Ally (31 page)

No, Commander Neville, I won't help you ship your frigging cobalt bombs to Ouzhari. I won't help you capture Shan.

It was that easy. It really was. He pushed the Skavu in the chest, just a warning shove. Qureshi was behind him, Chahal to the right. One of the bezeri on the floor moved, not yet dead despite the thorough attention of the Skavu, and one of them—where had Kiir gone?—drew the long flat blade from the sheath on his back.

I'm
c'naatat,
Ade thought, and saw his dad kill orphaned fox cubs he'd hidden so carefully under his bed, and his
mother getting a thrashing from the bastard, and
it could all be stopped if he just stood up—

Ade blocked the downward sweep of the blade with his arm, no conscious effort. The liquid-armor layer in his vest deflected the stroke and the blade skidded down his arm. He heard Chahal shout, “Jesus, Ade—” and he felt no pain, but he clamped his free hand down on the blade and jerked it from the Skavu's grip. Blood—he
had
to be careful with his infected blood.

Now
it hurt. The blade—the sword—had sliced along the length of his forearm. Chahal and Qureshi had seen
c'naatat
do its instant healing trick before, but the Skavu had not, and they watched in either horror or fascination as the spectacular laceration sealed itself and faded through pink to unmarked skin.

Ade held on to the sword. It was covered in blood. “Don't even think about asking for it back,
Skavi.
”

“I'm clear,” said Chahal. He checked himself for blood spatter. “Are you okay? Ade, you're fucking insane.”

“My shirt's buggered.”

Qureshi stepped in. “Come on, Sarge, take it easy. It's not worth it. Walk away.”

Ade expected all hell to break loose among the Skavu, but they were quiet, and they backed away from him. Kiir looked him over like a parade inspection. Then he took out his sidearm and shot the isenj, and resumed his staring. Ade found a pure cold slab of focused hatred that really did feel like Shan's contribution to his ragbag of genes.

“You're fucking dead, sir,” Ade said quietly. “First chance I get.”

Qureshi stood between the two of them, rifle held one-handed on Kiir, and flashed Umeh Station for extraction. “No offense,” she said. “But I don't think we're going to play well together.”

I haven't thrown up or shit myself.
The rescue thing usually triggered that, Ade realized, all the helpless failures in his boyhood.
Shan's going to go ballistic.

Kiir stared him in the eye and Ade stared back. But it wasn't some macho display, he knew. It was revelation, and
fear, and disgust. The Skavu would see
c'naatat
as something to eradicate. They had a point.

Eventually Kiir turned away, and the other Skavu made no attempt to recover his blade. They backed out of the room. “Your kind,” said Kiir, pausing in the doorway, “is too dangerous.”

“I don't think he meant the Corps,” Qureshi said. “Ade—oh, never mind.”

The foxes were dead, and his mum was dead, and the isenj were dead, and Ade had saved nothing. The bezeri were dead, too, and not dead. But he felt a profound peace settling in his chest, and took out his cleaning kit to wipe his blood from a rather handy sword that had nearly removed his forearm.

Eddie's cam was still running. Ade switched it off and the three marines waited in the stinking, body-strewn road to be picked up.

Jejeno, Umeh

Wess'har, Ade had said, had no external testicles. But when it came to sheer balls, Aras had plenty to spare.

Eddie watched him stride down the service road that circled Umeh Station and head towards the government offices of the Northern Assembly. He was Vlad the Impaler, Pol Pot, Bulaitch and every war criminal rolled into one as far as the isenj were concerned. And their historical monster was walking openly through their city.

“You're bloody mad,” said Eddie. “We could have called for a ground car.”

“Mad, perhaps, but I'm not afraid,” said Aras. “And I'm not ashamed.”

The sobering deterrent of Esganikan Gai's warship sitting indiscreetly above the city was impressive but offered no psychological support for a man running the gauntlet of those who had wanted him dead. What they wanted now
was unknown: which meant Eddie had to find out or bust.

The walk was fine up to the point where Umeh Station's precincts merged into Jejeno itself. It had never been a city where you could take a casual stroll. It was so packed with teeming isenj most of the time that pedestrian traffic had its own rules, and you ignored them at your peril. It was as packed as a football crowd and in constant movement. But as Aras walked on, with no sign of stopping or giving way, the chattering, rasping sea of brown, black and umber shapes, some jangling with beaded quills, somehow managed to part. The pace of their tottering walk slowed and there was a sense of a river being dammed and forming swirling eddies.

The last time Eddie had done anything as stupid as ignoring the traffic rules and changing direction in the wrong place, he'd caused a crush. Street crushes caused injury and death. His instinct was to yank Aras back, but you couldn't stop a 170-kilo two-meter alien that easily.

The isenj simply stopped and stared, and somehow the ripple spread and the living river froze for as far as Eddie could see.

“Shit, Aras, you don't even know where the National Archive is,” Eddie called. “For Chrissakes,
wait.
”

The bee cam was already flying escort overhead and he waved it forward to cover the crowd reaction.
Are you really going to use this footage? Really?
Eddie took advantage of the wake Aras left and jogged up behind him.

Aras glanced back over his shoulder. “I
know.
” His voice, which usually had little trace of the wess'har overtone when he spoke English, suddenly had two distinct notes, as if he'd slipped back into being a full wess'har again. “I
know
Jejeno from memories.”

The isenj seemed dumbstruck again: no agitation, no shrill objections, nothing that indicated anything beyond incomprehension or shock. This wasn't how notorious criminals were greeted by crowds on Earth. And Aras
was
a criminal to them, one that even the Northern Assembly politicians had demanded be handed over as recently as last year, after
five hundred years.
The destruction of Mjat, one of many colony
cities erased from Asht, as the isenj called Bezer'ej, was as powerful an icon of holocaust for the isenj as Hiroshima was for humans.

They don't recognize him. Shit, they can't understand why he doesn't look the way they recall.

The thought hit Eddie hard.

Their genetic memory is a wess'har who looked like Nevyan.

But something in Aras recognized parts of Jejeno even if Jejeno didn't recognize him. He strode on, scattering the crowds. Jesus, if any isenj got near enough to catch
c'naatat
—no, it wasn't that simple to pass on except through open wounds and body fluids. And isenj had a dread of
c'naatat
that Eddie had once thought was the simple common sense of an overcrowded people, but that he now suspected was a race memory of the terrible consequences of the parasite infecting them on Bezer'ej.

The bee cam pursued Aras to the National Archive, and Ralassi met them to lead them through its corridors. He'd promised Eddie an “interesting experience” before he went back to Wess'ej, as if watching a civil war and a spot of ethnic cleansing wasn't interesting enough.

Aras had also insisted on seeing the records.

“If they've got genetic memory, why do they need records and archives?” asked Eddie.

Ralassi gave him a disapproving look with compressed lips, exactly like Serrimissani's don't-be-such-a-dick look. “Because isenj don't all have the same memories, of course. Someone has to collate them.”

“Ah,” said Eddie. “Good point.”

The bright green corridors were suffocatingly narrow and low, nothing like the grand halls of the ministerial offices. Aras looked uncomfortable ducking through them. They followed Ralassi into a pale gray plastered chamber deep in the government complex, and Eddie found himself in a well of bright light.

Looking up, he focused on a skylight with glazing bars in that distinctively isenj organic style like vines strangling a rib cage. Then he worked out why the room needed natural
light. An isenj was hunched at a desk scribbling furiously on sheets of plastic material, and it looked as if it was drawing rather than writing.

That hunched posture put Eddie in mind of a dead spider in a bathtub. He hated himself for that, but he couldn't help it. He was only a pattern-recognizing monkey himself. The isenj paused and stared at Aras, and then at Eddie.

“This is the archivist of visual records,” said Ralassi. “She is an artist. I brought you here for the memory.”

She.
The isenj paused for a second, and might have been looking at them, but it was hard to tell. She went back to her rapid scribbling.

“What memory?” asked Eddie, whispering automatically. It was a library, after all. It was amazing how universal a setting a quiet archive room was. “I don't understand.”

“You wanted to know what Umeh was like in the past. Helol Chep remembers.”

“Ah, she's going to let me look through the records?”

“No, she's willing to draw you an image. What would you like to see? Her job is to communicate memories accurately when needed. Helol has one of the most exact and extensive memories of anyone in the city. She comes from a long line of great recallers.”

This extraordinary transgenerational power of recall also seemed to have generated a vast storehouse of records. Isenj were natural bureaucrats.

“I wouldn't trust a human to do that,” said Eddie. He struggled with the notion of verifying a genetic recollection. No wonder isenj had more of a wess'har approach to truth and accuracy. “We're all lying bastards with bad memories.”

“Yes, I have heard this.”

Eddie took a deep breath. “What was Umeh like before the isenj…” He almost used the word
overran
. There was no escaping the terminology of pest control, and the remnant of his liberal heart rebelled. “Before Umeh was urbanized?”

Helol Chep appeared to listen carefully to Ralassi's interpretation and replied with shrills and clicks. Eddie suddenly understood why ussissi became interpreters. They weren't
just adept at languages; they were superb mimics in the same way that the macaws were. They could reproduce any sound. That was what Ralassi was doing now.

The artist threw herself into a new work, this time using a screen, and Eddie wondered if he was going to see footage after all. She made scraping chittering sounds as she worked. He wished he could speak their language.

“She will depict it for you.”

“She's going to show me pictures?”

“She is going to
draw
pictures.”

“Don't they have image records?”

“Not of the original world. They had no recording devices then. That must be obvious to anyone.”

“Not to me.” He imagined flickering film images of a small town that later became Jejeno and the buildings engulfed the continent. “So is this how she imagines the city was then?” He thought of all the dinosaur recreations that changed every time BBChan made a new natural history show and some scientist had a better theory. “Artist's impression?”

“No, this is how she recalls the primeval world from her genetic memory.”

Primeval.
Ussissi were too fluent to pick the wrong word. The isenj really did
remember.
Isenj didn't just recall ancestral grudges and their parents' memories; they could go back further. How far? No, he'd misunderstood the word. It was like a bird recalling being a
Tyrannosaurus rex
. There had to be another explanation.

“Amazing,” said Eddie, still impressed. “Can they all do that?”

“Most isenj seem to have the primeval memory of the forest, yes.”

Eddie stared at the isenj and wondered how it would feel to shut your eyes and see woolly mammoth and ice-covered Britain.

“Okay,” he said, and motioned the bee cam to an over-the-shoulder-shot position. “Fire away.”

Ralassi stepped back and the isenj grasped stylus-like instruments in her hands—both of them—and began sketching furiously on a tablet. The cam recorded the astonishing
spectacle of someone sketching two-handed, cross-hatching frantically with one hand and doing long curving sweeps with the other. At this angle it was hard to get a feel for the landscape, but Eddie resisted the urge to peer over her shoulder.

After a few minutes Chep paused and tilted the tablet. The image was projected into a display on the wall and for the first time Eddie could picture ancient Umeh, even though the drawing was monochrome. He watched a forest like no forest he had ever seen take shape. Aras smelled suddenly of grapefruit, a sign he was agitated. Even a human could detect that.

Ralassi's lips compressed, just like Serrimissani in stroppy mode. “I've never seen this before. I too am curious.” He inclined his head towards Chep and chittered. “She says she doesn't have an explanation, only memory. The trees captured water at the top and fed the ground.”

Chep tapped with both styluses. The image flooded with colors, single tones at first and then shadowed with graduation of tint and shade.

Eddie looked at a landscape of massive tubes seen from a low angle with light slanting through and between them. Where the light penetrated the trunks, it was gently pink and red; it gave him the impression of being dwarfed by giant rhubarb. Between the stalks, tall towers of soil stood aligned in a way that suggested they were built, not a random act of nature.
Termite mounds.
Chep began adding detail, pausing occasionally and becoming motionless. Then she started scribbling again. Sometimes the strokes produced nothing that Eddie could see.

“She says it is
sirp
,” said Ralassi. “You call it infrared.”

So it was a color to them. He wondered how they managed to depict that in a digital image—if it
was
digital, of course; he didn't know much about their technology. Maybe the reproduction emitted it as IR. It was a real shame that humans, isenj and wess'har would never cooperate enough to share technology, because Eddie could see so many applications that would transform Earth.

He could see the destructive technologies, too. He put
them out of his mind and watched the monitor in his handheld to check that the bee cam was capturing what he thought he was seeing.

“How long ago was this?”

Ralassi was silent for a few seconds and looked as if he was having problems calculating.

“Six hundred thousand years,” he said.

“Shit,” said Eddie. The footage didn't do it justice. The bee cam couldn't record
boggling time scales
or
this is all from memory, folks
or any of the things that made this a feat of astonishing, unimaginable, utterly alien recall.

A bizarre landscape unfolded beneath a canopy of purple cups and spheres. A dark shape gripped the primordial rhubarb trunks with smaller, lighter creatures clinging to it. Growths that looked like vines snaked up some of the trunks and disappeared into the canopy where patches of blue sky contrasted sharply with the amethyst cups.

“Does she miss this?” said Eddie. “Does she want to see all this back again?”

The ussissi and the isenj chattered. “She says it would be nice but as she has it stored in her memory, it isn't necessary.” Ralassi looked at the image and blinked slowly. Eddie almost expected him to slump to the ground in slow motion and doze like a meerkat, but the interpreter was just considering the art. “They
are
very attached to their natural world, you know. That's why you see the images on the buildings and the road surfaces. They revere it.”

“But not enough to preserve it, eh? They love the idea but the reality can go hang.”

“You wish me to express that to Helol Chep?”

“That would be rather rude, wouldn't it?”

“Indeed.” Ralassi didn't seem as quick to snap at him as the female ussissi. He wasn't such good company, either. Eddie decided he had a weakness for awkward customers. “And Serrimissani tells me there are many kinds of human who behave the same way, loving the abstract ideal while abusing and destroying the living object.”

“If you say cuddly animal toy to me, I'll scream.”

“Why?”

“Not literally.”
Jesus, haven't I learned by now?
“Just that the wess'har say that to me too.”

“I
say it,” Aras interrupted. “Pandas—why you kept the toy and let the real animal become extinct.”

“Okay, what he said. And let's not get started on cuddly rabbits.”

“If I knew what rabbits were, I would avoid mentioning them.” It was hard to tell if Ralassi was being sarcastic or literal. “But I understand the irony of loving what you have destroyed.”

“And destroying what you love,” said Aras, offering no explanation. Eddie decided not to pursue it.