Matriarch (10 page)

“Shan believes she has to act. Targassat does say that those having choices must make them.”

Nevyan turned her head slowly. She was very much Mestin's daughter, but he could see the echo of her father in her too, even though she had the genes of all of Mestin's husbands. “I expected her to be like us because she's my friend. Perhaps that was naive.”

“You mean that you like what's like yourself.”

“I thought she chose us because she agreed with us.”

Did she have that choice? I infected her. She thought she had to stay, and so did I.
“It's hard to tell with humans. They tend to comply with their social group. That isn't quite the same as consensus.”

“But she believes in ecological balance. Every decision she's ever made has been based on that. She put it before her own life.”

Aras laid Black in the grave. The body was cool and growing rigid now. Aras wanted to know what a rat thought and how it saw the world and those who persecuted its kind, but he didn't know how he might discover that. He covered the body with soil and pebbles as carefully as he could and stood back to consider the nature of death again.

“Shan believes that walking away is not the way to deal with problems,” he said. “She intervenes.”

“But as wess'har we confront threats to ourselves and others. We do
not
walk away.”

“But we do as Targassat advised. We don't seek out wrongs to put them right, we just respond to pleas. Our forebears left Eqbas Vorhi because they disliked interventionist policies, but we didn't actually improve the universe a great deal by doing that. We just salved our consciences.”

Nevyan now smelled deeply, acidly unhappy. The warm powdery scent of contentment that she normally exuded these days had vanished. Unlike Shan, she wasn't able to suppress her scent signals. It wasn't surprising she was under stress; she was very young, the dominant matriarch due to an accidental burst of dominance hormone—of
jask
—when she heard Shan was dead. She had inadvertently displaced her mother in the pecking order of
isan've,
but the fact that Shan had survived couldn't alter what had happened. Nevyan, as Ade put it, had the ball. And she had summoned the Eqbas to help deal with the human threat.

And now she was regretting it, Aras suspected. Events were overtaking her. It was a feeling he found all too familiar.

“Do you resent Shan?” he asked.

“No.”

“But you're concerned that she seems to be friendly with Esganikan Gai.”

“I fear losing my friend again, but she will be more than dead this time. She'll be an instrument of enforced ideology.”

“And you want her to adopt the ideology of Targassat. Of non-intervention.” Aras enjoyed these logic loops. He'd spent five hundred years in exile, more than three hundred of them entirely on his own except for the occasional encounter with bezeri. He'd had plenty of time to think himself in circles. “Your
own
enforcement of ideology, in fact.”

“I can't fault your argument.”

“You're afraid of the Eqbas and you're worried that Shan will return to Earth with them.”

“Yes.”

“Shan won't leave me. I know that now. And she feels responsibility for the fate of her homeworld much as I still feel for Bezer'ej. Neither of us is good at walking away.”

“Preventing Earth being a threat is one thing. Adjusting its environment is another entirely.”

“But they requested it. Even Targassat would have agreed that the planet is in need of adjustment.”

Nevyan got to her feet and dusted down her opalescent white
dhren,
the traditional
isan
's robe that Shan declined to wear. “I suspect I feel afraid because Giyadas is interested in Shan's ideas. We've maintained our position for ten thousand years and change is alarming.”

“F'nar is just one city. And we can handle new ideas.”

“Tell me, Aras. Have I made a serious mistake?”

The rest of Wess'ej took no part in relations with aliens, although their military backing was there if Nevyan called for it. They were a small population—too small to handle peacekeeping across the system indefinitely and deal with humans once and for all.

“I don't think you had any other choice,” said Aras.

They set off down the slope. Life had changed out of all recognition for both of them since he had been the custodian of the bezeri and Nevyan's mother Mestin had been garrison commander of Bezer'ej.

But neither Matriarch would be around when the consequences of the Eqbas expansion into new systems were felt. That would be many, many years in the future.

He'd still be here, though. And so would Nevyan's descendants.

Umeh Station: plant and machinery level

The thrum of the generator was hypnotic.

Shan drifted in a pleasant drowsy haze and wondered how a piece of machinery could produce such a soothing white noise effect. Somehow it erased all her worries, and there were a lot of them jostling for attention lately.

But maybe it was Ade's influence, the simple normality of a male of her own species. She rested her chin on the top of his head, enjoying the brushlike sensation of short hair and the scent of male skin and lemon soap. She couldn't get up because he'd wrapped himself around her, and she didn't really want to move anyway.

“Don't fall asleep,” she said. “I need to go to the toilet.”

“Not falling asleep…”

“Are.”

“I'm comfortable, 's' all…”

“Yeah.” He was playing with the ring on her finger, turning it slowly around her knuckle.
That's how he copes. He focuses on normal things. If he can't find any, he creates them.
“It is, isn't it?”

Ade reminded her that she was human. However strongly she was bonded to Aras, however enjoyable she found his body, Ade was exactly what she had evolved to want; a human male. Everything in her that was still human said
yes, this is right, this is what you should be doing.
She found him comfortable in every sense of the word. He stopped fidgeting with the ring and she put her hand on his biceps. Human skin felt hotter than a wess'har's, warm satin rather than cool delicate suede. She hoped she wouldn't see Aras any differently now.

“Look at your hands,” Ade whispered.

“Uh?”

“Hands.”

She opened her eyes and focused. Violet and blue lights rippled in her skin and made her fingers appear backlit. It was only when she moved her hand that she realized light was also coming from the tattoo on his upper arm. The lines of pigment seemed to float in a violet glow. She'd seen the effect before; Ade had tattoos in some intriguing places.

He twisted his arm to peer at it. “Why does it do that?”

“No idea. Communicating, maybe.” She thought of the illuminated bulkhead display in Esganikan's ship, and how her hands had flared into light when she touched it as if somehow answering it. “Funny how it gravitates towards your tattoos and not your hands.”

“What's it saying?”

“Possibly nothing. Might just be a reflex.”

“See, I asked Nevyan if
c'naatat
could think. And she didn't seem to want to know if it did.
I
do.”

Shan tried to think of her parasite as bacteria. If she started ascribing sentience to it, then it said things like
tapeworm
and
fetus
to her. She didn't like the idea of either. That was invasion, violation, possession.

“One way or the other, it makes optimal choices. And some bloody weird ones.”

Ade settled his head back on her chest. “Does it scare you wondering what it's going to do next?”

“It used to. Sometimes it tries something out and then removes it. Aras said he had vestigial wings once.”

“No shit?”

“Seriously.”

“Jesus. A glow-in-the-dark dick doesn't seem too bad by comparison.”

“It even seems to give you what you want, sometimes.”

“I never wanted landing lights.”

“It totally redesigned Aras. Maybe he felt more at home being human.”

“He was stuck with a bunch of humans. He likes to belong.”

“He was stuck with the bezeri, but he never turned into a squid.”

Ade appeared to ponder that for a while. She could see him frowning slightly.
C'naatat
had given her wess'har vision; she saw in very low light and there were blues in her spectrum that she had never seen before as a human, as well as ultraviolet. Sometimes she could see infrared. And she wasn't aware of switching between modes. It just…happened. She didn't like her body doing things without her consent. She'd have to work out how to control it.

“How do we make this work?” Ade asked.

“What?”

“When we go home. Me and Aras. You.”

Yes, she'd thought about it. Her brain said
rota
and that appalled her. “How do you
want
it to work?”

“Sundays off?”

“Ha bloody ha. I'm sure we'll think of something.”

“And you don't have to suppress your scent.”

“Is this a list?”

“Sort of. You don't need to hide what you feel. Not with me and Aras, anyway. We can work it out for ourselves.”

“Go on.”

“And don't feel you owe me anything, Boss.”

She knew she ought to be angry with him. Something kept tapping her on the shoulder and reminding her that he'd handed over
c'naatat
and that she had to fret about it. Another part of her brain said
so what—you'll deal with it.

Of
course
she owed him something. If she hadn't head-butted him, he wouldn't have caught the bloody thing. And he made her feel as good about herself as she ever had. She owed him a
lot.

“Do you
have
to call me Boss?”

“Guv'nor?”

“I don't want to be Superintendent Frankland when I'm on my back, to be honest.”

“Okay, Mrs. Bennett.” He raised his head and gave her a noisily enthusiastic kiss. “And I bet you don't like that name, either.”

“Fine by me,” she said. Yes, it was. “No problem at all.”

Ade made a satisfied rumble in his throat and rolled over,
pulling her into his side. Something itched at the back of her mind. It felt almost like the Suppressed Briefing she'd been given three years ago, anamnesis chemically locked out of reach of her conscious mind until triggered by events. Now others' headline memories sometimes intruded on her own recollections: Aras's time as a prisoner of the isenj, Ade's brutal father, his comrade Dave getting shot beside him and the warm splash of greasy brain tissue on his face as if it were her own skin. It was impossible to know anyone better than that. Maybe that was what was making her more tolerant of Ade and Aras right now; she lived out the worst parts of their lives.

Would I have been a more sympathetic copper if I'd lived criminals' lives? Whoa, forget that. Crime, not motivation. Think of the victims. Dead's dead, raped is raped, and if your assailant puts you in a coma, his apology won't revive you. Outcomes, like the wess'har say. Only outcomes.

So it didn't matter what Ade or Aras had done if
c'naatat
was confined to Bezer'ej, and the bezeri had what they wanted.

Why can't I actually remember being an isenj or any of the other hosts this bloody thing has been through?

Ade's breathing settled into the slow rhythm of sleep, and the generator's murmur washed away the day. Shan wondered what Eddie was up to and what Esganikan was going to do when the rest of the isenj balked at the idea of reducing their population, as they surely would.

Bloody lights.
She stared at her glowing hand in increasing defocus. The wreathed globe tattoo on Ade's arm flickered a response to it.

Could be worse.

Could be…worse.

Umeh Station vanished. She found herself having a conversation with Baz-the-Bastard, dead for decades, an old colleague. He watched her bite the end off the soya-dog.

“Shan, you got to do it
gently,
” he said. “This is why you never get lucky. No
technique.
”

“Piss off,” she murmured. For some reason it was daytime Reading Metro outside the unmarked squad car but the
interior was in semi-darkness. They were on obbo on observation duty, waiting for signs of activity in the house opposite, which she knew was there but still couldn't see.

“Why didn't you listen to me when I told you not to drive drunk?” Yes, she knew he was long dead; but it was the unreadable readout on the dashboard display that told her she was dreaming and it was too late to talk sense into Baz. “Daft fucker. You should know better.”

“You're okay,” he said, ignoring her scolding. “You'll do fine.”

Then the windscreen dissolved into black, open, star-speckled space and the absolute cold and vacuum swallowed her and silenced her scream. A weight pressed on her shoulder. She thought it was Baz and wondered how he'd managed to follow her into the void, just like Vijissi did.

A distant explosion in her head jerked her awake and she found she was sitting upright, wide awake.

“Shit,” said Ade.

He was sitting bolt upright too. Without conversation they scrambled to their feet at the same time and began dressing. They both knew what an explosion sounded like. It wasn't in her dream; it had
happened.

“Better go and check that out,” said Ade. He fastened his boots and grabbed his rifle. “Even if Esganikan has it covered.”

He sprinted down the narrow passage between the banks of pipework and up the stairs, Shan right behind him for a change. She had her 9mm in her hand and didn't even remember drawing it; she couldn't imagine what use it might be in whatever situation she was about to face, but the muscle memory born of long practice took over. When they reached the ground level, still dimly illuminated with the nighttime safety lighting, a crowd had already gathered and was looking up into the transparent bowl of the dome itself.