Ally (29 page)

“You know now that you can never drive us out of this system,” Nevyan said. “Your species is the one most at risk. But how can you ever change? I pity you, but how can we reach agreement that you will never land on Bezer'ej?”

Rit chittered. Ralassi listened.

“She intends to put a stop to those military ambitions. The rule of ancestors' memories makes it hard, which is why many deaths are needed. Thoughts have to be killed too. Gene lines must broken. New ones with…
green
views must be encouraged and given precedence.”

Thoughts have to be killed too.

Shan struggled to make sure she still found that sinister. The day she didn't, she'd know things had gone too far.
They needed to stamp out ideas preserved in genetic memory.
Nevyan seemed taken aback too. Her pupils snapped between cross wire and flower and her head tilted further to one side. She was absolutely consumed with amazement.

It was a radically different culture, all right.

Selectively breeding for tree-huggers.

Jesus, that sounded like a grand eugenics scheme that the Eqbas might even try. It riveted Shan, like all shocking revelations. Wess'har, who didn't care about what you believed and were only concerned with what you did, were now fumbling for common ground with isenj, whose entire existence was determined by obsolete mental images, not of the here and now and real, but of the what-was. And somehow they
were
finding it. Shan could see it on Nevyan's face, and even on Esganikan's now.

She could even smell it—a bright vegetal scent that made her think of cut grass but that was nothing like it.

“Self-selecting,” said Shan. “Those who fight disqualify themselves from the gene pool.”

“As a survival mechanism, it's admirable,” said Esganikan. “Does it trouble you, Shan?”

Shan was certain she'd suppressed her scent to avoid the olfactory equivalent of muttering dissent in the corner. She concentrated and inhaled. Yes, she had. The wess'har trait that
c'naatat
had given her had become another external “tell” that she hid, part of the poker face she'd grown over the years to feign impartiality for the world.

“It's something my society would find disgusting,” Shan said at last.

“For Umeh, is there another option?”

It was just as well Eddie wasn't here. The core of the problem was that isenj bred and expanded, and that characteristic had now put them in conflict with wess'har, Eqbas and a fanatical Skavu ally. It was what Aras had called a vermin argument. He'd had a row with Eddie about the definition, and said that humans fitted it as well as any other inconvenient animal. Shan saw not the isenj being tried even in their death throes here, but Earth: because Earth was going down the same path.

You knew that. You've always known that. You even wanted some higher authority to kick our sorry arses.

And here was the philosophy, the rambling debate over a beer, made solid and scary and full of dilemmas. Shan, unflinching when it came to loathing the depths of human behavior in the way that only coppers could, imagined the reality of culling and adjustment accurately and it still hit her hard.

Did she still feel it needed doing?

It wasn't even her choice now.

Yes, it did.

Bezer'ej: Nazel, also known as Chad Island

“There are other Dry Aboves we must see,” said Keet.

A dozen bezeri lounged in the shallows on the shore of Chad, still making that transition from their ancient emotional tie to the sea. Lindsay wondered how any creature could handle a shift in niche that radical, and then she recalled that she'd done it—almost.

She'd been getting used to being an aquatic human. How long that would have lasted until she missed her existence on dry land, she'd never know.

“Not Ouzhari,” said Lindsay.

“Next towards the Greater Unknown.”

Ah,
north.
The sequence ran northernmost to southern tip of the chain—Constantine, Catherine, Charity, Clare, Chad and Christopher, or Ouzhari. They wanted to explore Clare. The colonists had named the islands for saints. Clare—friend of Saint Francis of Assisi, Francis to whom the incongruous Norman-style church in Constantine's underground colony had been dedicated; the stained-glass window, made partly by Aras and now gone, showed the saint in brown robes surrounded by animals from Earth and Bezer'ej.

Clare.

Clare…Saint Clare had
not
been martyred, but she tried. Lindsay recalled that from forgotten lessons. Clare had given up her wealth to embrace poverty, and tried to give up her life too. When she heard Franciscan monks had been martyred by the Moors in Morocco, she was set on going there to share their fate, but the holy sisters held her back. Yes,
Clare.
Lindsay couldn't help but see the echo in a well-meaning woman who thought a sacrificial, late and totally impractical gesture would save the world.

But I'm being practical. The bezeri are the last of their kind, and I had no right to wipe them off the face of the planet. I'm not a martyr. Really, I'm not.

“Okay, Clare it is.” She recalled the charts: twenty-five kilometers of open water, maybe. They had podships. “A day trip.”

“We feel well,” said Maipay. “We feel better than before, better than many seasons.
You
give us this.”

It was a fragile straw to clutch, but Lindsay needed its support. She wanted forgiveness and approval. She was prepared to accept that now, and if the outcome was positive, then—as the wess'har said—motive didn't matter.

The bezeri had almost all come ashore now and made daily forays into the water for food, but they were sampling vegetation on land, and, inevitably, they were hunting. The
shevens
fascinated them. The creatures were large, aggressive prey, they put up a fight, and they often escaped. Even the largest
sheven
couldn't seize and envelope two adult bezeri hunting as a team, and all it took was a two-pronged attack with one of them going for each side simultaneously and seizing the edge of its membrane like a sheet and stretching it. Bezeri packed a lot of muscle.

“We go,” said Saib imperiously, assuming his Sahib role. All he needed was native bearers, and the image of the colonial hunter would have been complete.

The impression most bezeri gave her now was of being amorphous big cats, able to spring and leap with great muscle contractions. Some had retained their translucency and others had developed camouflage-like mottling. A dozen of them rushed out of the settlement, crashing through bushes and splashing into the surf. Lindsay braced herself and went in after them. She was used to submerging but the first rush of cold seawater into her nose and the sensation of her gills opening from slits that ran parallel with what were once her ribs was always a second or two of near panic.

Once she passed that stage, she was an aquatic creature again, using bioluminescence to speak. Once she'd clung to vocalization underwater: now it seemed irrelevant.

Once.
Her transforming exile was weeks, months—not years.

The bezeri also seemed to find the amphibious transition effortless. They dived to the shelf a hundred meters out to sea where they had assembled podships and began sliding into them. The pods—translucent organic material, grown from plants—were a lot faster than swimming.

The ships also reminded Lindsay of the challenges facing the bezeri ashore if they were to become capable of holding the planet against any colonizers who would inevitably have space flight capability. The ships were powered by a natural seed pod ejection system that had been selectively bred for generations into something that could eject a laden pod ten meters or so onto dry land and get it back into the water again. The technology wouldn't be much use on land.

Okay, they're ticking things off fast the evolutionary list
now: walking on dry land, talking, building settlements. The industrial revolution will have to wait. First—they need to discover fire.

Lindsay could pilot a podship, and the old skills she learned as a fleet aviation cadet came back, along with memories of training for collision repair at sea; standing in a training tank with a damage control team, slipping in fast-rising ice-cold water, trying to get panels secured across breaches in the mocked-up hull in darkness, simulating a real incident on board a stricken ship.

I could stroll that now. Cold water's easy, I can detect objects without even using my eyes. I'd be really useful as part of a ship's company.

C'naatat
would be a gift for the military, and for any industry needing to send humans into hostile environments. Shan said it would get used. She'd always known: and so had Rayat.

Was he dead now? He always had a plan on the go. Lindsay worried at a vague level that Rayat would always be trouble until the day she saw his corpse and watched it rot. Nothing short of that would convince her.

She shook aside the speculation. Bezeri knew their way around the islands in pods without charts and Lindsay trailed after them, trying to tap into the natural navigational skills that were now within her. Bezeri were also more adept at landing on beaches than she was. It was a largely uncontrolled beaching exactly like the first time she'd come ashore in a pod, using simple friction to slow her, but this time she skidded a long way up a smooth sandy cove. The pod shot past the rest of the flotilla, narrowly avoiding a collision.

Lindsay slipped out of her pod in a flood of water and waited for a rebuke from Saib for her lack of seamanship, but none came. He poured from his vessel like a jar of drained pickles and slid onto the beach, leaving an indentation, and swung across to the foot of low cliffs.

“We have never been beyond here.” He shimmered his happy colors—amber, blue, violet—and thudded up to the cliffs, followed by Carf and Maipay, as if looking for a path
inland. Lindsay followed in the wake of churned sand that they left. “We must visit all. We must go to the furthest…north.”

“Yes,
north,
” said Lindsay. Their rate of language absorption varied a lot, and Saib was the most articulate by far, but the others were at least speaking some English. “The mainland.”

“Are there
sheven
there?”

“There seem to be
sheven
or creatures very like them everywhere.” Lindsay jogged past them, and the sun cast her hazy shadow ahead of her like a glass of water, dark patches and lens-magnified pools of bright light. What she saw was still basically humanoid in shape. She wasn't sure how she felt about that. “I don't know how plentiful they are, though.”

Clare's cliffs crumbled into slopes of scree half a kilometer east and Lindsay led the bezeri onto a rolling plain dotted with pockets of heath and large cracked gray boulders. The island was more like Constantine. There was the same blue-gray grasslike ground cover and spiked lavender bushes that grew knee-high. Orange foliage in the mid-distance bore a resemblance to the tree-ferns that stood as an exotic alien backdrop to the rural terrestrial idyll created for the Constantine colonists by Aras. There was enough of the familiar here to prod Lindsay's memory of a recent and almost happier time.

“You remember,” said Saib. “I remember too. Your glass on the grave.”

“So…you have some of my memories as well, not just Shan's.”

Saib considered the question, drumming the tips of his tentacles on the ground. Sometimes he reminded her of a sarcastic and impatient uncle almost to the point of comedy, and then she'd remind herself of his reflexes and his capacity to take down a giant
sheven,
and the humor evaporated.

“No, this is Shan too,” he said. “Thinking of the glass colors.”

I have to get a grip. I can't keep resenting every mention of her.
Shan had seen David's grave, of course: Aras made
the glass headstone, a cluster of flowers from roses and native blooms. Did it mean anything to her, then, to surface in her memories? Whatever it was, however genetic memory functioned, Saib had expressed Shan's recollections and almost nobody else's. If he'd taken on her other characteristics as well, it would make him one very aggressive, self-righteous squid. And he had plenty of that attitude to start with.

Lindsay paused and looked up, searching for stabtails, the hawk-sized flying predators that were an occasional sight on Constantine. After a few minutes she saw something else that had been a familiar sight around the colony. It was an
alyat
, a flying relative of the
sheven
.

It was a different color: it was a vivid, transparent peacock blue. But blue or not, it was still an
alyat.
She remembered them having no color, resting in branches and looking for all the world like plastic bags scattered by a high wind. They were transparent membrane too, a single piece of digestive tract that fell on prey and enfolded it, just like a
sheven
did in streams and bogs. In terms of things you didn't want dropping on you,
alyats
beat spiders by a long way.

“Look.” She pointed and the bezeri turned to follow her gesture. “
Alyat.
Flying
sheven.
”

Lindsay could almost see the cogs of thought grinding as the bezeri studied the creature. It was like watching a cat at a window, chattering its teeth on seeing a bird outside. They were wondering how they could catch them. Everything that moved seem to be fair game.

She was starting to realize how central hunting was to the bezeri psyche. They'd been without large challenging prey for a long time, many generations, and even millennia if she went by the azin shell records that Mohan Rayat had learned to interpret. The prospect of the chase excited them in a primeval way.