Matriarch

by Karen Traviss

  Conversation died. Rayat wished for a crystal clear window so he could stare at the astonishing array of life that he knew had to be out there somewhere. It was all tantalizing smears of color and movement. Either life here was more resistant to cobalt than he’d thought, or the spread of the fallout had been limited—or the Eqbas were cleaning up the area at a rate close to miraculous.

  Don’t use that word. Stick with the science. Learn.

  “Where are we now?” Lindsay asked.

  “I was under the impression that you were the naval officer.”

  “You’ve got the charts. I’ve still got a compass, for what it’s worth. Let’s try working together.”

  “All stop, then.” Rayat peered at the sand within the azin shell, then eased the soft hatch open and slid out to get his bearings, comparing the landscape to the sand images. “The seabed looks about right.”

  “We’re still heading north.”

  “You could surface.”

  “Won’t help. I don’t remember the landmarks from last time. And my watch shattered, so we can’t do the old submariner’s trick and time between features, and I don’t know what speed this thing is making anyway.”

  It was easy to forget that Lindsay Neville was actually Commander Neville—fired or not—and that she’d had to satisfy the FEU navy of her seamanship skills before being trusted with warships. Eventually the sea in front of them grew darker and a cliff loomed and filled their field of view.

  This was why the bezeri called islands Mountains to the Dry Above. From this perspective, it was exactly what they were.

  “I think this is it,” said Lindsay. She took the podship into a climb, holding parallel with the slope, and it porpoised on the surface, falling back to float with just a fraction of its bulk above water. Rayat could see the fierce sunlight. He realized how much his perception had changed in a matter of a month. Yes, he was sure it was about a month now.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to beach this. I hope I get it right, or it’s a bloody long swim back.”

  Neither of them said they were worried about breathing air again. Neither of them mentioned David’s grave, either.

  “Get on with it, then,” said Rayat.

  Lindsay dropped her shoulders as if limbering up for something and then her lights flared. The pod responded and shot forward like a speedboat, silent except for the weird hammering of the jets’ bubbles under the hull.

  “Good God, woman—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Steady on—”

  The darkness ahead—a blurred slice of black and gray and amber—expanded rapidly and suddenly the impact beneath him lifted him bodily and slammed him against the deckhead like he was landing on a trampoline facedown. His teeth smashed together and he tasted blood. He was totally disoriented.

  You can’t die.

  You’ll heal.

  Shut up.

  He didn’t know what podships used for brakes. He found out.

  Friction.

  “Oh God…” Lindsay groaned.

  But the podship was stationary even if the water inside was still attempting to move forward, making the bulkheads bulge and pulse as it slopped back and forth.

  Water. Bloody good impact bag.

  He waited until all movement around him died down. They were still in a bulb full of water.

  “Who’s first?” he said.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Okay, me.” Rayat put his hands against the soft catches—little interlocking projections—that held the hatch closed. “You realize that once we readapt to air, we have to drown all over again, don’t you?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, just do it,” she snapped.

  He counted to three and pushed. The hatch opened with a faint ripping sound like a zipper and water spilled out, but his head was still submerged. There was nothing to do now but to just sit up and put his head above the water.

  And breathe.

  It was agony.

  Rayat drowned in oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide and traces of other gases. Bezer’ej’s atmosphere had once been inhospitably short of oxygen by Earth standards, but now there was far too much and he couldn’t get it into his lungs. He could hear his gills slapping as they opened and closed in frantic attempts to glean oxygen from the dry air.

  He drew a long agonized scream of breath and his chest felt as if it was exploding. Ribs creaked: lungs blossomed. He felt every single cell changing and tearing loose.

  Oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

  He fell out of the pod and his face hit pebbles, cold wet pebbles. Water poured out of his mouth and he coughed and choked. And he was suddenly heavy. He could hardly move.

  And then heat seared through him.

  You think this is bad? Think what space was like for Frankland. Body fluids boiling. Lungs rupturing. Desiccation and cryogenic freezing, all at once, fully conscious.

  He hated thinking of her but it was inevitable. For all he knew, her memories were surfacing in his brain and this wasn’t what was happening to him at all, just her nightmare intruding for a few moments.

  Lindsay might well have been scrambling clear of the podship too. He didn’t know and he didn’t care, because he was…a fish.

  Rayat swore—yes, he swore to God, to Allah, that when he got back to Earth he would never take up angling because now he knew what it was to be a fish plucked out of water and left to drown helplessly in air.

  People who wouldn’t dream of drowning a puppy in a barrel of water think nothing of killing a fish the same slow way.

  Was that his own thought? It could have been Shan’s. Or Aras’s, come to that. Rayat never had those kinds of thoughts before. He lay on his back, staring up at the blue sky and scudding white clouds, heavy and wet and gasping, and he was a man again, a mammal that breathed air.

  C’naatat was terrifying, magnificent, beyond his imagination. His mind raced with possibilities for it. And as soon as he conceived them, the dread chilled his stomach.

  No, this couldn’t ever be trusted. He was more certain than ever that he would do whatever it took to keep this out of the wrong hands. It was more than his mission. It was his duty.

  “That was…worse…than I’d imagined,” said a voice he barely recognized.

  Lindsay Neville was standing over him. She sounded very different in air. She was a ghost: the sunlight penetrated her like a stained-glass window left to grow filthy in a neglected church, her photophores and reflectors providing brilliant splashes of color.

  “If we find a mirror,” he said, “try not to look.”

  F’nar, Wess’ej

  The steady influx of ussissi evacuated from Umeh had made little difference to F’nar. Shan was surprised how effortlessly they blended into both the city and the landscape. Where did you hide hundreds of stroppy chest-high meerkats?

  They melted into the little settlements half-buried in the plain. Some stayed in F’nar: a few went to Bezer’ej with the Eqbas.

  Shan walked along the terraces to Nevyan’s home, twisting Ade’s ring on her finger and savoring the slow surprise of managing to feel comfortable with two males. Neither Eddie nor the marines had said a word about it. But she knew damn well that there had to be some prurient interest and comments she never wanted to hear.

  It didn’t feel weird or kinky or even thrilling. It was normal. She wasn’t sure whether that was because Aras wasn’t human, and so didn’t count as an extra, forbidden man in the part of her brain that told her monogamy was right and anything else was wrong, or because she wasn’t human any longer.

  Either way, she was comfortable and so was Ade. Aras—she had never doubted that Aras would settle into a marriage like that because he’d wanted a housebrother so badly. No, Aras was happy. He urrred a lot, that oddly appealing little variation on the paternal purring that wess’har males did when they were pleased with life, like a human humming tunelessly. Marriage: Jesus, that wa
s the weird bit. Humans needed events and markers in their life events. Ade needed to put that ring on her hand and she’d needed to wear it, and that caught her by surprise.

  She felt guilty about that. She felt weak because she enjoyed thinking of herself as someone’s wife, and wondered if she’d ever admit that even to Ade. They were happy now, as happy as three fucked-up, exiled, badly damaged people ever could be. She’d make sure it stayed that way. It was part of her self-imposed therapy to steer her away from tackling anything—world-saving, crime-busting, avenging, the bigger the risk the better—rather than face the fact that she was a piss-poor excuse for a human being most days.

  She rapped on Nevyan’s door with her knuckles, counted to ten and pushed it open.

  “I’m glad you came,” said Nevyan.

  Giyadas sat at the table beside her, every inch the work-shadowing student matriarch, mane bobbing as she cocked her head. Shan wondered if she’d ever get to know the three sons in Nevyan’s adopted family: they always seemed to be out working or learning in the communal schoolroom beneath the city.

  Nevyan smelled agitated. Shan swung her leg over the bench and sat astride it, facing her. “What can I do for you, Nev?”

  “The Eqbas are handing over bioagents to the Northern Assembly.”

  “I heard they were going to discuss it.” Shan was aware of Giyadas staring intently at her, so she suppressed her scent slowly and tapered it off to nothing. “I seem to recall we did that too. DNA donor number one here.” Jesus, if you couldn’t trust Eqbas to know what they were doing with biohazards, there was no hope for anybody. Then her next careless comment simply hijacked her and she marveled that she could say it and mean it. “What’s the problem with that?”

  What’s the problem with biological weapons? Did I say that? Well, dead’s dead. Don’t be so bloody prissy.

  “I hope they’ve made sure they can’t reverse-engineer it.”

  “Do you want to talk about regret, Nev? If so, I’ll join you.” Shan held up her hands to indicate she wasn’t up for a fight. Without a scent cue, it was probably hard for Nevyan to tell from her voice these days. “I don’t know how I got from EnHaz to being Biobomb Woman. I told myself you were the good guys and that I could trust you to use science responsibly.”

  “As I trusted the Eqbas.”

  “Have they actually betrayed your trust yet?”

  “No. No, they’ve just done things that I would never do myself, and I have no rational argument beyond the fact that I think they’ve gone too far with the isenj.”

  “Once you start messing with this stuff it’s really hard to work out where the line lies between far enough and too far.”

  “I can see that line,” said Giyadas. “One requires the isenj to do something wrong for them to be killed. The other doesn’t.”

  Shan paused for a moment. It was sobering to argue moral relativism with a child, especially one who actually understood it better than most human adults.

  She hoped she wasn’t going to find herself outgunned at the end of the debate, because the core of her self-respect was that everyone else was less intellectually able than she was. Thick bastards, most people. She’d found it hard at first in F’nar because—unlike on Earth—she wasn’t feared, and she wasn’t stronger, and she wasn’t more ruthless, and she wasn’t smarter: she was pretty average by wess’har standards, except for her aggression and capacity for taking massive risks.

  Well, that’s too bad. If the kid’s smarter than you, you learn something. Deal with it.

  “Okay,” said Shan. “The wess’har view is that the isenj have no right to be on Bezer’ej.”

  “Yes.” Giyadas had cocked her head to the right, fascinated. Her pupils were fully dilated. “They’re despoilers. Polluters.”

  “But they were there before you. They’d had a colony there for some time.”

  “But they killed bezeri by their irresponsible increase in numbers and their pollution and the bezeri asked for our intervention.”

  “So Aras and the army wiped them out and restored the planet. So how is that different to the Eqbas responding to the isenj request for help?”

  “We were not asked to intervene by those suffering.”

  “I think Esganikan asked me once if I waited for a murderer to ask for justice for his victim before I would arrest him. What if the victim can’t ask you?”

  Giyadas considered the statement carefully. Shan had a sudden, powerful sense of being as fascinated by the kid as the kid seemed to be with her. She was watching the development of a mind of astonishing capacity; what Giyadas would be like as an adult was frightening. The sheer elation of fencing with her verbally and of being close to defeat didn’t demoralize her, as she’d expected, but made her want to encourage the child, nurture that mind, look after her…

  Oh, fuck.

  Shan didn’t have a maternal bone in her body. But she suspected this was an insight into what parents felt. It was massively seductive.

  Nevyan watched, scent neutral. Giyadas appeared to finish ruminating. “It happened before we arrived here. How far back do we look to decide if a species is in need of balancing?”

  “Wrong’s wrong. Why does time make a difference?”

  “Nobody asked us to intervene there.”

  “Okay, Targassat taught that Eqbas Vorhi was wrong to force its view of a balanced environment on other worlds, and that your ancestors couldn’t take it on themselves to police the galaxy.” Shan thought it was interesting that the nearest wess’har had to a religion was the thoughts of an economist. Targassat had been an analyst of resources on Eqbas Vorhi 10,000 years ago. “But she also said that if you have a choice, you have to make it, and those with most choice have most responsibility.”

  “Responsibility for restraint. Just because the Eqbas can make a world do what they want, it doesn’t mean they have to. Because how do we know that the people on that world want what we think they want, or what we think is best?”

  “What about creatures who can’t ask? Nonhuman animals on Earth? The gene bank. Wess’har and Eqbas agree on that.”

  “No people…no animal wants to die or be used or to suffer pain.” Giyadas struggled with the word: wess’har had no concept of a division between species like humans did, and no word for animals except people. “It seems obvious that we should help them.”

  “Okay, but what about plants? Plants on Earth try hard to avoid being eaten. They defend themselves with poisons and spines, so they probably don’t want to be eaten. But we all eat plants here. Where’s the line now?”

  Giyadas chewed that over visibly. “We have to eat to live. We don’t have to eat other people.”

  “Some animals have to eat others.”

  “Gethes don’t. We don’t. We make the choice because we have one.”

  “So, the line is necessity?”

  “The line,” said Giyadas, “is necessary.” Shan thought for a moment that the child had just stumbled over an unfamiliar word and then realized where she was heading. She felt as if someone had poured ice down her neck. “Because if we don’t place a line somewhere, then anything is acceptable. There’s an excuse for any excess. We draw a line so that we’ll always be able to see there should be one.”

  Shan sat back and almost forgot she wasn’t in a chair. Without even thinking, she applauded. Giyadas and Nevyan stared at her clapping hands.

  “Amazing,” she said. The child had put Shan’s moral gyro back in balance. Giyadas had reminded her what she’d always lived by. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

  Shan had never actually liked a child before. The kids she’d known always needed a good kicking to point out the error of their ways. They were little evil versions of adults who got away with murder because some whining liar of a lawyer said that kids needed to be given a chance to change. But they would never change, and she knew it.

  And now she was sitting with a kid who she actually felt affection for, affection that—whether she wanted to face it or
not—was maternal in its intensity.

  Giyadas was still staring at her, head so far on one side that it looked comical. Nevyan seemed less taken with the diversion and fixed Shan with her hard citrine stare.

  “Do you feel Esganikan has the situation under control?”

  Shan shrugged. “She’s given the isenj a good hammering.”

  “I knew little of the World Before when I asked for their aid, and I admit that I was expecting—greater power.”

  “Well, one ship blatting a continent is pretty good going. It got my attention for a start.”

  “Have you asked her how many resources Eqbas Vorhi is committing to the Earth adjustment mission? How many vessels?”

  “Not really.” Now that’s a bloody oversight: how did I miss that one? “If she said ten ships, how would I know if that’s enough? I don’t know the first thing about their capability, other than it’s overwhelmingly impressive and it looks like magic to humans.”

  “I feel the Umeh readjustment is needlessly destructive because she has insufficient resources to do the job properly, by degrees.”

  Nevyan often surprised Shan as much as Giyadas did. She was a strategist, of course: wess’har females were. They were the planners, the ones who saw the big picture. Nevyan had learned a lot being at Mestin’s side in the Bezer’ej garrison.

  “Well, she said as much.” Shan wondered if she was defending Esganikan because there was no case to answer or because she was afraid Nevyan might be right. Shan wanted the Eqbas to be omnipotent too. “There was no way she was going to mount a ground offensive. Don’t forget she was diverted from another mission, like Shapakti’s team. They weren’t equipped or tasked for this. And they’ve met resistance, so they fight back. What else do you expect?”

  Giyadas was watching intently. Shan was careful not to set a bad example: the kid learned like blotting paper.