I fail to understand why gethes talk about individuals versus society. They are the same thing. The action of every individual counts, and those individual acts of personal responsibility accumulate to create society. Snowflakes are equally blind to their role in causing avalanches.
Siyyas Bur, matriarch historian on early encounters with human colonists on Bezer'ej
Seguor Marshes near the former colony of Constantine, Bezer'ej: 2377
The sheven reared from the marshes, and suddenly it was a plastic bag dragged dripping from a polluted river and falling back into the water with a splash.
Aras had never seen that river and he'd never seen Earth. But the memory was vivid, and it wasn't his.
"I hate those bloody things." Ade Bennett peered over the edge of the skiff, rifle ready. "How big do they get?"
"Did you live near a river once?"
"What?"
"A river. A memory. It feels like yours. Plastic waste in a river."
"Maybe." Ade's gaze stayed fixed on the marshes. "Might be Shan's. We've both seen plenty of shit at home." He turned his head slightly, eyes still darting back to the sheven's last location, ever the vigilant soldier. "Come on, how big?"
Aras's c'naatat parasite, efficiently filing recollections from other hosts, had absorbed the memory of the river either from Ade, or from Shan, their mutual isani>their "missus," as Ade put it. The snapshot of the humans' filthy homeworld was shared between them by an organism that adapted, preserved and repaired its host in the face of all threats except fragmentation.
"Three meters, perhaps." Aras considered the range of sheven he had seen over the years. They lurked just beneath the surface, emerging only to snatch prey and plunge back beneath the surface. "I saw one that size a century ago, but most of them are two meters or smaller."
"Bloody awful way to die, being digested by a bit of cling-wrap."
"But you wouldn't die. C'naatat wouldn't allow it."
"Bloody awful way to give the thing indigestion, then." Ade had a quiet persistence when it came to pursuing ideas. "So what would happen? Would I sort of sit there in its guts until it threw up? I mean, do they have arses? Would it shit me out?"
"You might infect it, of course, in which case you might remain within it." It was unhappy speculation, but nothing that Aras hadn't considered himself in the five centuries since he'd become a host to the organism. "But c'naatat seems to favor more complex hosts than a sheven."
"I feel so much better. Thanks."
C'naatat certainly favored humans. They were hunting an infected human now; Commander Lindsay Neville was somewhere out there in the waters beyond this estuary, an altered woman living underwater with the native cephalopod bezeri. Aras now wondered if Ade had been right to infect her deliberately.
You were seconds away from doing it yourself.
"No bezeri," said Ade.
"With so few left, I doubt we would spot them now."
"It sounds like Lindsay at least got them organized."
"You're still asking if you made a mistake giving her c'naatat."
"I'm still feeling like an arsehole, yes."
"If you hadn't, I would be down there now."
Ade's focus on the water seemed unnaturally...
)
The worlds orbiting Cavanagh's Star are in turmoil. Civil war on Umeh--ignited by outsiders--threatens to annihilate the teeming masses of a grossly overpopulated planet. On Bezer'ej, the handful of native aquatic creatures who survived extermination must take extraordinary and terrible steps to ensure the future of their kind ... And the interlopers from a distant planet called Earth can only watch the chaos they helped, in part, to create--knowing their home world will be next to suffer. The day of reckoning is rapidly approaching when the powerful Eqbas will remake the Earth at the expense of its dominant species. And Shan Frankland--once a police officer, once human, now something much more?must decide where her loyalties truly lie: among the gethes, on a planet she once called home, or here, where a dying species presents her with a new and unexpected crisis.
