Judge (9 page)

“Aras, did we make a mistake bringing back the gene bank?”

He'd never heard her express doubt before. “I don't believe so.”

“You never lie, and you've restored planets yourself. Convince me.”

“Think of it as a staged process. Everything in it can be resurrected when the conditions are right.” Aras risked putting his gloved hand on her shoulder, suddenly conscious of her neck and seeing Josh's seconds before he swung his wess'har harvesting knife at it. “The alternative was losing all life that might have survived, had humans not driven it to extinction. I would say you did the only thing you could.”

“You know, I can't help thinking we've brought it back for Judgment Day.”

This was where rational, pragmatic, calm Deborah Garrod became someone who alarmed Shan. Deborah switched from demonstrable reality to unfathomable belief, seamless and certain. Shan would try not to look embarrassed, biting her lip and talking patiently to Deborah as if she was a child—a human child, not a wess'har one. Wess'har children needed no fairy tales. Humans—of all ages—seemed unable to live without them, and Aras could still see no difference between morality tales and the word of their god.

“Why would your god destroy what he created, unless he felt he'd made a mistake?” Aras asked. He didn't do it out of cruelty, but out of a frustrated need to understand. This faith was a massively powerful motivator for good and bad in humans, and he had never fully grasped it. “Is he culling, like we did to the isenj?”

“In a way. He'll save the righteous and give them eternal life.”

“And the sinners are cast into Hell, yes?” Aras remembered that bit. He wondered about it from time to time, and if he would be considered a sinner. It struck him as unfair. “So he doesn't forgive.”

“Oh, God forgives.”

“Then who goes to Hell? I asked your ancestor Ben about this many times, and I never understood where God drew the line between those he forgave and those he didn't.”

“I don't have an answer.”

“Do you think you'll be saved? Because you did what you thought God wanted and preserved the gene bank?”

“I
hope
I'm saved, because I want to see God. And…Josh.”

Aras knew he would have made the same decision today, right now, and killed Josh for helping destroy Ouzhari. He still missed him. He still pitied Deborah. He still didn't feel guilty. It had to be done, or there was only chaos to follow.

It was
judgment.
He understood that.

Aras wanted to find Shan and Ade, and shelter in the comfort of his family, but the conversation had transfixed him and he felt on the brink of genuine discovery after so many years of confusion. He was acutely aware of the language used in the conversation, because he'd struggled with the concepts for many years.
Forgiveness
had taken him years to unpick, but he had a better idea of what
guilt
was. There was also
redemption
, which he still thought of as selfish and irrelevant, and then there was judgment, which he understood when he saw it as
balance.

“Billions of humans will die when this planet is restored,” he said. “Is that Judgment Day? Does it have to be God who kills them to count as that? Or is this what you call
working through man
?”

“Do you realize how profound your theology can be, Aras?”

“No. I understand too little.”

“I think that's what makes it profound.”

“Well, is it? Will that be Judgment Day? Is it the end of Earth, or the end of humans? Because this won't be the end of humans, not unless Esganikan—”

“You're scaring me now.”

Deborah had never said that before, not even as a joke. And she
was
scared: her pupils were dilated and she smelled of anxiety. How could she fear death if her god was going to reward her for doing the right things in life, and reunite her with Josh?

“I'm sorry, Deborah. Why?”

“Because if this is God's judgment coming, then I have to rethink my whole life.”

Aras thought of something Shan had said to him a long time ago when he made a grave and headstone for Lindsay Neville's premature baby, and asked Shan about the afterlife.

Every miracle's got a mundane explanation. Your City of Pearl is actually insect shit. Eternal life is a parasite. The bubbles in champagne are the farts of yeast colonies. That's just the way the universe is. And you can choose—you can look at the wondrous surface, or you can look at the crud beneath.

He had a moment of revelation, of epiphany—ah, all those god words again, the god words the colony always used—that made perfect sense of it all. He knew now, or at least he had a theory. It would comfort Deborah.

“But that means you were right,” he said. “That your faith has been proven.”

“—I like to think so. We all struggle with faith, Aras, because if we didn't we'd be wasting the minds that God gave us.”

“Your Bible is looking increasingly factual.”

The expression on her face was suddenly unreadable. But there was still fear on her scent, and not of him. “You surprise me by saying that.”

“It's a matter of perspective. The future of the planet is being determined by the Eqbas, which is judgment. Only a relatively small number of humans will survive, which is the righteous. You've seen the City of Pearl in F'nar, and eternal life in
c'naatat.
And whatever environment is left here may well be the world to come. Doesn't that vindicate your views?”

As soon as he finished the sentence, he knew he'd said the wrong thing. Deborah didn't turn on him, but there was the faintest slackening of the muscles around her mouth and eyes, a little human tell that he knew could mean anything from dismay to well-hidden shock or grief. He thought she wanted to know the truth, to be proven right after all, but he'd got it wrong again.

They're within you. You have their memories, you have a human
isan
and house-brother, and yet you still don't know humans at all, not even now.

“In a way,” Deborah said, “I hope the Bible is wrong in that respect.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. Humans—believers—have always tried to tie the scriptures to real events and to second-guess God. I think that's why we shunned literalism in the colony, all of us, whatever branch of Christianity we came from. Our intellects aren't enough to comprehend God on that mundane level.”

It was as kind a way of being told to shut up as Aras had ever heard. He felt he'd wounded her.

“I didn't mean to undermine your faith.”

“We all question belief, Aras. It's not wrong.”

“I never really understood it.”

“Faith keeps you going when there's no logical reason to. In its way, it keeps life going. It keeps
people
going, having kids even though the future looks bad, because they believe it'll get better. I hear that even Mohan Rayat found comfort in his faith. Commander Neville did too.”

“But after they
sinned.
After they destroyed Ouzhari. Do we have to sin to find faith? Do we—”

Aras was desperate to continue the debate. He wanted to understand so badly. But he stopped short of the logical progression, of pointing out that as far as he knew, other animals went on reproducing without a formal belief in God, and that eventually the Earth and the whole solar system would die when the Sun reached the end of its life. But that was something she literally didn't need to hear.

There was always the chance he was wrong. He hoped so, for her sake, and wondered where he might stand if he were. God must have found a way of dealing with an ever-increasing population of people who were eternally alive. He must have learned a way to deal with a kind of
c'naatat
that lay beyond the scope of ecologies. Perhaps the humans' god would
forgive
an alien who had faced similar choices to his own.

Deborah stood up and looked at Aras, tears in her eyes. He could see the glistening liquid welling in the dying light.

“You'll visit us many times before you return to Wess'ej, won't you? Promise me.”

“I will. I'll visit as often as I can.”

“Good.” Then she hugged him. It was rare for any human other than Shan to touch him, and Shan had transformed his life when she took his arm for the first time. A hug was an exceptional thing. “You're part of the miracle, Aras. I wish you peace, and an answer to your life in the fullness of time, because even
c'naatat
can't outlive God. Thank you. I'll miss you.”

She walked back to the camp of shiplets, kicking a little dust behind her, and was swallowed up in the cool darkness of the evening. The desert was empty except for him and the silent camp. Aras felt an
end.
One job was over forever. The next—

He didn't know what came next.

He
needed
to know what happened next. He needed to know what he'd done so many years ago, saving the Bezer'ej mission from disaster, had not simply created more problems for the many species of Earth. He wanted all of it saved, the whole gene bank, and he wanted the various worlds he knew to go back to the way they were: when Bezer'ej was clean and unpolluted by colonizing isenj, when Earth was peopled with the species that filled the gene bank, when Wess'ej hadn't yet been drawn into a terrible war.

Humans said you could never turn back the clock. But wess'har—Eqbas especially—could.

Aras walked back to the shiplet for the night, wondering how far Shan and Ade would turn back their own clock if they could.

 

Eqbas ship 886–001–005–6: command center module.

 

Esganikan studied Da Shapakti's message again with a mix of relief and apprehension. He'd done it; he'd managed to remove the
c'naatat
organism from Mohan Rayat, not once but a number of times.

The parasite's capacity to adapt and resist removal had its limits. Shapakti had found a way to beat it—in humans, at least, there was.

Esganikan found herself looking past his recording on the screen set in the bulkhead of her cabin, straining to see something of her home city, Surang. She missed it: the longing was sharp, sharper than she had ever known on previous missions, a craving for a normal life and a clan of her own. She knew his words well enough by now. She didn't need to listen, just to see.

She'd talk to Shapakti tomorrow. Her life depended on it:
c'naatat
would have to be removed one day, or she would have to be removed from it by fragmentation. She had no intention of ending up like Aras, alone for unthinkable periods.

And then there was Rayat.

Could she allow him to return home now? She'd once told him he could come back to Earth. What harm could he do once
c'naatat
was removed? Without the parasite in his possession, nothing he knew could help humans to find it and exploit it. And they would never reach Bezer'ej again, she'd see to that.

Is that Rayat's voice persuading me?

Shan would fight to stop him returning; she'd try to kill him again, Esganikan was sure of that. Shan thought knowledge was dangerous and needed to be controlled, one of her few blatantly human failings.

Esganikan searched as best she could in the jumbled memory that wasn't wholly hers, trying to test Mohan Rayat's motives. She felt the passing touch of an isolated child who wanted to please his grandfather. The memories of the humans through which
c'naatat
had passed emerged with a fragmented but surprising clarity. The wider picture eluded her, but she saw
snapshots,
as Shan called them, frozen moments of great detail. She felt his intense devotion: family, nation, but no wife, no child, and a conscious, aching gap where they should have been.

How similar all creatures are, deep down.

Esganikan could feel Shan's desperate dread of
c'naatat,
a fear that had drowned out her own needs—a nightmare of supersoldiers, uncontrolled population growth, wars over the privilege of owning the biotech, a battleground between the haves and the have-nots, the destruction of the fabric of the ecology, the economy and society. There would also be something called
stupid, wasteful bloody beauty treatments
derived from it without a thought of the long-term consequences, although Esganikan was still working out what that meant.

All life was meant to end. Humans were far too obsessed with stagnant permanence—in mortal or spiritual form—in a universe already predestined to end and begin anew.

Esganikan distracted herself by catching up on the latest climate modeling that the ecosystem analysts had produced in the last few hours. It would probably upset the
gethes
that she'd taken information from their systems rather than waiting to be given it, but this was not their timetable to dictate. They were squabbling among themselves just like the isenj had done, except that their wars would damage other species, and so they had to be
managed.

If Shapakti failed to find a way to remove
c'naatat
from Esganikan, she would face the same choice as the wess'har once had—at what point to give up her unnatural life.

Stop this. You've been on Earth less than twenty-four hours. Deal with that when you have to. You knew the risks.

The climate changes on Earth weren't as extreme as the first Eqbas model had predicted: humans had tried to mend their ways again, but it was never enough and they always stopped short of the necessary measures. She gazed at the three-dimensional animated models of expanding and contracting ice, isotherms, storm systems and sea levels. The warming had slowed; so had the deliberate destruction of many habitats, but humans had no technology for putting things back the way they were. The reports emerging on her screen showed a debate growing between her ecology analysts about how much of that slowdown could be attributed to declining human numbers, remedial action, or the planet's natural cycles. The
gethes
were dying in greater numbers from famine, floods and disease. There still seemed to be an ample and renewable supply of them, though.