“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.”
Like Ade had always said, Shan really did have the most striking pale gray eyes, and on the rare occasions when emotion had broken down her barriers they had a genuine beauty, an unexpected and almost alien compassion. Maybe Ade saw that when the rest of the world never did, reserved solely for him and Aras, but now she finally seemed willing to drop her guard a little for Eddie.
You know I’m dying, don’t you, doll?
“Do me a favor, Shazza.” It was a nickname he once thought she hated, but she never told him as much. “Can you make sure I get a really good view?”
“What view, mate?”
“Bury me somewhere nice.”
“Eddie, you’re not going yet…”
“You never lied to me, Shan, so don’t start now. Go on. Please.”
The light switched off in her eyes for a moment, that instinctive jerk back to locked-down self-control. Yes, you’re upset. I can see from your reaction that I really am going now. But I know that. It feels different this time. Eddie saw Ade slide his hand discreetly down Shan’s back to steady her.
Look at that. He loves you, Shan. God, I miss Erica.
“Of course I will,” she said at last. “I know a place with a great view. I promise. You can see the whole plain from there.”
“Good.” Eddie had a list. He reminded her every time he saw her now, because he never knew which visit would be the last. “And you know where all my archives are.”
“Check.”
“My stuff to transmit to Barry when he comes out of cryo.”
“Check.”
Yes, Erica…if there’s anything more beyond this, it’ll be so good to see her again. If there’s not…then the missing her will stop at last. Either way…there’s an end in sight.
Shan reached up and laid her hand on his. She wasn’t wearing gloves, and he couldn’t tell if she had that gel coating on, but it didn’t feel like it. She was instinctively careful about accidental contamination now. But it was much harder to infect a human with c’naatat than people thought. Open wounds were the likely vector. Rayat had told him.
Who’d have thought it? Rayat, self-sacrificing patriot. Lindsay, heroine. You never really know people until they’re in the grinder.
“You’re thinking something, Shan,” Eddie said. It really was a lovely balmy day, high white cloud and a warm, almond-fragranced breeze—not flowers, but the scent of a red-and-white striped sluglike creature that lived in the crevices of the walls. Aumul. That was it. “Are you wondering what dying’s going to be like for you?”
“Do you really want to talk about this, Eddie?”
“Not if it upsets you.”
“This isn’t about me. You can talk about anything you like, mate. I just didn’t want to feel I was…”
“Okay.”
“Yes, I think I’m a bit jealous. Is it okay to say that? I have no idea when I’m going to die. I know I can. Nothing’s killed me yet. That’s more unsettling than counting down the clock like I used to.” Her face was still set. She’d switched off the emotion. “I used to have this constant low-level panic about running out of time. Not death so much as not getting things done.”
This was what Eddie wanted. He didn’t need platitudes, attempts to pretend he had years left in him, because he didn’t. He wanted to see the innermost soul of another person again, to hear an absolute truth; he wanted one last good interview. What better than this? Who better than Shan?
She’d been a bloody hard interview the first time.
“How did it feel to stand in that cargo bay and see the airlock doors open, Shan?”
Ade looked down at the terrace floor and changed knees, uncomfortable either emotionally or physically, but uncomfortable. Shan inhaled slowly through her nose and seemed to be making herself look directly into Eddie’s face.
He could see her weighing the morality, as she always did—tell him the truth and maybe distress him, or tell him what would comfort him because a lie now didn’t matter.
Eddie knew what she’d do.
“I’ve never felt fear like it,” she said at last. “And I split into two people, and the one who gives the orders told me to get on with it, because it had to be done. It was the worst pain I can imagine. I couldn’t believe I was going through with it. And all I could think of was that I’d never told Aras that I loved him.”
Her gray stare didn’t waver, but she did blink, just a couple of times.
“Thanks for being honest, doll.”
“And, yes, I broke the law over and over again to protect Helen Marchant’s eco-terrorists.”
“I know…”
“But I never admitted it when you interviewed me when we first landed on Bezer’ej. I never put my hands up to it before, not to anyone, but I’m doing it on the record now. For you.”
She knew him better than he’d thought. “Thanks.”
Eddie heard Giyadas coming. He knew her walk. She bent down over him and stroked his hair just as he used to stroke hers when she was just this funny, clever little alien kid who he adored.
“It’s a lovely day,” she said, suddenly very human. A wess’har would have told him he had run out of time and that he should make the most of the hours or minutes left. “Do you require anything?”
“I’m fine. Just sit where I can see you.” He reached for her hand, but it was so much more effort than it used to be. Giyadas settled on the opposite side to Shan. “I’m glad you’re all here.”
“I don’t know where Aras has got to, Eddie.” Shan shifted position. “Ade, can you see him?”
F’nar was a natural amphitheater. Every part of the city was visible from the upper terraces, right the way down to the pearl-coated natural pillars that marked the entrance. Ade got to his feet and looked over the edge.
Eddie almost told him to be careful, because there was no barrier and a steep drop beneath.
But Ade couldn’t die from a fall.
“Yeah, he’s coming along the walkway by Taorit’s house,” he said. “A couple of minutes, maybe.”
Shan’s expression was unreadable. She squeezed Eddie’s hand harder. “I can stop this, Eddie. I can stop it right now.”
He didn’t quite understand her at first. “Stop what?”
“Just say the word, Eddie. You don’t have to go. I can make it all right, give you as much time as you want.”
Giyadas didn’t react. Ade turned slowly and looked as if he might intervene, but he said nothing. Eddie had always wondered how he might respond. Shan was offering to contaminate him with c’naatat. The prospect made his stomach tighten for a moment, but it was gone as fast as it came.
“No, you don’t really want to do that, doll,” he said. So this was how it felt to have choice of living forever: it didn’t feel miraculous at all. “You were always my bloody hero, the woman who wouldn’t give it away, not for anyone. Don’t ruin my illusion. Don’t give in to that impulse now.”
He held her grip as tightly as he could. She looked at him for a few moments, and her carefully composed expression threatened to crumple.
Save me now, and I still have to go some time. Temporary reprieve, and I’ll still be on my own.
“It’s different for you,” he said. “You’ve got a matching family.”
Shan nodded. “Okay, mate.”
She didn’t mention it again. Aras arrived with a small bowl and held it in front of Eddie at lap level for him to admire a few spoonfuls of brilliant scarlet fruits the size of hazel nuts, studded with pinprick seeds. He could smell them; when he managed to place one in his mou
th, the flavor was so intense at the back of his throat that it almost felt like inhaling acetone. He tried to eat a few more, but the effort was just that little too much for him then. He settled for basking in the warmth.
“Ade,” Shan said softly, thinking Eddie couldn’t hear her, “get Nevyan.”
It might have been minutes; it could even have been an hour, or more.
The sun was a lot brighter now.
“Eddie?”
He knew that wonderful double-toned voice. Giyadas, my little seahorse princess.
“Worst thing you can have, doll. Regrets.”
“Eddie, you have been a second father to me—”
“Eddie?” Was that—Nevyan? Shan?
“Eddie!”
The sun was really very bright indeed now, but it seemed a long way off.
“It’s been amazing being out here,” he said. He should have looked around to try to imprint those sweet faces for his journey, but he didn’t feel he had to now. “Absolutely amazing.”
“Eddie—”
The light was blue-white now, a narrow shaft. Ceret, they said. Not the sun he’d left behind. And that was amazing too.
Yes, it really had been…
Amazing.
23
Yes, of course I’ll do an interview about Eddie Michallat. I got to know him very well in the Cavanagh system. He’s the reason I don’t shoot journalists on sight, and I miss him. I miss him a lot.
Inspector MARTIN BARENCOIN, Australian Federal Police,
responding to a media request for a tribute to
veteran broadcaster Eddie Michallat
F’nar Plain; memorial cairn.
The soil on top of the butte was almost solid rock, and Ade knew how hard it was to excavate any kind of hole because he’d dug Shan’s grave here.
Now she was digging Eddie’s. It was the kind of heavy-handed irony that c’naatat always seemed to create. Ade felt uneasy about the memorial cairn that he’d built out of pearl-coated pebbles to give him somewhere to mourn Shan when he had no body to bury. It still stood intact, looking out from the top of the butte across the plain and the city, its nacre layer slightly thicker from fifty summers of tem fly swarms. Shan had never felt disturbed by it, she said. She could disconnect from her own mortality with surprising ease. But Ade no longer found it a comforting place to be.