Karen Traviss - Wess'Har 02 - Crossing the Line

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CROSSING THE LINE
KAREN TRAVISS
For Richard D. Ryder, Andrew Linzey, and all those who question where we have drawn the line.
Contents
PROLOGUE
It was much, much worse at night.
ONE
"Is it true?"
TWO
It was hard being nothing more than an extra pair…
THREE
It was nicknamed the Burma Road, for reasons nobody could…
FOUR
"Look, I didn't know. I had no bloody idea. Will…
FIVE
Lindsay fastened the belt on her fatigues and tidied her…
SIX
Shan sat on the toilet with her chin resting in…
SEVEN
Asajin was dead. Mestin hadn't known her well but she…
EIGHT
The cabin hatch swung open and Lindsay's smartpapers fluttered briefly…
NINE
Something small and wet thudded onto Shan's back like someone…
TEN
If anyone had any doubt about Dr. Mohan Rayat's true calling…
ELEVEN
Mestin got a message she hadn't been expecting. Actaeon's senior…
TWELVE
Eddie had never been used to sleepless nights. These days…
THIRTEEN
In the Exchange of Surplus Things, sitting on crates of…
FOURTEEN
"This is one of the hardest things I've ever had…
FIFTEEN
Okurt wasn't unlikable. He wasn't as quietly impressive as the…
SIXTEEN
Ual was not returning calls. Eddie wasn't sure if that…
SEVENTEEN
It was an old rifle but it was very clean…
EIGHTEEN
Shan was angry. She had been angry all the way…
NINETEEN
Aras's instinct to defer to a large, angry female had…
TWENTY
Lindsay looked at her watch and checked the bioscreen in…
TWENTY-ONE
The first bezeri to be washed up on Chad Island--to…
TWENTY-TWO
In zero g, the shattered rounds that were easing out…
TWENTY-THREE
"He lies," said Ual.
TWENTY-FOUR
Mestin had been thinking about the outrage for half a…
TWENTY-FIVE
"They will pay for this," said Nevyan.
TWENTY-SIX
There were so many fragments from the shattered hull of…
TWENTY-SEVEN
"Come on," said Eddie "You can patch me through to…
TWENTY-EIGHT
Aras wondered how long it would be before even a…
TWENTY-NINE
Minister Ual called Eddie in the early hours with the…
RESOUNDING PRAISE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY KAREN TRAVISS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Prologue
Constantine Colony, Bezer'ej,
February 2376
It was much, much worse at night.
Night cut you off from any reference, any reassurance, and nights here on Bezer'ej were far blacker than
any Shan Frankland had seen on light-polluted Earth.
Once the lights that danced in the blackness were the product of her optic nerve playing electrical tricks.
But these lights were real.
They were coming from her hands.
The display was mainly blue and violet, flashing occasionally from her fingertips. It was almost as bad as
her claws. And it wasn't something any human should have had, but Shan wasn't any human, not any
more.
Don't think of it as a parasite, Aras told her. Think of it as a beneficial relationship. It can be.
Aras had five hundred years to get used to carrying c'naatat, being c'naatat, living with all that c'naatat
meant; and she had been infected for a matter of months. He meant well. He did it to save her life. But it
was hard waking up to a new body every day.
She studied the pattern of lights again and wondered if there was language within it, as there was for the
native bezeri. She also wondered if her c'naatat had done it to teach her a lesson for hubris, for her
contempt for the organic illuminated computer screens grown into the hands of combat troops.
You'll never put one of those bloody things in me.
But here she was, with that and plenty more. The symbionts had almost certainly scavenged the
component genes at random, unaware of her beliefs and her guilt. She was just an environment to be
preserved with whatever came to hand. If they had purpose beyond that, she wasn't sure that she wanted
to know about it.
Shan put her fingers to her head and felt through the hair. There wasn't the slightest trace of unevenness in
the bone, no evidence that her skull had been shattered by an alien weapon. C'naatat was efficient. It
seemed to enjoy doing a tidy job.
Small wonder that some of her former crewmates from Thetis thought she was a paid mule for
manufactured alien biotech. The truth was messy and unconvincing, but truth often was, and it didn't
matter. The crew knew the broad detail, and so did the colonists of Constantine who gave her asylum,
and it would only be a matter of time before the matriarchs of Wess'ej found out what Aras had done to
save her.
And then all hell would break loose.
She buried her head under her blanket and tried to sleep, but the lights persisted, and she fell into dreams
of drowning in a locked room that was scented like a forest.
1
There are countless constellations, suns, and planets: we see only the suns because they give light;
the planets remain invisible, for they are small and dark. There are also numberless earths circling
around their suns, no worse and no less than this globe of ours.
GIORDANO BRUNO,
Dominican monk and philosopher,
burned at the stake by the Inquisition
in February 1600
"Is it true?"
Eddie Michallat concentrated on the features of the duty news editor twenty-five light-years away,
courtesy of CSV Actaeon's comms center. The man was real and it was happening now, in every sense
of the word.
For nearly a year he had been beyond BBChan's reach on Bezer'ej. But the glorious isolation was over.
Isenj instantaneous communications technology meant there was now no escape from the scrutiny of
News Desk. In the way of journalists, they had already given it an acronym, as noun, verb and
adjective--ITX.
"Poodle-in-the-microwave job," Eddie said dismissively. "Urban myth. People talk the most incredible
crap when they're under stress."
He waited a few seconds for the reply. The borrowed isenj communications relay was half a million miles
from Earth, and that meant the last leg in the link was at light speed, the best human technology could
manage. The problem with the delay was that it gave Eddie more time to stoke his irritation.
"That never stopped you filing a story before."
How the hell would he know? This man--this boy, for that was all he appeared to be--had probably
been born fifty years after Thetis had first left Earth. Eddie enjoyed mounting the occasional high horse.
He saddled up.
"BBChan used to be the responsible face of netbroadcast," he said. "You know--stand up a story
properly before you run it? But maybe that's out of fashion these days."
One, two, three, four, five. The boy-editor persisted with the blind focus of a missile. "Look, you're
sitting on a completely fucking shit-hot twenty-four carat story. Biotech, lost tribes, mutiny, murder,
aliens. Is there anything I've left out?"
"There wasn't a mutiny and Shan Frankland didn't murder anyone." She's just a good copper, Eddie
wanted to say, but it was hardly the time. "And the biotech is pure speculation." My speculation. Me
and my big mouth. "We don't know what it is. We don't know if it makes you invulnerable. But you got
the aliens about right. That's something."
"The Thetis crew was saying that Frankland's carrying this biotech and that she's pretty well invulnerable
to injury and disease, and--"
Eddie maintained his dismissive expression with some difficulty, a child again, cowering at the sound of a
grown-ups' row: it's all my fault. He always worried that it was. "Oh God, don't give me the undead
routine, will you? I don't do infotainment."
"And I don't do the word ‘no.' Stand up that story."
The kid was actually trying to get tough with him. It wasn't easy having a row with someone when you
had time to count to five each time. But Eddie was more afraid of the consequences of this rumor than
the wrath of a stranger, even one who employed him.
"Son, listen to me," he said. "You're twenty-five years away as the very, very fast crow flies, so I don't
think you're in any position to tell me to do sod all." He leaned forward, arms folded on the console, and
hoped the cam was picking up a shot that gave him the appearance of looming over the kid. "I'm the only
journalist in 150 trillion miles of nothing. Anything I file is exclusive. And I decide what I file. Now run
along and finish your homework."
Eddie flicked the link closed without waiting for a response and reassured himself that there really was
nothing that 'Desk could do to him any more. He was here. Actaeon had no embeds embarked.
BBChan could sack him, and every network on Earth would be offering him alternative employment. It
wasn't bravado. It was career development.
Ironically, the stories he had filed months ago were still on their way home at plain old light speed: the
stories he would file now, would ITX, would beat them by years. He was scooping himself and it felt
wonderful. It struck him as the journalistic equivalent of masturbation.
"I wish I could get away with that," said the young lieutenant on comms duty. He hovered just on the
edge of Eddie's field of vision. "Why didn't you tell him you were on your way to see the isenj?"
"Because all news editors are tossers," Eddie said. He felt around in his pockets for the bee-cam and his
comms kit. "If you tell them what story you're chasing, they decide in their own minds how it's going to
turn out. Then they bollock you for not coming back with the story they imagined. So you don't tell them
anything until you're ready to file. Saves a lot of grief."
"Wise counsel," said the lieutenant, as if he understood.
From Actaeon's bridge, Eddie could still see the dwindling star that was EFS Thetis, heading back to
Earth with the remnant of the Constantine mission, a party of isenj delegates and their ussissi interpreters.
So vessels weren't titled European Federal Ship these days, then. A nice bland CSV, a harmless
Combined Service Vessel, purged of any reference to territory to avoid offending the recent multinational
alliance between Europe and the Sinostates. He had seventy-five years left to amaze the viewing public
with the latest in alien contact before the real thing showed up on their doorstep. Thetis was a much
older, slower ship than the Actaeon.
And Thetis had been the state of the art just over a year ago. Time was flying obscenely and confusingly
fast.
"It's not like he can send someone out to relieve you of duty, is it?" said the lieutenant. He seemed to
have badged Eddie as a maverick hero, an understandable reaction for a young man enmeshed in the
strict hierarchies of navy life. No, there was nothing News Desk could do out here: Shan Frankland had
taught him that. When you were on your own, without backup, you had to make your own decisions and
stand by them. "Is Frankland really as bad as they say? Did she really sell you out? Did she let people
die?"
"Who's saying?"
"Commander Neville."
"Look, the commander's been through a lot lately. I'd take some of her observations with a pinch of salt.
You can't lose your kid without losing some sanity too." I'm just an observer. No, he wasn't. He was
involved in this. He had been involved in it right from the time he had decided there were some stories
about Shan that he was never going to file. "Lindsay had a sickly, premature kid. That's what you get if
you're not used to low oxygen. You've got to remember the colony's medical facilities are pretty
primitive."
A pause. "But presumably Frankland's aren't."
"Are you trying to interrogate me, son?"
"Just making conversation."
"Word of advice. Never try to get information out of a hack. We wrote the book on wheedling. I can't
give you any information on Frankland because I don't have any." Well, technically, I don't. It suddenly
struck him that he was calling all younger males son, just as Shan did, a copper's kind patronage with its
edge of threat. "No, Frankland probably saved a lot of lives. But maybe she's proof that it isn't what's
true that makes historical record, it's who gets their story in first."
A blood sample from Shan here, and a cell culture there, and maybe David Neville might have survived
more than a few weeks. But releasing that biotech into the human population was a price Shan Frankland
refused to pay, regardless of what it cost her. Eddie knew that now.
And he still felt guilty that he believed, however briefly, that she had been carrying the biotech for money.
He wondered whether he would have made the same choice if placed in the same dilemma.
"Come on," he said to the young officer, who was hanging on his pronouncements like a disciple. "Take
me down to the shuttle bay. I'm going to have tea with the isenj foreign minister."
Aras crunched down to the cliffs on a paper-thin crust of light snow. He still worried when Shan was out
after nightfall. But she could come to no harm. She couldn't freeze to death, and she couldn't drown, and
she couldn't die even if she fell and broke her neck.
And neither could he.
But she was uneasy. He could smell that even from a hundred meters away. She was where he had
hoped to find her, sitting near the cliff edge again, looking down at the glittering darkness of a sea half
illuminated by Wess'ej in its gibbous phase.
He concentrated, willing his visual range to expand. A human would hardly have spotted her. A
wess'har's low-light vision would have picked her out. But on top of that, Aras had his infrared sensitivity,
gleaned from the isenj by his c'naatat, and Shan was at that moment a shimmering golden ghost of
bright-hot exposed skin and darker, cooler garments.
The c'naatat produced a fever during its active phases. He could see it. She wouldn't be feeling the cold
at all.
"Time to eat," he said quietly. "Still watching for the bezeri?"
She smiled, a brief flash of hotter, whiter light flaring in a mask of amber. "I wanted to wave to them."
She peeled off her gloves, held out her hands and flexed them. Brilliant violet lights flickered briefly under
the skin. "I think I can guess where I picked that up."
She was bothered by it. She feigned calm well enough to fool a human but not enough to evade a
wess'har sense of smell. Her expression, her posture, her voice; all said she was fine. But her scent said
otherwise.
"It might not be from the bezeri," he said, as if that made a difference. "C'naatat is often unpredictable.
I've been around bezeri for many years and never absorbed any of their characteristics."
"As far as you know, of course. Well, could be worse. At least it's not their tentacles, eh?" She flexed her
fingers again and stared at them. The lights, as intense now as anything the bezeri emitted, added to her
illuminated image. "Shouldn't I talk to them? I feel I owe them an explanation."
Aras thought the bezeri probably had all the explanation they needed or wanted. However much Shan
thought she could protect them, however ashamed she was of her own species' short history on Bezer'ej,
the bezeri themselves were still raw from losing an infant to human violence. Aras wondered how the
humans--the gethes, the carrion-eaters--who flew into violent outrage themselves at the harming of a
child could think another species would behave any differently.
It was just as well that the bezeri were soft-bodied, confined to the sea, and without real weapons
beyond their piercing mouth-parts. Shan's apologies would mean little to them.
He held his hand out to her. "Here. They're not coming. They haven't been near the surface for weeks.
Let's eat."
It was like watching a child who was scarred by a fire of your making, a constant rebuke to your
carelessness, except that he had done this deliberately. She was trying to cope with her c'naatat and
finding it hard. What choice did I have? She would have died if I hadn't infected her. But he knew
how it felt to wake wondering what alterations that the microscopic symbiont was making to your body.
He had seen c'naatat develop in others, and no two experienced exactly the same changes.
That was the least of her problems. In time--and she would have plenty of that--she would have to cope
with the lonely reality of having everyone she knew age and die, leaving her alone, except for him. He
knew where his duty lay. He owed her that much.
But she was right. It could have been worse.
She could have found herself reliving other beings' memories.
"I'm starving," she said. C'naatat demanded a lot of energy while it was rearranging the genetic furniture.
"I could murder some nice thick lentil soup. And some of those little rolls with the walnut bits in."
"We'll see what the refectory has to offer."
They walked back to Constantine across a plain that was starting to push blue-gray grass through the
snow. Usually Aras managed to see only what was truly there: tonight, once again, the images of what
had once been were intruding on the present.
Shan walked through wilderness. But Aras walked along the vanished perimeter of an isenj city called
Mjat and down what had been a main thoroughfare flanked by homes. There was less than nothing left,
but he remembered exactly where it had been. He hadn't needed to see the gethes' clever geophys
images of the ghost of a civilization to recall those roads, because he had mapped them.
And he had destroyed them.
He had washed the cities with fire and cut down isenj and set loose the reclamation nanites that devoured
the deserted homes. It had been five hundred years ago by the Constantine calendar, but he remembered
it all, and not only from his own viewpoint. Back then he had had no idea that isenj had genetic memory.
"I'm sorry," he said. "But I had to do it."
Shan seemed to think he was talking to her. "Stop apologizing." She thrust her arm through his. "It's
okay."
Apart from a brief, violent escape of contained rage when she had found out she was infected, she had
shown neither self-pity nor recrimination. He admired that about her. It was very wess'har. It would
make it far easier for her to adapt to her new world.
Could be worse.
Aras walked the invisible central plaza of Mjat. Worse could have been genetic memory, and that was
perhaps worst of all, worse than claws or vestigial wings or a million other scraps of genetic material that
c'naatat had picked up, tried on for size, and then sometimes discarded.
Now he was clear of Mjat and back in the small world of humans, his home for the best part of two
centuries. Wess'ej, the planet where he had been born, hung in the sky as a huge crescent moon, and he
didn't miss it at all.
The biobarrier crackled slightly as they passed through into Constantine's shielded, controlled
environment. Aras trod carefully to avoid the overwintering kale that was shrouded in snow-like
sculptures.
Wess'har had no sculpture, no poetry, no music. He almost understood those concepts now, but not
entirely. There was a great deal of human DNA in him: c'naatat had probably found it in shed skin cells
and bacteria and taken a fancy to it, but it had not helped him grasp the human fondness for what was
clearly unreal. He had often wondered why the symbiont had devoted so much energy to altering his
appearance and fashioning a makeshift human out of him.
It took him some time to realize that it had given him yet another refinement to help him--its
world--survive. It was trying to help him to fit into human society. It seemed to know he was outcast
from his own forever.
It knew how badly he needed to belong.
Malcolm Okurt had not signed up for this. He told Lindsay Neville so. He took it as a personal slight, he
said, and it was bad enough having to crew a vessel with civilians without getting dragged into politics
as well. He was the only person Lindsay knew who could spit the words out like that. At chill-down, his
orders were to follow up the Thetis mission. Nobody mentioned anything about aliens, especially not
four separate civilizations.
"I thought you'd want to get out of here as fast as you could," he said.
Lindsay paused, and not for effect. "I've got unfinished business. I lost my kid here."
Okurt knew that well enough. She just wanted to remind him that she needed a wide berth at times. She
didn't feel the pain at all, not right then. She made sure she didn't because if she did then she would fall
apart, and as she told Okurt, she had a task to complete.
She steadied herself and glanced at her bioscreen, the living battlefield computer display grown into the
palm of her hand. She couldn't switch off the light, but she had disabled the monitor functions because it
depressed her to see the unchanging bio signs of her comrades in chill-sleep. It made them look as if they
were dead.
Okurt must have been watching her gaze. "They phased those out years ago," he said. "Unreliable."
So nobody had them any more, nobody except her and a few Royal Marines who were on their way
home. She turned her hand palm down on the table.
When Okurt was agitated he had a habit of spinning his coffee cup in its saucer, and he was doing it now.
"We might have been able to help, had we been allowed access."
"I know." She was drawing parallel lines on the pad in front of her, darker and deeper and harder with
each stroke. "Do you have current orders regarding Frankland?"
"We're backing off for the time being. No point getting into a pissing match with the wess'har, not if we
want to do business with them. If she's got what you say she's got, there'll be other ways to acquire it.
I've got enough on my plate trying to keep the isenj sweet without the wess'har noticing we're kissing
both their arses."
摘要：

CROSSINGTHELINEKARENTRAVISSForRichardD.Ryder,AndrewLinzey,andallthosewhoquestionwherewehavedrawntheline.ContentsPROLOGUEItwasmuch,muchworseatnight.ONE"Isittrue?"TWOItwashardbeingnothingmorethananextrapair…THREEItwasnicknamedtheBurmaRoad,forreasonsnobodycould…FOUR"Look,Ididn'tknow.Ihadnobloodyidea.Wi...

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