Judge

  “You told her to go.”

  “I know. I just feel I should have said something.”

  “Like goodbye.”

  “Yes.”

  Ade wondered what had softened Shan’s attitude. Maybe she’d run out of anger. Digging up the kid’s body must have put a dent in her. “You did the right thing.”

  “No point de-c’naatating someone just to slot them.”

  “And what about us?”

  “What?”

  “I know what you’re like.” It was just a casual comment, nothing more. “I know you feel guilty keeping it now that we can remove the bloody thing.”

  Shan gave him one of her long, slow looks, unblinking, possibly because it was a subject she didn’t want to discuss even in front of her closest friends. “We had a way of getting rid of it before. It was just a bit more emphatic.”

  “Okay, so now it’s easier, and I bet that makes you think you ought to take the option.”

  “Do you? Do you want to go back to the way you were?”

  Ade thought of all the things he knew and could now do that he hadn’t been able to do before; it wasn’t just invulnerability. In fact, apart from a fall he’d had while rock-climbing that otherwise would have killed him, he hadn’t had the parasite long enough to feel that he was pretty well immortal. It hadn’t sunk in. What had sunk in was that he knew, absolutely knew, what Shan felt for him from right inside her head, and that was the most precious thing he could imagine: it was a certainty that no other man had ever had, except Aras. Ade valued it more than he could have imagined.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t. I really don’t. It’s given me more time and I want that time. But that isn’t the only issue, is it?”

  “No, it’s not. I hate that bastard Rayat being right, but he asked why we weren’t going for the removal option, and I admit that it’s been eating at me.”

  Ade went on slapping the bread on the hot plate to cook, wondering if he was selfish to hang on to this privileged life when too many of his mates were dead. Eventually there was a rapping at the door, and Eddie used his powered seat like a battering ram to push it open, followed by Giyadas.

  “No Aras?” he asked.

  “I think he’s in Baral.” Shan moved seats to make room for him at the table. “He’ll probably get back while we’re eating.”

  “Ah, your dinner is in the dog…”

  “Lin’s gone.”

  “I guessed as much.” Eddie, a painful frail reminder of the mortality that Ade had dodged, gave him a sympathetic look. “I think we said our goodbyes anyway. You have to stop sobbing on each other’s shoulders sooner or later.”

  “Took me several attempts to take my leave of the lads,” Ade said quietly. “I understand.”

  They ate with Eddie most nights now. It seemed rude to want time to themselves when they had an infinite amount of it and he didn’t. He ate slowly and with difficulty, helped by Giyadas tonight. Ade and Aras both tried to make meals that could be eaten easily with a fork rather than watch him struggle with arthritic and increasingly shaky hands. Ade sliced the flat breads into chunks to make it easier to mop up the stew.

  “It’s okay, Ade,” Eddie said, not looking up from his plate. “I know I’m a senile old bastard. It’s fine to acknowledge it.”

  Shan filled his beer glass. “You could just as easily say that you did bloody well to make ninety, and your liver deserves a medal for endurance.”

  Eddie chuckled. “Yes, I thought the thing wouldn’t see seventy.”

  “So when are they going to do a Michallat lifetime achievement show, then?”

  “I think I’m past that. I’m into obituary country.”

  At least he could joke about it, and that was something. Eddie had never been the self-pitying kind. Ade did what he always did, and tried to keep everyone’s morale high, and that meant jokes, lurid stories and recollections delivered in that tone of fixed cheerfulness that didn’t give anyone a chance to slip into reflection. Giyadas and Nevyan just listened.

  Eddie was playing the game too. He never let on what he was feeling, not deliberately anyway. They finished the meal, still with no sign of Aras and no call from him, and went to sit on the terrace at the back of the house, the one that overlooked the desert. The other overlooked the city. Aras had chosen a bloody good spot when he excavated the home all those years ago; maybe he hadn’t picked it for the view—it was right on the jagged, left-hand edge of the broken caldera—but it was nice anyway. On a balmy late summer evening like this it was wonderful. It was actually autumn by the F’nar calendar, but it was August by the Earth one, and it was warm, so summer it was in Ade’s imagination.

  At least Eddie could still enjoy his beer. That was something. Shan sat on the broad wall that edged the terrace, arms around her knees, looking out in the direction of the network of supply tunnels that shunted small underground cars from city to city carrying surplus crops and occasionally passengers. She was getting worried about Aras. Ade could tell.

  “It’s so good to have you back,” Eddie said, his chair close up against Ade’s. “I bloody well missed you.”

  Ade rested his arm on Eddie’s. He wanted to hug him, half out of comradeship and half out of regret and pity, but it seemed like an admission to Eddie that Ade thought he didn’t have long to go. “You kept me and Aras sane when we thought Shan was dead. You’ve always been a good friend.”

  “I’m glad you think if me that way.”

  “I always will.”

  “Big word, always. Especially from someone with c’naatat.”

  Shan joined in the storytelling, regaling Eddie with tales of recovering elephants wandering loose on the motorway, and arresting a man who was a serial stealer of women’s earrings while they were wearing them, and only the left ones. It took all sorts. Eddie countered with a roundup of all the awkward places he’d caught politicians trying to avoid his persistent questioning, from hiding in a janitor’s cupboard to getting their kids to tell Eddie that Daddy wasn’t home.

  “I really hated pressuring small kids,” said Eddie. “But I did. A job’s a job. Can’t let the bastards use human shields, can we?”

  “I gave in to that once,” said Shan, looking out over the plain, keeping watch for Aras. “And I never will again.”

  “You mustn’t agonize over c’naatat, Shan.” Nevyan, in that typical wess’har way, changed topics instantly and showed what had really been on her mind while she was apparently listening to the stories. “Rayat made his choice. We didn’t force Lindsay to make the same one, and as urgency is not an issue, you mustn’t feel pressured.”

  “But I do.” Shan was in gut-spilling mood tonight, which wasn’t like her at all. “Targassat, remember? Those with choices must make them.”

  “That applies equally to us,” said Giyadas. “And we have choices in this, too, and haven’t taken them.”

  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.

  22

  We must do what we can in life to tread lightly on worlds, but we must also remember that just as other people have a right to live, from the smallest tem fly to the living system of a planet, so have we. Our lives might not be worth more than others’, but they are worth no less. Be considerate to yourselves. There is no purpose in self-denial for its own sake; only outcomes matter. When your actions do no harm, enjoy them.

  TARGASSAT, on living each day

  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.”