Ally (11 page)

All he had given her were ideas. She wouldn't give him a way home.

Chad Island, known in the bezeri language as Nazel

“I don't care,” said Lindsay.

“I hurt,” said Saib.

“Hurt is better than dead. Keep moving. Where's have you been, Keet?”

Chad was an island of stony coastline with rock pools like the shores of Constantine, not a textbook idyll like Ouzhari, its southernmost cousin in the chain. There were no icing-sugar beaches giving way to dunes tufted with glossy black grass: it was a silver gray island that looked less magical and more plainly grubby when Cavanagh's Star—Ceret, Nir, whatever—dipped behind clouds. Lindsay tried to imagine the geology that created the variety of shorelines as she
coaxed Saib and Keet inland and further away from the sea. They inched up the exposed sand between the outcrops of rock, sliding through gaps with an audible wet sound like someone peeling off plastic gloves.

“Seeing the Aras,” said Keet.

“What?”

“I see Aras. I tell him, not sorry.”

Lindsay stopped dead, furious. “I told you to steer clear of the Eqbas camp. You idiot. Don't do it again.” There was nothing Aras or anyone else could do about the bezeri now, but she felt advertising their changed physiology was a bad move anyway. “You took the lamp? Where is it?”

“No, I speak!”

Brilliant. That'll get back to Shan in no time. Ah well.
“You stay away from the mainland and the Eqbas patrols unless I say otherwise. Understand?”

Keet lapsed into silence, and as he moved he looked uncannily like a sulky teenager scuffing his heels in protest.

“No change,” he said.

“You don't
want
to change, or you
can't
change?” She stopped and confronted them, still mirroring her spoken words in light signals.
Learn, damn you.
It was a real speak-and-show lesson. The two elderly bezeri settled in heaps of translucent mantle and exhaled like air escaping from a tire. “Look, I can live under water. And you're moving across dry land and you're
talking.
You're making sounds.
C'naatat
will do whatever you need it to do to keep you alive.”

“Want to,” said Keet sullenly.

“Take back this planet. Defend it.”

“With forty?”

“Forty's all you need if you're immortal.”

She turned and walked towards the fringe of brilliant yellow and amber mossy bushes that marked the edge of the beach. The moss formed mounds that were waist high in places and looked soft and insubstantial until her arm brushed against one and it scratched her.

Doesn't matter. You're indestructible—more or less.

“Hurt too,” said Keet behind her.

But they still followed her, through the rigid moss bushes
and into heathland dotted with coppices of chocolate brown stubby trees with trailing branches that appeared to grow back into the soil. The ground beneath her feet felt slightly spongy. She paused, remembering the bogs on Constantine with their shifting organic roads, mats of vegetation afloat on quicksand and constantly, dangerously changing. Indestructible or not, she didn't fancy testing her new powers of recovery in liquid mud populated by God only knew what kind of creatures.

“Go careful,” she said. “Follow where I tread.”

Saib made that deflating tire noise again. “I see redness.”

“What?”

“Hot moving redness.”

Lindsay came to a careful halt. She felt she was on a rolling deck, which might have been her imagination, but if she was on saturated ground then she was going to be wary. She turned to look at them: Saib had settled back on the ground in an awkward way that reminded her of an elephant, two tentacles braced on the ground in front of him like forelegs.

“Something you can see that I can't?” She had plenty of their visual enhancements but maybe she didn't have them all. “What is it?”

“In the heart.”

She was getting used to their idiom now. The lamp hadn't shown the subtle detail of the bezeri language, and now she wondered if she was experiencing it or if they were already slipping into a blend of all the linguistic concepts that previous hosts had donated via
c'naatat.

“Your heart,” she said carefully. “Your mind. Your brain?”

“Not now, and not mine.” said Saib. “Long before. Where is it?”

Long before.
Memory. And not
his
memory, obviously: someone else's.
Hot moving redness.
Fire.

There was no getting away from Shan Frankland. Saib was reliving her memory of facing a riot and having a petrol bomb—not petrol, but the name had survived—smashing against her riot shield in a cascade of flames. She'd talked about it: that, and the gorilla. The bloody woman could agonize over abandoning a caged gorilla but had no problem
turning her back on a dying baby.
My son.
The fact that Shan had been right not to save his life with
c'naatat
didn't make it hurt any less. And the bitter irony of her own actions wasn't lost on her.

“It's fire,” she said. Aquatic creatures had no concept of it, of course, but maybe they'd seen smoking hot vents on the sea bed. “That's genetic memory kicking in. You'll have all kinds of memories that aren't yours. It's a characteristic of the isenj.”

“Are isenj always angry?”

“Not that I noticed.” Lindsay began to think about an amalgam of a reactionary, genocidally inclined Saib and a fists-first-questions-later Shan. It wasn't pretty. “That'd be Shan Frankland again.”

But maybe that was what the bezeri needed, a dose of ruthless pragmatism that went beyond self. Shan got things done. She'd changed the course of entire worlds, for good or ill. And the last of the bezeri needed that obsessive focus badly if they weren't to become the galactic equivalent of unicorns.

They're immortal, barring detonations. Why the hell make them do all this? And what happens if they start breeding again?

“This
Frankland,
” said Saib, almost chewing the syllables. “Explain who is in my mind.”

“Your people saw her. The one who brought the dead child back to you.”

“The one who failed to keep her promise to defend us.”

For some reason that stung Lindsay. She had no idea if it was species loyalty kicking in or if there was a bit of Shan too near the surface in her now. “All she had to defend you from was me.”

Saib said nothing. Keet made a loud noise like a fart and heaved himself into a strange loping movement, propelling himself along by throwing two tentacles forward and then swinging his bulk between them like a man on crutches. He didn't seem remotely afraid of the unknown terrain and even if he didn't know where he was going, he was moving with purpose. That was encouraging.

His tentacles seemed to be changing and becoming capable of rigidity. That was
c'naatat
in action. He was evolving before her eyes, as she had before his.
I'm used to this. Where's it all going to end? What am I going to become?
She had a moment of heart-stopping clarity and the sense of loss almost overwhelmed her. Raw survival was a wonderfully erasing, focusing thing but she didn't have that to distract her any longer—and she never would again.

She centered herself on a goal. It had always worked before. It had to work now.

“Here's what you do,” she said. Keet was moving faster now and she had to break into a trot to keep up with him. Each time he grounded between swings his translucent bulk shook like rolls of blubber. “You rebuild your civilization ashore. You build it here, and you concentrate on developing technology to defend yourselves. That's why I brought you ashore.”

“Yes, so easy,” said Saib from behind her. The steady
thud-thud-thud
of his movements was slower. He was keeping pace with her. “From nothing, we invent. Forty of us, none of us scientists, none of us land engineers.”

“You're speaking, and you're speaking English. That's two things you couldn't do a month ago.”

“What shall we eat here?”

“And you're getting fluent.”

“What is to
eat
?”

“Everything.
C'naatat
can help you digest anything at all. You saw me live on seaweed.” Saib didn't need sympathy: he needed to get a grip. “My species made the transition from the sea to the land once. Without bloody
c'naatat,
too, so stop whining.”

They were hunters. They'd hunted other aquatic species to extinction. Lindsay didn't know what animals lived on Chad that would take their fancy, but the bezeri were as bad as humans when it came to exploiting their planet. And she knew the wess'har and their Eqbas cousins well enough by now to know that they wouldn't take the bezeri's near extinction as a plea in mitigation if they wiped out any more species. They'd “balance” them. It sounded like a euphemism,
but it was literal. You killed: so you died. Maybe a dose of Shan, and Aras, in them would temper that. Maybe they'd avoid being “balanced.”

“Eqbas will protect us.” Keet loped between the trees and a shaft of bright sunlight caught him, illuminating his flesh. For a moment he was a lump of ice studded with debris, and then his color changed completely, instantly, inexplicably to an opaque mottled brown like camouflage. He blended into the landscape, his lights silent, until he burst into a vivid green display of pure panic.

He was screaming. Under stress, he defaulted to light signals. Lindsay ran up to him.

“
C'naatat
does that,” she said, voice calm, lights a soothing violet. She wondered if the camo could now adapt to any environment like the chameleon battledress the Royal Marines wore. “Take it easy. However it makes its decisions, it's decided you need camo for a while.”

“I am not me,” said Keet.
“I am not me!”

They'd taken the decision. They'd agreed to be infected, and she was certain they'd understood the full implications. If they hadn't, it was too late now. It's was irrevocable. And she had no explosives, no certainty of ending it for any of them if they decided immortality wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

“You'll be okay,” said Lindsay.
But will I?
“It gets easier. I've seen it. Shan was okay, Aras was okay—you remember Aras, don't you?”

“I remember what Aras remembers,” said Saib. He edged forward, sounding like water slopping around a tank. Keet was slumped in a heap, tentacles twitching, a beached cephalopod again, not a brave pioneer. Saib stretched out a translucent limb and placed it on his comrade's mantle. In seconds the flesh became the same mottled brown. “He remembers
us.
I know how we appear to him. And others like us once changed color.”

Saib used the past tense. Lindsay wanted to be sure that wasn't just a slip in an unfamiliar language.

“You mean the birzula. The ones you wiped out.”

“Yes. Much like us. But color changers.”

It was the kind of thing Rayat could have explained to her. She knew enough about photophores to understand they weren't all that different from the chromatophores that made terrestrial—no,
Earth
—squid change color.

She was looking at a
genuinely
terrestrial squid now; a cephalopod that had walked ashore and become—however reluctantly—a land animal. That should have stunned her. It didn't.

“What's upsetting you?” she asked Keet. Saib seemed resigned to the changes, sitting in a Buddha-like heap without a trace of bioluminescence. He was now totally mottled brown and opaque. “Is it that your body's changing or that you're like the race you killed?”

It was probably too complex a question for Keet; she wasn't sure how she would have answered it herself. He levered himself up and swung off in the direction of a clearing, looking for all the world as if he had moved that way all his life. No wonder he was scared. She'd been scared, too, when her body and even her mind didn't feel or look like her own any longer.

If you thought about
c'naatat
too much, it was worse than being dead. You were a tenant in your own body. You could be kicked out at any time.

But not if you're Shan bloody Frankland.

Lindsay tried to center herself and conjure up that degree of certainty—of blinkered arrogance—that enabled Shan Frankland to take
c'naatat
in her stride and make it serve her. It was in her somewhere. The parasite had passed through Aras, and Ade, and Shan, picking up genetic material along the way. Something of all of them—memory too—was there within her for the taking, and if she could force the bloody thing to express the genes for photophores to give her bioluminescence, then she could wring some extra willpower out of it too.

Lindsay and her entourage of evolving squid followed the course of a stream inland. It wasn't the image of a glittering naval career that she'd dreamed of as a young cadet.

Keet stopped. Saib shook to a halt next to him. They were now in a clearing fringed by taller trees, bulbous purple-
brown columns almost like fungi but with a fine mesh of drooping branches coated in glistening dark red leaves. They were sticky to her touch. When she withdrew her hand, a soft resin pulled out in thin weblike strings and left her smelling of sickly-sweet decay. Unseen life rustled and moved in the undergrowth and when she glanced up, a stabtail was circling high overhead, pursued at a distance by a flock of some small flying creatures she hadn't seen before.

“We can never go back,” said Saib.

“Actually, you
can
go back.” She hoped she was right, but she had no real idea of how
c'naatat
behaved in different species. Did anyone? No, not even the wess'har, and they'd had more experience of it than anyone. “Because the parasite will keep changing you. If you want to go back into the sea, fine. You'll adapt right back to it. But you're going to give this your best shot.”