it, Aras? What will you do then?”
Humans often said by way of apology that they hadn’t meant to say cruel things. Aras had meant every word. Every human was gethes to him right then, except Shan.
Back in his chambers, Aras took Black and White from their nest of shredded linen in the alcove and held them in his arms. They were warm and sleepy: White yawned and stretched luxuriously with both paws, then arranged himself across Black and went back to sleep.
While Aras was fond of them, he didn’t want the c’naatat to scavenge any more interesting DNA. He kept his gloves on. He knew very little about rats.
He wondered now how much he knew about humans, too. There was no way of telling how c’naatat would express itself in a human host. It might just repair damage or it might indulge in grandiose, never-ending genetic reconstruction schemes, as it had with him. Whatever it did, Shan Chail now shared with him a common genetic ancestry, and he with her. All the creatures that had hosted his c’naatat before it encountered him were now part of her: all her lungfish-lemur-monkey ancestors were his.
She was even closer than friends, than family. She was in his blood.
Lindsay peered round the door of Josh’s spare room.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
Shan looked up from the screen of her swiss and got up to greet her. “Bored shitless. Hey, it’s good to see you, I—”
Lindsay stepped back, hands held out as a barrier. “Josh said you might have an infection. No offense. But David. You know.”
Shan felt instant regret. Deborah had kept her informed of the infant’s lack of progress. It reminded her how very far they were from Earth and the safety net of hospitals. “Sorry. Yes, I’m still running a temperature. Is there anything I can do? That’s pathetic, I know. I’m not very good at this sort of thing.”
“The longer he survives, the closer he gets to forty weeks. No change isn’t bad.”
“I don’t know how I’d cope if I were you.”
“You’d cope. Believe me. Anyway, you look pretty good for someone who’s been shot in the head.”
“Nobody’s more surprised than I am. I’d really like to get back to work.”
“And have Kris Hugel crawling all over you? No, stay here as long as you can. She’s mad with curiosity about wess’har medical techniques since Ade Bennett said how bad the wound was.”
The faintest grumble of an inner voice—a copper’s instinct—made Shan feel uneasy and she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was her Pagan background, her mistrust of unnatural science, that was talking. “If she comes anywhere near me with a probe she’ll be wearing it for a suppository,” she said, and smiled. “Tell her that from me.”
“Anything you need?”
“Has Actaeon responded on the evac request yet?”
“Consulting. I imagine they’re trying to work out how they convince the isenj we’re not wess’har mercenaries.”
“I bet Commander Okurt would still like a word with me about Surendra Parekh.”
“I told him to piss off.”
“Thanks, but I can face that one myself.”
“And Eddie sends his best. He did a live real-time broadcast from Constantine, and he’s as pleased as a dog with two dicks.”
“Yes, I got the live news feeds, thanks. Earth doesn’t look like home anymore, does it?”
“Things change in seventy-five years. I’d better be going.”
It was a strange kind of quarantine. Shan took a walk round the perimeter and decided she was indeed remarkably fit for a woman with a hole blown in her head. If it hadn’t been for the constant hunger and the mild fever she would have pronounced herself fit, but Lindsay was right about Hugel. If Aras had employed wess’har technology to treat her injuries, it was a good reason to stay clear of the doctor. There were too many things to be unleashed here. And they were probably days away from being evacuated, just days from withdrawing from this world without her very worst fears being realized.
Days away from leaving Aras for the last time, too. The thought had upset her before and it disturbed her now. She had become too attached to him. He was all the things that had kept her in the police when she could have left: belonging, loyalty, family, purpose. She wondered where the next meaning in her life would be found, if anywhere.
For a moment she wondered about c’naatat. No, that was crazy. She knew Aras too well. He would never go that far. Kill me if I might lead them to it, she’d said. And he would, too.
She watched a group of rockvelvets sunning themselves and thought that it wouldn’t have been so bad to have spent a little longer here. It struck her how beautiful they were; despite their eating habits, she found their slow black progress hypnotic. A couple of them lounged on a nearby rock, overlapping slightly as if they were holding hands.
She had never noticed the concentric pale rings on them before. Maybe it was their breeding coat, or gender, or age. And then there were the alyats. There was one hanging from a tree like a discarded but glamorous plastic bag, a fabulou
s peacock-blue sheet of gossamer waiting to drop on an unsuspecting meal walking beneath to smother and digest it.
She had never seen one that color before.
Bezer’ej was full of things you could see right through and yet not see at all.
26
PRIORITY MESSAGE TO: Cdr Lindsay Neville, Thetis ground station.
FROM: Cdr Malcolm Okurt CSV Actaeon.
Stand by to embark remainder of landing party at 1100 ST August 28. EFS Thetis will be reactivated to transfer personnel opting to return to Earth at this stage of the mission. An isenj delegation, interpreters and accompanying officers from Actaeon will also be embarked. Those personnel wishing to remain in Actaeon may do so for the duration of the ship’s deployment.
Ensure Superintendent Frankland makes herself available for embarkation pending a formal inquiry into the death of Dr. Surendra Parekh.
It had been years since Aras had gone hunting isenj with quite this degree of anger.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
Bennett was keeping up with him remarkably well, barely breaking a sweat. “No problem, sir. I have to assume they’re a risk to our personnel now, whatever Actaeon’s decided.”
“But you leave things to me. Is that understood?”
“As long as you’re upright, sir, it’s your call. If they drop you, all bets are off.”
“I think that’s fair.”
“Shouldn’t we be keeping silent, sir?”
“I want them to find me. Even more reason for you to leave me to do this.”
Isenj weren’t stupid. The first party had tried to lure him with human bait and got it badly wrong: the others would not be so rash. He had hoped he could rely on the bezeri to tell him if they detected traces of isenj waste in the shallows, but the pollution from three or four of them would have been too scant and too slow-moving even for a bezeri’s sensitive biology to detect.
Besides, the bezeri had gone deep. There were hardly any lights visible now.
“What is the name Eddie calls me?” Aras asked, eyes fixed on the skyline. A flight of handhawks had caught his attention. Perhaps they had been disturbed by isenj.
“I don’t think he means it, sir. He certainly didn’t use it in his broadcast. In fact, he didn’t mention you at all.”
“The name.”
“The Beast of Mjat.”
“This is how you refer to war criminals.”
“It’s just journalists, sir. You know how they are.”
“You know why the isenj want me.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“Do you know how long ago this was?”
“Does it matter?” Bennett was a man who stuck to his own business, which was soldiering. Aras respected him for that too. “We’ll never understand it and you don’t have to explain yourself to us.”
“You have a commendable grasp of diplomacy.”
“I’m just a bootie, sir. They load me with kit and point me in the right direction and I do whatever needs to be done.”
The handhawks had settled again at a distance. Aras stopped to listen. So did Bennett. The marine checked his palm to read the living light grown into it, as magically illuminated as any bezeri.
“There you go,” he said. He held his palm out. “Three targets heading our way, fifteen hundred meters. On this heading, we should intercept right there.”
“Find some cover.”
“If you’re planning an ambush—”
“No. I just want you safely out of the way. Don’t die here. I would rather see you live to go home and find a female and raise offspring for her.” Bennett stared at him, clearly offended. Of course: this was the gethes who needed to defeat his fear afresh every time.
“What if you have to take prisoners, sir? Wouldn’t you like a hand?”
Aras transferred his gevir to his right hand and pulled out the knife from his belt. For a harvesting tool, a tilgir was extremely adaptable.
“I am wess’har,” he said quietly. “We do not take prisoners.”
The church of St. Francis seemed as good a place as any to sit and think. Nobody asked what you were doing there, and nobody looked at you. Shan sat in a pew right at the front just letting her mind wander. She checked her swiss. There were still no messages. Sooner or later she would have to get back to camp, Hugel or not.
And Actaeon or not.
She wouldn’t have blamed the resident god for ignoring her, especially as she hadn’t wholly—or even partially—accepted he might exist. So if he wasn’t going to do it she would judge herself.
She felt no regret for Parekh. She couldn’t allow herself to. The moment she started thinking that humans were special and anything they did was okay, then she was no better than Parekh or any colonial governor who counted a native’s death as less serious than a white man’s.
Shit, she had only come for the damn gene bank. And now she couldn’t recover it and return it to the government of the day, because there were no Peraults left to defend it, just men and women who couldn’t even maintain a defense force now without relying on the largesse of corporations. It had waited centuries. It would have to wait a few more.
I could have retired after this. I could have gone home. But what would be happening to the bezeri, and Aras, and Josh while she lived out her days 150 trillion miles away? When I look up at the sky and try to find Cavanagh’s Star, how will I stand not knowing what’s happening there?
There would be consequences to face for the business with Parekh, and although Shan had never walked away from responsibility, that just didn’t seem fair right then.
Staying here was crazy, a fantasy. Go home and face what’s coming to you. And home—home would be no less alien than here. She would be more than a century out of time.
Oh shit.
It was chilly in St Francis’s. The plain’s notorious wind had come up suddenly, poking angry cold draughts under the doors even at this depth. It was probably going to be a bright, blustery day.
Shan pulled her coat round her and noticed for the first time how uncomfortably tight it was becoming. That’s what you get for stuffing your face all last week. Early light was beginning to illuminate the stained-glass window, picking out a black-lined coloring-book image of a lean man in a bronze-brown robe. It was a very fine window and it had lost none of its majesty from the first time she had seen it and stood amazed before it.
Around St. Francis creatures that she recognized and creatures that she did not were gathered at his feet and seated at his side. This time she felt it was important to commit them to memory. She would never see them again. There was a European robin, very skillfully rendered, and an udza, a rockvelvet, and a handhawk. And there were things she had only seen in Aras’s library.
Aras, she thought. Of course: Aras showed them how to make better glass. He would have added images of creatures from home, too.
That made her smile, and it hurt. The light was brighter now. People would be waking, and she would have to go even though right then she would have been content to stay there for eternity. She allowed herself a few more moments to drink in the now vividly transparent beauty of the window.
She’d never studied it like this before. She wished she had, because it was calming, beautiful and timeless. It transcended faiths and divisions. It had meaning. The more she stared, the more detail she found: the shaft and vanes in each feather, the pale rings on the rockvelvet, the slightest gray-blue border to the robin’s red bib. The shading and detail was in the glass itself, not in the leading. It was breathtaking. The rainbow of light cast a distorted ghost of the window at her feet and draped itself across the altar.
And St. Francis—there was real compassion in that lined face and more than a little weariness. He looked every inch a man who had turned his back on privilege and comfort because nothing mattered more to him than what he believed in. He would have had no trouble understanding why an alien life counted as much as a human’s. It was a damn shame
he wasn’t commanding Actaeon right now.
As she stared at the figure of the saint, she wondered why she had never noticed that his halo was such a fabulous blue. It wasn’t just a single color. It was peacock and cyan and violet, every blue she had ever seen, and she felt she could actually taste the colors pressing at the roof of her mouth.
She moved her head, taken by surprise at the intensity of the synesthesia. The colors flooded into gentian. She was sure the halo had been plain milk-white before.
It had.
Her memory for detail had been honed by a hundred crime scenes, a thousand interviews. The most wonderful blues and mauves, but not to human eyes. That’s what Josh had said. And she had thought of angels, nothing more.
Now she knew whose eyes he had meant.
And anyone who could see those colors was no longer wholly human.
“Oh shit,” she said.
Shan was built to cope. She liked crises: they were clean and fast and she didn’t have to spend time planning and justifying and persuading. She acted. It was what her brain was wired for.
Even so, this new crisis—for she was certain it was one—was moving too slowly for her. She walked as briskly as she could without breaking into a run along the passages of Constantine and up the ramp into the raw day. She was on the main route out of the settlement, staring at the sunlight as it made brilliant blue bubbles out of some of the home domes visible on the surface.
Oh yes, they were blue. And they had never been blue before.
The fields were south of her; she headed north through the bio-barrier and out onto the plain.
She kept looking at her hands. She had no idea why c’naatat should have manifested itself there, but if there was anything of her that spoke of humanity, it was her hands. She understood why medical students said they were the most disturbing parts of the body to dissect. They were more familiar than your own face, unique in a way that organs and muscles and bones didn’t seem to be.
Her hands still looked pretty average.
Maybe she was jumping to mad conclusions. There might have been a perfectly banal explanation, but as soon as she thought that she knew it wasn’t true, she broke into a stumbling run.