“Not until she bothers to learn it. Some wess’har can, though. Don’t assume otherwise.”
There were times in Shan’s life when she had the uneasy sensation that something of great importance was taking place and that she really ought to have been standing outside herself to observe it. This was one of those times. She walked beside Aras into a wide colonnaded terrace lined with buildings that could easily have sprung from the Earth as living objects. Doorways twisted slightly; windows—if they were windows—were irregular, one a teardrop, the next a jagged slit, and there were beings paused in their daily lives and looking at her. She tried not to stare back at them. They all looked like Fersanye, and none like Aras. As she passed, a double-toned burble wafted on the air behind her, no doubt a discussion of the strange human who had been brought to explain herself to them. Most would never have seen a live human before.
Their gaze was easy to follow. But they weren’t staring at her.
They were staring at Aras.
They gazed at him down long muzzles that were neither human nor animal; Shan tried not to stare back, but it seemed rude not to at least acknowledge them in some way. When one caught her eye, she nodded as she had seen Aras do, but she couldn’t gauge their reaction. Aras was still no reliable guide to wess’har behavior.
F’nar spread round the entire bowl of the caldera, an amphitheater of terraced streets punctuated by trickling water courses, twisting steps and brilliant foliage in carmine and gold
“So this is what you meant by noticeable building,” she said.
“I come from the north. We build into the world. They’re soft down here—they just disguise it.”
She said nothing more until they reached a building at the bottom of another flight of steps that promised to be treacherous in wet weather. It looked ordinary, if anything in this city could be called commonplace. Aras indicated the door with a spread hand and waited for her to enter. It was just a screen across an irregular opening.
“Is this it?” she asked.
“It’s Chayyas’s house,” Aras said. “Are you disappointed?”
She had expected the grandeur of a government building, a statement of power or past or empire. Once through the door, the building seemed to be the size of a small hotel, a maze of interconnecting chambers that didn’t correspond to anything that resembled human architecture or layout. She found herself walking through occupied rooms where wess’har youngsters and small males with their distinctive long manes paused to stare at her and then glance away again. She could see no doors to close.
“Am I using the tradesman’s entrance?”
“No,” said Aras.
“Don’t you have corridors?”
“Not in a family home. All rooms connect.” He paused in front of an opening partly covered by a swath of ornate green and blue fabric and pulled the curtain aside. “We don’t share your need for seclusion. This is the most private they can make your accommodation for the time being.”
A doorway led into a chamber decorated with the same fabric. There was an alcove with a shelf cut into it at waist height and filled with bolsters, and several more openings revealed other smaller rooms.
“Bed,” said Aras, pointing at the alcove. “Washing facilities through there. Library in there.”
“Library.”
“Everyone has a library.”
“Right.”
“I’ll go and see what’s to eat,” Aras said, and slipped out.
Shan unfastened the top of her fatigues, feeling the heat of the c’naatat still at work, and wondered what it was up to in the quiet microscopic backwaters of her body. Her clothes were at the limit of their expansion.
She waited for Aras to come back and fetch her from her room. She didn’t relish the thought of wandering around a wess’har home on her own, not knowing when she might cause offense or look foolish.
“There’s a meal ready when you want it,” he said.
“Is this formal?”
“No. You eat with whoever happens to be around. Mainly the males and children at the moment. The matriarchs are in discussion.”
Expect nothing in common with aliens, Galvin the xenozoologist had once told her. Shan thought briefly that it was a shame Galvin didn’t make it this far, but that was dangerously like sentiment. She hadn’t. It was tough.
Shan watched for a few seconds before venturing into the room. The aromas were odd, some familiar and distinctly foodlike, some more chemical, but whatever the smells were she didn’t have the olfactory receptors to pick them all up. Perhaps the c’naatat would add those in due course. Long tawny wess’har males were chopping vegetables and stirring pans. They glanced up at her and then looked away, intent on their cooking again.
The difference between the genders was clearer now: the females were much larger than the males, with tufted manes rather than long soft braids. There also seemed to be very few of them. This was a predominantly male society, even if the matriarchs did have control. Shan was immediately surrounded by a small group of wess’har children. They stared up at her totally unself-consciously and made little doublewarbling sounds.
“I’m not going to learn to speak the language, am I?” she said, turning to Aras for support. She tried to smile reassuringly at them for all the good it would do. She was alarmed not that they were aliens but that they were children. “I can’t do that overtone thing.”
“I think you might,” Aras said. “Trust your little colony.”
Aras dispersed the children with a brief sound and led Shan to the table. One of the other males laid out plates in front of them with the quick ease of a card dealer. The plates were every shade of colored glass she could imagine, some shot with swirls like the glasses she had first seen in Josh’s house, others speckled with bursts of contrasting colors. Even the serving spoons, broad curved scoops like overblown sticks of celery, were dazzlingly colorful glass. The food, at least, would be safe. There would be no entrails or unidentifiable body parts to negotiate.
She gave the bowls of food a cursory glance, searching for shapes she might recognize. There were some odd dishes, but one was immediately recognizable. A bowl was filled with glistening purple shreds.
“Oh boy,” she said. “Beetroot. My favorite.”
“It’s popular here,” Aras said. “Our one import. An honor.”
Shan decided to risk breaching etiquette and dug a serving spoon into a plate of brilliant orange cubes that yielded like sponge. She speared a cube on a single-tined fork and bit off a piece. Rosewater, cardamom, salt. It was slightly chewy and left her mouth tingling.
“Evem,” Aras said. “And that is lurisj. I would normally advise caution, but I doubt it will have any effect now.”
She took a piece and chewed. It felt like Turkish delight in her mouth but its flavor was fungal.
“Lurisj,” Aras repeated. “It’s recreational. Like beer.”
“Really?”
“A few pieces will affect your perception.”
“You can get legless on this?”
“If your little colony allows it. Which I doubt.”
“What do you mean, if it allows it?”
“It’s a toxin, as is alcohol.”
“Yes, mum, I know that.”
“And your new body ecology will neutralize it and excrete it.”
Shan stopped chewing. “I can’t get drunk, then?”
“No. But you said you despised drunkenness, so that would be a bonus, wouldn’t it?”
He was right. She was puritanical about drinking, even more than the colonists, but knowing she could never experience its release again left her feeling bereft. She could no longer get drunk, and she couldn’t go home, and she could never screw Ade Bennett or any other man—and never now translated as an unimaginable time stretching ahead of her.
Tears pricked her eyes. She changed the subject.
“I’m not going to cause offense by serving myself, am I?” She piled more evem onto her plate.
<
br /> “Nobody would seek to serve you food,” Aras said quietly. “With the exception of some of the more remote clans, wess’har would only serve food to a sexual partner or their immediate relatives. Or someone they wanted to be their sexual partner.”
He beamed to himself as if he were remembering a private joke. She was going to ask him what was so funny when one of the wess’har males stopped what he was doing and came to sit with them.
“I speak English,” he said, all musical tones and shocking gold eyes. “I am Cekul. Do you like this food? Is it strange to you?”
“It’s very nice,” she said weakly, and smiled, trying to reassure him. She bit into a meatball-shaped cake, like the netun that Aras seemed fond of: it was overwhelmingly sweet and scented. The center popped and yielded a burst of tart fuchsia-pink filling. “This is very good.”
“I make the best paran jay,” he said flatly.
Aras gave her a glance that warned her she was on contentious territory. Skills, he had told her, were one of those status things that took the place of possessions.
“It is all safe for you,” said Cekul. “Nothing disgusting from creatures.”
“I realize you don’t use animal products. Lots of humans don’t, either. I do understand.”
He leaned forward a little, all curiosity. She could suddenly smell—no, taste—the most delicious scent of sandalwood rising from him, just as with Aras. She inhaled it involuntarily. It gave her an indefinably pleasant feeling.
“Is it true you eat a substance made with insect saliva?” Cekul asked carefully, as if it were a disgraceful perversion. “A viscous yellow liquid?”
“Honey?” she said. “Oh. Yes.”
“And eggs, out of creatures’—backsides?”
Human food habits seemed suddenly embarrassing. Rotted animal lactation laced with mold or curdled with stomach enzymes. Intoxicants made out of yeast-piss. Raw bivalves, eaten alive. No wonder they called humans gethes. “Yes,” she admitted.
The master chef stared down his muzzle at her and his sandalwood scent shifted a little into citrus. “Oh, gethes,” he said. “How will we live alongside you? I think we never will.” And he stood up and went back to his pots and knives. For a few moments she couldn’t speak. Aras fumbled nervously with the paran jay.
“We tend to speak our minds,” he said at last. “I have lost something of the habit.”
“I think diplomacy is going to be a challenge here.”
“I’ve not prepared you properly for this.”
“Should I be that rude to the matriarchs?”
“Yes.”
“I spent half my working life learning to keep my big mouth shut. That’s what we call irony.”
Shan retreated to her room and awaited the call of the matriarchal assembly, and tried not to visualize it. She had been summoned, not invited, and they weren’t about to seek her views on F’nar’s economic future as a tourist center.
How hard could it be? She’d given evidence enough times in court. There wasn’t a lawyer alive who could make her nervous or browbeat her into expressing doubt about her evidence. This time was no different.
Aras appeared at the doorway. “They’re ready,” he said.
Wrong. This time was different.
He led her down buff stone hallways that were punctuated by skylights every few meters. Dust motes danced in the shafts of sun as she passed, and when she looked to one side or the other, she spotted hallways within hallways. There were still no doors. And nothing terrible waiting behind them. She still didn’t like doors.
As they walked she caught snatches of warbling voices and the scraping of implements on china. No, glass: it was probably glass. These people were obsessed with transparency. She paused and looked up at one circular skylight, and caught her breath with a yelp when she saw a mass of wess’har faces crowded above it, arranged round the margin like flower petals.
“Kids,” said Aras helpfully. He gestured through the glass and the light bloomed again as they scattered. “I did try to create some privacy. I’m sorry.”
Eventually they reached the end of what had begun to feel like a tunnel and came into an octagonal lobby faced with polished stone. It was a startling contrast to the honeycomb passages and chambers of the family quarters, and if it was meant to inspire reverence and fear in the face of government, it was doing a pretty good job.
I remember this, she thought. I’ve been here before in a way.
She recalled a courthouse built in the nineteenth century, a magnificent Victorian criminal court where the accused were brought up from the cells through the bridewell to ascend steps and find themselves in a vaulted courtroom of intimidating beauty. The judge sat on an impossibly high platform at the front, the jury on extravagantly carved benches to one side and the press on the other. It was a victim’s entry into the arena. It was bowel-loosening grandeur. But it had never been her bowels at stake before, just her prisoner’s. Now she understood.
Aras led her to the side of the room and picked up a long pole from a bundle propped in the corner. He flicked it and it snapped into a frame.
“Seat,” he said, and showed her how to make herself comfortable on it by kneeling and slipping it under her backside, so that she was almost but not quite taking her weight on her heels. It reminded her of a meditation stool, but wess’har obviously had knees of a more heroic construction than humans’. She shuffled uncomfortably. In so far as her buttocks were on something that was taking her weight, she was sitting. But she had no idea how long she could maintain the position. Her c’naatat hadn’t yet seen fit to equip her for the furniture.
She glanced around. The lack of seating had now begun to obsess her, and she noted that there were no tables or work surfaces at the heights she expected. The hall she had entered was uncluttered, with absolutely no furniture whatsoever. Then she watched a wess’har male wander in and look briefly along the walls for something as if he were reading a notice. She couldn’t see what it was from where she was sitting. It was hard to skew round on the stool, wedged as it was, without popping a vertebra or making obscene scraping sounds on the flooring. The male took a cylinder like a large pen from his tunic, snapped it out into a longer shape about fifty centimeters long, unfolded that into a strip about fifteen centimeters wide, and then folded it into a triangular form to make—another stool. He slid it under him with unconscious skill and knelt. As he touched the floor before him, a flat ovoid surface rose up at a slight angle to meet him at the optimum height for a work surface.
All he had done was pull up a chair and sit down at a desk. But it had dazzled her, just as firearms and cameras had once shocked native peoples on Earth, and it served to remind her of humankind’s new place in the pecking order. She laid her hand on the floor in front of her, just to see what would happen, and nothing did. The pastel terrazzo flooring yielded nothing to her. Aras glanced at her and said nothing.
A sound of rustling movement came from another corridor leading on to the lobby and Shan looked up, expecting to see a matriarch bearing down on her. What emerged from the passage looked more like a meerkat or a mongoose: it was smaller than a human, standing upright and moving with a brisk swaying movement that made the fabric bandoliers it was wearing swing dramatically. It pressed the wall and stood staring at it until a screen appeared. Then it took a pole-seat from its garment and sat down, apparently to read. It seemed to be having as much trouble getting comfortable as Shan had.
She turned her face slowly to Aras. “And that is?”
“Ussissi,” said Aras. “Are they what you expected?”
“You let them wander around in your state buildings?” All her faith in the wise might of the wess’har was crumbling. “Are they security-cleared?”
“What would they find out about us that the isenj don’t already know? They take no sides. They like to live alongside other species.”
“Aras, military and technical strength might work for you now, but if you ever mix it up with h
umans, you’ll have to be a lot more canny.”
“You can explain ‘canny’ to me later,” he said, and got up, indicating a doorway opposite them. “You’re summoned. I will follow.”
Fersanye—she assumed it was Fersanye, anyway—stood in the entrance and simply motioned her forward with a single gesture like a parking marshal, and it was a gesture that expected to be obeyed. Whatever chamber was on the other side of that doorway behind that veil of yellow and amber fabric was going to be immense. Shan swallowed. If there were brilliant lights, she would keep her eyes down. If there were rank upon rank of hostile alien faces, she would concentrate her gaze on one at a time. She could do it. It was just a day in the witness box.
She stepped through the opening and glanced round the chamber.
It was slightly smaller than the kitchen in which she’d eaten earlier, and there were nine wess’har females sitting there, some on benches at a table, others in individual chairs. A mongoose of a ussissi with a text pad scuttled up to her side. The anticlimax almost forced a sob from her.
“Shan Frankland, I shall translate for you, although the matriarch Siyyas and the matriarch Prelit and the matriarch Chayyas do speak some English.” The mongoose was talking to her in an odd, sibilant little girl’s voice. Did they really need an interpreter? Didn’t they have software? “They apologize for making you wait in the library for so long, but they had other items to discuss that they thought might bore you.”
It was as eloquent a lesson in cultural misreading as she had ever received. A library. It wasn’t a court lobby. Nothing here was what she took it to be. Its apparent familiarity was deceptive and dangerous.
“You have a function that defines you,” Prelit said. “What is it?”
“Your job,” the ussissi prompted.
“I’m a police officer,” Shan said. “I enforce the rules of my society. My speciality is preventing environmental hazards.”
“Can you prevent your fellow gethes working with the isenj?”
“No. What they can offer humans in terms of technology is probably far more persuasive than anything I can do or say to them.”