She had to be exposed, and stopped. He couldn’t trust her not to be Mohan Rayat. And he couldn’t count on her being Shan Frankland.
St George, Eastside Australia: Eqbas temporary camp.
Aras stood in the blazing heat with the virin cupped in his palms, and stared at the image that had formed within it.
“Is she angry with me?” Eddie’s voice hadn’t changed but his hair was thinner and grayer; his face was deeply lined. Wess’ej, clean and unspoiled, still took its toll on humans with its higher gravity and austere life. “Look, I’ll face it like a man, Aras. Just let me talk to her.”
“She’s…regretful. I would not say angry.”
“Does she understand why I had to stay?”
“Ask her yourself. She’s busy talking to the government here, but she’ll always have time for you.” The virin had a limited field of view but it was clear there was someone else with Eddie. Behind him, Aras could see the shimmering city of F’nar reflecting light like a covering of snow, and a shadow moving. “You’ve been meticulous in cataloguing the progress on Umeh. A little remiss in keeping us updated on your own circumstances, though.”
Eddie shrugged in a way that usually indicated benign embarrassment, as if he felt uncomfortable with praise. When he reached out of the field of view and pulled someone into the frame, Aras understood why.
“I have a family now,” he said. “This is my son, Barry.”
Barry was around fifteen with sharp features and light brown hair. Aras assumed he was the likeness of his mother, a woman Aras hadn’t yet seen.
“Hi, Aras,” said Barry Michallat. Eddie has a son. Even Eddie, solitary and obsessed Eddie, had a child, but Aras didn’t. He should have been happy for Eddie, but all he could feel was shocked betrayal that made absolutely no sense. “I’ve heard all about you. How’s Earth?”
“It might be dying,” said Aras. “Or it might be going through a normal cycle in its life. Either way, life is changing here.”
“But the Eqbas can fix it, right?” Eddie cut in. “Have you seen Umeh? Seriously, have you seen it?”
“I’ve seen your programs, yes.”
“Has anyone on Earth taken any notice?”
“Time will tell.”
“Aras, it’s been just about scoured clean and the population is below one billion. In twenty-five years.”
Ferociously efficient nanites were a standard wess’har method of remediating polluted land and stripping down the detritus of construction. Nanites had reclaimed Ouzhari and the surrounding area after the isenj had been driven from Bezer’ej: nanites had left Constantine pristine again, as if no human colony had ever settled there, and no mission had set up base. But Eqbas nanite technology, ten thousand years removed from that of Wess’ej, seemed to have done much more in the time available.
“Show me the latest images,” said Aras. He hadn’t yet checked all the ITX links from home and what might be available now. It was hard to know where to begin to pick up the threads of his interrupted life after five hundred years of relative stability. “The last I saw were years old.”
“It’ll knock your socks off.” Eddie grinned, but unconvincingly. He fumbled with something in his hand. “Here’s the view south of Jejeno today. Live.”
Aras pressed the virin to accept output from the Wess’ej ITX node. The image stirred no recollection in him, neither from his conscious recollection of the all-encompassing city nor from the more fleeting genetic memory of isenj who had hosted his c’naatat before him. Where there had been tight-packed towers and spires covering every meter of land as far as the horizon, there was now a more open vista with patches of light green vegetation and light yellow cycad-like trees. The sky was clearer; the whole impression was one of a city that had been thinned out. From this altitude and angle—the observation point must have been relatively low in the sky, perhaps a monitoring remote left by the Eqbas—he could see no living rivers of isenj packing the streets and moving in carefully managed traffic streams.
But this was Jejeno, the capital of the Northern Assembly on the Ebj landmass—just one of Umeh’s nations. There were three more island continents. This was not the complete picture.
“Now show me the Maritime Fringe,” he said. “Show me Pareg, Tivskur and Sil.”
It took a few moments for Eddie to patch through the images: Aras didn’t need to see them all, because Tivskur’s coast summed it up. What had been a packed coastline crenellated with ports and inlets, with towering structures right up to the pinkish gray polluted sea—the dying sea—was now completely flattened. It reminded him of Ouzhari after the cobalt-salted neutron devices had incinerated it. It had a velvety uniformity; not a wasteland, but a blank sheet. The buildings were gone, utterly gone without even ruins to show where they’d stood.
Aras had used nanites for clearance on Bezer’ej post-war, and years later when the colony of Constantine was evacuated, so he knew what he was looking at without any prompting from Eddie. The built environment and everything in it—including corpses—had been broken down into their components by nanites. It was bare soil, barren, but clean. Like a new volcanic island erupting from the sea and cooling, it would in time become colonized by…what? The isenj had destroyed everything living that wasn’t of direct use to them, and were eventually forced to manage their climate with brilliant but doomed engineering on a planetary scale. They would import native flora and fauna from the isenj moon of Tasir Var.
There were no isenj in Tivskur, of course. They were all dead.
“So the genome-targeted bioweapons were used,” Aras said at last. Somehow he thought the phrase knock your socks off implied a positive surprise, but this wasn’t. Part of him—and not his inherited isenj memories—took no pleasure in seeing the demise of a people even if they had once tortured him as a prisoner of war, and reviled him as a war criminal; in fact, he regretted the loss of talented engineers who might have had elegant solutions for some of Earth’s problems. “Was it Minister Rit who decided to use them, or Nevyan?”
“Rit,” said Eddie. “Deployed by wess’har craft.”
“Just as they agreed to do.”
“I didn’t say I approved of it, Aras. Just that…well, desperate situations sometimes require extreme solutions.”
Aras wasn’t shocked by the mass slaughter. He was wess’har, and no life-form was more valued or sacred than another; but those with choice and control had more responsibility for exercising it responsibly, and if they didn’t then balancing had to take place.
He’d done that balancing. He’d led the assault on the isenj colony on Bezer’ej centuries before, when he was just a normal wess’har male, because they’d polluted the seas and caused the deaths of bezeri. He would do it again without a second thought. This was the ethos of his species.
But to see that isenj could kill isenj in those numbers…as Rit had said, change could only come if whole lines of genetic memory were wiped out, not just culling for the sake of numbers. Thinking had to change. Isenj were physically hidebound by their genetic memory.
“Tell me,” he said, dragging his gaze away from the virin, “do we now have a population made up almost wholly of the Northern Assembly isenj?”
“I reckon so,” said Eddie. “Ethnic cleansing, by genome.”
Barry was still in shot, looking awkward and bored. He’d grown up in a world where this was normal—but it would not be normal on Earth. Humans were appalled by racism and yet hardwired to seek out and favor their own kind, their closest genetic match.
And wess’har didn’t care. Numbers were what mattered: they just reduced the number of isenj to the level that the global ecology could support. How and who didn’t matter, no more than humans discriminated when they culled numerous animal populations.
“I think humans will find that very hard to understand,” said Aras.
For a moment, he and Eddie looked at each other in silence. It struck him that twenty-five years was too much time to lose in a friendship.
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“Get Shan to give me a call, will you, mate? And Ade.” Eddie put his arm around Barry and gave him a rough paternal hug. “Tell her it’s important. The FEU have been sniffing around, asking me for what they loosely term advice. I think they’re going all out for grabbing c’naatat because that’s one good way of surviving an Eqbas clean-up, isn’t it?”
Aras thought of Mjat, the isenj colony on Bezer’ej that became Constantine, and how he’d destroyed it, c’naatat-infected or not. “It doesn’t always help, and that’s why I was known as the Beast of Mjat…”
“Sorry, mate. Look, warn her, will you? You’ve all got to be bloody careful.”
“It’s not as dangerous as you think,” Aras said. “Shapakti has perfected a technique for removing c’naatat from humans.”
Eddie’s expression was blank for a moment, as if he was waiting on the five-second delay of the relay, but this was point-to-point transmission, and he was simply surprised by the news.
“So now you tell me,” he said.
“Make sure that Nevyan has been told. We can’t rely on Esganikan to keep us informed. Shan is very angry about her silence on the matter.”
“I’ll bet…” said Eddie. “But we’ve been here before, right? It won’t affect you three. So don’t fret about it.”
Aras thought it was interesting that Eddie focused on the impact it might have on his relationship with Shan and Ade. The whole issue of wider human contamination and its countermeasures fell by the wayside. That wasn’t a journalist’s reaction; it was a friend’s.
“I regret missing so much time with you,” Aras said gently. “I’ll return as soon as I possibly can, and then…then we can catch up.”
Eddie compressed his lips for a moment in that expression that often preceded tears. “I’ll try not to die, then,” he said, and forced that laugh again. “Get Shazza to give me a bell, okay? I’ve really missed a good swearing session with the old ratbag.”
After he closed the link, Aras stood in silence contemplating the emptiness of the desert. The sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows from the rocks and hard-baked stumps of trees, every bit as dead and sterile as Tivskur. Life had moved underground. It was like the Constantine colony.
And Eddie has a son.
Aras knew how isolated Eddie had felt and saw the paternal affection he had for Nevyan’s child, Giyadas. Now he had a family. It was good to see your friends’ lives come right in the end.
He has a son.
For that, Aras envied him; no, it was much more than envy. It was jealousy, that ugly human thing, but he was unable to dismiss it.
Eddie had a child, and Aras didn’t.
6
Giyadas Chail, forgive me for contacting you, but I need your advice. The matriarchs of Surang see no need to intervene in the Earth mission, but Mohan Rayat is pursuing an alarming path. There is something you need to know, and that you need to tell Shan Chail. She refuses to listen to Rayat. She will listen to you.
DA SHAPAKTI to Giyadas,
breaching the agreement not to contact
Wess’ej unless invited
Nazel Island, Bezer’ej.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Giyadas asked.
Eddie knew he didn’t, but there was wanting to and having to. He hadn’t seen Lindsay since she was a regular human, a woman with a lot on her conscience and no way out. The least he could do now was give her one bit of good news.
She could go home.
“I am, doll.”
“You’ll be shocked.”
“I’ve done shock.” But he’d never seen a friend turned into another species. Not even Shan, or Ade—they looked like their old selves, except for a little bioluminescence. “I can handle this.”
The biohaz suit felt too gauzy and insubstantial to be proof against the pathogen that now protected the planet from incursions by humans. There was one to stop isenj getting a foothold again too, but the one that mattered to him was the human-specific one, created and put in place here by the wess’har to stop humans returning, not the Eqbas. The biological box of lethal tricks had a long and ancient pedigree and predated human bioweapons by thousands of years. It did him good to remember that sometimes, when he thought humans were unique in their destructive ingenuity.
Eddie trudged up the shore of a rocky island south of Constantine that he’d never seen before, feeling like a beekeeper in a shroud. Biohaz suits were supposed to look macho and spacesuit-like; this was practically a frock. Giyadas walked beside him, needing no suit, with one hand ready to steady him in case he tripped over the loose folds. The suit was built for wess’har, and tall ones at that.
“Did you ever see normal bezeri?” Giyadas asked.
“I saw the lights in the sea,” Eddie said, straining to see some sign of terrestrial squid, as fantastic an idea as any he’d come across in the Cavanagh system. “And I saw the pictures of dead ones. But I never went in the water, no.”
“You’ll find this interesting, then.”
As they moved beyond the beach and into the knee-high heathland foliage, the clearing was visible, and with it the sight of a settlement that looked like a collection of giant wattle-and-daub warbler nests. There were other structures too: some like drystone walling, others built from timber giving the overall impression of an eclectic Bronze or Iron Age village.
A large ITX screen—a sheet of the typical wess’har blue metal—stood in the center of the village.
“Christ,” Eddie said, “are they getting ready to watch football or something? Squid soccer hoolies pissed up on lager. Now that’s got to be worth a feature.”
Giyadas didn’t laugh, but pointed past the screen. It was then that he noticed the huge shapes like glass sculptures lounging in the trees or protruding from the doorways. They were alive with lights.
“Wow.” For the first time he could remember, he didn’t rush to grab a few shots with his bee cam. This wasn’t for any bulletin, because c’naatat bezeri on Bezer’ej had to remain a secret. He waved, helpless. Could they hear him, being glass squid? Of course they could. They lived in air. “Hi, guys!”
“Eddeeeee…the hack!” said one with a rumbling voice like a tuba. They could speak—and they knew who he was. Giyadas visited regularly to check they hadn’t bred out of control, and she must have mentioned him. He wondered how she’d describe him if they’d learned the word hack. “How do you like our modest home?”
What could he say? For once, he had to think hard.
The central building of the village, a semi-submerged roundhouse with a plaster dome, reminded him of other places in the Ceret-Cavanagh-Nir system; the ussissi village, with its painted eggshell roofs, and the domed skylights of the subterranean colony of Constantine.
“It’s pretty damn good,” he said. My God, I’m having a chat with an intelligent immortal land-squid. This is the fucking ultimate journalist moment, but no bloody viewers to stun with it. “You’re way ahead of us apes. It took us quite a few million years to start building things once we got out of water.”
Eddie thought that if he kept talking then he might recognize Lindsay while he scanned the shapes, and slide tactfully into a conversation. He dreaded showing any reaction. There was a polite English core of him that still thought it was bloody rude to stare, even at the extraordinary sight of walking, talking, house-building squid.
He looked around, helpless.
“Eddie!” said a voice. He recognized it. It was completely human except for a slight vibrato in the lower registers. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
Lindsay had no trouble recognizing him even after all these years, but he struggled to match the voice to the shape, and prayed that his shock didn’t show. When she got close enough to peer through the transparent visor, he didn’t recognize her. He’d looked past her just as he looked past one of the bezeri ambling around the village like a glass ghost. She wasn’t even humanoid in shape, just an upright column of bipedal gel studded with shadows like
variations in density. But there was a definite bulbous formation at the top of the column—a head. Eddie struggled to find eyes to focus on.
“Eddie,” she said. “It’s me. Here.”
Had she still been in human form, she’d have been over fifty, and probably looking much older thanks to a hard life of largely manual labor spent outdoors, but he’d have known her from the little unchangeable things that survived the erosion of time.
“Lin?” he said. Oh God. She’s not human anymore.
“It’s okay. You can say it.”
Eddie was a man with a heart who finally let it get the better of him, something he once thought a journalist should never do. He tried to spare her feelings. A knowing grin—professionally manufactured, but probably not enough to fool her completely—spread across his face, and he was damned if it was going to slip.
“There’s something different about you,” he said. “New hairstyle?”
“How are you, Eddie?”
“I’m good.”
Yes, her voice was almost the same, another of c’naatat ’s odd touches. He could see a hole in her throat—more or less—opening and closing. “Long time.”
“I know. I should have visited years ago.”
“But…seeing the rest of them back on Earth got to you, yes?”
He nodded. “It seemed a good point to…I dunno, catch up.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Giyadas and I have some encouraging news. We need to talk about it.”
“Oh, you’re here to soften me up for something.”
“Not exactly. I really wanted to see you anyway, but…remember Shapakti?” Eddie took a breath. Blurting seemed to be the best policy these days. “He’s found a way of getting rid of c’naatat.”
Giyadas intervened. “Let us be precise, Eddie,” she said. “He can remove it consistently from humans. He doesn’t know if it can be done with other species.”