Judge (27 page)

“Shan, can you hear me?”

No, she hadn't. “Yes. Go on.”

“I said that we identify the individuals in the most capable species who can maintain the world when we leave. It's normally the first step. And if there are none, we remove them and allow other species to develop.”

“Not as scorched earth as I thought, then.”

“Only Umeh was that clear-cut, to our knowledge.”

“You must have done a lot of world makeovers in your time, then. If you're at the zero-growth stage, that must be a drain even on your resources.”
Bang goes omnipotence. And I never thought infinite mercy was on the menu from the start. Bye-bye, God.
“But you've still got the main Eqbas fleet on its way. Just tell me they haven't started defense cuts back home.”

Esganikan gestured to the pilot to land, holding her hand flat and lowering it like ordering a dog to sit. “No, there are still six ships in transit. I expect to leave a more sustainable situation here for them to take over.”

“And how long is Eqbas Vorhi prepared to stay?”

“I won't speak to the matriarchs in Surang until I see how the next year goes. The outcome for Earth is as much in the hands of humans as it is in mine.”

It was one of those platitudes that was true and probably not believed; humans always needed to think Mum and Dad would be there to run to and make things all better. When Shan realized she did too, only on a far bigger scale, she finally felt herself ripped from her moorings. She'd always known what to do, rock-solid, her core of right and wrong as fixed as a navigation beacon, and humans had been the playground bullies in a universe where the smaller kids were just victims and someone grown-up was ultimately out there to break it up and punish the wrong-doers. But animals did almost all the bad things that humans did—rape, war, child neglect—and the grown-up aliens did their bad stuff too, and couldn't always control the kids or get things right.

All animals really are equal, and I don't like it. Shapakti said I wanted humans to be the only bad guys around. I think I do. It gives me a bit of hope that there are galactic grown-ups out there.

“Okay,” Shan said. She suddenly felt physically smaller. “Let's think of this as assertive enabling, then.”

It was liberation, or disappointment on a scale that crushed souls, and she could choose which if only she knew.

The ship landed with barely a vibration as it settled onto the bare earth on the outskirts of the town. The port bulkhead opened and extruded a ramp, letting in the real world and a gust of hot air.

“I'm so glad you came,” said Deborah Garrod, face illuminated with a certainty that Shan had just lost. “This is the leader of the town council, Mo Ammad. We're so sorry about Izzy and Jon. How's Ade coping?”

There was no lecture on morality or any mention of the circumstances. “You know Ade,” she said. “He's solid.”

Shan didn't ask if Mo was short for
Mohan.
It would have rattled her at a time when she'd had enough rattling. Ammad greeted Aitassi without turning a hair, squatting at the knee to meet her gaze at eye level rather than looming over her, and Shan took a shine to him right away.

He looked like any other fifty-something dark-haired bloke and not like a religious nutter at all, and he held out his hand.
That saves me worrying if I'm breaking some religious rule on shaking hands. Decent of him.
She'd worn gloves again. Nobody seemed to comment on that.

“What does it do to the liter?” Mo asked, looking back at the Eqbas shuttle.

“I don't even know where they stick the fuel,” she said. “Weirdest thing you ever saw. You should try it.”

“That'd be something to tell the kids. No security crawling all over you, I notice.”

“There would be, if we told them where and when we were moving.”

“You used to be a cop.”

“I did. I think I still am.”

“A ride in the squad car, eh? They'll love it.”

“My treat.”

It was a spontaneous offer and Shan didn't ask Esganikan.
Hearts and minds, remember?.
They headed towards the town in a dusty farm vehicle that brought back memories of her first contact with Constantine:
Sam.
Sam, that was his name, and he was probably here now, the man who collected her from the
Thetis
shuttle in her biohaz suit and took her to an underground city with a completely incongruous Norman-style church built at its heart. From humbled amazement to planning an assassination took her fewer than three years.

And you knew then that you'd never be able to come back home, in any real sense of the word.

“I admire your ability to keep uprooting yourself, Deborah,” Shan said, trying hard to be sociable. “There's a lot to be said for carrying your sense of belonging around with you.”

The Constantine colonists had coped with Bezer'ej—thinner air, higher gravity—and brief confinement on the Wess'ej island of Mar'an'cas, a cold wet rock. Earth, even during an Australian summer, seemed to be just another challenge they took in their stride.

Deborah nodded. “If you can do it once, you can do it as many times as you have to.”

“Commander, we didn't know what food would be safe for Eqbas,” Mo said, half turning his head from the driving seat. “Biochemistry and all that. But at least you know none of it will be animal products.”

Esganikan was exceptionally still for a moment. Something made her nervous; it might have been Mo's driving, or it might have been the realization that she could eat anything now that she was
c'naatat.
“Wess'har have eaten some terrestrial crops without harm,” she said, surprisingly gracious. “I'll regard it as an experiment.”

The town looked like a cluster of enclosed shopping malls that had settled several meters after an earthquake. Inside, it was a lot cooler and the filtered light fell on an impressively green, leafy landscape where the buildings seemed to be drowning in vegetation. The Umeh Station biodome in Jejeno was probably built with similar technology; it was sobering to see how it had developed here in what was—Shan had to pause and count—an intervening fifty years or more.

A utilitarian-looking but rather short tower was the most striking landmark. It was a minaret.

“There's a lot more underground,” Mo said. “But we need light, being the delicate flowers that we are. Deborah says the wess'har could pipe sunlight into Constantine. That must have been quite a sight.”

I didn't even record any images. It's gone forever. Do I even have any pictures of Jon and Izzy? God, the first time I met him, I bollocked him for setting off the defense grid. Poor sod.

“It was,” Shan said, wishing for temporary amnesia. “It really was.”

She didn't ask where the Christians gathered. She had no idea if a church was a contentious issue here or not. There were plenty of places on the Earth she'd left where it would have been, and enough of others where a mosque would have been unwelcome too. Wars left very deep divisions that even the shift in global power didn't heal. But this place gave every impression of being a regular town where the inhabitants—watching carefully, inevitably curious about real live alien visitors—just had a few more headscarves than usual. It could have been any city in Europe.

“Do you need a police force here?” Shan asked, smiling as best she could and waving to some fascinated small boys leaning over a wall that was one big flowerbed. They reached out to pat Aitassi like a dog, and Shan braced for the screams, but the ussissi just accepted it. Everyone seemed to be in a tolerant mood today. “Even traffic cops?”

“Why, are you looking for work, Superintendent?”

She'd once asked Sam, her guide to Constantine, if there was crime in the colony. “Just curious. Always am.”

“Oh, we have cops, all right. Nobody's perfect.” Mo kept looking at Esganikan, who seemed very interested in the kids. Shan could almost see her evaluating their long-term potential as reliable curators. “But we don't have anyone holding secret barbecues, which is probably more of an indicator of our ability to live what we believe.”

“Not even grilling soy links?”

“Nah, the bloody things fall through the grid.”

Yes, Shan could do business with Mo Ammad.

In the town hall, a small group of men and women waited for them in a committee room that had a whiff of fresh paint and cinnamon. They'd laid out a good spread of what Ade called
small eats
that would have been serious currency for the marines on Wess'ej. Shan had to suppress a reflex to grab a bag of treats to take back for their entertainment. She'd already spotted something that Qureshi would like before reality crashed in and reminded her that Izzy was dead.

Esganikan examined slices of mango with an expression that said the scent was all too familiar, but tried it anyway.
Go on, you crafty cow. You know you could eat it even if it was strychnine.
Esganikan seemed to be surprised by the flavor.

“I intend your settlement to be a model for the rest of this planet,” she said suddenly. “There have to be others like you.”

Town councils everywhere were used to hearing that. It meant
pilot project
to them, though. That wasn't what Esganikan had in mind. There would be no fact-finding missions to persuade other authorities what might be done. This would be enforced, one way or another, sooner or later.

One of the women councillors took out a handheld. “Are you asking if there's a network of towns like this?” She tapped a control and then held out the screen so that Esganikan could see it. “Because there are, all over the world. Look. We stay in touch, share ideas, occasionally visit. Very different beliefs, some very diverse populations, not all vegan, but we've all aimed to build minimum-impact, zero-growth communities. Some have been around for a few hundred years.”

“That,” said Esganikan, “is slow progress.”

“She doesn't do charm, folks.” Shan abandoned any pretense of tact and took a sandwich. She was briefly distracted by a wonderful flavor and sensation she'd almost forgotten—avocado, buttery and green. When she'd left F'nar, the prized dwarf avocado tree hadn't fruited. That'd be something to look forward to when she got home. She craned her neck to look at the handheld Esganikan was scrutinizing, and saw a world map with locations picked out on it and a text list of names.

“What makes you different?” Esganikan asked, gazing into the councillor's face.

“In what way?”

“If your community sees the need to live this way, why don't all humans? You all have the same information about the state of the planet.”

“I don't really know,” said the woman. “We just want to…stop doing more harm, I suppose.” She turned to Deborah as if in a plea for backup. “I can't imagine anything worse than that planet in the documentary. The one with nothing but buildings.”

“Umeh,” Shan said.

“Yes, Umeh. If you believe in a deity, you have to respect everything he made. But you don't have religion, do you, Commander?”

“No.” Esganikan seemed enthralled by the discovery, judging by the tilt of her head and her dilated pupils. “But motive is irrelevant to us. We care only what happens, and your aims are the same as ours. That's all that matters.”

“So what can we do that's useful, Commander?” Mo asked.

“Someone will have to take responsibility for the gene bank when we release it. I'll give you ownership in due course.” Esganikan lobbed in the decision like a grenade. “I won't give it to a government until the nature of government changes, and is not influenced by commerce.”

If Shan had ever kidded herself that she had some joint status with Esganikan, or even the basic courtesies due a sidekick, she'd been mistaken. One minute she was changing their entire policy simply by saying that she wanted an Earth where the whole gene bank could be restored, and the next she didn't even get told about the ownership of the bloody thing.

Or that the CO gave herself a shot of
c'naatat.

Shan didn't want to crack the image of a united front, but whatever humans thought, wess'har didn't regard disagreement as a loss of face. It was just discussion, reaching the consensus. She tried to keep her challenge conversational. “Isn't that a lot to expect of lay people?”

“I'll appoint experts in their fields to advise on reintroduction of species,” Esganikan said. “This is to deal with the obsession that groups have with
owning
the bank. It's not theirs to own.”

“You've been following the row over patents on the crops, haven't you? That's why I asked Bari if he'd produce patent-free seeds and distribute them worldwide.”

Shan was now back on her own turf, her last job before Eugenie Perault marooned her on Bezer'ej: EnHaz, environmental hazard enforcement. She knew all about licensing seeds. There hadn't been one legally available patent-free seed variety left for sale when she'd headed for Cavanagh's Star. But she'd brought the gene bank home, with all those non-GM varieties that anyone could grow, save the seed, and grow again, year on year. They could breed for drought resistance, salinity tolerance, anything in the heritage of these vintage crops, all the things that commercial production had taken away.

How could I have forgotten? Fuck you, agricorporations. Fuck you all. This is worth the journey. If Izzy and Jon died for anything, it was things like the right of people to feed themselves. I have to hang on to that. It wasn't in vain.

“The biotech boys will rush to court,” Mo said. “You know what they're like.”

“Commercial law won't count for anything now, and the staple crops aren't their product.” It was a pity the mission hadn't had five years' lead time as planned; they could have arrived with a consignment of seeds and just dumped it on the market.
Never mind.
It would still get done. “The Eqbas don't use lawyers to settle out of court.”