Humans. Lindsay, a translucent biped who was more like a cartoon pillow than a humanoid, reacted to that word with a brief glitter of colored lights. Eddie wondered what she might be left with if all that c’naatat had made her suddenly vanish. Would he have accepted the bloody thing? If he had—could he have given it up? It was a terrible choice either way, and one he was thankful never to have had to make.
“This is all about the tests on Rayat, isn’t it?” Lindsay looked around as if to check who might be within earshot. She seemed to default to human habits forgotten for decades. It told Eddie a lot. “So did he survive? What was left? What did it do to him?”
“He was perfectly healthy each time,” said Giyadas. “I’ve been in touch with Shapakti, and he says Rayat returns to the state he was in when the organism infected him. Shapakti repeated the infection cycle and it worked consistently every time. He’s managed to defeat its defense mechanisms.”
“It’s taken so long.” Lindsay sounded wounded. “Or has he been sitting on the news?”
“I don’t know. But he succeeded, and that means you have choices beyond fragmentation.”
Eddie had to judge Lindsay’s reaction by tone. There was no face to show emotions that he could recognize, and the lights told him nothing. So she can go back to being blond, petite Lindsay Neville. She was quite pretty back then. Does she even remember her own face in the mirror?
“Does Shan know?” Lindsay asked.
“Yes,” said Eddie.
“Is she going to have it removed? Is Ade?”
“I haven’t asked her, but remember they don’t know yet if it’ll work on wess’har.”
But Lindsay doesn’t care. She can go home now.
It was the simplest, most animal of thoughts, and it ambushed him again. Lindsay had lived with c’naatat for a very long time, much longer than Shan in real everyday terms; even Rayat had carried it for longer. For some reason, Eddie thought of mentioning it as some kind of reassurance but then wondered if she might be offended by mention of such a petty thing as if it were evidence of not being wholly in Shan’s overwhelming shadow.
“You’ve come to send me back, then,” she said. “But I can’t leave David here. If I go, he has to come with me. I can’t leave him here, all alone. I have to exhume him.”
It seemed suddenly to become her dominant thought. Eddie had a distressing image of her sifting through soil to find a fabric shroud and heartbreakingly tiny bones. He hadn’t thought about it before; but that was why she’d scavenged parts of the stained glass headstone from David’s grave and taken them to the bezeri settlement underwater. She still needed a physical focus for her grief.
Faced with the crushing reality of a grave 150 trillion miles from home and no hope of returning to visit it, Lindsay was probably doing what many parents would. But restored to normality, wholly human and around thirty years old, would she have another baby in due course, and would she find that a solace or a reminder? It was an awful choice. Once again, it was one Eddie was grateful never to have to make.
But who’ll understand her back on Earth, after all she’s been, and been through?
“Well, not send you back, exactly.” Eddie’s tone was set on soothing. “Not if you don’t want to go, but we need to find out now if Shapakti can do the same with bezeri and return them to normal too. Then they can rebuild their society in the normal way. I mean, it’s what they want, isn’t it? To be able to breed and spread out, and not worry that c’naatat ’s going to turn them into a plague like the isenj.”
Is that it?
“What do you want me to do, then?”
“We want a bezeri volunteer,” said Giyadas. “Perhaps you might persuade one of them.”
“But what if they don’t want to be normal again?” asked Lindsay.
“Do you want to?” asked Giyadas. “Do you want to give up the bezeri and wess’har components in you? Did you prefer that first life you had?”
“Is this part of a bargain?” Lindsay asked. “I give you a bezeri to play with, and you let me become a human again?”
“There is no bargain,” said Giyadas. “Just a question.”
Wess’har didn’t go in for those kinds of games. There were never strings attached, but the downside was that there was no bribing or persuading them with an exchange of favors, either. Every action was a separate process carried out for its own purpose. Their reason for offering Lindsay a way home would not be linked in any way to getting the bezeri to cooperate.
It was one of many reasons why humans thought they understood wess’har but didn’t. Even their Eqbas relatives seemed not to mesh with them completely. Even after decades living here, Eddie sometimes couldn’t fathom them.
“I’ll ask them,” said Lindsay. Eddie noted that she said them, not the others, as if she’d started withdrawing into human territory right away. “But I honestly have no idea how they’ll react.”
Maybe she remembered them as they were when she infected them all those years ago: the last remnant of their kind, almost all elderly and infirm, waiting to die and too old to repopulate their world. What if that was the state they were restored to? Why would they ever want to do that, if c’naatat had made them fit and young again? It was a rotten kind of normality to crave after years of vigor.
Eddie thought of Shan aborting her own child, and had a glimpse of the impossible dilemma of anyone with c’naatat. It was an all or nothing kind of thing. Having any c’naatat around changed the whole nature of life, and whether you couched it in Deborah Garrod’s religious terms of a satanic temptation, or just looked at the basic maths and social implications, it wasn’t a boon for anyone or anything. It was a terrible burden.
“I’ll ask them,” she said again. “Come back in a week or so.”
Lindsay could go home. Eddie could hear it in her voice, real human relief coupled with desperation in case her hopes were dashed. He felt a strange empty guilt that she’d been here for so long among a tight-knit community, and yet the prospect of being human again and going back to Earth made her react as if she was being rescued.
It was a glimpse of hell: unending existence in a situation you didn’t want to be in. Eddie got back into the shuttle and wasn’t sure what to say to Giyadas.
“Upsetting, isn’t it?” she said.
“I feel like I abandoned her.”
“It was a choice she made, Eddie. She went to a lot of trouble to get infected. She also caused the catastrophe for which she sought to atone.” Giyadas was a wonderful, supportive friend and exceptionally restrained for a wess’har, but wess’har she was, and so her thinking was that once you made your bed then you bloody well had to lie on it. She wasn’t being callous. She was simply linking cause and effect, wess’har style, to make Eddie realize that this situation wasn’t his fault. “But now she has a solution. She could quite easily have been executed like Josh Garrod and Jonathan Burgh, and then none of this soul-searching would have been necessary.”
She made a good point. Wess’har always did.
“Seeing as I’m wearing my hazmat rig,” he said, “can I see Ouzhari?”
He’d never been there, although he’d seen the apocalyptic images after the bombs had detonated. C’naatat was native to the island and nowhere else. Now he wondered how, and why, and if it might have come from another place. It was a question he knew he shouldn’t pursue, ever.
“The radiation levels are back to normal.” Giyadas fired up the shuttle’s drives. “But the biohazards are still there, yes.”
“Let’s go, then,” he said. “Please?”
Ouzhari was the smallest and southernmost island in the chain that started with Constantine nearest the coast, and it had first been named Christopher, although they all had bezeri names; Eddie couldn’t remember which island went with which saint, but they all began with C. Aras had described the landscape as glossy black grass and pure white sand. But even from half a kilometer offshore, Eddie could see that while the sand was white again, the
grass that had grown nowhere else had vanished for good. Nothing had regenerated. The vegetation now colonizing the island was the same as on the islands north of it, a mix of bronze and blue-gray spiky stuff like aggressive heather. Eddie, with his eye for a good shot, could imagine the visual drama of the way it had once been.
He suited up again when they landed. He walked along the shore with Giyadas, savoring the tranquillity and the rhythmic wash of the waves.
“All for nothing,” said Eddie. C’naatat survived the cobalt bombs intended to destroy it, but not much else had: not the species that lived on Ouzhari, not the relative safety and peace of Earth, not the comfortable wess’har isolation far from Eqbas Vorhi, and not friendships. He thought of Aras and Josh, and pitied Aras having to live with the memory of executing a friend. “What a fucking mess.”
Eddie turned around to look at the footprints he’d left in the icing sugar sand, and very nearly crouched down to grab a handful of it like any beachcomber. But there would always be the risk of dormant c’naatat lurking in it. The idyll ended right there.
“I’m done, doll,” he said. “Time to go.”
He almost asked to visit Constantine and relive the brief months of wonder and terror, when alien planets were exciting stories, and he had been a much younger, blinder man. But he wasn’t in the mood now. He’d come back one day, maybe with Aras, just as the big guy had promised.
Eddie missed him. He had a long wait until he saw him again.
Aliens’ accommodation, Immigrant Reception Center, twenty kilometers south of Kamberra.
Barencoin dropped his bergen on the lobby’s dusty inlaid floor and looked around the entrance to the hotel.
“I suppose it’s too much to hope they kept the bar open,” he said. “But my first stop after I have a pee is to search the stores.”
“That’s the spirit, Barkers.” Jon Becken consulted his handheld. Eqbas crew and ussissi milled around them with the occasional Skavu officer, looking even more bewildered than Ade felt. “Seeing as there’s no porter to carry our luggage, allow me to show you all to the presidential suite.”
Some of the Skavu had already moved into the center—officers, Ade guessed, because there were too many troops even for this huge complex to swallow—and they gave Ade a long wary look that said they knew who he was, what he was, and that they’d all heard about his robust disagreement with their Fourth To Die, their commander, Kiir. Stupid titles. But if he comes the acid with me again, I’ll make the fucker live up to it. Ade and Shan were abominations to the Skavu, who played their environmental credentials like a fundamentalist religion. It had exploded into violence twice, and Ade was fairly sure it would do so again. He was counting on it. He’d promised Kiir that he’d kill him. Ade didn’t like to disappoint.
“What do you suppose their planet’s like?” Chahal asked, staring back at the Skavu. “You’re right, Izzy. They do look like fucking iguanas.”
“I bet it’s all frigging cycle routes,” Barencoin muttered, and joined in the staring. One of the Skavu barked a sound at the others, and they walked away with some reluctance. “But they can come and have a go if they think they’re hard enough.”
Ade listened carefully for a hint of unhappiness in the voices of his RM detachment, but they were tired, disoriented, and just grateful to be in a place that said Earth to them. He didn’t know how long that would last. The bio-screen in Becken’s palm, a computer grown into living flesh, had lit up again but wasn’t showing any data; they all had one, except Ade. It was a redundant system that still functioned but had nothing to connect to, just like them. C’naatat had expelled Ade’s early on in its makeover of his genome, but he checked his palm again anyway. He had its own lights, thanks, and his c’naatat knew where it wanted to put them.
Ade was still living down the piss-taking about the bioluminescence that had gravitated to his tattoos. It was fine with the ones on his arm, but sometimes he regretted getting so rat-arsed with Dave Pharoah that he’d had his dick tattooed for a bet. It kept Shan amused, anyway. That was worth any number of neon knob jokes from Barencoin.
I’m going to visit the Ankara war graves. I said I would one day, Dave. They can’t stop me.
“I’m a lost soul,” said Chahal. “I hope we find something to keep us busy.”
“Fed up, fucked up, and—well, not that far from home, eh?” Barencoin jerked his thumb over his shoulder at nothing in particular as they climbed the stairs. “Christ, Chaz, I’ll give you a list. Smartening up this place, for a start. Filling out your ADF forms. Getting your bank account released. We’ve got plenty to crack on with.”
The lift to the upper floors wasn’t half as interesting as the huge stairwell, which had obviously begun life as the central feature of a place that had once wowed tourists. Then it had been turned into a place to store visitors who weren’t so welcome before shipping them out again, which struck Ade as an ironic thing for a country founded on transported criminals. The water feature was disconnected now, and a white chalky deposit was all that was left to show an artificial waterfall had been there; but it was still bloody big and impressive. Barencoin sprinted up the stairs with his bergen on his back, which was relatively effortless given the lower gravity and higher oxygen levels of Earth. They still had their Wess’ej muscles and lung capacity from a few years’ acclimatization in a tougher world. For a while, they’d find the place a stroll, boiling hot or not.
“Poser,” Qureshi called after him. “There’s no women here to impress now.”
“We’ve got to keep fit for upcoming shagging duties, though,” Becken said, pausing to look over the staircase into the abyss. Ade could see empty beer containers down there. “Even Ade still runs every day, and he’s a real superhero who doesn’t have to.”
Ade smiled. “Piss off, Jon.”
“C’naatat—I mean, it does amazing stuff. Does it improve sex too?”
“Yeah…”
“Really?”
“I’m not telling you. I told you before. Don’t ask.”
“Well, if Shan hasn’t kicked you out, and Aras has two dicks, then you must be getting good at it.”
“Leave him alone,” said Qureshi. “It’s romantic. Don’t spoil it, you crude bugger.”
There was the usual chorus of oo-ooo-oo! and she gestured eloquently with a finger.
Ade shrugged. “I’m going to get married, properly this time.”
He almost wished he hadn’t said it, and braced for barracking. Barencoin leaned over the banister above him. “Who’s the lucky woman, and have you told Shan yet?”
“There’s your alternative career, Mart, comedy…”
“Seriously. Do we get an invite? And who’s going to do it? Don’t you have to have a passport or residency or something?”
“If the Aussies can process you lot in a few days, they can turn a blind eye to any paperwork.”
No, he hadn’t asked Shan. They were as married as they could ever be, even down to his mum’s ring because there was nothing else he owned that he could give her at the time, but it wasn’t enough now that they were on Earth and he could do it properly. Anything less smacked of…of lack of commitment. Until death us do part really meant something when you had c’naatat.
“Won’t it be bigamy?” asked Becken.
“I was never married before,” said Ade.
“I mean Shan. There’s Aras. It’s not strictly legal, polyandry, is it? Not here.”
“Can you even spell it? Sod what’s legal here.”
“Okay, Aras is an alien. I think she can argue that one of you doesn’t count towards her recommended daily allowance. I’ll be best man.”
It was a joke that started Ade fretting. His mates ribbed him about sharing her, but it was a mix of the usual good-natured banter and general human curiosity about the logistics of it all, approached with a kid’s need to know the scary stuff. They never asked him the really important things, like if he was worried she had a favorite, or if he thought that A
ras was better at it than he was, or if she would leave him for Aras in the end. It was that messy emotional side of life that still worried him, even if he picked up their memories from the genetic transfer during sex. He knew what Shan felt about him from right inside her mind. No regular man could have that certainty.
But he wasn’t absorbing the memories now. The gel barrier condom stopped oursan. That meant he didn’t pick up Aras’s memories via Shan either, although she must have been getting them. It made him feel suddenly out of the loop.
Ade stopped at the top to gaze down the full depth of the stairwell, hoping to see Aras somewhere. He’d been very quiet since they landed. Ade hoped it was just the usual stunned silence at seeing a new planet—shit, how many humans could even say that and mean it?—and not some sense of dissatisfaction. There was no sign of him.
Yeah, I’ve been all over Shan, hogging her attention. I’m like a kid. I’m home, sort of. I know there are things to do and see. I’m excited. Does he feel left out? I just don’t know. And I can’t know now, not if he won’t tell me.
“Ade, come and look!” It was Qureshi’s voice. “This is the life!”
He followed the sound. The rooms allocated to the marines were on the coast side of the block. Qureshi and the others clustered on the balcony of one of them, looking out to sea. There was plenty of it.
“Wow,” said Chahal. “What a view…”
They’d seen alien worlds of astonishing variety—pearl cities, underground cities, cities that covered a whole planet and reached into the sky—but here they were oohing and aahing about a glittering sea that filled the horizon, standing on a balcony in a disused hotel that needed more than a lick of paint.
Humans were bloody weird. But Ade found it an amazing sight too, probably because he never thought he’d see it again.
“Okay, settle in, and we’ll meet back here in ten minutes,” Barencoin said. “Then we plan an op to locate and liberate some fucking beer.”
The banter started again. “Shit, he’s taken command, Ade…”