Shan spread her arms and shrugged. “Beats me. I expect you already realized I’m not like other girls.” She wandered across the room. Unbidden, Lindsay placed her hands back against the wall and edged up it. It was a clumsy way to stand when she could have knelt first, but maybe she was expecting a boot in the face. Shan met her horrified eyes. Looking cadaverous had its advantages. “You stupid, selfish little cow.”
“Oh God,” said Lindsay. “How did you…?”
“Survive without a suit? It’s the first minute that’s the worst. Want to try it?”
“Oh God.”
“Too fucking quick for you. I ought to let the ussissi shred you.”
“Get it over with.”
“Esganikan would rather I didn’t. Not yet.”
Neither of them had finished helping with inquiries, as her old sergeant used to say. There were helpful people, and there were people who needed some help to be helpful. Either way was fine by her.
Rayat was made of sterner stuff than Lindsay, or at least he seemed to think he was. Shan kept an open mind. He was certainly managing to be more coherent.
“Okay, Superintendent, I know your record with prisoners. You enjoyed your work.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” said Shan. “What was in your Suppressed Briefing from Perault? Everyone knows what was in mine.”
“Why does that matter to you now?”
“Good old-fashioned copper’s need to know. What was your primary task?”
Rayat looked through her. There was a definite shift in his expression, as if it was part of a mechanism he’d adopted to resist interrogation. Shan thought that if she were an agent who had no further mission and no chance of escape or survival, then the last thing left to preserve sanity was the satisfaction of thwarting the enemy in some small way.
She could have beaten the answer out of him, given time. He wasn’t all that different from her, hanging on to his sense of self in a lonely and frightening place.
But understanding him didn’t excuse his crime.
Bastard.
She felt something primeval flare up from her gut and the kick she aimed at him came straight from her subconscious. It caught him under the arm, right in the ribs. He didn’t even scream. They usually did.
“Come on, you shit-house.” He curled up instinctively, hands shielding his head. The shock from the next kick traveled back up her leg, and it hurt. “You can take me, can’t you? You’re trained. You’re hard. What do you want? Want me to draw enough blood that you catch this fucking thing?” She stamped down hard on his ankle because she couldn’t get at his balls. She was light-headed and it wasn’t from exhaustion. She’d tipped over this brink of rage before. “Get up, you bastard. Come on, you murdering heap of shit—”
He rolled over on his back, gasping. “You’re a—” he began, but that was as far as he got because she didn’t want to hear, and she didn’t want to argue, and she didn’t want him to get up again. She kicked him in the back and the kidneys and anywhere else she could reach. She kicked him until she staggered to a halt with exhaustion and all she could hear were his grunts of pain and—at last—her own gasping breath.
If she’d been fitter, heavier, she knew she would have killed him. She’d come as close to killing someone before but she knew when to stop in those days. Whatever Rayat knew didn’t matter right then. She wanted destruction. She loathed herself for that and wasn’t sure why.
She managed to haul him into a sitting position by his collar so that his face was inches from her. “Do you know what you’ve done? Do you fucking know?”
Lindsay was completely silent, watching them warily.
Rayat uncoiled and spat blood on the floor, white-faced and trembling. But she couldn’t make him scream. God, she wanted to.
“You’re an animal,” he said hoarsely. “And if you think you’re hard enough to beat anything out of me, you’ve got a long job ahead of you, bitch.”
“Then maybe I’ll settle for just making you fucking bleed.”
Lindsay was pressed flat against the wall, silent, trying not to be noticed. Shan forced herself upright and walked out.
She got to Fersanye’s door and Ade—made to wait outside—caught her before she collapsed.
“What the hell happened?” Ade had a tight grip on her arms. “Did he hurt you?”
“The fuck he did,” she said. “I kicked the shit out of him.”
“Good for you, but—”
“But it wasn’t for the bezeri.” The realization crashed in on her. “It was for me.”
It was accumulated rage; rage at being set up, being shanghaied, being used, being turned into a freak, being expected to clear up everyone else’s shit, freeze-boiling to the point of death and beyond…and being caught between black and white.
So Rayat killed thousands. Aras killed millions.
But she could still see the difference, just as she could still feel that Perault’s motive for consigning her here mattered even though her wess’har side didn’t give a toss.
If Rayat thought that calling her an animal was an insult, he hadn’t understood her at all.
Human would have been much, much worse.
Aras found the smell that Shan called forest floor more than distracting. It came close to unbearable.
It took him back to the time long before the first humans came to Bezer’ej, five hundred years ago, when he huddled in an isenj cell on an island called Ouzhari. The smell told him his jailers were coming to inflict more tortures on him. He had looked much like any other wess’har in those days. Minister Ual reeked of that scent.
“I never thought we would have this conversation,” said Ual. He lapped from a bowl of yeast broth. Wess’har busy drying sliced lurisj in one of the courtyards paused to look at him and then went back to their task. “Without our human friends, we would never have had a common language to do so anyway.”
Aras felt the skin rip from his back again. Murderer, monster, child-killer. You don’t deserve any better. He ignored the insistent smell of wet leaves. “They have their positive elements.”
“Perhaps that’s their purpose. A catalyst.”
Aras had heard enough of purpose and pattern from BenGarrod and his descendants. “We had reached a satisfactory equilibrium before they arrived. Did their purpose include destroying the bezeri?”
It wasn’t Ual’s fault. He hadn’t settled on Bezer’ej, and he hadn’t tortured him. Aras couldn’t understand why he was experiencing this flashback so intensely now when he had lived with the accurate, unchanging memory for so long. Shan had inherited the memories. She’d reacted badly to them as well. He tried to shake off the intrusive images because they were producing an anger in him that wasn’t his.
“Are you unwell, Aras?”
It was odd to hear an isenj call him by name. “No, I’m remembering what your people did to me.”
“You can also remember what you did to them.”
“I can.”
A white ball of fire rolled down the street and the screams were deafening. He hid, calling for his family when the silence fell.
But it was the memory of an isenj. And he could recall his own astonishing survival when the prison was attacked and smashed to rubble, and how his comrades couldn’t understand how he had survived such an ordeal. It had seemed a blessing, a vital advantage to share with other troops when the small wess’har army faced millions of isenj.
Nobody had known what it really was in the early days. They found out soon enough.
“Can you do for Umeh what you did for Asht? I apologize—what you did for Bezer’ej.” Ual corrected himself, perhaps making a deliberate point that he could accept massive cultural change. “And by that I mean reversing environmental damage, not… reduction in population.”
“Of course we could,” said Aras. “But you must be aware that you can’t sustain the population you have and still restore your environment. Do you recall any natural environment on your world?”
>
“We do,” said Ual. “Our memories span generations.”
“And where will you find the species with which you once shared Umeh? Do you have a gene bank like the one the gethes brought with them to Bezer’ej?”
“No.”
“Then what can be restored?”
There was no answer to that: a Umeh rich in biodiversity was a memory, no more than that. Ual lapped his drink again. He was decorated with hundreds of small blue rattling gems that caught the light. Isenj had always liked shiny objects.
Aras recalled the musty, sulphurous flavor of the yeast broth. He had never tasted it but he had the memory, just as he could relive the moment when a petrol bomb exploded against Shan’s riot shield or when she had beaten a criminal until she broke his bones.
“We need to find a way of reducing the pressure on Umeh,” said Ual.
“You must accept that there must be fewer of you.”
“I have invited wess’har intervention. I had hoped for a solution I might be able to… what’s the human expression?… sell to my people.”
“I think you need to discuss this with Esganikan Gai.” Aras was remembering far too much now. His distant past churned up again. His first isan, long dead by her own hand, unable to tolerate endless life: Cimesiat and all his comrades contaminated by c’naatat: and the years in Constantine with the alien newcomers whose strange belief in invisible forces had always managed not to conflict with the principles of Targassat until now. “I find it interesting that we all spend so much time letting the past influence the present, when it no longer exists. We all let our personal World Before rule the world that is.”
But there was a previous time he wanted to find again rather than forget. He wanted to walk away and return to some semblance of a peaceful life with Shan, and he had a second chance to do that now. Eqbas Vorhi was more than capable of taking on the task of restoring Umeh and even Bezer’ej. He’d done his duty and now it was over.
But even now Shan was struggling around F’nar, pretending she was fit and able to be the Guv’nor again. No, she had done her duty too, and even duty was finite. Aras thought of the Baral Plain, his birthplace, quiet and remote and truly cold in winter. They could live there, Ade as well. Ade liked snow.
“Forgetting the past is a monumental task for a species with genetic memory,” said Ual. “But it’s exactly what we have to do. Most isenj will resist Eqbas Vorhi’s help—will your people help me convince them?”
Aras stood up. He couldn’t stand the smell of decaying leaves any longer. “Will you excuse me? I must find my isan.” He beckoned to Giyadas, watching them from a discreet distance with unblinking yellow eyes. “The future matriarch of F’nar will keep you company for the time being.”
He walked home up the terraces, willing Shan to be there when he returned. He needed comfort. His need made him feel guilty because she was the one in need of care, but for the first time in centuries he felt that he had lost control. When he opened the door, Shan was sitting at the table while Ade stirred a pot on the range.
Aras could smell her distress. She wasn’t bothering to suppress it. Ade raised his eyebrows in mute warning.
“What’s wrong, isan?”
“Nothing. I gave that shit Rayat a good hiding. And what happened to you? I can smell you from here.”
“I spoke to Ual.” He knew that would silence her. “I haven’t had a conversation with an isenj since I was their captive.”
Neither Shan nor Ade needed an explanation. C’naatat, for all its disadvantages, was also a conduit for understanding. Ade had never mentioned inheriting those memories but his reaction told Aras that he had. The marine ruffled Aras’s hair in that roughly affectionate manner of human males anxious not to appear oversentimental.
“I’m sorry, mate,” said Ade. He patted Aras’s back a few times and withdrew to the range to resume his cooking, a house-brother in every sense but one. It had been a very long time since Aras had felt that. He missed the intimacy.
“Did it help you?” asked Shan.
“It disturbed me. But it’s done. I mustn’t live in the past when there’s so much time ahead to deal with.”
“They’re going to invade Umeh, aren’t they?”
“Eqbas? Ual has invited them, as we did, whether his people want them or not. Let’s see what happens.”
Shan reached out and put her hand on his and they sat that way in silence for a few minutes, not looking at each other. “You’re right,” she said. “There’s a lot to be said for clean slates.”
Aras meshed his fingers in Shan’s and tightened his grip. Ade poured the contents of the pan into a bowl and set it on the table with some mugs. It was very good soup.
“You’re not a bad cook at all, Ade,” said Shan. And for a moment she looked at Ade in a way that told Aras he did not exist. It was a fraction of a second, no more.
Wess’har males can’t be jealous. And I want a house-brother.
It was just a random flash of silly human jealousy, another facet of the gethes’ greed for more than they needed. C’naatat normally dispensed with inherited traits that it found troublesome. Aras hoped it would purge him of this one before it became intrusive.
“That’s Mar’an’cas,” said Nevyan. “The human colony appears to be surviving.”
“Why didn’t you kill them all when they first tried to land on Bezer’ej?” asked Esganikan.
The spray whipped up from the sea. Jon Becken seemed comfortable steering the boat so Nevyan let him and knelt down on the curved deck. Her dhren shaped itself high around her neck against the cold northern weather.
“They were harmless in those days,” she said. “And they brought other species with them.”
“This is the gene bank I hear about.”
“They thought they could preserve Earth’s life-forms and then return them when the planet was fit to be restored.”
Esganikan made an approving urrrr. “A task we can perform. They aren’t all despoilers, then.”
Becken turned to Webster and Barencoin while he held his hand above the controls to correct the course. The marines chatted, either oblivious or uncaring of the fact that Nevyan could understand them. Their conversation consisted of speculation about Shan’s survival, which they deemed fucking amazing, and the weird shit Ade had got himself into.
Nevyan turned to them. “Yes, it is indeed fucking amazing,” she said, and her comment seemed to silence them. She hadn’t intended it to.
“Tell me more about the gene bank,” said Esganikan, glancing Barencoin’s way. “In English.”
“The colony brought it with them and Shan was sent to retrieve the strains of edible plants for free distribution on Earth. Human organizations make living things like food plants into commodities that only they can sell to other humans.”
“I am not sure I fully understand sell.”
“A barter system. They license seeds and even other beings, altered genetically so they can track and control them.”
“What do they exchange for food, then, if they have no free access to food plants?”
“Labor.”
Esganikan pondered the concept. “So they are cooperative?”
“No, their entire society revolves around individuals acquiring more than is necessary.”
“The more you tell me about gethes, the more I feel they are overdue for our intervention. And what about the other life-forms in this bank?”
“Shan was sent to retrieve unlicensed food plants to break the cartels. She had no orders regarding other species.”
Esganikan looked at the marines and then faced the bow of the boat again. “There is no consensus among humans.”
“No, they all believe and act differently.”
“Then we should differentiate between them. We should separate the gethes from those who can be wess’har.”
Barencoin appeared to take notice of that. Perhaps it had some significance for him, because he looked annoyed. Nevyan glanced at him a
nd he turned away.
When they landed on the island the two marines Qureshi and Chahal were waiting for them. They jogged down to the waterline and exchanged slaps on the back and embraces with the three other soldiers. Whatever privations they faced, they seemed content in each other’s company. Nevyan thought that their communal spirit was an encouraging sign.
Nevyan had seen the colonists of Constantine when she was stationed at the Temporary City on Bezer’ej with her mother Mestin. The colony had never been a problem, quiet and absorbed in its pursuit of strange invisible beliefs of noncorporeal life, and it was properly invisible itself, buried in the excavated settlement modeled on Aras’s memories of his home city of Iussan. And then the harmless humans had become gethes after all, true to their nature, helping Rayat and Neville. Perhaps it was not possible to find many wess’har among them.
Some gathered at the route into their camp of fabric shelters. There were males and females, some clutching small children. And they stank of misery. Nevyan knew an unhappy human when she smelled one.
“I want the person called Jonathan who helped Joshua Garrod enable the gethes to bomb Ouzhari,” said Esganikan.
Nevyan wondered if they had understood her, because her rapid acquisition of English had not included perfecting the accent of a single-voiced creature. There was a collective murmur that seemed like one moan of despair. It seemed that they had.
“If you don’t fetch him, then you condone what he did, and you will be balanced too,” she said.
“Like every godless fascist regime that’s ever been,” said a man at the front. “Burn the churches, punish the innocent, show others what happens to the disobedient. But God will judge you.”
Esganikan met the reaction with an explanation, as was proper. “How can you be innocent if you prevent what’s right? This is to balance the genocide of the bezeri. If you prevent that, you become part of it. I have no wish to show anyone anything. I care only what you do, not what you think.”
They looked back at her, unmoving.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” said Barencoin.