Crossing the Line (9 page)

“Look, we have big spaceships and small spaceships. There isn't enough of a space navy to build specialized hulls like the domestic fleet. They just strap on more armaments to whatever's flying. We're lucky they haven't sent a sodding submarine.”

“I just hope they've told the isenj that she's coming.”

Yun just raised his eyebrows. “Classified,” he said.

It was so classified that Lindsay hadn't thought to mention it. Maybe she hadn't been told either. It was a massively provocative act to launch another vessel into a disputed area. These species had been at each other for centuries: did the FEU really think another twenty-five years would see them kiss and make up? And a ship called
Hereward
suggested Albion had fallen out with the Alliance des Galles again. The FEU had never been a happy family.

But he didn't think the wess'har—or the isenj, come to that—would give a damn which European tribe was in the ascendant. They'd just lock and load.

“I wouldn't mind seeing my old mates,” Eddie said, trying not to look too interested in the
Hereward
even though it was burning holes in him. “Or is that classified too?”

“They should be out of quarantine on Thursday. I imagine they'll gravitate towards the wardroom, seeing as there's beer available.”

But Rayat was already out. That told Eddie something, but he wasn't sure what. He decided not to push his luck. He'd gleaned plenty from Yun for the time being.

He rather wished he hadn't. The shitty thing about knowing stuff out here was that it
mattered,
whereas on Earth you knew you were a cog, a nothing, a player in the game. You weren't actually responsible for the sequelae of information that was awkward and had consequences—not unless you were doing an investigative piece, and then it was up to the Shan Franklands of the world to go and take action on the strength of your allegations. You could go down the pub for a beer and start on something new and interesting the next day. Nobody really got hurt.

Out here he wasn't a cog. He was the entirety of the media: he was the populace: and he was society. He was all the people who weren't wearing a uniform, military or corporate. The information he gathered had real, immediate consequences beyond embarrassing headlines and calls for ministerial resignation.

That meant he had to be very careful how he used it.

“Barry, are we carrying much in the way of armament?” he asked.

“Depends what you mean by much.”

“More than just demolition ordnance and a bit of close-in protection.”

Yun's eyebrows danced briefly again. “Oh, plenty more. We can't exactly nip back and pick up anything we've forgotten to pack.”

“Shit,” said Eddie.

 

If he rose early enough, Aras could tend to his crops before anyone else was about in the fields. He could see well enough in the pre-dawn light to hoe safely around young plants. It was also cooler and more like Bezer'ej at that hour.

He was missing Bezer'ej. On Bezer'ej, he had no reminders of his enforced celibacy.

At the entrance of one home he passed, a young father was leaning against the doorway, savoring the breeze, a child clutched to his chest. Aras could hear him humming a single note under his breath, the sound Shan called
purring
, distracted by his thoughts as he suckled the baby. When he saw Aras he simply nodded acknowledgment.

Aras felt a stab of sorrow but returned the nod and hurried on. It was another reason he was going to find the time in F'nar hard to pass. The human infants in Constantine triggered no instinct in him. All he could detect was their frustration and rage. He didn't like them much: raw, unshaped
gethes
, all demand and self-absorption, barely tolerable until they learned that they had to fit in with the rest of the world.

No wonder so many humans never managed that.

Aras took the hoe from his pack and assembled it with its narrowest blade. There was ripe yellow-leaf to be harvested. He squeezed the top of the leaf in his hand and it crumpled like soft fabric. The foliage had softened and turned from red to gold, all its toxins safely drained back to its roots. It was ready to eat.

Toxins didn't trouble him but he harvested at the appointed time. There was more yellow-leaf to pick today than he needed, so he would take it back to the food stores at the Exchange of Surplus Things. That was the way it worked. The Christians in Constantine had also operated a communal food system, but theirs seemed to require that someone tallied all the produce and checked that everyone was contributing their share and not consuming more than they were entitled to.

I thought I understood them
.

He had lived in the company of humans longer than he had his own kind. His body housed human genes gleaned from bacteria, viruses and skin cells. But the blood-to-blood contact with Shan had brought with it a far more fundamental experience of what it was to be human, and it was shocking.

I never understood them at all
.

Aras hefted the hoe. The handle felt like…felt like a weapon, a stick of some kind. Not his:
hers.
When he squeezed it he could feel outrage, horror, a sense of knowing something that had changed her world forever.

He abandoned the hoeing and concentrated on recalling the memory. Whatever it was, he needed to know what had marked her so much that it surfaced above the images of waterfalls of fire and the pleading ape.

Human genetic memories didn't feel at all like isenj ones. Eddie had once shown him how moving pictures were assembled, and Aras found parallels between that technology and the assorted memories that had lodged in his brain. Isenj memories were complete, accurate, realtime sequences; humans' were snatched and distorted, like spooling through scraps of spliced footage at high speed and having both blank sections and sudden vivid freeze-frames.

And isenj memories felt like the past. Shan's felt like
now
.

He concentrated.

Sitting in the dark on a hard bench, a heavy baton in hand
. It was Shan. There was an overwhelming sense of disbelief and shock.
Do something about it. Balance the score a bit. A door swings open in a sudden shaft of yellow light and it's someone she knows, someone she respects, telling her to sort it. A massive cold surge of adrenaline and then a blank and that baton feels part of her arm, all sweet animal rage. There's a man's face, and he grins but then he stops smiling and—

Aras felt the repeated downward swings of the baton so vividly that it was all he could do to hold onto the hoe. Then he dropped it. Relief as intense as quenched thirst flooded him. He fell to his knees and struggled to find his own thoughts again. No, this was nothing like the mind of an isenj.

Whoever Shan had beaten, she had savored every moment of it.

It disturbed him. He didn't want to think of his
isan
—and he admitted to himself that he saw her as that now—as a torturer. It was an unpleasant thought for anyone: it was especially unbearable for him. He busied himself piling the yellow-leaf into a rolling crate and wheeled it down into the network of passages that moved items around the city and to other settlements. The pipework above his head throbbed with the intermittent flow of water to the irrigation systems.

There was one barge resting at the loading point, already partly filled with
evem
, and he laid his bundle of yellow-leaf on top of it before pulling down the cover and inspecting the route information displayed on the top, a few glyphs fingered into the soft surface.
Iussan, Baral
. So the weather was dry enough back home to start digging up last year's
evem
early.

Why had Shan delighted in breaking a man's bones with her baton?

Aras climbed back to the top of the entrance shaft and found three children—an
isanket
and two boys—standing and staring at his collection of terrestrial crops. One boy kept putting his arm through the prickling biobarrier and inspecting his skin. The other two were much more interested in the plants, but they acknowledged Aras with sober nods like adults would. He thought of Josh's daughter Rachel, all giggles and carefree silliness.

“Aras Sar Iussan, this is new,” said the
isanket,
pointing.

“It's called
tea
,” he said. “Humans dry the leaves and make an infusion from it for drinking. Its closest relatives are grown for their beauty, but the tea plant has both qualities, so Targassat would approve of it.”

“Is it pleasant?”

“You would find it bitter. Humans enjoy it. This is for
Shan Chail
.”

The
isanket
looked hard at the glossy leaves as if absorbing every detail of them, which she was. Then she tipped her head politely and walked off, the two boys trailing obediently behind her as they would throughout the rest of their lives.

Aras tried to recall his first
isan
's face and failed. He felt no guilt at that: Askiniyas had been dead nearly five hundred years, one more
c'naatat
host who had decided it was better to return to the cycle by her own hand. Sometimes, when people talked of the sacrifices of
c'naatat
troops, they often forgot the matriarchs who had transmitted the symbiont to their males out of duty, some unaware of the true nature of
c'naatat
, others not.

Askiniyas hadn't known. Nor had his house-brothers until his infection traveled through them all.

I started it. It was my fault
.

Ben Garrod might have been right. Josh's ancestor claimed there were punishments meted out by the unseen being called God, and if there was a punishment for infecting your entire family through copulation, then Aras felt he had truly been punished by his endless celibacy.

It was time to be getting back. He dismantled the hoe and put it in his pack, reluctant to hold the handle tightly again in case he relived the moment when Shan began breaking bones and gloried in it.

Whatever had driven her to torture rather than kill, her explosive, vengeful anger was now within his very cells.

He would have to handle it carefully.

Shan sat on the toilet with her chin resting in her hands, savoring a moment of privacy.

It wasn't a perfect lavatory bowl and there wasn't a seat to speak of, but it was hers, and it worked, and it required no special technique or physical agility to make use of it as a wess'har latrine did. She'd had enough of going native. She was determined to be a good wess'har citizen but she drew the line at their plumbing and their furniture. She had her toilet: and now there was a half-built settee out on the terrace, which she would finish when she sorted out how to make proper mitered corners. Then she'd make a bed, a nice comfy bed.

She heard the front door open and close.

“Shan?”

“In here, Aras.”

A pause. She hoped he hadn't taken it to mean
come in.
“I have yellow-leaf. Lots of it.”

“Lovely. Great.”

“Are you unwell?”

“I'm fine.”

“Are you—”

“Look, I'm fine,” she said. “I won't be long. Give me a few minutes.”

Poor sod: it wasn't his fault. She felt bad about wanting a few moments to herself, but…her
flash-to-bang time
, as Ade Bennett called it, was perilously short these days. Josh had probably averted her meltdown by sending specs for a Constantine-style toilet bowl to an obliging wess'har craftsman.

The bowl the
jurej
had fashioned was ice-clear aquamarine glass, and too disturbingly transparent to be ideal for a toilet. But she learned to look away. And now she had a real toilet door too, and suddenly she felt a lot less like rounding on Aras and snarling at him.

Poor sod.

The nightmares weren't helping her mood either. She was still drowning, still being jerked awake by a searing pain in her back and a devastating sense of abandonment.

“You were up early,” said Aras. He sounded as if he were moving around the room. “Are you still having problems sleeping?”

Oh, please. Just a couple of minutes.
“It's probably
c'naatat
shaking down.” She stood up and took a deep breath. She could always retreat here again. “Bound to be a few glitches.”

When she opened the door, Aras was standing at the spigot, peering into the bunch of yellow-leaf he was rinsing. He placed a finger carefully into the soft crumpled leaves, lifted something out with his claw and set it on the windowsill. “Just a
banic,
” he said. “It'll go about its business when it dries out.”

He seemed preoccupied. It was mainly the silence that told her so. In the few weeks they had been sharing a single, suffocating room, partitioned by curtains, silence had been one thing he wasn't good at. Aras liked talking. He had been through five hundred years of solitary, relatively speaking, and now he had a listener who was just like him, except that he was from a species that needed to huddle and chatter, and she liked her own company.

You can't imagine what he's been through,
she told herself.
Patience. Just a bit of patience.

She found herself staring at his broad back and noting how nicely it tapered into his waist. The sudden realization that it wasn't just xeno-anatomical curiosity made her face burn. She thought of Mestin warning her not to breed, and wondered if the matriarch had spotted what she had only just discovered.

Oh no. Not that. Get a grip, you silly bitch.

“You don't look well,
isan.
”

She reminded herself how much she despised Lindsay Neville for getting pregnant in a careless moment. “I'd rather you called me
Shan,
” she said.

“Very well.” Aras put the bowl of yellow-leaf on the table and picked up his hoe from the corner. He hefted it in his hand, staring down the length of the handle as if something terrible were crawling up it towards him. “I need to ask you a question.”

“Okay.”

“When I grip this,” he said, “I have vivid recall of an incident. You had a weapon like this.”

Shan nodded. Of course she did. “My baton,” she said. “A truncheon. I've still got one in my kit.”

“You beat someone with it.”

“Well, that doesn't narrow it down much.” She was about to make a joke of it but Aras didn't smell amused. He reeked of agitation. She tried again. “Yes, I used a baton, and I used it a lot. If you're churning up my memories, you'll know that.”

“I see this one over and over again. You were very upset and a man was shouting at you to do something about it, and then you were looking at another man and you started beating him with the baton. You broke his bones. I heard it. He wasn't armed.”

It sounded like a rebuke. And it was an indictment of her approach to policing that she was genuinely having trouble pinning down what he was recalling, but she was embarrassed to say so. She struggled. “Sorry, I don't recognize what you've remembered. Lots of blokes have shouted at me over the years. And I've smacked quite a few of them. Hard.”

“But I keep picking up pieces of it.”

“Sorry.”

“You were sitting on a bench in the dark when a man came in and told you not to sit there
all fucking night.
”

For a few more seconds it was as much of a puzzle as before: and then it flooded back with a sickening wave of adrenaline.

Shan knew exactly where she was, but she didn't
want
to know.

She'd battled to come to terms with the images from that night. After a few years of seeing them behind every locked door and trying to stop them crowding into her mind between the time she closed her eyes and the time she fell asleep, she had succeeded in burying the detail.

The pervading dread of doors had never left her, though. Like all terrible things she had seen and couldn't then erase, they became more persistent the more she tried to stop thinking of them.

“I need to know…Shan.” Aras's voice was quiet and almost apologetic now. “I need to know what marked you so, and I also need to know why you tortured a man. It bothers me. I find it hard to accommodate.”

It was a shabby slate-blue door that had previously been dark green because she could see where the paint had flaked off. There were some doors you could kick in, cheap doors with fragile locks; there were others you needed a dynamic ram or a couple of plastic rounds to tackle. She preferred a good kick. It psyched you up for what followed.

“I don't think you're in any position to judge me, Aras.”

“Perhaps not, but I must know.”

The lock took one all-out kick. The detective inspector with her said he was impressed that she could do the physical stuff as well as a bloke. He let her go ahead.

She couldn't see what was happening at first. It took her a few seconds to look down on the floor at what one of the two middle-aged men was recording on a top-of-the-line camera. It took another second to register what she was looking at and then she lost all professional control and slammed one of the men into the wall, face first.

It was the wrong house. No credit and ID cloning kit, just fucking weirdo porn, said the DI. He was pissed off. It was a fucking bum tip, he said, but they might as well nick the lot of them, not that it would be worth the paperwork for the sentences they'd get. He looked into her face, and she didn't want him to see the tears in her eyes. “Don't be such a fucking girl,” he said. “You'll see a lot worse.”

But she never had.

Now Aras was staring into her face. “What's wrong?” he asked. “You look—”

“You've got no other memories of this? Nothing at all?”

Aras was going to wring it out of her. She couldn't even manage the words, not even twenty years later. She was as ever torn between unbearable pain and anger, and she chose anger because she knew how to wield that without crumbling. Her sympathetic sergeant, the man who'd found her sitting on the shaking edge of tears in the darkened locker room, knew that much about her.
Go on,
he'd said.
Do something about it if you feel that strongly. It's not as if it was a kid or anything, He'll only get six months' suspended, tops.

Even the score.

She did. She had never exhausted herself beating the shit out of someone before or since. She didn't care if she was suspended, charged, sacked: all she cared about was
justice.
But nobody saw anything, even if the desk sergeant kept wandering by the holding cell to check that she was coping. The guy was decitizenized anyway. Unpleasant things could happen to people with sufficient criminal record. They'd offended once too often and their rights were formally abrogated. Nobody was going to stop her. No lawyer would take it on.

Aras was still staring into her face, bewildered. If she looked anything like she did that night, he would be seeing her anew.

“Here.” She handed him her swiss. He knew how to use it. She gathered herself up into the woman everyone seemed to think she was, the one who could cope because she didn't have feelings like the rest of them. It was self-pitying, she knew, but she wanted Aras to understand she had her limits of endurance as well. “Read for yourself. Look up
snuff
and
squish.
I don't imagine Josh kept material like that in his bloody little Eden, did he? I didn't think so. Okay, here's your primer in human depravity. There are humans who are entertained and aroused by watching children and animals tortured and killed, so they make movies of it. It's quite an industry. Take a look at my files.”

Aras said nothing. He held the swiss flat on his palm, and she had no doubt he would read it: wess'har weren't squeamish. Perhaps he understood the very worst about humans anyway.

“You wanted to know,” she said. “And I didn't torture him. I
crippled
him, and I did it as efficiently as I could without killing him, because I wanted him to have plenty of time to think about it. And I'd do it again in an instant, just as you did at Mjat, because it needed doing. Now read those fucking files, and never mention it to me again.”

Shan shut the front door behind her a little too hard, sending flakes of pearl shivering to the ground, and walked down onto the terraces. Mindless physical displacement sometimes helped put her back together again. A couple of wess'har nodded politely to her as she passed and she tried to smile back, but her scent must have told them she was in turmoil.
Yeah, don't be such a fucking girl.
It was a lifetime ago.

And it wasn't Aras's fault. Nothing was. He was just a bystander with her memories playing out in his head, when God only knew what pain of his own was already there. She wondered when some of that was going to well up unbidden in her. She wondered if it would be worse than the images that were resurrected and fresh in her mind now, and whether it would replace them and so in a way erase them, bury them, make them go away again.

She got as far as the fields and busied herself inspecting the swelling peppers and the tops of the sweet potatoes. It wasn't necessary to go to all this trouble. She could survive on just about anything, and knowing Aras had put so much effort into trying to provide her with familiar foods simply made her feel all the worse for taking out her frustrations on him.

She squatted down. The smell of wet soil put her back in her recurring nightmare, the water flooding into her mouth and nose. She shook it off.

No, she wasn't losing it. She was
adjusting.
It was a life, a body, a future no human had ever had to face, and she was doing just
fine,
all things considered.

“Chail, neretse?”
said a double-voice behind her.
Have you seen this?
A wess'har male—one of Fersanye's neighbors, she thought—beckoned to her. She was starting to recognize them all now. He led her over to another patch of soil a little distance away. Aras tended scattered plots everywhere, wess'har style, to make the planting look more random, less obtrusive. The biobarrier crackled against her skin as she stepped through the invisible bulwark between Wess'ej and a little piece of Earth.

This plot was dotted with sapling bushes with glossy, emerald-green serrated leaves. They looked like camellias. She didn't think Aras would grow anything as irrelevant as decorative flowers.

The male—Tlasias? Tasilas?—was fascinated. “What is
tea
?” he asked.

“It's a drink,” she said.

Her wess'u was serviceably fluent now. Tlasias appeared to understand her. He touched the leaves and inspected them. “But how? You extract the juices?”

“You make…” She searched for a word for infusion. She didn't know one yet. “A solution from the dried leaves.”

Then the penny dropped. She was looking at tea plants.
Camellia sinensis.
Aras was growing tea for her, and he hadn't told her. It was a surprise. Tlasias, like every other wess'har, had no concept of giving people surprises. He'd blown it.

It didn't diminish the pleasure one bit. She almost winced at the extra weight of guilt it placed on her, because she had not only given Aras a hard time for reminding her of her demons, but she had also bitched at him while he was making extraordinary efforts to please her. He knew how much she loved tea. She had enough left from Constantine to make a dozen more pots. She was eking it out, saving it for special occasions.

She took a deep breath. “The Chinese say that it's better to be deprived of food for three days than of tea for one. That's how much
gethes
enjoy it.” She used the word almost without thinking. There was no wess'u alternative for
human.
It was the generic name they gave all things that ate carrion, a verb, a reflection of their world view that you were what you did, not what you believed or intended or looked like. “And it's kind of Aras to grow it for me.”