Judge

  Shan just looked at him for a few moments and then went on rearranging the cupboards. “Okay. Fair enough.”

  “Has Lindsay Neville agreed to be treated?”

  “I didn’t give her a choice. She’s getting it either way.” Ade abandoned his meal. Shan sat down beside him and watched him for a while, frowning, stroking his hair. “I didn’t tell her about Izzy and Jon. I’ll do it if you want me to.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Ade said. “Who gives her the…well, cure?”

  “It’s a transfusion. Nevyan can find someone competent.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Aras. “I know how to do that.”

  He’d seen c’naatat take hold of his comrades and even Shan. He knew what it did, the changes and the high temperature and the ravenous appetite while it rebuilt cells to its own taste. But he had no idea what it would be like in reverse. But what would be left of Lindsay Neville? Would it change the way she thought and felt as well?

  A realization crept up on him. He wanted to know for his own peace of mind, to understand fully what he might be turning down. He was almost certain that he would—most of the time.

  But how can any of us justify remaining c’naatat now?

  “Can’t be that big a deal if Shapakti processed Rayat more than once,” said Shan. “Sorry, I’m not being very precise in my language. I’ve got no idea how to describe it.”

  “I’ll talk to Shapakti,” said Aras.

  Shan reached across the table and squeezed his arm. “Thanks. I’ll do it if you want me to, though.”

  “No need,” he said. “I think your time is best spent with Ade, who has had a more unpleasant time.” It would only distress Shan and Ade if he spoke with Shapakti in front of them. “I’ll visit Lindsay. I can see Eddie at the same time. We must make the most of our time with him.”

  Aras walked along the terraces to Nevyan’s home, enjoying the sunset that lit up the polished caldera. It was full of the sounds and smells of family life—clattering glassware, bitter spices, the cacophony of trilling voices—that were little like his own past; Iussan, on the Baral Plain, was in the cold north, underground and echoing. He’d never taken Shan there. It was time he did. Ade would probably enjoy it too, being an arctic warfare specialist from a world that had had little ice.

  F’nar was full of children, or so it seemed to Aras. There were noticeably more sets of twins playing in the alleys, a sure sign of a temporary decline in the population being balanced by a brief burst in the birth rate. Wess’har physiology controlled fertility very precisely.

  Another reason why we can’t really understand the gethes. They might not be able to do this naturally like us, but they can do it artificially—and yet they still want to spread to fill the space available.

  Nevyan took the influx of waifs and strays in her stride. Her home, a typical warren of passages and chambers, merged with Giyadas’s and the place was alive with voices. Eddie sat in the main room by the range, enjoying the warmth and apparently untroubled by the noise of the jurej’ve of the house preparing food and arguing over some minor detail of recipes. They acknowledged Aras and went on with their debate as if he’d only been away for weeks.

  Eddie gave him a deeply wrinkled smile. “For a bloke with c’naatat, you really haven’t changed.”

  “I was worried you might be dead by the time we got back.”

  “I was a bit worried about that, too. Bit of a bugger, being dead.”

  “And Lindsay?”

  “She’s taken to her room, as they say. I think we came as a shock to each other.” Eddie moved his chair, a device like a scaled down version of the local transports that Ade called hovercraft, so that Aras could sit. “Livaor made this for me. Good, isn’t it?”

  “You can’t walk?”

  “Not enough to cover a city like this. But I don’t need my arse wiped for me yet. I’m planning on dying before I do.” He switched on the link, making the gold stone of the wall shimmer with images. “Shapakti might not be around at the moment. He’s very keen on hiking. His kids even visit him here. Funny, that. If humans had someone defect with our sensitive tech, we’d hassle their family the minute they crossed the border.”

  “What would you do if you were me, Eddie?”

  “How, exactly?”

  “All of us can have c’naatat removed now. We shouldn’t have it anyway, but we do, and I struggle between wanting it gone and wanting to stay as I am, and I’m unclear about my reasons.”

  “Motives…”

  “Sometimes, they do matter.”

  “Heretic.”

  “As an aid to self-understanding. If I knew what I sought, I would make the right choice.”

  “You’re looking for advice from me?”

  “I am. You have a wide perspective now.”

  “You’re even older than I am.” Eddie paused. “But now? I regret not living life more fully. More emotional stuff, fewer causes. Family. Kids. Erica and I weren’t the best-suited couple ever, but I wish I’d held my relationships together better and had kids when I could have some kind of life with them. It broke my heart to have to send Barry back to Earth, and I asked myself why we had him, knowing it would be inevitable. Why? Because it’s what all living creatures do. Mate. Have kids. Care and fret over them. Gaze indulgently on their achievement. Have them take something indefinable into the future for you.”

  It was a view, not advice on what he should do. Aras still heeded it, because it was passionate, and given from a position where Eddie could see all the facts.

  There was no easy answer; either choice would cause pain for a while. But for the first time in ages, Aras had a clearer idea of what was eating away at him.

  “I’ll find Shapakti,” he said. “He can show me how to administer the countermeasure to Lindsay.”

  “It’s okay,” said Eddie. “I think you’ll be a lot happier.”

  Lindsay—awful, alien, lost—huddled in the sleeping alcove and watched Aras. Her expression was impossible to see in that gel face, but Eddie could still read the basic human body language in her that said she was scared and hostile. Aras stood waiting with a device that looked like one of those old gas-operated corkscrews that they had in the National Technology Museum, a neat oval with a needle on the end.

  “I’ll try to think of it as being dewormed,” she said.

  “Like Jon Becken’s joke?” Aras asked. He was fascinated with tapeworms, possibly because he had no real idea what one was. The Royal Marine’s joke about removing one with the lure of a chocolate bar preyed on his mind, but then maybe you had to have a different outlook on sharing your body space with parasites to appreciate the concern.

  “Sort of,” said Eddie. “Lin, you’re going home. Home might be fucked in places, but not all of it, and you get to join the chosen few in Australia. Sort of like heaven with alcohol.”

  “What did Shan do with David’s remains?”

  Aras stood waiting as patient as a mountain, transfusion kit held in both hands. “She treated them reverently. They’re in an efte box that you can take back with you.”

  They’d be tiny things, little doll’s bones. Eddie found the thought disturbing and wondered how Shan had felt about them for all her veneer of police unshockability. He’d never had the chance before she left to get beyond the “I’m-okay-ness” of losing her child. No, she didn’t lose it, not like Lin did. She got rid of it, she got rid of it herself, and she did it the hardest way possible. Lin would be going home with a box of remains to a world where she knew few people and those few might not even be alive when she got there.

  “Who’s left?” she asked, almost reading his mind.

  “Right now? Deborah Garrod…Chaz…Sue…I’m sorry, Lin, I don’t know if anyone told you that Izzy and Jon got killed, not long after landing. Mission went wrong.”

  Intellectually, Eddie knew that it was fresh bad news, but the years had made it hard for him to fully gauge the impact on her. She said nothing. Aras still waited. He looked
as if he could wait forever: he could, of course.

  “Do it,” she said.

  She held out her arm. It didn’t matter where Aras injected the plasma, but that was what humans did. It took as long to inject her as it did to infect her.

  “Do you want me to stay with you?” Aras said. “It might be some comfort. It could be hours, or even a few days.”

  Lindsay, rapidly reverting to the body language and movements of what she had once been, rubbed her arm. “I think it would be easier to have Eddie sit with me. Is that okay, Eddie?”

  “’Course it is, doll,” he said. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere, is it?”

  Aras didn’t take offense as far as Eddie could see, but then he never did. Lindsay curled up on the thin mattress in the alcove—how did wess’har ever find those comfortable?—and began shivering within minutes. Aras did stay and watch for an hour or so, expressionless and utterly still, but eventually he left without a word and Eddie was alone with Lindsay again.

  “I was scared of this when I got it,” she said, “and now I’m scared because it’s going.”

  Eddie wasn’t sure if it was safe to hold her hand but he maneuvered his chair closer so that she could see him. “Doll, you’ll be back on Earth before you know it. You’ll be young again but with all the experience and wisdom you’ve gained. No human ever managed that before. You can live your life in the light of that—don’t we all say we wish we’d known then what we know now?”

  She seemed to consider it for a while. “It’s still a scary place where I’m going. But then everywhere is scary when you’re on your own.”

  He was going to a scary place soon, too, and nobody could go there with him. He understood. He reached out his hand anyway, and she took it.

  20

  On the path to becoming a man,

  There will be times of suffering,

  There will be times when things are unsaid,

  There will be times of discomfort,

  There will be times of tears.

  Japanese proverb

  F’nar, Mestin’s home: three days later.

  “I thought I’d come and see how you were,” said Shan.

  Lindsay, hair straggly with sweat, answered the question pretty eloquently without opening her mouth. She rolled over onto her back and stared up at something Shan couldn’t see.

  “Okay, you’re not feeling too good now,” Shan said. “But if it’s any comfort, you look…normal.”

  “I feel like hell,” Lindsay said.

  “So now you’re going to rail at me for forcing this on you.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t give you a choice. But it was that or fragging you. I’m clearing up. Rayat got me thinking about it. I still hate that shit-house, by the way.”

  Lindsay struggled to sit up but Shan didn’t offer her a helping hand. Eventually she maneuvered into a position to prop herself on one elbow.

  “I won’t say I don’t trust you,” she said, “but let’s say I’m wary.”

  “Yeah, and I won’t insult you with the cliché that you’ve served your debt to society. There just comes a point when I’m done, and any further retribution is pointless.”

  “Meaning you think I’ve suffered enough, and you’re not sure how to add to it?”

  “Not meaning anything, but if I thought that having you dead was the best option, I’d have used a grenade rather than hauled you back here to make you wholly human again.”

  Lindsay stared back at Shan for a while as if she was trying to focus. “How do I get home? What the hell do I do next?”

  Shan found she trusted her subconscious a little more now. It probably wasn’t hers, and might have been the sweetly moderate core of Ade in her, or even Aras’s ability to walk away manifesting itself. “I think you know more about the reality of devastation and rebuilding than most. You can have an Eqbas ship and it’ll just take you home.”

  “In time for Thetis making orbit?”

  “That too.” Shan had a moment of completely purged anger that felt like nothing she’d ever known before. She found herself reaching into her pocket, unplanned. “Here. If the banking system hasn’t totally collapsed by then, here’s a kick start.”

  She handed Lindsay one of the credited chips she’d loaded up back on Earth. Just money, that’s all. Only a means to an end, and I have my end. Lindsay looked at it in her palm, lips moving slightly in silence.

  “Is this guilt, Shan?”

  “The fuck it is. It’s to leave you free to do a job. You need a purpose, don’t you? I understand that better than anyone. What about picking up where I left off, and keeping an eye on that gene bank?”

  “Ah, you’re as obsessed with heritage as anyone.”

  Shan knew Lindsay resented the shadow she cast. Shit, she’d made sure she’d told her she’d never have the balls that Shan did; the judgment of a woman about to die left a lasting scar, and she’d intended it to be so. But now…now she just wanted Lindsay to get out of her life and do something useful somewhere. The only place for that was Earth.

  “We have a duplicate gene bank. It’s a little bit more than vanity, sweetheart.” Shan leaned over her. “Just start over. Make different choices.”

  “And you’re granting this gift…”

  “And I’m not in your head any longer, am I? So the choice you make is all yours.”

  Shan turned to leave her to think about it. Do I want that choice? What would I do with it? But if she gave up her c’naatat, she’d be back to being middle-aged and out of time, a feeling she recalled all too well, and with nothing to show for it except a long catalog of fascinating experiences unique in human existence and nobody to tell them to.

  But that didn’t mean it wasn’t the right thing to do.

  “Lin, now it’s gone, what’s different?” she asked.

  Lindsay raked straggly blond hair back from her face, looking as if she’d had a bad night on the tiles rather than the temporary company of an alien organism. She looked slightly to one side of Shan.

  “It’s like losing one stereo channel,” she said after a pause. “Or realizing you’re totally alone.”

  Alone was an odd choice of words. Shan thought Lindsay would have been glad to get rid of any trace of her; maybe it was someone else’s memories she’d got used to having around.

  So she had a second chance, like Earth, and that was a better deal than Shan had, in a way: Lindsay had her youth back, and the opportunity to make better choices. It was a benevolent sentence. The only drawback was that Lindsay had to serve it on an Earth in the throes of Eqbas restoration.

  F’nar, the Exchange of Surplus Things: ten days after return.

  “I promised you this,” said Shan.

  She cut a wedge from the cake, lifted it carefully onto the board, and sliced a bite-sized chunk from it. Ade expected her to put it on the rainbow glass plate and hand it to him; but she held it to his mouth, anxious and half smiling. He hesitated, embarrassed, then accepted it.

  Wess’har didn’t do weddings, receptions or any kind of formal celebrations. The vaulted hall was packed with them but they watched, bemused, and there was odd silence where humans might have clapped or proposed toasts.

  “Yeah, we got there in the end, Boss,” Ade said. He could have made better cake himself, but it was nice of Nevyan to put all her husbands on the job. At least they’d stuck to ingredients that came close to the real thing. “And it’s good we don’t have to have the first dance or anything.”

  Aras helped himself to the cake while the wess’har milled around and sampled it. It was routine for them to leave their surplus food and other produce here and take anything else they needed, no money changing hands or anyone keeping an eye on how much they took, but they had to be told that they should stay and socialize now rather than collect what took their fancy and wander off. Eddie hadn’t taught them to party. Ade decided he would make it his pet project.

  I’m never leaving home again. I can?
??t stand it. I can’t stand the time gap coming back like bad news.

  “Human brains aren’t made for interstellar distances,” Ade said, wishing he could feel soppy and in love right then, but no amount of understanding how time and distance worked, or how his own extended lifespan meant that time didn’t matter, could take away the fact that most of the people he cared about were the ordinary dying sort and he was a long, long way from them. “I hope I’m not ruining this for everyone.”

  No, c’naatat doesn’t make time less relevant. It makes it the most important thing there is.

  Aras handed Ade the rest of the cake. The plates were an assortment of wildly colored glass that the residents of F’nar had brought in for the event, everything from plain violet to what Ade could only describe as stained glass windows without leading. He tried to see what a wonderful communal effort this had been by his neighbors to mark an event they knew was important to him but that they didn’t understand.

  “’Ras, I think you should have a proper wedding too,” Ade said. “I feel like we left you out.”

  Aras had been subdued since they’d got back. He always said that losing people never got easier for a c’naatat so maybe he was as upset by losing Izzy and Jon as anyone. The unhappy memories of his distant past had seeped into Ade’s mind via oursan, but there was nothing specific like whether he missed individuals. Genetic memory wasn’t a complete record; it was just headline events, impressions, attitudes, the most raw emotions. All Ade could tell was that Aras was unhappy.

  “I’m wess’har,” Aras said. “This makes me feel no more neglected than if you didn’t leave surplus crops here. The point is whether you feel I’m not part of the family because I haven’t performed this ritual, or if Shan thinks less of me because I haven’t.”

  “Of course we don’t.”

  “There’s your answer.”

  But Aras hadn’t given him all the answers. Wess’har didn’t lie, but sometimes they didn’t think to tell you all the things you might need to know unless you asked, and they were a culture of askers. Aras had spent more time around humans than his own kind. And he had a fair dose of human in him.