Crossing the Line (38 page)

“What a strange language English can be,” said Nevyan. “He'll never learn wess'u. He'll never be able to pronounce it, anyway.”

“It's English you most need him to speak,” said Mestin. “Because it's the humans who need to listen.”

 

Eddie hesitated before knocking on the lovely pearl door. He knew it was shit, but it didn't make it any less magical. And knowing Aras well didn't make it any easier to work out what to say to him.

The door opened. Aras, grim and huge, filled the opening. He didn't look any different, but then Eddie wasn't sure he would show signs of not eating or sleeping.

And he knew wess'har couldn't weep.

“I don't know what to say to you,” Eddie said. “I'm truly sorry, and I miss her too, and I won't presume to tell you I know how you must feel, because I don't.”

Aras said nothing, but held out his arm in a gesture to invite Eddie inside.

Eddie stood in the center of the Spartan room, afraid to sit down in case he was taking a seat that had been Shan's. He waited for Aras to indicate a place on the incongruously human sofa.

“Thanks for taking me in,” he said.

“Shan was very fond of you.”

It was painfully touching. Eddie knew she enjoyed their verbal sparring but he had no idea that the relationship generated any degree of warmth at her end. She was good at holding people at arm's length. “It's all my fault,” he said. “If you want to kill me, I wouldn't blame you.”

“As always, you confuse knowledge with action,” said Aras.

“If I had kept my mouth shut, they wouldn't have known she had the damn thing. I even told them where to find her. And
it.
”

“No. If you had kept those things to yourself, they would still have found out in time, and pursued us, but you would have been long dead, and so oblivious of the events.”

Aras had an accidental talent for making Eddie feel better. Eddie hoped he could return the favor. But he had a feeling that the questions he needed to ask Aras would simply scrape at wounds so fresh and raw that the pain would overwhelm him.

They didn't talk much for the rest of the day. Aras busied himself cooking, which Eddie took as displacement activity, but he was glad of it because it was good food. Aras didn't eat anything. He just gave Eddie a pile of
sek
blankets, showed him the sofa and went out.

Eddie thought he might be going into the center of the city on some errand or other, but as he watched from the terrace, taking in a vista that had still not yet palled for him, he saw a figure walking out into the dry plain.

He hoped Aras wasn't going to do anything stupid.

But Aras was
c'naatat
, and that made killing yourself a very tall order. Eddie still decided he would keep an eye on him.

The room was stark despite the odd touches of human upholstery—a bed against one wall, the sofa, a padded stool. Eddie looked around. There was almost no storage. It was like being back in the cabins at
Thetis
camp. He rummaged in the one cupboard and found some glass bowls, Shan's carefully folded formal uniform jacket, thin-woven hand towels, and two hand grenades. It didn't really surprise him. She liked to be ready for emergencies.

It was painful to realize that she wouldn't come striding through the door and give him a stream of inventive and good-natured abuse. He thought of how she'd taken a laser cutter to Rayat's desk when he'd argued about some trivia, and he smiled, and it hurt. He'd miss her.

Aras was going to have a very hard time of it.

Eddie picked up the grenades, prayed that they were disarmed, and put them in his bag. Fragmentation was the one thing he knew that could kill
c'naatat
troops. There was no point taking chances.

He spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the insubstantial-looking translucent console at the far end of the room. He worked out how to get images, sound, and data from the wess'har archives, but the tuning defeated him.

He was still fiddling around when Aras, silent and unexpected, walked up behind him and showed him where the data streams from Earth could be found.

“Thanks,” said Eddie. “Are you okay? Want to talk?”

“No.”

At least Eddie could watch the news. He wasn't sure he wanted to. There was nothing worse than being spitting mad and 150 trillion miles away from being able to do anything about it.

He watched the news anyway, curled up on the eccentric white sofa while Aras disappeared onto the terrace.

“I can listen,” Eddie called. “And I don't mean an interview.”

Aras grunted noncommittally from a distance. Eddie turned back to the screen to wander through his favorite news channels.

He was glad he did. The European Federal Union's junior defense secretary was having a hard time. His boss had gone to ground, leaving him to deal with reporters covering a space war for the very first time. Eddie could sense their excitement.

People always tut-tutted about journalists being pushy and rude and disrespectful. But Eddie thought there was nothing finer than the sight of a minister being doorstepped and harried all the way from his shiny office door to his overpriced privilege of a chauffeur-driven limo by a pack of reporters.

It was democracy. He loved it. He could take all the abuse and slammed doors in the world because, when it came down to it,
this
was what the job was really about.

It was about being one of the last ordinary people left with enough clout to put those in power on the spot and make them account for themselves.

Shan would have loved it too.

 

Serrimissani had slotted into the gap left by Vijissi without asking or being asked. She wanted to be useful. She sat on the steps of the terrace beside Mestin and Nevyan without comment as they waited for a response from the World Before.

The wess'har populations no longer spoke the same language, but the ussissi moved between the worlds and could make contact and translate. Shan had found it hard to work out how the ussissi could work with such differing cultures without being a conduit for any of them. Mestin would have sent her out with them to learn and understand, but it was too late now.

“They're wess'har, like us,” said Nevyan. “However differently they live, they will share our basic drive for cooperation. And they will not be
gethes.
”

“What do you want them to do if they accept our approach?” asked Mestin.

“To tell us what's possible in confining the
gethes
to their own system, and what support they will give us to achieve that.”

“So we're back to the
policing
that Targassat so despised?”

“She felt we sought out cultures for interference because we believed we were morally superior, and that it would over-stretch us and cost us our own civilization.
This
is a response to outright aggression.”

“Outcomes,
isanket,
not motives. And perhaps she was just wrong.”

“And perhaps she was right for the times, but not for now.”

“You don't need to comfort yourself about betraying a dead woman's ideals.” It seemed they were being driven by respect for opinionated and exceptional matriarchs who were no longer around to enforce their own philosophies. “You make your own judgments. The will of Wess'ej supports you. It's time to act.”

And if it wasn't, it was too late to step back.

Nijassi, a member of Vijissi's pack, came scrambling up the steps. “There is a message,” he said. “It has taken time to find the right people to ask the questions, but we have an answer.”

“And?” Nevyan stood up and shook down her
dhren
as if she were heading somewhere to receive a visit.

“They will arrange a conference by screen as soon as they have spoken to the various cities.”

“This isn't an answer. What did they actually say? What were the words?”

Nijassi sat back on his haunches as if he had forgotten to note the most important part of the message. He seemed to have taken it as understood.

“They said that what threatens us threatens them. And threat is now. They will come.”

Aras wondered how long it would be before even a
c'naatat
succumbed to lack of nourishment.

He really didn't feel like eating. It was more than simply being off his food. Food was communal: he had cooked for Shan, and Shan was no longer there to enjoy it. She had not been there for nearly seven days now and she would never be there again.

There were no stages of grieving for wess'har, no denial or bargaining. First they were paralyzed by grief and shock, and then they accepted it. Males remated and the pain was soothed, but not wholly forgotten. So did females. Aras had to find his own solution, and for a second time.

But he was mired in human anger.

He spent the morning wondering how many scores he would feel obliged to settle before his life was too miserable to be faced.

“Aras,” said Eddie. He stood at the door to the terrace and called him. He seemed scared to come within Aras's reach, as if he would receive a blow. It was a shame. The human was doing his best to support him, misguided though it was. “Aras, Nevyan's at the door. She's brought someone to talk to you.”

It was Sergeant Bennett in his camouflage battle dress, even though there was no longer any point in concealment, and he was wearing that odd flat green fabric headdress that he called a
beret.
Nevyan gestured the soldier forward silently. He saluted Aras.

“Sir,” he said. It sounded like
sah.
“I need to talk to you urgently.”

Aras stood back and let them walk in. Bennett simply stood in the center of the room with his hands clasped behind his back, legs a little apart. They called it
standing easy.
It certainly didn't look like there was any ease about it.

This man had shot his
isan.

He had also stopped Lindsay Neville from killing her. Aras didn't know what to make of him, but he had once liked him a lot more than he had liked Josh, and he needed his skills and knowledge.

“Go on,” said Aras. He didn't sit down either.

Bennett put his hand in the expandable pocket on his trouser leg and took out Shan's gun. He handed it to Aras on the flat of his palm. “She would have wanted you to have it, sir.”

Aras took it and turned it over in his hands. He'd used the weapon before. He had executed Surendra Parekh with it. It hadn't done Shan much good. Pain, the real physical pain of grief, gripped at his chest.

“She asked me to tell you that she was sorry and that she hadn't abandoned you,” said Bennett. “You would have been very proud of her, sir.”

Aras wanted to hear it and yet he didn't. “Tell me what happened,” he said. “Everything.” He turned to Eddie. “And you need to hear it too. Because you will tell the
gethes,
and I know you will tell the truth.”

It was a hard story to hear. Bennett kept stopping. He related it like a report, but he was struggling to keep his voice steady.

“And you shot her,” said Aras.

“It took nearly the whole magazine to bring her down,” he said. “She wouldn't give up. It took two of us to restrain her and even then she head-butted me. Hard.”

“Do you expect sympathy? She admired you. She
trusted
you.”

“I mention it simply because she was so bloody brave, sir.”

“And she—” Aras stopped. He couldn't say it. He needed to sit. Eddie stepped in smartly.

“I think we want to know if she really…jettisoned herself of her own free will, Ade.”

Bennett's jaw worked silently for a few seconds. “She did, but not that she had much of a choice. She told Commander Neville what she thought of her, and just stepped out into space, and the ussissi wouldn't leave her.” He swallowed and his whole throat seemed to move. “It was horrible but I'm glad I was there. Some people disappoint you. They're all mouth. Shan wasn't. She got on and did it. I just wanted you to know that.”

There was a silence. It went on for a while, and Nevyan seemed to be having the most difficulty with it. She was almost billowing acid agitation. She stood up and peered into Bennett's face.

“Can you give me any location?” she said. “We want to retrieve her body. And Vijissi. They deserve to come home.”

Bennett held out his hand. The palm was illuminated green, showing flat lines and numbers. “It records a lot. There'll be a month's worth of location data in there. You'll have a job on your hands, though, even with the coordinates.”

“Then it's a job I should be getting on with,” said Nevyan.

“I still don't understand why you surrendered,” said Eddie. “You didn't kill Shan. You didn't help her much, but you know it wasn't your doing. Had enough of the FEU shunting you around to nursemaid corporations or something?”

Bennett hadn't taken his eyes off Aras. He held his hand out to him, palm up, fist clenched. He nodded towards the
tilgir
on Aras's belt.

“Want to take a slice out of me, sir?”

“That won't bring her back.”

“That's not quite what I meant. Please. Just cut me.”

Eddie looked completely stunned.
No
, thought Aras.
No, not that.
But he took his knife and he caught Bennett's arm and drew the blade down from the inside of his elbow to the faint blue vessels on his wrist. It was a shallow cut. It was all it needed.

Blood welled for a moment and stopped. Then the cut settled into a red line, and then a pink one, and then it was as if he had never been cut.

“Oh shit,” said Eddie. “Here we go again.”

“See, I told you she nutted me,” said Bennett. “I mean
hard,
too. Blood everywhere, right across my face and hers, and I thought it was all mine because there wasn't a mark on her when we looked. It was an accident. She didn't know she'd infected me.”

Aras stared. It was one more difficulty he didn't need. It was the sort of problem Shan would have made him feel better about had she been here to advise him.

He needed her. And he didn't need a human
c'naatat
soldier to worry about.

“Sir, I thought it might be best for everyone if I went deep for a bit,” Bennett said, looking rather modest for a man who had kept his nerve under unthinkable circumstances. “And I did tell Commander Neville I took a piss-poor view of what happened to Shan, but it was probably bloody daft of me to let her know I was infected. Anyway, here I am, sir. Can you tell me if the rest of the detachment are okay?”

Eddie interrupted. “I'll find out,” he said. “In the meantime, take a seat. I'm sure you'll come in very handy.”

 

The pearl icing of F'nar looked perfectly wonderful in heavy rain.

Eddie stood at the door to the terrace, watching the downpour wash in great waves down the walls of the caldera. The glass conduits were almost singing. At some points the city looked like a designer water feature, the torrent rolling across the iridescence in swirls and channels and creating an abstract animation. Eddie had sent the bee-cam in, fully weather-jacketed, to capture footage while he waited.

It was now five days since he had become the most sought-after interviewee on four planets. It wasn't a position a journalist ever expected to find himself in. He watched angry debates and call-ins with people demanding that he be allowed to speak, and still the call didn't come.

He had interviewed Bennett. It was one of the best he'd ever done, and he reckoned so himself. Bennett had an endearingly frank quality and a matter-of-fact manner that made the telling of Shan Frankland's last grand gesture something of a show-stopper. She would have liked that.

But Eddie couldn't use it. The whole story hinged on
c'naatat.
If he ran the line on Shan's death before he conveyed the enormity of the attack on Christopher—on Ouzhari—then nobody would hear the detail. They would be working out how feasible immortality might be for them. Once again one of Shan Frankland's moral stands would have to remain a secret.

She hadn't been able to admit even to him that she had once sacrificed her career and reputation to protect a bunch of ecoterrorists with whom she sympathized. He knew anyway. Whether anyone agreed with her or not, there was something heart-stoppingly admirable about a woman who would put everything on the line—her life included—for a principle.

Eddie was going to make sure she had prime-time if it was the last thing he ever did. He'd just wait a while.

There was no interview with Lindsay Neville or Mohan Rayat, of course. He wanted that most of all. But he could wait for that too.

Eddie walked back into the house and stood in front of the screen, now sliced into five different news channels. Then he hit the message key: still nothing. No incoming calls from Earth.
Call me, you tossers.
Eddie wondered what Ual made of the FEU's poor handling of the row. He needed the diplomatic channels to stay open, at least until he had filed.

Maybe it didn't matter. By not being able to speak, Eddie had become a silent nod to growing speculation that humans had started the war. Yes, they were using the word
war
on every channel. The legal niceties of declaration had gone by the board, even on BBChan bulletins. If your loved ones had died, you needed to hear that it was a war. Nobody wanted to hear that they'd been killed in a diplomatic misunderstanding.

Eddie went back to the door and watched the rain punching through ever-changing rainbows for a long time.

“Does it piss down like this all the time?” asked Bennett. Eddie hadn't even heard him come up behind him. “Been walking round F'nar, getting accustomed to the layout. Pretty. Very pretty.”

“Heard from the others yet?”

“Izzy and Chaz are on Mar'an'cas, but Izzy's bioscreen packed up so I'm messaging Chaz. I think they quite like setting up the colonists' camp there. Something good they can do. And Sue, Jon and Barkers are on Umeh.”

“And Lindsay's okay?”

“Not interested in her,” said Bennett. “Maybe you could ask Nevyan if we could get them all over here. They wouldn't do anything stupid, I'd see to that. When things calm down a bit, of course.”

“As POWs?”

“Why?”

“You want to be deserters? Even this far from a court-martial? Otherwise we have to explain why you've cut loose.”

“Come on, they'd never try to take me here.”

“It's not about that, really. If the
c'naatat
story goes fully public, then who's going to give a shit about a few dead squid?”

“Or Shan,” said Bennett.

They stood and shared a homebrew beer. It hadn't fermented long enough but it was more a symbol than an expression of the brewer's art. Bennett was politely tactful.

“Interesting,” he said.

“You can't get drunk any more anyway,” said Eddie. “So Shan said.”

The front door opened and let in a blast of damp air. Aras had come back from the fields with a basket of muddy vegetables. He dumped them in the bowl under the spigot, rinsed them, and then went to the lavatory and locked the door.

“That's not good,” said Eddie. He wanted Aras to talk, at least to Bennett if not to him. He walked up to the door and tapped very gently with his knuckles.

“How are you feeling, mate?” he asked.

There was no answer.

“Aras, come and have something to eat.”

“Later,” said Aras.

Eddie went out onto the terrace again and began working out how he might get a story off Wess'ej. He couldn't think of any route that didn't involve ITX and bribery. Bennett busied himself cleaning his rifle.

Eddie was still coming up with nothing and feeling increasingly frustrated when he heard Aras moving around inside the house. There was the sound of a container easing open and then a sharp slam as something else was opened and closed.

The sounds of rummaging became more rapid and frantic. Eventually they stopped and Aras came slowly out onto the terrace.

“You have taken something of mine, Eddie.”

It hadn't been a bad premonition. There wasn't much of anything to take from Aras, being wess'har: just the grenades.

“It's no good looking for them,” Eddie said. He was suddenly scared. Aras could have torn him apart with little effort, and in his current state of mind there was every chance he would. Bennett stood back, watching them carefully. “You won't find them.”

“Eddie, how can you do this to me?”

“Because I care what happens to you.”

“I can't stand another day like this. I have lived long enough and I have nothing left now. If you had any respect for me you'd stop this stupid game, so give me the grenades.”

Eddie had nowhere to run. He stood with his arms held away from his sides, thinking where he'd left his bag. It was stowed under the sofa. He edged between Aras and the door. His stomach was churning. Aras twitched and Eddie almost leaped back, but he stood his ground. “I'm not going to let you kill yourself.”

Aras was still for a moment. Then he seized Eddie by his collar and thrust him so hard against the wall that it hammered the breath out of him and he thought Aras was finally going to kill him.

“Let me
go,
Eddie. Let me die.”

Eddie gasped for breath. “Fuck you, no.
No.
You want to do it—you do it alone.”

“Give them to me. Sergeant Bennett, will
you
give them to me?”

Bennett walked slowly forward, one careful pace at a time. “I'm not helping you, mate.”

“Why? What's it to either of you?”

Eddie choked. “She wouldn't have wanted you to do it. And you're the last bit of her left.”

Bennett finally came close enough to lay both hands on Aras's arm, very slowly, very gently. “Come on,” he said. “Eddie's right. I know what you're going through, remember. I know better than Eddie, anyway. You help me through it and I'll help you. Okay?”