“I thought you might be upset if you woke and I wasn’t here.”
“Aww. Sweet.”
“It’s started.”
“What has?”
“Recall of your memories.”
“Oh.”
She felt him swallow. “Most unpleasant.”
“Try fucking awful.”
“You’re very resilient.”
“Didn’t have a lot of choice.”
She started to drift off again, soothed by the delicious scent of sandalwood and the suede-like feel of his skin. This was bliss. She didn’t need to be on her guard. She knew her gun was on the table by the bed and it didn’t matter that it was a little out of reach. F’nar felt safe in a way that Earth never had.
He nudged her. “And am I forgiven for my reluctance to mount you?”
“Aras, can we work on a bit of euphemism, please? Mounting just doesn’t do it for me.”
“But you don’t use euphemism. You say—”
“I know what word I use. But mounting is a bit too… agricultural.”
“Very well. But am I? Forgiven, that is?”
“I reckon.”
“Promise me that you won’t get involved in Esganikan’s missions. I would welcome some uneventful time with you.”
It wasn’t an unreasonable request. “Provided she doesn’t piss me about over the gene bank, I’ll leave her to her own devices. I’m not the cavalry any more. I know when I’m done.”
Aras made a noncommittal rumble in his throat that might have been either approval or disbelief. She shut her eyes again and rearranged his arm into a more comfortable position for her head; the rumble turned into that purr with its undertone of infrasonics, ebbing and flowing, soothing her just as it would calm a wess’har infant. The outside world receded. She sank into a blanket of endless, blurred gold.
“What if it had been Rayat?” The purr trailed off.
Oh, please. The gold haze evaporated. “What if what had been Rayat?”
“If you had infected him. Would you have felt the same pity and…obligation?”
“Oh, come on.” She rolled over on her back. She was wide awake again. “No. Not even with a bag over his head. I’d have given him a grenade and told him to do the decent thing.” She got up and checked her swiss: it was still four hours to sunrise and 2318 Western FEU time, as if that mattered to her body clock any longer. “I know what this is about. You want a house-brother, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Poor sod. He’d coped with his condition on Bezer’ej, but being surrounded by ordinary wess’har again seemed to have made him more desperate for normality. She wondered how long it would be before he became broody. But a remedy for that longing would always be completely out of the question in so many ways, and she wasn’t even going to mention it.
“Look, if you and Ade want to sort out some arrangement, go ahead.” Yes, go on. Save me having to make the decision for once. “If that’s the way you both want it, I’ll be perfectly happy.”
“That’s very wess’har of you.”
“There’s a lot of me that is.”
Liar. That was one part of her that wasn’t. Her brain said one at a time, girl. She was appalled at herself for even looking at Ade, and she did, oh yes she did. She’d looked at him that way for a long time. It might have been normal and even commendable for wess’har, but a voice inside kept yelling slut, slut, slut. Of course polyandry was okay for wess’har: they were…animals.
And that was another thought she didn’t like, and it was equally unbidden. If there was anyone who should have had the most open of minds about nonhuman species, it was her, and here she was relegating wess’har into the category of not like us.
She really didn’t have an us any longer. The us consisted of Aras Sar Iussan and Ade Bennett and her. She now had more in common with the yodeling sea horses in the city below and even with the microscopic organisms she had sifted between her fingers on Ouzhari than she had with the monkeys whose worst attitudes still rose up in her when she least expected it.
“When are you going to see the bezeri?” Aras had taken the news of their request in silence. She wondered if he didn’t want to leave her on her own with Ade after all. “I could come with you.”
“No need,” said Aras. “I shall talk to them. I’ll leave tomorrow.”
He didn’t sound happy about it. But that wasn’t surprising. There was no comfort he could give them, and apologies were worse than useless.
Outcomes were all that mattered, and Shan couldn’t think of any happy endings for the bezeri.
18
We approve of your decision to limit human endeavor to your own system. But your poor relations with other species on Earth make us believe that the common interest still needs our intervention. You appear to be familiar with the concept of third party arbitration and peacekeeping. Our current timetable and intentions stand.
CURAS TI
senior matriarch of Surang and speaker for Eqbas Vorhi in
off-world matters,
in a message to the United Nations
Ade crouched down to look Serrimissani in her hostile black eyes and handed her the sheet of smartpaper. “This is the best I can do, mate,” he said. “Rigger’s would be best, high combats if not. I’ll be really grateful.”
Serrimissani studied the traced outline of the sole of a boot and gave Ade the sort of look that he’d seen her give Eddie. He felt stupid. But he’d promised Shan he’d get her some replacement boots, good solid ones, and he was going to do it. Barencoin and Qureshi watched him suspiciously. The Exchange of Surplus Things had become the nearest thing they had to a mess and when they weren’t on crop duties they hung around here, and he wished they wouldn’t.
“I will do my best,” said Serrimissani. Ussissi seemed not to find it demeaning to run errands. “If I have to barter for this, what do I offer?”
Ussissi were new to haggling. Ade couldn’t help thinking they would end up being bloody good at it. They always had their walk-away point and you couldn’t manipulate them. He fumbled in all the pockets on his shirt and in his pants, and then in his belt pouch, but there wasn’t much. The sum total of his negotiable wealth was his fighting knife, his mother’s wedding ring, and his medals. That wouldn’t be worth much to anyone in Umeh Station. A few kilos of prime steak would have done the deal a lot better.
No, not the ring. He turned the medals in his palm. Barencoin grunted and stepped between him and Serrimissani. “Aw, for fuck’s sake, Sarge, not your medals.”
“They’re not worth anything out here.”
“She doesn’t need the boots that badly. She’s got boots. Jesus, all this on the off chance she’ll give you a leg-over? You sad bastard.”
“Piss off, Mart.”
Qureshi pitched in, always the sensible older sister breaking up a fight between the boys. “Come on, they’re his and he can do what he likes with them. Lay off him.”
“I can’t for the life of me think what you see in that bird, I really can’t.” Barencoin did one of his theatrical eye-rolls of exasperation. “I mean, I know you’re not going to get it anywhere else, but you’re not much use to her now she’s had a bit of wess’har, are you? Not with one dick.”
Ade tried very hard not to be his father, always solving his problems with his fists. He was still the bloody sergeant here whether they’d dismissed him or not. He lowered his voice. “I said I’d get her the boots, so I will. And you can wind your neck in, okay?”
“Suit yourself,” said Barencoin, and walked off.
Serrimissani studied the medals and handed them back. When her paw brushed Ade’s hand it felt like corduroy, all soft little ridges, but she couldn’t have been less like a toy if she’d tried. Her teeth looked like serious business.
“I will find a way to acquire the boots without barter,” she said. “And Marine Barencoin is wrong. From what I have seen of Shan Frankland, she will take pity on you and grant you sexual favors w
hether you offer her boots or not. She has a strong sense of jask.”
There were some things a bloke didn’t need to hear, and pity was one of them. Qureshi steered him into a quiet corner and sat down on an empty crate.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure you know what you’re doing? We don’t want to see you get hurt. Emotionally, I mean, because it’s not like getting a good hiding from Aras is going to make much difference to you.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m just looking out for her.”
“Right.”
“She reminds me of my mum.”
“Christ, Ade, you never actually told her that, did you?”
“Yes.”
“You should never tell a woman she reminds you of your mum. Not even if your mum was Helen of Troy.”
“I meant that she’s not afraid of anything and she makes me feel safe.”
“Well, if you didn’t make that clear to her, the boots aren’t going to get you very far.”
“I’m not getting her boots for that.” He really shouldn’t have mentioned his mother. He could see that now. “So what would work, then?”
Qureshi’s expression was that of someone trying to break bad news. “You could always just ask her.”
“Izzy, you’re not going to take the piss out of me, are you?”
“No, Sarge. She’s not that much older than you. And she doesn’t look it.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“I’ve said the wrong thing, haven’t I?”
“Think what you like.” He occupied himself with his belt, sheathing his fighting knife with exaggerated care. “I can trust her.”
Qureshi didn’t ask him to explain. They all knew he’d had unrelenting bad luck in his love life. They thought he was bloody soft with women, a pushover, a mug. Maybe he was, but he didn’t know how to be anything else.
“What’s the Boss planning to do with Neville and Rayat?” said Qureshi.
So she thought of Shan as the top of the command chain, too. We all need structure. “She still wants information out of Rayat, but I haven’t a clue what she wants to do with Neville.”
“I thought she would have jobbed her by now.” Qureshi mimicked Shan’s two-handed gun grip. “And that tosser Rayat.”
“You know they’ve found some bezeri survivors, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Not much comfort for them, I shouldn’t think.”
“I’d ask them what they wanted done with the bastards.”
“What if they want all of us strung up?”
Ade hadn’t thought of that. He’d started to accept Shan’s view—and the prevailing wess’har opinion—that the marines weren’t responsible for the destruction of Ouzhari.
But it didn’t feel true.
“I could have told Lindsay Neville to fuck off,” said Ade. “What’s the worst she could have done? What’s the worst Rayat could have done? Had us court-martialed.”
“We could all have refused, Ade. You might be the sergeant, but we were all capable of saying no and we just obeyed orders.”
“And we should have known better.”
“You’ve seen more action than the rest of us. How many times have you thought, oh, sod this for a game of soldiers, I’m not doing that? We all think it and we don’t act on it. That’s why we’re in uniform and civvies aren’t, because if you argue the toss every time you can’t fight.”
“Yeah, and wess’har don’t give a shit what your motives are, just what the end result is.” He could see Barencoin making his way back down the Exchange, shuffling a pack of cards as he walked. He really didn’t fancy a game now. He was troubled: he needed to talk to someone who’d done something unthinkable and had learned to live with it. “I’ve got to see Aras about something. I’ll catch up with you later.”
Barencoin slapped the cards against his palm to align the pack and held it out to Ade. “Gin rummy?”
“Nah, got things to do.”
“Okay, I was well out of order there. Sorry. Now can we play?”
“I meant it. There’s something I’ve got to sort out.”
Barencoin didn’t look as if he believed him. Ade didn’t think Mart would spend a second worrying about what he’d done; or maybe he was like Shan, just good at looking as if he didn’t. When he got back to the house—and he wondered why he thought of it as a house and not a cave—there was no sign of Shan. Aras was sitting on the terrace, Shan’s swiss balanced on one thigh and Rayat’s handheld on the other, the devices linked by a wire. A few shafts of pink late afternoon light pierced the cloud and gave one pearl face of the city a rosy luster.
“Isan has gone to see Nevyan,” said Aras, not looking up. “I have been examining Rayat’s handheld.”
“Anything?”
“Nothing further. In the end, not having a named individual will not prevent Eqbas Vorhi intervening. It’s simply a matter of detail.”
“Can I talk to you?”
“If this is about Shan, we have discussed that enough.”
“Actually, it’s about Mjat.”
Aras put the two devices down on the flagstones and beckoned Ade to him. “Are you having unpleasant flashbacks?”
“No. Well, yes, but it’s not about that.”
“What do you want to know, then?”
“How I came to roll over and just ship those bombs to Bezer’ej because I was ordered to. I never thought I was a bad bloke and now I just don’t know any more.”
“Have you followed orders before?”
“You know I have. I’m a marine.”
“And how did you feel then?”
“I went where they sent me, and my targets were always ones who’d shoot me if I didn’t shoot them.” You had to be able to stop thinking about it after you’d fired. Most blokes couldn’t in the end. Ade found women were much better at killing and moving on. “But c’naatat wasn’t doing me any harm and neither were the bezeri.”
“Humans follow orders, especially if conditioned to do so.”
“I know. I know all that. But when you bombed Mjat, the isenj weren’t a threat to you personally. So how do you handle it?”
For all Aras’s human characteristics, he still had his unshakeable wess’har clarity when it came to cause and effect. “They were a threat to the bezeri. They wouldn’t stop polluting the planet.”
“But how do you feel about it now?”
“I regret that I had to do it and I would do it again.”
“So how should I feel about Ouzhari?”
“You know how you feel about it. You feel guilty. The question is whether you are guilty.” Aras reached out and took hold of Ade’s wrist, a loose grip, apparently unthinking. Ade braced his muscles involuntarily and had to remind himself that wess’har were touchers and huggers: there was nothing weird about it. But he still wasn’t comfortable with another bloke touching his hand. “For wess’har to consider you guilty of causing bezeri deaths, you would have had to arm the devices. And you did not.”
“I helped get the ordnance there. Lindsay Neville would never have managed it without us.”
“And if you had a human lawyer, he would argue that you thought you were transporting neutron devices to an island without animal life, and that you had every expectation that the explosion would create minimal environmental effects beyond a few days.”
“What’s the word for that? Sophistry.”
“And if you had known they were cobalt devices, and Commander Neville had not set them to detonate, would you be guilty even though no deaths resulted?”
“Yeah. I would. It’d be like conspiracy to murder.”
“Our two species have different views of reality.”
It didn’t help him at all. It muddied the waters. Perhaps that was an answer. Both sets of logic made sense in themselves but not side by side, and in the end it was the gut feeling that events produced that made guilt or innocence.
But Ade had a better idea of what he was feeling n
ow. He was a kid at home again, not standing up to his violent father, not doing what he should have done. Aras let go of his wrist.
“You don’t always follow orders,” he said. “Shan said you held a gun on Commander Neville to stop her using the grenades.”
“Yeah, and you know what happened next.”
“Move on.”
“I’m trying. It’s funny how good and evil get harder to spot as you get older. I wish I had Shan’s sense of black and white.”
“It was part of her job to have one. And good and evil are concepts best left to the colonists. I prefer to think in terms of what I will personally tolerate and what I will not.”
“How do you think the colonists fit that in with a god who’s supposed to have a plan?”
“Does your god receive in packets?”
“Sorry?”
“Prayer. Perhaps God receives data in packets, like your communication systems once did. Or maybe prayers are heard only by the praying, which is perhaps more useful.” Aras seemed distracted by the ideas. “If God is omniscient, why does he need prayer to make him aware of the things troubling people? And if he is aware, why are humans so presumptuous as to ask him to change events for them? Has he no firm plan for the universe? I asked Ben all these things, and Josh too, but they said I needed faith.”
For a being with absolutely no concept of the divine, this was a twenty-four-carat piece of theology. Ade savored the moment of strangeness brought on by watching a pink pearl sunset with an alien brother in a caldera 150 trillion miles from home.
But there were no packets of prayers, and no god, and nobody was waiting for him at the Pearly Gates with a tally sheet of his sins. He wasn’t going to die, and the only pearly gates were right here, and real.
Whatever peace he reached with himself would take some work.
“Fuck faith,” said Ade. “It’s as bad as following orders.”
Boom.
The Eqbas vessel shivered slightly, causing several bridge crew to bob their heads. Ual found himself looking at an aerial view of Jejeno that spanned most of the bulkhead in front of him. A trail of vapor plumed up from the city and seemed to arc straight into his face, confirmation that something had been fired at the warship.