Judge (37 page)

Nevyan took the influx of waifs and strays in her stride. Her home, a typical warren of passages and chambers, merged with Giyadas's and the place was alive with voices. Eddie sat in the main room by the range, enjoying the warmth and apparently untroubled by the noise of the
jurej've
of the house preparing food and arguing over some minor detail of recipes. They acknowledged Aras and went on with their debate as if he'd only been away for weeks.

Eddie gave him a deeply wrinkled smile. “For a bloke with
c'naatat,
you really haven't changed.”

“I was worried you might be dead by the time we got back.”

“I was a bit worried about that, too. Bit of a bugger, being dead.”

“And Lindsay?”

“She's taken to her room, as they say. I think we came as a shock to each other.” Eddie moved his chair, a device like a scaled down version of the local transports that Ade called
hovercraft
, so that Aras could sit. “Livaor made this for me. Good, isn't it?”

“You can't walk?”

“Not enough to cover a city like this. But I don't need my arse wiped for me yet. I'm planning on dying before I do.” He switched on the link, making the gold stone of the wall shimmer with images. “Shapakti might not be around at the moment. He's very keen on hiking. His kids even visit him here. Funny, that. If humans had someone defect with our sensitive tech, we'd hassle their family the minute they crossed the border.”

“What would you do if you were me, Eddie?”

“How, exactly?”

“All of us can have
c'naatat
removed now. We shouldn't have it anyway, but we do, and I struggle between wanting it gone and wanting to stay as I am, and I'm unclear about my reasons.”

“Motives…”

“Sometimes, they
do
matter.”

“Heretic.”

“As an aid to self-understanding. If I knew what I sought, I would make the right choice.”

“You're looking for advice from me?”

“I am. You have a wide perspective now.”

“You're even older than I am.” Eddie paused. “But now? I regret not living life more fully. More emotional stuff, fewer causes. Family. Kids. Erica and I weren't the best-suited couple ever, but I wish I'd held my relationships together better and had kids when I could have some kind of life with them. It broke my heart to have to send Barry back to Earth, and I asked myself why we had him, knowing it would be inevitable. Why? Because it's what all living creatures do. Mate. Have kids. Care and fret over them. Gaze indulgently on their achievement. Have them take something indefinable into the future for you.”

It was a view, not advice on what he should do. Aras still heeded it, because it was passionate, and given from a position where Eddie could see all the facts.

There was no easy answer; either choice would cause pain for a while. But for the first time in ages, Aras had a clearer idea of what was eating away at him.

“I'll find Shapakti,” he said. “He can show me how to administer the countermeasure to Lindsay.”

 

“It's okay,” said Eddie. “I think you'll be a lot happier.”

Lindsay—awful, alien, lost—huddled in the sleeping alcove and watched Aras. Her expression was impossible to see in that gel face, but Eddie could still read the basic human body language in her that said she was scared and hostile. Aras stood waiting with a device that looked like one of those old gas-operated corkscrews that they had in the National Technology Museum, a neat oval with a needle on the end.

“I'll try to think of it as being dewormed,” she said.

“Like Jon Becken's joke?” Aras asked. He was fascinated with tapeworms, possibly because he had no real idea what one was. The Royal Marine's joke about removing one with the lure of a chocolate bar preyed on his mind, but then maybe you had to have a different outlook on sharing your body space with parasites to appreciate the concern.

“Sort of,” said Eddie. “Lin, you're going home. Home might be fucked in places, but not all of it, and you get to join the chosen few in Australia. Sort of like heaven with alcohol.”

“What did Shan do with David's remains?”

Aras stood waiting as patient as a mountain, transfusion kit held in both hands. “She treated them reverently. They're in an
efte
box that you can take back with you.”

They'd be tiny things, little doll's bones. Eddie found the thought disturbing and wondered how Shan had felt about them for all her veneer of police unshockability. He'd never had the chance before she left to get beyond the “I'm-okay-ness” of losing her child.
No, she didn't lose it, not like Lin did. She got rid of it, she got rid of it herself, and she did it the hardest way possible.
Lin would be going home with a box of remains to a world where she knew few people and those few might not even be alive when she got there.

“Who's left?” she asked, almost reading his mind.

“Right now? Deborah Garrod…Chaz…Sue…I'm sorry, Lin, I don't know if anyone told you that Izzy and Jon got killed, not long after landing. Mission went wrong.”

Intellectually, Eddie knew that it was fresh bad news, but the years had made it hard for him to fully gauge the impact on her. She said nothing. Aras still waited. He looked as if he could wait forever: he could, of course.

“Do it,” she said.

She held out her arm. It didn't matter where Aras injected the plasma, but that was what humans did. It took as long to inject her as it did to infect her.

“Do you want me to stay with you?” Aras said. “It might be some comfort. It could be hours, or even a few days.”

Lindsay, rapidly reverting to the body language and movements of what she had once been, rubbed her arm. “I think it would be easier to have Eddie sit with me. Is that okay, Eddie?”

“'Course it is, doll,” he said. “It's not like I'm going anywhere, is it?”

Aras didn't take offense as far as Eddie could see, but then he never did. Lindsay curled up on the thin mattress in the alcove—how did wess'har ever find those comfortable?—and began shivering within minutes. Aras did stay and watch for an hour or so, expressionless and utterly still, but eventually he left without a word and Eddie was alone with Lindsay again.

“I was scared of this when I got it,” she said, “and now I'm scared because it's going.”

Eddie wasn't sure if it was safe to hold her hand but he maneuvered his chair closer so that she could see him. “Doll, you'll be back on Earth before you know it. You'll be young again but with all the experience and wisdom you've gained. No human ever managed that before. You can live your life in the light of that—don't we all say we wish we'd known then what we know now?”

She seemed to consider it for a while. “It's still a scary place where I'm going. But then everywhere is scary when you're on your own.”

He was going to a scary place soon, too, and nobody could go there with him. He understood. He reached out his hand anyway, and she took it.

F'nar, Mestin's home: three days later.

 

“I thought I'd come and see how you were,” said Shan.

Lindsay, hair straggly with sweat, answered the question pretty eloquently without opening her mouth. She rolled over onto her back and stared up at something Shan couldn't see.

“Okay, you're not feeling too good now,” Shan said. “But if it's any comfort, you look…normal.”

“I feel like hell,” Lindsay said.

“So now you're going to rail at me for forcing this on you.”

“No.”

“I'm sorry I didn't give you a choice. But it was that or fragging you. I'm clearing up. Rayat got me thinking about it. I still hate that shit-house, by the way.”

Lindsay struggled to sit up but Shan didn't offer her a helping hand. Eventually she maneuvered into a position to prop herself on one elbow.

“I won't say I don't trust you,” she said, “but let's say I'm wary.”

“Yeah, and I won't insult you with the cliché that you've served your debt to society. There just comes a point when I'm done, and any further retribution is pointless.”

“Meaning you think I've suffered enough, and you're not sure how to add to it?”

“Not meaning anything, but if I thought that having you dead was the best option, I'd have used a grenade rather than hauled you back here to make you wholly human again.”

Lindsay stared back at Shan for a while as if she was trying to focus. “How do I get home? What the hell do I do next?”

Shan found she trusted her subconscious a little more now. It probably wasn't hers, and might have been the sweetly moderate core of Ade in her, or even Aras's ability to walk away manifesting itself. “I think you know more about the reality of devastation and rebuilding than most. You can have an Eqbas ship and it'll just take you home.”

“In time for
Thetis
making orbit?”

“That too.” Shan had a moment of completely purged anger that felt like nothing she'd ever known before. She found herself reaching into her pocket, unplanned. “Here. If the banking system hasn't totally collapsed by then, here's a kick start.”

She handed Lindsay one of the credited chips she'd loaded up back on Earth.
Just money, that's all. Only a means to an end, and I have my end.
Lindsay looked at it in her palm, lips moving slightly in silence.

“Is this guilt, Shan?”

“The fuck it is. It's to leave you free to do a job. You need a purpose, don't you? I understand that better than anyone. What about picking up where I left off, and keeping an eye on that gene bank?”

“Ah, you're as obsessed with heritage as anyone.”

Shan knew Lindsay resented the shadow she cast. Shit, she'd made sure she'd told her she'd never have the balls that Shan did; the judgment of a woman about to die left a lasting scar, and she'd intended it to be so. But now…now she just wanted Lindsay to get out of her life and do something useful somewhere. The only place for that was Earth.

“We have a duplicate gene bank. It's a little bit more than vanity, sweetheart.” Shan leaned over her. “Just start over. Make different choices.”

“And
you're
granting this gift…”

“And I'm not in your head any longer, am I? So the choice you make is all yours.”

Shan turned to leave her to think about it.
Do I want that choice? What would I do with it?
But if she gave up her
c'naatat
, she'd be back to being middle-aged and out of time, a feeling she recalled all too well, and with nothing to show for it except a long catalog of fascinating experiences unique in human existence and nobody to tell them to.

But that didn't mean it wasn't the right thing to do.

“Lin, now it's gone, what's different?” she asked.

Lindsay raked straggly blond hair back from her face, looking as if she'd had a bad night on the tiles rather than the temporary company of an alien organism. She looked slightly to one side of Shan.

“It's like losing one stereo channel,” she said after a pause. “Or realizing you're totally alone.”

Alone
was an odd choice of words. Shan thought Lindsay would have been glad to get rid of any trace of her; maybe it was someone else's memories she'd got used to having around.

So she had a second chance, like Earth, and that was a better deal than Shan had, in a way: Lindsay had her youth back, and the opportunity to make better choices. It was a benevolent sentence. The only drawback was that Lindsay had to serve it on an Earth in the throes of Eqbas restoration.

 

F'nar, the Exchange of Surplus Things: ten days after return.

 

“I promised you this,” said Shan.

She cut a wedge from the cake, lifted it carefully onto the board, and sliced a bite-sized chunk from it. Ade expected her to put it on the rainbow glass plate and hand it to him; but she held it to his mouth, anxious and half smiling. He hesitated, embarrassed, then accepted it.

Wess'har didn't do weddings, receptions or any kind of formal celebrations. The vaulted hall was packed with them but they watched, bemused, and there was odd silence where humans might have clapped or proposed toasts.

“Yeah, we got there in the end, Boss,” Ade said. He could have made better cake himself, but it was nice of Nevyan to put all her husbands on the job. At least they'd stuck to ingredients that came close to the real thing. “And it's good we don't have to have the first dance or anything.”

Aras helped himself to the cake while the wess'har milled around and sampled it. It was routine for them to leave their surplus food and other produce here and take anything else they needed, no money changing hands or anyone keeping an eye on how much they took, but they had to be told that they should stay and socialize now rather than collect what took their fancy and wander off. Eddie hadn't taught them to party. Ade decided he would make it his pet project.

I'm never leaving home again. I can't stand it. I can't stand the time gap coming back like bad news.

“Human brains aren't made for interstellar distances,” Ade said, wishing he could feel soppy and in love right then, but no amount of understanding how time and distance worked, or how his own extended lifespan meant that time didn't matter, could take away the fact that most of the people he cared about were the ordinary dying sort and he was a long, long way from them. “I hope I'm not ruining this for everyone.”

No,
c'naatat
doesn't make time less relevant. It makes it the most important thing there is.

Aras handed Ade the rest of the cake. The plates were an assortment of wildly colored glass that the residents of F'nar had brought in for the event, everything from plain violet to what Ade could only describe as stained glass windows without leading. He tried to see what a wonderful communal effort this had been by his neighbors to mark an event they knew was important to him but that they didn't understand.

“'Ras, I think you should have a proper wedding too,” Ade said. “I feel like we left you out.”

Aras had been subdued since they'd got back. He always said that losing people never got easier for a
c'naatat
so maybe he was as upset by losing Izzy and Jon as anyone. The unhappy memories of his distant past had seeped into Ade's mind via
oursan,
but there was nothing specific like whether he missed individuals. Genetic memory wasn't a complete record; it was just headline events, impressions, attitudes, the most raw emotions. All Ade could tell was that Aras was unhappy.

“I'm wess'har,” Aras said. “This makes me feel no more neglected than if you didn't leave surplus crops here. The point is whether
you
feel I'm not part of the family because I haven't performed this ritual, or if Shan thinks less of me because I haven't.”

“Of course we don't.”

“There's your answer.”

But Aras hadn't given him all the answers. Wess'har didn't lie, but sometimes they didn't think to tell you all the things you might need to know unless you asked, and they were a culture of askers. Aras had spent more time around humans than his own kind. And he had a fair dose of human in him.

He'll tell me if he's got any problems. I know he would.

Aras ate without enthusiasm, looking around at the crowd. Shan, Nevyan and Giyadas were having a loud conversation in wess'u. Ade still hadn't learned the language well enough to follow every detail, but he got the feeling Shan was sliding into becoming a governing matriarch. She couldn't leave stuff alone even if she wanted to. It was a compulsion, like Eddie said. She felt it was her duty to run the whole bloody universe.

“What's bothering you, mate?” Ade's stomach churned. “That you could be—well, cured?”

Aras looked like he was considering the idea for the first time, although it must have occurred to him a hundred times. “I think it is.”

Ade wasn't in the best state of mind to take on more problems. They'd been through all this crap before, the last time Shapakti had thought he could do it. “Oh, terrific. Go on. Everything else has gone to rat shit and the only thing we have that's in one piece is the three of us, so why not start dismantling that too?”

“Ade—”

“Last time this came up, we did something stupid because you were trying to be the saint and leave so that me and Shan could have normal lives again.
No.
You don't make anyone happier by leaving us. For Chrissakes, stop being a martyr.”

Ade had rebuilt everything in his life time and time again, after every death or crumbled relationship or disappointment. All the shit from his past was erased—or at least numbed—by a daily effort to reinforce normal life; he played happy families. Anything that might destroy that was a threat. He dug in.

“Ade,” said Aras, “did you ever think what
I
might really want?”

He felt it like a slap in the face. “I
always
think about what's best for you, mate, and I was ready to butt out, remember? You love Shan. She was your missus before I came on the scene.”

“And you had feelings for each other before she became my
isan.
Neither fact is relevant.”

“What, then?”

“Possibilities are always unsettling. I need to consider what mine might be.”

Ade wanted to tell him he was a selfish bastard, but then he realized he was reacting to the unsaid; he was assuming Aras would choose to revert to his original genome. He'd always had the choice of killing himself, but he'd never taken it, although Ade had seen him come to the brink once—and that was when Shan was presumed dead, not because he'd had enough of
c'naatat.

Aras liked staying alive. There was the chance that he'd like staying alive forever. Ade decided he'd overreacted and that…well, they could take
c'naatat
out of humans, and Ade was content with that as long as Shan was, and he wanted as long with her as he could get. Finding the love of your life in middle age was too late if the first half had been a wasteland.

“Sorry, mate.” Ade reached up and tugged at Aras's braid. “I'm not at my best at the moment.”

“You grieve. I understand.”

What happened to Ankara? Are the graves still there? Did they let nanites loose there too?

Eddie trundled towards him in his mobile chair and held his glass out for a top-up. “Don't stint on the beer, Ade.”

He could always change the subject at just the right time, Eddie. “You still making this stuff?”

“I can't manage the pressure caps,” said Eddie, holding up a gnarled, arthritic hand. “Nevyan's next-door neighbor makes it for me. They even synthesize the sugar.”

Ade reached for the jug and refilled his glass. Eddie couldn't hold it as steadily as he once did, and so Ade erred on the side of caution by half filling it, cupping his hand around Eddie's until he was sure he had a firm grip.

“So you've been stuck with Rayat for a neighbor for twenty years, eh? Never wanted to gut him?”

“Hard to hate forever.” Eddie beckoned to Aras. “He did do one decent thing in his life, anyway. Look, Shan said I could come to dinner. Got room for me this evening? At my age, you never know if there's going to be a next day.”

Aras began clearing the plates and crumbs, and took over the social arrangements. “Of course. Come every day if you like. It was your house as well.”

The exchange emptied fairly fast. Tomorrow, it would fill up as wess'har brought surplus crops and left them for anyone who wanted them. Somehow, everything got used, nobody took more than their fair share, and everyone was satisfied. It was survival of the most cooperative here. At every level, wess'har looked like they might have a lot in common with humans, and then Ade found every reason why they were fundamentally different.

Shan sat down beside him and slid her arm through his.

“No brawls, then,” she said. “Not a proper reception without a punch-up.”

“Miss being a copper?”

“Sometimes.”

“Fancy old Mart joining the police.”

“He still has to call me ma'am. He's a poxy inspector.”

“I'm going to see if I can pick up the Eqbas ITX link,” Ade said. “Why don't you take Eddie back to our place? I said he could come round for dinner tonight.”

Shan nodded with that look on her face that said she knew he was saying he wanted a bit of time to himself. “If he behaves himself, I won't cook.”

Even after the exchange had emptied, it took Ade a few minutes to steel himself to activate the link and search for views of Earth from the Eqbas orbital sensors. He didn't even have to hack his way in. The channel was open to anyone who wanted to access it.