Kamberra, Earth: April 2406.
Den Bari, in his second term of office as Australian PM, stood outside Old Government House in the early autumn sun and marveled at how tolerable it all was.
“It’s working,” he said. “What a great day for them to arrive.”
The air temperatures were falling. There were times when he resented how many taxpayers’ resources had gone towards the solar-reduction layer, given that some countries hadn’t contributed much, but climate engineering didn’t follow borders. Water systems and land remediation, though—those could be withheld from nations who hadn’t toed the line on population reduction or any of the other Eqbas diktats. It had been a few brutal years for the Sinostates, and overseas aid was a thing of the past.
This was how the Earth got fewer humans. You did it voluntarily, and met your zero-growth targets, or you got them met for you. Sometimes he felt guilty for not asking if the epidemics in the Sinostates were naturally occurring, and sometimes he felt the question was best not asked.
“I have difficulty with this, I admit.” Deborah Garrod walked out onto the gravel expanse and shielded her eyes against the sun. “I know you’re not a religious man, Den, but I try to account to God for my inaction most days. Letting people die isn’t much different from killing them.”
She was a remarkable woman, and she’d done a lot to bridge the gaps with the Eqbas, but her rules weren’t his. They agreed to differ and square their consciences as best they could. Now they were waiting to catch sight of the first ships of the main Eqbas Vorhi fleet, five years behind the vanguard that was now a feature of life on Earth.
“It’s not collaboration,” he said. “It’s saving as many of my own as I can, and there’s not enough world to go around—better to save a few than lose everyone by spreading the misery evenly.”
Deborah just nodded. He found it interesting that she’d never tried to save his soul. They waited half an hour in the open air, something they wouldn’t have been able to do before the Eqbas arrived, and looked hard for the familiar bronze ships with their chevron belts of light. Then it started; a low-frequency pulsing that made him screw up his eyes and ram his fingers in his ears to stop the itching that traveled to the back of his tongue. He didn’t recall the first Eqbas fleet having that much effect on his ears. Maybe this lot came in lower, or closer, or—
“Oh my God…” he said.
Maybe this lot were much, much bigger.
The first ship cast a spectacular shadow, cool as an eclipse, as it passed over Kamberra. Six ships, Laktiriu said, but with vessels that could break up and reform into any number of units, the figure meant nothing. The flagship was followed by an assortment of craft of all sizes, some showing a definite blue bloom as they changed shape.
“Forty thousand personnel, Laktiriu said.” Bari looked back at the building to see staff standing around with cameras and taking in the spectacle. “And all the others go straight home, bar the handover team.”
“I’ve done a deep-space flight just once, and I’m still coming to terms with the time displacement,” said Deborah. “How do they ever cope with doing this time after time?”
“Maybe society changes when you’ve got a lot of people doing it.” Bari occasionally got a strong urge to ask Laktiriu if he could just pop back and take a look at Surang for real, but the logistics of dropping out of life for sixty or more years were beyond him, and always would be. “I’ll always feel I’ve missed something big and important now that I know just how much is out there.”
Bari left her to watch and headed back to his office. His handheld was already ticking with the influx of messages and requests to speak to this ambassador or that foreign minister. The Eqbas fleet might have been a welcome sight for him, but for others it meant a bigger Eqbas presence on Earth and all the fears that went with that scale of expansion. Two thousand Eqbas, and their Skavu troops, had changed the planet. What would twenty times that number of Eqbas do?
Sell it as less than four times the number. Add in the Skavu. Hell, you don’t have to sell anything. You just make sure Australia—and New Zealand, and the rest of the Pacific Rim, and every state that’s played ball so far—goes on keeping its nose clean.
Bari passed the groundsman who was raking the gravel level, tidying up the place for the meeting and greeting of the new Eqbas command. “Historic day, Kennie,” he said.
“Seen one alien,” he said, not looking up, “seen ’em all.”
It was a good sign. Really, it was.
F’nar, Wess’ej: Undercity.
“We used to call this sofa government, you know,” said Eddie as he followed Giyadas and the ruling matriarchs of F’nar down the tunnel. “Very informal.”
“Do you miss democracy, Eddie?” Her Spartan helmet of a mane bobbed slightly out of sequence with those of the other matriarchs, whose numbers expanded and shrank as the occasion demanded, but which now always included Nevyan, Giyadas’s mother, and her mother, Mestin. Giyadas was the senior in the group, a pecking order that was as unspoken and subtle as the hierarchy among the males of a household. There was consensus; but they all knew who was boss if push came to shove. “Mestin says you were fascinated by the lack of any formal politics here.”
“And,” Mestin growled, not turning her head, “it has been millennia since any isan has been killed for failing in her duty and not ceding. I wish you hadn’t reported that, Eddie. You made us sound like savages.”
Eddie had forgotten that story; the political editor had loved it, though. Office was thrust upon the most capable and aggressively competent females here, not sought; and nobody voted, and consultation and representation…it was chatting in the Exchange of Surplus Things or being waylaid by a neighbor with a point to make. Somehow, in this anarchic, osmotic process, responsibilities were taken and decisions were made. Eddie loved human politics as a game, but when he saw wess’har community life, he was ready to burn the ballot boxes. It was the most alien thing of all about them, really. He’d thought it was their double voices, or the polyandry, or the four-pupilled eyes, or even the transfer of genes between male and female during sex, but in the end, what made them most unhuman was the way they handled the concepts of responsibility and guilt.
Suddenly, the assassination orders that Shan was given made sense. Esganikan was an isan who had let the side down, and so her genes were obviously dodgy. She had to be taken out of the gene pool, at least by Wess’ej rules.
I get it. I get it, after all these years.
“How did Esganikan fail?” he asked. It was a failure by Wess’ej standards, obviously, but not by Eqbas Vorhi’s. The genetic divergence in just ten thousand years was astonishing, and very visible. “What did she do wrong?”
“She kept information from her community that they needed to know,” said Nevyan. “And she took too many risks with the safety of a world’s ecology.”
They were green hardliners here, although the Skavu made them look like woolly liberals. Eddie had a second or two’s fantasy about enforcing wess’har need-to-know rules on Earth.
The light level increased as they walked further into the complex. Rack-lined tunnels and recesses branched off everywhere, filled with machinery, some clearly military, and some that could have been anything. There was a device for every purpose down here, most of them dating back to the arrival of the wess’har in the system ten thousand years ago, but still bloody useful and capable of indefinite replication by nanites. Some of the older-generation Eqbas metamorphosing vessels were stored down here, broken out into dozens of small shiplets that could coalesce into one large warship. It had never dawned on Eddie that the liquid-to-solid tech also made them very easy to store.
“Are we there yet?” he asked.
“Nearly…” Giyadas hung back a few paces and put her arm around his shoulders. “We value your wisdom, Eddie.”
“Can I have that on my headstone?”
“Not for a very, very long time.”
They turned
right into a branch tunnel and then into a biomaterials area, where the duplicate Earth gene bank was stored. The walls were marked with biohaz warning symbols, wess’har style—this was also where they created and stored their bioweapons—and the doors were already open. Inside, Shapakti was waiting by a bench with what looked for all the world like a small thermal oven.
This was why they wanted his wisdom.
“We’ve debated what to do about c’naatat, Eddie, and our view is that we shouldn’t keep these samples.” Giyadas sounded as if the decision had been made, but the matriarchs still liked to canvass opinion sometimes. “If we keep them, temptation may lead us to use it. And one day in the future, we may not be as powerful as we are now, and there’s no way of knowing what might happen to it. The proposal is that we destroy all the samples. All of them.”
They valued his wisdom, they said, so he did his best to scrape up some of it and earn his keep. “But there’s shitloads of c’naatat on Ouzhari. They couldn’t even kill it off by nuking it.”
“Ouzhari is always going to be an issue, but Bezer’ej is already defended by bioagents, and we’ll assess new threats to its quarantine as and when they arise. But these samples—think of the hosts they’ve passed through, and the characteristics they embody. Aras, Shan, Ade, Rayat, even Lindsay. They’re ideal for creating persistent, intelligent troops. This makes the material especially desirable.”
“If anyone knew about it.”
“Eqbas Vorhi does, for one.”
“Ah. I’m with you. I get it.”
“It also denies the asset to us, of course, but on balance, we feel it should be destroyed.”
Eddie knew wess’har wouldn’t destroy any living organism if they didn’t have to. Their have-to thresholds bore no resemblance to those of humans, as the extermination of the isenj on Bezer’ej had shown. This was a big deal for them strategically, and maybe morally too.
“What happens to c’naatat when you remove it, Shapakti?” Eddie asked. “How do you actually do it?”
“It was a matter of stopping the individual organisms communicating. They then leave the body and remain inactive, permanently dormant. Or at least I haven’t found a way of making them active again.”
“So they’re not actually dead?”
“No. But they can’t communicate with each other, and so they can’t act.”
“And you can take the organism out of the host, but you can’t take the host out of the organism.”
“So far, yes.”
So far. There was no telling what some clever bastard might be able to do in the future, and possibly not a wess’har bastard at that.
The extracted c’naatat ’s fate struck Eddie as a depressing one: he had no idea if the organisms were sentient, but sentience was a very subjective thing, and the idea that this…. this community that lived within its host like the population of a planet was suddenly rendered blind, deaf and mute seemed desperately sad. Bacteria lived and died within every living thing each second of the day, though; there was a limit to how much even wess’har could mourn.
But Eddie knew what it was to be lonely, cut off from everything he knew. He decided he would rather be dead than totally, endlessly isolated. He had a brief glimpse of what Shan must have endured, drifting alone in space, unable to die, just like the hapless individual c’naatat.
He hated it when life drew such stark parallels.
“I’m uneasy about biological agents in general,” he said after a long pause. “We won’t ever agree on that, and I still feel bad that I tricked isenj DNA samples out of poor bloody Ual to help you make that anti-isenj pathogen. So…yes, I think you should get rid of c’naatat. Just be sure that you won’t need to use it to survive in the future.”
And just in case the poor bloody thing knows what’s happening to it.
The pause was long and silent, and then, without any discussion, Giyadas gave Shapakti a nod.
“Do it,” she said.
Eddie didn’t see anything happen in the little oven, and wasn’t even sure what the method of destruction might be. But Shapakti pressed the top, there was a slight sigh of air for a few moments, and then he took his hand away and nodded politely.
“It’s sealed, isan’ve. Now all that remains is the countermeasure, in case we ever need it.”
“Is that it?” Eddie asked. “You killed it? How? How could you do that if Rayat couldn’t even nuke the bloody thing to death?”
“You misunderstand,” said Shapakti. “This is a biohazard container. It’ll be launched in a missile directed into the sun. Into Ceret. That’s the most certain destruction we know.”
Eddie had never lost his sense of journalistic drama. He thought it would have made a lovely shot, Cavanagh’s Star swallowing this bizarre burden. Nobody was going to land and fish out the container, that was for sure. He tried to see the funny side, but failed.
“Let’s go,” said Giyadas.
And that was wess’har strategic planning. Just a few minutes; just a few what-do-you reckons and nods, and a superpower had thrown away one of its greatest trump cards.
Only wess’har could do that, he thought, although the reasoning wasn’t pacifism.
“So will you carry on working on removing c’naatat from wess’har, Shap?” Eddie asked.
“In computer modeling only, alas,” he said. “But I was close, and I think a full range of countermeasures would be wise.”
We’ve been here before, thought Eddie. It’d be a shame to put Aras through all that dilemma again.
He wondered what Ade and Shan would decide to do in the end. The challenge never went away. As long as Aras had to stay as he was, neither of them would take advantage of the cure.
Eddie wondered if they would even want to, and followed the bobbing manes back down the soft-lit corridors and back up to the city, blindingly pearl-bright in the sun.
18
Regret is new to me. While wess’har don’t spend pointless hours imagining the different course of events that we could create by turning back time, we can recognize what we must not repeat. I regret calling on Eqbas Vorhi for help. Everything stems from that. The Eqbas are strangers, I fear further contact, and I will always worry about the Skavu now that Esganikan’s restraining hand is gone. Like Giyadas, I now wonder if we were wise to destroy c’naatat, which gave us the military edge when we needed it.
NEVYAN TAN MESTIN,
in discussion with the matriarchs of F’nar
F’nar, Wess’ej: 2426: twenty years later.
Fnar hadn’t changed.
Aras brought the shuttle in low over the plain as if he wanted to take in every detail of the terrain and make sure every stone, every pebble was still there.
Shan just wanted to get her boots on the ground as fast as she could. When the ship set down just outside the caldera, she didn’t even grab her grip; she just ran all the way into the pearl city, scattering bewildered wess’har, and raced up the rows of terraces until her lungs made her stop for a minute before she could run again.
Her legs burned with the effort.
It’s still the same. It’s all here, nothing’s changed, even Eddie’s here—
The city still functioned in the way it was intended. Progress for the sake of it was meaningless to wess’har here. Nothing needed to change.
She waited a few moments outside Nevyan’s door and took in the view, getting her breath back before facing Eddie.
We’d say this is stagnation. So? Where does progress take us? Where would we go?
Progress was like freedom and democracy. You had to define it before deciding if you wanted it, or it was just a Pavlovian trigger to get you to serve someone else’s agenda. If progress was an end to disease, fear, and death, and having enough to eat, she had it all. There was nowhere else to go.
Get on with it.
She rapped on the encrusted door. The layer of nacre wasn’t completely even. The varying thickness gave it undulations and ripples that added to the organic
lines of a city trying hard not to stand out from the landscape. She thought of Earth—last week, last month, not a short lifetime away—and her only regret was that she couldn’t show off F’nar to more people who would be amazed by it.
This time, she recalled nothing of being in chill-sleep. She took that as a measure of her relief at heading home.
The door opened. “You never have to knock,” said Nevyan. No, wess’har just barged straight in, even if you were using the toilet. “But I’ve waited for that sound for a long time.”
Shan couldn’t imagine what it was to wait twenty-five years to see someone again. Her separation felt like weeks, not enough to really feel that gut-punch of recognition. Nevyan seized her in a fierce hug that took her by surprise, and Shan returned the embrace with appropriate caution.
“Hey,” she said. “Tell me you’re just middle-aged now and that we’ve got lots of time left.”
“I shall not die for many years, my friend.” The warren of chambers was as full of noise and cooking smells as ever. Damn, wess’har food actually smelled homely to her now. “Where do I start on events you’ve missed?”
“Try Eddie,” said Shan.
Nevyan led her past curious youngsters—grandchildren, by the look of it—and into another chamber that looked out into the caldera. “I’ll wait outside. I know you dislike others seeing your emotional moments.”
It was a nice room, the sort you’d pay a lot for in an Earth rest home; the hazy gold light reflected from the pearl terraces outside filled it, and for a moment she could defocus a little and see it as a vast halo. An Eddie she’d never seen before sat near the window, and struggled to turn his head far enough to look at her.
“You’re late, doll.”
His voice still hadn’t changed that much. There was a little creaking, hoarse undertone, and his breathing was labored, but he didn’t sound like a man in his—
Nineties.
Knowing that in advance didn’t reduce the impact of what a rotten bastard time could be.