Private apartments of Minister Rit, Jejeno
“They’ll come for you,” said Ralassi. The ussissi’s tone was weary and matter-of-fact. “They’ll kill you.”
“I haven’t revealed my intentions.” Rit checked her communications logs to see that the message to her sons had been received at the Tasir Var relay. She wanted to reassure them that she was safe if they heard more reports of fighting in the capital. “Shomen Eit has no idea what involvement I have with the Eqbas. I plotted with nobody.”
“That also means you have no allies either, Minister.”
“Winners always have allies after the fact,” Rit said. “And fortunately I have no need of them before it.”
“But how will you hold a government together in the aftermath of this? The Eqbas can’t be at your side forever. At some point after they withdraw, the army will turn on you.”
Rit’s apartments were the top section of a tower to the northwest of the Northern Assembly parliament building. Her privilege gave her that most sought-after of things, an open terrace set in the asymmetric roof that sliced across the top of the tower at an angle. At this height she felt safe enough to open the doors onto the roof and take a few steps outside to get a better view of the cityscape. In her private home, she had no access to the monitoring network that would have shown her the movements of troops and the status of utilities and traffic across the country. She had to rely on what she could see, hear and smell from this high tower, and the height of the surrounding buildings meant she had almost no view of ground level.
A dozen distant palls of gray smoke rose up from the forest of towers and canyon-sided multistory blocks; muffled booms punctuated the ever-present murmur of city sounds that reminded her of the ocean on Tasir Var. Umeh’s moon was a world with a few remaining forests and open land where no buildings had ever stood. It was the reason she had her children educated there, and why she was happier leaving them in the school than bringing them to Jejeno.
If that wasn’t an admission of the need for drastic change on Umeh, then nothing was. Umeh wasn’t a place she wanted to raise her sons. Ministers and the wealthy from all four continents sent their children there if they could, and saw no irony in the fact that the world they shaped and created wasn’t good enough for their own offspring.
I see it now. Ual saw it long before me.
Now she understood her husband’s willingness to risk everything to break the cycle of profligacy before it was too late.
I never understood it. I never supported you. I took on your legacy grudgingly. But I know better now.
Rit felt a pang of curious envy for the hybrid humans who could absorb each other’s memories through the parasite they carried. Ironic that it was an isenj characteristic, and even more ironic that it had entered its first wess’har host, the Beast of Mjat, when he was wiping out isenj communities on Asht.
“Minister, come inside,” said Ralassi. “The shelling is random. There’s no point testing the law of probability.”
“I can’t see the Eqbas ship.”
“It’s probably too far south. And there’s no telling what it looks like at the moment—it could be broken up into hundreds of smaller vessels. Fighters, landing craft, whatever they require at that moment to carry out the task.”
“How do they do that?”
“I’m not an engineer, Minister. But wess’har have had responsive material technology for tens of thousands of years. Their ability to reshape matter is unrivaled.”
“And not only inorganic matter. Genetic material too.”
“Combine the two, and there’s little over which they don’t have control.”
At that moment, those were the most reassuring words Rit could hear rather than the most alarming. She took one last look at the glittering facets of the city skyline and imagined what might be happening in the Maritime Fringe. Five hours ago, Esganikan Gai’s ship—or ships—had started dispersing the pathogen that would attack only isenj with certain genetic markers. By now, the first effects would be noticed.
“Minister…”
“Very well.” She closed the terrace doors but left the shutters parted. When the Eqbas ship came back to Jejeno, she wanted to see it. At times like this, she wanted something that Earth had and Umeh didn’t: a universal broadcast network. She’d seen it. She knew that Eddie and his kind provided information that anyone could see and hear. If she’d had this now, she could have observed what was happening across the planet, without any need to know government contacts in other nations.
She picked up one of the small gray data cubes that stored network information and dropped it into its slot in the communications console, a child’s puzzle with smooth shapes that fitted into only one hole. The image that emerged on the screen was one of a list of terminals she could reach. Each showed its own onward connections, red lines connecting to symbols.
“This is what is wrong,” she said. “We follow chains. We connect, like we were still colonies communicating one to another. Networks touch and share information, but there is no…”
“Big picture.”
“Is that the phrase?”
“It’s what Eddie Michallat calls it.”
“We need a single source of images and information, that anyone can reach directly.” She needed to spend more time talking to Eddie. Her husband had found his insights useful, in some cases essential: whether Eddie knew it or not, his advice had played a part in creating the cataclysmic events she was now watching. Ralassi said knowing that would appall him.
Doesn’t Eddie know that every action we take changes the world in some way? How can he think he exists in a separate state of being?
“You have a terminal, Minister.” Ralassi tapped the screen and cycled through a few network portals—Rit noted her access to all the government ones had now been revoked—until one of the many BBChan streams of information appeared. “Minister Ual perfected his spoken English from this channel. He found it educational, if baffling. Would you like me to activate the translation?”
“Yes, but I meant that I would like a similar source of information of our own.” She imagined Ual here, watching the activity of far-distant humans and learning their language, alone and lonely while she was with the children on Tasir Var all that time. “Wess’har understand all this?”
“Some speak English. Eqbas are learning it too. They plan to visit Earth.”
“Visit. As they visit here?”
“Their objective is the same wherever they go. You know this.”
Rit settled in front of the screen. The image was hazy—humans detected only a limited visual spectrum and their transmitted material was proof of that—but it was a window on a civilization that was less like hers than she’d thought.
And they made no mention whatsoever of anything other than their own world. The stop-start war on Umeh didn’t appear, even though humans should have been interested to see what awaited them when the Eqbas visited.
Earth looked wonderfully rich, though. Images of a devastating storm showed giant green trees with feathery crowns not unlike the dalf’s, and large open areas with foliage, and clean gray-blue oceans whipped by white foamy waves.
An ancestral memory in Rit recalled seas like that. She felt she was operating largely on the impulses of that memory now as it guided her in a crisis.
“Anyone on Earth can see this, yes?”
Ralassi had seen it all before and appeared bored, “If they want to. There are many information conduits like this, and some require payment.”
“But everyone knows these are available. They don’t have to inquire, or rely on contacts to help them locate information that’s not easily found.”
“Yes. In fact, BBChan and the other providers of this material go to great lengths to tell humans that it’s there and invite them to see it.”
That was the difference that fascinated her.
Isenj were as much driven by the genetic memory of their lineage as they were by new daily ex
periences. They lived within those social networks. Those networks cooperated, but…
“It’s very repetitive,” said Ralassi. “The information is all very similar. Not only similar, but actively repeated.”
It might have been tedious for Ralassi, but for Rit it was still a striking novelty. It wasn’t about people and situations she knew. It should have been utterly irrelevant to her. But it wasn’t. This was now her future, and—more to the point—her children’s future.
Rit waited. Across the city, at the cabinet offices, Eqbas troops were landing to secure the building.
They could have tired of the discussions and launched the universal pathogen that would kill every isenj on the planet. But they hadn’t, and had taken a more difficult option to preserve isenj. Oddly, it gave her hope. Hidden in what others would see as a holocaust was actually something…positive that she never expected.
The traditional enemy, the wess’har—Eqbas or Wess’ej born—had changed its stance.
Wess’har were not immune to negotiation as everyone believed. Some of them could be persuaded. The wess’har couldn’t be driven out, but if they were open to persuasion—they could be peaceful neighbors again, just as her husband had dreamed.
8
A legal battle to decide who owns the largest and most complete terrestrial gene bank in history has begun in the international courts. The Federal European Union today lodged a claim for ownership of the Christopher mission collection, taken from Earth nearly three centuries ago and due to return with the Eqbas fleet in 2406. The FEU claims that the bank was created by European geneticists and should be returned to the control of Brussels for safekeeping. Australian premier Canh Pho described the FEU bid as “bizarre opportunism” and said the gene bank was an international resource that his country planned to defend from commercial exploitation.
BBChan 557, March 2377
F’nar, Wess’ej, underground storage complex: Day one of the Umeh invasion
“They never learn, do they?” said Shan.
The future of Earth sat in industrial refrigerators in the tunnels under F’nar. Like all miracles, it could be reduced by observation to the measurable and mundane, and Shan preferred things that way. There were enough wild cards in life already without adding conjuring tricks. She even knew how people rose from the dead: it was a parasite, not divine intervention.
Nevyan stood watching her in the same indulgent way she did with Giyadas, as if Shan was just getting the hang of reality. “Esganikan Gai is hardly likely to respond to a court order to hand over the gene bank when the fleet arrives.”
“I never saw her as respectful of bureaucracy, somehow.” Shan pressed the seals of the freezer unit to reassure herself they were still locked, and reminded herself she had no technical expertise whatsoever to verify anything. She was just indulging in a nervous tic of ownership, checking the bloody thing like it was a kitchen appliance and not an ecology worth fighting wars to protect. “You know what surprises me? That even now I’m still stunned by how stupid human beings are. Here’s one of Earth’s two superpowers thinking that a court order is going to make an alien fleet—hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than theirs—hand over anything. What do they use for brains? What in the name of God do they think the Eqbas are?”
“Why God?”
“Nev, it’s just a phrase. I’m asking a real question. How can humans be that insanely blind to reality?”
“If you’ve been the dominant species for millennia, how can you suddenly accept that you have little significance in the scheme of things?”
“It’s whistling in the dark. That’s what we call it. Mindless activity to stop yourself feeling scared.”
“The time scales involved in this are beyond them. One thing I’ve learned about gethes in observing them is that anything more than a few seasons in the future is never going to happen.”
“You said it.”
This was the original gene bank, the one that the Christopher mission had gambled billions of euros and a human community to send as far from Earth as it could to protect it until it was safe to return not only animal material but also all the unpatented, unregistered food plants that no corporation owned or controlled. It was Earth in a kit, copyright God, free for use without alteration, the holy shareware of life. The loony God-botherers had succeeded and Shan had no doubt that even the ludicrously tolerant Deborah Garrod had allowed herself a private moment of “Up yours, heathens!” when the Eqbas showed up to complete the miracle.
Shan bloody well had. But she didn’t do tolerant. And she didn’t do trusting. She’d had the gene bank divided and duplicated, so that only one version of the irreplaceable collection took the risk of returning to the world whose greed and stupidity had made it necessary in the first place.
She’d hang on to the other bank here as long as it took. It was insurance: and she’d be around forever to keep an eye on it. That made her feel better than she ever imagined possible, and for a moment she almost saw Deborah Garrod’s delusional God-logic pointing out that c’naatat had an enabling purpose in all this too.
Fuck you, Eugenie Perault. You never banked on me pulling it off, did you?
The jumble of emotions ambushed Shan and she shook them off. “This is what I hate about genetic memory,” she said. She motioned Nevyan out of the compartment and closed the hatch of the chamber behind them. “You get mad ideas. You have to learn not to listen to the voices.”
“I watch you with concern.”
“Am I that different now?”
“No, and that’s why I’m concerned. Events should have tempered your zeal.”
Nevyan walked ahead of her along the dimly lit tunnel that led to the surface, her mane of tawny hair bobbing with her rolling gait. Shan pondered on her observation in silence until they emerged from the tunnel and stood in the cool night air of F’nar. The clean clarity of it still caught Shan unawares sometimes. When she looked up into the sky, the stars—constellations she was now beginning to recognize—were more vivid than anything she’d ever seen from Earth. They were almost as harshly bright as they’d been in the uninterrupted vacuum of space.
Shan could think about that more frequently these days without reliving the terror and pain. It heartened her. She was getting used to the long, long term perspective of c’naatat.
It’s only pain. Everything passes.
Her swiss beeped for attention as soon as they moved clear of the tunnel entrance. “Bloody thing,” said Shan. “I think it’s on its way out.” Everything else passed on in the end, even this little gadget that she’d carried all her adult life. She flipped the key and found a message waiting from Ade. “Still, not bad going for an antique.”
“Livaor could repair it for you.”
“He did a great job even getting an ITX link into it, but I think it’s just getting too old.” Maybe she’d part with it for a few days if Livaor could give it a stay of execution. “Ade’s going to think I’m ignoring him.”
“He’s very anxious about your view of him.”
“He doesn’t have to be.”
“You still refuse him oursan.”
Nevyan’s unflinching wess’har pragmatism about sex and bodily functions didn’t sting Shan as much as it used to. “Actually, no. Shapakti came up with a mechanical solution to the problem. The sex situation is back to normal, more or less, except there’s no exchange of genes.”
“Your reproductive system has regrown again?”
“No, it hasn’t. I check every day.” Shit, what if the swiss’s penetrating scan was playing up too? “I just can’t take the risk again.”
“This is very sad.”
“Most humans manage to get through life without swapping genetic memory, Nev. So will we.” Whatever Ade wanted probably wasn’t urgent. He’d have called Aras by now if it was. She pressed the return key, tiny and worn smooth by owners long before her, not minding if Nevyan heard an intimate conversation. “Come on Ade…”
He must have been clutching his link to his chest. He answered immediately, voice shaky.
“You’re going to be angry, Boss.”
Oh, shit. Ade, don’t do this. “What is it?”
He took an audible breath. “I had to tell the detachment that Rayat and Lin are alive.”
Relief flooded her; stomach first, then legs. She’d imagined something worse, formless and unguessable. “Okay. Why?”
“It’s okay?”
“They’re bloody special forces. I’m sure they can handle surprises and keep their mouths shut. You’re right, I should have leveled with them from the start. Anyway…why?”
“Had a contact from HQ, offering to reinstate everyone if we could find Rayat. Are you sure you’re okay about this?”
“Yes. Look, why the interest in Rayat now? You reckon they know what he’s carrying somehow? If it’s Eddie—”
“Eddie’s not the problem. I don’t know if they do know. Just that now they can get on the ITX direct to Cargill, they’re interested again.”
“Well, it’s an embarrassment to lose a spook. I can see how they’d want to tick him off the list. They’re not personnel you can write off if they go AWOL.”
“Thanks, Boss.”
“What?”
“I thought you’d kill me.” There was almost a little sob in his voice. “I really thought I’d done it this time.”
Was that what she’d made of him? Shan felt ashamed that Ade was still scared of her reaction. It told her more than she wanted to know about herself.
“They had to be told,” she said. “I’m sorry if that’s the deal. Tell HQ he’s dead. I’ll provide the body if they insist.”
“You’re serious?”
“I’m serious. And you trust those fucks in Spook HQ to honor that deal, do you? Call their bluff.”
“The brigadier said the verdict couldn’t stand whatever that is worth.”
Nevyan was watching her face intently. Wess’har had no concept of intrusion, no human habit of looking away and pretending they couldn’t hear a conversation taking place right next to them. Shan tried not to feel spied upon.
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