So what’s really pissing you off about being pregnant?
She didn’t want a child at all, but Ade and Aras would have liked nothing better. She knew that. She also knew how she’d judged Lindsay’s unplanned pregnancy: if you really couldn’t face having a kid, then you didn’t open your legs, and if you did, then you had to live with the consequences. Even Lindsay—knocked up when she was drunk, the irresponsible cow—had accepted that and turned down a termination.
Okay, so you have the kid. You don’t have to do the maternal thing. Ade and Aras are just gagging to be dads.
Shan stared out across the plain and defocused again, reducing the complex landscape to a blurred gold tapestry. She tried to imagine growing up as a c’naatat; and now she knew why the parasite and the host were both given the same term by the wess’har, because it defined you.
The word meant unending.
How fast did a c’naatat fetus develop?
How did you tell a kid that they were never going to die?
And what happened when the kid realized there were no others like them, and that they’d never have a lover or children of their own?
They could never have a normal life unless more c’naatat hosts were created. Here’s your little friend, sweetheart. I’ve made you a new one to play with. Jesus, it would be condemning them not only to a lonely existence, but a permanent one that locked them in a continual emotional childhood, where the only people like them would be their parents. You couldn’t stand by and not be tempted to make just a few more hosts so they had the chances of happiness that you had.
And then where did it stop?
There would be generations, each facing the same dilemma: do we stop this here and now? Shapakti said he might be able to remove c’naatat from humans, but she couldn’t have a face doing that, knowing she’d watch her child die of old age—and that they would watch, normal and mortal and probably resentful—while she lived on.
Shan squatted by the cairn to see if her warrant card was still wedged between the stones and then took a brisk walk back down the slope and across the plain to the patch of fields where Ade and Aras were working.
Take a run at it, just like you did at the airlock. Just tell them. Maybe they’ll see it more clearly than you.
She never used to agonize over decisions like this.
Aras straightened up at her approach. “Isan, we have a surprise for you.” He never quite managed a human smile, but he beamed wonderfully, and it was disarming. “Ade, show her.”
Not half the surprise I’ve got for you. “What is it?”
“Potatoes,” Ade said. “They grew really fast.”
He held out his hand, palm up, with a few soil-caked tubers about the size of eggs. There was something inexplicably exciting about crops.
It’s your child, Ade. It can’t be Aras’s. This is between you and me. “No mint,” she said. “But who needs mint with them anyway?”
“What’s wrong?” asked Aras. “You’ve shut down your scent. You said you wouldn’t do that with us.”
“Sorry.” They might as well have been telepathic after all. “Habit.”
There was always a fraction of a second that was the right time to say something difficult, and when it passed it became impossible again. Shan had always cut to the chase. Now she struggled. She floundered between sorting out her own mistakes and debating what rights Aras and Ade had in this. They both looked at her, so transparently focused on her welfare that she hated herself with renewed vigor.
Yes, Aras too. His genes are as much a part of this thing as Ade’s.
“I’ve had a few nasty surprises lately,” she said. “I’ll sort myself out in a few days. Look, give me those spuds and I’ll take them back to the house.”
“We’ve got enough for potato salad and a few chips,” said Ade. “I know new potatoes make poor chips, but…well, chips.”
He grinned. He was artless and sincere, and she longed for the certain, old days when everyone she met was a bastard to be nicked and not to be trusted. She’d break his heart.
“I love you,” she said. “Both of you. I don’t say it enough.”
That was all she could take right then. She turned and walked at race speed back to the city, where she couldn’t get behind her own door fast enough to punch the wall in the washroom over and over again until she broke bones and her knuckles were raw and bleeding. She wanted to bleed because c’naatat always stopped the flow, and she was determined to beat the fucking thing just once, just once.
It hurt like hell and that was fine. She put her palms flat against the wall and let her head hang while she caught sobbing breaths. Her blood was vivid and ugly against the pale stone, far harder to clean off than she expected, but her hands were already whole again as if nothing had ever touched her.
She’d never be able to abort this fetus. C’naatat wouldn’t let her.
It struck her that the last thing she had considered was what the child might have wanted if it could choose.
Bezer’ej: Bezeri settlement
Rayat was almost grateful for the revelation that there had once been other large aquatic species in the oceans of Bezer’ej.
It took his mind off the fact that he had no immediate way of getting off the planet. Tough. The whole point is not to crack. This is about time. Time—you’ve got time, more than you can even count. He’d come up with unexpected solutions in desperate situations so many times in the past that he had every confidence that he could do it again, and again, and again. He didn’t have a deadline. And if his government had one, he neither knew it nor could he do anything about it. The trick of endurance was to concentrate on getting through the next moment and not look at the daunting length of the road ahead.
But the history of the bezeri wasn’t just an artificial diversion to hang on to his sanity.
It mattered. For some reason, it mattered. If the bezeri had hunted another species to extinction, then what he’d done to them took on a whole new moral perspective. It also changed the context of what the isenj had done here. And that…that would put the wess’har in a very different position too. He was pretty sure he knew how they thought now.
“Hoist by your own petard,” he said.
Lindsay, still and glassy, looked up from the azin shell map. “Me?”
“Them.”
“Don’t gloat. We don’t know this for sure. Only that some species disappeared. Like that hasn’t happened on Earth.”
“Like we didn’t make it happen on Earth.”
“Does it make a difference?”
“Yes. It makes the bezeri far less blameless.”
“Mohan, that’s like saying Auschwitz or Rwanda or Nepal were justified because we killed the last tiger.”
Nobody had called him Mohan for years. It startled him. He almost wondered who she was talking to. “I didn’t say justified. Only less black and white.” He looked at the long row of maps that he’d stacked like dishes on a draining board and decided to drill down. There were at least a thousand now. “Help me out with this, will you? I want to find the point at which these large animals disappeared. These maps run from oldest to most recent. Start sampling them at intervals from your end until you see this pictogram.” He pointed to the symbol for the large animal, a vivid blue oval striped with yellow lines. He wondered what created the blue color: lapis deposits? The ovals were on every one of the most ancient maps he’d seen so far. “I’ll do the same from the earliest end. Get cracking.”
Rayat’s spirits lifted. He liked tracking down information, hunting facts. Oh yes, he understood what drove Eddie Michallat. There was a blind exhilaration in it and it almost didn’t matter what you found as long as you found it. Somehow the same mindset operated in him, and Eddie, and Shan Frankland. Spies, journalists, detectives; all hunters, all prone to feeding frenzies.
You could only truly hate others for showing you the things you recognized in yourself.
They worked in silence except for the scrape
and clack of azin shell plates as they gradually moved towards each other along the line of records. He forgot time. Eventually, with his stomach growling for food, he pulled a sheet at a ten-record interval and the blue ovals were nowhere to be seen.
“Got it,” he said. Lindsay stopped. “They’re gone by this period, I think.”
She moved towards him and started pulling records at shorter intervals, and then checked every one in a run of twenty. She shook her head; that much of her was still very human, Rayat thought.
“Nothing like that from this point on,” she said. “I haven’t checked them all, but it doesn’t look as if they reappeared. I mean, they might be—oh, extraplanetary for want of a better word, like the wess’har.”
“Either way,” said Rayat, “they were here for a very long time, and then they weren’t, and their presence is linked every time to the pictogram for hunt.”
“Let’s pin it down on the timeline, then.”
They attacked the task with renewed vigor. Eventually, Rayat pulled a record with a blue oval, and Lindsay pulled the one ahead of it, and there were no more pictograms like it.
“Here’s the end of the line,” she said. “What’s the date?”
Rayat was still tackling the detail of the timeline. The shell plates were marked with indentations that had probably been added afterwards at a point where the bezeri had adopted a kind of numerical dating system. But it was long before the wess’har arrived in the system, and long before the isenj colonized the planet; he took a guess at between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago.
“I’ll ask Saib to check it for me,” said Rayat, and put the shell record carefully inside his shirt. “And there are some pictograms I still can’t understand. Time to ask a few questions.”
Lindsay might have smiled at him. It was hard to tell with the increasing transparency of her face.
“Eddie would be proud of you,” she said. “If he even knows you’re alive.”
F’nar, Wess’ej
Eddie leaned around the open door and knocked on it anyway. He always approached Shan with due caution.
“Hi,” he said. “Holy shit. Why didn’t you tell me Vijissi was alive? No, you’re right. Stupid question. Like you wouldn’t tell me if Lin or Rayat had a dose of c’naatat too.”
Shan had never been a pretty woman but she usually appeared luminously fit, and her strong coloring and psychotic fixed gray gaze made her at least striking. But now she just looked ill. No, stupid, she sucks vacuum for an encore. Ill doesn’t happen to her. He invited himself in and noted that she was scrubbing potatoes.
“So now you know he’s alive, what are you going to do?” she asked.
She gave him a baleful look but something told him it was meant for someone else. He just happened to be in the line of fire.
“Same as I did when you survived. Say nothing. Don’t you think I’ve learned my lesson?”
“You’re forever polishing your conscience about what you should and shouldn’t report, Eddie,” she said. “How do I know when you’re going to get all ethical about c’naatat?”
“At least tell me I’m not going mad and that I was right about the other two.”
She paused. It looked as if she really wanted to concentrate on those potatoes and he was interrupting. “There was a good reason for it.”
“You’d never have let that happen on your watch.”
“I think you better stop right there.”
Aras? Ade? They were the only two carriers who could have doled it out. Jesus, he was glad he wasn’t in their shoes. But she’d seemed pretty affectionate with them; he couldn’t begin to piece this together, and he shouldn’t have tried, but old instinct made him yearn to pursue it.
It was a story. Stories made him tick. He fell into trying to coax it out of her without even thinking; and that wasn’t the best approach with Shan. She asked the questions. Her police days might have been over, but she’d never left the interrogation room.
“It’s Vijissi, isn’t it?” He thought about offering to help her with the potatoes, but that wouldn’t have worked either. “I know how badly you felt about him. But he did the big gesture of his own free will. Not your fault.”
“You’re not thick, Eddie. You know how serious the implications are of having another c’naatat on the books.”
“The whole bloody ussissi colony is going to be in a tight spot.”
“You always manage to make me feel better, you know that?” she said wearily. “Can you just fuck off for a while?”
“Who pissed in your corn flakes this morning?”
“Sorry. I decided I was getting too nice lately so I’m brushing up my bastard skills.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“I’ll live. Look, Vijissi is a pack animal who can’t ever be part of a pack again. His clan won’t go near him. They’re upset, he’s upset, the whole fucking ussissi mob is upset. I promised I’d be there for him and you know what? There’s nothing a human female can do to help a ussissi kid who’s a leper.”
“Kid?”
“He’s only just past the juvenile stage. I didn’t realize that either.”
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he’ll change like Aras did.”
Shan turned very slowly. It was pure menace, and not for effect. He knew her well enough to see that savage violence when it was being tightly reined in: her face was a mask and her pupils set wide. Her eyes were such a pale gray that the sudden dilation to black changed her whole face.
“I don’t like where that line of logic is heading,” she said. The quieter her voice, the more scary she was. “So it stops. Now.”
Good old Shan, good old honest and courageous Shan: but she could be the Shan you’d run and hide from, and hate too. Eddie felt his adrenaline start to pump. Maybe she’d had a fight with Aras. Ade wouldn’t say a word out of line to her; he thought the sun shone out of her arse. So it had to be Aras. But they’d kiss, make up and be all over each other again in no time.
Eddie shifted tack. “Come on, let’s go and find Vijissi.”
Shan turned back to the sink and stared at the wet potatoes as if willing them to bake spontaneously. “Okay.”
Eddie gave up trying to make small talk while they walked to Mestin’s home on the opposite side of the caldera. Shan always knocked: wess’har found it hilarious for some reason. Sevaor opened the door and made an exaggerated come-in gesture.
“Vijissi?” he said.
“Is he okay?”
“No.”
“Can we see him?”
“Ask him.” It wasn’t as abrupt as it sounded. Sevaor’s English was limited, but it was polite of him to try to speak it in front of Eddie. “He does not talk to me.”
Shan walked past Sevaor, and Eddie followed her down winding passages. Vijissi was curled up in a ball on the floor. There was no bed, just a typical alcove set in the wall: Eddie wondered how wess’har managed not to roll out of those holes when they fell asleep. Once their chambers reminded him of submarines lined with cramped bunks, but they seemed more like catacombs now.
“Hey, fella,” Shan said. She squatted down and shook his shoulder. “It’s okay. Want to talk? How’d you like to stay with us for a while?”
The ussissi opened his eyes. They really did look like roadkill now. “Shan Chail.”
She leaned over and did something that only another c’naatat could risk with impunity. She nuzzled his sharp little meerkat face and even kissed his head. “I am so, so sorry. It must be hard seeing her like that. Whatever it takes to get you through this, I’ll do it. Whatever.”
Eddie had never seen Shan display emotion quite that openly. He’d chipped the ice on the pond a few times and seen the angry bitch beneath, but sometimes he also caught a glimpse of a truly broken woman who’d seen too much and yet still kept going. Sometimes, though, she was actually affectionate in a way he found almost embarrassing, and he wasn’t sure why.
“Let me
die,” said Vijissi. His voice was a whisper.
“No, mate, we’re not going to let you die.” Shan straightened up. “You’re like us now. Now, I know that means—”
“You should have let me die.” He was very clear. He uncoiled himself and sat back on his haunches. “Everything dies in time. Everything should die in time. They should have destroyed me. It’s wrong. It’s wrong.”
“Vij, come on home with me. Nobody knows what you’re going through better than Aras. He was on his own for centuries and he came through it.”
“But he has you, and Ade.”
“Yeah.”
“Ussissi can’t live alone. Ever. And I can have no children now. You think you’re helping, but you’re not.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “Please, leave me. We can talk later.”
If Vijissi had spat at her, Shan couldn’t have looked more crushed. Eddie wondered if she’d have felt so guilt-ridden about a human. Two legs was usually bad as far as Shan was concerned. He caught her sleeve and steered her away.
Shan paused and looked back at Vijissi as she left the room. “I won’t pester you, but you know where I am. Anytime, okay?”
They ambled along the terrace back to her home. She thrust her hands deep in her pockets and said nothing.
“I thought they’d be more supportive of him,” said Eddie.
“I don’t understand them yet.”
“They don’t tolerate difference well.”
“Funny how wess’har do.”
“Just because they evolved together doesn’t make them identical.”
“Nah.”
“Are you going to be okay, doll?”
“Funny thing to ask a c’naatat.”
“You’re not yourself.”
“Shitty week all round. I’ll survive.”
She didn’t ask Eddie to stay for lunch. He saw her safely inside—a weird thing, fretting over an immortal’s welfare—and went back to the haven of his makeshift studio in Nevyan’s tunnel-warren home.
Three more c’naatat, then. This was what Shan had dreaded: one, then three, then six, and where would it end?