Judge (39 page)

We could frag you, but we haven't.
Ade understood that clearly enough. But Shan was scaring him now. She was so bloody
moral
; it was part of the reason why he loved her, the fact that she never did the expedient thing, but sometimes it got her into an endless loop of conflicting choices. Ade didn't want to lose this second bite at life. He was greedy for time with Shan. Would a few
c'naatat
who weren't going anywhere be that much of a risk? He was tied to whatever Shan did. He refused to imagine life without her. It wouldn't have been a life at all. She was his wife.

“You're quiet, Ade,” Shan said.

“I'll do what you do, Boss. I don't want to go on a day longer than you.”

That pretty well killed what little lightheartedness was left in the evening. They could all think it through. Even Eddie didn't have anything to say, and Giyadas and Nevyan took him home shortly afterwards.

Ade heard Aras come in a few hours later. He waited for the sound of running water that meant he was taking a shower—a basic stream of water from an overhead cistern, nothing fancy—and then timed him. He was taking a long time to come to bed. Shan was asleep, curled up in a ball with her back to him. Ade slid out of bed and went to find Aras.

He was sitting at the table, looking through what Ade thought was a book, until he remembered that wess'har didn't store data that way. It was a sheet of glass, or so he thought.

“Where you been, mate?” It was a daft thing to worry about a
c'naatat
's safety, but he said it anyway. “We were getting worried about you.”

He looked over Aras's shoulder and saw that the glass sheet was something like a
virin,
a clear material with embedded displays and controls. It seemed to be full of moving images.

“I met my whole clan for the first time since the isenj wars,” he said. “My
family.
Five centuries on.”

“How did that feel?” Ade could see and smell how hard that had hit him. “I don't know what I'd do if I found I still had family on Earth. We weren't exactly close, not in the end.”

“I felt both happy and unhappy,” Aras said, not looking up. His gaze was fixed on images of an event that Ade didn't understand, but it seemed to be some kind of communal building session with the kids joining in, almost like raising a barn in the old days. “Happy that I could recall my childhood, and that it felt good, and unhappy that I didn't know if I wanted to be there or not.”

Lindsay's restoration to plain basic human must have set Aras thinking again. It was inevitable. Sooner or later, Ade would pick up Aras's headline emotions via Shan, and he'd find out just how upset he was.

“Did they make you welcome?”

“Yes.”

“It's okay, 'Ras. I understand. You can't pretend you're not wess'har.” Ade sat closer and treated it like looking through a family album. “Are these your folks?”

“Most of them, to some degree or other.”

Aras didn't seem to want to talk. He was engrossed in the images, either genuinely preoccupied or trying to make Ade go away, so Ade took the hint.

“Come to bed, mate.” Ade worried that he took too much of Shan's attention and that Aras missed out. It wasn't that he kept a tally of who had sex with her most often, but he was pretty sure that Aras wasn't getting as much as he used to. “Shan's beginning to think you don't fancy her any more.”

“Reassure her,” Aras said. “But I have centuries of catching up to do, not just twenty-five years. I don't know why I avoided Baral for so long. The problem was all mine.”

Ade went back to bed and wrapped himself around Shan, burying his face in her hair and trying not to wake her. She was sound asleep, breathing slowly.

“So what's up with him?” she said suddenly, and made him jump.

“I thought you were asleep, Boss. Did I wake you?”

“No. I heard Aras come in.”

“He's got some kind of picture album. He met his family. The clan.”

Shan paused for a few moments. “But is he okay?”

“A bit rattled, I think.”

“I ought to help him through this.” She let out a long breath. “He's had a lot of hard memories to face in a short period, and I don't think handling Lindsay's kid's bones helped much.”

“What about you? It got to you, too, didn't it? Because of the abortion.”

“No, it's because I wouldn't help Lin's kid survive by giving him a dose of
c'naatat
—but I'm happy to stay alive myself, so what happened to my fucking principles? When did I decide I should keep it? And why do I feel so bad about the loss of life on Earth when I spent most of my career thinking that humans needed culling? Where's my line? What
won't
I do? I've sat in judgment on so many people, and now I don't even trust my own sense of right and wrong.”

See? I knew it was eating at her. All of it.

She didn't say anything else. He worried that she might do something stupid again, as stupid as stepping out the airlock to do the decent thing like some fucking mindlessly heroic general of the Victorian era, but it might have been a reaction to what happened on Earth—too much shit in too short a time, coupled with the realization of the time lost with people who mattered.

He'd still keep an eye on her.

“Do you suppose you might be staying
c'naatat
for me and Aras, knowing what shit we went through when we thought you were gone?” Ade whispered. But Shan was asleep, really dead to the world this time, and didn't hear him.

Aras didn't come to bed that night. Ade decided he'd need to keep an eye on him too.

Jejeno, Umeh: August 19, 2426.

 

The city itself didn't look all that different to Shan's recent memory, but Jejeno
had
changed.

It was the noise that was different. The city once ran to a permanent atmos track of rustling, clicking, chittering noise, the sounds of millions of isenj, but now it seemed quiet. As Shan walked along the wide streets between canyonlike brick-red buildings, she had a sense of being in a ghost town. It was totally misleading; there were plenty of isenj around, tottering about their business, but there weren't solid carpets of them moving in streams that needed traffic rules to avoid crushes.

They had their wide-open spaces. The remaining three continents—Pareg, Tivskur and Sil—were those spaces, scoured clean by bioweapons and nanites, and now the isenj of the Northern Assembly were dispersing across them.

“I thought they liked being crowded together,” Shan said. “The termite inheritance.”

Nevyan steered her towards the dome of Umeh Station. “I could say the same of urban humans.”

Umeh Station—now called Njirot—had been designed to house human explorers in hostile extrasolar environments, so it had weathered fifty years in Jejeno with ease. Even from outside, Shan could see plants thriving within. It looked for all the world like a botanical hothouse. When the doors parted, she found herself breathing lush, muffled air, and surrounded by isenj taking in the sights in a way that reminded her of Edwardian gentry on a Sunday stroll.

“I suppose all these plants come from Tasir Var,” she said.

“All except a few food crops.” Nevyan led her through unsettlingly familiar paths between foliage and blooms that made her feel as if she was back in a greenhouse. Isenj reacted to their visitors with little clicks and nods that Shan took as acknowledgment when Nevyan nodded back. “We were able to breed the plants back a little closer to their wild forms.”

Shan had no idea that wess'har set any store by symbolism. Maybe she was misinterpreting the effort they'd put into reverting a few lonely plants to their wild state. She reached out and rubbed a thin, spiky leaf between her fingers, crushing a faintly fragrant oil from it.

“Any chance of visiting the other places?” she asked. “Like Pareg?”

“I think it would distress you.”

She had a point. It was sometimes better not to remind herself of things she couldn't change.

I can't do a frigging thing about Earth, either.

She'd accepted there were limits to her own responsibility and powers. It might have been a symptom of being ready to move on at last.

But if I haven't got some imagined crusade, how do I justify my existence—a
c'naatat
existence?

She had no excuses left, and it was her personal wishes, enjoying precious and potentially infinite time, versus what was prudent and necessary.

Nevyan beckoned. “We can come back here later. Let's pay our respects to the senior minister.”

There was a groundcar waiting for them, but Shan preferred to walk so she could look in detail at Jejeno. The last time she'd been here, Minister Rit—widow of Minister Par Paral Ual—had just staged a coup and asked the Eqbas to back it. There were bomb craters that gouged jagged black gaps in the city. Palls of smoke rose from the horizon. She'd watched it all, as detached as a vid viewer, from behind the protection of an Eqbas shield.

Did Ual bargain for this when he invited the wess'har to help his planet?

It was impossible to tell what he might have imagined. Jejeno was spacious. The isenj had opened up spaces—parks, with trees. This was a world that had been literally a coast-to-coast city with nothing left of the natural world, a totally managed environment where survival hung on the extraordinary skill of isenj engineers. But now it had parks.

Shan stood at the huge doors of the government offices and walked through into a reception chamber of polished aquamarine stone. “Nev, do you ever think how different this might have been if it had been the Eqbas who restored this place, and not you?”

“Of course I did,” said Nevyan, taking it literally again, like any wess'har. “That's why I demanded that they left the system and took the Skavu with them right from the start.”

“Well, if you and the isenj can be allies, then I have hope for the whole universe.”

Embarrassingly, Shan found she did. Hope wasn't one of her traits; any optimism she appeared to have was actually a bloody-minded inability to withdraw from a fight. It was a day of sea changes for her.

Minister Faril appeared the same as any other isenj to her, all gem-beaded quills and a piranha-spider face with no distinct eyes to focus on, plus a remarkably human outlook on life that reminded her what
alien
could mean. He seemed genuinely pleased to see Nevyan.

“This is my old friend,
Shan Chail,
” she said, introducing her to Faril. Around them, ussissi—ubiquitous assistants, oddly neutral, still an enigma to Shan—skittered on the marble tiles. “She's just returned from Earth. It's undergoing its own restoration.”

“Ah, but you had diverse species, your own gene bank,” Faril said. He spoke English. He managed to suck in the air and expel it in a bubbling baritone voice, bypassing the need for ussissi interpreters. “Do you realize how fortunate you were, to be able to restore your world, that you actually
saved
this diversity? The gene bank was a very fine thing.” He summoned tea, something the isenj had learned from Eddie, and it turned out to be a herbal infusion that was foul but couldn't kill her. Shan sipped politely. “You have a duplicate.”

“We do,” Shan said. “Because I don't trust my own kind not to destroy Earth all over again.”

“But those who survive will think
differently.
”

The old Shan tapped her on the shoulder and told her that was a load of bollocks, because humans never changed. The Shan who needed to get used to living in a world where good things were not only possible, but even part of the hard-wiring of more truly communally-minded species, told her to listen. “Did you? Are the isenj who survived the ones who can override their instincts?”

“We don't
need
to override them,” said Faril. “Those who are left
want
this.”

How? How could any species like the isenj resist the need to fill every gap again? How could humans?

“Is this an education process?” she asked.

“No, selection. The tendency among citizens in the Northern Assembly was to want restraint, which made us relatively weak against the more expansionist elsewhere. This is…a memory. Our genetic memories predispose us to it. Once we had removed the tainted thinking, the tainted memories, we could live differently. Do you understand our genetic memory?”

Shan suppressed a human shudder at the idea of eradicating deviant thought.
What are you turning into, some kind of wet liberal?
“I understand it, all right,” she said. “I have it.”

“Of course. Nevyan did explain.” Faril seemed perfectly happy. Maybe he was too young to remember the purge first-hand; old isenj didn't have wrinkles and distinguished gray, so it was hard to tell. “We have plans for the other landmasses. There may be Earth species that would adapt to life here.”

Shan tried to take that in. It was usually anathema to introduce non-native species into an ecosystem. It set all her old EnHaz instincts on edge. But there was no true native ecology here except for a few vegetables; everything else was imported. The thought crossed her mind, then wandered back again and didn't show signs of leaving.

“Maybe,” she said.

Oh God, no. Don't set yourself a new cause. Don't build a problem to solve.

She'd see. She'd keep an eye on how things went on Earth, and—

And that was the first paving stone laid, marked
Good Intention.
The wess'har must have done much the same when they colonized Wess'ej, if the modest scattering of zero-growth cities that hid in the landscape could be called
colonization
. Shan put the thought of manageable possibilities out of her head.

Nevyan settled down on one of the stone slab seats in the office. Unlike the rest of the seating it was padded, as if the isenj were used to making an alien guest feel more comfortable. It was a far cry from the war that Aras had fought, and even from recent history. Shan sat down on a slab cross-legged, which was a novelty act for both wess'har and isenj, who couldn't sit that way. And Faril was chatty. It was odd to meet a thoroughly enthusiastic quilled egg on legs that looked as if he could take your head off in one bite. Shan thought she should have been uniquely used to the biological diversity of the universe by now.

She had a little isenj in her, after all.

“I would suggest that you don't worry about
geth-ezz
coming back,” Faril said. He even used the wess'u word for humankind, but gargled the terminal
S
. “We have an alliance. Together, we will be able to keep this system free of invaders. This is how our societies
should
be, stable, cooperative and convivial.”

She almost expected him to quote Targassat next.
Nev must have played a blinder of a PR job.
Shan glanced at her, catching a faint whiff of that powdery contentment scent that told her Nevyan was very okay with the world, and had to chalk that learned skill up to Eddie Michallat. Whether he knew it or not, his influence had led to a kind of peace in the end. It wasn't a minor achievement for a journalist. Shan was instantly proud of him. He deserved a statue.

“I don't think humans will be spacefaring again for a very long time, Minister,” she said. “Tell me how things are going in Pareg.”

It was quite a civilized afternoon, taking tea—of sorts—with an isenj minister without the powder keg of war threatening to ignite at any time. It was almost enjoyable, right up to the time that a ussissi came tap-tapping across the splendidly inlaid floor to give them bad news.

“You'll want to return to F'nar,” said the ussissi. “Eddie is unwell. These may be his final days.”

Ussissi, like wess'har, had never been big on tact. Shan faced up to the first pain of being
c'naatat,
seeing one of her contemporaries overtaking her on the road to the graveyard.

 

F'nar, Nevyan Tan Mestin's home: August 23, 2426.

 

He'd hung on long enough, longer than he ever imagined he could from sheer will, and now Eddie Michallat was the last surviving ordinary human in the Cavanagh system.

Dying…dying wasn't what Eddie expected at all. He was ninety-three, and each time in the recent past that he'd thought death might be a possibility, it had lost some of its formless dread and taken on another aspect. When he lay awake in bed at night, struggling for breath, he'd always wondered:
Is this the last one?
Was this the final illness, the one from which he would never recover? Each time he got better and returned to his daily routine—a little slower, a little more careful of the steep steps cut into the terraced city clinging to the sides of the caldera—his life was a strange blend of relief at seeing another day and a regularly surfacing thought that this was
not
the end. The final illness still had to be faced, and it might not be like the last one at all.

When he'd recovered from a particularly bad chest infection at eighty-six, it was the first time that he'd ever felt a sense of anticlimax.

Did I want to die then?

Was he fed up waiting for the ax to fall, or had he reached a new understanding of it, or did he just dread an end that would be even worse than that?

Now he knew. He'd done all he had to here. There was one last thing left for him to explore.

In the filtered gold light that filled the room, he'd reached the stage where he wasn't entirely sure if he was awake or dozing, and he had to press against the cushion under his hand to be sure he could feel it at all. For a moment he thought he'd slipped away and not noticed the point of death: he panicked to think he might have missed the last thing he had to observe and report upon.

But he was still alive. His breathing settled down again almost independently of him. His body would do as it pleased, which was a fair deal given that he hadn't let it give up while he was waiting for friends to come home all those years.

I had to see them back safely. It's not that I had so much to say, either.

“Eddie?” Shan blocked out the sunlight for a few seconds and then squatted down in front of him. “How are you feeling? Ade wondered if you'd like to go outside. It's a nice warm day.”

“Just outside, on the terrace,” he said. “I don't want to go too far.”

“Come on, then.” She stood up again. “Ade, give me a hand with the chair.”

Eddie didn't know what the wess'her called the mobile chair. He'd picked up an awful lot of wess'u over the last fifty-odd years, but he couldn't speak it, not that double-toned khoomei singer's voice with its choral complexity.
I was doing pretty well to be able to make the sounds at all. Here I am, a bloody Tibetan monk almost.
He really would have loved to have spoken wess'u fluently. The chair moved smoothly down the passage, Ade steering, and into the daylight to settle on the terraced walkway itself.

Eddie remembered his first sight of City of Pearl, of F'nar, and how it took his breath away. It had looked just like
this,
right now. It had never palled.

He loved this city.

“Where's Aras?” he asked. “Is he okay? And Giyadas?”

“They'll be along soon.” Shan sat down cross-legged at his feet and Ade knelt down on one knee next to her, so Eddie could have an uninterrupted view. “He's just getting some strawberries. The little wild ones. Specially for you.”