Iokan could barely get out the words: “But it was holy…”
She looked at him with sadness and pity. You still feel as I did when I saw them.
“Yes!” he cried.
They were wrong. It was a crime.
“They are perfect…”
They’re just a remnant of what they were. They didn’t know they were doing any harm.
I noticed the remote projections of the ICT investigators paying close attention with raised eyebrows. But for Iokan, the shock was terrible. “No… it’s not true…”
We all felt the same as you when they took us. But we are the majority now and we will not commit the crime again.
“You’re… you’re… you’re not my wife! You’re lying!” He screamed it through tears. “You’re lying!”
She looked at him with a deeper sadness than light can show. I saw her speak two words, lost in silence. But to someone who knew the language, their meaning must have been clear, and I could easily guess: “I’m sorry.”
“No… no…” He turned from her, looking terribly stricken, seeing what I suppose must have been pity on my face. And realising he had been mistaken. It was too much for him. His eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped to the floor.
A security guard was with him in an instant, checking him over, and telling me he’d simply fainted. I looked up at Szilmar floating beyond the glass, looking anxious and worried. “He’s just passed out,” I told her. “He’ll be fine.”
The words appeared on the glass in front of her and she nodded. She tapped on the keyboard. Please look after him. He’s suffered more than any of us.
I nodded, and with the help of the medic, lifted him onto a stretcher, took him inside the ship, leaving the diplomats to face the shining woman, who watched her broken husband with sad, helpless eyes.
13. Asha
Ranev still had his tan, and looked as though he’d just been in the sea. He told me he’d been running therapy sessions out in the shallow water where his patients felt comfortable. He assured me it was a hard slog, but I found myself doubting it.
“Have you heard?” he asked.
“About what?”
“Ardëe.”
“Nothing official.”
“It’s getting worse.”
“I got that from watching the news.”
“Could be an evacuation coming,” he said. “You know what that means.” I knew well enough: drop everything we were doing, endless trips up and down the Lift, years spent consoling and healing the survivors only just escaped from yet another dying world. And for the group? No one had said, and my messages asking for clarification from management had gone unanswered.
“They might ask you to hand your group over to someone else.”
“Or worse…
“I don’t think they’ll break them up after everything you’ve done… but you’re too valuable in an evacuation. So. What’ll you do if it comes to that?”
“I’d…” I thought I knew what I’d say if asked that question: I thought I would say no. It was a simple, obvious, moral issue. “They don’t trust anyone else. If I handed them over it would set some of them back months…”
He saw through me easily. “Sure. But what do you want?”
I looked out at the view from the window: the same old mountains wrapped in cloud. It was getting cold outside.
“Asha?” he asked.
“I’m sorry…” I said. “I just, I felt for a moment… just for a moment, I thought it would be good to stop. And…”
“Go on.”
There was no point in lying to him. “I don’t know. I really don’t. If they asked me to go… I don’t know what I’d do.”
“Is it the group itself?”
I shook my head, not wanting to blame them. But…
“I feel like…” I looked away, down the room, at nothing at all. Anything to get away from Ranev’s kindly eyes. “I don’t know what I can do for them. It doesn’t seem to make any difference.”
“You feel powerless?
“Stupid, I know…”
“Not at all. How are they?”
“Iokan’s still in shock. We had to bring him back. He won’t talk about it…”
“He will.”
“He’s not the only one. I can’t get Pew to talk to me either. And the stuff he’s reading is scaring me.”
“Oh? Such as?”
“He’s only interested in genocide. Not preventing it. Starting it.”
“Don’t you think he has a right to be angry?”
“Up to a point. I’m worried he’ll go off the edge and we’ll lose him.”
“There’s only so much you can do. If they choose not to co-operate, you can’t force them.”
“I know.”
“You have to accept that we do lose them sometimes. It’s not a failure. It’s a measure of how damaged they were to begin with.”
“It never feels like that.”
“True. But I think you’re emphasising the negative over the positive. You’re close to diagnosis on all of them, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you know as well as I do, that’s the hill you have to get over.”
“If they can actually be treated.”
“Well, yes, there’s that as well. Do you think they can’t?”
I looked out at the mountains again. If anything, they looked colder than before. “I wonder if it’s worth it.”
“Why?”
“They’re the last of their kind. They're probably never going to see another member of their own species again.”
“All the more reason to help them.”
I didn’t answer for a moment. I had another worry. “I started wondering how many members of my own species there are on Hub.”
“Ah.”
“One hundred and twenty-three. Forty-six in the delegation. Everyone else went on to the new place.”
“Is that what you’d prefer?”
“I don’t know. I keep thinking… I keep thinking about home.”
“Hub Metro?”
“No.”
“You mean your world.”
“Yes. I keep thinking, what if we hadn’t been evacuated? What if we’d gone all the way to the end?”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. My patients did.”
“Transference, Asha. You have to be careful. You’re not them.”
“I know. But… I keep…” It was hard to express it; this thing growing closer to the edge of my waking mind. “I keep thinking it’ll always be like this. We’ll always corrupt every world we find. Not just my species, not just their species, I mean every human species. And I know this is just because I’ve been closer to the bad stuff than usual…”
“I don’t have to tell you that the more advanced each species gets, the more able they are to avoid all these problems.”
“I know. I know that. I’ve seen how some of the older species live. I just don’t know how they do it.”
He took a breath. “Okay. Listen. I think if they ask you to work on the Ardëe evacuation — if that happens — I think you should say no.” I looked outside. “And I think you should take a holiday. You need some time off. You went through a lot in the attack and I don’t think you’ve really had a chance to recover.”
I didn’t reply immediately. Something outside the window caught my attention.
“Asha?” he asked. “Are you all right? Is something wrong with the signal?”
“No,” I said, and went to the window. I looked back at him. “What can you see out of this window? In your centre?”
“It’s a sunny day. Like every day. Except when the rain comes, but it’s sunny now. What do you see?”
I looked back outside. Clouds were billowing up around the mountains, the kind we’d been warned about. I looked up and saw they were coasting over the centre, heavy and black. The first snowflakes flittered down. The wind picked up and suddenly the snow was heavier, and catching in the grass.