Judge (15 page)

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.

“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.

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.”

Humans.
Lindsay, a translucent biped who was more like a cartoon pillow than a humanoid, reacted to that word with a brief glitter of colored lights. Eddie wondered what she might be left with if all that
c'naatat
had made her suddenly vanish. Would
he
have accepted the bloody thing? If he had—could he have given it up? It was a terrible choice either way, and one he was thankful never to have had to make.

“This is all about the tests on Rayat, isn't it?” Lindsay looked around as if to check who might be within earshot. She seemed to default to human habits forgotten for decades. It told Eddie a lot. “So did he survive? What was left? What did it do to him?”

“He was perfectly healthy each time,” said Giyadas. “I've been in touch with Shapakti, and he says Rayat returns to the state he was in when the organism infected him. Shapakti repeated the infection cycle and it worked consistently every time. He's managed to defeat its defense mechanisms.”

“It's taken so
long.
” Lindsay sounded wounded. “Or has he been sitting on the news?”

“I don't know. But he succeeded, and that means you have choices beyond fragmentation.”

Eddie had to judge Lindsay's reaction by tone. There was no face to show emotions that he could recognize, and the lights told him nothing.
So she can go back to being blond, petite Lindsay Neville. She was quite pretty back then. Does she even remember her own face in the mirror?

“Does Shan know?” Lindsay asked.

“Yes,” said Eddie.

“Is she going to have it removed? Is Ade?”

“I haven't asked her, but remember they don't know yet if it'll work on wess'har.”

But Lindsay doesn't care. She can go home now.

It was the simplest, most animal of thoughts, and it ambushed him again. Lindsay had lived with
c'naatat
for a very long time, much longer than Shan in real everyday terms; even Rayat had carried it for longer. For some reason, Eddie thought of mentioning it as some kind of reassurance but then wondered if she might be offended by mention of such a petty thing as if it were evidence of not being wholly in Shan's overwhelming shadow.

“You've come to send me back, then,” she said. “But I can't leave David here. If I go, he has to come with me. I can't leave him here, all alone. I have to exhume him.”

It seemed suddenly to become her dominant thought. Eddie had a distressing image of her sifting through soil to find a fabric shroud and heartbreakingly tiny bones. He hadn't thought about it before; but that was why she'd scavenged parts of the stained glass headstone from David's grave and taken them to the bezeri settlement underwater. She still needed a physical focus for her grief.

Faced with the crushing reality of a grave 150 trillion miles from home and no hope of returning to visit it, Lindsay was probably doing what many parents would. But restored to normality, wholly human and around thirty years old, would she have another baby in due course, and would she find that a solace or a reminder? It was an awful choice. Once again, it was one Eddie was grateful never to have to make.

But who'll understand her back on Earth, after all she's been, and been through?

“Well, not
send
you back, exactly.” Eddie's tone was set on
soothing.
“Not if you don't want to go, but we need to find out now if Shapakti can do the same with bezeri and return them to normal too. Then they can rebuild their society in the normal way. I mean, it's what they want, isn't it? To be able to breed and spread out, and not worry that
c'naatat
's going to turn them into a plague like the isenj.”

Is that it?

“What do you want me to do, then?”

“We want a bezeri volunteer,” said Giyadas. “Perhaps you might persuade one of them.”

“But what if they don't want to be normal again?” asked Lindsay.

“Do
you
want to?” asked Giyadas. “Do you want to give up the bezeri and wess'har components in you? Did
you
prefer that first life you had?”

“Is this part of a bargain?” Lindsay asked. “I give you a bezeri to play with, and you let me become a human again?”

“There
is
no bargain,” said Giyadas. “Just a question.”

Wess'har didn't go in for those kinds of games. There were never strings attached, but the downside was that there was no bribing or persuading them with an exchange of favors, either. Every action was a separate process carried out for its own purpose. Their reason for offering Lindsay a way home would not be linked in any way to getting the bezeri to cooperate.

It was one of many reasons why humans thought they understood wess'har but didn't. Even their Eqbas relatives seemed not to mesh with them completely. Even after decades living here, Eddie sometimes couldn't fathom them.

“I'll
ask
them,” said Lindsay. Eddie noted that she said
them,
not
the others,
as if she'd started withdrawing into human territory right away. “But I honestly have no idea how they'll react.”

Maybe she remembered them as they were when she infected them all those years ago: the last remnant of their kind, almost all elderly and infirm, waiting to die and too old to repopulate their world. What if that was the state they were restored to? Why would they ever want to do that, if
c'naatat
had made them fit and young again? It was a rotten kind of normality to crave after years of vigor.

Eddie thought of Shan aborting her own child, and had a glimpse of the impossible dilemma of anyone with
c'naatat.
It was an all or nothing kind of thing. Having any
c'naatat
around changed the whole nature of life, and whether you couched it in Deborah Garrod's religious terms of a satanic temptation, or just looked at the basic maths and social implications, it wasn't a boon for anyone or anything. It was a terrible burden.

“I'll ask them,” she said again. “Come back in a week or so.”

Lindsay could go home. Eddie could hear it in her voice, real human relief coupled with desperation in case her hopes were dashed. He felt a strange empty guilt that she'd been here for so long among a tight-knit community, and yet the prospect of being human again and going back to Earth made her react as if she was being rescued.

It was a glimpse of hell: unending existence in a situation you didn't want to be in. Eddie got back into the shuttle and wasn't sure what to say to Giyadas.

“Upsetting, isn't it?” she said.

“I feel like I abandoned her.”

“It was a choice she made, Eddie. She went to a lot of trouble to get infected. She also caused the catastrophe for which she sought to atone.” Giyadas was a wonderful, supportive friend and exceptionally restrained for a wess'har, but wess'har she was, and so her thinking was that once you made your bed then you bloody well had to lie on it. She wasn't being callous. She was simply linking cause and effect, wess'har style, to make Eddie realize that this situation wasn't his fault. “But now she has a solution. She could quite easily have been executed like Josh Garrod and Jonathan Burgh, and then none of this soul-searching would have been necessary.”