Judge (35 page)

He hadn't even had chance to prepare himself for it. He stood staring at the pot of tea for a long time until he became aware of Ade not talking, but making an occasional
ah
sound. Aras turned to look, and Ade had his hand to one side of his face, eyes closed, listening carefully.

“Oh…I'd like that,” he said softly. “I'm sorry that I bothered you. It's not like you can post it. But thanks. I'll try that number too.”

Ade closed the link and sat back, then took a breath and stared at a fixed point on the wall. “Chahal teaches at Army College.” He stood up and sniffed loudly. “That was his missus I was talking to. I'll get the other numbers when I'm feeling a bit more up to it. Sue's retired and Mart's a bloody police inspector. Christ, Shan's going to laugh her arse off at that. Inspector Barencoin of the Yard. Fuck me.”

Aras couldn't even think of mentioning his own news. It was too selfish and potentially cruel; Ade had comforting news to help him buffer the aftermath of the short disastrous time on Earth. It could wait. He finished making the tea, and waited for the sound of Shan's boots on the terrace outside.

It was no time to start making decisions.

First, they had to work out what kind of home they had come back to. Not even stable, studiously traditional Wess'ej was immune to change. And then—

Shan swung open the door and stood there for a moment, looking around. “God, you'd never think Eddie lived a whole married life in here, would you? And guess what. Rayat's back.”

F'nar: upper terraces.

 

Shan didn't look half as surprised as Rayat expected when she opened the door.

“Dr. Rayat,” she said, with just an edge of ice, “how are you?”

She actually stood back to let him in. Rayat felt the temperature drop even further as he walked into the central living area, chilled by a blank stare from Ade. Aras never looked welcoming anyway, but Rayat assumed that he was still persona non grata with all three of them. He reminded himself that they'd missed living out the years that might have dulled the animosity.

No, they still loathed and mistrusted him, and he had neither the years left to him to work on that nor the desire to justify himself.

Shan went back to the table, where she'd spread out a selection of Eddie's meticulous records of the Eqbas occupation, and appeared to be working through them.

“So, what can I do for you?” She didn't look up.

“I'm sorry about Qureshi and Becken. I really am.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn't see any point sliding around trying to avoid you. F'nar's a small place.” Rayat saw Ade turn his back to switch on the ITX, audio set low. Aras simply sat watching Shan. “So, you know Shap and I cleaned out
c'naatat
from the Eqbas.”

“I heard. I'm glad. Been back to Bezer'ej?”

“Once or twice. You heard that Shap worked out how to get the thing out of other species, too?”

Rayat knew Shapakti had left a note for them, but the barely noticeable wobble in Shan's eyeline, just the hint of a double blink, told him that it was either a very sore topic or she didn't know for some reason.

“That's a lot of immortal squid to round up and treat.”

“Well, I just wanted to break the ice so I didn't have to cross the whole bloody caldera to avoid you,” said Rayat. “And, to be honest, I wanted to know if you were planning to remove your own
c'naatat
and Lindsay's so that we can get back to baseline here in terms of potential risk. You're the last left.”

“Oh, yeah. Nice job stoking Kiir into fragging Esganikan, by the way.” Shan closed the screen on the folder she was reading. “That's got to be the record for long-distance spook manipulation.”

“Well, are you?”

“I'm damned if I'm going to be answerable to you.”

“I did it.” Rayat selected his best verbal knife. “You see, Lindsay has this very vivid memory of you stepping out of the airlock, and telling her she'd always hate herself for lacking the courage of conviction that you had. I just wondered how you might now justify
not
removing the thing from all three of you.”

Ade turned slowly and got up, hands on hips, with that expression that turned him from an engagingly self-effacing man into someone who rang all Rayat's alarm bells.

“It's okay, Ade,” Shan said. “It's how he gets his stiffy, seeing how far he can go before I kick the shit out of him again.” She cleared the table and stacked the files on top of a cupboard. “Rayat, I'm a bit too preoccupied with Eddie, and recent losses, and trying to make sense of what I missed in the last twenty-five years to give you any entertainment. Let's have fun catching up some other time, shall we?”

She wouldn't look at him, but as she turned to open the door she couldn't avoid it; and in her usual unblinking stare, there was the slight frown of someone who had been forced to think about something they didn't want to.

Rayat pondered his own reaction as he walked back down the terraces to his home. Yes, he'd wanted to knock that saintly certainty off her face by reminding her that the only possible reason why she and her two lovers were still walking around as
c'naatat
carriers was that she was too swayed by self-interest to be consistent in her stance on it.

I stopped short of reminding her about the abortion. Maybe I'm going soft.

She
was
inconsistent about it. She'd veered from spacing herself and aborting her child to turning a blind eye to Ade and Aras. She had limits to her ruthless principles.

Rayat thought about his own reasons for wanting to be returned to normal, and tried to separate his own weariness with an exceptionally solitary life from the belief—so easy to cling to in doing his job—that
c'naatat
was too disruptive, destabilizing and open to abuse to be allowed to exist.

He didn't know. He also didn't know if he would take this to its logical conclusion and finish off the remaining
c'naatat
carriers himself.

All he knew was that he'd surrendered it, and she hadn't, and motive didn't matter. After a few decades, the wess'har way of thinking began to make sense.

 

Nazel, Bezer'ej

 

The islands didn't look any different from the way they'd been the last time Shan had visited, still as wild and unspoiled as the day she had landed in one of
Thetis
's shuttles. Shan kicked along the shingle with Nevyan, scattering pebbles.
Thetis
was still twenty-five years out from Earth. She thought about the humans on board at times like this.

They're going to get a shock when they get home

“It's not that I don't believe you, Nev.” She remembered her way to the bezeri settlement, which she felt she'd visited so recently. “But I have to see.”

“I didn't think this would be a priority on your return,” said Nevyan.

“Closure. That's all.”

“Have you spoken to Shapakti yet?”

“Haven't had the chance. Still working through my list and trying to walk around the terraces without old neighbors going, ‘
Shan G'san!'
all the time.”

“Then there are things I have to show you.”

Shan thought she'd managed to get lost after all, but when she walked into an overgrown clearing she could see that this was the right place. The wattle-and-daub tree houses had crumbled, leaving fragments like eggshells, but the stone structures still stood largely intact. The bezeri had gone. She wandered around, peering inside. There were no artifacts, just the ruins of homes. The illusion of having been here recently was shattered. She'd last seen the place fifty years ago.

“Is this it?” Shan asked. “Is this what you had to show me?”

“Partly.” Nevyan waited while she inspected all the structures. “They returned to the sea.”

All Shan could think of was that bezeri were harder to track and find underwater than they were on land. With
c'naatat,
it was academic for bezeri, though. They could go anywhere they liked. They could even glide and fly in air if they felt like it. In the early days, they'd tried it all, taking full advantage of
c'naatat
's ability to reshape their anatomy.

Maybe I could fly, too. What's the point, though? What does any
c'naatat
want to be?

“Lin too?”

“No,” said Nevyan. “She's usually around somewhere.”

“She could go home now. She could have gone home years ago if she'd had the transport.”

“She was given the choice, and she declined both.” Nevyan looked as if she'd had enough of the abandoned village and began walking back towards the shuttle, where her ussissi aide Serrimissani waited, and was probably getting impatient. Age hadn't tempered Serrimissani's stroppiness. “Lindsay persuaded the bezeri to be treated, but she thinks not all of them. So we keep an eye on the situation in case the Eqbas return at some time in the future, or even the Skavu. It concerns me.”

Shan felt an answering kick in her gut at the mention of the Skavu. She had her doubts about the Eqbas now that she'd seen that they weren't as wary of
c'naatat
as their cousins, but she was even more conscious of the Skavu and their extreme views. Anyone who looked like zealots compared to wess'har was a concern. Esganikan had given her word that the Skavu would never return to this system and take action against
c'naatat
. But Esganikan was dead, and Shan had no idea what that meant in terms of Eqbas Vorhi's influence on their homeworld, Garan, which was a little too close for Shan's paranoia. If nuking Ouzhari hadn't eradicated
c'naatat
, she had no idea what Skavu might resort to.

And…Kiir. Okay, he was either monstrous or simply beyond human rules of engagement, but she'd shot him, killed him, and he was not unlike her—a creature from another culture seduced into the ideology of wess'har environmentalism, and used to enforce it. When Giyadas had given her the order to kill Esganikan, she didn't question it. She went right ahead with the plan, and would have gone through with it if Kiir hadn't beaten her to it.

Shan shook herself out of that thinking, but mentally filed it under the things that she had to remember to worry about. “So what keeps Lindsay here?”

“She feels she has a duty to the bezeri, as Aras did.”

Shan had never been able to empathize with Lindsay's motives but she could follow them in a mechanistic kind of way, tracking her from one martyred delusion to the next.

“What are their numbers like?”

“Hundreds now. They bred, or at least some of them did.”

“
C'naatat
-free.”

“Those we can locate.”

Shan almost said they were back to square one, but they weren't, and never would be. She'd almost expected Lindsay to be waiting for her. Shan walked away from the settlement, curious—how could the bezeri, the bloody squid supremacists, be talked into giving up their survival advantage?—and went back to the shuttle, Nevyan trailing her.

Paranoia tapped Shan on the shoulder again. It was hard to ignore. “You really think the Eqbas might come back and give you problems?”

“They were angry about Shapakti, but we made it clear that if they wanted the research back they would have to take it by force,” said Nevyan. “It's academic. The tissue samples are gone.”

“And you ordered me to assassinate one of their commanders. How do you think they'd react if they knew that? Act of war?”

“We wouldn't care if they found out, of course, but it never happened, and only outcomes matter.”

If only human politics had been that easy. Shan was slipping back into the moral framework of Wess'ej again, a worldview that she now knew was subtly but significantly different from the Eqbas variety. It felt comforting. She wasn't out of step here.

“Can we swing by Constantine?” she said. “For old time's sake?”

If Lin had gone to ground anywhere, it'd be there, and Shan could probably pinpoint the area to within a few meters. Serrimissani took the shuttle low over the sea and banked to starboard to give Shan a better view of the ocean. The deck was resolutely opaque; the wess'har here hadn't made use of the Eqbas technology that Esganikan had left, and Shan now found it oddly frustrating not to be able to see through the hull. But she could see from the viewplate what Serrimissani was trying to locate. Beneath them, there were the telltale lights of a shoal of bezeri near the surface, watching them much as they always had until the shuttle passed.

Constantine was a carpet of amber and blue-gray foliage. Orange cycadlike trees and patches of bog streaked with shifting mats of vegetation gave Shan a jolt of
home, familiar, been here
. She reached out and tapped a point on the chart that tracked the shuttle's movement on the console.

“Okay, set us down about here, please.”

Serrimissani's eyes seemed permanently narrowed in disapproval. “If you're going looking for Lindsay Neville, she spends her time at the old colony site.”

“Okay,” Shan said. “I'm looking for her.” She turned to Nevyan. “How long has it been like this? Do you stay in touch with her?”

“Ten years. And only occasionally.”

“Do the bezeri still want her around?”

Nevyan had a nervous habit of plucking at the collar of her
dhren.
The garment shaped itself to the wearer's needs anyway, but Nevyan always seemed to be giving it a helping hand. “She was your friend, once. Are you going to pursue her again?”

Shan hadn't got off to the best start with Lindsay when the
Thetis
mission reached Bezer'ej. There was a brief truce in the middle but then it went back to being as bad as it began. “That's not enough of a reason. Aras executed Josh, and they were a damn sight closer than Lin and I ever were.”

“She does no harm, Shan.”

Wess'har justice was sometimes a confusing thing even for Shan, who felt she had the measure of it. The bezeri hadn't killed Lindsay—not that they would have been able to even if they'd tried—but they'd had their opportunity for balance, as wess'har called it, and now the matter seemed to be closed, leaving only the issue of whether Lindsay was a continuing risk. It was a kind of double jeopardy.

She wasn't going anywhere, and humans couldn't get access to Bezer'ej. The only risk was the Eqbas, and even if Lindsay wasn't a host, the organism still lay dormant in the soil on Ouzhari. Not even nuking the place had killed it. There was sod all Shan could do about it.

And nothing I
should
do about it.

Shan knew the terrain well enough to find the place where they'd buried David Neville. The stained glass headstone was still standing, the top broken off where Lindsay had removed pieces of the floral design as a keepsake. It was hard to tell if it was tended or not, because the ground cover of short barbed grass never grew higher. Shan stood over it for a few minutes, wondering what awareness a baby had of being born into an alien environment, then locked down every thought that would flow from that and turned to walk back towards the remains of the colony.

“Do you want to be alone?” Nevyan asked.