She stripped off her uniform down to her briefs, not wanting to walk back in sodden clothing, and steeled herself for the coming moment of complete animal terror as water flooded her lungs.
She glanced over her shoulder first. Aras was sitting on the shore, elbows braced on his drawn-up knees, chin resting on his hands. She felt suddenly stupid. It was hard to maintain an image of silent menace in a pair of pale blue panties and a dog tag.
“Nothing to see here, folks,” said Shan. “Move along. Break it up.”
Aras didn’t smile. He pointed past her. There was the faintest suggestion of lime-green light in the shallows. The bezeri patrol was watching. She walked towards it. And contrary to popular myth, she stepped clean through the surface of the water. She couldn’t walk on the damn stuff at all.
The sea was achingly cold despite the balmy day. The cold stopped her breathing for a couple of seconds and then c’naatat overrode her weak human reflexes and forced her lungs into action. Currents tugged at her as she got in chest-deep. The pressure squeezed her ribs.
Just dive.
She plunged in. She couldn’t stop herself taking a great gulp of air before going under; nor could she stop herself holding her breath until the need to surrender to the reflex overwhelmed her and she inhaled. She screamed for air but there was no sound, just the endless sucking gasp that didn’t have a beginning or end. She couldn’t stop her arms flailing.
I’m not dying I’m not dying I’m not dying I can’t die I can’t die I can’t—
And then she felt something like cool water, separate from the sea, trickling over her from the top of her head and through the core of her. Her breathing stopped. It stopped. And she wasn’t dead, not unless dead was a long way from what she expected it to be, which was black oblivion.
She let her eyes adjust to the low light and the distortion of the water. Then she realized she was flat on her back. She eased herself into a crouch, straightened up and looked around for the signaling lamp, which had settled into the sand a few meters away.
The water in front of her blackened and moved. Then it was as if someone had suddenly switched on the Christmas lights in a shopping center. There was a wall of color. She had forgotten how big the adult bezeri could grow.
Why are you here? they asked.
She fumbled with the lamp. Her voice vibrated in her ears, and wess’u seemed to translate a lot better than English ever had. I once promised you I would maintain an exclusion zone around this world. It was the job I came to do.
But the wess’har are withdrawing. How can you help?
They’re leaving a weapon that will protect you, and it was made from my body.
There was a silent moment. The great gelatinous shapes, trailing tentacles that were striped with rippling gold and carmine, hung in front of her.
We know you would kill your own kind for us.
There was no tone in the translation and she wasn’t sure if they were complimenting her on her solidarity with them or saying they didn’t trust her an inch.
She picked her response carefully.
I’m sorry we’ve caused you so much grief.
They knew sorry. They’d seen the word from her before. She held out both hands and concentrated until the luminescence in them danced. That got a reaction. The bezeris’ lights flared and the lamp spluttered a burst of what sounded like static. She wondered if it was the bezeri for well, bugger me.
She had to explain it. I have something of you in me. I’m like Aras now.
Silence. They just hung there, watching.
I just wanted to know how you felt.
Still nothing. Then one glided forward and stopped a meter short of her. It—he—loomed almost twice as high as Aras, tentacles trailing almost straight down. If we had weapons like the wess’har, we would fight your kind, and the isenj. But we do not. Until then, we must rely on the courage of people we cannot see.
It was an ambiguous answer. What was she expecting, absolution? Was any of it her fault? It felt like it. She felt ashamed to be human. It was time to go.
Goodbye.
Perhaps they didn’t have a word for farewell. The lamp was silent. She backed off a few steps and then turned and walked back the way she had come, navigating by rocks and plant growth. She didn’t look behind again. A little further up the slope, she struck out with her arms and legs and summoned up some primeval human instinct to swim that she had never used before.
When her head was clear of the surface, she choked on air again. She knelt on all fours on the beach, coughing and retching up water. She could feel that her briefs were halfway off one hip and she wondered what the lads from her relief at Western Central would have said if they could have seen her, if any of them had still been alive. They would have laughed themselves sick.
Aras’s boots came into view. She retched again, coughing out mucus and seawater in long strings.
“It’s sheer glamor that attracted you to me, isn’t it?” she said, and tried to grin. But the remnant of the sea wanted out, and fast.
Aras put her jacket over her shoulders and sat with his arm round her back while she recovered her breath and her underwear dried.
“That wasn’t as bad as you expected,” he said, forestalling any comment from her that it had actually been bloody terrifying. “In time, you’ll control it.”
It was another tick on the list, another life-threatening event that her new body had treated as a learning opportunity. She had long known it, but this was the first time she had genuinely felt that she wasn’t human.
And if she was no longer human, she had no need to be ashamed any more.
Eddie could sleep anywhere when he had to, and a pallet on the construction site at Jejeno provided a sounder night’s sleep than a bunk on a vessel that was one big target roundel in his mind’s eye. He didn’t want to say as much. He worried that he made things happen just by saying them.
He got up and splashed his face in the fountain.
“Oi, don’t you know there’s a bleedin’ shower over there?” said a worker in a hard hat and coverall. He jerked his thumb to help Eddie better locate the facilities.
“Ah, silly me,” said Eddie. “Thank you so much.”
It was hard doing laundry in the shower, but he managed to wash and rinse his change of shirt and smalls and left them draped over a bot to dry. It made him feel quite the correspondent again: news editors, anchored to their desks, had no idea about the messy logistics of being in the field. He entertained a brief fantasy about dumping Boy Editor in the middle of a war zone where the local food was beyond human digestion. It gave him a warm feeling. It was exactly where he was now.
“You look untidy,” said Serrimissani when she collected him to escort him to see Ual.
Eddie checked his distorted reflection in a polished metal plate. He did his shirt up a little higher. It seemed to placate the ussissi, and she trotted ahead of him in silence. He opened his screen to check the news while he walked.
“Keep up,” she said, not turning. She had a predator’s hearing, the sort that listened for small things burrowing. Shan had told him about their taste in snacks. It didn’t surprise him one bit.
The headlines didn’t help. The diplomatic row—and Eddie normally found that an amusing mental image—was intensifying. It was all unspecific threat, typical of frightened people led by even more frightened politicians who wanted to look like they were Doing Something About It. Eddie wasn’t sure if the Americas or the Rim states could actually take out Thetis. But even if they could, they had a long wait ahead before they could see the whites of her eyes.
Eddie tried to work out how long it would be before Thetis came within range of Earth vessels, trying to juggle seventy-five-year transit times against near light-speed, and gave up. There weren’t that many deep space vessels about even now: they cost money, and space was neither a popular tourist destination nor a vote-getter. It was the main reason why they were using an old knacker like Thetis instead
of saving twenty-five years by sending a modern vessel to pick them up.
A group of isenj laborers walked across his path like a badly adjusted film sequence, all jerks and twitches. His hard-wired reaction to quick, staccato movement said spider and he tried to think person. But he failed. Maybe they were failing to make that conceptual leap on Earth, too.
They had left little dusty tracks across the Instaroad that had been rolled out to stop the bots digging even deeper gouges into the soil. Eddie paused and looked down. It looked like someone had shattered a flowerpot and left some of the fragments of black plastic behind.
Oh, he thought. Oh.
There was only one movement between involvement and noninvolvement. Eddie paused before making it. They said time wasn’t linear and that all things really happened at once but that you just saw it sequentially. Eddie knew that was bollocks. Once he had taken this step, there was no quantum state that would untake it for him.
He uncapped the urine sampler and scooped up the black fragments. He was pretty sure he knew what they were. He hoped they would do.
Serrimissani had realized he wasn’t keeping up and scuttled back to chivvy him. She followed his wrist action with scorpion-eater’s eyes as he closed the cap on the vial and popped it into the top pocket of his shirt.
“Don’t hold us up,” she said. “Minister Ual is waiting for you.”
“Sorry,” he said.
She didn’t say anything else. He walked behind her at double time like a Greenjacket. When they got into the ground car, she stared out of the open door as if to avoid conversation.
The boundaries of the site were marked by no more than chevron tape strung between waist-high poles, but the isenj treated them like fortifications. The crush started right outside. As soon as the car was past the tape, it had to press slowly through the throng. Eddie remembered the isenj who he thought he had seen fall and wondered if he’d ever got up again.
They didn’t seem to be a brutal or thoughtless people. But it was very hard to stop a crowd moving, even an orderly one that seemed to have its own unspoken rules of flow and speed.
Ual greeted Eddie at the door of his office, covering ground like a piece of badly designed furniture on castors.
“I’m sorry that things are still so tense back home,” said Eddie.
“You’re not responsible for your governments,” said the minister, still sucking in and wheezing out the alien words through a hole in his throat somewhere.
They sat in his fine plain aquamarine office and sipped something that might have been coffee. It was too liquid for Eddie to choke on. But he thought he might, and he didn’t feel clever and he didn’t feel in control. He took an occasional but discreet glance at Ual’s coat of projections strung with beads—red ones today—and wondered what perverse universe created a species with quills that was also doomed to live at very close quarters.
“We will be careful not to react,” said Ual. “We are not the ussissi. And we truly want a mutually helpful relationship with humans.”
Serrimissani wasn’t in earshot but Eddie still winced. “Do your people know what’s been on our news?”
“Yes, but it’s not their preoccupation. It’s a long way away and they have problems here and now to cope with.”
“We really do have a lot in common.” Yes, and you’re using it to kill them. “If it’s any comfort, we behave the same with members of our own species. We don’t take kindly to strangers.”
“It’s a wise precaution.”
“Are you in direct contact with the FEU foreign minister?”
“Not as directly as I am with you. He sends general messages, I send general replies. All encouraging words about technology and understanding. I don’t believe he is ready for a real-time exchange, as you call it. I imagine he has people around him who I don’t see but who want to check every word in and every word out.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
“And yet you have no such problem.”
“I’m a journalist. We’re not here to make politicians happy. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
If Ual was a two-faced weasel, it would make what Eddie had to do so much less painful. Eddie had no idea yet whether isenj were enough like humans to play nasty little games, or whether they were like the wess’har and the ussissi—aggressively frank and literal because they not only didn’t know how to lie but felt sufficiently confident not to need to.
Weasels. Eddie decided he would see animals differently in future, if he ever got home. Maybe weasels had something to tell him.
“We understand your natural fear of overcrowding,” said Ual. Now that was for the bee-cam, for sure. “I wish your people would be reassured that what we want is your help to learn your technologies, so we can address our own problems. Your planet is not our target. I do believe you should stop people reading those books by Mr. Wells.”
Eddie laughed. “He was a journalist too. We’re a lovable bunch.”
“There is a predisposition among your trade to make trouble,” said Ual, and made a gargling sound like a fast-emptying drain.
“I take it you wouldn’t mind if I broadcast our conversation?”
Ual looked at him—he imagined—with amusement. Eddie had no idea, really: isenj had no discernible eyes.
“ ‘Every mike is a live mike,’ ” said Ual. “That is correct, is it not?”
It was always satisfying to play the game with a professional. The key to self-respect was self-awareness: as long as you knew the game was on, it didn’t hurt at all. Ual had learned it rather well.
There was a small glassy ping, and one of Ual’s decorative beads bounced and rolled on the smooth-polished floor. Eddie fielded it deftly.
It had a fragment of quill still attached.
“Split ends are a bugger,” said Eddie, and held it out on his palm, willing Ual not to take it back.
“I have many,” Ual said. “Do keep it. I think you call it corundum. We have mined a very great deal of it over the years.”
“Rubies?” Eddie was briefly distracted: the stone was just tumbled, neither faceted nor polished into a cabochon. He’d never seen a plain stone. And those green beads might have been emeralds. “Thank you. But don’t tell too many humans about these, eh? It plays to our most excessive fantasies.”
He kept the bead and the quill in his palm until he was clear of the ministerial offices and waiting for the car outside with Serrimissani. Then he uncurled his fingers and breathed properly again. Serrimissani was looking the other way, but as he tightened the cap of the vial, she jerked round and stared.
“Look what Ual gave me,” said Eddie, having no choice.
Serrimissani looked him over as if she was searching discreetly for evidence. She reminded him of Shan, who always kept watch on what was happening around her even if she was also looking you straight in the eye. Coppers could do that.
“Is that all he gave you?” asked Serrimissani, and got into the car before he could frame an answer. He was expecting her general irritability to erupt into a lecture on how he should not interfere with the affairs of other nations, but she just studied her text pad, with an occasional yawn that ended in a slight whine and a snap of jaws, much like a fox’s.
She was not on anyone’s side, and his actions were his own to take, and to justify.
“D’you know, I’ve never parachuted,” said Rayat.
“Shut up,” said Barencoin.
The Once-Only suits hung from a sliding rail in the shuttle bay, ready to be fired out into space by a pressure jet when the aft hatch opened. Lindsay felt like a silk cocoon waiting to be dropped into seething water. She debated whether to kill the suit-to-suit comms but they needed to be able to hear each other.
They had plain old radios too: no AI comms, automatic switching or multiples. It was back to basic radio procedure. She hoped she could remember it.
Barencoin appeared to have stopped Rayat’s muttering. He was surprisingly discourteous for a Royal
Marine. And he was goading Bennett mercilessly. She wondered if it was nerves.
“DZ IN THIRTY SECONDS,” said the pilot over their headsets.
I’m going to die, thought Lindsay.
“DZ IN TWENTY SECONDS.”
I’m not coming back. I didn’t think about that.
“DZ IN FIFTEEN SECONDS.”
I only thought about going. Sorry, Eddie.
“TEN.”
At least…
“NINE.”
…I’ll be…
“EIGHT.”
…near David.
“SEVEN.”
“Ade, hold my hand….” said Barencoin.
“SIX.”
“Ade, I want to pee….”
“FIVE.”
“Cork it.”
“FOUR.”
“Ade, are we there yet?”
“THREE.”
“Fuck you, Mart.”
“TWO.”
“Shut it,” said Lindsay.
“ONE. DZ. GREEN LIGHT. AWAY.”
And she thought she fell.
Foam exploded into the suit’s inner skin and in seconds she was encased in a soft but insistent molded cradle of polysilicate. And she kept falling, but her brain said she should have landed by now. She could see the thin line that tethered her to the maiale; if she had been able to summon up the courage, she could have looked back and followed the other section of tether to see Bennett and the others, strung like beads from the tow-line.
Humans needed a floor. They needed it more than they needed a definite up and down. This was not flying; this was not banging out of an aircraft through the canopy; this was not an EVA with a safety line rigged to the hull. This was complete, unconnected, disembodied physical terror, made all the worse because she had no reassurance of gravity.
It was all she could do not to be sick. She shut her eyes. Her suit, like all of them, had its own autopilot, but it was very hard to trust that when you were in a foam-filled plastic bag that you hoped would withstand reentry temperatures. She could hear the quiet, almost casual chitchat between the marines. Barencoin had stopped teasing Bennett. They were all business now.