Matriarch (20 page)

“So…do you mind if we have a proper Christmas?”

“You don't need my permission.”

“But Pagans don't observe it.”

“I'm a
very
lapsed Pagan and I like eating to excess as much as anyone.”

“Y'know, I always dreaded Christmas. Dad was a lot worse when he was drunk. They say suicide rates and domestic violence are worse at Christmas because families get cooped up together. Bloody true in our house. Fucking awful.”

“Then we'll try and have a good one.”

As a boy, Ade had always planned his escape just to stay sane. When he was old enough to leave home, he'd join the Marines and get as far from his dad as he could. He'd meet
a nice girl, and they'd have kids who'd never have to lie about how they got the burn marks on their hands, or spend the night sleeping in the bus station because they were too scared to go home.

He'd met the girls; but they never stayed. And he never had the kids to give the childhood he'd never had. But he'd finally found his nice girl, even if she was very different from his boyhood fantasies, and it didn't matter one bit that there was now absolutely nothing normal about his life or hers.

He had a wife and he had a brother. And that was enough for any man.

Bezer'ej: near Ouzhari

Sand castles. They're sand castles.

It was Rayat's first thought when he saw the bezeri settlement. The buildings were cones, columns and domes, clustered together like an asymmetric jelly mold. They looked as if a single wave would sweep them away. Colored stones were set into grooves and depressions in the walls.

And the settlement was deserted.

He followed the faint, pulsing green light in Saib's mantle. There was no sound coming from the signal lamp and he took their green light to be wordless noise, as if the bezeri were humming to themselves. But it might just have been the equivalent of a heartbeat.

Rayat was starting to notice pattern in the light sequences. The intensity seemed to convey emphasis like volume in sound. Saib swam ahead of him in rhythmic, explosive bursts, propelled by a jet of water, his green light more noticeable as he slipped into shadow from filtered sunlight and back again. The bezeri appeared to be comfortable swimming at any depth, just like cephalopods on Earth, but it
seemed they chose to live nearer the surface in the shallows around the landmasses.

Maybe they could have avoided the fallout from Ouzhari if they'd chosen to live deeper and further from the shoreline. But, like humans, they lived in places where it wasn't always safe.

Lindsay swam parallel with Rayat, hair billowing just like it did in zero-g. He'd given up conversation with her for the time being. He felt feverish even in cold water. He was sure the sea around him would boil sooner or later.

I have to sleep tonight. And I have to eat.

Eating.
He'd steeled himself to that. His instinct—somebody's instinct, anyway—took over. He swam through fanlike white growths on the rocks and caught a ribbon of it between his fingers. If it was the one thing that
c'naatat
couldn't handle, it was too bad. Maybe Lindsay would note that it killed him and identify it as a way of stopping the parasite from spreading if it ever did fall into the wrong hands. She wasn't wholly incompetent: just impossibly
subjective.

So whose hands are the wrong hands?

Rayat didn't know if that was his own thought or that bitch Frankland's. He broke off a piece of the white ribbon and chewed it. He was now an animal on the brink between survival and death, and it was wonderfully focusing in the way it shut down all his long-term planning.
Can I eat this?
It tasted metallic and salty.

His body said
yes.

He snapped off more of the white growths and swam on to catch up with Saib and the other bezeri. He'd never been an animal before. There had been brief moments of pain and danger in his life when he'd glimpsed his primal self for a few seconds at a time, even minutes, but this felt indefinite and the way he might be forever if he didn't keep his mind sharp.

They passed more molded mud villages. The groups of sandcastle buildings became a strip and then what could only be described as a city with buildings curved around rocks and slopes, some of them stacked one on top of the
other. If you swam, you needed no horizontal roads. There was none of the decay in the water that he'd tasted near the map repository.

Rayat made his way towards Lindsay and gestured for the lamp. Her eyes had that flat, dead look that a barrier of water created but she showed no dissent and handed him the device.

“Saib?” He caught up with the patriarch and moved in front of him, treading water. “Saib, tell me about this place. What is it?”

A city we once lived in before the isenj came and killed us with their pollution.

“How long has it been abandoned?”

For generations. There were many millions of us once, spread across this part of the world.

Tens of thousands had died after the detonation of cobalt devices on Christopher Island. That gave Rayat a good idea of how fragile bezeri biochemistry was, and how long it took them to recover their population numbers from the last disaster. They hadn't; they'd still been struggling back to strength after the isenj occupation when the bombs detonated. Five centuries, and that was all they could manage—a few hundred thousand. Now there were around fifty, the few of breeding age all from one family.

They were doomed to extinction. They had passed the point of recovery.

“When things are normal, how many young do you produce?” It was a brutally zoological way of putting it, and he hoped it didn't come across as dismissive. “How fast do you breed?”

One child every six, seven years. Our eggs mature for many seasons. We must be thirty years or more before we can reproduce.

“Yeah, think about that, you bastard,” said Lindsay.

Bezeri had very little in their favor in survival terms. Against the fast-breeding isenj, they were the universe's losers.

Rayat thought of the impact that
c'naatat
would have on
Earth. You did right.
You didn't have much choice.
Yes, he still believed that.

It was the nature of his job. Collateral damage was inevitable and it didn't take away the need to get the job done. Rayat handed back the lamp and Saib directed him into one of the mud cones.

Concrete might have been a better description than mud. When he ran his hand down the walls, they were smooth and hard, dotted with inlaid colored stone and fragments of shell. The floor wasn't packed silt but the same hard material. He grounded himself and walked on it.

He was so engrossed in wondering how they'd made these structures that he almost didn't see the three bezeri huddled in an alcove until one uncoiled and its bioluminescence flared in a pulsing pattern like chaser lights. He flinched instinctively. Saib glided between them and wrapped his tentacles around one of them. The exchange of lights was a conversation that Rayat couldn't understand.

He wasn't looking at cephalopods now: he was looking at
people.

Get out of my head, Frankland. Get out, you bitch.

But it wasn't a fragment of her memory; it was his own painful revelation, and it was different. He could feel it. He'd met aliens. He'd encountered four intelligent species and seen many more alien life-forms in this system. But each time his rational mind had noted them and their characteristics, he'd never had that pang of recognition, that visceral realization that there was
someone just like him
inside them.

Rayat had too many questions now. He needed desperately to communicate without using the lamp. He
had
to. The more he knew, the better his chances of getting home.

Lindsay squeezed through the opening and settled beside him. She had a firm grip on the device and didn't look ready to surrender it.

“Okay, you've got the talking stick,” said Rayat. The room had openings at apparently random points in the walls, some set high off the ground and he assumed they were connecting
doors.
Bezeri live in freefall, dummy; they swim. Think zero-g spaceship architecture.
“Who are they? I need names.”

Shafts of aquamarine light pierced the gloom of the chamber. Rayat looked up; the roof of the building was dotted with inserts of the same transparent shell that sandwiched the sand maps. He was getting a sense of how bezeri lived and what they liked. They liked light. But they could function at extreme depths, and they had bioluminescence, so they didn't
need
light. It spoke to him of beings that wanted to explore, and he knew that was as much an emotional reaction as a scientific one.

Rayat concentrated on everything
but
emotion. He wanted his scientific rationality, or his animal survival instincts; he didn't want regret or empathy or any of the other unreliable, weakening elements of being human to make his time down here any harder than it had to be.

“Take the bloody thing, then.” Lindsay thrust the lamp at him. “I need to eat.” She backed out of the chamber. Saib uncurled a tentacle in her direction. “Just going outside to find some seaweed, okay? I'm not running away. I've got nowhere to go.”

Rayat took the lamp. “
Rye-aht,
” he said. “Rayat.” Nobody called him Mohan; he'd always been just Rayat. He couldn't remember the last person who had called him by his first name, let alone
Mo.
For some reason that crushed him for a few seconds. “My name is Rayat.”

“Ooorrrrrrrr,” said one of the bezeri in a stream of bubbles. “Oooorrrrrraaaaaa….”

A talking squid. And I'm not even surprised.

If bezeri could manipulate air and water in their body cavity, maybe he'd learn to use light—if he developed bioluminescence. They rippled with rainbows, living liquid opals, and the lamp's translation systems took over.

I am Pili, a mother. She is Seem, mother of mothers. He is Keet, father of fathers.

“Where are your children?”

Dead. All of them.

Rayat laid the lamp aside as Saib deposited armfuls of
azin maps in front of Pili and the others. They seemed far more interested in fondling the maps than in his questions. Their light patterns changed into repetitive concentric circles of violet, ruby and gold that welled up from bright central points all over their mantles. It was a pattern he hadn't seen before.

Their maps were their past. They were looking at their history. For a moment Rayat imagined browsing through a picture album of relatives long dead and had a brief, awful glimpse into what the bezeri might be thinking.

He shook it off.
You came here to secure
c'naatat
for the FEU and to stop any other government getting hold of it. That's all: nothing else. Don't forget that.
Sentimentality was dangerous.

The bezeri appeared to have forgotten him. He slid down the smooth wall and rested his head on his folded arms, knees drawn up, and the moment he closed his eyes, reality crowded in on him again and he was
drowning.

He jerked his eyes open again and found he had braced both hands on the floor of the chamber. The more he looked at his right hand, the more disoriented he felt.

It didn't look the same any longer. Something wasn't quite right. He thought for a brief elated moment that he saw a colored spark, but it was something more bizarre even than that. The faint play of light came from the floor.

His hand was becoming translucent.

“I wanted lights,” he said.
“Lights.”

Maybe
c'naatat
could hear him. There was no harm trying.

F'nar, Wess'ej: experimental rainforest habitat

Shan had to hand it to Deborah Garrod. For a woman whose husband had been decapitated, she was being very polite to his executioner.

Aras walked beside her, pointing out objects of interest on the plain as they approached F'nar. The transport could have taken them straight to the city, but Shan knew why Aras
had opted to walk the last two kilometers. He wanted to see Deborah's face when she caught sight of F'nar.

The City of Pearl left humans stunned. Shan wasn't steeped in Christian mythology, but it had left her reeling the first time she saw it; she could only guess what impact it had on people who thought their heaven looked like that.

Deborah inhaled sharply and put both hands to her mouth.

“It's exquisite,” she said. She paused for a moment, eyes closed. Shan assumed she was praying. It didn't seem the right time to tell her the nacre coating was insect shit. “I had no idea.”

“You should see it on a nice summer evening.” Shan walked on, hands in pockets. Aras walked alongside Deborah. Her two kids hadn't come with her. Shan's last encounter with the teenaged son, James, had involved slamming him against a wall and backhanding him to get him to tell her what his dad was doing, so maybe that was just as well.
Dad's just helping Commander Neville bomb Ouzhari. Thanks, kid.
“How does everyone feel about going back to Earth?”

“Apprehensive, but happy.”

“It's an alien planet for you. Big upheaval.”

“A sense of fulfillment, though. For both of us. This was your mission too.”

“Yes.”
I only
thought
it was. That's what you get for trying to stitch me up, Perault.
“Well, when you see the macaws, it'll put it all in perspective.”

Shan wanted to get it over with. Somehow it felt like taking a relative to identify a body, and she was more concerned with getting back to visit Vijissi to check on his progress.

She didn't mention him to Deborah. It couldn't remain a secret forever, but the longer it took for the colonists or Eddie to find out, the more time she had to maneuver. Twenty-five light-years wasn't distance enough to reassure her that
c'naatat
was out of reach of Earth.

Deborah slowed down as she drew closer to the F'nar, and when the sun came out from behind thick cloud and illuminated the top level of the terraces in fierce white light
she stopped again. Shan and Aras waited, silent. Then Deborah gathered herself and walked on.

Da Shapakti was waiting for them at the top of the flight of steps that led down into the tunnels beneath the city. He kept rolling his head slightly, a preening gesture almost like the re-created macaws he was so proud of: he'd even delayed his departure for Bezer'ej so that he could show off the birds to Deborah.

Deborah peered down into the stairwell. “Just like Constantine. Everything's underground.”

Shan hung back to let Shapakti lead the way. The enclosed rainforest environment that he'd created was nestled between the dimly lit hangar bays of fighter craft, built thousands of years ago and maintained by nanotech, and still capable of taking out a FEU warship like
Actaeon.
The more intrusive aspects of city life—the utilities, generators, storage and manufacturing facilities—were housed down here. F'nar might have been less rigorous about making minimum visual impact on the natural landscape than the stricter Targassati wess'har further north, but it still kept its industrial side carefully concealed. Even a meticulously agrarian society needed some ugly technology. It was the only hidden aspect of this transparent culture that Shan had seen.