Crossing the Line (17 page)

Shan would never have tolerated that amount of lip from any human subordinate. Her annoyance must have hit Nevyan's olfactory system pretty hard, because the junior matriarch locked position again. “Is that why you took on Asajin's family?” Shan asked.

“Yes, because they would have died without an
isan,
” Nevyan said. Her tilted head rather than her tone told Shan it was the proverbial bleedin' obvious answer. “Do you not understand
oursan
?”

“No.”

“Ah.” It came out as a forlorn trill on a falling note, like birdsong.
Lrrrrr.
“This is how we are. Males need the genetic material of the female to repair their tissues. I transfer it through cells in my body to theirs, and I take in some of their genes too, and we all share it. It keeps them well. It's also pleasurable.”

Shan couldn't imagine having sex with a complete stranger as an act of charity. “You seem okay with all this.”

“Why wouldn't I be? That is the nature of
oursan
as well as my duty. We're bonded. It's very nice. It feels very good up here.” And she touched her forehead with one many-jointed finger.

Shan felt an urge to giggle but didn't find it at all funny. Nevyan, distracted briefly by the high wavering wail of the infant now fully fed, glanced at her males with such obvious pride and delight that the air around her was filled with the powdery musk of her contentment. Then she looked back at Shan. Her pupils were just a cross, faint rutilations in yellow quartz.

“You are certainly distressing Aras,” she said. “Ask him to explain it to you. You know enough about wess'har males now to understand how hard he finds this.”

Shan decided she would rather have faced an armed mob without backup than ask Aras to explain the facts of wess'har life to her. She stood up to go. “Well, that's going to be fun,” she said flatly.

Nevyan trilled. She found something amusing. Shan glanced back, instinctively and humanly annoyed.

Nevyan stiffened. “You have an
aumul
on your back,” she said. “Let me remove it.”

She reached between Shan's shoulder blades and then held her hand where Shan could see it. Nestled in it was a very large red and white striped slug, and it smelled of almonds, and it was making melodic plinking noises like a musical box.

“Is it dangerous?” Shan asked. You could never take anything for granted here, not even musical slugs.

“No.”

“What does it do for an encore?”

“It scours the
tem
deposits at night looking for organic waste before it sets hard.”

“It eats
shit?
”

“I will learn that word.”

Nevyan placed the
aumul
carefully on the flagstones and it shot off across the floor at speed like an Arsenal scarf caught in a high wind. Shan had liked it better when she was totally unfamiliar with this alien world. Being lulled gently into thinking you belonged here made it even more disturbing when you thought you recognized something—and then realized it was absolutely, totally and wholly unlike your expectations.

That was Aras too.

Shan took a slow walk back home, looking for courage on the way.

 

There was fish on the menu today and that cheered Lindsay up no end.

It was cod in a garlicky tomato sauce. The culture-grown fillets were a regular portion-controlled shape that no real cod would ever have achieved in nature, as was the way with muscle-protein production systems. But that didn't matter. It was cod. Lindsay tucked in with all the gastronomic enthusiasm that only people cooped up on long deployments in isolated places could fully understand.

Or it might have been the battlefield mood-killers that Sandhu had prescribed for her. David was dead; nothing would make her forget that, except for those few brief seconds on waking each day. But the drugs provided a soothing erasure of grief for the time being. She was sad, but it was—she imagined—as she would be in a few years' time, having come to terms with her loss and the changes it had made in her, but not disabled by it any longer.

The drug had been developed to halt plummeting morale in combat. Lindsay wondered if they ever thought it would be used to help a grieving mother kill a woman who had once been her friend.

She savored the thick tomato sauce. And this time she
did
hear Rayat come up behind her.

He made quite a point of acknowledging people sitting nearby. She felt a pleasant flood of satisfaction: she must have made him think twice about startling an unstable woman with a weapon.

“Mind if I join you?” he said.

“It's a free country.”

Rayat sat down opposite her. “Yes, we keep it that way, don't we?” He appeared to have a pile of beans and spinach in a carry-out container. It looked like he was used to eating alone in his cabin. “I was thinking about what you said.”

“Um.”

“Have
you
been thinking about what might happen if you were successful in cornering this biotech for the military?”

Lindsay shrugged. “Drop the games. Please.”

“Have you?”

“I'd be stupid if I hadn't, and I'm not stupid.”

“I don't think you like the idea any more than my boss does.”

“And I don't want to know who your boss is, thanks.”

“I have something to share with you.”

“In exchange for what?” She glanced up and Eddie was standing at the servery. He looked back and made a discreet warding gesture at her, the forefinger of each hand overlapping in a cross.
Watch that bastard.
She almost laughed.

“Troops and transport,” said Rayat.

“You could ask Okurt.”

“Okurt's orders aren't the same as mine.”

“Or mine?”

“I think you're rightly terrified by this thing and you can see the threat it represents. You know that's why Frankland did what she did to you.”

The cod didn't taste so good now. Lindsay shunted it around her plate and then put the fork down. “Okay. Let's talk about this somewhere else.”

“My cabin, ten minutes?”

“You're a charmer,” she said, and picked up the fork again. Rayat took his lonely container of beans and left. Eddie was engrossed in a conversation by the salads with Lieutenant Yun. Lindsay cleared her plate and left a decent interval before getting up to leave.

Eddie, engrossed or not, turned his head immediately and caught her eye.
Well?
And she could only think of one response, the gesture that Shan used so often to indicate her low opinion of a colleague. Thumb and forefinger held together in a loose fist, she made a rapid stroking motion.
He's a wanker.
Eddie grinned, but it was the studied camaraderie of a man keeping an eye on her.

She grinned back. But she wasn't planning to share any of this with Eddie.

 

Shan felt incompetent for the first time in her life, and it hurt.

When she got back to the one-room house and leaned against the iridescent door, it opened and she almost fell in. It wasn't the entrance she wanted to make. Aras filled the doorway.

“You've been a long time,” he said.

“We got talking,” she said.

“Are you hungry?”

Shan followed him to the table and looked over the dish of
evem.
“I could do with a cup of tea, please.”

Aras shook the jar of tea to indicate the falling level of the leaves. “The bushes will be ready for harvest in four hundred days, and this won't last. I could ask Josh for more supplies.”

She ignored him. “Nice and strong, please.”

“You're upset.”

“Yeah, everyone keeps saying that,” she snapped. “It's been a bit of an educational morning.”

Aras said nothing and watched the water boil, which was another thing you could do with relative ease if you lived forever. She flopped onto the sofa and tried to frame the words. It took longer than she expected.

She wasn't prepared to spend another day sneaking glances at his extraordinarily appealing man-shaped back and buttocks. And she had no intention of giving in randomly to instincts like Lindsay Neville had done. If she was going to go through with this—and Aras must have been suffering untold misery in his isolation—then she'd do it logically and responsibly.

There were worse ways to spend her time. Aras was a striking, magnificent creature. But tigers and peacocks were beautiful too: it didn't mean it was okay to consider screwing them. She wondered what was happening to her cherished view of nonhuman animals as equals.

“Nevyan seems very happy with her new family,” Shan began. She accepted the proffered bowl of tea with relief.

Aras shrugged. “It's natural. They're bonded.”

“Yeah, they were bonding pretty well when I walked in.” She didn't get a reaction so she carried on. “Is that it? They have a quickie and it's happy ever after?”

Aras seemed to understand
quickie
perfectly well. “I can see why
gethes
find it peculiar. We bond for life. We need no sanction or law to achieve that.”

Gethes. Thanks.
“So this is
oursan,
is it?”

“Yes. We have cells that exchange our DNA, bond us to our
isan,
and give us pleasure, just as you secrete oxytocin. And you consume methamphetamine. These substances make you feel affectionate and euphoric. The same applies to
oursan.
”

Shan thought back to her drug squad training. It didn't help. “You get an emotional high from screwing?”

“Inelegantly put, but yes.”

“Where are the cells?”

“In our genitalia.”

Shan felt her hand go involuntarily to her forehead in embarrassment. “I walked in on Nevyan having sex with her new husbands.”

Aras looked puzzled. His scent of sandalwood was especially strong right then. “But they all have children.”

“So?”

“Males never have sex after they've fathered children. The
sanil
atrophies and forms the gestational pouch.”

She could work out what a
sanil
was. She wondered why he didn't just say
penis.
“Aras,
atrophied
isn't the word I'd have used.”

This really wasn't going as she'd planned. He looked completely and utterly bewildered. If he had tilted his head any further, she would have thrown a stick for him to fetch. Right then she didn't want any more random images that blurred the line between Aras the man and Aras the animal. “You must be mistaken.”

“I know what I saw, for Chrissakes. Do I need to draw a picture? Anyway, they were having it away. End of story.”

Aras's head straightened up smartly and there was a definite flash of comprehension. “No,” he said, evidently relieved. “That wasn't sex. That was
oursan
.”

Shan fought to remain detached. He must have smelled that she was agitated: he was pumping clouds of tension himself. But her stand-back-I'm-a-police-officer persona took over and projected complete, glacial, accidental calm. “Look, I know I don't get out much lately, but if that's not shagging it's doing a bloody good impersonation of it.”

“Oursan,”
Aras repeated, as if she were deaf. He paused for a second and then unfastened his long tunic, completely unself-conscious. He took in a deep breath and pointed. “
That
is for
oursan,
” he said, “and
this
is for sex.”

“Ah,” said Shan. “
Ah.
”

She thought she had seen just about everything in the course of her police career but now she knew that she
definitely
hadn't. Her shock must have been tangible. But she couldn't even blink, let alone look away.

Aras must have noticed her oh-my-God expression. “I apologize,” he said. “Once I'm back among wess'har, I forget the taboos of humans. I shouldn't have done that.”

“I think it made an eloquent point,” said Shan hoarsely.
Oh shit. Oh, shit…
“It's okay.”

“This one is for reproduction, for
sex
as you say. The other is for
oursan.
Horizontal transmission.” And he fastened his tunic again.

Shan couldn't quite maintain
glacial.
She tried. She battled another totally humorless urge to giggle and very nearly won. “I've heard it called a few things, but that's a new one on me.”

“I can explain it further if you like. Genes transferred from one organism to another, not just from parent to offspring—”

“Draw me a picture.” She choked on suppressed laughter. “I'm sorry. This isn't how it looks.”

“You're mocking me.”

“No, I'm just very embarrassed. I'm sorry—”

Aras dropped his head for a moment and then walked past her and out of the door without a word. He closed it firmly behind him, just one shade short of slamming it.

“
Shit,
” said Shan. “Our first fight. Oh, terrific.”

Men could rot in hell before she'd run after them. She busied herself trying to make proper right angles on the frame of the new bed, sawing and swearing each time she offered up a piece of
efte
and it still didn't fit. No, men were a pain in the arse: necessary recreation, but not one of them warranted changing your routine, your priorities or your name.

But Aras wasn't a man.

He was an alien who happened to look a lot like a man and even had some human characteristics. He was also an alien who had suffered terrible isolation for an unimaginable time. And despite herself, she cared about him: and she had given up caring about people a lifetime ago. Aras was outside the corrupt circle of humanity, a clean soul despite his wars, an innocent…animal. She could forgive an animal anything.