Judge

by Karen Traviss

  No, actually, it didn’t. It just begged questions that he wouldn’t get answers to until 2426, when he might not even be around to ask them. He almost felt that she’d died, and Aras and Ade with her. It was a strange and distressing moment that left him unable to concentrate on much else.

  And he never got the chance to tell her that Rayat and Shapakti had skipped Surang with the entire c’naatat resource. It gave Eddie a laugh at a time when there hadn’t been much good happening, just unrelenting bad news that he could do nothing to assuage.

  “Do you recall me, Eddie Michallat?” asked Laktiriu.

  He must have seen her when the task force passed through Wess’ej, because she seemed to recall him, but she’d been just another Eqbas in a green uniform then. “It’s been a long time,” he said. “My apologies. What can I do for you?”

  “I need your assistance.”

  Here we go again. “Go on.”

  “With Shan Frankland gone, I have no human to advise me.”

  “Well, you sent her home…”

  “I felt the risks of having c’naatat carriers around outweighed the benefits. All I ask is to bring questions to you occasionally. Even if I employ a human to advise me, I can’t evaluate the advice because I don’t know if it’s neutral. You might not know Eqbas Vorhi, but you do have long experience of Wess’ej, and so you understand us.”

  It was very flattering, and not sugar-coated. Eddie felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of being in the thick of things again. It was always a bad sign lately. “How frequent would this be?”

  “I don’t know. I have no way of telling when I won’t understand something.”

  Eddie saw the specter of calls at all hours with pleas to sort things out. He’d given up being at the beck and call of News Desk a long time ago, and he was too old to start it again now. He hated firefighting, and that’s what it would be; he’d get the call when the shit had already hit the fan.

  “I’m too far away to do any good,” he said. “But here’s a suggestion. Let me see your plans in advance, and I’ll go through them and tell you what looks like trouble to me.” It was the kind of request that caused terminal paranoia in humans, but wess’har didn’t like secrecy. “It’ll be cultural and political stuff, just presentation and human-wrangling. I don’t do science, but then you’ve got that covered.”

  Laktiriu did a little head-tilting this way and that, and the brown plumed mane that ran front to back across her skull shook a little. “Let me think about how that might be arranged.”

  Eddie closed the link, and realized that he’d probably just invited her to send him every single scrap of Eqbas business for the next five years. He’d probably get it. She had no way of knowing what was a minefield and what wasn’t at the moment.

  Well, that’s going to brighten things up a bit.

  Eddie knew what hell was. It was becoming a viewer.

  He now had to watch news without having any input or redress, and it was a punishment worthy of Dante’s imagination. Shan was in the limbo of space, twenty-five years away, and the aliens he’d had to himself for so long were now part of the fabric of Earth. Nobody needed him.

  “You can’t leave it alone, can you?”

  He hadn’t realized that Erica was standing in the doorway. “How can I tell her to sod off when she’s gone in to make over our homeworld? Barry’s going to want to go back some day, and I’d like to leave the place in good shape for him.”

  “You don’t think, do you? What’s Giyadas going to say about that?”

  “How does it affect her?”

  “You’re getting slow. She ordered a hit on Esganikan and she’s going to be left holding all the Eqbas c’naatat stuff. I say that makes them the other side.”

  Eddie was surprised he hadn’t seen that coming. On the other hand, if the Eqbas were the other side, having a friendly Eddie in the camp was pretty handy.

  He just wanted to be useful again, after a working lifetime of mattering and dealing with decision makers, and—he was no longer in denial about it—he wanted to steer the Eqbas towards a lighter touch on Earth than on Umeh. As the years went by, and the more he visited Umeh, the footage he still had of the invasion troubled him more and more. It was hard to know the isenj as well as he did and not look back at that archive and see not spider aliens suffering and dying but the people he knew.

  Ual. Damn, I don’t think about him enough. The isenj minister who started it all had been shot dead right next to him, close enough for him to be splashed with the watery yellow blood.

  “You realize what we’re doing here, don’t you, Ric?” he said. “We’re the Targassat rift in miniature. I think I have a duty to act if I can. You think keeping out of things that don’t directly concern you is best. There we have it, the million-year history of the wess’har species, adapted for audio and performed by the monkey boys.”

  “Okay, but don’t expect me to approve, and you better clear your yard arm with Giyadas.”

  Erica stuffed food, a flask of water, and surveying equipment into her rucksack before fleeing for the day on the pretext of taking samples. She’d never made close wess’har friends, and retired couples could get on each other’s nerves if they were cooped up with nothing to do. “Accept that it’s over, Eddie. You can’t run the show any more. The aliens are there, right now, and nobody’s interested in what’s going on here, and you can’t change a damn thing on Earth. You don’t even have a vote.”

  She stared into his face, more upset than angry—upset for him, he knew—and then made an incoherent sound before shutting the door behind her with a thud. She hadn’t quite slammed it, but Eddie knew she wouldn’t be back until nightfall.

  She was right about one thing, though. He needed to let Giyadas know what was happening, if only out of courtesy. It was a lovely breezy day up on the terraces, and a good excuse for a brisk walk to her home.

  He didn’t have to knock. Wess’har didn’t knock anyway, but Eddie was family and could treat Giyadas and Nevyan’s homes as his own. Sometimes it was immensely comforting.

  “Hey, doll,” he said, “I got a new job. Spying for the Eqbas.”

  Giyadas was playing with her sons, Tanatan and Vaoris. He didn’t recall Nevyan spending as much time with her sons, but Giyadas liked to do things differently, and Eddie wondered again how much she’d been influenced—humanized, in the literal sense—by spending so much time with him as a child.

  “As spooks go, you have some way to go to catch up with Mohan Rayat,” she said.

  “Great cue,” Eddie lifted Tanatan and whirled him around, playing grandfather. “The Eqbas aren’t going to be thrilled when they find Shapakti’s handing you their research, and let’s not even think about the orders you gave Shan.”

  “So what have the Eqbas asked you to find out from me?”

  “Nothing. Laktiriu’s asked me to advise her on humanology and our cute ways, because she kicked Shan out. I suggested it would be easier if they kept me briefed on what they were planning for home sweet home, then I could tell them they were heading for trouble before they found it.”

  “Ahh…. Eddie the special political adviser!”

  “You really should go to Earth sometime, doll. You’d have done a far better job than the Eqbas.”

  “I like irony.”

  “Aw, come on. You know Earth needed intervention.”

  “It still bothers me.”

  “Erica’s furious that I said I’d do it.”

  “She thinks you’re tormenting yourself,” Giyadas said gently. “That’s all.”

  “What, that I can’t handle being nothing? That nobody hangs on my every word when I file a story from the end of the bloody galaxy?” All he could do was watch the car crash unfolding. It made him boil with impotent…impotent what? He didn’t even have a word for it. He had phrases, though, like those are my aliens, those are my friends, ask me because I could have told you that, and why don’t they listen. Eddie had all the outbursts of a man w
ho had been the expert and go-to guy on outer space for as long as most viewers could remember, but had now been forgotten. He’d ceased to matter the minute the Eqbas stepped onto the desert at St George. “Yeah, maybe she’s got a point.”

  “And you, having a choice, must make it.” It was one of those classic lines from the philosopher Targassat. “I understand the shame of doing nothing when action might help. The trick is to know where to draw the line of responsibility and interference.”

  Giyadas was his best friend. Just that fact on its own would have been enough of a miracle for any human; his closest friend wasn’t Olivier Champciaux or any of the other handful of humans still hanging on to an obsessive exile light-years from home, but a wess’har matriarch who ran a city that had enough firepower to take on a small planet. She had bioweapons, too, but he didn’t want to think about that. She’d been such a cute, funny, clever kid. The adult Giyadas still had that charm and glittering intellectual insight, but her legacy had been the desperate peace with Umeh that had been forged by a mutual need to see the Eqbas leave the system for good. It had taken the joy out of her. She was all duty, and that wasn’t very wess’har, because all of them knew when to live for the moment. Her gravitas was a human taint.

  That’s probably my fault, too.

  “You know how to crush a man, doll. I started all this, you know.”

  “Your initial reporting didn’t cause Rayat to be sent here, or anything that happened after it.” Wess’har concepts of guilt and responsibility were radically different from those of humans. “Knowledge should change the way you feel.”

  “In about forty-odd years, Thetis is going to arrive home. What’s going to waiting for the crew?”

  Thetis was an older ship, with a top speed that was a third of Actaeon’s or any of the wess’har fleet. She was still inbound with the last of the colonists and Actaeon personnel who’d opted for the slow, seventy-five-year journey home. It was easy to forget them. He hadn’t.

  “I think they made the right choice, because much of the adjustment will be yielding results,” said Giyadas.

  “You’re humoring me, aren’t you doll?”

  She patted his hand. “I’ve known you even longer than your wife has, Eddie. But I think she’s distressed not to be able to cut all links with Earth. This simply reminds her that every option for your son is a sad one—to go to a world where humans have an uncertain future, or to stay here, where there’s peace but no possibility of a normal human life.”

  It was perfectly true, and it should have hurt Eddie, but it didn’t. One thing he’d become used to was wess’har frankness, and the odd comfort—eventually—of knowing that he could say what he thought without editing a single word.

  Tanatan tugged at the leg of his pants, wanting attention. Wess’har kids were wonderful fun, and the two boys spoke English with adorable little double-tone chipmunk voices. “Do you think they’re old enough to visit Jejeno?”

  Giyadas gave Eddie that same affectionate brush across the top of the head that he’d given her when he was the taller of the two. She was a head taller than him now, a full-grown isan.

  “It’s never too soon to get to know your neighbors,” she said. “Or too late.”

  “I’m maudlin at the moment. Take no notice. I’m gutted about the marines and I’ll be dead by the time Shan, Ade and Aras get back.”

  “I won’t let you die, and you can stay in touch with the marines who remained. You have to concentrate on what can be done.”

  “Well, at least I know I’ll be here to welcome my old buddy boy Rayat and shake him warmly by the throat.”

  “For Rayat,” said Giyadas, “you only have to wait five years.”

  “And what are you going to do with c’naatat?”

  “I’ll think about that,” she said.

  17

  After a while, I began putting a disclaimer at the beginning of every report I filed. I described who and what I was, so the viewer could judge the inevitable filter I put on my reporting. I strove to be the most neutral voice I could, just a proxy observer for the audience, but eventually I had to ask if that was what I was supposed to be doing. I had more and more days when I felt that being neutral—reporting news—wasn’t adding to the sum of human improvement, but abdicating responsibility. People usually choose news to reinforce their views, not to change them. So what was the noble cause? It wasn’t observation. In the end, I decided that it was better to save the drowning man than to report objectively on drowning, because people didn’t rush out to learn life-saving techniques when they saw those reports. They just observed a man drowning.

  I’m Eddie Michallat, human being, and I have to be involved in life to live. Those having a choice must make it. It took an alien to teach me that, and ultimately how to be truly human.

  EDDIE MICHALLAT, Constantine diaries

  F’nar, Wess’ej: March 2406.

  The transport that brought Rayat, Shapakti and his family into F’nar from the landing strip outside the city hadn’t changed since Eddie had climbed warily on board more than thirty years ago.

  It was still a hovercraft covered with a valance as far as he was concerned, but wess’har didn’t care how daft things looked, only how well they worked. Wess’har would have been a very tough sell for marketing men.

  “Don’t hit him, Eddie,” said Giyadas. “You’re not as young as you were.”

  “I’m going to be charm itself, doll. He did manage to do one honest thing in his life, even if it was robbing the Eqbas.”

  Da Shapakti didn’t seem to have changed much, but Eddie never could gauge age in wess’har very well. The biologist came trotting across the flagstones, isan and house-brothers following, and hugged Eddie fiercely.

  “It’s good to be back,” he said. “I feel at home.” He gave Giyadas a courteous nod. “Giyadas Chail, thank you for your hospitality and refuge.”

  Rayat looked grayer, but he’d been on hold with c’naatat so many times that he still looked fiftyish. Eddie really wanted to see him raddled and spotted like the evil twin painting he was sure to have stashed in some attic.

  “Hi, Eddie.”

  “Hi, Mohan.” Eddie couldn’t even remember what he’d called him in the past. He’d always just been Rayat. “You cleared the place out, then.”

  “It had to be done,” Rayat said. “Last chance, really.”

  “And what about you? Are you staying undead for awhile now that Shap’s got a cure?”

  “No, I want it out of me for good now. I want to know my body’s my own when I wake up in the morning.”

  Eddie wanted to say, “It’s a trap!” but Rayat had no sense of humor and there was only so much tormenting that he could do before he lost the will to make Rayat’s life hell. “Okay,” he said. “Come back to the house and we’ll give you a decent cup of tea, dinner, and bring you up to speed on Earth.”

  “Good to know it’s still there.”

  “It is, but I’ve been working for the Eqbas for five years so I talked them out of turning it into parking lots.”

  “I haven’t had chance to check the ITX,” said Rayat. “Just give me the headlines.”

  “I think you need to watch the screen. I might even be able to get you a chat with the Aussie prime minister. He’s still in office. Nice enough bloke. Den Bari.”

  Wess’har were already ferrying containers into the city on small pallets and taking them down into the tunnels that ran underneath F’nar. There was a lot of storage down there, but also an arsenal and fighter hangars with nanite production templates. Pretty little pearly F’nar and its deliberately agrarian ways might have looked like a theme park, but it was a superpower in human terms.

  “Is that it?” asked Eddie, pausing to look at the pale yellow drums. They looked like hatboxes. “I’d expected something bigger.”

  “That’s just the c’naatat materials in suspension,” said Shapakti. “The equipment I need for the Bezer’ej project remains in our transport for the trip t
o Nazel. But we’d like to spend some time here before we go.”

  “It’s a bus ride.” Eddie pointed up at the sky, where Wess’ej’s twin planet hung as a fat, cloud-streaked crescent moon. “You forgot how cozy things are down Ceret way.”

  “And the macaws?” he asked. “My pretty friends?”

  Eddie had to think. “Oh yes. They’re fine. They’re at a bird sanctuary in Canada.”

  “So beautiful,” said Shapakti’s isan, Ajaditan, looking around the caldera and up the steep steps that linked the terraces. F’nar was at its tourist-poster pearly best right then. “And so much climbing…”

  They spent the rest of the day settling Shapakti’s clan into their new home, and Giyadas saved Eddie a difficult moment by offering Rayat his own private accommodation. Eddie didn’t think Erica would want a permanent houseguest, and he still wasn’t ready to have Rayat at close quarters for the next twenty years, however mellow he’d become.

  “Dinner,” he said, pointing Rayat in the direction of the house, right at the far end of the terrace on the broken edge of the caldera bowl. “It used to be Shan’s home, but we’ve exorcised the place with beer and holy water, so you’ll be fine.”

  “Wrong religion,” said Rayat. He walked ahead of Eddie along the terrace with the energy of a younger man whose body was self-repairing, and for a moment Eddie envied that. The moment passed. “How is Shan, then? I’m a bit time-addled at the moment.”

  “She’s on her way back. Hang on twenty years, and you can give her a nice big kiss.”

  “We wanted the same outcome, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know you’re a matched pair of psychotic ideological zealots.”

  “Well, we put an end to the risk, between us, I suppose.”

  “She’ll love the joint credit.”

  Twenty years sounded like an eternity. It would certainly be close to it for Eddie. But the thought of Shan catching up with Rayat…well, that was motivating. Eddie wasn’t going to die until he’d seen that.