Ally (36 page)

Shan looked around the floor of the dome and got the impression of a busy airport. People were anxious to go:
Actaeon
crew queued for the next shuttle to the Eqbas ship, fidgeting and checking watches. Shan wanted to go too, right now. All the upheaval gave her a terrible sense of loss, and she dreaded what it would be like when the time came for everyone else to head back to Earth.

“I'm really going to miss the detachment,” she said.

“Jesus, yes…”

“Sorry.”

“I was thinking what it was going to feel like when people we know start dying and we don't.”

“Christ, we've turned into a morbid pair of bastards, haven't we?”

Ade smiled. “It's being so cheerful as keeps us goin'?”

“First night back, in Finar, we have a bloody big dinner and have everyone round for game of cards. Okay?”

“I'll wear my best frock.”

“Silly sod…”

“I'll wear yours, then.”

Skavu, bezeri, Rayat.
Three things to fix before she could relax.
Skavu, bezeri, Rayat.
“You've got better legs, Ade.”

Yeah, she was going to miss the detachment.

Chad Island, called Nazel: Bezer'ej

They were eggs all right.

Pili celebrated with her friends and neighbors. The father to be—who seemed to be a quiet male called Loc—sat curled at the base of a tree with the air of a man who'd had one beer too many at a barbecue. Lindsay wondered if he was always quiet, or just stunned silent by the fact that he'd been senile a few weeks ago, waiting patiently for death while his civilization died around him, and now he was nearly indestructible and getting his girlfriend pregnant.

Okay, eggs. Still pregnant. Semantics.

“Leeenz!” Pili called, bouncing over to her and grabbing her with a tentacle. It rasped against Lindsay's arm. “You come over here. We sing. We sing properly.”

Eggs were convenient; Lindsay recalled that the last thing she felt like doing when she was heavily pregnant with David was bouncing anywhere. “Okay,” she said. “How long before they hatch?”

“Many seasons. Six.”

Lindsay made that something like twenty months, if she understood them right. That was before
c'naatat,
though. She decided to keep a very close eye on the clutch. She joined the group of bezeri sitting around a pile of shellfish and the ubiquitous
sheven
shreds laid out on a huge flat azin shell platter. Shan would have been proud of her; the menu had made Lindsay turn vegetarian with a vengeance. Grazing on bark and leaves was just fine as far as she was concerned. Settled farming was next week's lesson for the bezeri, and she was looking for seeds wherever she could find them.

Right now, the bezeri were still in hunter-gatherer mode, which wasn't bad progress for the recently aquatic. And they were enjoying it.

They sang, and in the absence of learned music, they sang in light. In the dusk, the rhythmic patterns of lights swept across their mantles in synchronized waves, sometimes breaking into individual patterns, and sometimes forming one continuous pattern that spanned all the bezeri in a row.

It was hypnotic. Lindsay looked down at herself and gazed into disturbing watery ghosts of organs. Sometimes her own translucency caught her by surprise. Back on land, doing the kinds of tasks that felt almost like the relief work the FEU navy was trained for, she lapsed into being someone a little closer to Commander Lindsay Neville. That was until she saw the bioluminescence within her flaring into life and answering the brilliantly colored, ever-changing patterns of her new community.

It was like hearing a tune being hummed, and finding yourself repeating it endlessly for the rest of the day. She couldn't stop herself. And it helped her put aside the nagging imagery of a horror film, of wondering what would hatch out of those eggs, and when.

“Leeenz! Does this mean we can all have babies?” Carf was a scout leader of a bezeri, cheerful and annoyingly positive, something Lindsay never thought she'd find to say about them. “Will the babies live forever?”

Oh shit, yes. Yes, they probably will.

Lindsay saw Shan's face. It was a carefully composed
lack
of expression, and it said she was displeased and that Lindsay had fallen short of her personal benchmark of excellence. Lindsay saw it far too frequently. She wanted it to leave her alone.

“Probably,” she said. If she showed panic, would the bezeri react? “Do you produce many eggs?”

“If we did,
we
would also be many.”

“How many?”

“Four, five.”

“Ah, okay.” Lindsay's marine biology primer had been full of numbers like millions. “Fine.”

She did a quick calculation based on twenty couples. Did they mate that way, or were they like wess'har, polyandrous? With four eggs each, all live births, she came up with eighty, which made 120-odd bezeri, and…yes, they said they had to be about thirty to be mature enough to lay eggs, and then they only reproduced every six or seven years. This wasn't an instant population explosion at the worst scenario. She had years to work out a solution—as long as
c'naatat
wasn't going to fast-track that. She had time to think. She
did.
There was no point in panicking.

She settled for worrying instead.

The light-song continued for a couple of hours until it was fully dark. Then Saib lit a fire. He was very good at containing it and keeping it alight. So cephalopods had discovered fire, and Lindsay was their Prometheus, and she recalled what happened to him.

“Please, God,” she said loudly. “No.”

She held her head in her hands, and saw for the first time the Greek myths mocking her at every step.
Thetis,
the ship she brought here: the Nereid mother of Achilles, the demigod she made almost immortal, with one vulnerability, so like
c'naatat
that Lindsay recoiled. And
Actaeon,
the hunter changed into a stag, who wasn't recognized by his own hounds and was killed by them; a transformation that
c'naatat
could have managed with ease.

And now
she
was Prometheus, the cocky Titan who decided he knew better than Zeus, and gave mankind a helping hand with technology and art, and so pissed off the boss that
his punishment was a perpetual round of having his liver torn out and healed each night. She was living one big Greek in-joke about
c'naatat.
And Prometheus's brother—she never
could
remember his name—fell under the spell of some girl called Pandora.

“Okay,” she said. “Funny. I get it. Now tell me something useful. Like—”

Pili nudged her roughly, as a bezeri would do to another. “Who do you talk to?”

“I wish I knew.” Lindsay stared at the plate with its dwindling pile of shellfish and gelatinous tripe-like
sheven.
“I thought it was myself, but I never know these days.”

Pili and Loc were happy, and the bezeri would now survive. Objective achieved: all Lindsay had to do now was to turn them into a civilization that could repel invaders.

She didn't have a Greek myth for that.

“Leeenz…” Saib rumbled. “See what Maipay can do.”

Bezeri liked novelty. It seemed to be so overwhelming for them that they stopped mentioning the recent holocaust, and Lindsay didn't ask why. She felt she knew. No, she
did
know: she had enough bezeri in her to feel that odd sense of entitlement that if you were alive, then you
deserved
to be, and that made you stronger. It fitted their Nietzschean mindset very well.

The bioluminescence was a harmless legacy, but the attitudes she feared she was inheriting troubled her. She wondered how long it would be before she felt this was all her right, and could think no other way, and forgot David.

“Okay,” she said. “Show me, Maipay. Do a trick.”

“Come to the wetland.”

“Does this involve killing
sheven
?”

“Not this time.”

“Good. You'll run out of
sheven
if you don't let some of them breed.”

“Never run out of
sheven
now…”

Lindsay and a few of the bezeri males trooped after Maipay and stood on the edge of the bog, feeling the faint vibration like standing on a very large ship that only occasionally reminded you that it was moving on waves. Water
that pooled on the surface reflected the light of Wess'ej, a nearly full moon.

“It is better in day,” Maipay said gravely. “But I light up so you see me better.”

He stood back, raised slightly on his back tentacles, and spread what would have been his arms to form a shape that reminded her of a flying squirrel. His flesh lit up in a range of blue from cyan to royal, and then he seemed to…thin out. She had no other words for it.

Maipay stretched into a enormous sheet of blue light, maybe six meters across, and then dived head first into the bog, and vanished into the blackness.

“Holy shit,” said Lindsay.

“Is clever,” said one of the males.

“Is
scary
,” Lindsay said. Well, if he met a
sheven
down there, Maipay was big enough and crazy enough to eat the damn thing. “What's he doing?”

And as if on cue, a brilliant blue sheet of light burst through the surface of the bog and reared in the characteristic menacing iceberg pose of a
sheven.
He hung there, like the real thing.

“I make
sheven,
” he said. His voice seemed very different, but he'd deformed his body so much that the air pockets and diaphragms bezeri used to make sound had changed shape, and the vocal tone with it. “Do I look
sheven
?”

“Like a native,” said Lindsay, shocked.

“I like this. I stay this way for a while.”

She had to ask. “Did you find any
sheven
down there?”

“No,” he said sadly. “All gone. But more to hunt on the next dryness. On
Clare.
”

Saib seemed very pleased, all amber and violet smugness as he watched the display. All that Lindsay could think was that she was again aping Prometheus with a repeating cycle, but this was not a renewed daily torture but a past where bezeri hunted species to extinction, understood that, felt no shame, and did it again.

Just like us,
Lindsay thought.
When
us
was human.

“I can do this too,” said Saib.

They practiced like athletes. Before long, Lindsay had a multicolored lightshow of
sheven
like bezeri diving into the bog and emerging, looking like sheet lightning in an inverted night sky.

Saib reared and dived with abandon. They were so bloody happy to be alive. However much it appalled her, she envied them.

“We can defend ourselves.” Saib flopped onto a patch of solid ground and gradually metamorphosed into a rounded cone to sit watching her. “One day we may build like the wess'har, but now we can hunt like
sheven,
and none will come here.”

It took a few seconds for the penny to drop. Saib suddenly slid into a horizontal shape and flowed towards a tree. Then he inched up it, projecting limbs and climbing. At the top of the tree, like some excessively showy Christmas lights, he draped himself over the branches and then shook loose and glided on a long shallow path to the ground. He made the climb three more times and then on the fourth, he flew a respectable distance like an
alyat.

“Cleverrrrrr!” the other bezeri cheered, ablaze with light. “Saib is clever!”

He had found an elegant solution to dealing with invaders for the time being. He was
sheven,
and he was
alyat:
he could swim, and climb, and run, and fly. He was the ultimate predator.

Saib began trying his new trick carrying a stone knife. It wouldn't be long before there were quite a few like him.

“Saib
is
clever,” Lindsay said.

The goal that she thought would take years had been achieved in accidental days. It also forced a choice on her that she'd known would come, but that had happened far, far too soon for her. The bezeri had found their own protection: to become multiform predators, adapting to any environment, and when their remarkable evolution became known, Bezer'ej
would
be avoided, Lindsay had no doubt.

She had to join them. There was now nothing else she could be.

But before she changed so much that she forgot she used to be a woman, she would visit Constantine and recover what was left of David's grave and his body.

“Let me try that,” she said. “I can fly. I'm sure I can.”

Mar'an'cas, Pajat coast

Aras never thought that the island could accommodate so much extra equipment, but somehow it did.

Umeh Station—personnel, everything that had use, everything that could be removed—had now been squeezed onto Mar'an'cas. The blue and green tents were pitched far closer together and the camp stretched into rockier ground. Fifty meters ahead, a queue of chattering, excited Umeh crew members snaked out of a tent.

“I think we might need to get another ITX link,” said Deborah Garrod.

The ITX relay meant the crew could check bank accounts. That was one of the first things they did when it was restored. Wess'har didn't have monetary economies, but Aras felt he understood the fascination. Money multiplied if you left it in a bank for long enough. Humans could never have too much of it.

A few crew, though, were trying to send messages to living relatives and friends, twenty-five years older but still there, still waiting.

Shan's journey had taken seventy-five years. Everyone she knew on Earth was dead except for Helen Marchant. Aras wondered if she still grieved about goodbyes never said to people she cared about. There'd been a few, even if she rarely mentioned them.

Deborah surveyed the camp with one hand to her brow to block the sun. “Apart from the
Thetis
crew, we've never met anyone from outside the colony,” she said. “It's no bad thing to see new faces.”

“Time to start practicing socialization with the godless and profane.”

“Is that a quotation?”

“No,” said Aras. “That's who you'll be living next door to on Earth.”

“More alien than any…alien.”

“Do you worry at all about going to Earth? Did you not see the news on the ITX link? War, corruption, strife, crowded cities.”

“I know,” she said. “But that's now. When we get there, it'll be a new generation, and they'll have grown up knowing that a change is coming, one that they can't avoid.”

“But you're going to land in Australia, in a predominantly Moslem country that's already worried about the rise of Christianity.”

“I have faith in God to shape the path, as he's done every step of our way. No, Aras, I have no doubts.”