“Wait a minute,” Horza said, “one of whose oldest?”
“…My dad was some… some man from a place, a planet the Rock stopped off at one time. My mother said she’d be back some time, but she never did go back. I told her I’d go back some time just to see him, if he’s still alive… Pure sentimentalism, I guess, but I said I would and I will some time; if I live through this lot.” She gave that same small half-laugh, half-grunt, and turned away from her picking fingers for a second to glance round the dark spaces of the station. Then her face again turned to the Changer, and her voice was suddenly urgent, almost pleading. “I’m only half Culture, by birth, Horza. I left the Rock soon as I was old enough to aim a gun properly; I knew the Culture wasn’t the place for me. That’s how I inherited the genofixing for trans-species mating. I never thought about it before. It’s supposed to be deliberate, or at least you’ve got to stop thinking yourself into not getting pregnant, but it didn’t work this time. Maybe I let my guard slip somehow. It wasn’t deliberate, Horza, it really wasn’t; it never occurred to me. It just happened. I—”
“How long have you known?” Horza asked quietly.
“Since on the CAT. We were still a few days out from this place. I can’t remember exactly. I didn’t believe it at first. I know it’s true, though. Look” — she leaned closer to him, and the note of pleading was in her voice again — “I can abort it. Just by thinking about it I can get rid of it, if you want. Maybe I’d have done that already, but I know you’ve told me about not having any family, nobody to carry on your name, and I thought… well, I don’t care about my name… I just thought you—” She broke off and suddenly put her head back and ran her fingers through her short hair.
“It’s a nice thought, Yalson,” he said. Yalson nodded silently and went back to picking her fingers again.
“Well, I’m giving you the choice, Horza,” she said without looking at him. “I can keep it. I can let it grow. I can keep it at the stage it’s at now… It’s up to you. Maybe I just don’t want to have to make the decision; I mean, maybe I’m not being all noble and self-sacrificing, but there it is. You decide. Fuck knows what sort of weird cross-breed I might have inside me, but I thought you ought to know. Because I like you, and… because… I don’t know — because it was about time I did something for somebody else for a change.” She shook her head again, and her voice was confused, apologetic, resigned, all at once. “Or maybe because I want to do something to please myself, as usual. Oh…”
He had started to put his arms out to her and edge closer. She suddenly came towards him, wrapping her arms tight round him. Their suits made the embrace cumbersome, and his back felt tight and strained, but he held her to him, and rocked her gently backwards and forwards.
“It would only be a quarter Culture, Horza, if you want. I’m sorry to leave it to you. But if you don’t want to know, OK; I’ll think again and make my own decision. It’s still part of me, so maybe I don’t have any right to ask you. I don’t really want to…” She sighed mightily. “Oh God, I don’t know, Horza, I really don’t.”
“Yalson,” he said, having thought about what he was going to say, “I don’t give a damn your mother was from the Culture. I don’t give a damn why what has happened has happened. If you want to go through with it, that’s fine by me. I don’t give a damn about any cross-breeding either.” He pushed her away slightly and looked into the darkness that was her face. “I’m flattered, Yalson, and I’m grateful, too. It’s a good idea; like you would say: what the hell?”
He laughed then, and she laughed with him, and they hugged each other tightly. He felt tears in his eyes, though he wanted to laugh at the incongruity of it all. Yalson’s face was on the hard surface of his suit shoulder, near a laser burn. Her body shook gently inside her own suit.
Behind them, in the station, the dying man stirred slightly and moaned in the cold and darkness, without an echo.
He held her for a little while. Then she pushed away, to look into his eyes again. “Don’t tell the others.”
“Of course not, if that’s what you want.”
“Please,” she said. In the dimmed glow of their suit lights, the down on her face and the hair on her head seemed to shine, like a hazy atmosphere round a planet seen from space. He hugged her again, unsure what to say. Surprise, partly, no doubt… but in addition there was the fact that this revelation made whatever existed between them that much more important, and so he was more anxious than ever not to say the wrong thing, not to make a mistake. He could not let it mean too much, not yet. She had paid him perhaps the greatest compliment he had ever had, but the very value of it frightened him, distracted him. He felt that whatever continuity of his name or clan the woman was offering him, he could not yet build his hopes upon it; the glimmer of that potential succession seemed too weak, and somehow also too temptingly defenceless, to face the continuous frozen midnight of the tunnels.
“Thanks, Yalson. Let’s get this over with, down here, then we’ll have a better idea what we want to do. But even if you change your mind later, thank you.”
It was all he could say.
They returned to the station’s dark cavern just as the drone pulled a light sheet over Neisin’s still form. “Oh, there you are,” it said. “I didn’t see any point in contacting you.” Its voice was hushed. “There wasn’t anything you could have done.”
“Satisfied?” Aviger asked Horza, after they had put Neisin’s body with Dorolow’s. They stood near the access gantry, where Yalson had resumed guard duty on the unconscious Idiran.
“I’m sorry about Neisin, and Dorolow,” Horza told the old man. “I liked them, too; I can understand you being upset. You don’t have to stay here now; if you want, go back to the surface. It’s safe now. We’ve accounted for them all.”
“You’ve accounted for most of us, too, haven’t you?” Aviger said bitterly. “You’re no better than Kraiklyn.”
“Shut up, Aviger,” Yalson said, from the gantry. “You’re still alive.”
“And you haven’t done too badly, either, have you, young lady?” Aviger said to her. “You and your friend here.”
Yalson was quiet for a moment, then said, “You’re braver than I thought, Aviger. Just remember it doesn’t bother me a bit you’re older and smaller than me. You want me to kick your balls in…” she nodded and pursed her lips, still staring at the limp body of the Idiran officer lying in front of her, “…I’ll do it for you, old boy.”
Balveda came up to Aviger and slipped her arm through his, starting to lead him away as she walked by. “Aviger,” she said, “let me tell you about the time—” But Aviger shrugged her away and went off by himself, to sit with his back to the station wall, opposite the reactor car.
Horza looked down the platform to where the old man sat. “He’d better watch his radiation meter,” he said to Yalson. “It’s pretty hot down there near the reactor car.”
Yalson gnawed at another ration bar. “Let the old bastard fry,” she said.
Xoxarle woke up. Yalson watched him regain consciousness, then waved the gun at him. “Tell the big creep to head on down the ramp, will you Horza?” she said.
Xoxarle looked down at Horza and struggled awkwardly to his feet. “Don’t bother,” he said in Marain, “I can bark as well as you in this miserable excuse for a language.” He turned to Yalson. “After you, my man.”