Judge

by Karen Traviss

  “But do they know?”

  “I’d say not.”

  Shan raked her hair with her fingers. She needed to get some sleep, c’naatat or not. They’d been debating this all night. “Okay, one piece at a time. Prachy first. Let me call Eddie. Lovely, isn’t it? The first thing I say to him in twenty-five years is, ‘Hi, mate, do me a favor, will you?’”

  She got up and went into the bathroom, probably for privacy; that was Shan’s habit at home. At least the hotel complex now had a good water supply, thanks to the desalination pipeline the Eqbas technicians had set up. Government engineers had already arrived to cluster around it and marvel at its efficiency.

  “It’s outcomes,” said Ade, scratching his hair. “Shan’s all about outcomes. You know that. Very clear about consequences. Esganikan’s a risk.”

  “We’re risks. We’ve both infected a human deliberately. Esganikan hasn’t. We live, she dies. Does that not trouble you?”

  “Are you defending the crafty bitch? Or saying we should be fragged too?”

  “No, I’m simply saying that it’s inconsistent, and that it causes me distress as a result. I have no answers or better suggestions, other than to walk away from it.”

  “Then why are you riding Shan about it? Life’s full of dilemmas we never solve.”

  “Because I always feared that she would be used, Ade. She’s very loyal. She’s been used by the matriarchs before. I don’t want to see her killed carrying out the orders of matriarchs who summoned the Eqbas in the first place.”

  “Hey, we were bloody glad they did at the time, remember? When we thought Shan was dead? We wanted the shit kicked out of the FEU. The only thing that changed is that Shan came back. Everyone and everything else is still dead.”

  It was true, of course. Aras wondered how they might be looking at events on Earth now if they had all spent the last twenty-five years living out their lives on Wess’ej. Perhaps the whole situation would have seemed more like an ancient wound, a scar, the incident recalled but the pain forgotten. It certainly wouldn’t have felt this urgent. Cryo-suspension had done nothing to stop the momentum of events that thrust them forward back then. Aras sat in silence with Ade, not wanting to talk further, until Shan came out of the bathroom toweling her hair.

  She took a comb and tugged at tangles. “I wonder if the FEU appreciates the irony that the only reason Esganikan hasn’t just dumped a metric fuckload of human-specific pathogens into their atmosphere and finished them off is because she doesn’t want to harm other life as a side-effect—like power stations going critical and a few continents of decaying human flesh polluting the place.”

  Aras tried to draw the line between venting his own distress and being helpful in a situation that seemed to be escalating out of control. “I think Esganikan badly underestimated the time this restoration would take.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.” Shan looked crestfallen for a moment. “Look, I came because I felt I had to keep an eye on her, as if I could do a damn thing to stop the Skavu and the slaughter and the whole shebang, as if there was a nice way of removing humans to make way for other species. I know bloody well that there isn’t, and I know I’ve presented the FEU with temptation just by being here. But I’m bloody glad I did come now, because if I hadn’t, who would have dealt with Esganikan? But I swear we will go home, as soon as this is over, and that removes all temptation for anyone else to make a grab for c’naatat. No us, no Esganikan. It’ll be over.”

  “So, as ever, you make the best of a bad job, and find a retrospective justification for it.”

  “I said we’ll leave as soon as I’m done here.”

  “You miss this kind of life.”

  “What?”

  “This is what you do best. I can see it on your face. You like sorting situations. You have no idea how to do anything else.”

  Shan paused for a second as if Aras’s accusation had hit a nerve.

  “I think the novelty wore off a long time ago.”

  “Accept, then, that the FEU may not hand over Prachy, that you might not be able to find her, and the outcome in fifty years will be exactly the same, except for the state of your conscience.”

  “Come on, knock it off, you two,” Ade said. He hated arguments, and Aras regretted reminding him of the way violence always started in his childhood home. But some things had to be said. “I agree with the Boss. Sorry, mate.”

  “And Prachy can’t vanish,” Shan said. “Europe’s the most heavily cammed, scanned, and recorded society in the world. She can’t leave her house without public security surveillance picking her up, or even buy groceries without the transaction being scanned, recorded on her medical records, and charged to her account. She can’t move anywhere without passing through a monitoring system.” Shan held out a small device, flipped it open from a small penlike tube to a flat sheet, and laid it on the table. “She never had to assume an identity, you see. Just a civil servant who never thought anyone would come after her, not a spook out in the field like Rayat. Detective work is mostly sifting the obvious. Look.” Shan pulled a file of documents and screen grabs on the display into a fan so they could see some of each one: directories, publications, and lists. “PRACHY. Patchy audit trail, starting with the Civil Service Staff Association’s list of retired members. Cross-referencing with awards, I find the field she claimed to work in—treasury forecasting—and then I find her writing papers at some university, because smart people don’t usually want to pack it all in when they have to retire. Combine that with a few totally unconnected comments she’s made in public fora about the state of her local waste management service, and I pin her down to one of three cities. Get one of the Gaia crowd’s friend of a friend of a friend to check the mass transit passes database—because Europe really got a taste for tracking people’s movements in the twenty-first century, and never stopped—and I have her home address. It took me four hours, start to finish. No rocket science necessary.”

  Aras and Ade looked at each other. It seemed like an impressive feat, but then Shan was a police officer, and an expert at taking one or two pieces of a puzzle and working out who might give her the others. Eddie would have been proud of her. They worked the same way.

  “I take it she’s not at home,” said Ade.

  “No, the word from greens on the ground is that she hasn’t been seen for a couple of days, and the transit guy lost her at the port authority data portal. So my guess is that the FEU moved her to the mainland to lose her. It wouldn’t be so hard to find her in a few small islands with thirty million people, as I’ve shown, not if she kept her real name until the last few days.”

  As far as Aras was concerned, Prachy was missing, and the deadline would not be met, and Esganikan would launch an attack on those she held responsible for harboring her, the FEU government. The whole stalking exercise was a massive waste of effort. It might also put Shan in danger. He was getting more frustrated and angry by the minute.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what I do next?” she asked. She held up the flattened communications device. “Transit guy’s database includes full ID. Hologram image, biometric security markers, the works, so, ironically, the security services can track naughty people when they need to. All those can go out via BBChan when Eddie does his piece. Now, tell me—would you want to shelter her once you saw what was coming down the pike? Someone will see her, sell her a coffee, let her ride the monorail. Someone will grass on her. Humans are lovely creatures like that.”

  “It’s a shame you can’t ask Esganikan if she remembers any more of what Rayat remembers,” said Aras, deadly serious. Shan seemed to take it as sarcasm.

  “It’s obsolete data anyway. Unless she wants to have a trial and call witnesses.” She snapped the sheet back into a tube and took out her swiss. “Time to loose the hunting hacks, gentlemen.”

  Cabinet Meeting Room, Government House, Kamberra: four days after landing.

  “Frankland has to be in intelligence.” Niall Storley, the attorney
general, had such a quiet voice that he could stop a meeting dead simply by forcing people to strain to hear him. Bari rather admired that strategy. “Records say she was Special Branch and an antiterrorist officer, and then she got busted over some eco-terrorist op and she resurfaced in EnHaz, as it used to be. All the same line of work, strong gene-tech component, and then she ends up in the Cavanagh system at the same time as an FEU spook called Rayat. That’s looking like she’s got some data they want back. I doubt that the FEU would go to the brink over a simple criminal extradition. They want Frankland for something else.”

  “Biotech fits,” said Andreaou. Everyone had been scouring the archives. “That was the rumor at the time.”

  “Well, we can’t swap her for Prachy, even if we were minded to,” said Bari. “One, the Eqbas don’t want it. Two, if it’s biotech she has access to, we want it. Or at least we want to deny it to the FEU.”

  “So why are we even discussing it?”

  “Because, Niall, I would love to be able tell the UN to shove it, stop trying to broker some understanding, and concentrate on reminding the FEU that piling up military assets around a nation’s maritime borders is bad form.”

  Bari had expected a very rough ride in Cabinet for making a string of decisions on the hoof without discussion. Instead, ministers took it all quietly and seemed almost grateful that he was going it alone. Perhaps they wanted someone to blame afterwards, if they thought there would be any afterwards when the shit finally hit the fan.

  “It must be bloody significant biotech if they’re going to all this trouble,” said Nairn. “And nothing concrete’s coming out of intelligence?”

  Storley shook his head. “Nothing. I can’t help being curious, even though I know it’s not really the biggest issue on the table.”

  Bari kept an eye on the various status screens in the cabinet room showing the positions of ships, news feeds, and diplomatic contact activity. “It’s academic, and I’m damned if I’m going to upset the Eqbas by asking Frankland what makes her so special, but let’s keep an eye on that.”

  “Here’s my worry,” said Andreaou. “The FEU got away with opening fire on the Eqbas once. They might think they can get away with a lot more without serious consequences.”

  “Could they?” Storley asked. “I know the Eqbas trashed Umeh, but would they do the same on Earth?”

  “We’re no more special than the isenj to them, but we have a hell of a lot more wildlife that would be collateral damage.”

  “I’m not worried for the welfare of the Eqbas, PM, I’m worried about us—because if they launch an attack using us as a base, especially bioweapons, then we’re automatically an international pariah and we’ll come under attack.”

  Nairn held up a finger. “Our ambassador in Beijing has had private assurances that the Sinostates won’t intervene if Europe takes a pounding. Noises, condemnation at the UN, but no action.”

  “Clears the world stage for them, doesn’t it? How about the African Assembly?”

  “Waiting and watching. More concerned about stopping refugees coming across its borders.”

  “Everyone’s expecting a shooting match centered on Europe.”

  Bari sat back and scrolled through the screens to see where the FEU had moved its warships. It was just a gesture. If they were going to attack, they’d use air assets, but it still didn’t reassure him.

  “I’m going to see if I can get some undertaking from the Eqbas that they’ll defend us if we take stick for their activity. I think that’s the most I can do.” Bari turned to the communications director. “Mel, our ratings?”

  “Eighty-seven percent still in favor of going with the Eqbas plan,” she said. “But a tangible benefit would help a lot right now.”

  “I’ll get the desalination stepped up and ease water rationing in the major cities. Any other grim business?”

  “Prachy, PM,” Storley said. “I hear there’s a motion going to the UN from the Canadians, asking for Prachy to be handed over to the UN International Crimes Directorate to be tried in neutral territory. The ambassador here says they think it’ll take the confrontational heat out of it.”

  “Niall, I know they’ve stayed on side since Canh Pho’s day, but I wish they’d keep their lovely polite expansionist noses out of it.” Bari tried to imagine how an Eqbas would take that move: peacemaking gesture, or trying to obstruct their justice? “Keep me posted, especially if they manage to find any neutral territory on this planet. I’m seeing the Eqbas next.”

  Bari grabbed his folio and walked up the back stairs to his office to wait for Esganikan and her environment scientist, Mekuliet. He needed a show of Eqbas largesse, something that would not only reassure the Australian electorate that there was some benefit to having aliens in the backyard, but also to show the rest of the world that this was rescue, not invasion. He’d gloss over the population issues. It wasn’t as if they were new, or if no human had ever suggested equally draconian measures. There were even humans who’d suggested self-extinction. They’d be recruiting for the Eqbas now.

  Esganikan and Mekuliet were sitting in his office, not entirely at ease on chairs, watching the feed from the UN chamber for a few minutes in bemused silence.

  “Should I have done this through the UN?” Esganikan asked.

  “A lot of member states are concerned that you haven’t started from that platform,” said Bari. It was as good a time as any. “They could extradite and try Prachy for you.”

  “The UN has shown no ability to make nations unite, so it’s of no tactical importance to us. It couldn’t even protect the gene banks it set up in the past. The Christians had to step in.”

  She didn’t seem bothered by the extradition idea. “Nevertheless, it’s the only truly global organization we have.”

  “The world can hear me as well from here as it can from the UN headquarters. As I recall, Australia extended the invitation to us to restore global ecology, so that is where I start, with the society most likely to be willing to maintain the planet once restored.”

  “You have to deal with the whole planet eventually.”

  “Prime Minister, if every nation realized that their boundaries are no protection against a deteriorating environment, I wouldn’t need to be here except to punish those responsible for the genocide on Bezer’ej.”

  Bari chewed the thought over. It was a long way to come just to smack a few humans. Wess’har seemed a remarkably motivated species. “Has your team finished their estimates?”

  “Yes. The global population needs to be reduced to approximately one billion or fewer, zero growth to prevent further premature extinctions of other species, and to free up resources to reintroduce species whose habitats have been destroyed by human activity.”

  So, five or six billion had to go. It was the time and manner of their going that made the difference. But he’d definitely seen worse scenarios. A billion…that took Earth back to the population of the nineteenth century. Life wasn’t too bad then. It wasn’t Year Zero. This was survivable.

  “We’ve had worse estimates from climate modeling,” he said. “We’ve even got a movement, been going for a few hundred years, dedicated to voluntary human extinction, except it’s still here, which always strikes me as being like an anarchists’ group drawing up a rule book.”

  “You’ll go extinct anyway,” Esganikan said. “Either through the natural course of evolution, or by bringing a disaster on yourselves. The issue for us is how many other species you destroy by altering the environment beyond its normal fluctuations.”

  “Okay, we pay for the climate change we caused. We still can’t agree on how much is down to us.”

  “You forget that climate change is only one aspect of this. There’s killing other life, and irresponsible land use too, and direct poisoning from pollution. Tell me, Prime Minister, when you see images of Umeh, do you see that as your own future?”

  “It’s hard to get humans to see that. It’s hard enough to get them to stop eating t
hings that they know will end up killing them in a few years, let alone something that’ll affect future generations. Which is why we’re in the mess we’re in now.”

  “But there are many who do heed warnings. They change their lives to reduce the harm to other life-forms, and refuse to use other species for their own benefit.”

  “I like to think we’ve got a lot of people like that here.”

  “Presumably you don’t have the monopoly on them.”

  “No, but we have a long history here in the Pacific Rim states of environmental responsibility and protection.”

  “Then I’ll be looking to you to demonstrate a more sustainable and civilized lifestyle here, which would include ending all livestock farming and use of animal products.”

  Bari knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and common sense told him this was coming. Gethes. Carrion eaters. Humans ate other animals, but didn’t need to. He tried to see it through Eqbas eyes: people here objected to dog meat and it was banned, but other cultures couldn’t see what the fuss was about. It was still going to be a bloody hard sell. On the other hand, drought had been the end of most cattle and sheep farming, and 90 percent of meat sold now was cell culture anyway.

  It’ll just be the rich bastards who can afford natural meat…and then there’ll be a black market in it….

  He thought he’d check anyway.

  “Does this extend to vat-grown meat and fish?”

  Esganikan looked at Mekuliet. Bari thought it was an ethics issue, but the Eqbas seemed not to separate ethics from anything.

  “We still find it repellent,” Mekuliet said. “But for the time being, it can remain, because no live person suffers.”

  “Person?”

  Esganikan looked puzzled for a moment, then the light went on. “All creatures are people. We have no concept of our own species as being unique.”

  “Got it,” said Bari. If he’d thought negotiating was hard, then non-negotiating was even harder. Did he dare ask for some sweetener to balance that? He imagined the headlines when this went public—GO VEGAN OR ELSE. It was the kind of small dumb thing—and it was small, in the scheme of global catastrophe—that brought down governments while much bigger sins like sleaze, death squads, and dubious allies passed unremarked. “Time scale?”