“Aware enough to lodge a protest.”
“I hope they do not see it as a concession that might also apply to them.”
“Then perhaps we should remove the visitors now, whatever Fersanye says,” said Mestin.
“I am tired of killing, Chail.”
“The balance, Aras. It has to be maintained.”
Aras finished his netun jay and considered the last cake in the bowl. Mestin waved her hand at it. “Finish it. I’ll give you some to take back with you.” Yes, she was right, and not just because she was the matriarch. He knew humans. He had viewed every single scrap of information in the Christopher’s archive over the years, and he knew humans were expansionist, opportunist, and brutal to the weak and the different. His humans said they had fled that.
“Make sure that your contamination does not shape your judgment,” Mestin said. “Ensure that it is the wess’har voice you listen to, not the parts of you that are gethes. And see Sevaor on the way out. He misses you.”
Sevaor. The clan was distantly related to Aras, but Sevaor felt like close family sometimes. Whatever Aras did, whatever he became, Sevaor had a fondness for him: he was proud of his living ancestor. The prospect of outliving Sevaor, as he had outlived everyone he knew, never lost its sting. Even losing generations of human friends had not inured him to bereavement. If anything it seemed to be getting harder each time a corpse was left to the rockvelvets.
“I will,” he said, and accepted a bag of netun jay for the return journey.
Sevaor was monitoring the warning system, walking up and down in front of a room-width screen that showed isenj traffic between their homeworld and its satellite. The chart was largely static except for the occasional wandering point of yellow light that marked a drone vessel, or a red one showing a defense emplacement. He turned as soon as he scented Aras and held his arms out in greeting, then dropped them. He had forgotten, however briefly, that you didn’t touch a c’naatat. War hero, Restorer, Targassati—and freak. Aras did not want to be admired and respected at a distance. He longed simply to be touched.
“You should have told me you were coming,” Sevaor said. “I would have brought food from home for you.”
“Who do I know back home any longer?”
“Your kin, Aras. They worry about you.”
“I don’t know them.” They care for the idea of me, not the person I am. “They were born generations after I left home.”
Sevaor smelled faintly of hurt feelings. “So they were.” He turned back to the screen. “Your colony has left a message for you. The human ship is landing its passengers. Let’s hope your colony doesn’t tell them about c’naatat.”
“Awareness of it is one thing—owning it is another,” Aras replied. Please, Sevaor. The chances of becoming infected are so low. Just a hand. Please. “Nobody has taken it from me, and many have tried.”
“You don’t know how they will react.”
“They, right now, are just sixteen beings, and I can handle them if I need to.”
“It takes only one, Aras. If they acquire it, there’ll be chaos for them and for us. We don’t want another race of breeders like the isenj.”
“They’re doing very well on their own without any technical assistance from us.” Aras eased himself up from his seat, a wordless gesture that told Sevaor he was no longer in a mood to listen to him. It was not the mild chastisement that had irritated him; it was the physical distance between them. “I admit the technique would be worth an immense amount to them. It would be regarded as a wonderful benefit for the wealthiest in their society while the rest starved. That is what they call irony.”
Sevaor flicked the long braid of his mane over one shoulder and appeared to be concentrating on the screen. “Just be careful, Aras,” he said, and didn’t look back at him. “Please, come again and see us, won’t you?”
Wess’har were touchers. They embraced. They liked, needed to be crowded together. Aras could indulge none of that instinct. It broke his heart every time, and he would make sure the next time did not come soon.
“I’ll be careful,” he promised.
He found himself walking briskly out of the control room, back up the smooth-worn passage cut into the plain, and up to the fresh air. He was reminded why he avoided Sevaor and why Sevaor irritated him so easily.
He was so like his dead house-brother, and so much like the son he could never have.
But the colonists needed him, and need was a powerful motivation for a wess’har male without children or isan to care for. His humans, however bizarre and untouchable, were his family. Aras broke into a sprint and kept the pace up all the long way down to the shore.
8
You can’t catalog Bezer’ej from a hundred square kilometers of island. It’s like landing in the Southern French Desert and thinking the lizards represent life on Earth. There was so much we could see when we were coming in to land and this place is just a fraction of it. And we’ve got just this single opportunity to find out what we can from it. But if we don’t come across anything economically useful, it won’t bother me one bit. I have waited all my life for this.
SABINE MESEVY, botanist,
from her private journal
Shan walked as fast as she could back to the settlement. It was hard going in the higher gravity, especially after cryo, and by the time she got back to Josh’s house she was dripping with sweat. She flopped on the futon and caught her breath. Her distaste for Suppressed Briefing surfaced again; if it held any answers, it wasn’t yielding the ones she wanted. She had no expertise in alien contact, she was years away from getting new orders from home, and any time soon she was going to have curious and therefore potentially dangerous researchers crawling around looking for novel products and new markets. Where were the revelations from the SB when she needed them most?
She tried to concentrate. No, that wasn’t the answer. Let it go, let the memories drift back—or so they had told her the last time. The worst aspect of SB was that you could find it hard to separate real memories from past dreams.
They were both equally faint and confusing, and both snapped to the front of your mind with shocking clarity in exactly the same way.
One thing she was sure of was that Perault knew little about the aliens. There was no ponderous weight at the back of her mind when she thought of them—whatever they might be—and no sudden rush of memories triggered by the stimulus. She concentrated on what facts she had in hand: a territorial dispute in progress, according to Josh, and, as the colonists were alive and apparently very well, humans were tolerated. Or at least the colony was. There was no guarantee of a welcome for what might appear to be an invasion force.
The what-ifs were legion. She needed more facts, and the primary reliable source was the colonists. If they were going to get out of here without a diplomatic incident, she’d need Josh and his people.
She started to call up Lindsay on the comms link, then paused to marshal her thoughts. There was no point telling the commander the full size of the problem until she had more of a plan herself. She would give Lindsay the order to disembark five marines to bring the accommodation down to the surface using the second shuttle, leaving one behind with the payload, and set up a quarantine area. No point, she thought, having armed personnel ambling around and alarming the colonists—or the natives. It bothered her that she had no measure of the aliens, any of them. She felt like she had stumbled into a pub brawl without backup.
“Shall we brief the payload?” Lindsay asked.
“Yes,” Shan said. It would pay to make things look as normal as possible. “Warn them they’re confined to the camp until I give them clearance.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes—I’ll take one of the cabin units as my base. Josh and his family need their privacy.” And I need mine.
“Give me six hours. If we can’t prep for landing before then, I’d rather we waited until tomorrow so we have enough daylight.”
“Okay. I’ll get back to you in a c
ouple of hours with location coordinates.”
“The payload’s champing at the bit. They can’t wait to make a start.”
“Tell them they’re going to have to.”
“Very good, ma’am.”
Shan lay back on the bed again. The ceiling of the room was a circle of opaque light. It had lost all three-dimensionality for her, try as she might to make it a concave dome again. She stared up into it for a long time, and held her hands in a frame so that all she could see was the featureless glow above her. Black specks and filaments drifted across her vision. Any doctor could have removed them, but they were part of being wholly human and she tried to concentrate on them, just in case the distraction helped her recall more of the SB.
The colonists held one of the Earth’s largest banks of animal and plant tissue. We have to preserve that if it’s still intact. There. It was a memory, and a clear one: Perault with hands meshed on the table in front of her, worryingly earnest, not a politician at all. Well, she knew about the DNA bank anyway. Plenty of organizations had assembled similar ones, all banking biodiversity against extinction. It was even in the archives, if anyone could be bothered to look up Constantine.
They’ve made contact with sentients. But we’ve been told to avoid the planet. We have no idea why. We’ve not shared the information with anyone outside my circle.
Again, clear; and nothing hovering behind it, nothing to give her the feeling that there was more to be revealed. Perault knew almost nothing about the aliens, then—so why the SB? Why would they waste such an expensive process—two shots at 20,000 euros a throw and the personal presence of a cabinet minister—to tell her so little? The best explanation she could come up with was that they wanted to avoid even more attention from the scientific community by concealing the presence of new life-forms.
Hell, they were seventy-five years away. Who was going to come running to take a look even if they knew?
Why Perault wanted the mission to be undisturbed was another matter. She would be gone now, whatever now was. Shan glanced at her swiss and flashed up Earth time: everyone she had worked with would be dead too, maybe even McEvoy. It was a lonely thought. The nearest she had to a familiar friend was the antique, inanimate machine in her hand.
Shan wondered what sort of funeral Perault had been given. The woman was a Christian—yes, she’d told her that, too. Maybe a belief in the afterlife lengthened politicians’ game plans beyond the next election. Maybe Perault thought she was Noah.
Shan straightened her uniform and prepared to have a serious talk with Josh. If Perault had really wanted to play at arks, she’d probably have needed a terraforming team to sort out Earth before she could find dry land. The planet had been in a sad state when Shan had left. What it was like now didn’t bear thinking about.
Aras could see the new human encampment growing. From his vantage point on the crest of the ridgeway, he could take in both Constantine and the growing cluster of sparkling green boxes. It was only a temporary intrusion on the landscape. He didn’t have to let it irritate him, but it did.
Josh walked up behind him, crushing foliage at every step and sending bursts of sharp wet scent into the air. Aras didn’t look round. He waited for the human to sit down beside him, and they sat wordless for a while. Josh smelled calm.
“Matters are under control, then.”
Josh nodded, still staring ahead of him. “They’ve landed. Their commander seems sympathetic and in control. Actually, not their commander—their governor, I suppose. She’s a civilian police officer. I explained the limitations on taking samples.”
“If they have no capacity to leave the island, then we should be able to avoid any contact with c’naatat.”
“They had planned to stay no longer than a year or so. But their ship—”
“Their ship can start to restore itself now. Mestin has shut down the sentry system. They can leave any time.”
Josh went to put his hand on Aras’s sleeve and stopped. The humans avoided touching him too, even though they were at far less risk of contamination than wess’har. This was too much: two rebuffs in a few hours. He would have got up and left had he not realized the aborted gesture was a silent preamble to an awkward question. He had seen Josh do the same to Martin. It would be an awkward question in the sense that Josh would struggle to ask it for some reason. Aras had no such trouble. Humans’ hesitation to just say what they meant still disappointed him.
“Did you set out to destroy their cryo systems, Aras?”
“No,” he said, without thinking. “The defense net took the data it had from the probes and simply shut down everything it could identify as not being life-support. It was a technical problem.” He paused. “If we had intended to destroy the ship, we would have done so.”
Josh gave him that wide-pupiled look, the sort that the first humans had given him. It confirmed he was still an alien to them, however much his appearance had changed. “I had to know.”
“Whatever happens, Josh, it won’t be your responsibility.”
“We sent the original message.”
“You sent a warning. That’s not the same.”
“The Frankland woman says humans have discovered other aliens since our mission left Earth, but it’s not aliens that bring them here. It’s the planet.”
“Detected,” Aras said, correcting Josh almost without thinking. As if other species had no existence until humans chanced upon them and defined them, discovered them. “Have they ever met a species with a more advanced culture than theirs?”
“If you mean technology, no. Culture—well, in our past, humans have discovered other humans with advanced cultures, but with inferior technology.”
“I think I recall what happened to them. I will be fascinated to learn how these gethes deal with being in that position.”
Josh got to his feet and stood staring down at the construction work going on below. “I haven’t heard you use that word in a long time.”
“No offense meant.”
Aras glanced at Josh and wondered what would happen if he simply reached out and touched the man as he had his ancestor. Benjamin had accepted him, every aspect of him, in a way no other human had. Josh, friend as he was, had his limits.
Benjamin had held him while he roared in pain at his exile. He hadn’t cared about the risk. In the complex forest of complete recall that was wess’har memory, that event still stood vivid and separate and precious.
“None taken,” said Josh, and walked away.
The payload was getting increasingly restless behind the cordon, but not Eddie Michallat. He was busy just sitting there and watching.
The marine contingent, accustomed to long periods of inaction, busied themselves with construction and routine. Most of them had been in operations where there were disputed borders, and assumed long negotiations would have to take place before there was free movement. Maybe it all made sense to them, but it did not make sense to the civilians: Eddie Michallat sat between two scientists from competing corporations who had met each other for the first time less than two days earlier, and soaked up their frustration. At least they had a mess area to sit in while the kit was being unloaded, and coffee to occupy themselves, even if the toilets were of the chemical kind until the plumbing system was hooked up.
Eddie welcomed the lull. He was cooped up with people who had nothing to do but chat and express their frustrations, and in idle chat lay the raw uncut gems of stories. There were no rivals to elbow out the way, either; he could pick them off at his leisure. It was a journalistic chocolate factory, with him as the only taster around. It was bliss.
He hoped there would be enough hours in the day to get it all covered. “There bloody well ought to be,” said Olivier Champciaux, the geologist. “This planet’s got a thirty-hour rotation.”
Every time Eddie wandered outside there appeared to be a new section bolted on to the habitation. It had started with two cubes on low supports, joined by a short section of corridor that sl
otted together like a kid’s toy. Section by section, it grew into a cubist necklace with two strands, an inner chain of cubes for the living quarters, the outer chain for the communal and work areas. All the walls were an incongruously soothing pale green, almost pearlescent. Eddie inspected them carefully, running his hand down the smooth surface.
“Nice pastels to keep us serene in close confinement?” he asked.
“No, the panels are impregnated with solar and chlorophyll cells to give us enough power and even out oxygen levels,” said Sabine Mesevy. “But it’s a nice color. Besides, we each have a cube of our own. Didn’t you read the mission spec?”
“Not all of it.”
“This is a sealed unit. If we have to, we can put this down in pretty inhospitable territory and it’d feel like home. But this world is Shangri La by planetary standards. There’s almost enough oxygen.”
But not quite enough, Eddie decided. The engineer marines found the oxygen adjustments were malfunctioning, and set about re-calibrating the panels while everyone breathed raw air. There definitely wasn’t enough of it. By the end of the second day, he felt like a tourist skier, with a throbbing headache and muscle pains that made him think he had flu. He was desperately tired and yet his sleep was fitful, and he wasn’t the only one. During the second night he could hear footsteps outside his cabin, and the hum of conversation from time to time. Nobody else was getting much sleep either.
From time to time the EFU’s zampolit, Shan Frankland, wandered in to check if they had degenerated into cannibalism. She had looked workmanlike in her fatigues, but when she came in wearing her police uniform it struck him how big she was. Not plump big, lovely womanly big, but tall, athletic, hard big, with a set to her shoulders that suggested she would never, ever try to talk her way out of trouble if there was a quick and physical alternative. Her highcollared black coat definitely said get-out-of-my-face, and not very politely at that.
She came in six times in the first day to say she was having “talks” with the local leaders and that she would keep them “updated” on the situation. He could hear her coming each time: her boots pounded on the composite flooring as she walked up the passage. Eddie decided he wouldn’t care to cross her. When she spoke to the group, she fixed someone, anyone, with her stare. When she wasn’t talking, she was taking in everything round her with the absorbent gaze of a detective. Then the penny dropped, and he recalled where he had heard her name before.
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