Crossing the Line (24 page)

“We're not
that
chummy.”

“—or anything they shed.”

Eddie mouthed a silent
ah
as if he remembered something. “Why don't they ask the ussissi to do this? They're in and out of isenj space like a fiddler's elbow.”

“Wess'har would never ask them to compromise their neutrality. They do their own dirty work.”

“Explains why they need you so much.”

“I wouldn't piss around with the ussissi either. I get the feeling it's like breaking up a pub fight involving soldiers. Take one on, and you've got to take them all on.”

Eddie drained his glass. He studied the nonexistent dregs for a moment and then glanced over his shoulder to check where Aras was.

“They really are after your arse, you know,” he said quietly. “I know you're not someone who likes hiding, but I'd keep my head down if I were you.”

“I appreciate the concern.”

“They've killed the story back home.”

“What, me?”

“
C'naatat.
One minute I had News Desk screaming for a story and I tell them to shove it, the next I hear we don't talk about the subject. Commercial or government pressure. Sad day for journalism, even if I didn't want the story to run.”

“Do you think they believe the threat's real, Eddie?”

“In what sense?”

“We're 150 trillion miles away. It must look like a movie to them. All the pictures, none of the problems. If the wess'har start on us—and I'm using the term
us
loosely—you know they won't stop, don't you?”

“Mjat made a big impression on me, Shan. I do know.”

“You make sure they do, too,” she said.

Eddie paused and then smiled knowingly. “You know, Shan, you're bloody good at this.”

She smiled back. “You know, Eddie, I was being sincere for once.”

His smile faded and so did hers. They both dropped their gaze. “I'll sleep out on the terrace tonight,” he said. “Nice warm night. And I'd love to stare up at those stars.” He nodded in Aras's direction. “Besides, I think you have some diplomatic relations to restore with your old man.”

“I reckon,” said Shan.

She waited for him to close the external door behind him. Then she allowed herself a grin.

Yes, she really was
bloody
good at it.

“This is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do,” said Shan.

No, it wasn't; it wasn't at all, not by a long chalk. The only hard thing about it was standing before the altar of St. Francis in the buried heart of Constantine colony. She could feel the exquisite light from the stained glass window at her back burning right through her. It wasn't the right place for a Pagan to be, not even a lapsed one like her.

She looked from face to worried face in the congregation, people she knew and who once trusted her.

“You have to leave Constantine,” Shan said. “You have to move everybody out.”

There wasn't so much as a murmur. She wasn't prepared for that. All her training and instinct was targeted towards meeting resistance. Right then she wasn't sure exactly what she was meeting, so she carried on. She could see Josh in her peripheral vision. She couldn't see Aras.

“The political situation is extremely tense,” she said. “Earth's sent another vessel to this system without seeking permission from either the wess'har or the isenj. You know the wess'har even better than I do, probably. They're taking extreme action.”

There was a sigh from somewhere near the front. And still there were no questions.

“They're going to block landings permanently by the only means they have. Basically, they're going to seed this planet with organisms that will kill humans and isenj. And that means you too, I'm afraid. The good news is that if you agree to leave, you can start again on Wess'ej. There'll be a habitat for you.” Their faces were stricken.
Maybe I didn't express that very well.
“So, any questions?”

“How long do we have?” asked a woman in the front pew. It was Sabine Mesevy, the botanist from the
Thetis
mission who had found religion and opted to stay. Shan hadn't spotted her, and that was bad, because Shan was used to taking in every detail of a crowd.

“Two months, tops,” Shan said. “There'll be plenty of help to get you packed up and shipped out. I'm sorry this had to happen.”

Mesevy wasn't giving up. “Won't our biobarrier protect us?”

“They're shutting it down. They don't want to hand over a potential foothold to either side.”

“They could land with full biohaz protection.”

“Maybe, but it's one thing to work in a sealed lab and another to live in one. This planet would be no more use to them than Earth's moon.”

“Is it just the planet that humans might be interested in?”

Shan hesitated. “I suspect not.”

Nobody said anything further. Shan found herself irritated and wanting to get on with the evacuation. The silence continued and it had a sound of its own. She began counting a full minute.

When she glanced at the floor, there was a brilliant shaft of ruby and emerald light from the stained glass window slanting between her boots as she stood with her legs slightly apart. The light from Cavanagh's Star was somehow channeled down into the colony: every day, the image of St. Francis, surrounded by the creatures of Earth and Bezer'ej and Wess'ej, came to life at sunrise.

She wondered if they would try to dismantle the window and take it with them to their new refuge. She hoped they would.

Sixty seconds. She looked up, and it was as if the silent moment had become permanent.

“I'll leave you to talk, then,” she said. “You'll have more questions. I'll be at Josh's house when you're ready to ask them.”

It was a long walk down that aisle. It felt as long as the walk through the
Thetis
mission compound to tell the payload that Surendra Parekh had been executed for causing the death of a bezeri infant.

Parekh didn't mean to do it.

And I didn't plan to give the bastards a stronger incentive for coming here.

She was almost at the end of the aisle when a man she vaguely recognized stepped out in front of her. Her reflexes said
threat.
Her
c'naatat
said
no problem.

“We're not going,” said the man. “We're not leaving. This is our home. Don't you understand that?”

Shan was taller, harder, and armed. He didn't seem to care. “That's too bad,” she said. “You have no choice.”

“How can you side with them? You're human.”

She'd heard that challenge before. He was an inch too close, and his fists were clenched. “What I do doesn't matter,” she said quietly. “They'll do it with me or without me. This is your one chance to go.”

“We can't leave all we've worked for. We were born here. We don't know anywhere else.”

He moved, probably not intending violence, but it was enough for Shan to reach out and seize his forearm with a gloved grip that might have hurt. It certainly rooted him to the spot.

“You'll do it,” she said. “Your forefathers did it, and so can you.”

“You can't force us.”

She let go of his arm. They were surrounded by crowded silence. “Look, love, one way or another, you're not going to be here in three months' time. You can start again, or you can end up like Mjat.”

Shan stared at him, unblinking, arms at her sides, until he stepped back and sat down in the pew, shaking visibly. There were kids sitting next to him. They looked transfixed by her.

She looked back to the rest of the colonists. “Just don't do anything bloody stupid, okay? No heroics.”

That was the trouble with people who thought they were going to heaven. They just didn't take death seriously enough.

 

The sight of smoke-blue grassland around the Temporary City was as emotional as a homecoming. Aras was glad to be out of F'nar: Shan might have enjoyed its urban intricacy, but he felt hemmed in by it even now that he could walk its terraces almost as a proper
jurej.

The Temporary City itself was looking less temporary than ever. The reinforcement of the garrison was visible.

Will we listen to the bezeri if they say something we don't agree with
? He watched a transport vessel landing, settling slowly on yielding legs. Wess'har were capable of trampling benignly over the wishes of others. Sometimes he felt that was right. Sometimes he wasn't so sure.

The bezeri had not forgotten their routine. He had only to stand for a while on the cliffs above the bay and ripple a sequence of lights from his lamp for a bezeri patrol pod to half surface. The patrols kept an eye on bezeri who might swim too near to the surface in curiosity and beach themselves. The constant military traffic across the region must have given them a great deal to be curious about.

The Mountain to the Dry Above?
the lights asked.

I will visit Constantine later
, Aras signaled back.
First I need to speak to you all
.

Constantine was set on an island. For the bezeri, it was one of a number of steep peaks rising out of their marine territories and into the Dry Above, as alien and hostile to them as space was to a human. He waded out into the water and eased himself into the open sac of the pod before suspending his respiration and letting the water flood in and engulf him. It was the price he had to pay for getting a lift. It wasn't pleasant, but he couldn't drown. He had the isenj to thank for that.

The pressure was uncomfortable in the depths of the bezeri settlement. The local sea tasted of dead
pifanu
and mud. Light danced everywhere, complex patterns and colors of conversations and songs between one bezeri and another. Aras could recognize a few concept sequences, but without the signaling lamp that interpreted for him, he was deaf and mute even after so many years. He turned it over in his hands.

A group of massive fluid shapes eased out of an opening in a carefully molded tower of shell and mud and came to a halt a few meters from him, blue and lime points of brilliant light rippling across their mantles.

There is something wrong
, the lights said.

More humans want to come here
, said Aras.

If they came, would they prevent the isenj returning?

Their horizons might have been limited by the sea, but the bezeri understood political alliances. Aras chose his next signal-words carefully.

Do you doubt we can keep you safe?

The patterns of light now formed ornate orange and red concentric circles.
There are too few of you and you must put yourselves first. We must choose the option that keeps the isenj at bay. If we could choose freely, we would like both humans and isenj to stay away.

Aras calculated again.
Do you understand the differences between the humans of the Mountain to the Dry Above and the newcomers?

Clouds of silt billowed as one of the bezeri jerked its tentacles up to its body.
What we understand is that the isenj fouled our cities with their excretions and that if they come again, we will all die.

Aras paused to search for a neutral answer. He needed to know what they wanted, not what they would agree to, whatever Mestin had ordered. He signaled carefully.
If more humans come to the Dry Above, they may find something here that will be used to cause trouble to other people in other worlds. We will create a barrier here that will stop both humans and isenj settling. We will remove the humans from the Dry Above and we will also remove the Temporary City in time.

You will abandon us.

No. You won't need us here.

You fear you will lose control of this system.

Yes.

Then our only choice is to rely on your science.

The bezeri elders paused in the dark waters for a moment and then swept away in a burst of green light. Aras steadied himself against their expelled water by clutching an outcrop of
esken
and waited, but nobody else came to talk to him. The pilot shimmered scarlet and amber.

I think you should go now.

On the trip back to the surface, Aras wondered if he now contained the characteristics of so many life-forms that he had forgotten what it meant to be any one of them. Why should the bezeri care about what happened on dry land, let alone other planets? All they could rely on was their memories. All they remembered that the isenj had once had settlements here and that they had fouled the water. Asking them to address the problems of other species that they would never see when they perceived an immediate and very real threat to their daily lives was futile.

Maybe wess'har spent too much time now worrying about their responsibilities. Perhaps they didn't have as many duties as they thought. But that was human thinking: all rights, no responsibilities. He shook the idea off, disgusted.

What had they said?
If we could choose freely, we would like both humans and isenj to stay away
. Mestin had given them what they wanted. In hindsight, Shan had acted correctly in donating her genes.

Aras was still trying to define what had disturbed him so much about the sequence of events. Shan had not deceived him: she had simply taken the straightest path through a complex situation to arrive at the correct result. Intent was irrelevant. Only action mattered.

It was the action that worried him. Wess'har had not been ideologically pure enough to destroy that knowledge of bio-weapons any more than they had declined the utility of
c'naatat
in a personal crisis.

And he hadn't had the will not to use it to save Shan's life, because his wants mattered more in those few minutes than his principles.

He headed up the beach and towards Constantine, wondering what had happened to his sense of right and wrong.

 

Josh ladled more soup into Aras's bowl than he thought he would ever be able to tackle. Huge butter beans broke the brilliant orange surface like fat white islands, and Aras prodded them with his spoon. There was a sense of relief about the Garrod family: the last time they had seen Aras was when Nevyan had arrested him. Excessive food was a substitute for expressing affection, so he accepted it as such. It was good to know they still welcomed him even if he brought bad news. Deborah and James simply smiled at him from time to time: Rachel, now six, studied him intently.

“I realize how terrible this must be for you,” Aras said.

Josh shrugged. Nothing seemed to panic him. “I feel a certain sense of relief that this world will be quarantined. I've been worried about access to
c'naatat
since the day your people detected
Thetis
for the first time.”

“They can't take it. They can't land here now. They will always focus on access to me, or to
Shan Chail
.”

Josh hadn't mentioned Shan at all. The lack of reference to her was conspicuous, and Aras felt a pang of annoyance that the colonists might now resent or even hate his
isan,
but he knew she would say that she didn't
give a fuck.

He tore off a chunk of bread and dipped it in the soup. The meal fell silent. Josh's home was a perfect haven, cut into the rock just like a wess'har home, with soft filtered sunlight streaming down through the roof-dome that doubled as a solar panel. The thought of this place being abandoned and erased by nanites saddened Aras. But the colonists had never intended to stay here forever, just long enough to wait out the dark days until Earth was ready to be restored again.

He suddenly thought they were insane to come here. The construction work had been backbreaking, and he had played his part. He'd looked very different in those days.

“You must find this very sad after investing so much labor,” he said.

“Material things can be remade,” said Josh. “And we will rebuild.”

“If I can help, I will.”

“I would rather you helped me tear down than build.”

“I don't understand.”