Free Ally by Karen Traviss Page B

It was all turning to shit and Ade knew he’d played his part in getting it there. “How do we stop this, Shapakti? You got any ideas?”
    The biologist seemed mesmerized by his specimens.In another chamber, the two macaws he’d recreated from the gene bank started screeching at each other, their flapping wings making fut-fut-fut sounds. “When we can define what we want to stop, Ade Bennett, then we can proceed,” said Shapakti. “But that also depends on what the bezeri do next.”
    â€œIt’ll end in tears.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œJust a saying.”
    â€œIt may end in culling.”
    A wess’har could use the word cull without any connotation of an animal at the top of the food chain pulling a gun on one at the bottom that was just a bit too inconvenient for its tastes. It still meant dead. Aras faced the prospect of seeing the bezeri wiped out again, really wiped out.
    It must have been a bloody nightmare to think about that after all he’d been through for so very, very long. Ade debated who needed him most right then, and decided that out of the two of them, Shan was probably coping better.
    Ade went in search of Aras.

3
    We have complete choice as individuals: the only decisions we can take are our own. And yet so many species use the state of being an individual as an excuse for inaction, helplessness and irresponsibility. No situation is so overwhelming that action is pointless.
    TARGASSAT OF SURANG,
on taking action
    F’nar, Wess’ej: February 2377
    Every world that Eddie Michallat knew was already full of crazy bitches, and nobody needed another one.
    He watched the news from Earth with one hand pressed to his mouth. He hadn’t even noticed he’d done it. On the screen on the wall, part of the stone itself, a woman called Helen Marchant urged governments to intervene with troops to stop the clearance of replanted forests for agricultural use.
    â€œStupid cow,” he muttered.
    â€œWhy is cow an insult?” asked Giyadas. She was a child, but young wess’har seemed simply to be undersized adults hungrily absorbing data. She was catching up fast. “ Stupid should suffice.”
    â€œIs this my daily lecture on speciesism, doll?”
    â€œI’m interested.”
    Eddie ruffled her mane, tufted hair that ran in a stiff brush from front to back across her little seahorse skull like a Spartan’s plume. “I’m just being rude about her, that’s all.”
    â€œSo by comparison with what you think of as an inferior species, you insult her. And you also make her not human, and so not worthy of respect.”
    â€œThank you, Jeremy Bentham.”
    â€œIs that an insult too?”
    â€œNo.” Eddie laughed; these days Giyadas was his only source of humor. He slipped his handheld out of his pocket and fingered in Bentham. “Read that.” Damn, she was just a kid, wess’har or not, and sometimes he worried that he was burdening her with too much adult crap—adult human crap. “Try some felicific calculus. ”
    Giyadas read intently, long muzzle tipped down so that her chin almost rested on her chest. This alien child could read his language, but he hadn’t a hope in hell of reading hers or even speaking it: he couldn’t manage the overtones that gave wess’u its two distinct and simultaneous voices. It rendered him illiterate. For a journalist, that was as near to hell as he might ever come. Giyadas viewed his ignorance with a grave patience that bordered on pity.
    And Helen Marchant carried on calling for war to save the forests.
    â€œShe is mad, you know, doll.”
    â€œShe only wants what the Eqbas have done for generations. This is not mad to us.”
    Marchant was a clever nutter, then. She’d once persuaded an antiterrorist officer called Shan Frankland to become an ally of her eco-guerilla movement. Knowing Shan, that must have taken some doing. Eddie