Matriarch (23 page)

Those having choices must make them.

Targassat taught that, too. She was a most inconsistent
isan.
What might she and this Darwin have discussed if they could have met?

Esganikan had made her choices as every Eqbas had for millennia. She wasn't ashamed of them.

Bezer'ej

Every time Lindsay woke now, she wanted to scream.

It took a few seconds for her to remember that she wasn't drowning but
surviving.
That bothered her: humans had a swimming reflex and all the signs that they remembered
their primeval aquatic origins. Her brain should have dealt with the new reality.

How long have we been here?

It wasn't months, she was sure of that now, or even weeks. They'd settled near enough to the surface with their bezeri captors to see the daily cycle of light and dark. And the lamp was still working. She examined it and wondered about its power source. With its hemispherical case and its flat lens, it reminded her of the headlamp of an ancient car.

But she hadn't had many conversations with Saib and the remnant of his people. They'd gathered in the deserted ruins, a ragtag community of the elderly and a single family, fifty or so individuals in all including a few very young infants.

They couldn't rebuild their species from this; it might have been kinder if they'd all died. Now they would watch their civilization—their entire race—disappear in the slow fullness of time.

She couldn't let that happen.

“I'm going to get some more maps,” she said.

Saib shimmered.
You should clear the repository today. We believe we have found more records south of here. But we must examine and put in order what we have retrieved so far.

She glanced at Rayat and laid the lamp down. “He'll help you sort them.”

The bezeri appeared to trust her to go off on her own now. It wasn't as if she had anywhere to run. She'd expected abuse and torment, but the bezeri were far more concerned with gathering their history around them than exacting revenge on her. Perhaps they thought they had their vengeance. Every time she ate weed or reminded herself that she was stuck here for the rest of her infinite life with a man she loathed, she knew they had.

In the repository, she examined the faced stone and the intricate detail of the carved images. Animals she didn't recognize and plants that she did chased up the walls to the vaulted ceiling. Bezeri had the same ability as human artists to reproduce exact images, and everything she saw reminded
her that she had helped destroy the remnant of an ancient and fragile civilization.

She gathered the last of the maps and took off her shirt to make a temporary bag, knotting the sleeves and fastening the front. The weight slowed her down. She resorted to walking along the seabed in a bouncing motion.

I can handle this. I can survive and I can do something for these people.

Gathering their maps wasn't much in the scheme of things. Maybe she could locate other bezeri communities so that they could breed. Most bezeri had gathered in the ancient spawning grounds around Ouzhari. But this small group
hadn't
gone; she found it hard to believe there weren't others like them.

Eqbas based here had found Saib and his group. Maybe they could find more in time.

Bezeri were vulnerable to land-living species: they had no technology that could stand up to the hard metal and ordnance of a spacefaring, terrestrial civilization.

So that's my job. That's my mission. Save them—somehow. Whatever it takes.

Lindsay needed a focus, and now she had it. When she got back to the settlement, Rayat was squatting over a pile of shell maps in one of the cone-shaped houses and examining them with Pili.

Then she realized his attention wasn't fixed on the maps but on his own hands. She'd rarely seen him look shaken; but he did now.

He was examining his hands with rapid, frantic movements, flipping them over palm to back to palm again, and his gill slits were opening as if he was panting.

Oh shit. Gills. I've got gills too.

She looked at her own hands: nothing, and no lights. She settled beside Rayat and grabbed his fingers.

“Oh my God, you're turning
transparent.
” She could see the purple and red snaking branches of blood vessels near the surface of his skin, and the hint of pale bone. “Like
them.
”

Rayat's eyes were wide and horrified. But he pressed his
lips together in a thin hard line and his gills flared. “Very scientific analysis, Commander. I can always rely on you for a rational view.”

Lindsay knew she would now be checking herself every few minutes for signs of translucency.
Why is that so much worse than gills or echolocation or whatever other weird adaptations
c'naatat
's giving you right now?
It
was
worse, because she could
see
it. Without a mirror, her other changes were visible only in the expression on Rayat's face.

Shan never changed, of course. Shan just became more of Shan than she'd been before. Suddenly Lindsay both envied and hated her with renewed venom for her absolute iron certainty in herself and the way the world should have been.

Lindsay had to find that certainty, too.

Saib drifted towards them and hung there with his lights on what Lindsay now thought of as tick-over—a steady speckling of green. She waited for the lamp to translate but there was nothing. Then he drifted away again, mantle pumping slowly like bellows.

“I'm going to look for food,” said Rayat.

Lindsay grabbed the lamp and followed him outside. She sat in the filtered light and picked fronds off a rock to chew them. Rayat tried them too. Pili swam towards them and appeared to watch.

They will poison you,
she said, shimmering a rainbow of urgent colors.

“We can't die,” said Lindsay. “Haven't you noticed?”

It was the first time she'd realized that bezeri had individual levels of intelligence, exactly like humans. Wess'har seemed uniformly intelligent and…superior. Pili hadn't quite worked out what was happening; but then she'd never seen humans before, and a human confronted with a bezeri would have no idea what degree of adaptation was normal for them, either.

Lindsay felt an odd kinship, and wondered if it was the bezeri tissue worked into her open wound, or a genuine moment of epiphany.

Or maybe it's because I know how it feels to lose a child.

She chewed on the fronds, concentrating on the satisfying texture, and found she was working out the bearing and distance to Constantine. She was thinking of David's grave and its stained-glass headstone.

I can visit it now.

She never questioned that she could emerge from the sea and that her lungs would take over again. She wondered if she was placing too much faith in
c'naatat.

No, Shan survived space without a suit. You can be amphibious easily enough.

“Are we going to adapt the same way, do you think?” she asked Rayat.

“How do you mean?”

“Shan didn't end up looking like Aras. Nor did Ade. It's not as if this thing works to a template.”

Rayat didn't answer. He just looked at his hands. Pili picked up a map and examined it lovingly, running tentacles over the smooth surface. There would be a lot of time to fill, and Lindsay wondered when she would eventually become used to her new existence.

For a moment she saw endless black void with a speckling of white hot stars and felt as if she was falling forever. The spit second of boiling pain was incredible. She put her hand to her mouth.

It took her a few moments to work out what it was, and that it wasn't a random image but a memory—Shan's memory.

Lindsay wondered how much of her acceptance of her situation was Shan's grim obsession, and who else's memories and characteristics would emerge.

Even my bloody courage might not be my own. I'm never going to be out of her shadow. When she said I envied her guts, she knew that'd eat away at me for the rest of my life.

Rayat laughed. For a moment Lindsay wondered if she was thinking aloud. But he was laughing at something else.

Somehow his speech had sounded normal to her underwater, but the laugh was booming and unnatural. She turned, wondering if he was cracking up at last. But his face was all
delight and triumph. She hated that expression. It bore no resemblance to a normal human being's happiness.

“Look,” said Rayat. He held out both translucent hands as if demonstrating steadiness and sobriety. “Look. Lights. I've got bloody
bioluminescence
!”

His hands flickered blue and violet like a lighting fixture about to break down. Pili watched. The lamp spoke.

What are you saying?
Pili asked.

“No idea,” said Rayat. “How do I control this?”

Pili was silent. The other bezeri emerged from the cone house to watch. Lindsay waited for some expression of surprise from them.

Saib moved into the range of the lamp.
I don't know. We simply speak.

Lindsay examined her own hands, bitterly disappointed that she had neither lights nor transparency. Rayat stared at the lamp and turned it to look at the display.

He put his hand flat on the lens.

“This is a test,” he said slowly. “This…is…a…test.”

The lamp flickered into color. Rayat counted up to ten and then began reciting Tennyson's “The Kraken.”

It was a depressing choice. Lindsay fought an urge to punch him. “Are you going to keep that up all day?”

“I'm encouraging the formation of neural pathways,” he said. “How do bezeri kids learn to talk? Probably by imitation. Whatever makes me light up might react the same way.”

Lindsay hoped he was right but said nothing. She wanted bioluminescence too. She wanted to understand the bezeri, just as she wanted there to be new bezeri infants who would learn to speak by imitating their parents' kaleidoscope displays.

It was a forlorn hope but she held on to it. She would find
survivors and rebuild the bezeri, and somehow train them to defend themselves—or she would find nothing, and spend her days looking after a store of dead and beautiful maps that would be all that was left of a unique civilization she had helped destroy.

The first option wasn't her idea of heaven, but the latter was certainly close to hell. In the uncertain gray lands of fragile faith, Lindsay Neville prayed just as Deborah Garrod had shown her, desperate to hear an answering voice.

Umeh Station, Jejeno: a few days before Christmas

There were just over five hundred ussissi in Jejeno and they traveled light.

Eddie watched them boarding the little droplets of ship-stuff and ascending to the main hull of the Eqbas vessel. The bee cam covered every angle while he sat on the curbstone that bordered the access road, pretending it was a sunny day on Earth. The shadow of Esganikan's ship sliced across the biodome and the surrounding isenj neighborhood, as eloquent an icon of invading menace as any historic B movie could have created.

He thought about Lindsay. He tried to recall his last words to her, and he had a feeling that they were along the lines of wess'har not forgiving or forgetting. He definitely didn't say goodbye. He could forget about her for days, and then suddenly she'd be on his mind, making him feel bereaved and guilty.

I ought to ask Hayin what he meant by too many
c'naatat.
Not exactly a plague.

“So, going home for Christmas?”

Eddie turned at a familiar voice he hadn't heard for a while. Kris Hugel, the doctor from the
Thetis
mission, ambled out of the main doors and sat down beside him. Her knees cracked alarmingly.

“You ought to see a doctor, doll,” said Eddie.

“Quacks. Can't trust 'em.” She was trying to make eye con
tact: he tried to avoid it. He was in his own head, thinking, and he didn't want interruptions. “Not going to sit it out here?”

“I need to go back to Wess'ej.” He missed Giyadas. The kid was always pleased to see him, never bored by his stories, seldom less than fascinating. “Things to do.”

“Why don't they evacuate us?”

“Where would they take you?”

“Where the colonists are.”

“They can barely feed themselves. You're better off here.”

“But can't they leave the defense shield in place?”

“Generated by the ship.”

“Well, if the fighting reaches here, we're finished. No protection apart from rifles and hand weapons. The dome's hardened, though. Designed for all hostile planetary environments. I hope that included angry natives.”

“Make sure you keep the warranty…”

“I'm scared, Eddie. I don't scare easily.”

“I've been shitting myself nonstop for the last few years Kris. Eventually you just run out of shit. Try it.” He stood up and held his hand out for the bee cam, and it plummeted back to him like a trained falcon. “The fighting's all on the border, and it's not about humans. Isenj have genetic memory so they haven't forgotten the wess'har wars in
any
sense of the word. We're a sideshow.”

“So what's actually happening?”

Eddie stared at the bee cam in his palm. “Civil disobedience. Revolution. The citizens on both sides of the border want the wess'ar out. It's bloody knee-jerk with them, and isenj have more knees than us.”