Judge (33 page)

F'nar, Wess'ej: March 2406.

 

The transport that brought Rayat, Shapakti and his family into F'nar from the landing strip outside the city hadn't changed since Eddie had climbed warily on board more than thirty years ago.

It was still a hovercraft covered with a valance as far as he was concerned, but wess'har didn't care how daft things looked, only how well they worked. Wess'har would have been a very tough sell for marketing men.

“Don't hit him, Eddie,” said Giyadas. “You're not as young as you were.”

“I'm going to be charm itself, doll. He did manage to do one honest thing in his life, even if it
was
robbing the Eqbas.”

Da Shapakti didn't seem to have changed much, but Eddie never could gauge age in wess'har very well. The biologist came trotting across the flagstones,
isan
and house-brothers following, and hugged Eddie fiercely.

“It's good to be back,” he said. “I feel at home.” He gave Giyadas a courteous nod. “
Giyadas Chail,
thank you for your hospitality and refuge.”

Rayat looked grayer, but he'd been on hold with
c'naatat
so many times that he still looked fiftyish. Eddie really wanted to see him raddled and spotted like the evil twin painting he was sure to have stashed in some attic.

“Hi, Eddie.”

“Hi, Mohan.” Eddie couldn't even remember what he'd called him in the past. He'd always just been Rayat. “You cleared the place out, then.”

“It had to be done,” Rayat said. “Last chance, really.”

“And what about you? Are you staying undead for awhile now that Shap's got a cure?”

“No, I want it out of me for good now. I want to know my body's my own when I wake up in the morning.”

Eddie wanted to say, “It's a trap!” but Rayat had no sense of humor and there was only so much tormenting that he could do before he lost the will to make Rayat's life hell. “Okay,” he said. “Come back to the house and we'll give you a decent cup of tea, dinner, and bring you up to speed on Earth.”

“Good to know it's still there.”

“It is, but I've been working for the Eqbas for five years so I talked them out of turning it into parking lots.”

“I haven't had chance to check the ITX,” said Rayat. “Just give me the headlines.”

“I think you need to watch the screen. I might even be able to get you a chat with the Aussie prime minister. He's still in office. Nice enough bloke. Den Bari.”

Wess'har were already ferrying containers into the city on small pallets and taking them down into the tunnels that ran underneath F'nar. There was a lot of storage down there, but also an arsenal and fighter hangars with nanite production templates. Pretty little pearly F'nar and its deliberately agrarian ways might have looked like a theme park, but it was a superpower in human terms.

“Is that it?” asked Eddie, pausing to look at the pale yellow drums. They looked like hatboxes. “I'd expected something bigger.”

“That's just the
c'naatat
materials in suspension,” said Shapakti. “The equipment I need for the Bezer'ej project remains in our transport for the trip to Nazel. But we'd like to spend some time here before we go.”

“It's a bus ride.” Eddie pointed up at the sky, where Wess'ej's twin planet hung as a fat, cloud-streaked crescent moon. “You forgot how cozy things are down Ceret way.”

“And the macaws?” he asked. “My pretty friends?”

Eddie had to think. “Oh yes. They're fine. They're at a bird sanctuary in Canada.”

“So
beautiful
,” said Shapakti's
isan
, Ajaditan, looking around the caldera and up the steep steps that linked the terraces. F'nar was at its tourist-poster pearly best right then. “And so much climbing…”

They spent the rest of the day settling Shapakti's clan into their new home, and Giyadas saved Eddie a difficult moment by offering Rayat his own private accommodation. Eddie didn't think Erica would want a permanent houseguest, and he still wasn't ready to have Rayat at close quarters for the next twenty years, however mellow he'd become.

“Dinner,” he said, pointing Rayat in the direction of the house, right at the far end of the terrace on the broken edge of the caldera bowl. “It used to be Shan's home, but we've exorcised the place with beer and holy water, so you'll be fine.”

“Wrong religion,” said Rayat. He walked ahead of Eddie along the terrace with the energy of a younger man whose body was self-repairing, and for a moment Eddie envied that. The moment passed. “How is Shan, then? I'm a bit time-addled at the moment.”

“She's on her way back. Hang on twenty years, and you can give her a nice big kiss.”

“We wanted the same outcome, you know.”

“Yeah, I know you're a matched pair of psychotic ideological zealots.”

“Well, we put an end to the risk, between us, I suppose.”

“She'll love the joint credit.”

Twenty years sounded like an eternity. It would certainly be close to it for Eddie. But the thought of Shan catching up with Rayat…well, that was motivating. Eddie wasn't going to die until he'd seen
that.

 

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.