Matriarch (15 page)

“I'll walk you back to the boat,” said Deborah.

“No need.” The worst he could face was abuse. “And let me know if you want help from the marines.”

Aras strode down the foot-worn path between the tents as the fabric snapped and whipped in the wind. He knew every one of the colonists in the camp; now he had fallen from grace with them, and it bothered him not because he wanted their approval but because he didn't like to be reminded of how fragile humans' affections were. Wess'har didn't have feuds or abandon their families. Attachments were for life.

You're still worried that Shan's the same. You're still worried that she'll do what humans do and choose between you and Ade, instead of accepting you both like a real
isan
should.

Aras's human side, scavenged by his
c'naatat
from viruses and bacteria and skin cells, was a little nagging voice of doubt. He ignored it. Shan was, he knew, as good as her word. She would never abandon him again.

“Aras.” The voice came from behind him. “Aras!”

Movement caught his peripheral vision. He wouldn't let the colonists' hatred touch him. That was their problem to deal with: he made himself immune, thinking of Shan and Ade.

“Aras!”

The man's tone was urgent. Aras turned. It was John, John for whom he had once made glass pens, John who had earlier turned his back on him. His wife stood beside him.

“We're sorry, Aras,” said John. “And we're sorry for what happened to the bezeri. Go careful, my friend.”

Deborah's words had hit their target. Humans were at least capable of change with sufficient motivation. Aras suspected it was more to find favor with their god, the one who said they had to forgive, than out of a genuine change of heart.

But that was motive. And motive didn't matter.

These had been his friends. He liked them, and he felt better when they weren't hostile towards him.

“You too, John,” said Aras. “You too.”

Bezer'ej: near Ouzhari island

Lindsay stared at the squirming translucent tubes clutched in one of Saib's tentacles.

I have to get through this.

She was ravenous. That was
c'naatat,
she knew: all that cellular remodeling expended a lot of energy. She felt hot, even though the water was cold, and her body demanded calories. And she could adapt to anything. And that meant…she could
eat
anything.

Oh God.

Saib shimmered with radial streaks of violet and gold and the lamp's audio boomed.
You must learn to trap your own. You might prefer the weed.

Lindsay was sure she would. Rayat reached past her and grabbed one of the tubes. “What is it?” he said, and hesitated for a second before shoving it into his mouth and chewing hard.

She was sure he'd vomit up. His eyes screwed up for a reflex second as he gagged on the thing but he kept it down.

Rayat always had to win, even against tubes.

It grows on the rocks,
said Saib.
It is perhaps a weed but it acts like an animal. It moves between rocks.

“Fine,” said Rayat. “Because if I don't eat something solid then
c'naatat
is going to make me filter krill or mud or something. I want to keep chewing, thanks.”

Lindsay steeled herself and reached for a tube.
Do it fast.
It felt horribly cold and gelatinous in her mouth but it tasted of
nothing.
Somehow that was the worst part. She swallowed hard and struggled against her gag reflex.

“How much of this do we need to eat?” she asked.

“Eat when you're hungry and stop when you're not.”

“Thanks, doctor. Great. I might never have worked that out on my own.”

But he was right. Her instinct told her to eat as much as she could when she found food. Whether it was her human hypothalamus telling her to gorge in an emergency or
c'naatat
making the decisions for her, she decided to obey it. Clustered on the rocks were writhing translucent gold tubes like the ones Saib had gathered. She made her way over to them—and it was becoming far more natural to move in the water now, a combination of swimming and touching down on the seabed every few meters—and reached out.

She expected them to shrink from her hand like anemones. But they
scattered.

She lunged at them and managed to grab a handful.
Plants,
she told herself.
Plants, plants, plants.
She crammed them into her mouth and shut out every conscious thought that said food had to be dead and cooked.

She'd eaten oysters once and vomited.

“I'll stick to chasing weed,” said Rayat. “Until I develop the ability to move efficiently in water.”

“You reckon you will?”

He nodded emphatically. “You can see how this thing works. It fits you to survive in your environment. It wants
you to stay alive, because it depends on you in some way. It optimizes you.”

“It survives in soil. Why does it need us?”

Rayat was a pharmacologist, a scientist. He would be useful at last. “Lots of parasites need a host for certain phases of their life cycle. Some even need hosts for transport, nothing else.”

“Maybe I shouldn't think about this.”

“Maybe you should. I want
c'naatat
to give me those damn lights so I can talk to the bezeri without the lamp. It probably won't last forever.”

“Shan picked up the bioluminescence. She couldn't speak the language, though.”

“Did she ever try?”

“I don't know.”

“How exactly did she acquire it?”

“No idea.”

Saib moved, shooting a powerful jet of water and sending silt pluming in clouds.
Hurry. If you do not want to eat, then work. Fetch more maps. The podship will come soon.

Rayat held his hand out for the signal lamp. Lindsay paused for a moment and then decided that if he tried to keep it, Saib would probably take it from him anyway. The bezeri needed to communicate with them too.

She put it in his hand. “Go ahead.”

Rayat aimed the lamp at Saib. “How can I get some cells from you?”

I do not understand.

“I want to be able to use light like you do. I need some cells from you, but I mustn't break your skin or I might infect you.” Rayat was looking over Saib's mantle, searching at a careful distance. “Can you scrape off any skin?”

Saib didn't respond. He hung in the water motionless for a moment, and then gathered up his tentacles tight to his body and shot off with a powerful jet of ejected water. He disappeared into the darkness. The two remaining bezeri waited.

“Okay, you've pissed him off now.” Lindsay kicked up into the water and swam for the repository again. “Come on, let's shift those maps.”

It was hard work. Lindsay
wanted
it to be. She'd brought these creatures to the brink of extinction, through her own stupidity, and she didn't deserve a second of respite. And the harder it was, the less she thought.

Lindsay wondered for a moment how long her clothing would survive immersion in saltwater. At least she didn't have to worry about hygiene and latrines any longer. The things she found comfort in now astounded her.

How long have we been down here now?

She had a sense of it being the first day, maybe the second. Her watch had stopped. Her hunger didn't mark time by telling her when she had missed regular meals: it was constant.

Ignore time. Just keep moving.

She stacked up the azin shell maps and records, passing Rayat in a silent relay. It must have taken an hour, maybe two—maybe three. The podship Saib had referred to turned out to be a five-meter translucent gel sac that maneuvered by pulsing jets of water. At first Lindsay wondered if it was a living creature. But it had a hatch that opened, a hatch with unnaturally straight edges, and a bezeri emerged from it to gather up the shell documents and place them in the craft.

The next time she returned to the cache of shells, she found Saib waiting with something in his tentacles. Rayat settled on the silt beside her, staring.

Saib was carrying a small body.

My kin,
he said. His light display pulsed deep blue, almost purple in its intensity.
He is recently dead.

Lindsay had no idea whether
kin
meant son or nephew or grandson; but she knew exactly how Saib felt. She could still taste the pain of David's death, such an unfairly short life after months of carrying him. Without the numbing influence of the mood enhancers she'd been taking, the grief was now rushing back to fill the voids, triggered by seeing that small body.

Let's get the poor thing tidied up.
Lindsay could hear Shan's voice even now. Lindsay was instantly back in the
Thetis
camp on Constantine, standing over the dissected corpse of an infant bezeri after Shan had punched Surendra Parekh to the floor for disobeying the order not to take organic samples. It had been the start of the chain of slowly unfolding disasters.

Take what you need,
said Saib.
Will he live on in you?

“Let's see,” said Rayat.

There was no bioluminescence in the body. But that didn't mean the cells were useless. It was worth a try. And if Rayat could develop the lights faster, then Lindsay wanted them too.

Saib laid the body on a rock and Rayat fumbled in his pockets, growing more impatient. Then he found a piece of plastic—a tag of some kind—and scraped it along the inside of his wrist.

“Don't look,” he said to Saib.

Rayat kept scraping until he drew blood. Lindsay hoped there weren't predators with the senses of sharks in these waters.

“Okay,” he said. “Let's try it with the body. The photophores are between the skin and the mantle muscle in terrestrial squid. You know how complex they can be? Lenses, reflectors, even color filters. Amazing.”

Lindsay gathered up the child's body—a child, a life like David's, whatever the species—and was surprised by how heavy it felt. Rayat hesitated before hacking into the mantle and scooping out chunks. Then he braced his arm and gouged into his own skin, working in the bezeri's tissue like a paste. That was the problem with
c'naatat:
it healed wounds almost instantly so it was hard to keep the blood flowing. Rayat pounded away at his arm making little grunts of effort for a period that felt like long minutes. It was hard to tell. He opened up three wounds. By the time he stopped, there wasn't a mark on his skin.

“My turn,” said Lindsay. She held out her arm.

“You sure?”

“Of course I'm bloody sure. This might be the only chance
we get to try this.” She stared at him.
Oh my God I'm living under water and I'm trying to develop bioluminescence and I have to stop thinking about this—
“Oww—”

Rayat stabbed into her arm. The edge of the plastic was blunt and it hurt like hell, shocking her out of her thoughts. Did it matter that he was working photocytes into her bloodstream? Wouldn't any tissue do the job? Maybe he knew something she didn't. It was as good an idea as any.

“Okay.” Rayat picked up the lamp and turned to Saib. “How do you dispose of your dead?”

Under stones.

“Is this place appropriate?” Rayat laid the child's body down on the seabed in a space between outcrops of rock. Then he gathered some stones. “I'll do it.”

Saib said nothing, but he coiled one tentacle around a rock. The other bezeri followed him. Lindsay joined in the burial party and they covered the body a stone at a time, forming a cairn between the outcrops.

I will make a memorial later,
said Saib.

Yes, they carved stone: Lindsay remembered that. They had memorials at the high-water line on Constantine, single carefully-shaped stones with inscriptions commemorating podship pilots who had breached the barrier to the Dry Above, a place as remarkable to the bezeri as space once was to humans.

“You do have some decency in you, then,” said Lindsay.

“One thing you need to learn about monsters,” said Rayat, “is that we're not monochrome. Saints aren't, either.”

He swam back to the repository. Lindsay paused to grab some red weed and chewed it. It tasted like wet salty leather, but it was better than chasing plants that might have been worms.

She looked up towards the sunlight, filtering through the water in shafts like a woodcut from a family bible. That was an image she couldn't shake now, not since she'd seen it on Christopher Island. And she knew where she was; she was close enough to Christopher—Ouzhari—to find Constantine, or what was left of it.

She wanted to see David's grave. She wanted to mourn properly for her child. Aras had made a glass headstone that threw brilliantly colored light on the grave in the sunshine.

She would find it. She knew she would.

But she had time, and these aging bezeri didn't. She had to do her duty first. She had to look for more survivors.

Umeh: Maritime Fringe airspace

“They don't piss about, do they?” said Shan.

Ade stared down between his boots at a fire-blackened, shattered landscape that had been part of a Maritime Fringe city called Buyg. Shan was back to being the detached copper again, and he wondered if the kind of violence she was used to seeing before she went to EnHaz made it easier to deal with this war. It was hard to tell. She'd just switched off; it was more than just her scent signals. She'd battened down all the hatches. Even her eye contact felt like a stranger's.

The devastation extended as far as he could see from the transparent deck of the Eqbas ship. He was almost used to walking on nothing now: as long as he concentrated he felt perfectly safe. But the minute he let it slip from conscious thought, the primitive part of his brain took over and he jerked back as if he was falling into a deep, deep pit. Eddie seemed to have solved the problem by kneeling on all fours and resting on his folded arms. Maybe he was just getting a better look, though. Sometimes he looked as if he had no sense of danger at all, as if he shut down simply to cope.

We all do it sooner or later.

“I'm glad Lin's dead,” said Eddie. “I don't think she'd cope with knowing she started all this.”

Ade decided not to even breathe. Shan didn't meet his eyes. “Yeah.” Then she glanced at Esganikan and warbled in eqbas'u. Ade took a guess that she was telling her Eddie didn't know Lindsay was alive, and to keep her mouth shut about it. Judging by Esganikan's rapid head-tilting, she had.

Eddie could never leave anything alone. “How did she go in the end?”

“Calm,” said Ade. He had that down pat now.

“Rayat?”

“Same.”

“Did she say anything?”

“Eddie, shut the fuck up about her, will you?” Jesus, everyone wanted to know how people died. Sometimes it was better not to. It definitely was this time.
Change the subject.
“Was that a single missile?”

Ade avoided Eddie's eyes but he glimpsed his startled expression. Esganikan took no notice of the spat and seemed engrossed in studying a mist of small lights that shimmered in the bulkhead.

She prodded one and the display changed. “Yes, with twenty dispersing warheads.”

“And how many do you carry?”

“Fifty,” she said. “But we make more on deployment.”

Make more.
Ade wasn't used to that. It skewed his sense of logistics and supply chains, chains that could be broken to cripple an enemy. He was glad he wasn't fighting them.

“I bet that got their attention.” It was hard to get a sense of scale because the buildings—or at least the stumps of them—had no familiar ratios that he could latch onto. “What's our altitude?”