Ally (7 page)

Shapakti looked up for a moment. “But you have none.”

“I know. It's humor.”

“Oh.” Shapakti pondered, head cocked. “Do you think she's foolish enough to infect them deliberately?”

It begged the obvious answer. Shan gave it: Ade winced.

“Two out of three
c'naatat
hosts in this room have done just that,” she said, “and they're both a lot smarter and a lot more disciplined than Lindsay fucking Neville.”

“Intent makes no difference.”

“Oh, it does. It makes me angrier.”

Shapakti switched topics with surprising tact, or maybe it was just that wess'har habit of darting from one topic to the next. “There are many structures in the cells that correspond to nothing I have on record. There might well be
sheven
elements in this and many other things. But I
can
say that this is very similar to the bezeri material we've gathered.”

Shan stood with fists on hips, seeming to have forgotten the door. “Okay, let's scope the worst nuclear accident here.
We've got
c'naatat
bezeri material ashore. That's two new problems—bezeri contaminated with
c'naatat,
and bezeri ashore.”

“Bezeri always did come ashore,” Aras said quietly. “They used podships to explore the beaches. You've seen the memorial to the first of them who did this and died in the attempt. They can survive out of water for a brief time, if you recall what happened to the beached infant Surendra Parekh found.”

Ade did, and Shan did too. Ade wondered if he'd look back on that incident one day and see it as the point at which human-wess'har relations really went to rat shit. Silly cow, Parekh: she thought the beached bezeri was dead. It certainly was after she'd finished with it.

Shan didn't deviate. “Yeah, but they didn't bloody walk ashore and stroll around with a picnic lunch, did they? You said you saw a large gelatinous shape moving around in the marshes and going back into the water.”

“Yes,
isan.
Something has changed.”

“I'll say. Walking bezeri.
C'naatat
bezeri.”

Shan turned for the door. Ade risked stepping in front of her.

“Where you off to, then, Boss?”

She looked him in the eye, all hostile out-of-my-way ice. Then her expression softened as if she'd suddenly recognized him in a crowd of strangers and was glad of it.

“If you ask Rayat if he knows the time, he'll just say yes.” She edged forward half a pace, impatient. “I want another chat with him just in case there's something he forgot to tell me.”

“I'll give you a hand.”

“Ade, I'm not exactly new to interrogations.”

“I just don't want you getting upset.”

She almost smiled, but put her left hand firmly on his elbow to steer him aside. “You're too nice for your own good sometimes, you know that?”

Ade knew that. But he also knew he had his father in him, and that—given the opportunity—he could make Rayat wish that he could die. He let Shan pass and watched
her stride down the passageway, longing for her to drop the act and show how broken she really was by what she'd had to do.

She
had
to be grieving. He needed to comfort her, to feel some kind of bloody use for a change. When she was out of sight and he turned his attention back to the lab, Aras was staring at the specimen captured in the tray, oblivious.

“Infection control is a difficult thing,” said Shapakti, jerking Ade back to the here and now. “If we assume the worst, then—”

Aras didn't take his eyes off the tray. “
Shan Chail
will always assume the worst.”

“Then the worst,” said Shapakti, “is that the bezeri become infected and that they spread
c'naatat,
and eventually destroy the ecology of the planet. But there are few of them, and it may well be possible to stop the spread.”

Aras wasn't prone to outbursts. Apart from his raging grief when Shan died, he was almost mild mannered in that oddly bipolar wess'har way, patient to the point of being dull and then flipping without warning into a ruthless killer. Ade knew. He'd tracked isenj troops with him: and wess'har really didn't take prisoners.

“What has it all been for?” Aras asked. There was an almost infrasonic rumble in his voice, right on the threshold of Ade's hearing. “The last five centuries,
what has it all been for?
What do I have to do now,
kill
them? After defending them for so many years?”

He turned so sharply that his long dark braid whipped around almost horizontally as he stormed out. Ade's instinct was to go after him. Shapakti held out a restraining arm but stopped short of grabbing Ade.

“It's snowballing.” Ade wasn't sure what he would say to Aras when he caught up with him.
Yeah, you went into exile for them, and we kicked off a war over them, and you executed your best friend because of them—and now we might have to kill them.
It was all turning to shit and Ade knew he'd played his part in getting it there. “How do we stop this, Shapakti? You got any ideas?”

The biologist seemed mesmerized by his specimens.
In another chamber, the two macaws he'd recreated from the gene bank started screeching at each other, their flapping wings making
fut-fut-fut
sounds. “When we can define what we want to stop, Ade Bennett, then we can proceed,” said Shapakti. “But that also depends on what the bezeri do next.”

“It'll end in tears.”

“What?”

“Just a saying.”

“It may end in culling.”

A wess'har could use the word
cull
without any connotation of an animal at the top of the food chain pulling a gun on one at the bottom that was just a bit too inconvenient for its tastes. It still meant dead. Aras faced the prospect of seeing the bezeri wiped out again,
really
wiped out.

It must have been a bloody nightmare to think about that after all he'd been through for so very, very long. Ade debated who needed him most right then, and decided that out of the two of them, Shan was probably coping better.

Ade went in search of Aras.

F'nar, Wess'ej: February 2377

Every world that Eddie Michallat knew was already full of crazy bitches, and nobody needed another one.

He watched the news from Earth with one hand pressed to his mouth. He hadn't even noticed he'd done it. On the screen on the wall, part of the stone itself, a woman called Helen Marchant urged governments to intervene with troops to stop the clearance of replanted forests for agricultural use.

“Stupid cow,” he muttered.

“Why is
cow
an insult?” asked Giyadas. She was a child, but young wess'har seemed simply to be undersized adults hungrily absorbing data. She was catching up fast. “
Stupid
should suffice.”

“Is this my daily lecture on speciesism, doll?”

“I'm interested.”

Eddie ruffled her mane, tufted hair that ran in a stiff brush from front to back across her little seahorse skull like a Spartan's plume. “I'm just being rude about her, that's all.”

“So by comparison with what you think of as an inferior species, you insult her. And you also make her not human, and so not worthy of respect.”

“Thank you, Jeremy Bentham.”

“Is that an insult too?”

“No.” Eddie laughed; these days Giyadas was his only source of humor. He slipped his handheld out of his pocket and fingered in
Bentham.
“Read that.” Damn, she was just a kid, wess'har or not, and sometimes he worried that he was burdening her with too much adult crap—adult
human
crap. “Try some
felicific calculus.
”

Giyadas read intently, long muzzle tipped down so that her chin almost rested on her chest. This alien child could read his language, but he hadn't a hope in hell of reading hers or even speaking it: he couldn't manage the overtones that gave wess'u its two distinct and simultaneous voices. It rendered him illiterate. For a journalist, that was as near to hell as he might ever come. Giyadas viewed his ignorance with a grave patience that bordered on pity.

And Helen Marchant carried on calling for war to save the forests.

“She
is
mad, you know, doll.”

“She only wants what the Eqbas have done for generations. This is not
mad
to us.”

Marchant was a clever nutter, then. She'd once persuaded an antiterrorist officer called Shan Frankland to become an ally of her eco-guerilla movement. Knowing Shan, that must have taken some doing. Eddie didn't underestimate Marchant one bloody bit.

Giyadas studied the handheld's cream matte surface as it filled with text and images. She looked up, head cocked to one side, crosswire pupils flaring into four teardrop lobes. Eddie didn't find those bright citrine eyes quite so alien now.

“This Bentham shares many of Targassat's views,” she said.

“Yes, he was one of the great liberal reformers.”

“How could he be?”

Giyadas was the equivalent of maybe a seven year old human kid now. Eddie still measured his words, and got them badly wrong every time. “Well, at the time, people didn't see the world that way. Women and anyone who wasn't white didn't have rights, the rich ruled, and animal rights were unheard of.”

“I meant that he said those things nearly six hundred years ago by your calendar and little has changed among the
gethes
since. So he is
not
a reformer. Intent is nothing. Only action matters.”

I'm debating utilitarianism with an alien child 25 light-years from home, and she's winning.
Wess'har logic was hard. “That's true, sweetheart.”

“Gethes
don't learn, do they, Eddie?”

“We never seem to.”
The wess'har can take out one of our warships with ten-thousand-year-old tech. The Eqbas can scour whole planets.
“And we don't have long to change that.”

“Are you all right, Eddie?”

Yeah, I'm fine for a man who's watching galactic war unfolding.
“Never better, doll.”

“We know this is hard for you. You're doing
very
well for a human.”

Talking squid. Talking meerkats. Talking spiders. Seahorse aliens with two voices and two dicks. And they're the normal ones compared to Shan and her menagerie.

“I try,” said Eddie, and gestured to her for his handheld. “For a monkey boy, I'm not doing so bad.”

The two crazy bitches, Shan and Helen, should have been dead by now, of course, and they weren't—Helen Marchant because she'd been on ice for the best part of seventy years, and Shan because her
c'naatat
parasite wouldn't let her die. Jesus, it was so easy to think that now. But once he'd seen one immortal, he'd seen them all.

Marchant—small-boned, bobbed light brown hair—was in full flood, addressing a rally on population control.

“We'll go to war over oil, over water, over fish stocks and over any religious or political ideology you care to name.” She had that quietly reasonable tone and benign, rarely blinking gaze of all really dangerous demagogues. “But we won't fight to preserve the planet. It's all we've got—and that
has
to be worth military action.”

Eddie responded with the frustration of a journalist who hadn't had a crack at a ripe interviewee. “You're going to get all the military intervention you want, doll,” he muttered.
“In about twenty-nine years, when the Eqbas show up with a frigging task force.”

But Helen Marchant was talking about here and now—as it applied to Earth, anyway—and she was urging the Pacific Rim States to intervene to stop clearance of restored forests for human use.

Earth, short of land and swamped by inexorably rising seas, needed the space for people, which it was still producing at a brisk rate despite all the evidence that it was a bad idea. The wess'har—whether the militarized Eqbas or the agrarian Wess'ej variety—didn't give a shit about humans. Marchant would get on with them just fine, if she was still alive when they reached Earth. They could purge the planet together.

“Why don't you interview her?” asked Giyadas.

Marchant was 25 light-years away. It was definitely a case of doing it down the line. “Because everyone else has. What could I add?”

“You know a lot more than she does. You could ask her better questions.”

“You really have got a journo's brain in that little head of yours, haven't you?” Giyadas was ferociously smart. Perhaps all wess'har kids were, but he didn't have that much contact with the rest of them, and he chose—yes, almost like a doting dad—to think of her as exceptional. “Besides, I can't call her up any time I want to. The UN is still controlling access to the ITX link.”

“Controlling who hears things doesn't change what's said.
Gethes
need to learn that.”

“Well, seeing as we had to scrape up chunks of
Actaeon
last time we pissed off the wess'har, everyone's understandably cautious.”

“Do you miss your friends?”

Damn, he'd almost forgotten
Actaeon.
Sometimes the memory ambushed him. Barry Yung, Malcolm Okurt. They were nice blokes one minute and dead naval officers the next. The wess'har had a very clean sense of reprisal.
Actaeon,
the best technology that Earth could manage, was fragmented by three missiles whose design was ten thousand years old.

Our best is their equivalent of a stone axe.

“I didn't know them well enough to really miss them,” said Eddie. “But I remember them, and I still think it's a bad thing to die so far from home.”

“I agree.” Giyadas ran spidery, multijointed fingers across the soft fabric keyboard and screen that made up Eddie's edit suite on the road. “Everyone should return to the cycle of life in the place where they were born.”

“Good point…Giyadas, what are you doing with that?”

“Making a record.”

She wasn't playing with his kit. She was
editing.
She really was. He was fascinated to see what she might make of the footage the bee cam had recorded on Umeh.

“What have you done, then, doll? Show me.”

She held the screen between her fingertips as if she was showing off clean linen. Eddie leaned forward and touched the icon to roll the footage. It was the attack on the Maritime Fringe armored column as it rolled over the border into the Northern Assembly, jarringly disjointed and—he thought—full of flash frames. It ran for exactly one minute. It was one short clip after the next with no apparent judgment exercised on shots or sequences. It was chronological, though, so she could certainly follow a time code.

“That's very good,” he said. Well, she'd mastered the technology even if the visual grammar left a lot to be desired. Not bad for a little kid. “Want me to show you how we'd do it?”

“Like this?” she said.

Giyadas laid the screen back down on the table and began working her fingertips over the surface again at high speed. She was utterly fixed on it. Her pupils snapped open and closed, flower to crosshairs and back again, and her head tilted to get the best focus. She seemed all movement; wess'har were usually remarkable for their lack of fidgeting. Their controlled motion could look glacial to a human, even more so when they went into that freeze reaction when startled. Eventually she paused.

“This is how humans see the world,” she said gravely. “Look. Am I right, Eddie?”

It certainly wasn't how Eddie would have cut it.

She'd spliced together a perfectly lyrical sequence that showed none of the carnage—the body parts and isenj rushing for cover—but only the aerial shots, explosions and billowing clouds of dust and flame. At first he thought she'd spotted that some images wouldn't be shown because they were too graphic. It was a sensitivity that came into fashion and waned again from time to time. He hadn't explained it to her; but she'd seen enough somehow to know that what made it to air was a fraction of what was shot.

“Yes, we have to be selective sometimes,” he said. Was there anything about her other than her size that made her different from an adult wess'har? He was damned if he could see it. “Blood and guts upset the viewers.”

“You don't understand.” It was a comment, not a rebuke. “I meant that
gethes
don't see beings involved in these acts. When you look at something, you remove all that doesn't affect you. You see what you need and feel, nothing else. You see nobody else.”

Giyadas had a way of slapping him down without intending to. She had that external perspective that he believed all journalists needed, while he now struggled to maintain his own professional distance as he veered between intensely partisan feelings and brief forays back into detachment. But Giyadas really
could
stand outside humanity: she was an alien.

Eddie paused and took the verdict like a man. He was used to it. “Do we do
anything
right, doll?”

“I don't know if you're wrong or right, only that you're different, and you don't behave the way we do, and we choose not to do what you do.”

“Is there any point to Esganikan restoring Earth, then, if humans can't behave right?” At times a voice told him he was insane to attach any importance to the world view of a child, but most of the time the other inner voice said that this was the raw wess'har heart, and a bloody good guide to their attitudes. The adults would have said exactly the same thing; unfiltered, undiplomatic, and blisteringly honest. He thought of the isenj and Esganikan's view of them as numbers to be
reduced. “I know the Eqbas aren't quite the same as you, but they're still wess'har. Would you wipe us out?”

“Not all of you.”

“That's nice to know.”

“The woman you called the cow sees the world as we do. Shan does too. There seem to be many.”

“How would you choose? Who's guilty? Who's not?”

Giyadas tilted her head to one side very slowly as if trying to work something out. “Who lives extravagantly with no thought of balance? Who kills other beings without provocation? Who eats carrion?”

“Probably a few billion people.”

“Then they'll answer to the Eqbas. As well as those who let the
gethes
contaminate Ouzhari.”

Eddie always felt like a kid edging across a frozen pond at this stage, desperate for the adventure but dreading what might happen. “They might be very old people by the time the Eqbas get there. Is it worth punishing them?”

“What difference does age make?”

No statute of limitation on war crimes, then: that was much the same as human morality. He felt a slight cracking and the threat of breath-stopping icy water. “Okay, Rayat and Lindsay set the cobalt bombs. Why are the people who
authorized
it guilty too? Wess'har logic says that they didn't carry out the act. Intent doesn't matter.”

“Does Rayat have orders? Like Ade? Orders he has to follow?”

Eddie considered what he knew of spooks. “Yes. More or less.”

“Then the person giving the orders knew that, and so is guilty.”

Eddie pondered the thought process. He'd moved from cracking ice to a maze from which he might not find his way out. Wess'har seemed to regard those given orders as mere buttons to be pushed, and yet they also regarded following bad orders—orders they considered immoral—as worse than giving them, because of the redemptive chance to refuse, and prevent the act.

And yet they didn't hold the Royal Marines responsible
for helping Lindsay transport the bombs to Bezer'ej. They hadn't taken part in setting them, and—Barencoin had told him—they'd reminded her that nuking Ouzhari wasn't within the rules of engagement.

Giyadas stared at him, pupils snapping. Eddie stared back, not quite seeing her.