“What’s that? Shukry asked.
“In the good old days, we withdrew the civil rights of slags who habitually broke the law by reading them a legal warning. Then you could deal with them no holds barred, any way you bloody well liked.”
“Jesus,” Shukry said. “But that’s Europe for you. Police state.”
“Fine by me…do they still do decitting?”
“No idea.”
Once again, Shan regretted Eddie’s absence. He would have handled this so much better. He could have explained what a woolly liberal Shan was compared with an Eqbas commander, and carried out a magnificent hearts-and-minds campaign. But he wasn’t, and she began to see all the small detail of what was needed here on Earth that hadn’t seemed to matter on Umeh.
Liaison, getting opinion-formers on side, motivating people…
“Shit,” she said under her breath, and walked into a room that held forty people, not ten. She sat down and looked at the expectant faces. Their expressions told her they hoped she might be the green messiah she was so determined never to be. And then they just stared at Aras and Laktiriu like kids. It was actually heartening to see pure wonder on adults’ faces. She softened slightly.
“Where shall we start?” she said. “You’ll have questions, so why don’t we start there? This is Laktiriu Avo, one of the Eqbas commanders, and…my husband, Aras, who’s restored ecologies too.”
Don’t mention that he had to, because he’d just killed every isenj in Mjat.
Silence.
“Hey, they speak excellent English,” she said. “Feel free. Anyone?”
“Seeing as the Eqbas are vegan in every sense of the word, can we look forward to an end to livestock and dairy farming?” asked the man from the Compassion Alliance, identified by a T-shirt whose front was dominated by a video loop of slaughterhouse footage. It was hard to look away. Laktiriu’s pupils were snapping away like crazy; it wasn’t the best advert for humankind’s baseline. “And what about cell-cultured meat?”
Managing expectation, Eddie liked to remind her, was the key to not losing support when things didn’t turn out the way folks wanted. Shan finally averted her eyes from the repeating cycle of poultry carnage across the table.
“How far are you going to restore habitats?”
“What are you going to do about stopping deforestation in Europe?”
“How are you going to deal with the loonies who’ve taken to the hills swearing they’ll resist the invasion to the last human?”
“Are you actually going to cull humans? It’s about time. They could start with the survivalists.”
Greens seemed a lot more managerial than she remembered. It used to be just fire-bombing unethical pharmaceutical and biotech corporations, measurable stuff that seemed strategically logical to her, even when she still thought the right thing to do was to prevent it.
“I think networks of like-minded people are going to be very important in years to come…”
It was a long afternoon. Laktiriu seemed to be enjoying herself.
She’d make a competent mission commander. She had to.
Nazel Island, Bezer’ej.
It was at times like this that Eddie could see the moral heart of the wess’har, and understood the power of its appeal to Shan. They could have taken a bezeri by force, but instead they asked if any of them would volunteer to be a research subject on Eqbas Vorhi.
It was all very civilized for a species that waged total war and wiped out millions of isenj.
He trudged along the pebble shore behind Giyadas and Lindsay the squid woman, trying hard not to stare at her. He wondered if he was just giving into journalistic voyeurism again, or if he really was trying to build bridges again with an old buddy. Either way, he felt sorry for her.
“So what have the bezeri decided to do?” he asked. “Are they going to play ball with us, or what?”
Shan might have written off Lindsay as an over-emotional weakling who gave uniformed women a bad name, but she was still sane as far as Eddie could tell, and keeping your marbles together after what she’d been through took some doing. Shan should have cut her some slack.
“None of them want to go to Eqbas Vorhi,” Lindsay said, indicating the huddle of bezeri watching from the cliff. “They say it’s too far and they’ll be away too long.”
Giyadas stood on the shore with her hands clasped behind her back, human-style. It wasn’t a comfortable position for wess’har because of their shoulder articulation, and they preferred to hold their hands clasped against their chest when relaxed, looking as if they were in constant prayer. With those elegant seahorse heads, the overall misleading effect was one of angelic human piety. Eddie was sure that the example he’d set Giyadas over the years had been anything but pious.
She thought like a journalist. She even swore like him occasionally. Sometimes he felt that she was more his child than Barry.
“I can understand that it’s daunting for them,” Giyadas said. “That’s a pity.”
And that was where the illusion of similarity with Eddie’s own species ended. Humans would never have taken no for an answer. Somehow, they’d have tricked or forced a bezeri into making the journey to the research center in Surang, because a bezeri was just an animal, however clever and articulate. It wasn’t Us, it was Them, and their needs came a poor second. But wess’har—when they said they didn’t exploit other creatures, they meant it. They wouldn’t even ask the ussissi on Umeh to acquire isenj tissue samples; that would have compromised the odd neutrality that the creatures maintained. In the end, Eddie did it for them, and tied himself up in an ethical maze that he’d never quite escaped.
“I did try,” Lindsay said. “But I stopped short of coercing them. I’m sorry. Bezeri are obsessed with place. Homebodies. Not exactly a colonial empire in the making even if their population expands like crazy. They only want Bezer’ej, and then only specific parts of it.”
Giyadas tilted her head on one side to look at her, crosshair pupils flaring into four lobes. “I asked Shapakti about the possibility of biopsy samples, but he still needs a living bezeri to be certain that removal doesn’t have other side effects in the host.”
“Can’t they model that?” Lindsay asked. “Even we could do that.”
“The Eqbas can model perfectly well. Shapakti simply doesn’t take even the remotest chance. If he’s wrong…the bezeri really will be extinct this time.”
There was an awkward silence. The human core of Lindsay, woken again by the hope of going home, was reminded of what she and Rayat had done all those years ago, and she seemed not to feel she’d atoned for that yet.
Come on, Lin. Shan said it. Rayat said it. It was tough on the bezeri, but if you’d known they wiped out a rival sentient race themselves—would you have felt so bad?
“Pili’s tribe has expanded a great deal,” Giyadas said. “We estimate about five hundred living aquatically now. Don’t you want to reunite the clans?”
“How do you know that?” Lindsay asked. “You haven’t done any oceanographic surveys.”
“We upgraded the defense-grid satellites. We can detect their lights near the surface from time to time.”
Giyadas swung her arms forward again and wandered up to the foot of the cliff. Sometimes she reminded Eddie of Shan, because she usually wore an Eqbas-like suit that was more like fatigues than the traditional white opalescent dhren of the matriarchs of F’nar. It gave her that uniformed no-nonsense look.
“You never told me.”
“If they’d been making trouble for you, you’d have told us.” Giyadas tilted her head back to look up at the bezeri. She was in earshot of them now. “Saib? Is Saib among you?”
The patriarch slid to the front and draped his limbs over the edge of the cliff, no doubt doing his leopard-in-tree impression to show how relaxed he was about talking to a wess’har. “I’m here.”
“How do you feel about a few scientists coming here to test you?”
Saib considered the
question without any display of lights. “How few?”
“No more than six.”
“Six….”
“We promised you that we’d keep the Eqbas out of here. These would be Eqbas personnel, but those are all we’d allow in.”
“The tests might be dangerous.”
“Yes. It might go wrong. Removal might kill you. I can’t promise anything, not even how long it might take. Nobody can.” Giyadas paused a beat. “Did you hear me tell Lindsay that Pili’s tribe now numbers five hundred or so?”
“We hear now…” Saib rumbled.
“Well, will you allow the scientists to land?”
“They can land,” Saib said. “And I’ll volunteer.”
“I’ll let Shapakti know,” said Giyadas, as if it was routine.
You can go home, Lin. Eddie felt the relief. Leave the bezeri to it. You’ve done all you can.
Giyadas walked back along the pebbles with Lindsay to the shuttle. There was no ussissi pilot. Giyadas was definitely a matriarch to break with tradition and habit.
“It’ll be five years or so before the team arrives,” she said. “You know the distances involved. But if you want, I can send you to Eqbas Vorhi now to be treated.” Treated was an interesting word to use, not at all a reflection of how wess’har saw c’naatat. “In cryo terms, you’d feel you were back home in a few weeks.”
Eddie expected Lindsay to jump at the offer. He’d started thinking of what he might do for her while she waited, how he could bring her up to speed with events on Earth in her absence and make it a little easier for her to settle back in to human society. A few days and she’d be out of here—tidy her limited affairs, steel herself to recovering David’s remains, and then…home.
“You could see Eqbas Vorhi,” Eddie said. “I haven’t even been there. It looks amazing. Might as well go while you’re in the neighborhood.”
Lindsay seemed to be thinking it over. He couldn’t judge her mood; apart from the voice, there wasn’t a single human clue to her emotions, not a face he could read or gesture he could interpret.
She sighed, though. She actually sighed, a real crushed and weary sound that said it all.
“I can’t leave until we’ve resolved the situation here,” she said. “Thanks, but I’ve waited twenty-five years. I can wait another five.”
Giyadas cocked her head, all curiosity, but didn’t press her. “A responsible choice,” she said, and climbed into the shuttle. Eddie, stunned at Lindsay’s resolve, almost went back and grabbed her, but he didn’t have the right.
It was bloody hard to accept it, though. He got into the shuttle and for a few seconds, he was sure she’d rap on the hull and say she’d changed her mind, and that she’d leave after all and put all this nightmare behind her. But she didn’t. As she’d told him before, it was both her choice and her fault that she’d come to this point.
“Extraordinary,” said Giyadas, lifting the shuttle clear of the beach.
“Yes, Lindsay’s found a steel backbone somewhere along the line.” She’d been quite pretty; blond and petite, quite the opposite of the Amazonian, dark-haired Shan. “Cometh the hour, cometh the woman and all that.”
“Yes,” said Giyadas. “Now you see why wess’har choose their males according to the genetic qualities they’ll bring to the whole clan. A little element of Shan via c’naatat has transformed her.”
Giyadas wasn’t a cruel person—no wess’har was, not that he’d seen—but it was possibly the most accidentally spiteful comment she could have made about Lindsay. The woman had always been in Shan’s shadow. Now not even her courage was regarded as her own.
One day, when it was safe to do so, he’d make sure history knew about Lindsay Neville, just an ordinary human who learned to be heroic.
Like he always said, everyone needed heroes. But the heroes who had to try hardest were sometimes the best of all.
Kamberra, en route for the Reception Center.
“Well, that was bloody awful,” Shan said, leaning her head against the window of the car. “I’m sorry about that, Laktiriu. A baptism of fire, we call it.”
They sped out of Kamberra on a deserted road. It might have been the heat, but Shan could see cordons at the intersections, and beyond those there seemed to be a lot of activity. The police were keeping people well away from the mission. The policing alone must have been costing them a fortune.
“It was most educational,” said Laktiriu. She actually seemed pleased. Shan could hear a little urrring undertone in her breathing, not unlike Aras’s when he was content. “To know that there are humans who think as we do is very encouraging. This is something we can build on. Their connections between nations…this is useful. This is what we can use. But those are not what Esganikan refers to as your terrorists, are they?”
Shukry glanced over his shoulder as he drove, but didn’t join in the conversation.
“No,” said Shan. “They’re just people who take the environment and those sorts of issues very seriously. You’ll get on with them just fine.”
Laktiriu went back to gazing at the passing landscape. Shan glanced at Aras, and he tilted his head slightly in mute approval. It only took one meeting of minds to kick off a chain reaction. Maybe this was the tipping point of the mission.
“Shan Chail.” Laktiriu lowered her voice. “May I ask your advice about a dilemma?”
Oh shit. I hope it’s on existentialism and not Eqbas sex.
“As long as you understand I don’t have all the answers.”
“I have been asked to conceal an important fact. I think it’s best that the matter is discussed more openly.”
“Depends on the fact.”
“Biohazards,” said Laktiriu, in eqbas’u.
Ah. She didn’t want the gethes up front to know about it. They spoke English in front of their hosts, so this must have been a big dilemma indeed. Shan was discovering just how different the Eqbas were from their Wess’ej cousins, who would have blurted it out regardless.
Shan turned towards Shukry. “Personal stuff. Don’t mind us girls.” She faced Laktiriu and switched back to eqbas’u. “Go ahead. What’s troubling you?”
“How difficult is it to live with c’naatat?”
Here we go. Please don’t let her be infected. Please. I can’t take out the whole bloody crew…
“It has its advantages,” Shan said carefully. “But it can be terrifying. It takes away a lot of your choices.”
Aras joined in. He was, after all, the expert. “I spent five hundred years in exile, without even the companionship of humans for most of that time. It is a very, very isolating thing.”
“Ah,” said Laktiriu. “Thank you for being frank.”
“Why is it bothering you?” said Shan. She knew anyway, but she played along. “Worried about us?”
“I was asked not to tell you, but I’m unhappy concealing critical information from someone I must work with. Esganikan Gai also has c’naatat, and she indicated she would pass the organism to crew members who wanted to experiment with it.”
Aras let out a very faint hiss like air escaping from a tire. He was angry, and the car filled with that distinctive scent. Laktiriu froze for a moment, taken aback. Shukry seemed oblivious. Wess’har scent signaling went largely unnoticed by humans.
“Aras has very unhappy memories of sharing his c’naatat with his comrades during the wars with the isenj to reclaim Bezer’ej,” Shan said. “He’d tell you spreading it was a bad move.”
“You have no idea.” Aras lost it. He didn’t lose his temper often, but when he did, it stopped Shan in her tracks. “You have absolutely no idea what Esganikan asks of you, chail, but I do, because I was there and I caused it. I was the first to be infected. If I could go back and choose again, I would never have done it. Ever. I have a happier life now and a family I love, but I lost my first family, and I lost all my comrades, and in the end they wanted to die. I lived through it. It costs. And you have no idea how much it costs, none of you.” He
was so agitated that even Shukry looked back over his shoulder. “Don’t do it. Don’t let it happen to you.”
“Wow,” said Shukry. All he’d heard was a stream of eqbas’u. “This isn’t about the wedding, is it?” He seemed to interpret personal as being connected to Shan’s ménage à trois which she had almost forgotten would still attract attention in most parts of Earth. “I got it fixed. I know it’s not the best timing what with all the…okay, never mind.”
The last thing she wanted Shukry to know was what was really going on.
And that was how strongly Aras felt, was it? Shan wasn’t sure that it hadn’t been necessary at the time, because wess’har were far more self-sacrificing for the community than most humans. But in terms of personal pain, it was as bad as it got.
But that’s where I am right now. And Ade, and Aras. And it doesn’t feel so bad. Maybe, after centuries, though, it looks different.
“I don’t want to cause problems for Esganikan,” said Laktiriu. “But I don’t think it’s something I want to risk.”
“Very wise,” said Shan. “And I won’t say a word to her.”
After Shukry dropped them off, past a growing maze of security barriers and roadblocks that seemed to stretch out further from the center each day, Shan and Aras retreated to their room. Ade wasn’t around.
“This is madness,” Aras said. “Giyadas was right.”
“Did you think she wasn’t, then?”
“I thought it was extreme to ask you to execute Esganikan, but if she plans to spread the parasite, then this is out of control, and I agree with her.”
“I know how many bad memories this brings back.”
“When are you going to do it, then?”
“When I think Laktiriu is ready to step in.”
“Make it soon, then,” he said. “I want to go home.”
13
Fourth To Die Kiir, something unexpected has appeared in the maintenance upgrade log. It is written in the human language, but you must come to see it for yourself. It appears to be a message from a human called Mohan Rayat.