Chapter 1-5
The Summit of Matrilines went well. I would go so far as to say that I had a good time.
The day did begin with some melancholy news. I traveled to the summit in a Spirit dropship along with Ruz, Chieftain Lirinus and a few gendarmes, and a delegation of cityfolk ward heelers. I thought back to the last time I was in a Spirit and wondered about the welfare of that Salarian gunner I had talked to. I asked Lirinus if he knew anything.
"I have no idea of the Salarian gendarme you're talking about, but if he was part of that crew, he is almost certainly dead. I remember that the dropship that carried you to Yalat's hive was later shot down. By the very same natives we are about to meet..."
"I am sorry to hear it."
Chieftain Lirinus shrugged.
One of the cityfolk ward heelers nudged me. "Ruxxia?" he offered.
The ward heeler was an urban Lystheni named Boss Tadim, who I knew to be a very important figure in Port Isola. He had offered to present Talita's plan to the Summit. I accepted the drink. "Did you know the guy well?" Tadim asked.
"No." I couldn't properly remember the dead gunner's face and would have had a hard time marking him out from any other Salarian. Or from Boss Tadim's people, for that matter. I was almost done with Narsompasi and the distinction between Salarians and Lystheni still seemed largely meaningless to me. I changed the subject and asked Tadim why Talita wasn't presenting her own plan.
"Some of it is that the plan will probably go over a little better if it's presented by a Lystheni, even one of the cityfolk. Mostly it's just that Valzeshia doesn't want to do it. She's not a woman of the people. She would tell you that she's afraid of public speaking." Tadim grinned at some private joke. "Listen, I know it was you who was behind a lot of this. I want to thank you. The spaceports were bleeding out before you came. Now we're starting to see families returning. You've done a lot of good for Narsompasi."
That made me feel better, and I talked to Boss Tadim until we arrived at our destination. Ninety-seven matrilines were represented at the Summit, which took place in a bright coastal bay traditionally reserved for such purposes. Grav-bikes were the only technology the swamp-dwellers really took pride in, well, that and weaponry, but the point is that the matrilines were all capable of traversing the continent under their own power. Our dropship touched down near to the flying sedans the Valzeshia family had traveled in. Queen Yalat was not invited, and no one could imagine that she would have wanted to come.
Thousands of Lystheni crowded the beach. For them it was a rare opportunity to socialize with old friends from other matrilines. The ward heelers moved out to mingle awkwardly with the swamp-dwellers, with only Boss Tadim smiling and looking like he fit in with the crowd. Chieftain Lirinus, four Jiralhanae lieutenants, and the two Mgalekgolo bodyguards he had brought stood there by the dropship with only each other, the Lystheni giving them a wide berth. Ruz wanted to catch up with the friends he had made among the Vikasayas, and I set off with him.
The Vikasayas had all come to the Summit carrying their new needlers and plasma rifles, which they were proudly showing off to all the other matrilines. They waved their guns in the air with particular enthusiasm whenever they thought they saw an Inlidaya. When the Vikasayas saw Ruz, they smiled, called to him, and invited him to go out shooting. I nodded to Ruz, and he went off. I found myself talking to Dalatrass Vikasaya.
"It was so nice to have two weeks with your aide Dir Ruz," she told me. "After all this time, to meet an alien who makes some sense! Did you realize that, like us, Kig-Yar associate leadership with femininity? It is a way of keeping peace." She kept a straight face at first, and it took me a second to realize she was joking.
"How stable is the peace?" I asked her after she finished laughing. "I don't have much in common with Chieftain Lirinus, but I think the two of us are nervous about the same thing. We're worried that you're all going to play nice until we leave, but the second that we do, you'll jump right at Queen Yalat's throat, and then she won't have any Jiralhanae to protect her."
"Would it be such a bad thing for the two of you?"
"Not in itself, but the Terminus Exarch would throw a fit. Lirinus would never see the Coreward Front, and it would be a blow for the standing of the whole Anuranite Lustration."
"The what?"
"It would be a blow for the standing of the people I work for."
"I see." We walked along the white beach together. "Was Narsompasi a typical job for you? It is the only planet I have ever known. Are other planets like this?"
I spent some time describing other worlds I had seen, with Dalatrass Vikasaya listening carefully, only once breaking me off when Dalatrass Inlidaya passed by us. "Next time!" Dalatrass Vikasaya shouted furiously, waving her needler over her head. "Next time!" She turned back to me. "Sorry about that. Go on."
After I ran out of stories, Dalatrass Vikasaya offered to loan me a grav-bike. She explained that one of the reasons the matrilines had settled on this bay as a place to hold their Summits was the opportunity to ride their grav-bikes over the waters of the bay, without any need to worry about running into trees. We drove grav-bikes in circles over the bay for a few hours, and that was some of the most fun I've ever had while working.
By the time we were done it was getting darker. The Lystheni around us were getting drunker and wilder. As we walked toward the center of the Summit, Dalatrass Vikasaya gestured to the crowd. "Look at us. You see why the Covenant can't work for us, don't you?"
"No. Why?"
"They want to box us into their tech-monkey caste. A very bad fit, even if we wanted to be boxed into any caste. They think we're Salarians. We came out here two thousand years ago so that we wouldn't have to be Salarians, and we've never regretted it."
"That's a Covenant needler you're carrying on your belt. Maybe you wouldn't mind gunsmithing for them, if you gave it a chance. And you haven't seen their vehicles yet."
"Is the Covenant what your people would have wanted? When they came to the Terminus Systems, I mean."
"Yes."
"Really? You think your people left the Batarian Hegemony, the most brainless tyranny in known space, just so that they could find a tyranny even more brainless?"
"I think the cartel-kin came to the Terminus Systems looking for power, and now it's finally found us."
Two people ahead of us were yelling. I recognized one of their voices.
"Sham!" an inebriated Lystheni shouted. "It was a sham!"
"This was years and years ago!" Talita protested. "Twenty generations past! We cannot allow such distant affairs of the long-dead to weigh on us here in the present!"
"Generations past? Long-dead? You ageless alien witch, you are the individual responsible!"
"Okay," Talita conceded. "I admit this. Sometimes people forget it."
"Everything all right here?" Dalatrass Vikasaya asked.
The Lystheni who had been yelling at Talita looked at Dalatrass Vikasaya. Dalatrass Vikasaya's clothes marked her out as leader of a matriline, and the drunken Lystheni decided he did not want to risk a feud over whatever he was angry about. He nodded sullenly and slipped away into the crowd.
"What was that?" I asked Talita.
"He believes I tricked his matriline into disaster some two hundred years ago. I am surprised that it would still stir such emotion! I do not remember the details of the case. I do not know whether I deserved to be yelled at there or not. Oh, well! This is a night for worrying about bigger things. Dalatrass Vikasaya! It is so good to see you! Thank you for your help there. And it is so good to see that you are still talking with Qelet B'Norai, and I am so happy that I was able to introduce the two of you." Talita looked pointedly at the needler on Dalatrass Vikasaya's hip. "I trust that whatever business brought you together was profitable to you both."
"It was. Thank you. You're not planning to trick anyone into disaster tonight, are you?"
"No, no, no! This is no time for swindling Lystheni! If I am to try and trick anyone into disaster these days, it must be the big bug! The monstrous Rachni devourer! I am sure you agree, but we must not talk about that in front of our friend Qelet B'Norai. Qelet, you do not need to frown. I am only kidding!"
I was growing slightly uncomfortable with how no one was willing to even pretend enthusiasm for coexistence with Queen Yalat after I was off Narsompasi. Well, I was bequeathing Yalat a gigantic antecedent bunker, designed for defense against other antecedents. There wasn't much more I could do for her than that, and it was more than she deserved anyway.
"It's interesting to me that you're so opposed to Yalat," Dalatrass Vikasaya told Talita. "We fought them for ten years with no help from you. And you don't see any parallel?"
"I was imprisoned! In a dank cell! Parallel? I don't think I see any parallel."
"You come to Narsompasi two hundred and fifty years ago, talk yourself into staying on as a guest, build your spaceports, and all the sudden the planet wasn't ours anymore. All the cityfolk who came in, it wasn't even their planet. You owned the planet. At least the Rachni queen never pretended to be doing anything other than what she was doing."
"You wound me; you are unfair. My planet? How can anyone, you, I, or anyone else, own a planet? They are huge! Huge! Only an invertebrate who only ever speaks to her own invertebrate larvae could presume to own a planet. These things are not questions of ownership. They are questions of collective expectation. They work when people expect the same things, and they fall apart when people expect different things. I have always tried to make it so that all the people of Narsompasi have the same collective expectations. Everyone two hundred and fifty years ago expected that I would get to build my ships, and that in return your ancestors would get to have modern medicine and then-modern hot guns, and everyone got what they expected, and most of it was good! Of course, other peoples forget things more quickly than Asari do, and they forget good things yet more quickly than bad ones, but there is nothing anyone can do about that. And now, of course, it has been a bad decade, but that was because none of us expected…" Talita nodded again to Dalatrass Vikasaya's Covenant needler. "So, we need to synchronize our collective expectations again. That is what this Summit is for."
"We're getting a better deal this time?"
"This time, we are going less capitalist and more traditional."
"What does that mean?"
"Who is your favorite son?"
"What?"
"Or brother? You are so young and beautiful! Maybe you don't have sons yet."
"I do. Explain the joke."
"My favorite great-granddaughter is Ninora Valzeshia. I was going to show her off to one of the big important matrilines, like the Inlidayas, but I like you, and I cannot help but feel that I may owe you for helping Qelet with whatever you helped him with. Pick out your favorite son, I will introduce him to Ninora, we can begin haggling over the dowry…"
Dalatrass Vikasaya stared at Talita. "Are you serious?"
I was seized, not for the first time, by the horrible thought that Talita's plan might violate some Lystheni cultural taboo, or more simply that the offer would insult them with its sheer feudal ridiculousness. But these were not the thrusts of Dalatrass Vikasaya's concern. "If you were to marry Valzeshias off to the relatives of Dalatrasses, your family would no longer be able to stay aloof from our matrilineal feuds. Your daughters would be obliged to oppose one another, each aligned with whatever Lystheni matriline they joined, and the unity of your Valzeshia family would break."
"The family will be tested, but it is strong, and it will withstand these tests."
"Why?"
"Why? For all the reasons you have suggested! I want real partnership between our peoples. I do not like to think I am a rude guest. I do not like to think I am an invader. I do not like to think I am like Yalat."
To me, Talita seemed to be speaking from the bottom of her conniving heart.
But Dalatrass Vikasaya scrutinized the Asari and came to a slightly different conclusion. "Yalat. I see. It's an alliance against the Rachni."
"Our friend Qelet would no doubt prefer we say Yanme'e, it is more polite."
"You don't know how to fight, and we do. If the Rachni attack you, you want to know the Lystheni will defend you. Well, I can't speak for the other Dalatrasses, but I think this arrangement might work. Depending on how stingy you try to be with the dowries."
"Attack Talita?" I interjected. "Over what? The Valzeshia fortune isn't in land, it's in the spaceports, and Yalat doesn't know any more about building spaceships than I do. What could she get from seizing the shipyards?"
"She didn't know how to build spaceships, but despite their supposed enmity I hear rumors Talita is staffing her shipyards with Rachni drones. The hive might pick something up from doing that work. And these queens are all supposed to be brilliant, at least in terms of learning and doing math and so on."
Talita raised her hand. "We are letting ourselves get paranoid. This is supposed to be a happy night, and the very sensible and smart plan of hiring the worker drones, which I take full responsibility for, will probably lead to nothing bad. But preparing for unfortunate contingencies is, of course, part of marriage. Please consider my offer, Dalatrass Vikasaya. Boss Tadim will be explaining all the details soon. You do not know him, but he is a good partner to me, one who helps me work around my fears of public speaking."
"I'll need to talk about it with the matriline, with my sons, but I think you and I have an agreement in principle."
"Good, good, good!"
Boss Tadim stood enclosed by a semicircle of people at the water's edge. Talita and her very large extended family filled the left section of the semicircle, Tadim's fellow the ward heelers the right section, and the Dalatrasses the central section. Chieftain Lirinus and I were the two important people on the beach who fit into no section of native Narsompasikar leadership. We sat next to each other, crammed in between the Dalatrasses and the ward heelers.
"Prime settlers of Narsompasi!" Boss Tadim began. "Bearers of that Lystheni heritage which was lost on Sur'Kesh but is not yet lost! It is an honor to address the first Summit of Matrilines to assemble since the invasion of the Covenant. This is a great step forward. I will take a short moment to thank those Covenant negotiators who worked patiently to help make it happen. Qelet B'Norai of the Anuranite Lustration…" tepid, unenthusiastic applause for me… "Chieftain Lirinus of the Jiralhanae gendarmes…" dead silence for him… "and, they're making me say it, Queen Yalat." Jeers, cries of outrage for her. I thought I heard at least one voice cry out "Down with the Covenant!"
This seemed like a bad start to me. "Those Mgalekgolo you brought, they're nearby?" I whispered to Lirinus. He nodded.
But after that, after the steam had been blown off a little, it all seemed to go smoothly. Boss Tadim explained how Queen Yalat was preparing to abandon the lands which she had already seized so that she might relocate to the Prothean Catacombs. This won him a lot of credit, especially among those matrilines whom Yalat and Chieftain Lirinus had displaced (several times Lirinus attracted some very bitter looks, but they didn't seem to bother him). The crowd was now willing to bear with Tadim as he bore through a series of mundane trade proposals. Finally, Tadim came to the crux of Talita's plan- arranged marriages which would bind the Valzeshias to the matrilines. These marriages would be accompanied by dowries which would in effect be a kind of public subsidy.
Even after Dalatrass Vikasaya was receptive to the suggestion, I had thought the whole idea of marriage alliances might stir some shock and offense among the Lystheni. I suppose that was only the Batarian romanticism in me, wrongly projected onto the Narsompasikar. Cooly negotiated marriage alliances were how things had always been done on Sur'Kesh and all its colonies. In their two hundred and fifty years on Narsompasi, the Valzeshias must have picked up some of the Salarian-Lystheni attitude. The crowd absorbed the suggestion with level-headed interest.
"My value as middleman is now exhausted. May there be peace on Narsompasi and amongst all the stepchildren of Sur'Kesh," Boss Tadim concluded. He stepped down, and there was a flurry of activity. Some of the Dalatrasses rushed straight to the Valzeshias to begin haggling, while others rushed into the crowd to confer with their advisers. A few, very few, rejected the suggestion out of hand and moved to leave the Summit. A few pairings were made and announced. The mood was positive.
Amidst the matchmaking, Chieftain Lirinus was the only one frowning. "Was this the only way?" he asked me. "It's unwholesome."
"It is pretty medieval," I had to agree. "It does make it harder to feel like we're making them part of a modern interstellar regime."
Lirinus squinted. "We cannot possibly be talking about the same thing. I mean this whole Asari business of intermingling castes. It's… alien cannot be the right word..."
"You too? I'm sure the San'Shyuum will figure out how to talk to Asari without accidently disintegrating their own empire."
"The San'Shyuum?" Lirinus' eyes went wide. "I hadn't even thought of that."
"It's not worth worrying about."
Lirinus looked out over the ocean, to the stars above, toward the Coreward Front. "You're right. I don't know what reports you see, but the Sangheili are starting to falter. They're going to lose Etzik-Las."
"I haven't seen any reports to that effect yet. I am sorry to hear it."
"No, don't you see? They'll have to let the Jiralhanae take our turn soon. They won't be able to strand us on these nothing worlds and forget about us anymore. No more gendarmerie. As one pack the Jiralhanae will storm the Coreward Front and succeed where the Sangheili failed! Everything will change. I am getting off Narsompasi just in time! The hour of the Jiralhanae is almost upon us!"
Chieftain Lirinus kept on staring at the starry sky. He stood there on that beach looking upwards and he howled like an animal, in relief or anticipation or rage I could not tell, but that is how I left him.
I talked with Boss Tadim and the other ward heelers for a while. I asked them if they thought the Summit of Matrilines went well, and they said they thought so, that there looked to be peace and order on Narsompasi for some time to come. With that, the imminent reopening of the shipyards, the admittedly tenuous settlement between the Narsompasikar and the Yanme'e hive, and the resolution of Wul'Tazamuna's xenoarcheological expedition, I felt that I had served the Anuranite Lustration to the best of my ability. I did admit to the ward heelers that I had felt like something of a bit player in the Summit. They said that this was nothing for a spy attending a public event to be embarrassed of. Salarians are known everywhere to be great spies, better than Batarians, so I decided that they were right and that I had done nothing irresponsible in spending half the day driving a grav-bike around in circles.
"Qelet!" Dalatrass Vikasaya called out to me near the end of the night. "Qelet! I'm converting!"
"You're what?"
"I think most Lystheni will. It'll be another year or more, but the Valzeshias have set an appointment. A San'Shyuum is coming to Narsompasi to conduct a mass conversion. Weapons! The legal right to hit the Rachni back if they hit us! Weapons! What am I supposed to say when I see the San'Shyuum?"
"All together, all as one on the Great Journey."
"All together, all as one on the Great Journey!"
