Crossing the Line

by Karen Traviss

  “No.”

  “Ah.” It came out as a forlorn trill on a falling note, like birdsong. Lrrrrr. “This is how we are. Males need the genetic material of the female to repair their tissues. I transfer it through cells in my body to theirs, and I take in some of their genes too, and we all share it. It keeps them well. It’s also pleasurable.”

  Shan couldn’t imagine having sex with a complete stranger as an act of charity. “You seem okay with all this.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be? That is the nature of oursan as well as my duty. We’re bonded. It’s very nice. It feels very good up here.” And she touched her forehead with one many-jointed finger.

  Shan felt an urge to giggle but didn’t find it at all funny. Nevyan, distracted briefly by the high wavering wail of the infant now fully fed, glanced at her males with such obvious pride and delight that the air around her was filled with the powdery musk of her contentment. Then she looked back at Shan. Her pupils were just a cross, faint rutilations in yellow quartz.

  “You are certainly distressing Aras,” she said. “Ask him to explain it to you. You know enough about wess’har males now to understand how hard he finds this.”

  Shan decided she would rather have faced an armed mob without backup than ask Aras to explain the facts of wess’har life to her. She stood up to go. “Well, that’s going to be fun,” she said flatly.

  Nevyan trilled. She found something amusing. Shan glanced back, instinctively and humanly annoyed.

  Nevyan stiffened. “You have an aumul on your back,” she said. “Let me remove it.”

  She reached between Shan’s shoulder blades and then held her hand where Shan could see it. Nestled in it was a very large red and white striped slug, and it smelled of almonds, and it was making melodic plinking noises like a musical box.

  “Is it dangerous?” Shan asked. You could never take anything for granted here, not even musical slugs.

  “No.”

  “What does it do for an encore?”

  “It scours the tem deposits at night looking for organic waste before it sets hard.”

  “It eats shit?”

  “I will learn that word.”

  Nevyan placed the aumul carefully on the flagstones and it shot off across the floor at speed like an Arsenal scarf caught in a high wind. Shan had liked it better when she was totally unfamiliar with this alien world. Being lulled gently into thinking you belonged here made it even more disturbing when you thought you recognized something—and then realized it was absolutely, totally and wholly unlike your expectations.

  That was Aras too.

  Shan took a slow walk back home, looking for courage on the way.

  There was fish on the menu today and that cheered Lindsay up no end.

  It was cod in a garlicky tomato sauce. The culture-grown fillets were a regular portion-controlled shape that no real cod would ever have achieved in nature, as was the way with muscle-protein production systems. But that didn’t matter. It was cod. Lindsay tucked in with all the gastronomic enthusiasm that only people cooped up on long deployments in isolated places could fully understand.

  Or it might have been the battlefield mood-killers that Sandhu had prescribed for her. David was dead; nothing would make her forget that, except for those few brief seconds on waking each day. But the drugs provided a soothing erasure of grief for the time being. She was sad, but it was—she imagined—as she would be in a few years’ time, having come to terms with her loss and the changes it had made in her, but not disabled by it any longer.

  The drug had been developed to halt plummeting morale in combat. Lindsay wondered if they ever thought it would be used to help a grieving mother kill a woman who had once been her friend.

  She savored the thick tomato sauce. And this time she did hear Rayat come up behind her.

  He made quite a point of acknowledging people sitting nearby. She felt a pleasant flood of satisfaction: she must have made him think twice about startling an unstable woman with a weapon.

  “Mind if I join you?” he said.

  “It’s a free country.”

  Rayat sat down opposite her. “Yes, we keep it that way, don’t we?” He appeared to have a pile of beans and spinach in a carry-out container. It looked like he was used to eating alone in his cabin. “I was thinking about what you said.”

  “Um.”

  “Have you been thinking about what might happen if you were successful in cornering this biotech for the military?”

  Lindsay shrugged. “Drop the games. Please.”

  “Have you?”

  “I’d be stupid if I hadn’t, and I’m not stupid.”

  “I don’t think you like the idea any more than my boss does.”

  “And I don’t want to know who your boss is, thanks.”

  “I have something to share with you.”

  “In exchange for what?” She glanced up and Eddie was standing at the servery. He looked back and made a discreet warding gesture at her, the forefinger of each hand overlapping in a cross. Watch that bastard. She almost laughed.

  “Troops and transport,” said Rayat.

  “You could ask Okurt.”

  “Okurt’s orders aren’t the same as mine.”

  “Or mine?”

  “I think you’re rightly terrified by this thing and you can see the threat it represents. You know that’s why Frankland did what she did to you.”

  The cod didn’t taste so good now. Lindsay shunted it around her plate and then put the fork down. “Okay. Let’s talk about this somewhere else.”

  “My cabin, ten minutes?”

  “You’re a charmer,” she said, and picked up the fork again. Rayat took his lonely container of beans and left. Eddie was engrossed in a conversation by the salads with Lieutenant Yun. Lindsay cleared her plate and left a decent interval before getting up to leave.

  Eddie, engrossed or not, turned his head immediately and caught her eye. Well? And she could only think of one response, the gesture that Shan used so often to indicate her low opinion of a colleague. Thumb and forefinger held together in a loose fist, she made a rapid stroking motion. He’s a wanker. Eddie grinned, but it was the studied camaraderie of a man keeping an eye on her.

  She grinned back. But she wasn’t planning to share any of this with Eddie.

  Shan felt incompetent for the first time in her life, and it hurt.

  When she got back to the one-room house and leaned against the iridescent door, it opened and she almost fell in. It wasn’t the entrance she wanted to make. Aras filled the doorway.

  “You’ve been a long time,” he said.

  “We got talking,” she said.

  “Are you hungry?”

  Shan followed him to the table and looked over the dish of evem. “I could do with a cup of tea, please.”

  Aras shook the jar of tea to indicate the falling level of the leaves. “The bushes will be ready for harvest in four hundred days, and this won’t last. I could ask Josh for more supplies.”

  She ignored him. “Nice and strong, please.”

  “You’re upset.”

  “Yeah, everyone keeps saying that,” she snapped. “It’s been a bit of an educational morning.”

  Aras said nothing and watched the water boil, which was another thing you could do with relative ease if you lived forever. She flopped onto the sofa and tried to frame the words. It took longer than she expected.

  She wasn’t prepared to spend another day sneaking glances at his extraordinarily appealing man-shaped back and buttocks. And she had no intention of giving in randomly to instincts like Lindsay Neville had done. If she was going to go through with this—and Aras must have been suffering untold misery in his isolation—then she’d do it logically and responsibly.

  There were worse ways to spend her time. Aras was a striking, magnificent creature. But tigers and peacocks were beautiful too: it didn’t mean it was okay to consider screwing them. She wondered what was happening to her cherished view of nonhuman animals a
s equals.

  “Nevyan seems very happy with her new family,” Shan began. She accepted the proffered bowl of tea with relief.

  Aras shrugged. “It’s natural. They’re bonded.”

  “Yeah, they were bonding pretty well when I walked in.” She didn’t get a reaction so she carried on. “Is that it? They have a quickie and it’s happy ever after?”

  Aras seemed to understand quickie perfectly well. “I can see why gethes find it peculiar. We bond for life. We need no sanction or law to achieve that.”

  Gethes. Thanks. “So this is oursan, is it?”

  “Yes. We have cells that exchange our DNA, bond us to our isan, and give us pleasure, just as you secrete oxytocin. And you consume methamphetamine. These substances make you feel affectionate and euphoric. The same applies to oursan.”

  Shan thought back to her drug squad training. It didn’t help. “You get an emotional high from screwing?”

  “Inelegantly put, but yes.”

  “Where are the cells?”

  “In our genitalia.”

  Shan felt her hand go involuntarily to her forehead in embarrassment. “I walked in on Nevyan having sex with her new husbands.”

  Aras looked puzzled. His scent of sandalwood was especially strong right then. “But they all have children.”

  “So?”

  “Males never have sex after they’ve fathered children. The sanil atrophies and forms the gestational pouch.”

  She could work out what a sanil was. She wondered why he didn’t just say penis. “Aras, atrophied isn’t the word I’d have used.”

  This really wasn’t going as she’d planned. He looked completely and utterly bewildered. If he had tilted his head any further, she would have thrown a stick for him to fetch. Right then she didn’t want any more random images that blurred the line between Aras the man and Aras the animal. “You must be mistaken.”

  “I know what I saw, for Chrissakes. Do I need to draw a picture? Anyway, they were having it away. End of story.”

  Aras’s head straightened up smartly and there was a definite flash of comprehension. “No,” he said, evidently relieved. “That wasn’t sex. That was oursan.”

  Shan fought to remain detached. He must have smelled that she was agitated: he was pumping clouds of tension himself. But her stand-back-I’m-a-police-officer persona took over and projected complete, glacial, accidental calm. “Look, I know I don’t get out much lately, but if that’s not shagging it’s doing a bloody good impersonation of it.”

  “Oursan,” Aras repeated, as if she were deaf. He paused for a second and then unfastened his long tunic, completely unself-conscious. He took in a deep breath and pointed. “That is for oursan,” he said, “and this is for sex.”

  “Ah,” said Shan. “Ah.”

  She thought she had seen just about everything in the course of her police career but now she knew that she definitely hadn’t. Her shock must have been tangible. But she couldn’t even blink, let alone look away.

  Aras must have noticed her oh-my-God expression. “I apologize,” he said. “Once I’m back among wess’har, I forget the taboos of humans. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I think it made an eloquent point,” said Shan hoarsely. Oh shit. Oh, shit… “It’s okay.”

  “This one is for reproduction, for sex as you say. The other is for oursan. Horizontal transmission.” And he fastened his tunic again.

  Shan couldn’t quite maintain glacial. She tried. She battled another totally humorless urge to giggle and very nearly won. “I’ve heard it called a few things, but that’s a new one on me.”

  “I can explain it further if you like. Genes transferred from one organism to another, not just from parent to offspring—”

  “Draw me a picture.” She choked on suppressed laughter. “I’m sorry. This isn’t how it looks.”

  “You’re mocking me.”

  “No, I’m just very embarrassed. I’m sorry—”

  Aras dropped his head for a moment and then walked past her and out of the door without a word. He closed it firmly behind him, just one shade short of slamming it.

  “Shit,” said Shan. “Our first fight. Oh, terrific.”

  Men could rot in hell before she’d run after them. She busied herself trying to make proper right angles on the frame of the new bed, sawing and swearing each time she offered up a piece of efte and it still didn’t fit. No, men were a pain in the arse: necessary recreation, but not one of them warranted changing your routine, your priorities or your name.

  But Aras wasn’t a man.

  He was an alien who happened to look a lot like a man and even had some human characteristics. He was also an alien who had suffered terrible isolation for an unimaginable time. And despite herself, she cared about him: and she had given up caring about people a lifetime ago. Aras was outside the corrupt circle of humanity, a clean soul despite his wars, an innocent…animal. She could forgive an animal anything.

  Shan realized that she still wasn’t sure how she thought of him, or how that sat with the sensation she experienced when she touched the hard muscle of his back. It felt just like when she touched Ade Bennett. It felt primevally good.

  But Aras isn’t human.

  And neither was she. Not any more. If you were a sheep-shagger, maybe that was okay provided you were also part sheep.

  “Oh, fuck it,” she said, and swept up the dust and shavings from the floor before going in search of him.

  There weren’t that many places Aras could have gone. She didn’t have to search bars for him—not that she would have, of course—and she didn’t have to ring round each of his friends to see if he was sprawled on their sofa with a Scotch in his hand, bemoaning the inconsistencies of women and why they were such rotten heartless bitches.

  He wasn’t human. But he was terribly alone, and he was her only friend, and she wanted very badly to erase his pain as well as her own.

  Aras was working on their patch of allocated land. Shan could see him kneeling among the plants, picking out something and putting it in a pile beside him. He didn’t look up as she approached. She knew that he was aware she was there: he could smell her easily at that distance, especially in her current state of mind.

  “Okay, sorry,” she said. She knelt down beside him. “Are you still talking to me?”

  Aras paused, folded his hands in his lap and looked at her, head still slightly lowered.

  “Oursan is a sensitive subject for me. I don’t handle it well these days.”

  “I’ve been told I have all the sensitivity of a lump-hammer. You might have noticed I’m not good at girly things.”

  “You never asked to be put in this position.”

  “I know, but I am.” If she didn’t say it now, she never would. “Let’s try it. I mean, we can avoid reproducing, right? Regard it as a favor for a friend. A bit of normality.”

  Normality. She was twenty-five light-years from home, playing house with an invulnerable alien war criminal and carrying a bizarre parasite that tinkered with her genome when the fancy took it. Just over a year ago she’d packed a bag and set off for a few days’ duty at Mars Orbital, expecting to be home by the end of the week, her biggest worry being that the supermarket would deliver early and forget to reset her security alarm.

  And now she could never go home again. Normality.

  “It might not make you happy,” said Aras. “There are…anatomical issues.”

  “Oh, I noticed. You got a better idea?”

  “Knowing you as I do, I fear you will dislike the emotional changes that come with it.”

  “Maybe by then I won’t care.”

  Shan stood up and held out her hand. He stood and took it. She thought for a brief moment of the gorilla, with its leather-glove hands signing a plea for rescue that she never understood until it was too late. The dividing line between human and nonhuman had always seemed arbitrary to her until now.

  Aras was both sides of that line, and it kept moving.

>   10

  There’s a time to take chances and a time to consolidate. This medical technology could simply wipe our competitors off the map. It’s worth every resource we can spare to find it, isolate it, and develop it.

  And then we can sell it. And I know who’ll buy at any price.

  Holbein CEO HANA SOBOTKA,

  to Board of Directors.

  If anyone had any doubt about Dr. Mohan Rayat’s true calling, his cabin would have dispelled it immediately.

  He had commandeered more comms kit and links than a simple Treasury drone or even a pharmacologist would ever need. And he had his own single cabin.

  “How did you pass yourself off as a pharmacologist?” said Lindsay. “You fooled the Thetis payload pretty damn well.”

  “I am a pharmacologist,” said Rayat. “It’s easier to train a scientist to be an intelligence officer than vice versa. And believe me, there’s plenty for a scientist to do in the intelligence services.”

  “I’ll bet.” Lindsay decided she could always explain away her meeting with him as a shipboard affair. Being caught in the heads with him had at least given her a cover story. But it wasn’t one she could use on Eddie Michallat. “Come on. What is it?”

  “I don’t trust easy,” said Rayat. “But you’re a professional and I’m desperate. Take a look at this.”

  Lindsay watched the triptych of screens above Rayat’s pull-down desk. There was a 3-D chart and two separate cascades of numbers and telemetry. The projection 15cm in front of the central screen was a part-formed globe with latitude and longitude lines. A crust of colored images was forming on it as if an unseen child were coloring the image in a book.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “The telemetry from both the original pre-colony bot ship that landed on CS2 and from Christopher, the manned colonization vessel that followed it a few years later.” Rayat leaned across and tapped the center screen to zoom in on the chart. “And this is Bezer’ej. I think you’ll recognize this coastline.”

  It was a chain of islands. There was Constantine, if she could call the whole island that, partway down the chain. There were six in all, and she discovered for the first time that they had names: Constantine, Catherine, Charity, Clare, Chad, and Christopher. Saints. It had never occurred to her to ask during the year that they were down there. They had never been allowed to leave the island.