Matriarch (2 page)

No.

I didn't bring
Actaeon
here.
That
started the shooting. I didn't make anyone nuke that bloody island to destroy
c'naatat.
All I did was…

He could rationalize all he liked, but he knew he
had
played a hand in helping Minister Ual defy his own government. And, however accidental the shot that killed Ual, the isenj politician was still dead.

Like Shan always said: dead's dead. Doesn't matter how or why in the end.

Eddie was so lost in thought that he tripped and looked around instinctively out of embarrassment. But there was only a lone
v'guy
flapping slowly overhead and the occasional pop as one of the many creatures that lived in bubbles on the rocks ventured out to grab something smaller to eat. Wess'ej was a carefully preserved wilderness and the wess'har trod so lightly on it that they were nearly invisible.

They're not native to this planet. They're invaders of a kind, too. Maybe this is how the Eqbas will behave on Earth.

He could keep wishing, anyway.

He walked on, feeling conspicuous, keeping his eyes on the uneven terrain beneath his feet. At the pillars of pearl-coated basalt plugs that formed a natural gateway to F'nar, a little alien seahorse waited for him.

“Eddie!” Giyadas had that wess'har double-voice like a khoomei singer's. She provided her own faint chorus even when speaking English. “You're going to Umeh.”

“Yes, sweetheart.” He ruffled the stiff mane that ran from
front to back across the top of her head and she walked with him. “With Ual gone, I need to get to know other people in the government.”

“You called them
people
.”

“They are. Even if they're isenj.”

“I meant that
gethes
usually only call
themselves
people, so you must be learning to be civilized.”

Gethes:
carrion eaters. Wess'har were strictly vegan. Eddie didn't mind being lectured in moral evolution by an alien child. Sometimes he preferred the company of cockroaches when he saw what humans could do. “Yeah, I hope so.”

“I want to come too.”

“Ask your mother.”

“I have to learn an
isan
's duties.”

“Not my call.”

Giyadas was the equivalent of a six-year-old, maybe. And it was too bloody dangerous for a little kid in the middle of—of what? Another invasion? Umeh was the dry run for Earth. What happened to the isenj homeworld now would happen to
his
home before too long.

“The Eqbas containment field will protect us,” she said.

“I've covered wars, sweetie. Lots of them. You're never safe anywhere in a war zone.”

“But you're still alive.”

Her logic was gnawing and inexorable. Like a human child, she was persistent; but she was also subtle and frequently two steps ahead of Eddie.

He wasn't used to that—not even from adults. “And Ual's dead.”

“That's not your fault.”

“I'm still getting the hang of the wess'har concept of responsibility.”

“You helped him to what he wanted to do. He chose badly—for himself, anyway. For his planet, he chose well.”

Her incongruously adult tone always unsettled him. “That's true. But what if you know someone is doing something stupid, and you don't stop them?”

Giyadas cocked her head this way and that but didn't look up at him. “He only harmed himself in the end. He has the right to choose to do that.”

“Outcomes, eh? Always outcomes.” Wess'har didn't care about motive. What was
done
mattered; what was
thought
was irrelevant. “You're probably right.”

Giyadas lapsed into silence. She spoke when she had something to say or ask, and beyond that she was content to observe. She spoke English with Eddie's accent. And she would be the next leader of F'nar if and when she grew more dominant than her mother Nevyan.

It was inevitable. They didn't vote. It just happened, and there were never any wars about it. Eddie had a moment of wondering whether invasion by a species like that was such a bad idea after all.

He reached the center of the city—one of a number of little self-governing states scattered discreetly across the planet—and began the punishing walk up the network of terraces that lined the caldera. Giyadas kept pace as if she was keeping an eye on an idiot.

“Lindsay Neville is dead,” she said suddenly.

Eddie's calf muscles were coping better with the climb these days. But he almost missed his footing.

“Okay,” he said.

“And Mohan Rayat. I saw Aras and Ade return.”

So they'd handed them over to the bezeri, or at least the few that were left. Eddie wondered how smart squid executed prisoners; he also wondered whether to change the subject, but wess'har didn't deal in euphemism even to spare their children. Giyadas could take it. “I expect it was quick.”

“Did you say goodbye to her?”

That kid never misses the jugular.
“No, I'm afraid I didn't.”

“Do you wish you had?”

Yes. She was a friend.
“What would I have said to her anyway? Serves you right? Trust in God? What do you say to someone who's killed thousands of innocents?”

“I thought you might know,” said Giyadas forlornly. “I
know how the isenj treated Aras when they captured him after he had killed so many. Perhaps you might have told her to be brave.”

She was suddenly both a child again and a wess'har, genuinely wanting to
know
things. It wasn't rhetoric. Eddie was never certain if it was naïve candor or insight so profound that he didn't quite grasp it. He suspected it was a blend of both. At the top of the steep steps that ran up the terrace, Giyadas slipped ahead of him and they walked in silence on pearl flagstones. Males followed, females led. The kid was falling into adult wess'har habits. So was he.

Eddie's view of wess'har went in cycles, unfathomable miracles one month and then almost family the next. Right then he felt like Uncle Eddie, and the thought crossed his mind that a trip to Umeh Station would mean human companionship again, humans in numbers, and human
women.
There were two female Royal Marines based on Wess'ej: incongruously pretty, slight Ismat Qureshi, who could probably take his head off without breaking a sweat, and Susan Webster, built more on the armored vehicle scale of things but pleasant enough company for a trained killer.

And then there were the colonists, biding their time on Mar'an'cas Island, a long way north of pretty, temperate F'nar. Eddie didn't fancy his chances of romance with the devout Christians there, not even with Sabine Mesevy.

If he went back to Earth with them, it might not be home any longer. It probably wasn't; nearly eighty years had elapsed.

Giyadas pushed open the door of her family's home and a wave of cooking smells and warbling voices spilled out. At the table in the big communal room, Dijuas—the youngest of Nevyan's four recently acquired husbands—sat suckling his infant son. Two of her three other males, Lisik and Livaor, were preparing
evem
for lunch, their long multijointed fingers stained yellow from the sap.

Nothing fazed Eddie now.
Seahorses. Yeah, think seahorses.
They had gold eyes, from citrine to topaz to amber, with four-lobed pupils that snapped shut into crosses. He sat
down next to Dijuas and reached to stroke his fingertip across the child's head, eliciting an approving rumble from the father. The baby looked less like a stick insect now: he was recognizably a little wess'har male, a bald one, and three times as big as the palm-sized creature that had spent most of its time in Dijuas's gestational pouch.

“Fulaor,” Dijuas said carefully in his double voice, tone on tone.
“Fu—la—or.”

Eddie pursed his lips and made a continuous humming sound before trying to add the second enunciated note. He'd practiced overtone singing for hours until his skull vibrated. He still couldn't quite manage it. The wess'har larynx, or whatever passed for it, could shape sounds like human lips and tongues before it even reached the mouth to pile on more phonics. Wess'u was more of a complex song than a language.

Eddie tried again.
“Oooooooofffffffffff…”

Dijuas trilled loudly and the chorus of amusement was taken up by Lisik and Livaor. They found it hilarious. Eddie dissolved into giggles too. There was something touchingly childlike about the wess'har zest for life, and it was easy to forget that they also switched instantly to a much uglier mode and waged total, destructive war without prisoners.
Chilled or punching,
as Shan Frankland described them; there was no middle ground.

Nevyan appeared in the doorway.

She was considered short for an
isan
—a matriarch—but she was as tall as Shan, a six-footer, and equally fearsome in her way. Her gold tufted mane bobbed, giving her the air of a Spartan soldier, and Giyadas watched her intently as if studying her style.
This
was how to be a seahorse warrior queen.

“You mustn't mock Eddie,” Nevyan said in English. She gave her males a quick glance and—Eddie knew, even if didn't affect him—a quick burst of her dominance pheromone.
I'm the boss. Shut up.
“He tries hard.”

“We're just having a laugh,” said Eddie.

God knew there were few of those around to be had lately. Every time he found something funny, or enjoyed food, or
just realized that life was richly fascinating, he thought of dead bezeri on the irradiated shores of Ouzhari, and Par Paral Ual, killed by his own nervous troops.

And dead Lindsay Neville. Unlike Shan, she wouldn't return from the apparent dead and resume her strange life 150 trillion light years from home.

“I want to visit Umeh after Esganikan has completed her talks with the isenj,” said Nevyan.

“I think it'll be a dangerous place.”

“I'm the senior matriarch of F'nar, and I intend to meet the isenj government, dangerous or not.” Nevyan was still very young, but she had all the seasoned steel of her mother, Mestin. “They're my neighbor and my enemy. Esganikan is just passing through this system. That makes the situation more critical for us, and we might well have different agendas.”

Eddie was aware of Giyadas staring up at him in expectation. She could always smell a tense debate and it fascinated her.

“I thought you two trusted each other,” said Eddie. “She's one of your own.”

“We both originate from the same species, but you might have noted that Eqbas Vorhi doesn't conduct its affairs as Wess'ej does.”

Yeah, I know, you're the hippy dropouts and they're the militaristic right-wingers. But
you
still took out an Earth warship without blinking, doll.

The Wess'ej wess'har just wanted the humans punished and put back in their box, confined to quarters on the speck of rock at the galaxy's edge, and no more: the Eqbas wess'har wanted to sort out Earth's environmental excesses as well.

“That means I can go to Jejeno,” said Giyadas, evidently satisfied. “I want to see it for myself.”

“I made a right little reporter of you, didn't I, doll?”

“Knowing is very important.” Giyadas was more speculatively curious than any other wess'har Eddie had met. “And finding out for yourself is more important still. You taught me that I could only trust my own eyes.”

Eddie worried what else he'd taught her without realizing it. He also worried how he had shaped her view of humans, because she would be a matriarch herself before too long, one with access to armies.

“Sometimes you can't even rely on that,” said Eddie.

Humankind had kicked over an anthill far from home, and found that the ants were smarter, bigger and far more technologically advanced than they could ever imagine.

And, like disturbed ants, the wess'har were pissed off at the brutal intrusion. They would head for the source of the irritation and deal with it: and the source was Earth.

Bezer'ej: the Ouzhari shelf, depth unknown

Mohan Rayat fought to stop trying to breathe. He thought of space for a long time, and concentrated on all the advantages of being at crush depth for humans instead of floating in hard vacuum in zero-g.

He was far better off than Frankland had been.

I'm oriented. I've got gravity. I can move.

And I'm not alone.

C'naatat
had invaded his cells, and if he had any thoughts of suicide then he had no idea how to carry it out. He'd lost any sense of how long he had been submerged, but it couldn't have been long. A few minutes; a few hours. Not days, not weeks, not years.

Look around. Focus on something.

What? There was no light except the bioluminescence of his captors, apparently waiting overhead. He concentrated hard on his arms as they rested on the satin-cold mud, spreading his fingers and raising one hand a few centimeters, then
letting it fall back. The silt billowed up in slow clouds—he could taste it—and it dimmed the bezeri's rainbow light-talk for a while.

But…he had
moved.
He was oriented and he wasn't actually in pain. He wasn't dying: he was
changing.

He could feel it. The searing cold had now been replaced by real heat, a fever burning within him, and all his reflexes to breathe and struggle for his life had faded. They had been replaced by a desire to open his mouth and…almost
swallow.
He raised his head a little.

And now he could
see.

But he could see in ways that he hadn't thought possible. As he got to his knees, he found he was aware of tall funnel structures spaced around a clear area of seabed, extending up the slope of a submerged cliff, almost a sonar map in his field of vision. Whatever he was seeing was beyond light. He felt buzzing in his sinuses—had they repaired themselves, or had they metamorphosed?—and an inexplicable urge to press his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

And he could
hear.
The sound flooded back in as if someone had turned up the volume.

His hearing had returned, new and alien, and the chatter of the ocean's life rose from a vague murmur to a cacophony of disorienting, directionless noise. Panic washed over him again and he fought for calm, scrambling onto all fours and disturbing the seabed again.

Concentrate on the next thirty seconds. Nothing more. Count. One, two, three, four, five, six…

Something caught against his collar as he turned his head. He sat back on his heels and put his hands to his throat; it felt like soft strips of sponge had stuck to his skin. Something was growing in his neck. His fingers probed instinctively, urgently.

They slipped into huge gaping slits.

Gills.

Oh my holy fuck gills no no no—

He patted frantically down his chest and felt inside his shirt to find that the slits went down into his chest and aligned
with his ribs. For some reason he wanted to sob. He should have been glad to be alive, but he suddenly wasn't, oh God
no
he wasn't. He got to his feet, churning the mud into clouds, and the bezeri moved in. He could pick out their bright-lit mantles, three or four meters long with their tentacles, the last of a population that he had decimated with cobalt-salted neutron bombs.

And now he could distinguish a human shape, but he could hardly call it seeing in this permanent night.

Lindsay Neville was a sonar scan, iron filings bristling on a magnetic field, a brass-rubbing outline of the woman she had been in the visual spectrum. She crawled across the seabed on all fours and then stood up, unsteady, arms spread as if expecting a fall.

Surrendering to the bezeri had been her idea.

She parted her lips and he heard a long groan of what sounded like expelled air, but her lungs should have been flooded by now. They were both alive in a nightmare that should have ended in a quick death.

“Rayat…”

The sound fizzed with a bubbling note.
Cavitation. Shrimp make sounds by cavitation. Hang on to the facts, stay sane, stay in your forebrain…

He pursed his lips, more out of instinct than conscious thought. It was harder to make sound than he imagined. Whatever rapid
c'naatat
adaptation had given Lindsay the ability to manipulate microscopic air bubbles would emerge in him too. He was counting on it. He had things to say.

“Lamp,” he mouthed. Could she see him? Could she lip-read? He could.

She held it up. The large round signal lamp that the wess'har had built to talk to the bezeri in their language of colored light had survived the dive. That was something. At least they could communicate with the creatures.

It was going to be hard to find something appropriate to say to them. But the more Rayat watched and felt the changes the
c'naatat
parasite was making to him, the more he felt
he'd been right to do whatever it took to keep the organism out of the wrong hands.

Sterilizing Ouzhari island hadn't destroyed the source of
c'naatat.
Even if that had made the deaths of the bezeri sadly unnecessary, it had also shown him how very high the stakes were. The parasite was even more remarkable and exploitable than he'd imagined.

This is for my government. This thing can't be trusted to commerce, either.

He could see Lindsay Neville clearly now. He could even see the detail of the shoulder tabs on her shirt. She'd taken off the commander's rank insignia long ago.

And gills.

They were slightly everted, like lips down each side of her neck. He was glad he couldn't see himself. Changes like that had to be accepted gradually, not appear shockingly in the mirror one morning.

“We killed them, you bastard,” Lindsay mouthed. Her wide-open eyes were like a statue's in his altered vision, a grayscale image devoid of pupil and color. “We
killed
them. Now we pay for that.
Forever.
”

Rayat thought that forever was much longer than he had in mind.

Upper terraces, F'nar

Shan Frankland let the stream of water from the shower spigot play on her head and stared at the sliver of hard soap cupped in her hands.

It was the last of the bars made by the colonists of Constantine before they were evicted from Bezer'ej. The scant lather smelled faintly of lavender and lemon oil; but there were no lemon trees left now. The biobarrier that had kept the colony enclosed in a cocoon of terrestrial conditions had gone, and the alien wilderness of Bezer'ej had reclaimed the island.

It didn't matter. She knew how to make more soap. But it was another symbol of how Earth was slipping further away.
Nearly eighty years adrift from home, everyone she knew and served with now dead, and her own body so fundamentally changed at the cellular level that she could survive in space without a suit, how much further
could
it slip?

She'd almost stopped noticing the play of bioluminescence in her hands. Violet light shimmered in her fingertips and vanished again, a legacy of one brief foray into the world of the bezeri. Aras had never picked up the photophore genes, even after so many years of contact; she couldn't work out why she had.

You slipped. You slipped right across the line. You're on the wess'har side now. Or maybe the Eqbas. Not human, anyway.

There was more than just 10,000 years of rapid evolutionary separation between the two kinds of wess'har. They didn't even think the same way sometimes. But wess'har identity was defined by what you did, not what you thought.

“Breakfast!” Ade called.

“Okay,” she said. “Give me a minute.”

She soaped herself. Apart from the lights and a lack of body hair and a little more muscle—and she had always been fit—her body looked much the same as it had been when she was a regular human. She made a point of checking daily. The claws had come and gone, and nothing truly and visibly alien had emerged.
C'naatat
had carried out minimal tinkering: it hadn't radically reshaped her appearance as it had Aras's. What went on beneath the skin, though, was another matter, and that still disturbed her at times because she saw the color spectrum of a wess'har, and the images of heat in darkness, and sensed the world in ways that reminded her she was no longer fully human.

She'd survived in conditions that only bacteria and lichens seemed to be able to tolerate.
Deep space.
What would happen at the end of time? The bloody thing kept you alive for centuries, maybe millennia.

How am I going to die?

She'd never worried much about that as a normal, fragile human being, even in a job where she risked being shot each time she went out on the streets.

But you got the gene bank. You did it. Even if bloody Perault conned you, even if that was just a ruse to get you out here, you
did
it. Go dance on her grave sometime.

But she wouldn't be going back to Earth to do any dancing.
C'naatat
had to stay here.

Above the steady rain of water, she could hear Aras and Ade outside in the main room, talking in subdued voices punctuated by the occasional
chink
of glass bowls. They weren't happy. She didn't need to hear that: she could
smell
it.

Go and deal with it.

Shan wrung the water from her hair, toweled herself dry, and pulled on the remnant of her uniform. The brown riggers' boots didn't go with the black pants or jacket, but that was all she had now, and nobody out here cared if she was wearing the wrong uniform order.

Maybe Ade did. He still wore his Royal Marines' rig, minus the badges of rank. He gave her a nervous smile and indicated the plate set out for her.

“Beans,” he said. “Did my best with the sauce.”

There was a limit to what you could achieve with soy beans, tomato pulp and the local food crops, but Ade had pushed the envelope. He was a resourceful if eccentric cook. The Corps had taught him how to live off the land, so making do with a limited larder was no great challenge.

“Great.” Shan uncovered something black and glistening with her twin-tined glass fork, an oily, dark disc with vanes on one side. “Is this a mushroom?”

“Correct.”

The novelty distracted her briefly from the unspoken question.
How did Lin die in the end?
“Want to tell me how you managed to get hold of mushrooms?”

“Shapakti,” said Ade.

“You didn't beat it out of him, did you?”

“No, Boss.” The Eqbas biologist was wary of Ade's aggressively protective streak. “I just said that if he was going to start reviving species from the gene bank, he might find edible fungi really interesting. He did. It was a surprise for you.”

Shan broke off a chunk of mushroom with her fork. It smelled wonderful, and the taste surpassed the aroma. It was amazing how uplifting familiar food could be a long, long way from home.

“Fantastic. I mean it, that's
fantastic.
” The praise didn't prompt Ade's usual reaction of an embarrassed grin. He just shrugged, still agitated. She sawed another chunk from the mushroom with the edge of the fork and placed it in Aras's bowl. “You tried this yet? Nothing like fried mushrooms to start the day.”

Aras jerked back his head as if scalded. “Fungi.”

“You'll like it.”

“It's
fungi.
Isenj smell of it.”

She'd forgotten that, but Aras hadn't forgotten being a prisoner of the isenj, and she'd absorbed the memories of what they'd done to him. Smells were very evocative. It was enough to make him freeze in that wess'har alarm reaction.

“Okay, sweetheart.” She retrieved the chunk of mushroom and gave it to Ade, wondering why the smell hadn't triggered her memory too.
Shit.
“I'm sorry.”

Breakfast fell silent except for the occasional scrape of glass on glass. How long she could she
not
ask what had happened? She didn't have a good track record on tact. Ade stared into his bowl of beans, wearing his don't-hit-me expression. Aras—long dark braid draped over one shoulder, still that elegant blend of heraldic beast and man—simply looked her straight in the eye, unblinking as only a wess'har could be. But he said nothing.

“I thought I'd germinate these tomato seeds,” said Shan, and rattled the container in her pocket in the hope of getting some conversation going. “See how they do out here.”

Ade and Aras sat eating in grim awkward silence, wafting a citrus tang of agitation. She suppressed her own scent—a habit now—and pushed the small box across the table towards them.

She'd expected them to be subdued. They weren't like her: they didn't get triumphant satisfaction out of seeing the guilty punished. But they were upset. There was no other word for it.

I should have done it myself.

She'd never let anyone do her dirty work before and this reminded her why. They made her feel
guilty.

Aras picked up the container and turned it over in his hands. The unpatented, illegal seeds that Shan had carried with her for years and light-years—more out of defiance and hope than certainty of settling long enough to plant them—tumbled inside.

“It's winter,” said Ade, voice strained by tight throat muscles. “Funny time of year to sow them.”

Shan tried to find a focus in the patterns of sauce that nestled in the bottom of her bowl. “I know people back home who keep theirs growing all year.”

Home
just slipped out, but she was sure she felt no pain in saying it now. It was just a location, nothing more. There was no way of removing
c'naatat
from Aras's cells, so he had to stay here, and so she'd stay too, and so would Ade. It was the way things were. They were a team, a family.