“As soon as you can.”
Bari wished he’d studied the interminable Michallat programs more thoroughly. One thing he recalled was that wess’har—and Eqbas were still wess’har—came out straight with whatever was on their mind. It had to be worth trying. Esganikan certainly wouldn’t understand the give and take that was expected and unspoken, and he had no cards to play anyway.
“Can I ask you two direct questions, Commander?”
“Yes.”
“If the FEU attacks us, will you give us military support?”
“Australia is our pilot project, as you call it, just as the Northern Assembly was our basis for progress on Umeh. Yes, we would defend you.”
Shit. That was so simple. “And is there any environmental improvement you could carry out in the short term to show our citizens what’s possible? Hope is a great motivator for humans. Most of our grand climate change remedies haven’t worked as well as we’d hoped.”
Mekuliet, who’d been speaking when spoken to up to that point, suddenly perked up. “You have inadequate models. I saw your attempts at reflecting solar energy with devices in orbit. Your concepts are promising, but your calculations are flawed.”
Puny Earthling. He really expected her to say it. “There’s also the complication that countries don’t like geo-engineering because it might benefit one nation’s environment but screw theirs. Very contentious. Wars have been fought over it.”
“We have to think in global terms,” she said. “While we decide whether to accept Shan Chail ’s wish that the planet be restored to a much earlier optimum state, such as the early twentieth century, what measure would you find most useful for your country right now?”
“Water,” Bari said. He didn’t even have to think about it. “We need more water. Always have.”
He had no idea if Canh Pho had this conversation with Esganikan in the past. But even if he had, it was worth repeating. Bari wasn’t sure if he was asking for rain-seeding or sophisticated recovery methods, although he’d seen the Eqbas tapping deep into the desert to find water that engineers here couldn’t get at. Bari was ready to believe that a million years head start on humans bought you something akin to magic.
“Desalination,” said Mekuliet. “You use it, but we can do it better. Your engineers have seen how we created a desalinated supply for the reception center.”
She made it sound so simple. Bari knew he should have involved the scientists right from the start, but he hadn’t, and now he was glad he’d played it that way. They would have dived straight into detail when what really needed doing was to look this relatively benign army of occupation in the eye and ask if they would take care of the place if the residents behaved.
It was that simple. Now the scientists could get on with the job. He had no doubt that the Eqbas would play it exactly as they saw fit, and roll over any interdepartmental rivalries.
“I’ll get the Minister for the Environment to see you right away, Chail,” he said, pleased with himself that he’d picked up at least one honorific.
The two Eqbas left, and Bari took a few minutes’ breathing space to reflect on the fact that it was barely a week since they’d landed and he was getting results. The planet hadn’t been plunged into war. Death rays hadn’t reduced the place to rubble. The future was going to be horribly hard, but not for Australia or its neighbors, and weaning the country off meat was a small price to pay.
He sipped his coffee, kept hot since early that morning in the socket on his desk. So Shan Frankland had enough influence to make Esganikan think twice about the restore point for Earth; that was something he hadn’t realized.
Nobody was ever going to hand her over to the FEU, then. And if the FEU were going to get shitty over that—well, now there was a new line of defense.
The Eqbas fleet and its Skavu army.
Surang, Eqbas Vorhi: Place of Maintenance and Innovation for Fleet Vessels.
Rayat still had time—days anyway; maybe months.
He sat among the transparent panels of the maintenance control room, feeling as if he was in a room full of shower curtains. The sheets of material were alive with colors and movement, looking very much like virin’ve—the transparent Eqbas communication devices—after a nasty accident in a rolling mill. When he reached out to touch them, they were soft and pliable. This was the live code that instructed the extraordinary liquid-solid nanite technology of the wess’har to create a home, or a robe, or a constantly changing warship. Wess’har could program matter.
“These each correspond with ships in the fleet,” said Rajulian’s obliging neighbor, Co Beyokti. “Each collection of materials—each ship—recognizes its parts, and only those, and communicates instructions from this banivrin only to them. So we have no accidents where parts of other objects merge with each other, and the technology doesn’t run wild and start deconstructing cities. Does that make sense to you?”
Rayat’s eyes searched for patterns in the shifting colors, and the bioluminescence in his hands, the legacy of his time among the bezeri, flared into wild rainbow sequences. He could speak in light, even if he’d fought hard to keep his vocal abilities during his time underwater; but the lights were random, like someone mimicking an unknown foreign language to try to squeeze meaning from it. Rayat quelled the signals with an effort and looked up into Beyokti’s face. His head was cocked completely to the right.
“They told me you could do that,” he said. “But seeing it is quite another matter.”
Rayat had him distracted. Good. He could handle the programming sheets any time and not draw attention, then. “It’s my party trick. I used to be aquatic, for a while…”
“I think you must be very brave to face that.”
“Drowning isn’t so bad after the first few times. It’s like going to the dentist. You can will yourself not to feel fear or discomfort.”
Beyokti didn’t know what a dentist was, seeing as he understood no English at all, but drowning had seized his attention anyway. Wess’har loved to hear everyone’s stories, something the Eqbas and the Targassati exiles on Wess’ej still had in common. Learning eqbas’u and mastering the overtone—c’naatat could do wonders with a human larynx—had been one of Rayat’s best decisions. It opened the planet to him, although not quite enough of it.
“You must tell me more,” said Beyokti.
“I will.” Rayat draped a program sheet over one arm. And I don’t even have to lie. “I’ve lived here twenty years, and I still don’t understand how you do all this. I know the principle, but that’s all. It’s quite astonishing. How do you input the code changes? With a stylus?”
Beyokti took out a glove that was made of the same transparent, color-shot material. Transparent materials, from the tough and beautiful glass all wess’har used to the slab of gel that formed those extraordinary Eqbas “tea tray” microscopes, were a wess’har obsession. Rayat slipped the glove onto his hand, noting how it reshaped itself from long multijointed spidery fingers to fit his shorter, thicker human hands.
“Here,” said Beyokti. He guided Rayat’s hand to a blank area of the sheet. “Trace your finger like so…”
A line of magenta light followed Rayat’s fingertip. He touched the tips together, as if using a virin, just to see what would happen, and the color changed to a vivid green. For a few seconds he was lost in a childlike finger-painting moment.
“Now tell me what I just did,” he said, smiling. Eqbas seemed fascinated that humans showed their teeth to indicate good humor. It came of living alongside ussissi, whose display of teeth meant anything but a good mood. “I bet I didn’t write a coherent program change there, did I?”
“No.” Beyokti trilled, amused. “The template will recognize that as useless data, and won’t attempt to incorporate it into any instructions. But the engineers on board a ship currently in ten light-years from here will see a pretty scrawl appear on their redundant code screen. It simply spits out what it can’t use, and shows it to the crew in case this
is significant.”
It was perfect. Rayat was careful not to sully his faith with the dirty necessities of his job, but there always seemed to be a solution at hand when he most needed one. His pragmatic self told him that he was the one who worked bloody hard to find solutions, not a higher being.
“Where are the programs for the Skavu fleet on Earth?” he asked.
Beyokti led him through the forest of gently swaying sheets. “Here. They don’t look any different from the modern fleet, but the ships are much older, and the technology less flexible. But they still work—and we waste nothing.”
“Very commendable,” said Rayat, just managing to stop himself mentioning Targassat. It was hard to offend any wess’har, but it would be a robust debate that he didn’t have time for at that moment. “Show me the flagship. If I can’t do any harm, may I write something on this for the commander to see?” Then he slipped in the only actual lie he had told in the whole process. “Fourth To Die Kiir. I met him briefly.”
He hadn’t, of course. But Beyokti wouldn’t check that, not for a long time anyway.
“Certainly.”
“Can I schedule it to be sent?” asked Rayat.
“We update the Skavu fleet in about six days.”
“Ah, that’s soon enough.” Rayat let himself smile, thinking that it probably looked like happy recall of meeting the Skavu officer. “Maybe he’ll reply. Like a message in a bottle.”
Rayat wrote carefully, and Beyokti watched him with as much comprehension as Rayat would have managed faced with a sheet full of kanji.
KIIR, ESGANIKAN HAS INFECTED HERSELF WITH C’NAATAT. YOU MUST ASSESS THE RISK. DOCTOR MOHAN RAYAT.
It looked very pretty, in vivid turquoise light that quivered slightly as the sheet flexed. And he hadn’t even urged the Skavu to do anything; merely to assess the risk.
There was always the chance that Kiir would do just that, and shrug it off, but from what he’d heard from Shapakti about Skavu and their fanatical views, he doubted it.
“There,” said Rayat. “And you’re sure that won’t cause a drive shutdown or anything unpleasant?”
“I’m sure. It’ll get transferred to the diagnostic screen.”
“It won’t get lost?”
“If Skavu engineers follow our procedures, they’ll pass it up their command chain. And it’s such regular script—they can see it’s not random. How I wish I could learn to read it.”
“I’ll teach you,” Rayat said. “Now, let’s have a pot of tisane at the Exchange of Ideas, and I’ll tell you all about my time living with the bezeri. All of it.”
8
We have two choices. One is to sit back and allow Australia—and its allies, who don’t seem to be getting much from this deal—to benefit from the local climate changes the Eqbas can put in place at the expense of the rest of the planet. Remember the disasters that unilateral climate engineering caused in the past. The other is to give Australia a very good reason to bring the Eqbas to the UN table to talk to us all.
MICHAEL ZAMMETT, FEU President,
addressing the UN Security Council
Immigrant Reception Center, Shan Frankland’s quarters
“You know I wouldn’t ask a favor of you unless I really needed it, Eddie.”
Shan shut her eyes and waited. Eddie’s voice hadn’t aged at all: no cracking, no hoarseness, just a measured and confident tone that made you stop and listen. Eddie always sounded as if he knew what he was talking about and that it was the holy truth.
“I’m amazed you’ve kept the vultures away from you for this long, doll,” he said. “Have you punched one out yet? Hope you wore your gloves…”
“Ade and Mart have been shooting bee cams for target practice. Y’know, calibrating for Earth gravity and air density. Cams are tiny things now. They even use dust tech.”
“How very modern,” he said. “It’s obvious, I suppose.”
Twenty-five years, lost in a heartbeat. I hate this. I hate time. I hate being outside time.
“I need a real journalist, Eddie,” Shan said. “I won’t dress it up. I want to leak something and put the FEU in a corner. It might stop Esganikan bombing the shit out them.”
“No pressure, then.”
“I can’t rely on the camera kiddies out here.”
“That’s my girl. Never ask a wanker to do a man’s job.”
“There was another jobsworth involved with Rayat’s orders, and the FEU won’t hand her over to Esganikan or even the UN. You can guess the rest. The name’s Katya Prachy.”
“P, R, A, C, H, Y?”
“Correct. I need her flushed out—either to show the FEU it’s a good idea to play ball, or, worst comes to worst, for a snatch team.”
“So she’ll end up dead, won’t she? Like the others.”
“Strange as it might seem, that wasn’t my doing.”
“I know that. Are you heeding my warning about the FEU making a grab for you?”
“Of course I am.”
“The man himself contacted me to ask if I could give him advice on the wess’har from time to time. The fucking FEU president. I’m sure you can join up the dots.”
“So are you up for it, Eddie, or has Zammett bedazzled you by making you the court anthropologist?”
“You’re sure you got the right woman?”
“Esganikan’s adamant. Must have come from Rayat. Do you ever have any contact with him?”
“Zero. All I’ve heard is what I got third-hand from Nevyan, that they’ve extracted c’naatat from him a few times and he survived. I’m amazed he talked after all this time.”
So Eddie didn’t know about Esganikan. Probably. “Well, can you put a piece together saying Prachy has been named as another bastard who ordered the bombing of Ouzhari, and that serious shit will happen if she’s not handed over? I’ve got her ID holos for you, her biometrics, the lot.”
Eddie paused. “She’d be what, sixty, seventy now?”
“Eighty-odd.”
“Ooh. Extraditing little old ladies for war crimes is always iffy, PR-wise.”
“They were ready to swap her for me.”
“Well, you’re getting on for a hundred and fifty…”
“Eddie. Please. I need pressure put on the FEU to give Esganikan what she wants before she starts taking Brussels apart. It’s going to be bloody enough as it is without that. You’ve got the whole BBChan machine, no other hack gets near the story, and it goes without saying that I’ll get Esganikan to front up and do the resistance-is-futile interview. And Rayat isn’t aware of this yet. Cards close to the chest, mate, okay?”
“I recall warning you way back that he was going to be serious trouble,” said Eddie. “Look, I’m not sure people even remember why the Eqbas decided to visit Earth in the first place. Twenty-six, twenty-seven years ago? I think I’ll need to remind them.”
“They think it’s to teach them to hug more trees.”
“But you realize they’ll ask why we bombed the place to start with.”
“Tell them.”
“About c’naatat? Jesus—”
“Say it’s valuable bacteria. Be vague. Make it sound like some lunatic government project. Like trying to train commandos to walk through walls.”
“That’d be lying. That’d be propaganda, not reporting. I still know the difference.”
Shan had never asked him to lie. Eddie’s decency was also his biggest flaw, at least when you were trying to get him to do something irregular. “Look, if you say the government thought it was something that gave the user eternal life, it’s true, and it’s also so fucking crazy that the public will nod and file it under Yet Another Waste of Our Taxes.”
“I never said I wouldn’t do the lying bit. Look, a question for you, doll. Not for the record. Does Esganikan really know what she’s there for? She was sliding into mission drift even before you set off. Not a good sign in a war.”
Did Eddie know? No, he’d have told her if he knew about Esganikan’s c’naatat.
He would never sit on anything that dangerous now. “At least she seems to have an exit strategy. That’s a big plus.”
“Time will tell. Look, it’ll still be dead squid as far as humans are concerned, but Ade and Aras got some great shots of the bodies strewn along the shoreline for me.”
Shan realized she didn’t find the short leap from great shots to bodies strewn at all callous, and wondered why the newscasts weren’t running that again now. But it was all so long ago, and humans couldn’t even keep the causes of terrestrial wars straight in their heads a week afterwards. They didn’t even care much about dead humans who were different from them.
I ought to come clean with him. But where do I start? Am I telling him what he needs for his own good, or dumping on him?
Shan began to frame her confession to Eddie and then swallowed it whole. “Time is of the essence, mate.”
“Pedaling as fast as I can. Keep watching the skies…”
Shan flicked the key and shut down the link. Isn’t that something? I can just call a man a hundred and fifty trillion miles away, right away, and for free. The corporations would be sniffing around again soon, war or not, trying to find the Eqbas price for technology transfer: ITX, morphing structures and ships, biodegradable metal, contamination remediation nanites…weapons, nice clean minimum residue weapons to fight nice green wars.
A ship that can split up into any number of vessels. Isn’t that something?
She could step into one of those right now and go anywhere she wanted.
Yeah, that’s something.
And she could call in a favor and have a retired intelligence officer exposed to the world’s media, and get her killed, but maybe head off a regional war.
Yes, that was something, too. But in the end, not one damn bit of it mattered. It would all end the same way.
Judge Page 18
