Matriarch

by Karen Traviss

  And one of them was Mohan Rayat. That was something worth worrying about.

  Bezer’ej: Bezeri settlement

  Whatever mistakes the bezeri had made in their past didn’t make Lindsay feel any less responsible for bringing them to the brink of extinction.

  The last bezeri—forty-four now—were contemplating their slow decline and watching their species fade from the universe, a terminally ill patient forced to see the look on his doctor’s face. Should have used a bigger device and done a quick job. She waited while Saib examined the azin shell record.

  Rayat looked triumphant. She hoped it was simply that he enjoyed being a clever boy and finding things out. Somehow the idea that he thought it served the bezeri right was sickening.

  “What does it mean, Saib?” he asked. His lights flashed and pulsed simultaneously with his speech like someone signing for a deaf person as they spoke. “Am I right about the dates?”

  Saib’s tentacles caressed the shell record, lifting it to the light and pulling it close to his eyes. Eighteen thousand years ago. I could be more specific but I would need to consult another record to be certain.

  “And what does it mean?”

  Explain.

  “The blue ovals are another species, aren’t they?”

  Birzula.

  “What happened to them?”

  They were all killed, every last one of them.

  Lindsay respected Saib’s lack of euphemism. She waited for Rayat to frame his next question. So far, he was managing not to lead.

  “Who killed them?”

  We did.

  “Ah…so if this pictogram means hunt, then I take it you hunted them to extinction.” He paused and Lindsay felt it might be for effect, and the only person who could be affected by human speech tricks was her. Bastard. “They were your prey.”

  Saib suddenly became a rippling cascade of red and violet. They were not our prey. They encroached on our hunting grounds and we found less to eat every year. They were too big, dirty and dishonest and stupid. We hunted them down and slaughtered them all so that they would never take our food again.

  Rayat actually leaned backwards a little as if he was taking a step away from the angry bezeri. Lindsay was stunned. She stepped in front of Saib, her lights pulsing.

  You wiped them out deliberately, she said.

  Yes.

  Do you feel regret? She certainly did.

  Never.

  Is that because it was long before your time?

  No. It was because they were inferior.

  The answers were not what she expected. Rayat found his composure again.

  “Saib, what happened to the other large animals in the ocean?” he asked. “We hunted a lot of ours. Whales, creatures like that. Did all yours become extinct?”

  The food ran out.

  Lindsay’s image of the harmless bezeri struggling to survive against the carelessness of invading isenj and then the brutality of her own decision had taken a hell of a blow.

  She needed to rethink things. Her tidy logic of cause and effect, crime and punishment, good and evil, had been shaken out of order. She needed to look at the pieces again. She swam back to the storage chamber and found herself cutting as cleanly through the water as a seal, without the slightest conscious effort. She settled down among the stacks of shell records and let the shock take her.

  After a few minutes the entrance darkened and Rayat drifted slowly towards her. He came to rest against the intricately carved wall that she suddenly realized was an image glorifying the triumph of the bezeri over the rival birzula.

  “Well done, Commander,” he said. His expression had shifted a fraction from triumph—yes, he loved to nail down a story every bit as much as Eddie—to bitterness. “How does it feel to ride to the rescue of the Nazis?”

  17

  Unless we want to maintain a permanent garrison on Earth—and that will stretch us greatly, given the distance—we’ll need to identify gethes who can be taught to run their own affairs sustainably. From what you tell me of the Constantine colony, they seem very well suited for this. I think you should consider giving them governmental responsibilities when you reach Kamberra; Deborah Garrod strikes me as an ideal isan for the role.

  What are Christians, by the way? If they share this belief in an invisible guardian, they should work very well with the others who like this myth, like the Muslims.

  CURAS TI,

  senior matriarch of Surang,

  in a message to Esganikan Gai

  F’nar, Wess’ej

  If you were pregnant, you couldn’t get any more pregnant than you already were. But Shan didn’t go to bed that night.

  How do I tell them?

  She couldn’t face it. If she told Ade or Aras—especially Ade—then it would be not so much sharing a problem as dragging him into hers. She spent the night on the sofa, and hoped they thought she was fretting about Vijissi.

  And it was a problem. Whatever she did would have an unhappy outcome sooner or later. There was no chance of her miscarrying: c’naatat didn’t make that kind of mistake. It wanted its host to live. If it had learned to resist being removed from the host, then it wasn’t going to give in easily.

  She lay staring up at the ceiling and missing the days when a truly pitch-black night on Bezer’ej could summon up a light display from her optic nerve. That had been before she contracted c’naatat. The constant noise of wess’har in their warren homes reminded her of living too close to a bar with the constant nocturnal chorus of drunks. But eventually she dozed off.

  Something touched her face and she sat bolt upright, smacking her forehead into something hard, heart pounding.

  “Shit,” Ade whispered. Her low-light vision and infrared picked him out: he had his hand to his nose. “Sorry—”

  Poor bugger: he’d tried to kiss her. At least she hadn’t pulled her gun, not that any damage would be lasting. “’S’okay. Did I break anything?”

  “Nah.” He knelt down next to the sofa and stroked her hair. “Is it me? What have I done?”

  “Not you, love. Not Aras either. Go back to bed.”

  “Something’s wrong. Come on. Tell Ade all about it.”

  “What’s not wrong? War, invasion, Vijissi, genocide, the full Armageddon tour. If you see four blokes on horseback, tell them to fuck off.”

  “I don’t even know where to start,” he whispered. “But I’m here.”

  It just made it worse. Ade was a man who deserved to be a father; he’d be good at it. She had to tell him because this could only be his child, however impossible the whole thing looked. Aras, like all wess’har males, would see it as his too. The continual exchange of genes gave him a real stake in it. If they only hadn’t all been c’naatat, she’d have accepted the situation without a second thought and made the best of it for Ade’s sake. She was too old and too pissed off with the world and too far from good mother material to do it well, but she’d accept it.

  If only. It wasn’t a phrase she used often.

  But it was the equivalent of three in the morning and her courage failed her. She’d work up to it, but not now.

  “I’ll never be angry with you again,” she said. “You’re a bloody saint. Don’t let me forget it.”

  She noted that Aras hadn’t attempted to coax her off the sofa. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. Wess’har males just knew when to leave isan to it.

  Shan lay awake for another hour trying not to hear the sounds of wess’har leading lives denied to her. Given what she had that the rest of creation didn’t—especially Vijissi—she felt petty and ungrateful. But her mind, which had once been uneasy at surrendering her body to the occupation of an unseen and unknown colony, was in turmoil at the presence of a real, definable, utterly unknown life in her. No primeval bond was there. No wondrous transformation or communion had taken place. She was just a woman who was pregnant despite her plans and precautions, and that brought her down to the level of Lindsay Neville.

  She
dozed off again. It was almost light when she opened her eyes and Aras’s gardening tools were gone. He and Ade always made an early start on the crops; creatures of routine, just like her. She got up and prepared herself for a difficult day.

  But difficult came in many forms, and she was far from the only person with problems.

  Giyadas turned up at the door and remembered to knock, even though it was open.

  “Shan, have you seen Vijissi?”

  On Wess’ej, small children could wander cities safely on their own. The community was their parent, and they were miniature adults anyway. Shan felt a knot of proud affection form in her chest and then the realization that she was gestating one of these, an alien thing known as a child, crashed back down on her and killed the sensation.

  “No, sweetheart,” said Shan. “He didn’t want to see me. I’m staying clear until he wants to talk.”

  “He’s very unhappy.”

  “Perhaps he’s gone to see his clan.” Some chance.

  “No, I checked.”

  “Ah.” A note of concern had crept in. “Are you searching for him?”

  “Yes. We all are. He got up this morning and left, and we haven’t seen him since.”

  I did that kind of thing. Shan remembered being so fucked up by the idea of her condition that she’d sometimes withdraw to a deserted spot to mull it over for a few hours. It was on for months. Aras often pulled her out of it.

  I did that kind of thing. She’d also dealt with a lot of mispers, missing persons, one of those bland little police terms that actually meant abducted, murdered, drowned, had enough of the job, can’t cope with the kids, sick of life. So she knew how to organize a search.

  “Tell you what, I’ll come and help,” said Shan.

  It was what she needed. She found herself alone most mornings while Aras and Ade were tending the crops or whatever housebrothers did when she wasn’t around. She usually liked her own company, but she didn’t want it right now.

  I’m pregnant. At my age. Minus a uterus, by a bloke who’s been sterilized. Nobody can accuse me of being careless.

  Giyadas sniffed as Shan pulled on her jacket and reached behind her back—pure muscle memory and old habit, nothing more—to check her gun was secure in the back of her belt.

  “You’re carrying an isanket,” said Giyadas. She sniffed again, head cocking left and right. “Why haven’t you told us?”

  After the stunned split-second had passed, Shan crashed into a trap of identification. Isanket. A little girl: Ade’s daughter. The knowledge crushed her and for a few moments she wasn’t sure how she would pull back her shoulders again and carry on as normal.

  She suppressed her scent again. She always did when she went out. So wess’har females could smell a pregnant sister up close, and now she knew they could even spot the gender of the fetus: but then females were rare, outnumbered four or five to one by males, and it was probably useful for an isan to be able to spot a sister with that kind of cargo.

  “Giyadas, this is important.” Shan squatted down level with the kid and reminded herself that she had the subtlety and intellect of an adult. “I don’t want anyone to know. Only Nevyan knows, and I haven’t told Ade and Aras yet. Please don’t mention this to anyone. You know what the implications are for people like me.”

  “Yes. I’ll say nothing. I understand.”

  Yes, wess’har kids did. They even understood secretive, deceitful, inconsistent gethes like her.

  “Thank you.”

  With the cocktail of genes she’d picked up from Aras and Ade via c’naatat—which seemed to be perfectly designed for transmission back and forth through oursan—she might have been carrying a little female that would be just like Giyadas.

  As if I need this to be any harder than it already is.

  “Off you go,” said Shan ushering Giyadas ahead of her. “We’ll find him. Don’t worry.”

  Don’t worry.

  It was the kind of terrain that was a pain in the arse if you were doing a door-to-door search. F’nar was a maze of tunnels and alleys, but there were no woods or bodies of water to comb, so Shan took a section along the western edge of the broken caldera, Giyadas at her side.

  It felt comfortable.

  Don’t get used to this.

  It ambushed her. She’d always been repelled by human kids, not just unmoved. Alien infants—like animals, like anything that wasn’t the self-obsessed, destructive, lying, violent apology for a monkey—slipped under her radar. They were clean. She could cope with a Giyadas Mark II. This wasn’t the end of the world. She had no idea how she’d deal with it, or how any of them would handle the problems, eternal problems, that went with it, but if it had to happen then it could be dealt with.

  It was tidy coppers’ talk: Who’s dealing? Whose case was this, who had the files, who did she have to liaise with about this incident? All were distilled down to who’s dealing. Language, even in her thoughts, helped put some cool distance into the process.

  She showed Giyadas the ropes. She taught her how to check in with the search team and how to look for things that might not be seen from certain angles, and how to be systematic so you didn’t miss anything. It was probably obvious to a wess’har, but it felt natural and rewarding to do it anyway. It was enjoyable.

  Her swiss chirped. Since the ITX had been fitted, she could link to wess’har networks, and she felt a lot more in control. It was Mestin.

  “Shan Chail, we’ve found him.”

  Her stomach flipped. Her mind defaulted to securing the scene for forensics and informing next of kin. She assumed dead. “Alive?”

  “But he’s in the armory below and he has—”

  Everything should die in time. You didn’t need to be a detective to work that out. “He’s holed up, hasn’t he? He’s going to do something stupid.”

  “I shall talk to him.”

  “You keep him talking, nice and calm, and I’ll be right there.”

  Shan broke into a jog, Giyadas at her side, and she found now that she could even run down the steep steps that linked one level of terraces to those below. She’d fallen down steps a few times in her regular human days when she was in pursuit on foot. Come to that, some of her prisoners had a habit of falling down stairs, too. She missed the clean certainty of those days: guilty and not guilty, law-abiding and villain.

  The less attractive industrial side of F’nar—the workshops, utility plant and warehousing—lay buried in tunnels that ran for kilometers beneath the caldera. Shan reached the chambers that housed F’nar’s very old but thoroughly efficient defense hardware and saw there was a small group of isan’ve with Mestin and Sevaor.

  Mestin was trilling very softly. Shan could hear her telling Vijissi on the other side of the blast-proof safety doors that he would be cared for and that he had nothing to fear.

  The negotiation was taking place over her virin.

  Shan could hear Vijissi’s voice.

  “I know I have nothing to fear. I am perfectly calm.”

  Giyadas went to her grandmother’s side. Shan had a completely random thought; as all Nevyan’s family was adopted when their isan died, then there were other grandmothers, genetic ones, ten of them out there somewhere. Then she snapped back to the present. She held out her hand for the virin.

  “Mestin, can I talk to him?”

  The matriarch cocked her head. “You understand better than I do how he feels at this moment.”

  “Probably,” said Shan. “But apart from the fact that I got him into this mess, I’m also trained to deal with suicide attempts.”

  By six-legged alien meerkats? You stupid bitch. Listen to yourself. You’re just trying to save the day again. You’re addicted to it. Anything rather than face your own problem.

  Mestin handed her the virin and she took it anyway. She could have used the swiss. But it paid to use one dedicated channel, without interruptions. People who were close to killing themselves could be spooked by multiple voices breaking in. It was rec
eiving audio only.

  One voice. One reassuring voice: one friend.

  “It’s Shan, mate.” She listened for clues from the ambient sound. Best voice, okay? All calm. Suddenly her pregnancy seemed unimportant. “Want to talk?”

  Pause. A click and a rustle. “If I talk, this will be harder for me.”

  “Nobody wants to make it harder, Vijissi. But if I say I know what you’re going through, you know that’s true. Don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know what you’ve been through, too. You and me. We’re the only ones who know what it’s like. And I’m fine now.”

  “I’m glad. I’m not fine.” Click, rustle. “I know you want to help, but I’ve given this much thought and I know what Targassat would counsel.”

  Some ussissi were actively Targassati in outlook. They didn’t just fit in with wess’har society, they embraced it. And Shan knew Targassat well enough—by reading her essays, anyway—to know that she wouldn’t have welcomed c’naatat. It was anathema. It was imbalance and excess.

  “Vijissi, you’ve got a weapon in there of some sort?”

  “This is an armory.”

  “Yeah, but shooting yourself won’t work. Ade emptied a clip into me. No permanent damage. So maybe it’s time to have a talk about it out here. Trust me, it looks a lot better if you take a bit of time and get used to it.”

  “I have a fragmentation device. I learned what would kill and not kill us by seeing you shot, on more than one occasion, actually.”

  He’d been there when Shan had pulled the pin on a grenade and held the catch down to force Chayyas to release Aras. Shit, she’d taught him how to kill himself properly.

  She switched tack. “Yeah, but you’ll just injure yourself with that and get pissed off if you don’t place it right. Look, it’s not going to do the job. Put it down and let me tell you about Shapakti.”

  She could do this. It was a basic copper’s task. Talk them down. Get them of the roof. Put the gun down. There’s nothing so bad that it can’t be sorted out, son.

  “Who’s Shapakti?”