Around her, the red plain was already dotted with shiplets that had broken away from the main vessel to form a camp of small bubble-like cabins.
The Skavu had landed too.
She could see their ships in the distance, still in one piece, waiting for her orders. The command center stood separate from the accommodation modules, and as she walked through the camp she could hear the sound of Earth’s news channels drifting from the hatches. There was panic and speculation, the sound of demands for answers and reassurances.
When she’d dealt with Umeh, she was remote and insulated. Now she felt part of Earth, among it, and not simply because she was standing here. When she walked into the command center module, she inhaled carefully, trying to sense if Shan had emitted jask, but detected no trace of the matriarchal dominance pheromone that would make her submit to another isan ’s will.
I never used to be wary of her, not like this.
But Shan had used jask for her own ends before, and Esganikan couldn’t rely on her instincts now. She no longer had any idea whose instincts they were. What she had in her altered brain was a library, a range of behaviors for any given situation, and she had to choose which was the most effective at the time.
Gethes rules applied here. Rayat’s solutions might prove to be the best options.
Esganikan Gai settled down in her cabin, and concentrated on the part of her mind that was Rayat’s, seeking not only guidance, but names.
3
I don’t think we know the difference between a diplomatic visit and an invasion. If I were you, I would start thinking in terms of Earth being under Eqbas occupation. We certainly have, and we’ll take whatever steps we can to protect ourselves, military or otherwise.
FEU President Zammett,
to Sinostates Foreign Secretary Evgeny Barsukov
F’nar, Wess’ej.
“You might have noticed,” Eddie said kindly, “that I’m a few trillion miles out of town right now. I’m not sure how I can help you, Mr. Zammett.”
If he thought he was getting a Mr. President out of Eddie, he was mistaken. Eddie was celebrating a late mid-life crisis with a little satisfying grumpiness, no longer needing to give a hand-job to political egos to get what he wanted. Zammett was familiar territory. Only the faces changed.
“We’d like to understand the wess’har—the Eqbas—better, Mr. Michallat, and you’re about the only neutral person I can reach who knows them well.”
There’s Shan, and Ade, and the Royal Marines. But maybe you don’t know where they are now, and you’re trawling.
“I suppose I do,” said Eddie. The five-second delay on the relay was a blessing sometimes, a little shakedown time. “What do you want to know that I didn’t cover in nearly six hundred hours of features and doccos over the last twenty-seven years? I wouldn’t have thought there was anything left not to know about. Even their sex lives and recipes.”
Zammett had an extraordinary ability to sit completely still while waiting to speak. He was bred for live video. “We got off to a bad start with them, alas. They violated our Antarctic airspace, one of our air force observers got too close, and there were shots fired. The pilot ejected safely, though. We could still talk calmly with them at the moment.”
Eddie shrugged. “If the Eqbas had opened fire, the pilot wouldn’t have been able to bang out, except as vapor. If he saw a big flash, that’s part of their mechanism for fending off collisions.”
There was a longer silence than Eddie expected. “Unfortunately, one of our warships launched a missile.”
“Well, is your office still in one piece? That means they weren’t too upset, because I’ve seen them wipe out a whole city for that. And they don’t have a concept of airspace and national boundaries.”
“The missile certainly seemed to make no impression on their ship…”
“Mr. Zammett, have you actually seen any of my programs? The civil war on Umeh?”
“Not all of them.”
“Well, get your secretary to dig up the BBChan archives and just watch the lot. That’ll tell you all you need to know about their military capacity. Capacity, as in you don’t stand a chance. They were spacefaring when we were living in caves. You know what they say—resistance is futile. Clichés are clichés for a good reason.”
“It’s hard,” said Zammett, “to know that, and yet still be unwilling to be downsized like Umeh was without at least putting up a fight.”
He’d absorbed that much, then. So what was he after? There was information, and there was special pleading. He didn’t need military intelligence. The words hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us should have told him everything.
“What do you want from me?” Eddie decided to play for time. “My wife isn’t keen on me getting involved with Earth matters these days, so I’d have to square it with her, but just tell me straight what you want.”
“Just advice from time to time on who we should be talking to. Cultural advice. That kind of thing.”
Right. If he’d seen the programs, then he would have known that he could just ask a wess’har anything at all and get a completely open answer. They didn’t need diplomacy and good contacts.
“Okay,” said Eddie, seizing a bargaining chip for the future. “For whatever good it’ll do.”
“You’re a European citizen, Mr. Michallat. I don’t think you want to see the English regions destroyed, however welcome the wess’har have made you.”
Zammett was right, but the Eqbas would do whatever made sense environmentally, and singing “Jerusalem” to them wouldn’t bring a tear to their eye and make them spare England. It wasn’t even a green and pleasant land any longer. It was a cluster of storm-whipped islands, and far smaller than they’d been when he left Earth. “Anything else?”
“Long shot, but…do you know what happened to Mohan Rayat?”
Transparent as a glass of piss. What an amateur. “Not really.” Well, that was true. He hadn’t heard from him since the Eqbas left. “Why?”
“You must be aware that the Eqbas want to know who gave him clearance to use nuclear devices on Bezer’ej. I just wondered if he might still be alive and willing to say. Clear it up without the need for nastiness.”
“I haven’t seen him since…oh, 2376? He’s not here, that’s for sure. He’d be in his late seventies now if he’s still alive.”
“Thank you anyway. Please, get back in touch when you’re ready to go ahead.”
“I will.”
Eddie closed the link with a sense of completely inappropriate elation. Why the hell has that given me a buzz? It was just the old juices flowing, being pivotal, knowing he was being set up and pulling a flanker on a smart-arse. All the old buttons were being pushed. Erica really would go nuts and lecture him about not being able to let go either of Earth or his old status, but that wasn’t why he asked for time.
So Zammett wants Rayat—still. He wants Shan—still. Nothing’s changed. Now, if you think your population is going to be wiped out like the isenj, what would you want more than anything?
C’naatat.
Eddie would have been surprised if Zammett hadn’t worked out what he’d do next, but he had to do it anyway. He needed to warn Shan. The ITX wasn’t encrypted; neither wess’har nor isenj cared much about secrets.
Giyadas would be delighted to help him contact Aras and cover his tracks. The little seahorse princess who’d wanted to be a reporter just like Eddie had grown up into a fearsome matriarch in her own right, wise to the ways of gethes.
Eddie grabbed his bee cam and headed for the pearl terraces to find her. He didn’t need a poxy president to make him feel important. His best buddy was a wess’har warrior queen.
Earth, Australian Republic: Eqbas temporary camp.
The most alien trees Aras had ever seen weren’t the cycadlike dalf of Umeh, or the efte of Bezer’ej, but the synthetic ones he was now looking at in the middle of a red desert so arid, so baked, so inhospitable that no real tree could ever have surv
ived there.
In the relative cool of dusk, the trees looked unnaturally white, their rectangular upper paddles and rigidly straight lines at odds with the natural curves of the landscape.
They weren’t decorative—humans used artificial plants for enjoyment, he knew that—but devices for carbon dioxide capture, trapping CO 2 and pumping it as liquid sodium carbonate for separation and routing to vast underwater gas injectors to bury the gas forever in the sea bed.
Forever was a very flexible word. Forever was, in this technology, millions of years. That wasn’t forever at all. Aras could envisage forever, and now it was troubling him. He thought of Umeh, of visiting the city of Jejeno that he’d never seen but that he recalled from the memories of his isenj captors more than five hundred years before.
What was I before c’naatat? What mattered to me? What gave me joy?
It was as if the intervening centuries hadn’t happened; long lonely years of self-imposed exile on Bezer’ej, where every day was the same except for the changes of garrison personnel, followed by fewer than three years of the most bittersweet joy, agony, war, and deaths that completely changed his life and the future of both Earth and two other star systems.
I can count my time with Shan in single years, and my time with her as my isan in months. I executed my best friend. I mourned Shan’s death and then she came back to me. I have a house-brother again, at last. And still…I dwell on what I was, because I can hardly recall it, but I need to. I need to know who I really am.
Aras preferred to do his thinking in the open air. The huge scattered camp of shiplets was quiet, and flickering status lights in bands of red and blue chevrons marked out each fragment of vessel. The defense shield now enclosed a more humid environment, and insects had appeared from nowhere to dance around the blue-white displays. The red lights didn’t seem to appeal to them.
“How do they do that?” asked a woman’s voice.
Aras should have smelled Deborah Garrod’s approach, but he was too engrossed in his thoughts. She startled him.
“Do what?”
“The moths. How do little things like that get past the shield when missiles can’t?”
“The shield recognizes them as harmless,” said Aras, realizing she was trying to keep him company rather than seeking a lesson. “Like the barrier around the Temporary City on Bezer’ej recognized wess’har DNA, or the biobarrier around Constantine separated the terrestrial environment from the native one. It’s the same technology.”
“I thought you’d be with Ade and Shan.”
“I wanted to think.”
“You sure of that?”
“Yes. Besides, Ade needs more of Shan’s time than I do. Human males are quite insecure, even sensible ones like Ade.”
“He’s a nice man. I’m glad you’re all happy. I think all of you had such lonely lives before.”
Aras wondered if it was wise to discuss loneliness with Deborah after making her a widow. Josh Garrod had been his closest friend, and yet Aras hadn’t hesitated to kill him for helping Rayat—and Lindsay Neville—detonate bombs on Ouzhari. Deborah had convinced herself that she bore him no ill will because her god had planned for it all to happen. Aras still wasn’t sure if he envied her ability to mold reality to what she needed to cope, or pitied her, or if—such was the certainty in her face—she was actually right.
But if she’s right, and her god is a real entity, then I have more questions about his failings and methods than his indefinable love that I can’t actually see working anywhere.
“I think I resent loneliness,” said Aras. “It accounts for ninety-nine-point-nine-five percent of my life.”
“You calculated that?”
“By years, yes.”
“Ah.” Deborah sat down on the outcrop next to him. “I forget that.”
Aras had seen no evidence of any god’s love in all those years. He saw detached abandonment, the balanced cycle of life and death, ebb and flow, and the inability of just one species to accept the ephemeral nature of all worlds. God was a good coping mechanism for humans.
“Do you feel content at completing your mission?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you when I do it,” she said.
“You saved the gene bank and brought it back.”
“I have to see what happens to it yet.”
“Where will you be settling now?”
“I’ve been talking to the government resettlement people on the link. There’s a refugee camp to the northeast, in the Islamic sector. A community of vegetarian Muslims has offered us land nearby.”
“They’re not the same faith as you.”
“Neither are you, but we were happy to share your goals.”
“No faith at all is easier to reconcile than a different one.”
“I know, but we do many impossible things each day, don’t we?”
Aras took abstinence from all involvement with other animals as a given, but for humans it was still a distinct lifestyle, and one the Muslim township clearly found some kinship with. Shan said Esganikan needed to understand that you couldn’t put religions like those together and expect them to play nicely. She cited wars and mutual persecution. Deborah seemed to see the same thing that Esganikan did, so perhaps Shan was wrong for once.
“You realize that many of the gene bank’s species have no habitat to be placed in now,” he said, wary of mentioning religious war.
Deborah nodded. “I worked that out when I wondered what would happen to the macaws.” She’d been stunned by the two blue-and-gold macaws that Shapakti had resurrected from the gene bank as an experiment. She’d grown up in a small and very limited copy of Earth’s environment on Bezer’ej, where there were just food crops and pollinating bees. The wild planet beyond the biobarrier on Constantine island was utterly alien, and had Aras not intervened and created the environment, the first settlers and all their dreams of returning the gene bank to Earth would have died. “Sometimes it’s hard to look beyond the next hurdle, isn’t it?”
I could have saved the gene banks myself and let the humans die. I know that now. Would it have been kinder, more in keeping with the balance of life?
Aras had inherited the human tendency to fret about things in the past that couldn’t be changed, but not their delusional certainty about the future that they called faith.
“I know,” said Deborah. “I feel that way sometimes. I wanted to know where the macaws would go and if they could be set free. Then I found the rain forests were gone.”
“There are still some surviving areas, and there’ll be more forest in the future.”
“But not in time for them, though. Where are they?”
“The survey team is caring for them. They plan to release them in a sanctuary in Canada.”
“Not a real forest, then.”
“No. I think they have little idea how to survive in the wild even if there were habitats for them. At least they’ll be with other captive macaws.”
“Ah,” said Deborah. “I know how they must feel.”
It summed up all of them—him, the colonists, everyone who’d returned. Place was tied to time, and the places were still here, but the time was not.
“Aras, did we make a mistake bringing back the gene bank?”
He’d never heard her express doubt before. “I don’t believe so.”
“You never lie, and you’ve restored planets yourself. Convince me.”
“Think of it as a staged process. Everything in it can be resurrected when the conditions are right.” Aras risked putting his gloved hand on her shoulder, suddenly conscious of her neck and seeing Josh’s seconds before he swung his wess’har harvesting knife at it. “The alternative was losing all life that might have survived, had humans not driven it to extinction. I would say you did the only thing you could.”
“You know, I can’t help thinking we’ve brought it back for Judgment Day.”
This was where rational, pragmatic, calm Deborah Garrod became someone who alarmed Sha
n. Deborah switched from demonstrable reality to unfathomable belief, seamless and certain. Shan would try not to look embarrassed, biting her lip and talking patiently to Deborah as if she was a child—a human child, not a wess’har one. Wess’har children needed no fairy tales. Humans—of all ages—seemed unable to live without them, and Aras could still see no difference between morality tales and the word of their god.
“Why would your god destroy what he created, unless he felt he’d made a mistake?” Aras asked. He didn’t do it out of cruelty, but out of a frustrated need to understand. This faith was a massively powerful motivator for good and bad in humans, and he had never fully grasped it. “Is he culling, like we did to the isenj?”
“In a way. He’ll save the righteous and give them eternal life.”
“And the sinners are cast into Hell, yes?” Aras remembered that bit. He wondered about it from time to time, and if he would be considered a sinner. It struck him as unfair. “So he doesn’t forgive.”
“Oh, God forgives.”
“Then who goes to Hell? I asked your ancestor Ben about this many times, and I never understood where God drew the line between those he forgave and those he didn’t.”
“I don’t have an answer.”
“Do you think you’ll be saved? Because you did what you thought God wanted and preserved the gene bank?”
“I hope I’m saved, because I want to see God. And…Josh.”
Aras knew he would have made the same decision today, right now, and killed Josh for helping destroy Ouzhari. He still missed him. He still pitied Deborah. He still didn’t feel guilty. It had to be done, or there was only chaos to follow.
It was judgment. He understood that.
Aras wanted to find Shan and Ade, and shelter in the comfort of his family, but the conversation had transfixed him and he felt on the brink of genuine discovery after so many years of confusion. He was acutely aware of the language used in the conversation, because he’d struggled with the concepts for many years. Forgiveness had taken him years to unpick, but he had a better idea of what guilt was. There was also redemption, which he still thought of as selfish and irrelevant, and then there was judgment, which he understood when he saw it as balance.