Matriarch
KAREN TRAVISS
For Lyn Graham, Martin Welsford, and all those who
put truth before convenience
Recycling won't save the Earth, and neither will prayer.
Mohan Rayat gave up the reflex struggle to stop hisâ¦
“She's going to fucking well skin us when she findsâ¦
Mohan Rayat fought to stop trying to breathe. He thoughtâ¦
“You hiding from Frankland?” asked Mart Barencoin.
It took a lot to reduce Eddie to speechless silenceâ¦
The sea around Rayat was growing lighter and greener. Sunlightâ¦
Lindsay stared at the squirming translucent tubes clutched in oneâ¦
“Where is he?” said Shan.
Sand castles. They're sand castles.
The eggshell domes of the ussissi settlement just outside F'narâ¦
Shan sat and stared at the ESF670 rifle on theâ¦
President Pirb repeated his call to arms as the Eqbasâ¦
The podship was a far simpler vessel than Rayat hadâ¦
Rayat found he could walk faster than Lindsay. Once they'dâ¦
Lindsay laid the glass petals on a slab of stoneâ¦
Shan sat next to her own grave and realized thatâ¦
If you were pregnant, you couldn't get any more pregnantâ¦
“It's been years since I covered a tree-planting,” said Eddie.
“Funny how the moral high ground tends to flatten outâ¦
The Eqbas could have been any human biohaz team asâ¦
Aras decided the crops could do without him for oneâ¦
F'nar, Wess'ej: November 2376
Recycling won't save the Earth, and neither will prayer.
The Eqbas are coming. It might be a few decades away, but they're still coming, and I know them. They're very hospitable, they love their kids, and they can kill millions without losing a second's sleep.
You can reach shock overload pretty quickly. After the first headlines and the protests and the panic, human beings tend to settle into apathy if it's not their life that's on the line. News is about
now
and
here
and
me.
When we wandered into a war zone in the Cavanagh's Star system,
that
was news. When we got greedy and nuked a neutral world out here, that got plenty of attention too; and so did the fact that the wess'har blew our warshipâ
Actaeon
âout of the sky.
But we're twenty-five light-years away from Earth, and domestic crises edge alien wars well down the running order now. When there's fighting and suffering on your own doorstep, do you care that we've pretty well exterminated an entire alien race ourselves? Do you care if a woman spaced herself rather than hand over the parasite she was carryingâand
survived?
Does it matter that the local wess'har are so pissed off with humans that they've called in the big guns to visit Earth and teach us a lesson?
If you don't, you probably will in thirty years' time. Because that's roughly when the Eqbas Vorhi fleet will reach Earth, and they're not visiting to say they come in peace or any uplifting shit like that. They're coming to punish us for
genocide. And while they're at it, they want to restore Earth to a state of environmental balance. In brief: a lot of humans are fucked. Most of us, probably.
They don't see us as special, you see. That's just our view of the universe. It's not widely shared.
The Eqbas Vorhi fleet is on its way, and there's nothing we can do about it. My news desk is losing interest by the day.
It all feels so far in the future.
But I know it's not.
Â
Private journal of Eddie Michallat, BBChan correspondent on Wess'ej, Cavanagh's Star system: the only independent observer, 150 trillion miles from home.
You detonated cobalt bombs on Ouzhari in your greed to keep
c'naatat
to yourself. The bezeri who died were collateral damageâthat is your phrase, is it not? Now Earth will learn what collateral damage really means.
C
URAS
T
I
,
senior Matriarch of the Eqbas Vorhi,
in a response to the Foreign Secretary of
the Federal European Union
Bezer'ej, Cavanagh's Star system: continental shelf off Ouzhari island, December 2376
Mohan Rayat gave up the reflex struggle to stop his lungs filling with water, drownedâwhich was nowhere near as painless as they claimedâand plummeted into the crushing black depths where the light of Cavanagh's Star never penetrated.
You bitch, Frankland.
And he wasn't dead.
You sanctimonious bitch.
He was shaking uncontrollably and convulsing, but he wasn't
dead.
Rayat was aware of the kaleidoscopes of colored light rippling above him in the mantles of the last surviving bezeri. He was a living corpse, a man imprisoned with his victims, a man who couldn't die.
Hold on to that. Whatever the parasite does to you, you're still a man.
He had no air supply and no suit. He could taste blood in his mouth: or maybe it was just something in the silt billowing around him. He sank down on the seabed, facing
upwards, crushed by pressure and a searing agony in his head beyond any pain he'd ever experienced. For a moment he wondered if his survival was the result of a primal diving reflex, and not the intervention of an alien parasite.
He'd never told anyone how scared he was of water. Now he never had to fear it again.
Somehow he could still see: green, violet, blue. Coils and fractal patterns of ludicrous fairy-lights danced overhead, the chatter of the bezeriâthe few who had survived the irradiation from bombs he had detonated.
I never meant to kill you. You just happened to be in the way.
But the bezeri couldn't hear him. He couldn't even hear himself. The silence was overwhelming, but although he could still reason, and he knew his eardrums were ruptured, he still expected to sense the sounds of his own body. It was surprising how much you noticed the absence of your own heartbeat.
His heart had stopped. He had no idea how he could still be conscious.
So Frankland must have gone through this when she stepped out the airlock: dead and not dead, aware that her whole body had ceased to function and existed solely by the grace of a microscopic parasite called
c'naatat
that was worth destroying worlds to capture.
You bitch, I beat you. I got your precious parasite in the end. Suck on that, bitch.
No sunlight: he could have been at least a thousand meters down, then, below the depth where light penetrated. When silent screaming panic overtook himâscreams he couldn't force out of his airless lungsâhe concentrated on numbers to stay sane.
I should be dead. A thousand metersâ¦maybe one hundred atmospheresâ¦ten thousand kilospascalsâ¦
But his mouth opened in a panting reflex anyway, because he couldn't take in what
c'naatat
was doing to keep him alive at this depth. The cold burned him. He should have looked around for Lindsay Neville but all he could think of right then was Frankland, drifting in the vacuum of
space without a suit. She'd spaced herself to stop him getting hold of the
c'naatat
she carried. Andâbitch, bitch,
bitch
âit had all been for
nothing,
because no matter how bad things were now, he'd got what he'd come for, and a small sane part of him rejoiced.
I beat you, you bitch. And your precious bloody Ade and your pet wess'har helped me do it. I hope you find out, oh shit yes I pray you do, you bitch.
It was amazing what you could hang on to when you needed to pass beyond death. God, numbers, vengeance: whatever it took. He seized them all.
Shan Frankland had survived. And so would heâsomehow.
And he could wait.
We've had our environment screwed for centuries by the Americas and Europe and the Sinostates. They shat out their crap and we paid the price. Now it's
our
turn to fuck
them.
We can invite anyone we please into our territory. And that includes aliens who can bomb them back into dodo country.
The Right Honorable J
AMES
M
ATSOUKIS
MAP,
Pacific Rim States lead delegate to the United Nations, in private conversation with the Canadian and
Indigenous Peoples delegates
F'nar, Wess'ej: December 2376
“She's going to fucking well skin us when she finds out,” said Ade Bennett.
The soldier kept pace with Aras all the way up the steeply carved steps to the top of the terraces, no mean feat for a short human male. Aras wondered if he would have managed it before his physiology was altered by
c'naatat,
and suspected that he would. He was a Royal Marine: he prided himself on his fitness.
“We'll find a way to tell her,” said Aras. “And she may not understand our reasons at first, and she'll swear at us like she always does, but in time she'll calm down and life will go on.”
It will go on, yes. That's the one thing a
c'naatat
host can be sure of. But not as before.
As soon as he said it, Aras knew things wouldn't be that simple. How did you tell your
isan,
your wife, your matriarch, that you'd thrown away her sacrifice? Shan Frankland had spaced herself rather than let Mohan Rayat get a sample of
c'naatat.
And now Arasâor Ade, whoever felt bravestâhad to tell her that they had
willingly
infected the man with it.
And Commander Lindsay Neville.
That would probably infuriate her most of all. The woman she called Lin had tried to be a pale imitation of her and succeeded only in disappointing her. Aras knew Shan well enough to guess that: if you survived unimaginable pain and terror, drifting for months in space, unable to die, you didn't easily forget that kind of ordeal or forgive its necessity.
Ade paused at the top of the steps to catch his breath, hands on hips. Stretching nearly two hundred meters directly beneath them, the city of F'nar covered the slopes of the caldera, an amphitheater of pearl-coated terraces carved into the rock.
“I'm the one who did it.” Ade wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “So I'll explain it to her.”
“No. I'mâ”
“Yeah. You're her old man and I'm not.”
“You'll be her
old man
too, as you put it.”
Ade shook his head and began walking along the terrace to the far end of the caldera where the home they shared was cut into the stone.
“If I don't tell her and then I sleep with her, she'll pick it up from my memories. And
then
she'll kill me.” He speeded up a little to the pace he described as a
yomp.
Aras had never worked out what that meant. “And if I tell her first, she'll kick me out anyway. So either wayâI've lost her. I might as well face it like a man.”
Aras had lived with
c'naatat
for centuries by human reckoning, and its ability to manipulate genetic material and keep its host alive still surprised him. It seemed able to do very nearly anything; it tinkered, it borrowed, it scavenged, it rearranged, it remodeled, and it defended. One set of genes that had taken its fancy was genetic memoryâa legacy from his isenj captors when he was a prisoner of war. And, as
c'naatat
crossed membranes from host to host, in blood or in the act of copulation, memories surfaced in other minds.
Sometimes the memories it picked up were terrible. Sometimes it simply showed you how other people truly saw you. And sometimes they were both the same thing.
“Ade, it's not the memory transfer that you fear.”
Ade didn't look round. He was a compact, muscular human with a distinctively upright posture. His rifle bounced a little, slung across his back. “No, it's trying to hide it from her, mate. I can't do that.”
Aras had always been sure of his duty until the
gethes,
the carrion eaters, the secular humans, had come to Cavanagh's Star in pursuit of a lost colony and commercial gain. Shan had changed his life out of all recognition. He wondered if he now resented her for that, but noâhe had
infected
her. Without
c'naatat,
she could have gone home again; and Ade could have gone with her. Aras found himself back in the circular argument, wondering if he should have gone to live among the bezeri remnant to help them rebuild instead of letting Lindsay Neville and Rayat take his place.
He had never had such cyclical, dithering thoughts before. A wess'har accepted reality and dealt with it, never glancing back. Humans fantasized about alternate realities to avoid the only one they could actually influence. He realized he was becoming too human.
“We'll tell her
together,
” said Aras.
Ade is my housebrother. We share genes now. We're committed.
“The bezeri wanted them alive. We'll explain that to her, and face the consequences.”
“You talk a good game.” The
clop-clop-clop
of Ade's boots echoed off the flagstone terrace. “And I'll be right there when she hands you your balls on a skewer.”
“I have no balls,” said Aras.
Ade snorted. It sounded like bitter amusement. “Neither will I after today.”
The marine was right. Shan would be more than furious; she would feel
betrayed.
Loyalty and honesty seemed to matter more to her than love.
But if they had no other choice but her, then she was confined to her own infected kind as well. If she rejected them, she had nobody.
Aras felt shameâreal
human
shameâat thinking so manipulatively. A female was a precious and scarce gift, one a
c'naatat
carrier could never have expected. He could never be allowed to father offspring and pass on his condition; but he could at least have an
isan
to love and look after. Unlike him, though, Shan Frankland didn't fear being alone. She dreaded doing what was
wrong.
Loneliness alone would not bind her to himâor Ade.
Ade paused at the pearl-coated door, slipped his rifle onto his shoulder, and listened as if he was about to storm the house.
“She's not back yet.” He put his hand on the latch and pushed it open. There was no need for locks among wess'har. “Got time to rehearse our excuses.”
They could hide nothing in the end. Shan had developed a wess'har
isan
's olfactory system, and she could smell the pheromones of agitation, anger, fear. She would certainly smell something was wrong.
At least I'll still have a brother.
“Perhaps she'll see why we did it.”
Ade laid his rifle on the shelf next to the door and hung up his jacket. “I don't think so somehow.”
“She forgave you for shooting her. She forgave me for infecting her with
c'naatat.
”
“Let's hope she works in threes, then.”
They stared at each other for a moment, knowing the answer. Shan cared about consequences. She cared about how things fitted into the bigger picture, and what she feared mostâwhat the wess'har feared mostâwas that
c'naatat
would get into the wider human population somehow, with all its attendant disasters.
Perhaps Shan would see the contagion as Rayat's punishment. Aras considered the irony: Rayat had been sent to seize it for the FEU. Whether he really was a Treasury agent or military intelligence didn't matter now. He had it. But he wasn't going anywhere, because there was no way off Bezer'ej, not without wess'har or Eqbas assistance. It was the ultimate punishmentâa cold dark eternity trapped with your prize and no way of using it, confined with the bitter remnant of the species you helped kill.
Aras wished he had Eddie's gift for presenting unpalatable information with selective grace. He was sure he could make it seem like a triumph.
“Your turn to cook dinner,” said Ade.
They stood side by side at the table, slicing
evem
and the last peppers that had ripened on the windowsill. Ade always seemed to seek refuge in dull routine, as if he could refashion and erase the brutal and chaotic world that had made him by mimicking the uneventful lives of lesser men. He was very precise about the thickness of the slices.
“Bugger,” he said quietly. He examined his fingertip, crowned with a welling blob of dark red blood. “Cut myself.”
C'naatat
still seemed to be a novelty to him. He licked the blood away and watched the cut as it closed and faded, then resumed his task.
Half an hour later, Aras heard the distinctive thud of Shan's footsteps approaching the door. He wished that he could suppress his scent the way she did. Ade looked at him and shrugged.
“Here we go,” he said.
The door creaked slightly before it swung open and brought in a gust of cool, damp air.
“Hey, you two,” said Shan. She forced a smile, and that wasn't like her at all. “I'm home.”
F'nar plain, Wess'ej: Eqbas Vorhi camp
They were leaving.
Eddie Michallat gasped to a halt in the center of the Eqbas camp. The bronze bubble habitats clustered on the plain were rolling together and coalescing like mercury, metamorphosing from little globe-like tents into a huge tapered cylinder of a warship, a belt of brilliant red and blue chevron lights pulsing along its length.
For a moment Eddie forgot his straining lungs and stared at the technology that made him feel like a particularly retarded amoeba fresh out of the primordial slime.
The warship had almost completely assembled itself. He looked around for the small survey vessel that had been the vanguard, Da Shapakti's ship, and noticed it wasn't there any longer. Maybe the destroyer had swallowed and absorbed it too. How did they route the services and the controls? How did they keep it vacuum-tight in space? He found he had a thousand questions whose answers would almost certainly be something along the lines of
forget it, chimp.
Esganikan Gai strode towards him. He could always ask her; it was her ship. She was the boss-woman.
The visiting Eqbas wess'har might have looked different to their native Wess'ej cousins, but the females still had that same ability to make you crap yourself. No wonder Shan fitted in with them so well. Esganikan's brilliant copper-red plume of hair bobbed as she stared down at him and cocked her head to get a better focus, four-lobed pupils snapping from open flower to tight cross-wires and back again in an instant, just like all the wess'har. Looking any of them in the eye was still hard. There was no single point to focus uponâjust the uneasy sense of being the center of their aim.
And Esganikan was
tall.
Eddie felt like a little kid lost in a towering forest of adult legs again.
“What do you want?” She lacked charm but, unlike Shan, she was incapable of even feigning it. “We leave soon for Bezer'ej and Umeh.”
“I know.”
You owe me one.
He'd lent her his database to learn English. He wasn't sure yet of the Eqbas approach to repaying favors, but if it was the average wess'har one, it was unpredictable. “Can you take me to Jejeno?”
“We have a presence to maintain.”
“So can I get a ride with you?”
The Eqbas matriarchâflat-faced compared to the elegant, long-muzzled wess'har he'd grown used toâglanced over her shoulder at the embarkation going on behind her. “Why?”
Eddie found himself detaching from a recent, raw memory. “Now that Minister Ual's dead, I need to make contacts within the government again.”
“So do we.”
“Yes, but
can I come too?
” You had to be direct with them; they had no concept of being abrupt. Eddie wondered if his natural diplomatic touch was being corrupted by close contact with species who were as outspoken as five-year-olds. “Please?”
She cocked her head again. “Be here tomorrow when we leave.”
“Thank you.”
“At your own risk.”
It always was. “I get it.”
Esganikan turned and swept back to the ship. Eddie watched her go, still feeling sweaty and uncomfortable from running, and reminded himself what she wasâan
alien
, the commander of an alien warship, a warship that was stunning in its size and technology and was just a small part of a much, much bigger fleet.
Earth had nearly thirty years left to prepare for the invasion. The fact that the Australian government had invited the Eqbas guaranteed no happy endings. Eqbas wess'har were the guests who never knew when it was time to go.
Eddie made his way back to F'nar at a sedate pace this time. He was used to the higher gravity, but it was still a long walk across the rolling plain of rock and tufts of sage green vegetation to the point where the terrain became lava buttes and the city was suddenly visible. Homes and terraces were carved into the cliff walls of a long-dead volcano. Whatever the weather, whatever the light, it was always beautiful, coated in a shimmering layer of nacre. It was, as the human Christian colonists called it, the City of Pearl.
The pearl happened to be insect shit deposited by billions of
tem
flies, but Eddie didn't let the reality spoil his sense of wonder one bit.
Nor did he let the equally accurate word
invasion
sully his irregular news reports. Twenty-five light-years away on Earth, his BBChan colleagues had abandoned diplomatic euphemism and used it with B-movie relish; but now the panic had died down, and humans were fighting each other again.
Okay, deep down, we all want to run the headline
ALIENS INVADE EARTH
.
Admit it, you tourist.
So Eddie admitted it. It was a journalist's fantasy story, along with
IMMORTALITY DISCOVERED
and
EARTH NUKES ALIENS
. And he'd done those for real, too. But it wasn't so mindlessly thrilling when you were part of the cause of it, and he still blamed himself. If he hadn't started digging when Shan had survived a fatal head-wound,
c'naatat
's extraordinary restorative powers would still have been a secret. And a lot of people would still be aliveâ
