Matriarch (28 page)

Shan leaned on the table and placed a careful fingertip on the cake. “Still warm,” she said. “I'd estimate time of death as two or three hours ago, but some rigor's already set in.” Then she grinned and gave him a playful shove with her hip. “Bloody clever. You're really into this, aren't you?”

“I thought it would be fun.”

“It's great. What about icing?”

“No idea.”

“Tofu maybe. A kind of whipped cream frosting.”

“I'm never going to hear the end of this from Mart.”

“Big roughy-toughy Bootie baking cakes, eh?” She sniffed it. “Can they eat it? I mean, is it all safe for humans?”

“Aras checked out the ingredients.”

“What if we can score some alcohol from Umeh Station? Then you could soak it.”

“Marinate?”

“Stab some holes in it and pour it in, if I recall correctly.” Women didn't have cooking genes, then. If they did, Shan must have been on leave when they handed them out. She looked at Aras. “What do you reckon, sweetheart? Does this do anything for you?”

Aras, gloved as a precaution, held a couple of rats in his arms. They really had taken to him. Sometimes he made that rumbling noise deep in his throat, the one that wess'har dads used to get their kids to sleep, and the rats gazed mesmerized at him until he stopped. It had that effect on humans, too. He placed them back in their cage with a tidbit.

“I've seen more than a hundred and fifty Christmas festivals,” said Aras. “I believe you need lights too.”

“Does that mean you're getting into the spirit of the thing, then, Ras?” Ade wanted everyone to have a good time: no arguments, no disappointments and no sense of dread. He was aware of how desperate that was, and he knew where the urge came from. But it didn't make it any less important or exciting. A normal, happy, stable family gathering: something everyone else seemed to have and that seemed distant and magical when he was a kid. No hiding from Dad, no avoiding the other kids at school because he'd have to explain his bruises: no listening to them looking forward to the holidays and talking about experiences that were as alien to him then as the isenj were now.

Aras looked thoughtful, head on one side like a dog. His dark braid flopped forward over his shoulder as he leaned forward to join the cake inspection. “If you mean that a biologically impossible act gives me hope for noncorporeal existence, no.”

“Bah, humbug,” said Shan, and burst out laughing. She was in an unusually good mood; Ade had never heard her laugh so much. She wasn't
demonstrative.
He liked that word. “Sod Tiny Tim, eh?”

“I enjoy communal celebration,” Aras said stiffly. “I just prefer to be clear about its purpose.”

“Well, we're still alive, we've got food, and we've got each other.” Shan picked a crumb off the cake and chewed. “Not bad at all, Ade.”

“I was thinking of asking the lads over. Can I?”

“You don't have to ask my permission.”

“Your home.”

“Aras's house.”

Aras shrugged. It was one of the things that made him look very human. “This is
our
home. I despair at your fixation with ownership.”

“Maybe we can get Eddie to front up, too,” said Shan. “And Vijissi, if he's up to it. Yeah, let's have a few laughs. God knows we need some. What's the alcohol situation?”

“Brewing,” said Aras. “Ade has planned ahead. And I think I shall make lights.”

Shan flexed her fingers. “I've got my own.”

“So have I,” said Ade.

“Let's see you hang
that
on Christmas tree, smart-arse.”

Things were improving, definitely. Ade savored the glimpse of the life that everyone else took for granted. Aras went in search of lighting equipment at the Exchange of Surplus Things and Shan picked another crumb from the edge of the cake.

“He's going to rig million-lux arc lights, isn't he?” said Ade, moving the cake to higher ground for its own safety. “Captain Overkill rides again.”

Shan smiled. “How do you want me to play this?”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “Your mates haven't seen us together socially since we became an item. How do you want me to behave in front of them?”

“Sorry?”

“Professional distance or all over you?”

“They know we're shagging.”
Oh God, I didn't mean it to come out like that.
He checked discreetly to see she was still wearing the ring. “That we're…”

“Well, then?”

Ade took her hand and squeezed gently. “All over me, please. And thanks for checking.” She was perfect: she understood every anxiety a bloke might have. “I'll deck Mart if he says anything out of order.”

“It's the thought that counts.”

His stomach knotted and that luscious weight settled on his chest, making him catch his breath. He loved her to distraction. Being with her was effortless: there was no mystery to her, no game with hidden rules to work out. He felt secure despite her occasional anger.

“I was really worried you'd be embarrassed to be seen with me.”

Shan shook her head with an exasperated snort. He knew when she was having difficulty broaching a subject and she was close to that now. “Shit, Ade, I love you. What makes you think I'm ashamed of you?”

She'd never said it before: love. He knew she didn't like saying the word. It caught him off guard and he found his mouth working independently of his brain. “I'm just so ordinary.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot that. Everyone freefalls from space and shoots aliens. When are you going to do something
different
?” She edged up to him on the bench and gave him a ferocious hug. “Ade, you'll never be ordinary as long as you've got a hole in your arse. You're a commando, for fuck's sake. I'll smack anyone who even looks at you the wrong way, okay?”

That was all he needed to hear. Being stranded twenty-five light-years from Earth among warring aliens with some parasite living in his guts was nothing, absolutely
nothing.
He was home now; and he had never been home before. When he thought she was dead, he'd made himself stop thinking about what might have been, but now he could stand on that edge and imagine what he would have lost. There was no other word for it: he
mourned
her at last. It was a frightening, bittersweet, unbearable panic. He threw his arms around her and pressed his face into her neck, feeling like he'd just been reunited with her after a long absence.

“What's up, sweetheart?” she said.

“Just feeling normal,” he said. “And I don't take normal for granted.”

He thought of what lovely kids they could have had—fierce
and clever daughters, loyal and protective sons—and put the idea out of his head.

Bezer'ej

Rayat rejoiced in the simple pleasure of learning a new skill. He couldn't recall the last time he'd had such uncomplicated joy; but talking in light was probably on a par with learning to walk, if only he could remember how that had felt.

Share?
he asked. He offered a handful of what he thought of as glass worms to Keet.

You are not what I expected,
said the patriarch.
I expected you would try to kill us again. We heard about the infant too. The isenj killed us accidentally. You sought us out to kill us.

Infant? He probably meant the juvenile bezeri that Parekh had thought was dead. She found it beached; she dissected it. She ended up in a body bag because she ignored the warning not to take organic samples. So humans were not only genocidal, they were child-killers. It was a tough image to improve.

I can't put this right,
said Rayat.
And sorry won't help.

Keet slipped the worms up into his mantle. There was a beak in a fold of the flesh at the front, not within the ring of tentacles as it would be on a terrestrial squid. Somehow the arrangement seemed more like a mouth and made him that much more…human.

Saib says Leenz says the same thing. Sorry does not help. She grieves for her child buried here. There is no sorry that can stop the grief.

Rayat watched but he couldn't see the progress of the worms into Keet's digestive system. Lindsay was doing her mourning late. That was the trouble with mood enhancers; you had to stop taking them sooner or later, and the reality that had driven you to them was still waiting patiently, drumming its fingers, happy to pick up the conversation of misery again.

How did people complete the grieving cycle?

Seeing where their loved one had died was important.

So was seeing the grave.

David Neville's grave was on Constantine, and Rayat
needed to go there.

It was an opportunity. He felt both satisfaction at its convenience and the slight worry that he'd already blown his credibility with Lindsay the last time he maneuvered her into doing his bidding. She was remarkably malleable. Most people were, once you worked out their motivation. He'd talked her into taking nuclear weapons to Bezer'ej and he'd talked her into acquiring
c'naatat,
and she knew it. Now all he wanted to do was have a legitimate excuse for visiting Constantine; a pretty harmless act for her to collude in, but she was twice bitten. She might refuse this time.

He'd try anyway. He had to. He turned to see where she was.

Lindsay had taken an interest in the maps and Pili held them in front of her, caressing the smooth surface of the shell with one tentacle as if pointing lovingly to familiar features. Rayat could make out words in the lights that shimmered in her mantle:
my clan, my home, our hunting grounds.

And this town had a name. He couldn't translate it into English; he could have used the signal lamp, but suddenly he didn't want to. He wanted to understand one bezeri word as a bezeri did, simply by feeling the resonance of that pattern in his mind. At a deeper level the word became
town;
he left it at that and savored the pattern and color and movement.

Town.

The rest of the bezeri came out of hiding now and moved around the settlement. The more Rayat explored it, the more it looked like russet clay jars thrown on a potter's wheel and then piled up while still soft so that they sagged together in a random honeycomb. And now that he'd started to find positive elements in life underwater, he started to appreciate the beauty of his new environment. It was the blues and pinks
and violets that struck him most. The carnival colors almost glowed; they painted everything from weed and coral-like growths to a surprisingly wide variety of animals.

There were no large predators, according to Keet. The biggest seemed to be what Lindsay called the killer whelks,
irsi.
One of them edged into the settlement on its own, skittering along the silt on its front claws and gouging a wake behind it with its long tail. It looked more comical than menacing. But Rayat could imagine what a pack of them might be able to do. He swam up to it and it shied away from him, propelling itself off the seabed with spurts of water jetted out beneath it. Then it paused on an outcrop, testing the water with a fringe of bright orange projections as if it was playing an invisible piano.

“They don't have a lot of bottle,” said Lindsay. “You can scare them off with a bit of noise.” She shook her rattle hard. The whelk took off like a missile. “See? They're all mouth and trousers.”

“Odd that there aren't any big predators.”

“The whelks from hell are big enough.”

“But water supports big bodies. There ought to be something that fills the niche of sharks and orcas. Even whales.” Rayat thought of the land animals of Bezer'ej, or at least the creatures he'd seen on Constantine. “Maybe a marine version of the
sheven.
”

“Great,” said Lindsay. “They'd be fun.”

“I'll ask Keet.”

“I don't like the idea of a carnivorous plastic bag at the best of times, let alone a whale-sized one.”

Lindsay was almost chatty. Bezer'ej had a number of species that were no more than transparent sheets of digestive material that enveloped their prey;
alyats
could fly, and
sheven
lived in the bogs and streams. Yes, the idea of a bigger marine version was unsettling. Being engulfed and digested was a terrifying thought.

“Perhaps the bezeri will teach us to pilot those podships one day,” said Rayat.

Lindsay's tone hardened a little. He could hear it even under water. “I didn't think we planned to do any traveling.”

“Face it, you're going to want to visit David's grave sooner or later.” He planted the idea almost without thinking. But he was certain it must have crossed her mind. “And it's almost a hundred kay to Constantine. That's a bloody long swim, and you don't know what's out there.”

She stared at him. It must have been sunny on the surface; the colors around him were vivid and Lindsay's uniform pants looked navy blue again rather than black.

“Since when did you worry about my welfare?”

“You think I want to live on my own down here? Fascinating as the bezeri are, I'd prefer to have human company, even if it tends to get a little whiny at times.” There was no point in looking too friendly. She'd get suspicious. “Lin, we're stuck here. Let's try to get on.”

Too late. She had that wary look, head tilted back a little. “Why didn't you refuse
c'naatat
?”

“Because I didn't want to die. It's a pretty consistent motive in organisms. If you recall correctly, we were about to be tipped off a raft into the middle of the ocean at the time.”

“Yeah.”

“And why did you insist I come along to do the undead thing, then?”

“It was time you paid for what you did.”