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  “You accept the deaths of some of your own citizens are inevitable, then.”

  Bioagents were a wess’har speciality: even the Wess’ej wess’har could do that, despite their lack of interest in pursuing technology and their talk of respecting the “natural” world. They could even target the pathogens by small variations between different isenj genotypes. Rit knew that, but she wondered how reliable the weapons might be, and if it might not be a ruse to wipe them all out.

  No, wess’har weren’t humans. If they were set on destroying isenj, they would have done it without a moment’s hesitation. Deception wasn’t a weapon they needed to use. She could at least trust them.

  “You know the stakes,” said Rit. “Our population will soon reach the point where even the managed environment will collapse and there’ll be millions of deaths anyway. Better to manage that in a controlled way—or do you subscribe to this view of Tass…Tassati…”

  “Targassat,” said Ralassi. “That only outcomes matter? All wess’har think that, not just Targassat. Yes, I believe I do think that as well. But you sound as if you’re trying to convince yourself, Minister.”

  I am, because I’m out of my depth. But I know we can’t carry on as we are and survive. How suddenly these tipping points come upon us.

  “I’m simply choosing the manner of their dying.”

  Ralassi narrowed his eyes again. “You and the cabinet.”

  The groundcar edged forward. The streets here weren’t as tightly packed with pedestrians as the capital, and the driver made better progress.

  Rit looked at Ralassi with renewed curiosity: why did ussissi adopt the culture of another species so thoroughly, and yet not that of the world where they were raised? Did they have their own languages and beliefs? What did it mean, then, to be ussissi? She couldn’t grasp a sense of allegiance and belonging so devoid of place or genes. But Ralassi was loyal in the sense that he wouldn’t betray her. That was all.

  “The human and the wess’har who have c’naatat,” she said. “Is it true they have isenj genes?”

  “I hear they have.” Ralassi glanced out the hatch of the groundcar and leaned through it to stare up at the sky. “And isenj memories.”

  It was a shocking revelation, but c’naatat was a strange symbiont. “Whose?”

  “Whoever captured Aras Sar Iussan in the wars.”

  That was five centuries ago. This wess’har, this freak of nature, had isenj memories—but direct ones, undiluted by forty or more generations, and he wasn’t just any wess’har but the destroyer of Mjat, a historical figure of hate for all isenj. This war criminal had a direct memory, a parental memory, one generation removed and no doubt vivid and detailed. Did it change the way he saw isenj now? Did he feel anything that his fellow wess’har didn’t?

  She wanted to meet him. She wondered if her dead husband had. “So the humans have inherited the memory from him, and so the two I saw, the soldier and the matriarch, they also…”

  Rit trailed off. Ralassi seemed distracted by something, cocking his head to one side.

  “Stop—” he said.

  Ussissi had excellent hearing. He was straining to hear something. Seconds later, a faint whistling sound became loud and insistent, and the noise of the crowd either side of the car leapt from a low continuous whirring to a few high-pitched shrieks, silenced almost instantly by an explosion that left Rit numb and tasting saline in her mouth.

  Snapping sounds crackled around her, her hearing so overloaded that it left a taste in her mouth. She was looking up at the inner canopy of the ground car. It was canted at an angle, but she couldn’t work out if it was the vehicle or she who was tipped on one side.

  The ground shook and she tasted more deafening sounds. Screams were drowned by low-frequency thuds. Ralassi’s face was suddenly right in hers, lips drawn back to reveal an unbroken reef of white, spiked teeth.

  “Minister—“

  “We’re under attack.”

  “Can you hear me, Minister?”

  Rit was convinced she was speaking and couldn’t understand why Ralassi couldn’t hear her. Perhaps ussissi were deafened by loud noises, like humans. She realized the snapping was the sound of her own quills, broken as she was thrown around the interior of the groundcar. Two goldstone beads rolled across the floor of the vehicle as it lurched into a new position, and she could see clouds of smoke with particles roiling in them.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What is it?”

  Ralassi was barely audible now.

  “We’re under attack, Minister. The Maritime Fringe has launched missiles.”

  2

  He’s not the God of answers; he’s the God of questions. He uses the events of history to interrogate us and ask how we will live and deal with them.

  Franciscan monk

  speaking after the earthquake that damaged

  the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in 1997

  The Temporary City, Bezer’ej: Eqbas Vorhi ship 886–001–005–6, in disassembled mode

  Esganikan Gai liked the bulkhead of her cabin set to transparency, for the reassurance of the unspoiled wilderness of Bezer’ej a glance away. Watching the output from the Umeh observation remotes fifty million miles away was somehow uniquely claustrophobic.

  It was also disappointing: the isenj had started fighting again.

  She watched the live images on the screen set in the bulkhead like a waking nightmare intruding on a peaceful day, a portal into what the humans called Hell. At high magnification, the sprawl of construction from one coast of the Ebj continent to the other was peppered and illuminated by detonations. Smoke spread like blooms south of Jejeno, the Northern Assembly’s capital.

  Aitassi trotted into the cabin and paused to stare at the image of Umeh. “They still seem unable to make up their minds whether to fight or not.”

  “They’re unaccustomed to civil war,” said Esganikan. “Their genetic memories are mainly of being a colonial power.”

  “Who did they fight?”

  “The local wess’har. You know that.”

  “I meant who else. If they were a colonial power, if they established instant communications relays across star systems, then do they have other colonies? Why haven’t we come across them before?”

  Esganikan considered the idea that there might be more isenj out there, breeding to destruction and pillaging environments. Eqbas had as good an idea as anyone could about the spread of species in this arm of the galaxy; but even after millennia, they hadn’t charted every world. Life wasn’t rare, and space was vast.

  “Perhaps, like humans, their colonial ambition is on a more domestic scale.” She couldn’t cover every eventuality. She fought to keep her focus. “But if they have colonies beyond Tasir Var, they haven’t ever come to their homeworld’s aid.”

  “Umeh makes you indecisive, doesn’t it?”

  Esganikan didn’t need reminding. “Except for their potential to threaten Wess’ej, it doesn’t matter if the isenj species survives or not. And that makes it difficult to evaluate the benefit of intervention.”

  It also didn’t matter which image of Umeh the orbiting remotes were relaying. Whichever of Umeh’s four island continents Esganikan observed, they looked the same except, at close quarters, in the detail of the architecture: coast-to-coast cityscapes and desperately overcrowded conditions. Umeh’s ecology was wholly artificial. The isenj had consumed and destroyed everything else that shared their planet except for microscopic life in the oceans. Left to its own devices, it was a dying world anyway.

  Does it matter if they kill each other? Does it matter if I help them do it? They’ll die sooner or later, along with their world.

  “I wish I’d never agreed to help the isenj restore the planet,” said Esganikan. “But I did agree, so I have to see this through somehow. Do you think the Northern Assembly will use bioweapons if we give them the capacity?”

  Aitassi made a little dubious chattering noise. “They’ll try it once.”


  “Once is all it takes.”

  “Perhaps leaving the weapons with the local wess’har might be a better idea.”

  “If the matriarchs of F’nar were prepared to use those countermeasures, they’d have done it by now. They have their own biological weapon capability. They’ve already seeded this planet with anti-isenj pathogens.”

  “Generic ones, commander. They never had the tissue samples to create more targeted weapons.”

  “They’ve never attacked Umeh so they didn’t need them. They only fought isenj in disputed territory.”

  The wess’har had arrived in this system ten thousand years ago. If they’d looked at their isenj neighbors then, and identified them as the threat they clearly were, things might have been very different. Instead they waited until a few hundred years ago, and intervened when the bezeri begged for aid. Too little; and far too late.

  That’s the problem with Targassat’s ideology. Don’t interfere. Turn a blind eye. And this is what happens.

  Shan Frankland would have called them bloody hippies. Apparently it meant the same thing.

  “I’m waiting for Curas Ti to respond,” said Esganikan. “I need to know exactly what resources she can now commit to Earth.”

  Aitassi didn’t say the obvious, that the matriarch of Surang, Curas Ti, should have worked that out by now. Earth mattered. Earth was more than the homeworld of humans who needed controlling: Earth had biodiversity to lose. Species there became extinct in decades, and it would take twenty-five years to reach the planet.

  Esganikan drummed her fingers on the console and the grim picture of the Ebj continent switched to another orbital image, this time a far more familiar one: Surang, her home city on Eqbas Vorhi five light-years away.

  Yes, she missed it.

  It was a landscape of discreet but artificial canyons and cliffs studded with terraced homes and communal buildings where the business of government and manufacture took place. Compared to the deliberately concealed architecture of Wess’ej, where the local wess’har strove to blend in with the landscape, it looked intrusive. This was the world that the followers of Targassat left thousands of years before, rejecting the responsibility that wess’har had always accepted as an ancient race: the duty to teach, enable and—if necessary—impose environmental stability on other worlds.

  But we came to your aid when you asked us to deal with the humans. We were heading home, and we’ve been away a long time. Now you don’t even want us on Wess’ej.

  Esganikan shook herself out of her growing resentment of her cousins. “I’d like a quick and straightforward solution.” She was thinking once again of how many years it might be before she could return to Surang and start a family of her own. “But there won’t be one.”

  How did I get drawn into this? Why did I not just let the isenj drown on their own filth?

  Another screen activated in the bulkhead, spreading from a pinpoint to form a rectangle a meter across. Curas Ti’s adviser on alien ecology, Sarmatakian Ve, seemed harassed. The backdrop behind her was a room that Esganikan recognized, dominated by a wall that was a single image of world’s weather systems: the climate-modeling center, in Upper Girim.

  “Is Curas Ti free to talk to me yet?” she asked.

  “We have a pressing problem at the moment,” said Sarmatakian. “We need to divert part of the fleet we’ve allocated to Hac Demil.”

  “Hac Demil has been stable for centuries.”

  “This is a natural disaster. A magma explosion. They’ve asked for our aid to restore the atmosphere, but it’ll still take months to reach them.”

  Unplanned and urgent: Esganikan understood the priority, but that still left her with one more world to restore that wasn’t on the schedule. They hadn’t even anticipated the need to intervene on Earth. “What resources can you give me to support this mission, then? Umeh can’t manage its own problems now.”

  “You should have thought of that before committing troops to it.”

  “The isenj asked for help, just as Hac Demil did.”

  “Hac Demil has a restored ecology and thousands of species. Umeh is virtually sterile.”

  “The planet is dying. Now they’re at war because we intervened. If we start refusing to help the willing, what does that make us? And much as I regret the decision, how can I withdraw completely now?”

  Sarmatakian didn’t appear impressed. It was hard to be sure of her mood without scent signals, but her head jiggled in visible irritation. “The planet won’t die. They will. Another kind of life will evolve and reclaim Umeh in time, as it does on every other world.”

  The adviser had never quite seen eye to eye with traditional Eqbas policy on selecting an optimum datum line for a planet’s restoration. Esganikan strongly suspected her of being a follower of Targassat’s theory of non-intervention, and that would have seemed extraordinarily archaic had she not been surrounded by Targassati wess’har on Wess’ej.

  You can’t have the power we have and not use it for the greater good. You can’t look the other way and pretend that matters will resolve themselves, because those least able to defend themselves will always succumb to the dominant and irresponsible.

  Nobody said it would be easy. Life never was.

  “What can you give me, then?”

  Sarmatakian hesitated for a second. “I have a standing offer from the overseers of Garav that they’ll commit troops to support us.”

  “They’re…extreme.”

  “Many find us extreme. I realize you have unhappy memories of Garav.”

  “The alacrity with which they embraced environmental balance after the war came as a shock.”

  “Converts can be more zealous than those who convert them. But Garav forces say they can be on Umeh in weeks, so consider the offer.”

  “Zealous.” It was one word for it: the intervention on Garav was a painstaking, difficult operation that cost lives. The ecology was too delicate and complex for Eqbas forces to pound down resistance with brute force as they might on Umeh. Esganikan’s commander had gambled and led ground troops. It had been the right thing to do but it had left her dead and Esganikan in command in a split-second burst of jask. “How many?”

  “A hundred thousand, perhaps.”

  Esganikan bristled. “Did you approach them?”

  “They’re aware of events because we remain in touch with them. They offered.”

  The Garav forces had experience of living in a vastly altered world and seeing the benefits. They called themselves Skavu: the newly awake. Esganikan didn’t trust zeal. She preferred stable pragmatism.

  But if they could deal with Umeh, she could concentrate on Earth. “How many ships can you commit to Earth now?”

  “Two more if we can recruit a full crew.”

  Six ships were already in transit to rendezvous with Esganikan: forty thousand personnel. “We need more than that to pacify a planet of billions without unnecessary destruction. We need more environmental specialists, too.”

  “You can’t have more. There are no more. Not at the moment.”

  Sarmatakian wasn’t a soldier: she was a scientist. Esganikan was getting tired of explaining what resources were needed to do the job. Maybe it was time Sarmatakian spent some time on the sharp end, as Shan Frankland called it.

  “Then I might have to accept Garav troops for Umeh.”

  “They’re keen to help. I’ll stand them by.”

  Esganikan closed the link and turned to Aitassi. “The gethes find our consensus odd. If only they could see us now.”

  “They wouldn’t see this as lack of consensus.”

  “This is the problem with remote working. No scent. No jask to help us agree on matters.”

  “So, you’re content to have the Skavu in this system?”

  Aitassi knew as well as anyone what the Skavu were. But like all her kind, she walked the fine line of neutrality, culturally anchored to the wess’har but somehow able to work with other races on a dozen worlds. Humans seemed completely
bemused by that. Everyone, as far as they were concerned, had to take sides. The neutral couldn’t be trusted. It was typical of a species that regarded information as a commodity.

  Esganikan’s gaze shifted to the Bezer’ej grassland beyond the hull. “The Skavu are utterly inflexible, but they’re efficient. I would have preferred an alternative, but time isn’t on our side.”

  “Perhaps they’re just what the isenj need. However heavy-handed they are, there’s not much more damage that they could cause. A case of two extremes meeting each other.”

  “Two extremes don’t make balance.”

  A patch on the deck of her cabin became transparent as she touched the bulkhead controls, giving her an aerial view south of Jejeno.

  The recent fighting had left patches of reconstruction work like the stumps of decaying teeth. It was impossible to attack a section of such a crowded, complex environment without the effects being felt like shock waves all round.

  Maybe she could make some inroads without needing to call in the Skavu. “It’s time I saw the isenj ministers again.”

  “They still ask for access to bioweapons.”

  “I find their method of warfare confusing. They never seem to finish anything. They simply peck away at each other now and again.”

  “If you look at their history,” said Aitassi, “they might have squabbles, but destruction is rarely their way of settling disputes. They have to be facing catastrophe before that reaction sets in.”

  “They are facing catastrophe. Perhaps it’s happening too slowly for them to notice.”

  Esganikan adjusted the magnification with a flick of her fingers so that the remote brought the cityscape hundreds of meters closer. She could see movement in some of the canyonlike streets that looked like a mudslide—the heads of thousands of isenj, dark and velvety, moving in orderly procession according to strict pedestrian traffic rules because they were so crowded. The infrastructure was finely balanced: they’d destroyed the ecology of their planet and everything was now carefully managed and engineered.