Matriarch (33 page)

People who wouldn't dream of drowning a puppy in a barrel of water think nothing of killing a fish the same slow way.

Was
that
his own thought? It could have been Shan's. Or Aras's, come to that. Rayat never had those kinds of thoughts before. He lay on his back, staring up at the blue sky and scudding white clouds, heavy and wet and gasping, and he was a man again, a mammal that breathed air.

C'naatat
was terrifying, magnificent, beyond his imagination. His mind raced with possibilities for it. And as soon as he conceived them, the dread chilled his stomach.

No, this couldn't ever be trusted. He was more certain than ever that he would do whatever it took to keep this out of the wrong hands. It was more than his mission. It was his duty.

“That was…worse…than I'd imagined,” said a voice he barely recognized.

Lindsay Neville was standing over him. She sounded very different in air. She was a ghost: the sunlight penetrated her like a stained-glass window left to grow filthy in a neglected church, her photophores and reflectors providing brilliant splashes of color.

“If we find a mirror,” he said, “try not to look.”

F'nar, Wess'ej

The steady influx of ussissi evacuated from Umeh had made little difference to F'nar. Shan was surprised how effortlessly they blended into both the city and the landscape. Where did you hide hundreds of stroppy chest-high meerkats?

They melted into the little settlements half-buried in the plain. Some stayed in F'nar: a few went to Bezer'ej with the Eqbas.

Shan walked along the terraces to Nevyan's home, twisting Ade's ring on her finger and savoring the slow surprise of managing to feel comfortable with two males. Neither Eddie nor the marines had said a word about it. But she knew damn well that there had to be some prurient interest and comments she never wanted to hear.

It didn't feel weird or kinky or even thrilling. It was
normal.
She wasn't sure whether that was because Aras wasn't human, and so didn't count as an extra, forbidden man in the part of her brain that told her monogamy was right and
anything else was wrong, or because
she
wasn't human any longer.

Either way, she was comfortable and so was Ade. Aras—she had never doubted that Aras would settle into a marriage like that because he'd wanted a housebrother so badly. No, Aras was happy. He
urrred
a lot, that oddly appealing little variation on the paternal purring that wess'har males did when they were pleased with life, like a human humming tunelessly.
Marriage:
Jesus,
that
was the weird bit. Humans needed events and markers in their life events. Ade needed to put that ring on her hand and she'd needed to wear it, and that caught her by surprise.

She felt guilty about that. She felt weak because she enjoyed thinking of herself as someone's wife, and wondered if she'd ever admit that even to Ade. They were happy now, as happy as three fucked-up, exiled, badly damaged people ever could be. She'd make sure it stayed that way. It was part of her self-imposed therapy to steer her away from tackling anything—world-saving, crime-busting, avenging, the bigger the risk the better—rather than face the fact that she was a piss-poor excuse for a human being most days.

She rapped on Nevyan's door with her knuckles, counted to ten and pushed it open.

“I'm glad you came,” said Nevyan.

Giyadas sat at the table beside her, every inch the work-shadowing student matriarch, mane bobbing as she cocked her head. Shan wondered if she'd ever get to know the three sons in Nevyan's adopted family: they always seemed to be out working or learning in the communal schoolroom beneath the city.

Nevyan smelled agitated. Shan swung her leg over the bench and sat astride it, facing her. “What can I do for you, Nev?”

“The Eqbas are handing over bioagents to the Northern Assembly.”

“I heard they were going to
discuss
it.” Shan was aware of Giyadas staring intently at her, so she suppressed her scent slowly and tapered it off to nothing. “I seem to recall
we did that too. DNA donor number one here.” Jesus, if you couldn't trust Eqbas to know what they were doing with biohazards, there was no hope for anybody. Then her next careless comment simply hijacked her and she marveled that she could say it and mean it. “What's the problem with that?”

What's the problem with biological weapons? Did I say that? Well, dead's dead. Don't be so bloody prissy.

“I hope they've made sure they can't reverse-engineer it.”

“Do you want to talk about regret, Nev? If so, I'll join you.” Shan held up her hands to indicate she wasn't up for a fight. Without a scent cue, it was probably hard for Nevyan to tell from her voice these days. “I don't know how I got from EnHaz to being Biobomb Woman. I told myself you were the good guys and that I could trust you to use science responsibly.”

“As I trusted the Eqbas.”

“Have they actually betrayed your trust yet?”

“No. No, they've just done things that I would never do myself, and I have no rational argument beyond the fact that I think they've gone too far with the isenj.”

“Once you start messing with this stuff it's really hard to work out where the line lies between far enough and too far.”

“I
can
see that line,” said Giyadas. “One requires the isenj to do something wrong for them to be killed. The other doesn't.”

Shan paused for a moment. It was sobering to argue moral relativism with a child, especially one who actually understood it better than most human adults.

She hoped she wasn't going to find herself outgunned at the end of the debate, because the core of her self-respect was that everyone else was less intellectually able than she was.
Thick bastards, most people.
She'd found it hard at first in F'nar because—unlike on Earth—she wasn't feared, and she wasn't stronger, and she wasn't more ruthless, and she wasn't smarter: she was pretty average by wess'har standards, except for her aggression and capacity for taking massive risks.

Well, that's too bad. If the kid's smarter than you, you learn something. Deal with it.

“Okay,” said Shan. “The wess'har view is that the isenj have no right to be on Bezer'ej.”

“Yes.” Giyadas had cocked her head to the right, fascinated. Her pupils were fully dilated. “They're despoilers. Polluters.”

“But they were there before you. They'd had a colony there for some time.”

“But they killed bezeri by their irresponsible increase in numbers and their pollution and the bezeri
asked
for our intervention.”

“So Aras and the army wiped them out and restored the planet. So how is that different to the Eqbas responding to the isenj request for help?”

“We were not
asked
to intervene by those suffering.”

“I think Esganikan asked me once if I waited for a murderer to ask for justice for his victim before I would arrest him. What if the victim can't ask you?”

Giyadas considered the statement carefully. Shan had a sudden, powerful sense of being as fascinated by the kid as the kid seemed to be with her. She was watching the development of a mind of astonishing capacity; what Giyadas would be like as an adult was frightening. The sheer elation of fencing with her verbally and of being close to defeat didn't demoralize her, as she'd expected, but made her want to encourage the child, nurture that mind, look after her…

Oh, fuck.

Shan didn't have a maternal bone in her body. But she suspected this was an insight into what
parents
felt. It was massively seductive.

Nevyan watched, scent neutral. Giyadas appeared to finish ruminating. “It happened before we arrived here. How far back do we look to decide if a species is in need of balancing?”

“Wrong's wrong. Why does time make a difference?”

“Nobody asked
us
to intervene there.”

“Okay, Targassat taught that Eqbas Vorhi was wrong to force its view of a balanced environment on other worlds, and that your ancestors couldn't take it on themselves to police the galaxy.” Shan thought it was interesting that the nearest wess'har had to a religion was the thoughts of an
economist.
Targassat had been an analyst of resources on Eqbas Vorhi 10,000 years ago. “But she also said that if you have a choice, you
have
to make it, and those with most choice have most responsibility.”

“Responsibility for
restraint.
Just because the Eqbas
can
make a world do what they want, it doesn't mean they
have
to. Because how do we know that the people on that world want what we think they want, or what we think is best?”

“What about creatures who can't ask? Nonhuman animals on Earth? The gene bank. Wess'har and Eqbas agree on that.”

“No people…no
animal
wants to die or be used or to suffer pain.” Giyadas struggled with the word: wess'har had no concept of a division between species like humans did, and no word for animals except
people.
“It seems obvious that we should help them.”

“Okay, but what about plants? Plants on Earth try hard to avoid being eaten. They defend themselves with poisons and spines, so they probably don't want to be eaten. But we all eat plants here. Where's the line now?”

Giyadas chewed that over visibly. “We have to eat to live. We don't
have
to eat other people.”

“Some animals
have
to eat others.”

“
Gethes
don't. We don't.
We
make the choice because we have one.”

“So, the line is necessity?”

“The line,” said Giyadas, “is
necessary.
” Shan thought for a moment that the child had just stumbled over an unfamiliar word and then realized where she was heading. She felt as if someone had poured ice down her neck. “Because if we don't place a line somewhere, then anything is acceptable. There's an excuse for any excess. We draw a line so that we'll always be able to see there should be one.”

Shan sat back and almost forgot she wasn't in a chair. Without even thinking, she applauded. Giyadas and Nevyan stared at her clapping hands.

“Amazing,” she said. The child had put Shan's moral gyro back in balance. Giyadas had reminded her what she'd always lived by. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

Shan had never actually liked a child before. The kids she'd known always needed a good kicking to point out the error of their ways. They were little evil versions of adults who got away with murder because some whining liar of a lawyer said that kids needed to be given a chance to change. But they would never change, and she knew it.

And now she was sitting with a kid who she actually felt affection for, affection that—whether she wanted to face it or not—was maternal in its intensity.

Giyadas was still staring at her, head so far on one side that it looked comical. Nevyan seemed less taken with the diversion and fixed Shan with her hard citrine stare.

“Do you feel Esganikan has the situation under control?”

Shan shrugged. “She's given the isenj a good hammering.”

“I knew little of the World Before when I asked for their aid, and I admit that I was expecting—greater
power.
”

“Well, one ship blatting a continent is pretty good going. It got my attention for a start.”

“Have you asked her how many resources Eqbas Vorhi is committing to the Earth adjustment mission? How many vessels?”

“Not really.”
Now that's a bloody oversight: how did I miss that one?
“If she said ten ships, how would I know if that's enough? I don't know the first thing about their capability, other than it's overwhelmingly impressive and it looks like magic to humans.”

“I feel the Umeh readjustment is needlessly destructive because she has insufficient resources to do the job properly, by degrees.”

Nevyan often surprised Shan as much as Giyadas did. She was a strategist, of course: wess'har females were.
They were the planners, the ones who saw the big picture. Nevyan had learned a lot being at Mestin's side in the Bezer'ej garrison.

“Well, she said as much.” Shan wondered if she was defending Esganikan because there was no case to answer or because she was afraid Nevyan might be right. Shan wanted the Eqbas to be omnipotent too. “There was no way she was going to mount a ground offensive. Don't forget she was diverted from another mission, like Shapakti's team. They weren't equipped or tasked for this. And they've met resistance, so they fight back. What else do you expect?”

Giyadas was watching intently. Shan was careful not to set a bad example: the kid learned like blotting paper.

Nevyan rocked her head from side to side in mild annoyance. “This is my point. If the Eqbas don't commit enough ships, then the same thing might happen to Earth.”

“It's not like Umeh. It's biologically diverse. They know that. Esganikan said so.”

“But if they miscalculate, the consequences will be enormous. Even with bioweapons, the destruction that might cause could make matters worse for Earth, not better. If you can't subdue humans, and you wipe them out in a conflict, what happens to all the processes that must be maintained to remain safe, like your power stations? Why did you want a duplicate of the gene bank held in reserve if that thought hadn't occurred to you?”

Ah. Good point.
“Because I'm a copper, and I don't trust any bastard.”

“Umeh has not gone as planned. While I feel no pity for isenj, I do fear for Earth if the World Before finds itself under-resourced. They do not retreat.”