Ally Read Free Page B

mirror.
    You bastard.
    She had to be clear why she was doing this. She tried to separate the logical necessity from just hating him for nebulous, meaningless things like needing to best him or letting his resilience goad her.
    â€œIs this it?” Shapakti consulted the data in his virin, tilting the hand-sized slab of translucent composite to see the data. Shan swung her legs over the edge of the makeshift examination table and pulled on her underpants before peering over his shoulder. He was looking at a cutaway image of a female human that had come from the Constantine colony’s simple library. “Here? In the pelvis?”
    â€œThat’s the thing,” she said, trying to be patiently helpful. “About the size of a fist.”
    â€œYou’re certain it was removed before?”
    â€œI reckon so. The doc made a big fuss about it. They don’t usually resort to surgery, but I refused gene therapy.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI was brought up Pagan. My family wouldn’t allow anything to alter my genome.”
    â€œAnd now you have a very altered genome indeed.”
    â€œDon’t rub it in.”
    â€œAnd you’re sure you removed the uterus when it re-grew?”
    Shan detached from a memory that felt like disembowelment. She could hardly believe what she’d done: she’d heard all the horror stories of how trapped people had cut through their own limbs, and now she knew there was a level of desperation you reached—like the one she’d reached floating suitless in the void—where the survival reflex took over totally and pain didn’t matter.
    â€œYes, I’m certain,” she said.
    â€œDid it hurt?”
    â€œI cut through my abdominal wall without anesthesia. Of course it bloody well hurt.” She stared at him, waiting for a lecture on abortion. She didn’t need one. It had upended her more than she ever thought possible. “It was theonly way to guarantee getting past c’naatat ’s defenses.”
    â€œI understand why you wanted to spare the child the life you have,” he said kindly. “Just as Vijissi was unable to bear the isolation.”
    Thanks. Remind me he killed himself. You could always rely on wess’har to cut the crap and plow straight through the euphemism. They didn’t understand oblique language. “It still shocks you, I know.”
    â€œWe have no unwanted offspring.” Shapakti smoothed his gel gloves over his hands. It made them look wet, and with his multi-jointed thin fingers, the effect was one of a sea creature stranded on the shore. “But then we have no offspring who would bear your burden, either.”
    â€œYou have a great bedside manner,” said Shan.
    â€œIt’s hard to tell how upset you are because you suppress your scent.”
    â€œJust as well I can.” C’naatat, forever tinkering with its collection of DNA fragments from other creatures it had passed through, had given her a wess’har scent signaling system. She kept her jask , her matriarchal dominance pheromone, well under conscious control. “I don’t want to lose my temper and end up deposing Esganikan.”
    â€œThis child was Ade’s.”
    She took it as a rebuke for carelessness. “We’d both been sterilized and we thought it was okay to copulate. C’naatat had other ideas.”
    â€œYou think it has ideas? That it’s sentient?”
    â€œJust a figure of speech. Bacteria try to survive and reproduce. But, yes, it does seem to learn and react to its hosts’ anxieties.” Shan stepped on thin ice of her own making: she’d taken the wess’har view of life and sentience to heart. Humans had no special rights or position in creation. “But I don’t like thinking of it as something making decisions for me. Nobody does that.”
    Shapakti tilted his head on one side in that appealingly canine wess’har gesture of intense