Judge

by Karen Traviss

  “I imagine this place will get a lot of media moving in afterwards, searching for scraps of information, now that they’ve worked out there are colonists here too,” Bari said, targeting Shan as his best chance. “We’ll do what we can to stop the buggers being a problem.”

  “They’ll follow vessel and vehicle movements by satcam and descend anywhere the Eqbas stop,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do to stop that. The police are zapping smartdust surveillance over the reception center area pretty well daily.”

  “Can’t put genies back in bottles.”

  “We all get hoist by own petard sooner or later, speaking as someone who made a lot of use of aerial surveillance. I spent some time with Eddie Michallat, too, so I suppose you could say I’m more understanding towards the media than I used to be.”

  “So what’s it—”

  They were interrupted by a loud shwoosh and a burst of surprised laughter as water fountained from the borehole. It was just a demonstration of a self-creating pipe that had zeroed in on the water-recycling reservoir a few meters away, but it captured imaginations. The tame media—one heavily vetted and scrupulously searched agency man—had good shots.

  “I was going to ask what it’s like to be home, Superintendent,” Bari continued.

  “Horrible,” Shan said. There was no expression on her face. “I’m going back to Wess’ej very soon.”

  As bombshells went, it was a small one, but Bari felt like a chair had been snatched away from under him. He’d have to find some other fast track into the Eqbas administration.

  It was early days, though. He set aside his need to get everything instantly nailed down, defined and filed, and tried to think laterally.

  There were always the ex-colony people, who knew wess’har better than they knew their new human neighbors on this planet. And then there were the unfortunate former Royal Marines, abandoned by the FEU and now without even a corps to return to.

  Maybe one of them wanted a job.

  Eqbas reconnaissance patrol, on station over southern Africa.

  “You know humans well, Aras. Why do they burn embassies?”

  Joluti had activated so much of the bulkhead area as video monitors that Aras felt as if he was back in the church of St. Francis deep under the surface of Bezer’ej, bathed in rainbow light from the stained glass window. Images from dozens of broadcast and observation sources made up a quilt of frantic activity across the planet. Aras had asked to spend his remaining Earth time on patrols, so he could at least have a chance of seeing more of the world that filled his borrowed memories, more than the isolated, security-ringed compound of the reception center and the narrow corridor into equally cloistered pockets of Kamberra. The repeated images of violence at various embassies intrigued Joluti.

  “Impotent rage,” said Aras.

  “They could channel their energy into locating the source of their grievance and resolving it.”

  “Us?” The patrol vessel—another craft metamorphosed from the main ship for this role, whose components might be a fighter tomorrow—spoke of the futility of stones and fire aimed at an Australian embassy in an African city. “I think that might demotivate most.”

  “Which is why I ask why they do it. We’ve made it clear in the past that we won’t leave until we resolve what problems we can. I don’t understand people who do things even though they know they have no effect.”

  “Humans react to symbolism more than reality.” Animal toys were always the ones that bothered Aras. Humans adored fabric models of animals, but cared nothing for the welfare of the real thing. “They can never believe what they say, hear or see, either.”

  Human uncertainty—c’naatat didn’t select all the best traits for me. If I were still pure wess’har, would things look clearer to me? I don’t even remember the way I used to think.

  “I’ll avoid going in any lower, then,” Joluti said. “I see no point making life worse for some wholly uninvolved person if our appearance causes rioting.”

  “Have we time to land in Canada?”

  “Yes.”

  “The bird sanctuary. I’d like to see the macaws we restored from the gene bank.”

  Aras wanted to see a great many things, but now he’d run out of time even before he’d got around to listing the sights he wanted to see. The bird sanctuary specialized in recreating destroyed habitats; Shapakti would have found that fascinating, having created a patch of rain forest himself. Negotiating a point to set down caused some concern with Canadian air-traffic control, but eventually a compromise was reached and the patrol vessel hung two hundred meters above the sanctuary grounds, giving the visitors and local community an unexpected novelty.

  Aras felt as much a specimen as the birds in the center. He was at ease with humans and found it disorienting when they reacted nervously, because he had almost come to see himself as looking just like them; but he had claws, he was two meters tall, and he didn’t have a human face. However much c’naatat had modified him, it stopped short of making him appear fully human. The parasite behaved differently in every carrier, somehow responding to its hosts anxieties. By whatever process it used to rearrange and tinker with his genome, it seemed to have decided that he wanted badly to fit in with the humans among whom he was exiled, but didn’t want to wholly surrender his wess’har nature.

  If it had reshaped him totally into a male like Ade—and it had done little externally to his house-brother, except for adding bioluminescence around tattooed areas of skin—then he might not have struggled with his identity for so long. But his mind created that struggle. He knew that he craved his wess’har identity too.

  Shapakti’s macaws recognized him immediately, and greeted him with squawks of “Uk’alin’i che!”— feed me. Shapakti had taught them phrases in eqbas’u. They’d also picked up English, some of it quite profane. Not knowing what they were missing in their natural habitat, they seemed happy with other macaws in a small forest biodome that reverberated with their calls.

  “What else would you like to see?” asked the sanctuary ranger. “We have a hummingbird breeding program. If you’ve never seen hummers in real life, I guarantee you a treat.”

  The plan to stay for an hour fell by the wayside. The hummingbirds, tiny jewels of birds, temporarily made him forget everything else that was preying on his mind. For the time being, he felt that the journey had not been wasted for this short and tragic stay, and that these creatures were worth the effort. He was happy for a few hours. The staff and visitors plucked up courage to ask to have their pictures taken with him, and he talked to the more confident ones about their feelings towards the Eqbas.

  Most were clearly scared, but seemed reluctant to say so; some, though, were excited and saw the Eqbas as arriving in the nick of time. None were hostile. But maybe it was hard to tell an alien invader to go to hell when they were two meters tall and looming over you.

  It was a wonderful diversion, one of the best times he could remember having, and wess’har had perfect recall. He felt suddenly robbed of the chance to explore this new world. Maybe, in centuries to come, he could return to Earth.

  But the prospect of future hummingbirds in the wild was a slim incentive when so much of his past wouldn’t leave him alone these days.

  “I shall miss Esganikan,” said Joluti, not rebuking Aras for keeping his vessel waiting several hours. “We’d served together for a long time. But Laktiriu may well work better with human society. She favors the gradual but sustainable path.”

  Aras had seen that path. It was the blind enthusiasm of humans who knew nothing much about Eqbas but were certain that aliens knew a better way to do things, and wanted to be good humans and help them. It was naive, and Eddie would have given them his benignly cynical smile, but it was the raw material that would determine if Earth went the way of Umeh or not.

  Humans responded to inspiration rather than logic. And inspiration was talking to mesmerized kids about macaws that could speak an alien language,
or getting humans to see that their species couldn’t possibly be more special and deserving than an insect-sized bird that vanished in a blur of emerald light.

  Yes, humans’ imagination could be captured.

  Reception Center.

  The Australian Defense Force ground transport waited with its drive running outside the main doors. Ade cried, and didn’t care. His detachment—what was left of it—had joined the Australian army.

  “You’re a big fucking girl, Ade,” Barencoin sobbed. “See, you bloody started me off as well.”

  The two men hugged because this really was the last time they would see each other, except via an ITX link when Barencoin was in his fifties, and Ade still looked the way he did now. They absolutely knew it. There were no maybes or if-you’re-passings to spare them the finality. It was a very tearful morning. The veneer of banter was showing cracks.

  “If Ade gets snot on you, Mart, that means you’re immortal,” Chahal said. “No tongues, mind.”

  “I’ll dribble on you now, then.” Ade grabbed Chahal, and then the hugging and backslapping went on around the circle for some time. It was painful, not a terrible pain like bereavement, but a more bittersweet one knowing that these were his mates, his more-than-family, and every one of them was a fucking hero and a pro who he’d trusted with his life and always would. The pain was because they were the best, and he would lose years of knowing them.

  “You better call the minute you land,” Chahal said. “We’ll have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Well, Ade won’t have much to tell us except how he threw up when he thawed out, so we can bore him with twenty-five years of derring-do,” said Webster.

  “We’ve got five minutes.” Barencoin checked his watch. “Come on, Ade, show us your lights one last time.”

  Ade blushed and wiped his nose. “I’m sober. I can’t do it sober.”

  “I’ve never seen them,” said Webster. “I’m an engineer and I need to know how things work.”

  “Go on, Ade…”

  “Light show! Light show!”

  “Whip it out.”

  “I reckon it’s batteries and he’s been having us on.”

  It was a quiet corner and the Eqbas didn’t care about human anatomy, so Ade unzipped and displayed his unique bioluminescence, certain he would die of embarrassment, until Webster howled with laughter and Chahal was almost coughing.

  “You can tell he’s not officer material,” he said. “He’d never be able to whip that out in the officers’ heads if he got a commission, would he?”

  “It’s a miracle,” said Barencoin. “They can make lights so small these days.”

  Ade heard the transport honk its klaxon as a cue that it was leaving soon, and he zipped up again. “That’s it, then,” he said. “I’m going to sob like a girlie if I don’t go now, and I’ve got to do this fast or I’ll never be able to do it at all, and—shit, I love you bastards, all of you, and I don’t care what cap badge you got now, you’re all Royals and always will be.”

  He turned to go back to his room. For once, nobody had mentioned Becken or Qureshi.

  “Send Shan down, will you?” Barencoin called. “She’s not going to get away with not saying goodbye.”

  Ade had no idea how he managed to do it, but he simply turned and ran up the stairs without a backward glance. The thought of eking out every last minute was like watching someone die. He had to go.

  Shan was coming down the third flight of stairs as he went up. “Did I miss them?”

  “Hurry up.”

  “Seen Aras?”

  “No, Boss.”

  Shan disappeared beneath the turns of the stairwell. Ade went up to finish his packing. It took about five minutes, and that was because he’d already packed, and unpacking again ate up a minute or two. He’d embarked for Cavanagh’s Star with what he could carry in his bergen and no more, and he’d lost a few items and expended rounds along the way. He was hanging on to the ESF670, though. The FEU owed him his bloody rifle. All his careful but unwritten lists of the stuff he would buy to take back to Wess’ej—food and other small comforts, mainly—had been abandoned. There was no time.

  However pragmatically Laktiriu put it, there was no way of dressing this up. They were being kicked off the planet, his own planet, all three of them. Fuck off, lepers. It was better than being fragged so the Eqbas could save the cost of a shuttle, but it left Ade feeling bereft.

  The video screen had been on in their room permanently since they arrived and had merged into the background noise now. But a familiar voice talking about macaws made him stop dead.

  “Shit,” he said. Aras was on the news, at the center of a small knot of people in what looked like a zoo, telling a kid about blue and gold macaws that had been born—not from eggs—on a world 150 trillion miles away. The angle of the shot suggested the recording was made by a visitor trying to get a better look through a crowd. They showed a lot of it, ten rambling unedited minutes, and Ade could almost hear Eddie ranting about crappy technical standards, but the media were short of material showing aliens wandering around Earth. The snatched footage of Aras must have been a godsend.

  So he’d gone to see the bloody parrots, all the way to Canada. It was just as well the Eqbas worked on a scale that didn’t need to worry about mileage. That was Aras all over, still capable of being stopped in his tracks by wondrous things even after centuries of seeing god knows what.

  It was funny to see him on telly in an ordinary Earth setting among humans. He looked suddenly alien, really alien, not taken-for-granted family whose appearance you had to think hard about if someone asked for a description.

  The item was over by the time Shan got back from saying goodbye to the detachment. She had her copper’s face on, the one that said she’d switched off and was just processing data, not getting involved.

  “Okay, Boss?”

  “I don’t mind admitting that was bloody hard,” she said. “Hated doing that.”

  “Aras has been on the news.”

  “Tell me he’s not complicated things.”

  “He’s been at the bird sanctuary. Actually, he came across as a nice bloke who you wouldn’t mind having invade your planet.”

  Shan took sudden and excessive interest in the contents of her wardrobe, which were about as meager as Ade’s. “I’m glad she hasn’t given me time to think,” she said at last, obviously meaning Laktiriu. “It’s always easier to just grab and run. I keep doing that. More to the point, I keep getting shunted around by politicians, and make no mistake, the new girl is one of those.”

  “You could have out-jask ed her, you know, if you wanted to hang on.”

  “Never occurred to me. What would be the point? How long is longer? Forever? She made a decision to keep c’naatat clear of Earth. Policy change. She’s more cautious. That’s a good thing.”

  You could wear a problem out by rubbing away at it, and Shan looked as if she had. She probably had the same things going around in her head as he had in his, all the why-didn’t-I and I-should-have. This was a shock phase for everyone, from the planet to individuals. When the shock and novelty wore off, and the reality of a long-term Eqbas presence sank in, the problems would start. That, Ade thought, would be when people here started to feel it.

  “I didn’t even get to visit Uluru,” Shan said. “Oh well. The good thing about c’naatat is that I’ll always have time.”

  They watched the news in silence while waiting for Aras. They could have been out making the most of the last day, but it meant secure cars and cordons and having so many things left undone and unsaid that it felt better just to forget it and not even look outside the window.

  “Here we go,” said Shan, gesturing towards the screen at a new headline icon. “It’s started.”

  The Sinostates border was now closed along its full length to road haulage from Europe in protest against the FEU’s failure to meet the terms of a joint food surplus policy. It followed on their withdrawal of consent to con
tinue an FEU water pipeline across the border because of deforestation.

  “And the movies always show Earthlings uniting to fight off the aliens,” she said. “But all we do is get competitive.”

  Aras returned with a small bag and tipped the contents out onto the bed. “Look what they gave me at the sanctuary.”

  It was a jumble of confectionery, snacks, promotional items, educational vids and other small novelties, the kind you got in any visitor attraction. Aras seemed to rate the gift pretty highly. He spent the evening examining every item with meticulous care. But he kept returning to one small packet so often that Ade had to find out what it was that kept drawing his attention.

  When he looked over Aras’s shoulder, he found that it was a small transparent pouch of tiny, iridescent green feathers.

  16

  I suggest you begin with a permanent ban on fishing. We haven’t yet established our position on cell culture flesh, but there must be an end to the use of other animal species for food, entertainment, self-decoration and research. Those who insist on subsistence by hunting as part of their culture must accept that the only justification is a return to the conditions that made it the only nutritional option—which means a pre-Neolithic situation with extensive glaciations and a world human population of a few million. You already have excellent alternatives to eating your neighbors.

  LAKTIRIU AVO, Adjustment Task Force Commander,

  delivering an off-the-cuff comment to media inquiry

  on what Eqbas thought of Earth food

  F’nar, Wess’ej.

  Eddie got the call from Laktiriu Avo a few days after the ITX had flashed up a message from Shan, saying that they were coming home. Shan’s message—sent as a file, not live—had seemed an oddly abrupt way to announce she was going to vanish into chill-sleep for another twenty-five years after he’d just got used to seeing her face on the screen again, but the phrase “asked to leave” said it all.