Judge by Karen Traviss

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.
    â€œIn a way,” Deborah said, “I hope the Bible is wrong in that respect.”
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œDon’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.
    â€œI didn’t mean to undermine your faith.”
    â€œWe all question belief, Aras. It’s not wrong.”
    â€œI never really understood it.”
    â€œFaith 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.”
    â€œBut 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.
    â€œYou’ll visit us many times before you return to Wess’ej, won’t you? Promise me.”
    â€œI will. I’ll visit as often as I can.”
    â€œGood.” 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