“Just us at the moment.”
“Well, ship in some Pacific Rim delegates fast. Get everyone feeling they’re involved. Show that we’re going to look after our neighbors.”
The UN hub was an anachronism, but participating in a meeting via an implant in your head just didn’t cut it like sitting down with other humans in that tribal way. It wasn’t the full main session in Brussels—the FEU could kiss his arse now—but every region clustered in its own hub because long-haul travel was antisocial behavior, and budgets were tight. The trade-off was business done on the hoof in the corridors and coffee shops; that was where political relationships were built.
But right now Bari only had announcements to make. There was no horse trading left to do.
The hub conference room looked in need of a lick of paint. The New Zealand delegate, Jackie Rance, was deep in conversation with the Indonesian rep, Charlie Nyoo. And, apart from the small army of diplomats and advisers sitting in the viewing area, that was it.
“You’d have thought we could have turned out a few more bodies for the end of civilization as we know it, wouldn’t you?” said Bari, reaching out to shake hands. “Better look like a crowd when the cam’s on. Don’t want to remind them how small we are down here.”
“The storm’s coming,” said Rance. “Travel problems.”
“Never mind.”
“I see you got off to a cracking start, then…not a pretty sight.”
“Mistakes were made,” said Bari. “But I’m not in a position to stop them happening…yet.”
Nyoo just looked at him, chin resting on his hand.
“What?” said Bari, checking the array of time zone clocks on the wall; five minutes to get his story straight. “Look, there’ll be terrific benefits coming out of this for us all.”
“Den, I just want to know if it’s a case of what we get out of it, or if we get out of it.”
“You want the truth? Both. Because the Eqbas strategy is to reduce the world population to a billion. We either win big or lose big.”
He’d rehearsed that line in his head so many times that it came out like a mantra. If he said it often enough and fast enough, it might not only be believed, but it would happen. Rance and Nyoo both made a long shhh sound under their breaths. Bari could imagine how that figure was going to go down with the wider UN community.
“How long have we known about this?” Nyoo asked.
“If we’d paid attention, twenty-five years.”
But Australia, and by default the Pacific Rim, had paid attention; and it got the seats in the lifeboat.
The screen that formed the entire wall went live, and Bari was looking at a packed chamber that was a composite of overlays from regional hubs around the world, creating a reasonable impression of being in a real session except for the delays on the links. Now that was something that ITX could fix, he thought; but there were more important applications for it.
“Here we go,” said Rance.
There had always been rules about life on Earth up to now, and the main one was that if you annoyed the superpowers, you paid the price. Now it didn’t matter. It struck Bari just as Michael Zammett—not a regular speaker at the UN—got up to call for sanctions against Australia.
It was an awfully quiet chamber.
“Mr. Zammett,” said Bari, “I have to point out that, so far, no Australian vessel, aircraft or citizen has crossed your borders. All we seem to be guilty of is thinking ahead.”
Zammett wanted his moment. “You’re allowing aggressors to use your country as a safe haven.”
“The Eqbas don’t need a safe haven, Mr. Zammett. They’re safe from us anywhere they go. I truly regret the loss of life in the incident yesterday, but the FEU is responsible for security on its own air bases, and let’s not forget the roots of the whole crisis—that the FEU committed an act of genocide on a planet for its own military ends, leaving the rest of this world to share the consequences. You had a quarter of a century to do as the Eqbas asked and punish those responsible. You didn’t. You made it worse for us all. All Australia is doing now is saying to the Eqbas that we understand their anger, and that we also recognize things have to change here if humans are going to have any kind of future.” Bari paused for effect. Hijacking a question was fair game, and while he had a world platform he was going to wring every advantage from it. Nyoo was making notes. “They’re not going to go away. They’re not going be driven off or defeated. There’s no simple germ that’s going to kill them off in the nick of time. The only choice we have is the speed at which we reduce our population and our consumption. Here’s the clue—a planet called Umeh did it fast. Anyone who doesn’t want to end up like that—sign up to an agreement to a more frugal way of life, and get some help from a race who can actually do something about cleaning up the planet. It’s that simple.”
There was a silence. Some of it was the delay on the relay, but then it was clear that it was just a bombshell coming to rest.
Zammett made one last stab. “That doesn’t deal with the matter on the table. The FEU asks for sanctions against Australia for harboring terrorists, and it asks Australia to honor its extradition treaty and hand over those individuals we want to stand trial in an FEU court. I’d also call on all countries not to cave in to an invasion—because that’s what it is—and to resist an occupying army.”
It doesn’t matter.
It really doesn’t.
Bari stood his ground. “And in the unlikely event that the Eqbas leave, Mr. Zammett, then we don’t have a future anyway, do we? We’re out of ideas for slowing climate change. Let’s treat this as the opportunity it is for humankind and the planet.”
The vote for sanctions was taken; the Sinostates were among the abstainers and Canada and Norway voted against. It was never going anywhere anyway. Bari was grateful for the chance to do his global savior speech, but slightly shaken by the awareness that he wasn’t exaggerating one bit.
“Nice job, PM,” said Persis.
Now all he had to do was get Esganikan Gai to start addressing the rest of the world, and not routing everything through him. And all she had to do was deliver on the promises of turning back the environmental clock.
En route for Rabi’ah community, Australia: seven days after landing.
“Can we make the bulkheads transparent?” Shan asked. “It’s getting claustrophobic in here.”
The shuttle pilot, Emrianu, obliged by clearing the nose section. Small patches of expensively irrigated crops, shielded against evaporation by canopies, stretched along both sides of a highway punctuated by clustered houses and silos partly buried in the ground. Some people refused to retreat below the surface.
Everywhere Shan looked now reminded her in some way of her first sight of the Constantine colony on Bezer’ej: the vivid colors, the sunken buildings, and the sharp delineation between the cocoon of cultivated land and the wilderness beyond. And Rabi’ah, as they called it, had one more parallel with Constantine. It was a religious community.
Shan could imagine how Deborah had reacted when she saw the place. She was probably measuring it up as another miracle inside five minutes.
“Is that enough?” Emrianu asked.
Shan savored the view, missing the open spaces of F’nar and what now seemed like a simpler life. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s plenty.” She turned her swiss over in her pocket, trying to find the right time to call Eddie about Qureshi and Becken. He’d know now; he’d have seen it on BBChan, even if the two weren’t named. He’d know.
I have to face him. Shit, it’s hard enough to face Ade.
“We could give them biobarrier technology,” said Esganikan. The ceasefire between the two matriarchs was just that—an awkward unspoken agreement not to rip into each other again. Shan resented every second spent with her. “That would be more efficient than these canopies they use everywhere.”
Shan’s suspicion reflex kicked in. “Is there any way it can be misused? I’d hate to think of you losin
g your edge.”
“I want to make Rabi’ah an example of the template for gethes to follow. Let’s see what we can do for them in the very short term.”
The debacle with Prachy was evidently history for Esganikan now. Nobody could accuse her of spending her time in working parties and meetings. If she hadn’t come straight from Umeh in operational terms, then maybe she’d have had the patience to spend a few more weeks settling in before she embarked on anything, but her sense of urgency was manic.
Shan had her own reasons for making Rabi’ah a priority visit. Aras had suggested that this was where Qureshi and Becken could be buried. She wanted the graves in good hands, and she could think of none better than Deborah Garrod.
It was a vegan community established by Muslims. Now it was host to the influx of Christians from Constantine and already working out how to move them out of the nearby temporary camp as soon as possible. Shan tried hard, but she couldn’t think of a logical reason why a multifaith vegan community could be bad news, other than that it was too good to be true, and she never trusted faith not to turn into something more bizarre and sinister when her back was turned. They’d said yes to the graves without a moment’s hesitation. Their generosity made Shan despise humans even more. If these people could behave decently, there was no excuse for the rest.
“Well, I can’t think of a better model,” she said. “You going to make it compulsory? Because a lot of Muslims won’t play well with Christians and vice versa. And you’ve only just scratched the surface of religion. We’ve got a long list of faiths with feuds and schisms.”
Aitassi, who’d been curled up against a bulkhead, edged into the conversation. She didn’t seem happy; Esganikan had been making less use of her services, especially as translation wasn’t needed now, and she’d come on board that morning with an air of not wanting to be left out.
“Religion seems to be the most powerful motivation for humans, even more than greed for wealth,” she said. “Look at Constantine, a mission that no company or government would attempt because they felt it wasn’t worth the resources. But the colonists gave everything they had because they thought this god of theirs wanted it done. How do we implant ideas that powerful?”
Shan could now jump a few stages ahead in that inexorable logic. “Religious people can also think their god wants them to kill anyone who disagrees with them, or commit mass suicide so they can join the mothership. It’s a lottery as to what they think God wants. So if you’re thinking of using religion to drive this, that’s very dangerous ground that your million years of civilization can’t prepare you for.”
“Restoring Earth is a long process,” said Aitassi. “It needs custodians with a long-term view. Religions seem to make a better job of that.”
Well, don’t expect me to hang around forever. Once I’ve sorted you out, I’m leaving. You’ve already cost me two good friends. “How did you do the triage of good guys on other planets?”
Esganikan tilted her head to one side very gradually, looking past Shan and through the not-there bulkhead at the panorama of a parched continent.
Shan noticed her distraction and tried to see the Earth mission through Eqbas eyes. They’d ended up with just a few months in total to plan the complete remediation of a planet, instead of the five years they’d counted on, and with data interrupted by time dilation in transit they were flying partly blind. It was like arriving in modern Rome with a copy of Tacitus’s Annales as a handbook and then trying to catch up on the run.
It was also like responding to a disaster anywhere, and Shan had done that as a copper so many times that she should have known better. The basic plan of things that had to be done whatever the situation, from moving people out of danger to clearing up the aftermath, was planned for and tested on exercise. But the detail of the real emergency was always new, always different, always something you couldn’t plan for until you got to the incident and took stock of what was unfolding around you.
And what you did on a moment’s instant decision shaped everything that followed.
I closed off a highway and diverted traffic onto another route because the flood barriers had overtopped and the road was awash. I didn’t know that the route I was sending it down was blocked by a collision, because someone’s data stream failed, because I couldn’t get an aerial view, because…I made the wrong call in a situation that was all bad calls.
Now multiply that by a planet.
Esganikan was just the first responder on the scene, and her backup was years away. Shan tried to make an effort now to see the adjustment of Earth as an incident, with strategic, tactical and operational elements. It didn’t change a damn thing in her plan for Esganikan, but at least she had a better idea of the problem.
And it scared the shit out of her. A million years’ head start didn’t make wess’har into gods. Yet that was what she’d expected in some subconscious way: omniscience, at least. It was the second time that God had failed to show for her.
I hate being right. Really, I do. I want the universe to be better than this, a commonsense place. I didn’t want humans to be typical. I was so sure we were the idiot dregs.
“Shan, can you hear me?”
No, she hadn’t. “Yes. Go on.”
“I said that we identify the individuals in the most capable species who can maintain the world when we leave. It’s normally the first step. And if there are none, we remove them and allow other species to develop.”
“Not as scorched earth as I thought, then.”
“Only Umeh was that clear-cut, to our knowledge.”
“You must have done a lot of world makeovers in your time, then. If you’re at the zero-growth stage, that must be a drain even on your resources.” Bang goes omnipotence. And I never thought infinite mercy was on the menu from the start. Bye-bye, God. “But you’ve still got the main Eqbas fleet on its way. Just tell me they haven’t started defense cuts back home.”
Esganikan gestured to the pilot to land, holding her hand flat and lowering it like ordering a dog to sit. “No, there are still six ships in transit. I expect to leave a more sustainable situation here for them to take over.”
“And how long is Eqbas Vorhi prepared to stay?”
“I won’t speak to the matriarchs in Surang until I see how the next year goes. The outcome for Earth is as much in the hands of humans as it is in mine.”
It was one of those platitudes that was true and probably not believed; humans always needed to think Mum and Dad would be there to run to and make things all better. When Shan realized she did too, only on a far bigger scale, she finally felt herself ripped from her moorings. She’d always known what to do, rock-solid, her core of right and wrong as fixed as a navigation beacon, and humans had been the playground bullies in a universe where the smaller kids were just victims and someone grown-up was ultimately out there to break it up and punish the wrong-doers. But animals did almost all the bad things that humans did—rape, war, child neglect—and the grown-up aliens did their bad stuff too, and couldn’t always control the kids or get things right.
All animals really are equal, and I don’t like it. Shapakti said I wanted humans to be the only bad guys around. I think I do. It gives me a bit of hope that there are galactic grown-ups out there.
“Okay,” Shan said. She suddenly felt physically smaller. “Let’s think of this as assertive enabling, then.”
It was liberation, or disappointment on a scale that crushed souls, and she could choose which if only she knew.
The ship landed with barely a vibration as it settled onto the bare earth on the outskirts of the town. The port bulkhead opened and extruded a ramp, letting in the real world and a gust of hot air.
“I’m so glad you came,” said Deborah Garrod, face illuminated with a certainty that Shan had just lost. “This is the leader of the town council, Mo Ammad. We’re so sorry about Izzy and Jon. How’s Ade coping?”
There was no lecture on morality or any mention of the circumstances. “Y
ou know Ade,” she said. “He’s solid.”
Shan didn’t ask if Mo was short for Mohan. It would have rattled her at a time when she’d had enough rattling. Ammad greeted Aitassi without turning a hair, squatting at the knee to meet her gaze at eye level rather than looming over her, and Shan took a shine to him right away.
He looked like any other fifty-something dark-haired bloke and not like a religious nutter at all, and he held out his hand. That saves me worrying if I’m breaking some religious rule on shaking hands. Decent of him. She’d worn gloves again. Nobody seemed to comment on that.
“What does it do to the liter?” Mo asked, looking back at the Eqbas shuttle.
“I don’t even know where they stick the fuel,” she said. “Weirdest thing you ever saw. You should try it.”
“That’d be something to tell the kids. No security crawling all over you, I notice.”
“There would be, if we told them where and when we were moving.”
“You used to be a cop.”
“I did. I think I still am.”
“A ride in the squad car, eh? They’ll love it.”
“My treat.”
It was a spontaneous offer and Shan didn’t ask Esganikan. Hearts and minds, remember?. They headed towards the town in a dusty farm vehicle that brought back memories of her first contact with Constantine: Sam. Sam, that was his name, and he was probably here now, the man who collected her from the Thetis shuttle in her biohaz suit and took her to an underground city with a completely incongruous Norman-style church built at its heart. From humbled amazement to planning an assassination took her fewer than three years.
And you knew then that you’d never be able to come back home, in any real sense of the word.
“I admire your ability to keep uprooting yourself, Deborah,” Shan said, trying hard to be sociable. “There’s a lot to be said for carrying your sense of belonging around with you.”
The Constantine colonists had coped with Bezer’ej—thinner air, higher gravity—and brief confinement on the Wess’ej island of Mar’an’cas, a cold wet rock. Earth, even during an Australian summer, seemed to be just another challenge they took in their stride.