Matriarch (17 page)

Esganikan gazed at Shan, unmoved. Shan stood stony-faced, fists on hips. It hadn't crossed Ade's mind that she might have a problem with collateral damage: she certainly had no trouble killing people. She could use her fists, too. Violence was far from her last resort, and frequently her first. He had enough of her memories now to prove it.

“You're right,” Shan said. “This isn't my business. I'll stay out of it.”

“I meant no offense.”

Shan held up her hands in acceptance. There was still an edge to her voice. “No problem.”

“Do you want to observe further?”

She shook her head and glanced down through the transparent deck. “I've seen what I came for. We'll head back to Wess'ej.”

“I'd like to stay,” said Eddie.

“Yeah, you do that,” said Shan.

There was an awkward silence and then the ship turned slowly, skewing the image in the deck through 90 degrees and Esganikan trooped off with Aitassi, followed by the bee cam and Eddie.

“Good call.” Ade caught her hand and squeezed it for a second, just long enough to remind her that he was hers without embarrassing her in public. “It's some other bastard's watch now.”

“I can't afford to get in a ruck with her. If that bloody dominance pheromone kicks in and she cedes to me, I'm in trouble.”

It was messy politics between creatures neither of them fully understood. “War's dirty, Boss.”

“Yeah. Don't think I underestimate the difference between us.” She blinked rapidly, hit by either realization or embarrassment: he wasn't sure which. “Remember I'm just a copper.”

“When are you going to tell Eddie about Lin and Rayat?”

“Not yet. I think Nevyan needs to know first, and that's going to be hard enough.”

“I think word will get around.”

“I know. It's hard to decide which pile of shit to tackle first, really.”

“And we ought to call Aras and let him know we're okay. He frets.”

“I'll do it.” Shan took the
virin
out of her pocket. She held it awkwardly. It really was like a bar of transparent soap; operating it needed finger placement on a par with guitar fretwork. “I miss my swiss. First thing I'm going to do is to get it back off Aras and have Livaor modify it for
me so I can use it on the ITX. He did it for Eddie, so he can do it for me.” She seemed to be making an effort not to look at him. “I'm not good bystander material.”

“You can't run the universe.”

“I know, I know…,” Shan fumbled with the
virin
and held it in front of her in both hands as if it was going to lunge for her throat. “But I can't remember a time when I wasn't responsible for putting things right.”

“First things first, Boss. Let's get our own house in order.”

“That's what I'm doing now.”

The lights shimmered inside the
virin
and Shan's hands reacted, pulsing violet light back. Ade couldn't shake the impression that the bioluminescence was trying to communicate. Aras's voice was projected from nowhere.

“Are you safe?” he asked.

“Of course we're safe, sweetheart. Just wanted to let you know we're on our way back. Seen enough here. The shooting's started.”

“I have news for you.”

Shan seemed focused on the
virin's
lights. “I've got a surprise for you, too. Garlic—”

“Vijissi has been found alive.”

Shan stared at the play of violet light in silence, expressionless. It was one of those pieces of good news that looked great on first glance and then came horribly unraveled when you thought about them carefully.

“Oh
fuck,
” said Ade.

F'nar: clan home of Mestin, former senior matriarch, mother of Nevyan

“Where is he?” said Shan.

“This way,” said Mestin. “I thought you would want to be notified.”

“You bet. It's my fault he ended up like this.”

“I was the one who told him to stay with you.”

“Why does everyone want to get into a guilt contest with me?” Shan followed her down the warren of passages cut into the rock. “Sorry. Trying times.”

The flagstones were polished smooth like the foyer of an upmarket hotel, bathed in gold light from a system that gathered sunlight and channeled it deep into the tunnels cut into the caldera: another piece of desirable wess'har tech that would have made them wealthy had they wanted to sell it to Earth.

They didn't. Commerce wasn't part of the way they thought.

Shan took a deep breath at the entrance to the chamber. It was like every raid she had staged, every door she had smashed down to make arrests, every closed portal that threatened to hold nightmares behind it. But wess'har didn't have doors, and all she had to do was steel herself to enter and see a creature in the same terrible state that she'd been in when Nevyan recovered her from space. Mestin gestured for her to go in, then walked away.

Vijissi looked like a little dead animal that had been hit by a vehicle and left to decompose and dry out at the side of the road. There was absolutely no flesh on him; he was just minutely pleated light brown skin shrink-wrapped onto bone. A tube hung from the corner of his mouth. From time to time his eyes fluttered open and their matte black surface simply added to the impression of roadkill.
C'naatat
had used every scrap of tissue it could spare to maintain life in hibernation in the most hostile of environments and the result was something akin to mummification.

Jesus,
thought Shan.
I looked like that once.

She was aware of the members of Vijissi's pack now waiting at the door of the chamber, a dozen or so adults and their young. Ussissi had a distinctive scent, like feathers. Their claws made skittering sounds on the stone as they milled about outside, and they were anxious: they wanted him home, but they feared
c'naatat
more.

If he had a mate, no female had come forward. Shan had little idea of the family lives of ussissi and she wondered why she'd never asked.

“You poor little bugger,” said Shan. Would he remember drifting in space like she did? There was no telling how a ussissi experienced
c'naatat
because the parasite seemed to have a new plan of improvements for every host it colonized. It was certainly imaginative. “Can you hear me, Vijissi?”

He stirred but didn't wake. A faint scent of powdery musk and fruit alerted her: Nevyan was coming, and Shan decided it was as good a time as any to try to repair the growing rift.

You saved me, Nev. You didn't give up looking for me when everyone else thought I was dead. Damn, if you're not my friend, who is?

Nevyan sat down beside her by the makeshift bed. Wess'har preferred to sleep in alcoves, a remnant of their warren-dwelling origins. “I insisted on returning as soon as we found you. But Serrimissani wanted to carry on looking for him anyway. She was right.”

Shan knew guilt all too well. But it was rare for a wess'har because they dealt in outcomes, not should-have-beens. “He's alive now. You couldn't have known he had
c'naatat.
”

“I hope he forgives me.”

It was a remarkably human sentiment and Shan wondered if Nevyan meant it the same way.

“Three months, six months…you've no real sense of time out there.” Shan hoped that was true of Vijissi. “You're not even sure who or what you are.”

And what had Vijissi come back to? Aras and Ade had been at her bedside when she regained consciousness—both
c'naatat
like her, with no fear of holding her or sleeping with her. She returned to a life that was possibly a hell of a lot better than the one she would have had on Earth. But Vijissi was the only one of his kind—just as Aras had once been. And she knew what that isolation had done to him.

“Still,” she said, continuing her thoughts aloud, “I know what he's going through and I'll give him whatever support he needs to get through this.”

“I think there's a limit to how much support a human can give a ussissi,” said Nevyan.

“Yeah.”

“We fed him exactly as Ade fed you, with a tube.”

“That's all you can do.”

“Are you going to tell me how things went on Umeh?”

“How do you
think
they went, Nev?”

“I can't smell your scent. I assume they went badly.”

“Let's just say I found it sobering.”

Nevyan put her hand on Shan's sleeve and tugged gently. Shan followed her outside, wanting to say something of meaningless comfort to Vijissi's pack; a large female, chest-high to Shan, stood in their way.

“What will happen to him,
Shan Chail
?”

“He'll recover.” She slipped effortlessly into her Superintendent Frankland persona, adept at breaking bad news to next of kin. “You know what
c'naatat
is. I won't pretend it's easy to deal with. But I've managed it, and so will he. He's alive. That's all that matters.”

Liar.
How could she trot out platitudes so easily?

“But he is my
son.
Does this mean he cannot father young? That he cannot mate?”

The answer was out before she could stop it. “Yes. I'm afraid it does.”

Does it? Really,
does
it? Yes, or else everything you've done is for nothing.

Vijissi's mother sank down on her haunches, visibly defeated. Shan hadn't realized Vijissi was so young and it stunned her for a moment; ussissi had none of the visual clues she used to gauge a human's age.
Shit, he's just a kid.
She'd thought of him as an elder statesman of some kind, a diplomat: but he wasn't. For some reason his lost future crushed her.

She wanted to be optimistic and say that Shapakti might be able to do for Vijissi what he couldn't do for Aras, and remove
c'naatat
from ussissi cells. But if he couldn't, it was a cruel false hope. She swallowed hard.

Damn, I didn't even tell Nevyan about that. It was my own private dilemma. It'll have to stay that way.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

Nevyan waited until they reached the terrace before resuming conversation. It was hard to know where to begin. And Nevyan, just like Vijissi, was far younger than she seemed, too, dealing competently with situations for which she was hardly equipped. There was nothing like seeing an old head on young shoulders for making you feel inadequate.

“When we found you alive, it was a cause for rejoicing,” said Nevyan. “Now we find Vijissi, and it's a source of unhappiness.”

“Ask Aras how well I reacted when I found I was infected.” Shan thrust her hands deep in her pockets and stared out into the pearl bowl of the city. On this cloudy late afternoon it looked more like newly polished pewter. “And I got used to it.”

“With
jurej've.
With males who bonded with you.”

“What are you saying? That we make Vijissi a little
c'naatat
friend and it's all okay?”

“No. That wouldn't be the answer.”

“Aras coped with being alone for centuries. Somehow, Vijissi will too.”

“Let's resume our talk about the Eqbas.”

Shan decided now was as good a time as any to blurt it out and get it over with. “No, let's stay on the subject of
c'naatat
for a few more minutes. It's not just Vijissi. The bezeri wanted assistance so we gave them Lin and Rayat. And to make sure they survived to do the job, we gave them a dose.”

Nevyan's scent of agitation was suddenly as strong as if she'd sprayed grapefruit oil in the air. She stood absolutely still in that wess'har alarm reaction.

“After all that happened to you, all that you did, you infected them
willingly
?”

“Yes.”

“
We.
”

“
Yes.
” Shan was aware of her reflex of bracing her shoulders and dropping her arms to her sides when she was cornered. She found she was doing it now. “We did.”

Nevyan cocked her head to one side. Shan stared back at her, waiting for all hell to break loose.
Great way to mend fences. This kid's a real friend, remember?

“I am…
surprised
that you took that decision so easily and without discussion.”

Wess'har always said what they meant and had no concept of tact or kind little lies. Shan wasn't sure if Nevyan's
show of unwess'har diplomacy was actually shock. It didn't matter. What was done was done.

“But I did,” said Shan. She hated herself for defaulting to the don't-argue-with-me Shan in an instant. “And I'll deal with it. Esganikan's aware of what's happened. So you don't need to worry about it, okay?”

They stared at one another for a few more silent seconds.

“I'm still disappointed,” Nevyan said at last. “And I will
remain
disappointed. How did Esganikan react, since you told her before you told me?”

“She's responsible for Bezer'ej now. She needed to know.”

“That wasn't a rebuke.”

“Okay, she didn't seem bothered.”

“And yet you find something in common with the Eqbas.”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Nevyan fixed her with that topaz stare, pupils snapping flower-cross-flower. Shan didn't notice wess'har pupils these days any more than she noticed Ade's or Aras's, but now they seemed suddenly so alien for a few seconds that she found herself wondering whose eyes she was seeing this through. It was almost like the moments of brief consciousness when she was drifting in space, waking and seeing but not knowing who or what she was.

“Shan, do you
want
to see the Eqbas invade your world? Is that what you want?”

“
This
is my world.”

“Now you know why I wanted the Eqbas to leave Wess'ej. It wasn't easy asking them to move their camp to Bezer'ej after I summoned them, but we admit when we're wrong and seek better outcomes. Why don't you see that the Eqbas are wrong to interfere with Earth?”

Nevyan was ignoring the problem as long as it wasn't in F'nar's backyard. Shan couldn't stop herself. “Whoa there, you wanted the human threat contained. You wanted balance for the destruction on Bezer'ej. That's
interference.
”

“But proportionate. The balancing of those responsible.”

“
Those responsible
will all be dead or senile by the time we get there. Working by your rules of guilt, the stupid bastards
who equipped
Actaeon
with cobalt and neutron ordnance aren't even responsible. That leaves Rayat, Lin and one spook minder back at base who authorized Rayat to deploy nukes, and anyone who fails to use their authority to bring the guilty to justice. So you go twenty-five light-years to sort out fewer than perhaps twenty people?”

Nevyan's pupils were a perfect black poppy on a gold field. She was utterly still. “We?”

“Figure of speech.”
Yes, it was. Wasn't it?
Ussissi trotted past them on the terrace, making their way back to the settlement just outside F'nar. Shan waited for them to be out of earshot; it wouldn't do for them to see her arguing with the senior matriarch of F'nar.

“Generalization. Wess'har. That's what I mean by
we.
Here's what I see. We fucked a chunk of Bezer'ej and the bezeri with it.
C'naatat
is something humans will always want, no matter how hard it is to get at, and if we got here once, we'll get here twice sooner or later. Add the fact that we've screwed our own planet, and that some people back home want radical intervention, then I think the Eqbas have made the right call.”

“You're wess'har. You live Targassat's philosophy.”

“Eqbas are wess'har too.”

“If they don't act as we do, then regardless of their genes, they are
not
us.”

It was ironic that the wess'har view of identity seemed so liberal—that you were what you did, nothing more—and yet was so beset by orthodoxy. Shan reminded herself that she had to choose which mindset to think in at any given moment, wess'har or human, because the two didn't mix. They never would.

“Nev, let's just say that they have a view of right and wrong, and they live it,” she said. “What's the point of believing something if you don't act on it?
You
do.”

“Intervention for the sake of it is not justified.”

“You
summoned
them.”

“And the isenj needed only to be confined.”

“Ual invited them in just like you did. What are you doing,
imposing your definition of appropriate response? What did your ancestors do when they realized the bezeri were asking for help to kick out the isenj? You responded.
With force.
You defended Bezer'ej for five centuries—with force. You're not native to this system, so how does walking into someone else's system with a new rule book fit Targassat's teaching? Where's the line?”

“I see a line, though, and I draw it.”

“Just tell me where your line is, then.”

“Intervening in a world where there are no people being exploited.” When wess'har said
people,
they meant any species,
all
species; there was no distinction for them between man and animal, intelligent or otherwise. Shan had never been sure what the opposite might be of
intelligent life.
“The isenj only cause themselves problems—except when they stray off their world.”