Heritage of Flight (42 page)

"Before receiving your pleas,” the trial counsel warned them, “I advise you that any motions to dismiss any charge or to grant other relief should be made at this time."

Yeager and Adams simply shook their heads. “The defense has no motions to be made,” she said. Her husband rose to enter their pleas. She rose with him, clasping his hand in a gesture that Neave thought was instinctive. No doubt, had they been aware of it, they would have deprived themselves of its comfort.

"The accused, Raiford Adams..."

"And Pauli Yeager...” her voice finally husked and trembled, and Adams squeezed her fingers.

"To all specifications and charges, we plead guilty."

There was no statute of limitations on genocide, so that line of argument was out. With as much of a shrug as the impassive TC could manage, he looked at Neave.
It's in your hands now.

Neave looked down. On his monitor, the proper words, the ancient words, glowed, reminding him of his role.
Why must you do this?
He had demanded that, and they had answered, until they were all hoarse and the question began to imply,
Why do you force me to judge you?

"I'm tired,” Rafe had told him. “It will be good to rest."

"You have pleaded guilty,” Neave stated as impressively as he could. His voice echoed in the room, barren of all decoration except the green and blue sigil of Earth, emblazoned on a field of stars. Despite the white noise generators, he heard muffled footsteps and voices outside the sealed, guarded doors.

"By so doing, you have admitted every act or omission charged and every element of that offense. Your plea subjects you to a finding of guilty without further proof of that offense, in which event you may be sentenced by the court to the maximum punishment authorized for it. You are legally entitled to plead not guilty and place the burden upon the prosecution of proving your guilt of that offense. Your plea will not be accepted unless you understand its meaning and effect. Do you understand?"

Make us prove your guilt. Make us prove what is human and what is not
, he wished them. But they were already, predictably, nodding.

"Yes, sir."

The footsteps outside grew louder, were approaching the room, and the rumble of voices rose to a shout.

Neave raised his voice to be heard over the uproar. If this went on, he would instruct the door guards to silence the corridor. “Understanding this, do you persist in your plea of guilty?"

"Yes, sir.” He could barely hear their reply over the cheers outside. Dammit, they deserved better than to have a riot outside. He just hoped that it was a riot, and not a mob. “I want that noise shut down,” he instructed the guards acidly. “If it means putting half the crew on report, do it."

Instead of the impassive “yes, sir,” he expected, he heard one of the guards erupt into a wild yell. An instant later, the doors burst open. The officers seated on the bench with him rose, outraged, as five men and women in grimy flightsuits rushed down the hall.

"What is it?” Neave had to ask.

"Their team made it across the ocean,” one of the guards yelled, jubilant. “And they found moths!"

A military man might have arrested the whole jubilant, unruly lot of them for contempt of court, or any number of other charges. The TC was already on his feet, shouting something about “outrage."

Yeager and Adams had sunk back into their chairs. Their faces were flushed; for an instant, their huge, incredulous smiles gave Neave a vivid picture of two young, reckless, and—in their way—innocent officers who had spent youth, innocence, and even human decency out here in the No Man's World. Then their smiles faded, and they wept.

Rafe hugged Pauli close and drew her toward the ramp that led to the open sky where several children banked and swooped in victory rolls. In a community this size, of course, the news could have spread at the speed of light; somehow, Neave could not blame the survey team for spreading the news that a colony of native Cynthians survived. A cheer went up as Yeager and Adams walked down the ramp, blinking through their tears, their steps as uncertain as any invalid's.

Neave drew close, eager to overhear anything they might say.

They shook their heads as they watched the settlers laugh, hug one another, and cheer. Then, as always, they turned to one another. Neave's shadow fell across their path, and Rafe turned to look at him.

"You understand, of course,” Pauli Yeager said.

He nodded. “Of course. This doesn't change anything."

Yeager almost smiled. “I thought that we could trust you to see it that way. Good enough."

"At least they're happy,” she looked out to see a tall woman with cropped dark hair swung into a joyous dance by a taller, blond man—Halgerd, his face transfigured by a grin. Rafe pointed at the sky, and Pauli looked up, her eyes following a small, thin boy whose victory rolls were the most flamboyant. “I'm glad for them. Their skies won't be empty."

"There was a while there,” Rafe explained, “when we couldn't bear to look up. Then we saw the kids copying us, and we realized that our children might grow up with their eyes fixed on the mud, not the stars. But it was hard."

"It still is,” said Pauli Yeager. “Commissioner, the fact that your people found living Cynthians is wonderful, but it doesn't make up for our having killed the ones on this continent. You don't have to succeed to be ... what we are. That's the law. We thought we were killing all of them. We tried to.” Her face twisted then, like a much younger, gentler woman's, and she hid it against her husband's shoulder. “But, O God, I'm glad we failed."

Rafe strode toward the survey team. The newcomers to Cynthia were tired, muddy, but their grins—the last time he'd seen a grin like that was after the first time his son Serge had grounded his flier without sliding two meters on his backside to do it.
Do they really think this changes things for us?
he wondered as one of the young men flung an arm about his shoulder.

"I've got the tapes of the last ... contact,” he said. “I assume you'll want to communicate with the Cynthians on the southern continent. Let me get the tapes, and I'll see what else I remember."

A flourish of fair hair, a slim, upright figure flickered across his awareness, and, for a sickening moment, he thought it was Alicia Pryor before the anti-agathics betrayed her to sickness and age. “Commissioner!” Damn. The von Bulow woman again. Her resemblance to the dead physician—that was another good reason to hate her guts; her conduct with Thorn had been the first.

"Yes?” Give Neave that, he barely raised an eyebrow at the Secess’ tone.

"These two ... officers are under arrest. A person in the status of arrest cannot be required to perform his full military duty, and if he is placed—by the authority who placed him in arrest or by superior authority—on duty inconsistent with such status his arrest is thereby terminated."

Neave achieved a mild glare. “Thank you,” he said blandly.

"For God's sake!” Pauli spat. “You've got a chance to meet an intelligent, friendly alien race, and you want to play this by the book? Who knows more about the Cynthians than the man who made the first contact?” She flushed, and her voice trailed off awkwardly.

"We aren't asking to take command,” Rafe put in quickly. “Just to serve in an advisory capacity. That doesn't have to be ‘military duty,’ is it, Commissioner?"

Taking Neave's look of relief for consent, “Come on,” Rafe repeated. “Let's dust off those tapes."

As no one had had the heart to do for many years, he darkened a dome's wall. Once again, the great swooping Cynthian elders Pauli had called Uriel and Ariel darted across the night sky, whorls and comets gleaming along their wings, the scales of their bodies shimmering and the eerie glow of their compound eyes catching the light of both moons.

"We can't hear them ‘speak,'” Rafe had long since deteriorated into lecture mode. “But the computer breaks the frequencies down into the analogical constructions typical of their thought processes..."

He could feel eyes on his back.
How could you kill creatures this beautiful?

How? Deliberately Rafe skipped forward to the mercifully brief footage of the hatching towers, arrayed across the world's magnetic lines, and the one or two shots of the meter-long larvae they had called “eaters.” He heard Pauli gasp, and himself gagged at his memories: Borodin falling into a field that teemed with the larvae; Pauli's “I hope he died before he hit the ground"; the awful stink of acid and ozone as they trained their blasters on creatures they had only begun to realize would metamorphose into winged splendor ... a
shot of a young adult, wings unnaturally bright from the pigments we gave them; the last elder dying once they answered his question “Why?"

"Shut it
down
, Rafe,” Pauli muttered desperately

He brought the lights up and stared bleakly about the crowded room.

"Those are Cynthians,” he said. “Tell me, what did you see?"

"Well, sir,” said the senior man of the survey team—about Lohr's age, Rafe judged, “we crossed the ocean and did some tests. Your man Halgerd ought to be really proud; the composites he's been working out for his gliders would definitely survive the storms we ran into. We picked up definite seismic activity, one or two dormant volcanoes, and a number of extinct ones. Apparently there's a chain of them. Well, in one of the largest caldera...

"We were getting readings on infrared. Life readings. So we dived to check..."

And saw the wings, the gleaming wings, Rafe thought. The catch of breath, the wonder, the ache at the back of the throat at all that beauty ...
at least some are still alive! I hope they prosper
.

"They didn't seem to have any fear of our craft, Captain,” came a reply to Neave's question.

"No, they never did fear ... except their own children,” Pauli muttered.

Winged, beautiful, and you killed them. How could you bring yourself to kill them?
Neave, his mind full of the glory that they had thought—and thought wrongfully—had existed only on tape.

"You have no idea just how
big
this crater was. Down below was a sort of lava flat, but the crater itself was ... it was carpeted with ground scrub like you have here, but wilder, lusher. We saw some of those towers like you showed us."

Hatching season, Rafe thought. The pale, fragile towers would split as the larvae woke to whatever ravenous instinct passed for awareness in them, and they ate. He shuddered, and realized that Neave was watching him. Carefully he drew himself erect and still.

"The tapes,” he husked. “Take them. If I can help you, don't hesitate to let me know. I'm not going anywhere."

For the first time since she broke her leg, Pauli had consented to swallow a sedative. Rafe sat by their bed until she fell into uneasy sleep, then left the darkened room to look in on their children. One decent thing about house arrest: they had left them Serge and ‘Cilla to care for.

But how long could that continue? Rafe stared down at his children. They were fearful now, afraid as he had once sworn no Cynthian child must ever be. Though years ago Serge had demanded the dignity of his own tiny room, tonight he and his younger sister huddled close together. Rafe bent over them, straightening their covers, easing twisted arms and legs that might ache tomorrow if he didn't move them now. ‘Cilla whimpered a little, then sighed into peaceful dreams.

Two children were a heavy burden to lay on Lohr and Ayelet; perhaps David ben Yehuda ... but if David too were sentenced ... Rafe tried to ward off panic by thinking. Who would take the children? Thorn, perhaps: if all went well, in his grief for Alicia, he might turn toward a woman who had wanted him for years. It didn't matter. There were many children on Cynthia who had no parents. Lohr, for example: though these days he called himself ben Yehuda.

The settlers would look after Serge and little ‘Cilla. It might be better that way. Others would be coming: farmers, refugees, scientists, teachers. What sort of life would his children have if the newcomers learned their parents had been the genocides who had tried to wipe out the native culture? No: the nights when Rafe could wander into his children's rooms just to observe them were fast running out.

The thought made him feel old and tired. Life on Cynthia aged a person. Hard as it seemed, those glossy young lawyers Neave had assigned him and Pauli were about their age; yet they were unlined, unscarred ... innocent. Rafe chuckled sardonically.

A low, desperate cry made him whirl and run back toward the room he and Pauli shared. Like their children, she had twisted herself into a tight knot of fear, almost a fetal ball. He laid a hand on his wife's shoulder.

"Pauli, Pauli, come out of it,” he murmured. Unaccustomed as she was to sedatives, she must be reacting to this one. Shadows still underlay her eyes; the sedative had brought her unconsciousness, but no rest.

She moaned and curled herself even tighter, rejecting the waking world. “No,” she whimpered. “Don't ... don't want to face them ... it's cracking ... oh, God, they're going to break free!"

Her cry woke her, and she hurled herself into a seated position. For a moment her eyes were blank with terror. Then they focused on Rafe. Warmth and sanity returned to them.

He laid fingers on his lips, stepped to the door, and listened. No, Serge and ‘Cilla hadn't been disturbed by their mother's nightmare. Reassured, he sat on the edge of the bed and held out his arms. She threw herself into them and clung to him as he wiped her forehead and eyes, then stroked the sweat-damp short curls—beginning to gray now—at the nape of her neck back into some order.