Judge (21 page)

“These each correspond with ships in the fleet,” said Rajulian's obliging neighbor, Co Beyokti. “Each collection of materials—each ship—recognizes its parts, and only those, and communicates instructions from this
banivrin
only to them. So we have no accidents where parts of other objects merge with each other, and the technology doesn't run wild and start deconstructing cities. Does that make sense to you?”

Rayat's eyes searched for patterns in the shifting colors, and the bioluminescence in his hands, the legacy of his time among the bezeri, flared into wild rainbow sequences. He could speak in light, even if he'd fought hard to keep his vocal abilities during his time underwater; but the lights were random, like someone mimicking an unknown foreign language to try to squeeze meaning from it. Rayat quelled the signals with an effort and looked up into Beyokti's face. His head was cocked completely to the right.

“They told me you could do that,” he said. “But seeing it is quite another matter.”

Rayat had him distracted.
Good.
He could handle the programming sheets any time and not draw attention, then. “It's my party trick. I used to be aquatic, for a while…”

“I think you must be very brave to face that.”

“Drowning isn't so bad after the first few times. It's like going to the
dentist
. You can will yourself not to feel fear or discomfort.”

Beyokti didn't know what a
dentist
was, seeing as he understood no English at all, but drowning had seized his attention anyway. Wess'har loved to hear everyone's stories, something the Eqbas and the Targassati exiles on Wess'ej still had in common. Learning eqbas'u and mastering the overtone—
c'naatat
could do wonders with a human larynx—had been one of Rayat's best decisions. It opened the planet to him, although not quite enough of it.

“You must tell me more,” said Beyokti.

“I will.” Rayat draped a program sheet over one arm.
And I don't even have to lie.
“I've lived here twenty years, and I still don't understand how you do all this. I know the principle, but that's all. It's quite astonishing. How do you input the code changes? With a stylus?”

Beyokti took out a glove that was made of the same transparent, color-shot material. Transparent materials, from the tough and beautiful glass all wess'har used to the slab of gel that formed those extraordinary Eqbas “tea tray” microscopes, were a wess'har obsession. Rayat slipped the glove onto his hand, noting how it reshaped itself from long multijointed spidery fingers to fit his shorter, thicker human hands.

“Here,” said Beyokti. He guided Rayat's hand to a blank area of the sheet. “Trace your finger like so…”

A line of magenta light followed Rayat's fingertip. He touched the tips together, as if using a
virin,
just to see what would happen, and the color changed to a vivid green. For a few seconds he was lost in a childlike finger-painting moment.

“Now tell me what I just did,” he said, smiling. Eqbas seemed fascinated that humans showed their teeth to indicate good humor. It came of living alongside ussissi, whose display of teeth meant anything but a good mood. “I bet I didn't write a coherent program change there, did I?”

“No.” Beyokti trilled, amused. “The template will recognize that as useless data, and won't attempt to incorporate it into any instructions. But the engineers on board a ship currently in ten light-years from here will see a pretty scrawl appear on their redundant code screen. It simply spits out what it can't use, and shows it to the crew in case this is significant.”

It was perfect. Rayat was careful not to sully his faith with the dirty necessities of his job, but there always seemed to be a solution at hand when he most needed one. His pragmatic self told him that he was the one who worked bloody hard to find solutions, not a higher being.

“Where are the programs for the Skavu fleet on Earth?” he asked.

Beyokti led him through the forest of gently swaying sheets. “Here. They don't look any different from the modern fleet, but the ships are much older, and the technology less flexible. But they still work—and we waste nothing.”

“Very commendable,” said Rayat, just managing to stop himself mentioning Targassat. It was hard to offend any wess'har, but it would be a robust debate that he didn't have time for at that moment. “Show me the flagship. If I can't do any harm, may I write something on this for the commander to see?” Then he slipped in the only actual lie he had told in the whole process. “Fourth To Die Kiir. I met him briefly.”

He hadn't, of course. But Beyokti wouldn't check that, not for a long time anyway.

“Certainly.”

“Can I schedule it to be sent?” asked Rayat.

“We update the Skavu fleet in about six days.”

“Ah, that's soon enough.” Rayat let himself smile, thinking that it probably looked like happy recall of meeting the Skavu officer. “Maybe he'll reply. Like a
message in a bottle.
”

Rayat wrote carefully, and Beyokti watched him with as much comprehension as Rayat would have managed faced with a sheet full of kanji.

KIIR, ESGANIKAN HAS INFECTED HERSELF WITH
C'NAATAT
. YOU MUST ASSESS THE RISK. DOCTOR MOHAN RAYAT.

It looked very pretty, in vivid turquoise light that quivered slightly as the sheet flexed. And he hadn't even urged the Skavu to do anything; merely to assess the risk.

There was always the chance that Kiir would do just that, and shrug it off, but from what he'd heard from Shapakti about Skavu and their fanatical views, he doubted it.

“There,” said Rayat. “And you're sure that won't cause a drive shutdown or anything unpleasant?”

“I'm sure. It'll get transferred to the diagnostic screen.”

“It won't get lost?”

“If Skavu engineers follow our procedures, they'll pass it up their command chain. And it's such regular script—they can see it's not random. How I wish I could learn to read it.”

“I'll teach you,” Rayat said. “Now, let's have a pot of tisane at the Exchange of Ideas, and I'll tell you all about my time living with the bezeri.
All
of it.”

Immigrant Reception Center, Shan Frankland's quarters

 

“You know I wouldn't ask a favor of you unless I really needed it, Eddie.”

Shan shut her eyes and waited. Eddie's voice hadn't aged at all: no cracking, no hoarseness, just a measured and confident tone that made you stop and listen. Eddie always sounded as if he knew what he was talking about and that it was the holy truth.

“I'm amazed you've kept the vultures away from you for this long, doll,” he said. “Have you punched one out yet? Hope you wore your gloves…”

“Ade and Mart have been shooting bee cams for target practice. Y'know, calibrating for Earth gravity and air density. Cams are tiny things now. They even use dust tech.”

“How very modern,” he said. “It's obvious, I suppose.”

Twenty-five years, lost in a heartbeat. I hate this. I hate time. I hate being
outside
time.

“I need a real journalist, Eddie,” Shan said. “I won't dress it up. I want to leak something and put the FEU in a corner. It might stop Esganikan bombing the shit out them.”

“No pressure, then.”

“I can't rely on the camera kiddies out here.”

“That's my girl. Never ask a wanker to do a man's job.”

“There was another jobsworth involved with Rayat's orders, and the FEU won't hand her over to Esganikan or even the UN. You can guess the rest. The name's Katya Prachy.”

“P, R, A, C, H, Y?”

“Correct. I need her flushed out—either to show the FEU it's a good idea to play ball, or, worst comes to worst, for a snatch team.”

“So she'll end up dead, won't she? Like the others.”

“Strange as it might seem, that wasn't my doing.”

“I know that. Are you heeding my warning about the FEU making a grab for you?”

“Of course I am.”

“The man himself contacted me to ask if I could give him advice on the wess'har from time to time. The fucking FEU president. I'm sure you can join up the dots.”

“So are you up for it, Eddie, or has Zammett bedazzled you by making you the court anthropologist?”

“You're sure you got the right woman?”

“Esganikan's adamant. Must have come from Rayat. Do you ever have any contact with him?”

“Zero. All I've heard is what I got third-hand from Nevyan, that they've extracted
c'naatat
from him a few times and he survived. I'm amazed he talked after all this time.”

So Eddie didn't know about Esganikan.
Probably.
“Well, can you put a piece together saying Prachy has been named as another bastard who ordered the bombing of Ouzhari, and that serious shit will happen if she's not handed over? I've got her ID holos for you, her biometrics, the lot.”

Eddie paused. “She'd be what, sixty, seventy now?”

“Eighty-odd.”

“Ooh. Extraditing little old ladies for war crimes is always iffy, PR-wise.”

“They were ready to swap her for me.”

“Well, you're getting on for a hundred and fifty…”

“Eddie. Please. I need pressure put on the FEU to give Esganikan what she wants before she starts taking Brussels apart. It's going to be bloody enough as it is without that. You've got the whole BBChan machine, no other hack gets near the story, and it goes without saying that I'll get Esganikan to front up and do the resistance-is-futile interview. And Rayat isn't aware of this yet. Cards close to the chest, mate, okay?”

“I recall warning
you
way back that he was going to be serious trouble,” said Eddie. “Look, I'm not sure people even remember why the Eqbas decided to visit Earth in the first place. Twenty-six, twenty-seven years ago? I think I'll need to remind them.”

“They think it's to teach them to hug more trees.”

“But you realize they'll ask why we bombed the place to start with.”

“Tell them.”

“About
c'naatat?
Jesus—”

“Say it's valuable bacteria. Be vague. Make it sound like some lunatic government project. Like trying to train commandos to walk through walls.”

“That'd be
lying.
That'd be propaganda, not reporting. I still know the difference.”

Shan had never asked him to lie. Eddie's decency was also his biggest flaw, at least when you were trying to get him to do something irregular. “Look, if you say the government thought it was something that gave the user eternal life, it's
true,
and it's also so fucking crazy that the public will nod and file it under
Yet Another Waste of Our Taxes
.”

“I never said I wouldn't do the lying bit. Look, a question for
you,
doll. Not for the record. Does Esganikan really know what she's there for? She was sliding into mission drift even before you set off. Not a good sign in a war.”

Did Eddie know?
No, he'd have told her if he knew about Esganikan's
c'naatat.
He would never sit on anything that dangerous now. “At least she seems to have an exit strategy. That's a big plus.”

“Time will tell. Look, it'll still be dead squid as far as humans are concerned, but Ade and Aras got some great shots of the bodies strewn along the shoreline for me.”

Shan realized she didn't find the short leap from
great shots
to
bodies strewn
at all callous, and wondered why the newscasts weren't running that again now. But it was all so long ago, and humans couldn't even keep the causes of terrestrial wars straight in their heads a week afterwards. They didn't even care much about dead humans who were different from them.

I ought to come clean with him. But where do I start? Am I telling him what he needs for his own good, or dumping on him?

Shan began to frame her confession to Eddie and then swallowed it whole. “Time is of the essence, mate.”

“Pedaling as fast as I can. Keep watching the skies…”

Shan flicked the key and shut down the link.
Isn't that something? I can just call a man a hundred and fifty trillion miles away, right away, and for free.
The corporations would be sniffing around again soon, war or not, trying to find the Eqbas price for technology transfer: ITX, morphing structures and ships, biodegradable metal, contamination remediation nanites…weapons, nice clean minimum residue weapons to fight nice green wars.

A ship that can split up into any number of vessels. Isn't that something?

She could step into one of those right now and go anywhere she wanted.

Yeah, that's something.

And she could call in a favor and have a retired intelligence officer exposed to the world's media, and get her killed, but maybe head off a regional war.

Yes, that was something, too. But in the end, not one damn bit of it mattered. It would all end the same way.

Billions would die, sooner or later, and Earth would be a very changed place.

 

F'nar, Wessej.

 

Barry leaned over Eddie's shoulder and peered at the screen. “What are you doing, Dad?”

“Dusting off my adrenal glands.” Had Barry ever seen this footage? Eddie couldn't remember. “I haven't had a really urgent story in a bloody long time. I'd forgotten how good a deadline felt.”

“What is it?”

“Bodies.” Eddie leaned back to let Barry see the rushes that had been sitting in his archive file for years. It was much more graphic than he remembered, but maybe he was getting soft in his old age. “What effect does that have on you?”

“I can't tell what they are.”

“Dead bezeri. After the bomb on Ouzhari.”

Barry watched the sequence intently. “Oh God. That one's moving. Oh…its lights are still flickering. Horrible.”

“Thanks.” Eddie hit the edit point and marked the section for later. It was tough to get apes to empathize with squid, so he had to use a heavy hand. “Just testing. I just want to be sure that it says
genocide, tragedy, dead aliens
.”

Barry tried to show interest in his father's trade, but he'd grown up in a world without mass media. “Tell me why it's urgent.”

“I'm interfering again. I'm exposing a spook. Don't you just
love
that word? I like it a lot better than
spy.
Anyway, when this breaks, there'll be a big row.”

“Right.” Barry didn't ask any more questions and just watched. Earth was as relevant to him as Mars, somewhere he knew a fair bit about but that wasn't home or even the Promised Land, and didn't hold any memories. “Why are you doing it? Keeping your hand in?”

Eddie was secretly disappointed that Barry didn't find current affairs the most hypnotically addictive subject in the world, but the kid didn't have that hunting instinct.
I fathered a normal human. I was so sure he'd be a hack.
Barry didn't grasp the enormity of Earth's predicament because he'd been a regular visitor to Umeh since he was a baby, and that was local for him.

“It's to help Shan out,” said Eddie. Sod it, Barry was old enough to wrestle with the realities of the job. “The Eqbas went to Earth to sort out the people who authorized the bombing. It's a war crimes thing. And if I name this woman and stir up some trouble, then the FEU might hand her over and avoid having the Eqbas cream Europe a city at a time to find her. Or the loony greens might assassinate her. That would avoid any international nastiness, actually. Maybe they'll oblige.”

Barry frowned. “Is that what a reporter should be doing? Setting people up to get killed?”

That stung, but a fair bit of the job could be seen that way. You didn't spike an uncomfortable story because there might be unhappy consequences for those scrutinized in it. Deliberately aiming to do that was only a few salami slices away from being impartial.

Yes, you
did
spike stories. You did it all the time. You
definitely
did the first time you saw what breaking the
c'naatat
story unleashed.

“It depends. The outcome could be slightly better than if I didn't do it. So wess'har would say I should, and humans would say I shouldn't, because I've set out to make something happen, not report the facts as objectively as I can.”

The look on Barry's face said it all.
It's wrong.
Well, at least his boy had a strong moral anchor, and that was no bad thing.

“Don't you get scared, Dad? Being responsible?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “I do.”

Eddie wondered from time to time what his life might have been like had he gone back to Earth with the Eqbas, but since the landing, he'd been thinking about it all day, every day, and admitted to himself that he regretted it. Not enough to sour the rest of his life, but a little niggle of pain when he thought what might be happening right now in Kamberra, and what he could be doing, and…shit, he'd be in his forties, not staring at seventy.

But going back when your news editor accused you of fabricating the
c'naatat
stories…no, that had been the turning point. That was the moment he rethought his whole existence, even if he didn't realize it at the time.

I'm not like Shan. She let people think she'd fucked up, and didn't give a shit what anyone thought of her, because she thought that the thing she was protecting was more important than her reputation. Me…I did the martyr act. But I cared what they thought of me, all right. I still do.

“I'm going out for a bit,” Barry said, obviously feeling he'd feigned the required period of interest in the item. He held his
virin
out so Eddie could see he was taking comms with him as a routine safety precaution. “I won't go any further than the mesa. Okay?”

“Be home in time for dinner, or your mum
will
go nuts this time.”

What was he worrying about? The worst that could happen to Barry was an accident. There were no drugs, gangs, perverts, murderers or drunk drivers out there. And you really didn't need to lock your doors, unless the wess'har habit of walking in without knocking really bothered you. Privacy was alien to them, but wess'har made great neighbors; they'd trash your planet if you broke the rules, but other than that, the worst he could say about them was that they were tactless and nosy.

That's worth staying for. I love 'em. Now I remember why I'm really still here.

Eddie had all the elements of the story now; the archive of the attack on Ouzhari—nice iconic mushroom cloud shot from a ussissi pilot, he'd forgotten that—and confirmation of Katya Prachy's identity with a bit of life history. Added to a brief but
au point
piece from Esganikan saying that she wanted Prachy or else, and a
no comment
from the FEU supplied by the BBChan bureau on the ground, it said guilty, guilty, guilty.

Why bother, Shan? It's not going to make any difference.

And why did Rayat wait until now to name Prachy? Maybe he didn't. Maybe he grassed her up before the fleet left—which was probably recent as far as the task force is concerned. I keep forgetting Esganikan's been on a different time scale to us.

Eddie got back to editing the death sentence on Katya Prachy. It didn't feel like he was doing that at all; it felt like any other story, one that he weighed and polished.

Eighty, is she? She looks like she's had a stress-free life.

It didn't feel like pulling the trigger until his finger hovered over the Send tab for a few seconds longer than normal.

He hit it anyway.

 

Former hotel restaurant, Immigrant Reception Center: three days to deadline.

 

“Here's how you do it,” said Ade, happy to be useful again. He upended the tumbler and covered the saltshaker. “Spider and glass. It's how the Eqbas took the Northern Assembly government building. Simple.”