“Billions of humans will die when this planet is restored,” he said. “Is that Judgment Day? Does it have to be God who kills them to count as that? Or is this what you call working through man?”
“Do you realize how profound your theology can be, Aras?”
“No. I understand too little.”
“I think that’s what makes it profound.”
“Well, is it? Will that be Judgment Day? Is it the end of Earth, or the end of humans? Because this won’t be the end of humans, not unless Esganikan—”
“You’re scaring me now.”
Deborah had never said that before, not even as a joke. And she was scared: her pupils were dilated and she smelled of anxiety. How could she fear death if her god was going to reward her for doing the right things in life, and reunite her with Josh?
“I’m sorry, Deborah. Why?”
“Because if this is God’s judgment coming, then I have to rethink my whole life.”
Aras thought of something Shan had said to him a long time ago when he made a grave and headstone for Lindsay Neville’s premature baby, and asked Shan about the afterlife.
Every miracle’s got a mundane explanation. Your City of Pearl is actually insect shit. Eternal life is a parasite. The bubbles in champagne are the farts of yeast colonies. That’s just the way the universe is. And you can choose—you can look at the wondrous surface, or you can look at the crud beneath.
He had a moment of revelation, of epiphany—ah, all those god words again, the god words the colony always used—that made perfect sense of it all. He knew now, or at least he had a theory. It would comfort Deborah.
“But that means you were right,” he said. “That your faith has been proven.”
“—I like to think so. We all struggle with faith, Aras, because if we didn’t we’d be wasting the minds that God gave us.”
“Your Bible is looking increasingly factual.”
The expression on her face was suddenly unreadable. But there was still fear on her scent, and not of him. “You surprise me by saying that.”
“It’s a matter of perspective. The future of the planet is being determined by the Eqbas, which is judgment. Only a relatively small number of humans will survive, which is the righteous. You’ve seen the City of Pearl in F’nar, and eternal life in c’naatat. And whatever environment is left here may well be the world to come. Doesn’t that vindicate your views?”
As soon as he finished the sentence, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. Deborah didn’t turn on him, but there was the faintest slackening of the muscles around her mouth and eyes, a little human tell that he knew could mean anything from dismay to well-hidden shock or grief. He thought she wanted to know the truth, to be proven right after all, but he’d got it wrong again.
They’re within you. You have their memories, you have a human isan and house-brother, and yet you still don’t know humans at all, not even now.
“In a way,” Deborah said, “I hope the Bible is wrong in that respect.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Humans—believers—have always tried to tie the scriptures to real events and to second-guess God. I think that’s why we shunned literalism in the colony, all of us, whatever branch of Christianity we came from. Our intellects aren’t enough to comprehend God on that mundane level.”
It was as kind a way of being told to shut up as Aras had ever heard. He felt he’d wounded her.
“I didn’t mean to undermine your faith.”
“We all question belief, Aras. It’s not wrong.”
“I never really understood it.”
“Faith keeps you going when there’s no logical reason to. In its way, it keeps life going. It keeps people going, having kids even though the future looks bad, because they believe it’ll get better. I hear that even Mohan Rayat found comfort in his faith. Commander Neville did too.”
“But after they sinned. After they destroyed Ouzhari. Do we have to sin to find faith? Do we—”
Aras was desperate to continue the debate. He wanted to understand so badly. But he stopped short of the logical progression, of pointing out that as far as he knew, other animals went on reproducing without a formal belief in God, and that eventually the Earth and the whole solar system would die when the Sun reached the end of its life. But that was something she literally didn’t need to hear.
There was always the chance he was wrong. He hoped so, for her sake, and wondered where he might stand if he were. God must have found a way of dealing with an ever-increasing population of people who were eternally alive. He must have learned a way to deal with a kind of c’naatat that lay beyond the scope of ecologies. Perhaps the humans’ god would forgive an alien who had faced similar choices to his own.
Deborah stood up and looked at Aras, tears in her eyes. He could see the glistening liquid welling in the dying light.
“You’ll visit us many times before you return to Wess’ej, won’t you? Promise me.”
“I will. I’ll visit as often as I can.”
“Good.” Then she hugged him. It was rare for any human other than Shan to touch him, and Shan had transformed his life when she took his arm for the first time. A hug was an exceptional thing. “You’re part of the miracle, Aras. I wish you peace, and an answer to your life in the fullness of time, because even c’naatat can’t outlive God. Thank you. I’ll miss you.”
She walked back to the camp of shiplets, kicking a little dust behind her, and was swallowed up in the cool darkness of the evening. The desert was empty except for him and the silent camp. Aras felt an end. One job was over forever. The next—
He didn’t know what came next.
He needed to know what happened next. He needed to know what he’d done so many years ago, saving the Bezer’ej mission from disaster, had not simply created more problems for the many species of Earth. He wanted all of it saved, the whole gene bank, and he wanted the various worlds he knew to go back to the way they were: when Bezer’ej was clean and unpolluted by colonizing isenj, when Earth was peopled with the species that filled the gene bank, when Wess’ej hadn’t yet been drawn into a terrible war.
Humans said you could never turn back the clock. But wess’har—Eqbas especially—could.
Aras walked back to the shiplet for the night, wondering how far Shan and Ade would turn back their own clock if they could.
Eqbas ship 886–001–005–6: command center module.
Esganikan studied Da Shapakti’s message again with a mix of relief and apprehension. He’d done it; he’d managed to remove the c’naatat organism from Mohan Rayat, not once but a number of times.
The parasite’s capacity to adapt and resist removal had its limits. Shapakti had found a way to beat it—in humans, at least, there was.
Esganikan found herself looking past his recording on the screen set in the bulkhead of her cabin, straining to see something of her home city, Surang. She missed it: the longing was sharp, sharper than she had ever known on previous missions, a craving for a normal life and a clan of her own. She knew his words well enough by now. She didn’t need to listen, just to see.
She’d talk to Shapakti tomorrow. Her life depended on it: c’naatat would have to be removed one day, or she would have to be removed from it by fragmentation. She had no intention of ending up like Aras, alone for unthinkable periods.
And then there was Rayat.
Could she allow him to return home now? She’d once told him he could come back to Earth. What harm could he do once c’naatat was removed? Without the parasite in his possession, nothing he knew could help humans to find it and exploit it. And they would never reach Bezer’ej again, she’d see to that.
Is that Rayat’s voice persuading me?
Shan would fight to stop him returning; she’d try to kill him again, Esganikan was sure of that. Shan thought knowledge was dangerous and needed to be controlled, one of her few blatantly human failings.
Esganikan searched as best she could in the jum
bled memory that wasn’t wholly hers, trying to test Mohan Rayat’s motives. She felt the passing touch of an isolated child who wanted to please his grandfather. The memories of the humans through which c’naatat had passed emerged with a fragmented but surprising clarity. The wider picture eluded her, but she saw snapshots, as Shan called them, frozen moments of great detail. She felt his intense devotion: family, nation, but no wife, no child, and a conscious, aching gap where they should have been.
How similar all creatures are, deep down.
Esganikan could feel Shan’s desperate dread of c’naatat, a fear that had drowned out her own needs—a nightmare of supersoldiers, uncontrolled population growth, wars over the privilege of owning the biotech, a battleground between the haves and the have-nots, the destruction of the fabric of the ecology, the economy and society. There would also be something called stupid, wasteful bloody beauty treatments derived from it without a thought of the long-term consequences, although Esganikan was still working out what that meant.
All life was meant to end. Humans were far too obsessed with stagnant permanence—in mortal or spiritual form—in a universe already predestined to end and begin anew.
Esganikan distracted herself by catching up on the latest climate modeling that the ecosystem analysts had produced in the last few hours. It would probably upset the gethes that she’d taken information from their systems rather than waiting to be given it, but this was not their timetable to dictate. They were squabbling among themselves just like the isenj had done, except that their wars would damage other species, and so they had to be managed.
If Shapakti failed to find a way to remove c’naatat from Esganikan, she would face the same choice as the wess’har once had—at what point to give up her unnatural life.
Stop this. You’ve been on Earth less than twenty-four hours. Deal with that when you have to. You knew the risks.
The climate changes on Earth weren’t as extreme as the first Eqbas model had predicted: humans had tried to mend their ways again, but it was never enough and they always stopped short of the necessary measures. She gazed at the three-dimensional animated models of expanding and contracting ice, isotherms, storm systems and sea levels. The warming had slowed; so had the deliberate destruction of many habitats, but humans had no technology for putting things back the way they were. The reports emerging on her screen showed a debate growing between her ecology analysts about how much of that slowdown could be attributed to declining human numbers, remedial action, or the planet’s natural cycles. The gethes were dying in greater numbers from famine, floods and disease. There still seemed to be an ample and renewable supply of them, though.
“Aitassi,” Esganikan called. “Aitassi?”
The ussissi normally hung around the cabin, but sometimes she disappeared to be with her clan, complete with infants, subordinate females and the complex hierarchy of males. Ussissi traveled in packs, and Esganikan understood why. Only a handful of her crew had families back home, waiting for their return in synchronized suspension. When a ship landed, and the crew was revived, their kin back home were as well, so that they could have the illusion of a shared life with no time dilation. Most of the crews were therefore young, unmated, and relatively inexperienced. Those with families endured a peculiar thing that Shan referred to as hell.
The sound of skittering claws announced Aitassi’s arrival, and she appeared in the hatchway with a small infant clutched under one arm like a piece of baggage. That was how ussissi transported their offspring; it looked so casual to a wess’har that Esganikan was always worried for their safety, but the little ones seemed perfectly secure. At that age, their finely ribbed skin—Shan called it corduroy—made them look appealingly wrinkled.
It was impossible to get away from reminders of family and offspring. Aitassi made no introduction of the new baby.
“What do you want, Commander?”
“The climate projections. Have you looked at them?”
“I have, but I don’t fully understand them.”
Esganikan, kneeling in the most comfortable resting position for a wess’har, looked at the projections and interpretations again. She was a soldier, a planner and strategist, not a scientist: she wanted to be absolutely certain she understood what she thought she was seeing in the data. The information had been prepared by the senior analyst in the biodiversity team, Balagiu Je.
“Get Balagiu for me,” she said. “I think we have a hard decision to take.”
“What would that be?” asked Aitassi. “Which humans to cull?”
“I don’t think that will be difficult,” said Esganikan. “The environmentally responsible ones are easy to identify, and Shan Chail will help with that. No, this is a matter of what kind of Earth we help them restore, because it may not be the same world the species in the gene bank were taken from. The issue is how far to reverse the damage already done. We’re not here to recreate a museum.”
Aitassi considered the dilemma and appeared to understand. The baby under her arm—her grandchild—began squealing, demanding food and attention. “I fear this will be the major point of contention between you and the host government. They clearly have their own expectations of what will be offered.”
“Shan called it a theme park mentality, but I suspect she wants the entire gene bank revived.”
“You should watch more of the gethes’ factual programming output. That’s what we’ve been doing today.” Aitassi hoisted the baby into a more comfortable position. “It always seems to be an outpouring of their wishes and opinions. They should at least ask for what they want, so we’re all clear.”
“They’re humans. They’re oblique and manipulative.” Esganikan still hadn’t had a response from the FEU to her demand that they hand over the last of those responsible for the destruction of Ouzhari. Europe was running out of time and didn’t appear to realize it. “I think I shall do what Shan calls cutting to the chase, whatever that actually means, and make their situation clear to them as soon as possible.”
“We have the genome and disease data, anyway. It’s simply a matter of completing the processing against the genetic templates.”
Esganikan couldn’t avoid mentioning the restless infant any longer. “Is this Hilissi’s child?”
“Yes. Gorossi. I have to feed him now. Will you excuse me?”
“May I hold him?”
It was an unusual request for an Eqbas. Aitassi paused and then held out the tiny creature to her.
“He already has teeth,” she said. “Mind out.”
Esganikan took him in both hands. She had never handled the young of any other species. There was no such thing as a pet in wess’har society, because non-wess’har of any kind were people to be left alone to pursue their own lives. Gorossi, warm and utterly alien, looked up at Esganikan with an expression of indignation, revealing an angry, demanding mouth fringed with tiny needle-like teeth.
And yet he was perfect: a creature of pure wonder.
It was shocking moment for Esganikan. It stirred memories that were very definitely not hers, of lost children and unfulfilled lives—ah, Lindsay Neville’s memories, no doubt—and a craving so profound that she was distressed by it. The fact that she knew this was an inherited memory didn’t dilute the pain one bit.
“Here,” she said, holding out the child for Aitassi to take him back. “He’s very fine. I envy you the prospect of continuity.”
It didn’t come out as she’d planned. As Aitassi left, Esganikan regained her composure and tried to look at the memories more dispassionately. No, she really hadn’t bargained for this when she insisted on an infusion of Rayat’s contaminated blood. It was far more intrusive than she had ever imagined. How did Shan or any of the others cope with this chaos in their minds? It made her feel invaded rather than guided, and that was totally outside her experience.
She shut her eyes and groped for a wess’har memory, something that she could feel more at ease with. It was Aras’s—Aras, realizing what c’n
aatat actually was, and what his isenj captors had accidentally given him along with the terrible wounds that healed over and over again almost instantly during torture.
Five hundred years ago. Yet it’s so vivid.
A wave of regret and dread—Aras’s—almost took her breath away; thinking c’naatat simply healed, then realizing it was far more than that, and knowing he had made outcasts of his comrades and that none of them dare breed. Esganikan could see the sunlit courtyard wall he was staring at when the full realization hit him, could smell the cut foliage scent of the vegetable roots in his hands, and the near pain in his chest. I can never be a father now. What have I done?
She had to physically shake her head to get the image out of her mind and reassure herself that she was still Esganikan Gai. Perhaps the memory felt so vivid because it was a preoccupation of her own—the urge to have family. It was one of a number of yearnings and regrets from so many other lives. She recognized Lindsay Neville’s grief for her dead baby son, an image of a little grave with a stained glass headstone depicting flowers; then she was suddenly underwater and watching the bioluminescence flickering and fading in a small bezeri body. And she could clearly identify another creature mourning the loss of family, but not a child—parents and siblings. That was more alien; isenj, she thought. When she concentrated, it was tied to an image of white-hot flame and explosions as the colony of Mjat on Asht—yes, Bezer’ej, when the isenj overran it—was destroyed by wess’har air strikes.
By Aras.
She saw the whole world from many eyes, and it hurt more than it educated. She wanted the longing for offspring to go away. She also preferred not to see the world through the eyes of isenj under wess’har attack, although she’d never been squeamish about such things before.