Judge (42 page)

“Will you look normal afterwards?”

Aras had been so used to being regarded as exotically beautiful by Shan that he'd forgotten how utterly alien he appeared to his own kind.

My own kind.

“I will,” he said.

Now he could think of his dead comrades with a greater degree of honor. His was a choice they'd never had, so would they have taken it? Of course they would. They chose to die rather than carry on as he did. Whether that made him stronger or more of a coward he didn't know. He lay down on the thin mattress, spread on the floor Baral-style, and stared up into the domed light above him. It was just a matter of inserting the needle into a muscle. He took a careless stab at his thigh and waited.

For the first few hours, Aras felt nothing. He wondered if
c'naatat
had yet again found a way to evade the countermeasure, a trick it had played before in wess'har tissue. But then he began to feel hot and feverish, and memories—truly forgotten memories, in detail he had never experienced before—began roiling in his mind: isenj cities, military barracks on Earth, scenes from high above the land and from beneath the sea, even the terrifying pain and cold of deep space—Shan's lonely space—and the dark cell where the smell of wet leaves meant his isenj captors were coming back to torture him again. Nobody was coming to rescue him.

It might have been hours. He wanted it to end. He wanted, and not for the first time in his life, to
die.

Footsteps echoed outside in the passages and he even recalled Jesenkis bringing in water, staring down at him with a sharply tilted head and strong scent of agitation, then leaving again.

It was all Aras deserved. He was a killer of isenj civilians, betrayer of better wess'har who took the honorable way out, abandoner of his
isan.
He got what he had coming, as Eddie might have said. He
was
dying. Shapakti had got something wrong.

“Hang in there, mate,” said a voice. Aras thought it was his disrupted mind, struggling to process the welter of recollections as he sweated out this fever, but a hand took his arm and someone wiped his face with a blissfully cold wet cloth. “Bloody daft. Who do you think you are, Captain Oates?”

It was Ade. Aras made sure he was real, grabbing his arm. “Is Shan here too?”

“No, I made her stay at home. It's better that way, mate.”

Aras tried to sit up but Ade made him lie still.
My brother came for me. My brother came when I needed him.
Aras had lost any sense of the passage of time, but it was a long and painful fever made more bearable by the knowledge that Ade was always there, one soldier determined not to leave his comrade scared and alone to face his fate, and that was all Aras needed to get through this.

Am I really dying? Is Ade here because he knows that?

When
c'naatat
made changes to its host, there was always a fever. This was far worse. The parasite seemed determined not to let go. It was struggling to save its world just as he had struggled to save Bezer'ej.

I'm sorry, but I have to do this.

He was no longer sure who the apology was aimed at.

Now he was back on Ouzhari, an island that had once been a mass of black grass and white powder beaches, and then became a scene of destruction and black vitrified sand. He'd walked through snow there, watching the first
gethes'
bots, their mechanical vanguard sent to build a home for them, and made the decision to move them to an island where they wouldn't encounter
c'naatat.
The bots had carved a stone section of a building with words that had bewildered him, and even now he was no closer to fully understanding them:
GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD'S WORK.

The young navigator—long since food for the scavengers—asked if he should fear the arrival of the
gethes
. Aras had told him he would be long dead if the worst happened, and he was.

But I'll live to see it.
He would live to see it all.

And he had.

 

F'nar, upper terraces.

 

Ade hadn't mentioned Aras at all since he returned from Baral and simply said: “It went okay.”

After that, it was as if Aras never existed, although they both knew damn well that they thought about him all the time, and set one plate too many on the table, with that catch in the throat that normally came with realizing someone was dead and never coming back for a meal again. And it was a lonely bed, too. When Ade was in the mood again, the memories swapped during sex would simply fill in the awful gaps and nothing would need to be said or discussed. Genetic memory might have been a sketchy record of detail, but it was meticulous about the intensity of emotions.

He'd miss that layer of subtle communication. He'd missed it when they had to use a condom. But he could get used to being without it again. There were no more excuses. Aras had shamed him.

“You coming to see Giyadas with me?” Shan said.

“Whatever we do, we do together.” He tried to find respite in harsh banter, just as he used to with the marine detachment. “I wouldn't have spent so much on that bloody ring if I didn't want to be chained to you.”

Walking to Giyadas's house felt just like the hours that melted into minutes when he finally had to say goodbye to his mates on Earth. The finality felt like an execution, even if there were plenty of years ahead of them both, if Eddie's innings were anything to go by. But somehow, it was like opening a wonderful gift as a kid only to have it snatched away from you and a smaller, less amazing toy thrust in its place.

Grow up. Izzy and Jon didn't even get this far. You selfish bastard.

It was a full house. Giyadas's kids and grandkids, Nevyan, the usual domestic crowd. Ade squirmed. Taking the countermeasure would be like having to pee in front of the doctor, a loss of dignity at a vulnerable moment.

“Shapakti's here,” Giyadas said. “You're sure you want to do this?”

“I'm sure I have to,” said Shan.

Ade saw Nevyan's pupils snap open and shut. She probably felt bad about it. She adored Shan; they were best mates. She'd saved her life, found her drifting in that terrible mummified state when nobody else was looking for her because she
had
to be dead. Nothing could survive spacing.

But
c'naatat
did.

At least he wouldn't have to worry about a hull breach. If it ever happened, it'd all be over fast now. There were plenty of good things about
not
being
c'naatat.

“I have to do this, too,” he said. “Bring it on, doc.”

Ade counted when things stopped happening. It was a habit. He couldn't remember when it started, or even if it had been quite this automatic before he got the parasite, but he counted the pauses in seconds. Nobody did anything or said a word for four seconds.

Nevyan just stared at Shan. Shan, usually a woman could make any bastard blink first, looked down at the floor. That wasn't like her at all.

“What's the problem?” she asked.

“I have a concern,” said Nevyan. “The matriarchs all have, in fact. This is not something we want to force upon you, just as we never took your DNA for the weapons program against your will, but it concerns us. We no longer have a source of
c'naatat
should we ever be in dire circumstances again.”

“There's Ouzhari,” said Shan. “Plenty of it there.”

Giyadas cut in. “We don't know if the organisms there have ever passed through a host, or what they might transmit to a wess'har host if they had. But we know what yours has acquired. It's a known quantity. It's been through our own troops before, and yourselves. And then we also gain whatever extra experience you acquire in living your life.”

“And it's Rayat-free.” Shan shifted to the other foot, looking like she was getting ready to move. She'd made up her mind. Ade knew how she hated last-minute changes. “So that's a bonus. But you could easily bottle my tissue samples, and Ade's. This is bullshit.”

“Who are you trying to convince?”

“It's a point of principle. Not fashionable, but how can I go on when Aras did the decent thing, when I've got no real justification for staying
c'naatat?
”

Shan put her hands on her hips and looked down at the floor in silence again. Ade found himself counting.

“Aras wanted to have children, Shan. He was frank about that. His reasons were very different from yours.” said Giyadas. “And what about Ade?”

“I do what the Boss does,” he said. But he didn't want to, not at all; he wanted much more time with her. He felt resentful that he'd had a taste of a life he'd craved and now it was being taken away from him. For a moment he reminded himself that he never gave Qureshi the chance, so maybe this was his punishment for being a stupid selfish bastard, but that voice inside wouldn't be silenced. It was childish, selfish and needy.

“What do
you
want, Ade Bennett?”

He couldn't bring himself to say it. Shan turned and looked into his face, and she knew. She just
knew
he didn't want to go through with it. He could see it.

Ade did what he always had. He stayed loyal. “Like I said, what the Boss says, goes.”

It was an awful moment. He'd put Shan in the position of taking something from him that he wanted. Nevyan tugged at the collar of her
dhren,
her little nervous gesture—rare for a wess'har—and stepped so close to Shan that Ade thought she was going to take hold of her.

“You'll never admit what you want,” she said. “But I know what this choice is not Ade's, and he deserves better from you than to be dragged in the wake of your principled stands. So I'm going to do something you may never forgive me for.”

Ade didn't notice it at first, but Shan did. She inhaled sharply. The scent of cut mango suddenly filled the room;
jask.
Nevyan and Giyadas had ganged up on Shan in pheromone terms, and asserted their dominance over Shan. That was how wess'har matriarchs enforced consensus in the group. Shan looked furious for a moment and then stepped back a pace or two. She'd been caught on the hop, and she was as susceptible to
jask
as any wess'har female.

“Well, that's a dirty trick,” she said quietly. It didn't seem to make her give in like it was supposed to. Ade braced for a fight. “How could you try that stunt on me?”

“It's for your own good.” Nevyan seemed taken aback. “When we took you in, we said you should be certain you would do your duty as a matriarch when needed. This is your duty; F'nar requires more than another twenty or thirty more years' service from you. Rationalize it as you will—living donor, whatever you wish—but I will not see someone I care about deny herself and her
jurej
some extended happiness over a principle. You represent no risk. Motive is irrelevant. Shapakti is forbidden from removing
c'naatat
from either of you until we have a very good reason to reverse that decision.”

Shan straightened up. Ade caught Shapakti's eye and he said nothing.

“Are you angry with me, Nev? You think I'm ungrateful?”

“I didn't save you so you could indulge in pointless self-sacrifice. Follow Aras's example, and do something that you want but that harms nobody. A matriarch who has no regard for her own needs is, as you might say, not a selfless paragon but a
doormat.
”

Wess'har could be much, much more subtle than Ade had ever thought possible. The
jask
might not have worked as she'd planned, but Nevyan seemed to be playing an unusually crafty and very un-wess'har psychological game with Shan. She wasn't telling her to indulge herself. She was telling her to stop being a martyr. That was bound to hit a nerve.

“Okay,” said Shan. The quieter she got, the madder she usually was. “If Shapakti's following orders too, than we don't have much choice. The matter's closed until further notice.”

“You're welcome,” said Nevyan. “And however much I may have offended you, you're still my friend, and I won't stand idle if this proves to make you more unhappy.”

Ade kept his mouth shut.

He should have felt relief or elation, but he just felt shaky. They left the house and walked a little way down the terraces in silence, not going anywhere specific, before Shan slowed to a halt and looked out over the city. The light was always changing, the view always fantastic, whatever the weather.

“Nev can really hit below the belt, can't she?”

“What, calling you on the martyr thing? Saving you from the decision?”

“Actually, no.” Shan's eyes welled but she didn't crack. “Reminding me that Aras actually had
c'naatat
removed because he wanted to be a regular wess'har again.”

Ade tried to think like a wess'har, drawing on the components of Aras that would always be within him. “They really do need the thing on standby, though.”

“Yeah,” said Shan. “Perhaps they do. But that's still an excuse.”

“I'm bloody glad she forced you to keep it. I haven't had enough out of life yet. I want more. I really do.”

Shan thrust her hands in her pockets and walked a few paces in front of him. “If you'd put it to me that strongly,” she said, “I'd never have asked to have it removed.”

He'd probably pissed her off, but it wouldn't last. He let the tension drain out of his shoulders and followed her. Now she seemed to be heading somewhere specific, and the direction became clear: she was going to Rayat's place, to see the only resident of F'nar who lived alone.

“No kicking or gouging, Boss.”

She put her gloves on. “Don't want to spoil these.”