Matriarch

by Karen Traviss

  “Okay, if things had been different, I’d have wanted nothing more,” he said. “And while it was a kid it would have been wonderful, and then it would grow up and need someone to love but not have anyone, ever. I know that. I understand that.”

  “But that doesn’t stop it hurting you.”

  “Or you.”

  “I didn’t want a kid.”

  Aras had been quiet and still, his agitation scent no worse than if they’d had a minor tussle over dishes.

  “Wess’har can’t have unplanned conceptions,” he said. “It’s not how our bodies work. The idea of having a child you don’t want is alien to me.”

  “God, I knew you’d never forgive me for this.”

  “Forgiveness isn’t relevant. I gave you no choice about being c’naatat. This is a consequence of my decision.”

  “For Chrissakes, let’s not start on some sodding interminable academic debate about guilt and causality, shall we?” Shan was suddenly very white-faced, pupils dilated. “I took a knife to myself. I used a grenade. I took a life that hadn’t asked for it. I robbed you two of a child. And it’s going to hang over this marriage like the stink of shit for a long time. I get it wrong and other people pay the price.”

  Ade couldn’t bear it. “No. It was a bloody awful choice between something quick and painful and something permanently painful. I’d have done the same if I’d had the guts.”

  No, Ade knew he wouldn’t. But he still knew why she did it, and he thought she was mindlessly brave to go through the pain, and he wanted to scream at her for shutting him out and not letting him do what a husband should. He couldn’t pin down one fixed emotion now.

  “Wasn’t guts,” she said. “It was shame. And fear. And now I have to tell Nevyan.”

  But it hurt. He hung on to the fact that he still had Shan. He had her back, back from death, and he was never going to let grief over a child that could never have been get in the way of that. He was determined not to give in to the screaming voice that said something had been taken away from him, and that he should rage at her.

  The rest of the day was like a wake, with the topic never mentioned but the loss almost coloring the air around them. Shan tinkered with the grenade harpoon that the wess’har had rigged for her to use to hunt down Rayat and Lindsay: Ade managed to detach totally into his weapons instructor state of mind for an hour or two. It helped. Aras joined in. Somehow all their voices had changed, and they were getting to know strangers again.

  Even the tea tasted unfamiliar.

  Shan practiced reloading the chamber late into the night.

  “I promise,” she said, “that one day we’re going to have a life so normal and boring and devoid of crisis that we’ll have to take up knitting to stay sane.”

  She had an early night and slept in the cupboard of a room that was once his. Aras made flatbreads in distracted silence.

  “I thought I knew her,” said Ade. “I mean, we share memories, right? You can’t know someone any better than having their memory. I thought she’d tell me everything.”

  Aras slapped the bread on the hot range. The disks of dough puffed into cushions. “I know her mind too, and she’s done things without telling me. She donated her DNA to make a bioweapon, one that might even be used on Earth now, and yet she’s strongly opposed to such unnatural science. She’s an uncomplicated woman negotiating a complex world in which she finds fewer certainties every day.”

  “But she knows us. She should know we would have been there for her.”

  “She knows herself, and she knows that would have made her decision harder. She also thinks we need protecting from unpleasantness. While motive is irrelevant in outcomes, it’s certainly relevant in understanding someone.”

  “I don’t want to be angry with her.”

  “Then don’t be.”

  “What about you?”

  “I grieve. And I would have done as she did. I’ll find it hard to look at her sometimes because of what night have been, because she was ready to let me go if c’naatat could be removed from me, just so I might father a child.”

  “It’s hard not to think of it as my kid.”

  “Our kid.”

  Ade had some way to go before he felt like a wess’har instead of just not being surprised by their attitudes and practices. But he would work at it. He tried to get to sleep that night wondering if he would have had a son or a daughter, and imagining the child growing up and facing a life in isolation; hunted or shunned, celibate, outliving everyone, and where the only people who were like them had a lover, and they never could.

  Vijissi had reached the same conclusion. My kid—our kid would have faced the same. Remember that if you start to resent Shan for this.

  She’d said it was time he saw her for what she was: not a goddess at all.

  Maybe the kid could have had c’naatat removed. But nobody knew if Shapakti could really do it outside a flask in his lab.

  Okay.

  It didn’t occur to him until he was close to nodding off that he had no idea whether the child would even have looked human.

  20

  Australia has confirmed it will go ahead with its pledge to provide facilities for a visiting alien fleet due in 2407. The FEU Foreign Minister said troops stationed along the Sinostates border would remain there until the unilateral hosting offer was referred to the UN for what he called “an inclusive global debate.” The Sinostates says its mutual aid agreement with the FEU will remain suspended until troops are withdrawn.

  Meanwhile, environmental groups meeting in Calgary have called for an indefinite moratorium on all leisure air travel in a bid to reduce further degradation of the atmosphere. The FEU and the Americas described the ban as “unworkable” and claimed it would threaten nearly a hundred million jobs in service industries worldwide. Canada has already banned nonessential flights from its airspace.

  The Business Agenda news in brief, BBCHan 4622

  Ouzhari, Bezer’ej

  The Eqbas could have been any human biohaz team as they worked on the beach, features shrouded in loose pale gray suits.

  Rayat burst gasping from the water and lay struggling for air as they laid aside their tools and clustered around him. They must have known who and what he was. They made no attempt to touch him, let alone help.

  He counted up to thirty to keep himself from panicking. It’ll pass soon. The pain in his chest wasn’t as bad as he remembered; his body was learning. He coughed up mucus and water and lay flat on his back as they watched, heads tilting and bobbing as his gills closed and his lungs filled with air again.

  Rayat rolled onto his side. The sand was fine and mostly white, and it was only when he realized that what he thought was black grass was the charred remains of organic material that what he’d done hit home.

  I killed the island. But I still didn’t kill off c’naatat.

  He eased himself into a sitting position. The clean-up team seemed to be taking great interest in the bioluminescence in his hands.

  “Any of you speak English?” he asked, not expecting a response. He wasn’t sure if they could even hear him through the layers of protective fabric. Keep it simple. “I request asylum. I have something to show you.”

  Of course: they didn’t understand a request for asylum. They had a much less complicated take on law and civil rights. And he was a criminal as far as they were concerned, one who wouldn’t get a call to his lawyer.

  “You can only be Doctor Rayat.” The voice had that double tone like the wess’har. “I believe I saw you a few months ago.”

  Rayat hadn’t expected that; but he was running out of things that could shock or amaze him now. “I am. So you know I carry c’naatat.”

  “I may be able to help you,” said the voice. The Eqbas flicked the filter back from his visor, revealing a rectangle of dull mid-brown skin and copper eyes. “I have done research. I am Da Shapakti.”

  “Sorry?”

  Shapakti looked him up and down. “I am a scien
tist.”

  “I had no idea it was reversible.”

  “In humans, perhaps. Not so easy for wess’har.”

  Rayat suddenly had to rethink his universe. His whole mission had been about acquiring the parasite and denying it to other governments.

  A superweapon with an antidote.

  That changes everything.

  His mind went through a leapfrog sequence: unique asset—unable to acquire—deny asset to others—acquire asset—seek to find route to deliver asset to command—identify countermeasure to asset.

  So what did he struggle to get back to the FEU government, c’naatat or the means to neutralize it? Or both? His task had now doubled in complexity. It wasn’t as if it had been an easy one to begin with.

  Shapakti encased him in a plastic bag that really did make him feel like he was being digested by a sheven. It was a decontamination device: he’d walked on the surface of Ouzhari unprotected, and although the radiation couldn’t kill him and the cobalt levels were already falling at extraordinary rates, he was a risk to others if they didn’t clean him up.

  The plastic bag clung to the side of the Eqbas ship, a dull blue torpedo-shaped vessel with red and blue chevrons pulsing along its sides and the occasional wash of something like a violet coronal discharge that swept the hull at regular intervals. Then he found himself sucked through the hull itself and he was standing on a deck in a confusing maze of flimsy half-visible bulkheads and lights, surrounded by a smell of chemicals and something not unlike yeast extract.

  Rayat was completely disoriented. He tried to focus by reaching inside his shirt and taking out the azin shell maps that showed the bezeri’s war crimes.

  “You need to see this,” said Rayat. “I have proof that the bezeri carried out the extermination of another intelligent species on this planet.”

  Shapakti—minus his hazmat suit now—took the maps and gazed at them as if they were works of art, which they were.

  “We’re returning to the Temporary City,” he said. “Aras will be very interested to see these, having been closest to the bezeri.”

  “He’s there now, is he?”

  “He arrived yesterday with Ade and Shan Frankland.”

  Shapakti held the maps under a brighter light and looked lost in admiration. He might just have been trying to read the symbols, of course.

  Rayat was suddenly uneasy. “Why are they here?”

  “Shan said she was going to hunt you down and kill you,” said Shapakti. “And now we have only to find Lindsay Neville for her. We have you already.”

  Temporary City, Bezer’ej

  Shan was back to normal. Her face was pure hard-set murder and Ade made sure he kept the grenade launcher well out of her reach.

  “If you were looking for a lift back to Earth, arsehole, you’re out of luck,” she said.

  Rayat looked like a man rescued from a raft after weeks at sea, minus the cracked skin and exposure burns. He was ragged and exhausted: and he looked faintly translucent. Ade was reminded briefly of horror movies where characters dematerialized. Someone seemed to have interrupted Rayat halfway through the process.

  “I’m just completing my mission,” he said. “Like you completed yours. Although now I’m not entirely sure how to interpret it in the light of new data, and I’m not sure if I can safely ask for guidance on that from the Grid now.”

  They were waiting on Aras. It was a regular little c’naatat tea party: only Lindsay was missing. Aras was poring over the azin shell maps and his scent was getting stronger and more acidic by the minute.

  “You okay, mate?”

  Aras raised his head. “How did I never see these? Why did I not know these existed?”

  “Are they genuine, then?” asked Shan.

  “Yes.” Aras sagged visibly. The poor sod had dedicated five centuries to protecting Bezer’ej and now he’d been told—by a spook—that the species he nursed back from the brink of their last extinction had a murky past on a par with any nation on Earth. “Why did I not know about this?”

  “Same reason I don’t know what’s in the Bodleian Library,” said Shan. “Never had reason to look, and I wouldn’t know where to look without a good reason anyway.”

  Wess’har had a very clean, clear view of the universe. Humans might have shrugged off a genocidal past as just part of growing up as a nation, but wess’har never would. That made them more alien than their two voices and two dicks and weirdly pretty seahorse heads.

  “They’re no better than the isenj in their way,” said Rayat. “And the isenj didn’t set out to slaughter anyone, not that wess’har care about motive. The bezeri did, and they still seem to think it was okay.” He gave Shan a little half-smile. “Not that I’m imposing my cultural morality on them, of course.”

  “We live in a galaxy of right bastards, then, don’t we?” Shan said. “I’ll never be out of work.”

  Rayat really looked as if he understood her for a second. “Nor me.”

  Ade watched the exchange between them and didn’t like the brief comradeship. It vanished again as fast as it had sprung up. Shan didn’t look quite as incensed as she had before, though. But she was smart enough to outmaneuver Rayat if he was playing one of his games again.

  “Okay, what happens now?” he asked.

  “I was going to execute you,” Shan said calmly. “But now I’m going to let Shapakti play with you and see if he can extract c’naatat from your cells and leave you standing. You’re the first human specimen I’ve been prepared to try that on.”

  “Ah, the anti-vivisectionist, aren’t you?”

  “I like to think of this as therapeutic intervention with a risk factor for the patient.” Shan didn’t blink but Ade could read her at a much more subtle level. “I’m getting better at negotiating the gray areas of life and death now.”

  “Well, let’s get cracking, shall we?”

  The bastard never showed fear, Ade had to give him that. He wondered if the spook ever crapped himself or threw up like he did. He doubted it.

  “First, let’s find Little Miss Perfect,” said Shan. “I know your game and it’s actually not that much different to mine. But she’s a fucking wild card.”

  “We all throw in our lot with some tribe or other—even you, Superintendent. She just picked a group of Nazi squid because she felt guilty. A sort of Stockholm syndrome.”

  “Just take me to her.” Shan stuck her head out the door and warbled in eqbas’u, then stepped back into the room and fastened her jacket. “You don’t have a tribe. Except maybe spooks. Or do you?”

  Rayat opened his mouth as if to say something and stopped dead, looking as if he’d heard someone say something, someone who wasn’t there. Ade had never seen him do that before. He had no idea what went on in his head just then, but if he was acting, he was the best.

  Spooks were, of course.

  “What happens if I survive the extraction?” asked Rayat, all cool detachment again.

  “I haven’t made my mind up,” said Shan, checking her 9mm like she’d missed slotting bad bastards, as she called them. “I’m such a girlie.”

  Ade let her have the grenade launcher back once they were settled in the Eqbas submersible and diving for the seabed. Ade wondered why Rayat wasn’t more set on stealing Eqbas ship technology, because it was a lot more use than c’naatat: the bloody stuff they used could shape itself into spacecraft, rafts and submarines.

  He leaned back, closed his eyes, and concentrated.

  “Nee-loor-ee-khoor.” Yes, he could do it, both tones, two voices. “Nee-loor-ee-khoor.”

  Shan grinned at him, lips parted in surprise. It was the first time he’d seen her look happy in a while.

  “Clever boy,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Very clever boy.”

  Bezeri settlement, south of Ouzhari

  The submersible made a few passes over the bezeri village but there was nobody visible. Rayat knew there were usually twenty or more elderly bezeri who stayed there while the younger o
nes went out to gather food. Maybe something had driven them inside. Whatever it was, it certainly hadn’t been a large predator.

  “You’re not going to piss me about over this, are you?” said Shan. She shouldered the launcher. Rayat wasn’t sure if he was disturbed or impressed by the fact that whatever weapon she handled, she looked like it suited her. “Just get the bitch out in the open.”

  “So you shoot her, but I get to be the lab rat as a reward.”

  “I’m getting soft lately. Yes.”

  Rayat liked the idea of staying alive. What he didn’t like now was not being sure what his mission was—or more to the point, how he should interpret it. Things changed, but you hung on to your objective to stay sane and focused; this kind of work was not for quitters.

  His task had been to investigate rumors of “invulnerability,” secure c’naatat, and prevent its falling into anyone’s hands except the FEU government. That included European businesses, even the friendly helpful ones who supplied the government. The c’naatat mission was asset denial.

  If I take this back home, I need to take the technology to remove it too.

  If I succeed with that, then there’s a source of the parasite and a means to remove it. And that makes it a viable tactical weapon, not a strategic one; it makes it more commercially viable for other uses, too.

  Everyone would have wanted a dose, until the consequences hit home.

  But everyone would definitely want it if it could be controlled.

  Rayat had kicked the idea around in the last few hours and his logic had told him what his gut first thought: that this made c’naatat a bigger threat for Earth, not a lesser one. He was clear what his mission was now, and he took duty seriously. His duty was to keep the thing here.

  Asset denial.

  It had taken some time coming, but now Shan, Lindsay, Aras, Ade and himself all had a single objective—to stop c’naatat being exploited anywhere else.

  If he could do that as a regular human, he wasn’t sure. But at least he was now clear that the last thing he should do was to go home carrying the parasite.