Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  “Whoa, what—” Shan began.

  Aras cut her off. “We understand the burden we carry,” he said.

  Shan simply looked at him and her lips pursed as if she was about to speak, but in the end she said nothing. Mestin guessed that Shan had little idea what was happening to her and that she had—for once—been surprised into silence. The two c’naatat exchanged glances. Mestin could detect nothing beyond Aras’s agitation and arousal.

  It was unimportant. As long as they were bonded, she cared little how they felt about it. Two unmated adults would create unrest in F’nar society, c’naatat or not. She watched them go and turned to Vijissi.

  “I would like you to look after Shan Chail when she appears to require it,” she said. “And whether she welcomes that aid or not.”

  Vijissi paused, bit on a netun with a dramatic snap of his teeth, and hissed like escaping steam.

  “I shall,” he said.

  Utility. Aras considered the word. Without reservation. There was a time when he had been told that too—several lifetimes ago, and not quite in those words, but it had been just as unqualified, and equally simple to accept. Difficult times made those decisions easy.

  He thought of Cimesiat and all the other c’naatat troops who had made the honorable decision to end their abnormal lives, and wondered if he would have agreed so readily if he were asked to serve again today.

  Shan was subdued. She walked a little way behind him. As they passed along the pearl-walled terraces to his old home, wess’har paused to greet him with trills, pointing him out to their children. C’naatat troops had been heroes. Nobody here forgot that.

  And he was the last of them.

  “You’re really angry with me, aren’t you?” Shan said.

  “No. Not at all.” He glanced over his shoulder: she smelled very good indeed, wess’har good, and that was a fragrance that had not beckoned him in centuries. He tried to ignore it. It wasn’t fair on her. “But you’ve been here less than sixty hours and you’ve already destabilized the city government and ousted a senior matriarch. I dread to think what you could achieve in a season.”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “Yes.” Maybe he could sit her down and explain things to her. Perhaps Nevyan might. “Why did you confront Chayyas?”

  Shan made that puffing noise of annoyance. “To stop her frying you, of course. Did I have an alternative?”

  “Perhaps waiting to see what would happen?”

  “Yeah, and it was me she put a hole through.” There was a slight tremor in her voice. “I made the choice and I’ll live with it.”

  Silence. But her anger only made her more powerfully appealing. They carried on their way around the caldera, a progress slowed by more wess’har stopping Aras to say how significant, how wonderful, it was to see him. Most had never actually seen a c’naatat before, let alone one as extraordinarily different as Aras. Their hero-worship stopped short of actually touching him.

  His rooms were at the far end of the top terrace and looked out not only on F’nar but also to the arid bronze landscape outside the caldera. It had taken him years to cut it out of the escarpment a little at a time and line it with stone fragments. When he pushed on the entrance door, thick with the deceptive glamor of undisturbed tem deposits, he half expected to see a family in residence. But he suspected nobody would occupy a c’naatat’s home, however long it had been abandoned.

  It was empty. It was also completely clean and smelled of freshness and water. Someone had been in to prepare it for him. There were evem tubers on the open shelves and a variety of boxes beside them.

  Shan followed him in. “How long did you say you’d been away?” she asked.

  He calculated briefly. “Just over a hundred and twelve years.”

  “You’ve certainly got a loyal home help.”

  “I don’t know who did this and I probably never will.”

  Shan seemed overtaken by delighted surprise. “Humans break into empty houses and loot them. Wess’har break in, do the housework and leave groceries.” She laughed, a totally artless peal of laughter. It was rare to hear her do that. “You lot are going to put the likes of me out of work. Amazing.”

  “We have a sense of communal responsibility.”

  She wasn’t mocking them, he knew. But she still had a lot to get used to. He slung his pack onto the hip-high chest that served as a table and pulled out a knife, glad that she had brightened for the moment.

  “I’ll cook dinner and then we’ll talk, yes?”

  Shan watched him warily. “Yeah. I do have a few questions.”

  F’nar was not Aras’s home. He wondered if he should have headed north, to Iussan on the Baral plain, where he had been born—born normal—and where people hid their homes as carefully as he had hidden Constantine from view. It was devout Targassati country; or at least it had been, centuries ago, before he left for the last time. F’nar society was less rigorous and more conspicuous in its habits. It was soft. You didn’t have to look hard for evidence of its existence. But it was probably a more sensible choice of home for humans easing their way into wess’har life.

  Shan appeared to have worked out that there were few rooms by human standards. While he sliced the evem, she paced from room to room as if calculating something. He had excavated only as much space as he needed, and that meant a main room where the living and cooking and reading was done, a cleansing room, and a small alcove for storage.

  “Mmm,” said Shan, looking round with a carefully blank expression. “Studio living. Nice.”

  It was a warm evening and he was already missing the crisp winter in Constantine. He left Shan to examine the vegetables and fruit and went to clean himself in the washroom while the evem soaked in broth. When he came back out, squeezing the water from his long braid, she was attempting to make sense of the foods in the crate. It was clear that being helpless wasn’t something she was used to. She couldn’t even activate the cooking range: she peered at it from every angle and her face became flushed.

  “I have a hell of a lot to learn,” she said. “And not just wess’u.”

  “You serve those raw,” he said helpfully, and took a bunch of green bulbs from her. “Why not watch me?”

  “I should be making myself useful.”

  Aras prised her fingers off the cooking implements and steered her towards one of the benches. “Sit and watch.”

  “I know you’re pissed off with me. I can’t do more than apologize.”

  “I am not angry with you.” It wasn’t anger she could smell, but he had to pick his moment to explain that to her. This wasn’t it. “My actions brought us to this point. Not yours.”

  He was ashamed of chiding her for impatience. She had been willing to trade her life for his, however foolish that was. And he had been a fool too: he had robbed her of normality and peace and home when he thought he was saving her life.

  “But you came for me,” he said.

  “Eh?”

  “You didn’t abandon me. You were as good as your word.”

  Shan looked down at nothing in particular. She did that to disguise the times her eyes betrayed her apparent calm. She wasn’t very good at it, although gethes might have been fooled. It was the same look she had when he had first told her about being a prisoner of war, a kind of painful embarrassment. “Yeah, well, I never could stay out of a fight, could I?”

  “It was a very dangerous and foolish thing to do.”

  “You’re welcome. Glad I could help.”

  “Why do you take such risks for me?”

  “You’re a good man, Aras. You’re also my only friend.”

  He watched the evem as it simmered and rolled slowly in the currents of the yellow-stained water. He recalled sitting on a plain on Bezer’ej telling Shan about the c’naatat parasite for the first time, ready to cut her throat with his tilgir if she looked likely to betray the knowledge to the scientists of Thetis.

  She never knew the thought had crossed his mind. She
had trusted him. Not confessing that to her carved a constant pain in his chest.

  He glanced back at her. Her normal don’t-piss-me-about expression, as Eddie called it—set jaw, unblinking gaze—melted for a few seconds into a slight smile.

  Why her? Why save her? Mestin had asked him, and he wasn’t sure until that moment. Now he knew. She filled almost every void in his distorted life: his instinctive needs, so long suppressed, were being met. She was a little girl, an isanket, in need of care and education; she was an equal, a house-brother who could provide comradeship; and she was—whether she knew it or not—an isan, a physically powerful matriarch who was the source of protection and life in the family.

  And she knew what it was to be isolated and alone. It was a heady combination.

  Aras struggled not to dwell on the idea. “Chayyas would have exacted a very high price from you,” he said. “Mestin’s will be even higher.”

  “I expect I’ll get my money’s worth out of her, too. Both of us are in over our heads. Level playing field. I find that reassuring.” She made an impatient gesture towards the range. “Come on, dinnertime. Isan’s orders.”

  Ah. He would have to discuss it. “You don’t have to be isan if you don’t want to.”

  “I’m happy to cook.”

  “Isans don’t cook.”

  “What are these responsibilities Mestin says I have, then?”

  “To make decisions for the household, to participate in the running of the city, and to protect your males.” Mestin seemed to think they had already coupled: it had been the usual way of transmitting c’naatat. “The other matters need not bother you.”

  “Why?”

  “They are of a sexual nature.”

  Shan made a noncommittal sound and looked away. He wasn’t sure how to interpret that. He was also sure he wasn’t going to ask. She watched him prepare the vegetables and tubers, repeating the name of each in wess’u as best she could, and she was an isanket again and he stopped thinking of what couldn’t be.

  Bezer’ej was in its full phase that night, a wonderful pale blue and terra-cotta moon streaked with silver. After dinner, Aras spent a long time on the terrace staring at it and wondering what Josh and his family were doing now. He hoped they would all understand why he had left. He longed to return, but Shan was here, and all his instincts anchored him to where she was.

  He tried not to think of Mestin’s household, of Chayyas’s household, full of children and love and normality, and it hurt. On Bezer’ej there were no reminders of what he had sacrificed. He needed to go back.

  Aras went back inside the house. Shan had settled down on a pile of sek covers in the corner of the room with her jacket rolled up under her head, one hand gripping it as if she thought someone might snatch it from her while she slept. He could see no lights and no claws: c’naatat had tired of the changes for its own inexplicable reasons. Her hands were human again.

  Her boots—very clean, shiny from constant buffing, black—were standing neatly against the wall. If she hadn’t been resting on the jacket, he would have tried to repair it before she woke. She set great store by being neatly dressed. The bullet hole in the jacket bothered her.

  Aras listened to her rhythmic breathing for a while and studied the lines of the muscles that ran over her shoulder and down her arm. Maybe he would work out what to say to her by the morning. A few strands of her hair had escaped from the fabric tie that held it in a tail, and he thought better of smoothing it back from her face.

  “Teh chail, henit has teney?” he said quietly. No, he had no idea how they were going to work this out. “Do you really think of me as a man? Or am I one of your helpless animals like the gorilla?”

  He almost wished she hadn’t told him that story. But he would have discovered it anyway, along with the flames and the sickened rage that were already surfacing alongside his own memories. The more traumatic and significant the event, the more likely it was to filter through. Failing to help the primate had definitely gouged a permanent scar in her mind.

  Shan looked exhausted rather than peaceful. She twitched occasionally in her sleep, making small sounds of nothing in particular.

  He wondered if she were having the same dreams as him.

  5

  I really quite like humans. They understand the need for mutually beneficial agreements. I have no doubt that they will benefit enormously from our communications technology—access to which we will of course control—and we will be grateful for their assistance in resuming deep space travel. If they are offended by being treated as a means of transport, then they don’t show it. Are we allying with a dangerous power? I think not. When we have their technology, when we fully understand terraforming, when we have relieved our resource pressures enough to resume our own exploration program, then we are free to end our agreements with them.

  PAR PARAL UAL,

  addressing fellow state leaders at

  the Northern Isenj Nations Assembly

  Lindsay fastened the belt on her fatigues and tidied her hair, relying on the distorted reflection in the console screen to check that everything was in order. She felt as she thought she looked: an aeon older.

  It was the most useful thing she could do with the screen at the moment. The recreation network terminal was down again, a consequence of her trying to dock her personal unit with it. Life in space certainly wasn’t like it was in the movies. There was never a handy universal computing platform around when you needed one.

  There were two more serious matters that she couldn’t get out of her mind. One was the first cogent thought that consumed her three seconds after waking each day, and that was that David was dead; and the other was that Rayat was back. He was supposed to be on board Thetis, on his way home with the rest of the payload, six Royal Marines and the isenj party. He wasn’t. He was here, and she wanted to know who else was now embarked in Actaeon, and why.

  She wanted to go and seek him out. But her natural caution told her to establish more facts before she went plunging in. Eddie might know something. He could wheedle information out of anybody, even information Okurt thought he might be keeping to himself. She tried activating the bioscreen but she was still getting flat lines; it looked as if her marine detachment was still on board Thetis, long out of range.

  Detachment. There were only six of them. But they were still a detachment, and six Royal Marines—six Booties—were a considerable asset.

  Eddie appeared to have adapted perfectly well to life on board Actaeon. The man settled into spaces as easily and smugly as a cat. He was wandering down the main passage that ran the whole port side of Actaeon’s main section when she saw him, pausing at every network niche to slot his datacard forlornly into the port. She wondered if she’d crashed the whole rec network.

  “Did you know Rayat was on board?” she said without preamble.

  Either Eddie wasn’t much of a poker player or he was covering a lie. He registered surprise with a frown. “But he was chilled down on Thetis. He should be…er…” He stared blankly at the bulkhead for a few seconds, flipping his card over and over between his fingers, but the maths had clearly defeated him. “Well, a few months down the road home now.”

  “I thought so too. I saw him about an hour ago.”

  “I hear a lot of things on this ship, but not that. Did he say why?”

  “We’re not exactly chummy. He said hi and he walked away.”

  “And you didn’t ask him why he was back? Is it all of the payload? The marines? What?”

  “Like I said, he just said hi and walked off.”

  “You’d make a poxy journalist, doll.”

  “I was caught off guard.” She had the feeling that Eddie had delivered the worst insult he could muster. He was the sort of man who’d interview his doctor on his deathbed. She struggled to regain his respect. “I’m seeing Okurt shortly and I intend to ask. If they’ve brought anyone inboard, one of us should know about it, and it’s not me.”

  “Paranoi
a is healthy. Makes you think creatively. So what’s he here for?”

  “Because they’re getting obsessed with that biotech Shan’s carrying. He’s come back for that, I reckon.”

  Eddie looked visibly pained. “Oh shit.”

  “You know more about this than you’re telling me, don’t you?”

  “I doubt it. Are you telling me everything you know?”

  “I don’t know who to tell what these days.” She gripped Eddie’s forearm discreetly, not sure herself if it were a friendly gesture or one of desperation. “Are you giving samples to the doc?”

  “Always do.”

  “Well, they’re checking for Shan’s biohaz.”

  Eddie still wore his I’m-your-chum smile, but it was thinning away to transparency. “And if you found you had it, what would you do?”

  “Run, I think. Run like hell.” She was starting to wonder if there was anybody who could be trusted with it. She hadn’t got quite as far as asking herself how far she would go to stop it falling into the wrong hands—and there were plenty of those grasping around. “If you hear anything, promise me you’ll tell me.”

  “If that works both ways, I will.”

  She just gave him a blank look and went on her way. She didn’t find it easy to lie. If he knew what she had in mind for Shan, she had no doubt he would get word to her. He admired the woman: he made no secret of it.

  Lindsay settled in the corner of the wardroom for the morning briefing and thought it was an informally sloppy place to do business. But this wasn’t her ship; it was Okurt’s. She decided to aim for invisibility, a hard task in her out-of-date uniform. She didn’t even speak the way the rest of the crew did. Two or three generations of separation from mainstream human culture were audible as well as visible.

  And there was the other problem, of course. Nobody knew what to say to a woman who had lost her baby anyway.