Judge (32 page)

It was a wonderful diversion, one of the best times he could remember having, and wess'har had perfect recall. He felt suddenly robbed of the chance to explore this new world. Maybe, in centuries to come, he could return to Earth.

But the prospect of future hummingbirds in the wild was a slim incentive when so much of his past wouldn't leave him alone these days.

“I shall miss Esganikan,” said Joluti, not rebuking Aras for keeping his vessel waiting several hours. “We'd served together for a long time. But Laktiriu may well work better with human society. She favors the gradual but sustainable path.”

Aras had seen that path. It was the blind enthusiasm of humans who knew nothing much about Eqbas but were certain that aliens knew a better way to do things, and wanted to be good humans and help them. It was naive, and Eddie would have given them his benignly cynical smile, but it was the raw material that would determine if Earth went the way of Umeh or not.

Humans responded to inspiration rather than logic. And inspiration was talking to mesmerized kids about macaws that could speak an alien language, or getting humans to see that their species couldn't possibly be more special and deserving than an insect-sized bird that vanished in a blur of emerald light.

Yes, humans' imagination could be captured.

 

Reception Center.

 

The Australian Defense Force ground transport waited with its drive running outside the main doors. Ade cried, and didn't care. His detachment—what was left of it—had joined the Australian army.

“You're a big fucking girl, Ade,” Barencoin sobbed. “See, you bloody started me off as well.”

The two men hugged because this really was the last time they would see each other, except via an ITX link when Barencoin was in his fifties, and Ade still looked the way he did now. They absolutely knew it. There were no maybes or if-you're-passings to spare them the finality. It was a very tearful morning. The veneer of banter was showing cracks.

“If Ade gets snot on you, Mart, that means you're immortal,” Chahal said. “No tongues, mind.”

“I'll dribble on you now, then.” Ade grabbed Chahal, and then the hugging and backslapping went on around the circle for some time. It was painful, not a terrible pain like bereavement, but a more bittersweet one knowing that these were his mates, his more-than-family, and every one of them was a fucking hero and a pro who he'd trusted with his life and always would. The pain was because they were the
best
, and he would lose years of knowing them.

“You better call the minute you land,” Chahal said. “We'll have a lot of catching up to do.”

“Well, Ade won't have much to tell us except how he threw up when he thawed out, so we can bore him with twenty-five years of derring-do,” said Webster.

“We've got five minutes.” Barencoin checked his watch. “Come on, Ade, show us your lights one last time.”

Ade blushed and wiped his nose. “I'm sober. I can't do it sober.”

“I've never seen them,” said Webster. “I'm an engineer and I need to know how things work.”

“Go on, Ade…”

“Light show! Light show!”

“Whip it out.”

“I reckon it's batteries and he's been having us on.”

It was a quiet corner and the Eqbas didn't care about human anatomy, so Ade unzipped and displayed his unique bioluminescence, certain he would die of embarrassment, until Webster howled with laughter and Chahal was almost coughing.

“You can tell he's not officer material,” he said. “He'd never be able to whip that out in the officers' heads if he got a commission, would he?”

“It's a miracle,” said Barencoin. “They can make lights so
small
these days.”

Ade heard the transport honk its klaxon as a cue that it was leaving soon, and he zipped up again. “That's it, then,” he said. “I'm going to sob like a girlie if I don't go now, and I've got to do this fast or I'll never be able to do it at all, and—shit, I love you bastards, all of you, and I don't care what cap badge you got now, you're all Royals and always will be.”

He turned to go back to his room. For once, nobody had mentioned Becken or Qureshi.

“Send Shan down, will you?” Barencoin called. “She's not going to get away with not saying goodbye.”

Ade had no idea how he managed to do it, but he simply turned and ran up the stairs without a backward glance. The thought of eking out every last minute was like watching someone die. He had to go.

Shan was coming down the third flight of stairs as he went up. “Did I miss them?”

“Hurry up.”

“Seen Aras?”

“No, Boss.”

Shan disappeared beneath the turns of the stairwell. Ade went up to finish his packing. It took about five minutes, and that was because he'd already packed, and unpacking again ate up a minute or two. He'd embarked for Cavanagh's Star with what he could carry in his bergen and no more, and he'd lost a few items and expended rounds along the way. He was hanging on to the ESF670, though. The FEU owed him his bloody rifle. All his careful but unwritten lists of the stuff he would buy to take back to Wess'ej—food and other small comforts, mainly—had been abandoned. There was no time.

However pragmatically Laktiriu put it, there was no way of dressing this up. They were being kicked off the planet,
his own planet,
all three of them.
Fuck off, lepers.
It was better than being fragged so the Eqbas could save the cost of a shuttle, but it left Ade feeling bereft.

The video screen had been on in their room permanently since they arrived and had merged into the background noise now. But a familiar voice talking about macaws made him stop dead.

“Shit,” he said. Aras was on the news, at the center of a small knot of people in what looked like a zoo, telling a kid about blue and gold macaws that had been born—not from eggs—on a world 150 trillion miles away. The angle of the shot suggested the recording was made by a visitor trying to get a better look through a crowd. They showed a lot of it, ten rambling unedited minutes, and Ade could almost hear Eddie ranting about crappy technical standards, but the media were short of material showing aliens wandering around Earth. The snatched footage of Aras must have been a godsend.

So he'd gone to see the bloody parrots, all the way to Canada. It was just as well the Eqbas worked on a scale that didn't need to worry about mileage. That was Aras all over, still capable of being stopped in his tracks by wondrous things even after centuries of seeing god knows what.

It was funny to see him on telly in an ordinary Earth setting among humans. He looked suddenly
alien,
really alien, not taken-for-granted family whose appearance you had to think hard about if someone asked for a description.

The item was over by the time Shan got back from saying goodbye to the detachment. She had her copper's face on, the one that said she'd switched off and was just processing data, not getting involved.

“Okay, Boss?”

“I don't mind admitting that was bloody hard,” she said. “
Hated
doing that.”

“Aras has been on the news.”

“Tell me he's not complicated things.”

“He's been at the bird sanctuary. Actually, he came across as a nice bloke who you wouldn't mind having invade your planet.”

Shan took sudden and excessive interest in the contents of her wardrobe, which were about as meager as Ade's. “I'm glad she hasn't given me time to think,” she said at last, obviously meaning Laktiriu. “It's always easier to just grab and run. I keep doing that. More to the point, I keep getting shunted around by politicians, and make no mistake, the new girl is one of those.”

“You could have out-
jask
ed her, you know, if you wanted to hang on.”

“Never occurred to me. What would be the point? How long is longer? Forever? She made a decision to keep
c'naatat
clear of Earth. Policy change. She's more cautious. That's a good thing.”

You could wear a problem out by rubbing away at it, and Shan looked as if she had. She probably had the same things going around in her head as he had in his, all the why-didn't-I and I-should-have. This was a shock phase for everyone, from the planet to individuals. When the shock and novelty wore off, and the reality of a long-term Eqbas presence sank in, the problems would start. That, Ade thought, would be when people here started to feel it.

“I didn't even get to visit Uluru,” Shan said. “Oh well. The good thing about
c'naatat
is that I'll always have time.”

They watched the news in silence while waiting for Aras. They could have been out making the most of the last day, but it meant secure cars and cordons and having so many things left undone and unsaid that it felt better just to forget it and not even look outside the window.

“Here we go,” said Shan, gesturing towards the screen at a new headline icon. “It's started.”

The Sinostates border was now closed along its full length to road haulage from Europe in protest against the FEU's failure to meet the terms of a joint food surplus policy. It followed on their withdrawal of consent to continue an FEU water pipeline across the border because of deforestation.

“And the movies always show Earthlings uniting to fight off the aliens,” she said. “But all we do is get competitive.”

Aras returned with a small bag and tipped the contents out onto the bed. “Look what they gave me at the sanctuary.”

It was a jumble of confectionery, snacks, promotional items, educational vids and other small novelties, the kind you got in any visitor attraction. Aras seemed to rate the gift pretty highly. He spent the evening examining every item with meticulous care. But he kept returning to one small packet so often that Ade had to find out what it was that kept drawing his attention.

When he looked over Aras's shoulder, he found that it was a small transparent pouch of tiny, iridescent green feathers.

F'nar, Wess'ej.

 

Eddie got the call from Laktiriu Avo a few days after the ITX had flashed up a message from Shan, saying that they were coming home. Shan's message—sent as a file, not live—had seemed an oddly abrupt way to announce she was going to vanish into chill-sleep for another twenty-five years after he'd just got used to seeing her face on the screen again, but the phrase “asked to leave” said it all.

No, actually, it didn't. It just begged questions that he wouldn't get answers to until 2426, when he might not even be around to ask them. He almost felt that she'd died, and Aras and Ade with her. It was a strange and distressing moment that left him unable to concentrate on much else.

And he never got the chance to tell her that Rayat and Shapakti had skipped Surang with the entire
c'naatat
resource. It gave Eddie a laugh at a time when there hadn't been much good happening, just unrelenting bad news that he could do nothing to assuage.

“Do you recall me, Eddie Michallat?” asked Laktiriu.

He must have seen her when the task force passed through Wess'ej, because she seemed to recall him, but she'd been just another Eqbas in a green uniform then. “It's been a long time,” he said. “My apologies. What can I do for you?”

“I need your assistance.”

Here we go again.
“Go on.”

“With Shan Frankland gone, I have no human to advise me.”

“Well, you sent her home…”

“I felt the risks of having
c'naatat
carriers around outweighed the benefits. All I ask is to bring questions to you occasionally. Even if I employ a human to advise me, I can't evaluate the advice because I don't know if it's neutral. You might not know Eqbas Vorhi, but you do have long experience of Wess'ej, and so you understand us.”

It was very flattering, and not sugar-coated. Eddie felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of being in the thick of things again. It was always a bad sign lately. “How frequent would this be?”

“I don't know. I have no way of telling when I won't understand something.”

Eddie saw the specter of calls at all hours with pleas to sort things out. He'd given up being at the beck and call of News Desk a long time ago, and he was too old to start it again now. He hated firefighting, and that's what it would be; he'd get the call when the shit had already hit the fan.

“I'm too far away to do any good,” he said. “But here's a suggestion. Let me see your plans in advance, and I'll go through them and tell you what looks like trouble to me.” It was the kind of request that caused terminal paranoia in humans, but wess'har didn't like secrecy. “It'll be cultural and political stuff, just presentation and human-wrangling. I don't do science, but then you've got that covered.”

Laktiriu did a little head-tilting this way and that, and the brown plumed mane that ran front to back across her skull shook a little. “Let me think about how that might be arranged.”

Eddie closed the link, and realized that he'd probably just invited her to send him every single scrap of Eqbas business for the next five years. He'd probably get it. She had no way of knowing what was a minefield and what wasn't at the moment.

Well, that's going to brighten things up a bit.

Eddie knew what hell was. It was becoming a
viewer.

He now had to watch news without having any input or redress, and it was a punishment worthy of Dante's imagination. Shan was in the limbo of space, twenty-five years away, and the aliens he'd had to himself for so long were now part of the fabric of Earth. Nobody needed him.

“You can't leave it alone, can you?”

He hadn't realized that Erica was standing in the doorway. “How can I tell her to sod off when she's gone in to make over our homeworld? Barry's going to want to go back some day, and I'd like to leave the place in good shape for him.”

“You don't
think
, do you? What's Giyadas going to say about that?”

“How does it affect her?”

“You're getting slow. She ordered a hit on Esganikan and she's going to be left holding all the Eqbas
c'naatat
stuff. I say that makes them the
other side
.”

Eddie was surprised he hadn't seen that coming. On the other hand, if the Eqbas
were
the other side, having a friendly Eddie in the camp was pretty handy.

He just wanted to be useful again, after a working lifetime of mattering and dealing with decision makers, and—he was no longer in denial about it—he wanted to steer the Eqbas towards a lighter touch on Earth than on Umeh. As the years went by, and the more he visited Umeh, the footage he still had of the invasion troubled him more and more. It was hard to know the isenj as well as he did and not look back at that archive and see not spider aliens suffering and dying but the people he knew.

Ual. Damn, I don't think about him enough.
The isenj minister who started it all had been shot dead right next to him, close enough for him to be splashed with the watery yellow blood.

“You realize what we're doing here, don't you, Ric?” he said. “We're the Targassat rift in miniature. I think I have a duty to act if I can. You think keeping out of things that don't directly concern you is best. There we have it, the million-year history of the wess'har species, adapted for audio and performed by the monkey boys.”

“Okay, but don't expect me to approve, and you better clear your yard arm with Giyadas.”

Erica stuffed food, a flask of water, and surveying equipment into her rucksack before fleeing for the day on the pretext of taking samples. She'd never made close wess'har friends, and retired couples could get on each other's nerves if they were cooped up with nothing to do. “Accept that it's over, Eddie. You can't run the show any more. The aliens are there, right now, and nobody's interested in what's going on here, and you
can't change a damn thing
on Earth. You don't even have a vote.”

She stared into his face, more upset than angry—upset for him, he knew—and then made an incoherent sound before shutting the door behind her with a thud. She hadn't quite slammed it, but Eddie knew she wouldn't be back until nightfall.

She was right about one thing, though. He needed to let Giyadas know what was happening, if only out of courtesy. It was a lovely breezy day up on the terraces, and a good excuse for a brisk walk to her home.

He didn't have to knock. Wess'har didn't knock anyway, but Eddie was family and could treat Giyadas and Nevyan's homes as his own. Sometimes it was immensely comforting.

“Hey, doll,” he said, “I got a new job. Spying for the Eqbas.”

Giyadas was playing with her sons, Tanatan and Vaoris. He didn't recall Nevyan spending as much time with her sons, but Giyadas liked to do things differently, and Eddie wondered again how much she'd been influenced—humanized, in the literal sense—by spending so much time with him as a child.

“As spooks go, you have some way to go to catch up with Mohan Rayat,” she said.

“Great cue,” Eddie lifted Tanatan and whirled him around, playing grandfather. “The Eqbas aren't going to be thrilled when they find Shapakti's handing you their research, and let's not even think about the orders you gave Shan.”

“So what have the Eqbas asked you to find out from me?”

“Nothing. Laktiriu's asked me to advise her on humanology and our cute ways, because she kicked Shan out. I suggested it would be easier if they kept me briefed on what they were planning for home sweet home, then I could tell them they were heading for trouble before they found it.”

“Ahh…. Eddie the special political adviser!”

“You really should go to Earth sometime, doll. You'd have done a far better job than the Eqbas.”

“I like irony.”

“Aw, come on. You know Earth needed intervention.”

“It still bothers me.”

“Erica's furious that I said I'd do it.”

“She thinks you're tormenting yourself,” Giyadas said gently. “That's all.”

“What, that I can't handle being nothing? That
nobody
hangs on my every word when I file a story from the end of the bloody galaxy?” All he could do was watch the car crash unfolding. It made him boil with
impotent…impotent what?
He didn't even have a word for it. He had phrases, though, like
those are my aliens, those are my friends, ask me because I could have told you that,
and
why don't they listen.
Eddie had all the outbursts of a man who had been the expert and go-to guy on outer space for as long as most viewers could remember, but had now been forgotten. He'd ceased to matter the minute the Eqbas stepped onto the desert at St George. “Yeah, maybe she's got a point.”

“And you, having a choice, must make it.” It was one of those classic lines from the philosopher Targassat. “I understand the shame of doing nothing when action might help. The trick is to know where to draw the line of responsibility and interference.”

Giyadas was his best friend. Just that fact on its own would have been enough of a miracle for any human; his closest friend wasn't Olivier Champciaux or any of the other handful of humans still hanging on to an obsessive exile light-years from home, but a wess'har matriarch who ran a city that had enough firepower to take on a small planet. She had bioweapons, too, but he didn't want to think about that. She'd been such a cute, funny, clever kid. The adult Giyadas still had that charm and glittering intellectual insight, but her legacy had been the desperate peace with Umeh that had been forged by a mutual need to see the Eqbas leave the system for good. It had taken the joy out of her. She was all duty, and that wasn't very wess'har, because all of them knew when to live for the moment. Her gravitas was a human taint.

That's probably my fault, too.

“You know how to crush a man, doll. I started all this, you know.”

“Your initial reporting didn't cause Rayat to be sent here, or anything that happened after it.” Wess'har concepts of guilt and responsibility were radically different from those of humans. “Knowledge should change the way you feel.”

“In about forty-odd years,
Thetis
is going to arrive home. What's going to waiting for the crew?”

Thetis
was an older ship, with a top speed that was a third of
Actaeon
's or any of the wess'har fleet. She was still inbound with the last of the colonists and
Actaeon
personnel who'd opted for the slow, seventy-five-year journey home. It was easy to forget them. He hadn't.

“I think they made the right choice, because much of the adjustment will be yielding results,” said Giyadas.

“You're humoring me, aren't you doll?”

She patted his hand. “I've known you even longer than your wife has, Eddie. But I think she's distressed not to be able to cut all links with Earth. This simply reminds her that every option for your son is a sad one—to go to a world where humans have an uncertain future, or to stay here, where there's peace but no possibility of a normal human life.”

It was perfectly true, and it should have hurt Eddie, but it didn't. One thing he'd become used to was wess'har frankness, and the odd comfort—eventually—of knowing that he could say what he thought without editing a single word.

Tanatan tugged at the leg of his pants, wanting attention. Wess'har kids were wonderful fun, and the two boys spoke English with adorable little double-tone chipmunk voices. “Do you think they're old enough to visit Jejeno?”

Giyadas gave Eddie that same affectionate brush across the top of the head that he'd given her when he was the taller of the two. She was a head taller than him now, a full-grown
isan
.

“It's never too soon to get to know your neighbors,” she said. “Or too late.”

“I'm maudlin at the moment. Take no notice. I'm gutted about the marines and I'll be dead by the time Shan, Ade and Aras get back.”

“I won't let you die, and you can stay in touch with the marines who remained. You have to concentrate on what can be done.”

“Well, at least I know I'll be here to welcome my old buddy boy Rayat and shake him warmly by the throat.”

“For Rayat,” said Giyadas, “you only have to wait five years.”

“And what are you going to do with
c'naatat
?”

“I'll think about that,” she said.