Matriarch (14 page)

Ordinary wess'har didn't grasp divinity. Aras very nearly
did, but every time he thought he had the measure of forgiveness and atonement, humans would do something that set him back to square one again.

The colonists treated him as one of them for five generations. Now he walked through the camp and none of them acknowledged him, although some stared.

Perhaps they were staring at Deborah, widowed by him and yet walking at his side as if nothing had happened.

She stopped in her tracks. She was a small woman, much shorter than Shan and much less strongly built. Eddie described her as “oriental”; humans came in many varied forms. She dropped her arms to her sides and turned to face a couple who were rinsing clothes in a bowl outside their tent, John and Catherine: Aras knew them well. He'd made glass pens for them.

“If I've forgiven Aras,” said Deborah, “then so can you. Don't forget what we are.” She was aware she had quite an audience: she turned around slowly, addressing every colonist within hearing distance. There were no doors to shut out the sound in a camp of tents. “Do you hear me? Let's put an end to this. Without Aras, none of us would be here today and we'd have lost the gene bank. We're going home to restore Earth and that's thanks to
him.
”

Aras wasn't embarrassed. It wasn't a wess'har reaction. He wasn't ashamed of what he'd done. He was simply bewildered. He had wanted to kill when he thought Shan was dead. He wanted revenge; no, he'd wanted
balance.
Pure revenge was a human emotion. But here was Deborah Garrod putting aside her human desire to see someone punished for her husband's death, and looking at…outcomes.
Like a wess'har.

Deborah seemed to resent the silence. “I want you to find it in your heart to forgive him.” She looked around. “
This
is what our faith is about.
This
is where it gets hard. Going without a few comforts isn't a test. Neither is being persecuted. Putting aside personal hatred—
that's
the test.”

Aras could smell the reaction of the colonists closest to
him. Their scents of agitation and discomfort carried on the wind; what she had said had hit them hard. Aras wished he understood the complexities of faith. But he understood, at least, that Deborah Garrod had stepped without hesitation into the role that Josh had left as the colony's leader, naturally and without effort.

“You said you would never understand why I did it,” he said.

“I think I understand why all these events had to happen, though,” said Deborah. “And that's close enough for me to carry on with what I have to do.”

Aras understood matriarchs. It was the natural order of things. Deborah seemed to think she had made her point to the colonists, and walked on. The Garrods' tent was in the center of the camp and she was heading in that direction.

“So some bezeri survived,” she said.

“Fewer than sixty.”

“We pray for them.”

“Will my presence upset James?”

Josh's teenage son had been bitter and angry about his father's execution. His little sister Rachel only seemed to understand that her father wasn't coming back—in this life, anyway. Their faith in noncorporeal existence was somehow both literal and symbolic. It kept them happy and restrained in their actions, so Aras saw no harm in the delusion.

“James and I have spent a lot of time talking,” said Deborah. “I won't pretend it's been easy. But he's reached some degree of understanding.”

“And Rachel?”

“She misses Josh, and she misses you.”

“Have you told her what I did?”

“Of course not. One day I will, though, so that she understands.”

Despite generations spent among humans—more time than he had even spent among his own kind—Aras still found it odd that human children couldn't absorb reality in the same way as wess'har youngsters. Giyadas could reason much as
Nevyan could; she was simply aware of fewer things, and as she experienced them, she absorbed them. Human children existed in a state of semi-sentience for years.

Deborah's tent was strewn with branches painted red and green. A candle stood on a saucer, its flame guttering occasionally as a draft caught it. It was nearly Christmas and Aras knew how much time they spent preparing for the religious festival. They took it seriously. It was some kind of birthday event, although Shan insisted it was just a Pagan midwinter ceremony dressed up in a new theology like many others. Aras didn't mind. It was all untruth to him.

“Rachel painted all these branches,” said Deborah.

“Where is she?” Aras missed the child. She'd always drawn pictures for him, strangely stylized and wholly inaccurate, and he wondered if that was how she perceived the world. “Where's James?”

“We've set up a schoolroom in one of the horticulture tunnels. It solves a few heating problems.” She handed Aras a cup and poured some liquid into it. The scent of sage tea filled the tent and briefly overpowered the smells of the camp—garlic, sewage and burning. “James teaches in the mornings and works on the crops for the rest of the day.”

“And you've taken over the leadership.”

“Not intentionally.”

“I don't recall women leading the community before.”

“That always confused you, didn't it?”

“My society is run by matriarchs, just as the Eqbas and the ussissi are.” He sipped the tea. “Will you do things differently? What do you intend to do when you return to Earth? I know you'll be planning.”

Deborah looked lost for a moment. “We're discussing that.”

“And?”

“We've served our purpose when we return the gene bank to Earth and the Eqbas begin restoring the environment. All we can do is carry on living a respectful life in the service of God.”

Aras groped for a focus in that.
We've served our purpose.
Life without purpose alarmed him. “But how will you live?”

“As we've lived here.” Deborah reached for an old data device, the kind that they no longer used on Earth. It was even older in design than Shan's swiss. She displayed a map on its small screen. “I believe we'll end up in Australia. We've been wondering where we might settle. At least we speak the same language, more or less.”

“Earth has changed a great deal since your ancestors left.”

“Yes, we know. That's why we're going back.”

The colonists seemed to take upheaval relatively calmly. A few had resisted the evacuation of Constantine, but it was just two families, and they'd succumbed to the pathogen that the wess'har had released on the planet to make it uninhabitable for humans. Aras was sure this had something to do with the colonists' unproven belief in a more desirable life beyond death. It was a strange gamble.

“You have a great deal of catching up to do.”

“Ah, so has Earth,” said Deborah. “It'll be a time of huge change for everyone.”

Aras fought with his curiosity for a moment. He'd never seen a whole ecology restored before. At the back of his mind, fragments of Shan's memories of Earth nudged him and told him he wanted to see the planet and the changes the Eqbas would make. He felt a passionate responsibility; and although it was an emotion transferred from Shan's memory, it was still powerful, so close to his sense of stewardship of Bezer'ej that it felt like his own.

He thought of the macaws that Shapakti had restored from the gene bank.

“The Eqbas have re-created some species.”

Deborah's face relaxed and for a moment she looked much as she had been three years ago, before the
gethes
had arrived in
Thetis
and the chain of destructive events had begun. “It worked?”

“Did you think it wouldn't?”

“I shouldn't have doubted. But it was always possible that we hadn't maintained the storage conditions properly.” She seemed distracted from her loss for a moment. “What did they re-create?”

“Blue and gold macaws.”

“Oh.”

“They're extraordinary. They're so
vivid.
” Aras felt that sense of amazement again at seeing life from Earth that was utterly unlike
gethes,
independent of humans and with its own way of life. “They use human language as well as their own.”

Deborah's eyes filled with tears but she smiled. She seemed to be at that tipping point of intense emotion where humans either laughed or cried, and sometimes did both.

“Josh would have been so excited.” She clasped her left fist in her hand. All these humans had seen of their homeworld was food crops, a few pollinating insects and rats. Earth's ecology was as alien to them as it was to Aras: and according to Eddie there were no wild macaws left on Earth. “May I see them?”

Aras didn't feel guilty, although he would always regret that Josh had to die. He missed him. And Deborah was a friend, and not responsible for what Josh had done. So making her a little happier was
not guilt.
“Of course,” he said. “I'll talk to Shapakti.”

“It's real, isn't it? It's really happening.”

“Yes. It's real.”

“Without the Eqbas, could we have carried out that degree of restoration?”

Aras thought of
gethes
and their technology, and their political will to change their greedy, destructive habits. “No,” he said. “I doubt it.”

“Then the intervention of the Eqbas was essential.”

Where is this leading?
“I would say so.”

Deborah's face was fine boned and her eyes were dark and slanted. Her point of focus now seemed to be to one side of him, on nothing at all.

“This helps me make sense of Josh's actions…and yours.”

“Why?”
No, don't ask. You won't understand.

“If Christopher Island hadn't been bombed, the Eqbas would never have come here. It's part of a purpose.”

Aras was right. He
didn't
understand. He drained his cup, fighting hard against his wess'har instinct to explain that she was wrong and that there was no greater plan in all this. Humans were superb at pattern recognition and prediction. They were so good at it, in fact, that they saw patterns where none existed and imposed them for comfort, to convince themselves of some benign plan unknown to them that would explain one day why life was so painful. They were still content not to know that imagined purpose. And sometimes they were led by the recognition of patterns that proved to be utterly wrong and totally destructive.

A coping mechanism. An evolutionary quirk, not a perception of reality.

Aras wanted to tell her that events happened because they were consequences of other actions and that only causality connected everything. Some humans seemed not to know where they were in linear time. But he knew Deborah believed that God intervened and placed events in order to offer humans choices and consequences as incentives.

“It's fortunate that the Eqbas have expertise in genetic manipulation,” he said carefully.

“But you left Eqbas Vorhi ten thousand years ago. They would never have come to this system, would they?”

“That's true.”
And delusional.
But if this helped
gethes
make restrained choices…did it matter how they reached them?
Outcomes.
Motive was irrelevant. He ventured into her framework of logic. “The destruction of Ouzhari was a catalyst. If you want Earth restored sooner rather than later, the involvement of Eqbas Vorhi is the best way I know to achieve it. And your God isn't omnipotent after all, perhaps he recognized a need to enlist their intervention.”

If that helped her deal with Josh's death, that was fine
too. Aras didn't require that
gethes
thought as he did. He just wanted them to act in a responsible and civilized manner. How they managed that was up to them.

Deborah's discomfort at his doubt in her God was visible, though. She changed tack. “Tell me, how did Lindsay Neville cope at the end? She seemed to find some peace in prayer.”

There was no point in deceiving Deborah, and for all his recent practice, Aras was still a literal wess'har with no fear of the consequences of knowledge.

“She's alive,” said Aras. “And so is Dr. Rayat.”

Deborah's expression was a total blank and her lips parted a little. Aras waited for her to speak again. She just stared at him. Eventually he filled the silence.

“The bezeri wanted someone to live among them and help them,” he said. “Lindsay and Rayat seemed appropriate, and
c'naatat
enabled them to do it.”

“You
contaminated
them.”

“Yes.” Aras waited for her to ask why Josh had to die but they were spared. He had his explanation ready, including the shockingly altered life they would lead, which would no doubt fit her ideas about eternal damnation. He didn't need to mention Vijissi as well. “It was deliberate.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “I'm glad you didn't do that to Josh.”

It surprised him. Sometimes he didn't know humans as well as he thought. But Deborah thought Josh was now with God, which was where they all wanted to be in the end. Aras hadn't felt that at all when he believed Shan was dead. She was simply gone, and the world had been too painful to bear without her.

“If I acquired some food supplies, would you accept them?” he asked.

“That's kind of you, Aras.”

“And contact me when you want to visit the macaws.” He took Shan's swiss from his pocket. He hadn't returned it to her yet. “I can receive your messages.”

There was nothing more to say. They looked at one another
and Aras found he had no more questions. He turned to go, disappointed that he hadn't seen Rachel, and ducked to get out of the tent.