City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  Sunlight filtered through the deckhead hatch of his craft and onto the galley table. He turned the azin-shell chart over and over in his fingers, letting the light dance on it. It was ancient: it had been made before even he had been born. He noticed that some of the painstakingly placed grains of sand and rock and luminescent microfossils had started to shift where the sheets of shell were beginning to warp from the dry air, releasing their tight grip on the sand layer. The map was shifting and breaking up. He blew a little puff of regret and laid it carefully on the table to avoid further damage.

  It would never be made again. The bezeri had better technology now, knowledge from other worlds, courtesy of the wess’har. Azin shell was a poor substitute for glass and translucent composites. Its gradual deterioration saddened him.

  The map is dying, Aras thought. I’ll even outlive the map.

  He was now the last of his squadron, and the last of his kind, and he didn’t know if that was a cause for sorrow or not. Two hundred and seven killed outright in the war; sixty dead by their own hand, the only possible way for them to die, a sudden and explosive death a long way from where their tissue might pose a hazard. There was no return to the soil and cycle of life for them. And here he was, alive and resenting it, because Benjamin Garrod had stopped him choosing oblivion by telling him he had work to do, and that his life was not his own to take.

  That was the problem with being burdened with scavenged human DNA. He never knew what was his own decision and what was done at the insistence of alien instincts. Humans had a strange relationship with death.

  Aras gave the map a last glance, tucked it into his pack and began the journey back to the Temporary City, the garrison on Bezer’ej. It had been a long time since he had last visited but he owed them an explanation of what was now happening to the human enclave. Mestin’s grandmatriarch had warned him the human species would take some managing, and so had her daughter after her, and now Mestin herself was quick to point out how right they had been. But there were so few of the new ones. There seemed little damage they could do in the time he would take to assess them.

  But the pressure was growing. A temporary respite for thousands of endangered species had seemed a good reason not to let the colony perish all those years ago. Today, though, he had the feeling he had unleashed a tidal wave.

  The sun had dropped closer to the horizon by the time he stepped from the human environmental zone and stood waiting by the shoreline for the bezeri pilot. The shallows were already dark, and sharp scents of decaying vegetation and salts drifted on the wind. He walked slowly up and down the pebbles, circling a route between the Place of Memory of the First and the Place of Memory of the Returned, shrines to the bezeri explorers who had beached their craft to explore the Dry Above.

  The First had never returned, like many pilots; unable to propel their pods back into the surf, and fully aware their journey was one way, they were prepared to die to acquire knowledge. Aras felt inexplicably sad every time he passed the shrines. There was no reason to mourn that choice, because one thing bezeri and wess’har shared was an acceptance of endings, but their sacrifice had begun to depress him. Maybe he had spent too much time around humans.

  These days the bezeri had better propulsion systems as well as a ready source of data from Aras’s own people. If they beached themselves, it was through foolish adventuring. As Aras waited, the shimmering lights from the deep became brighter and danced a message of recognition.

  Do you wish to travel?

  Aras raised the signaling torch above his head and angled it onto the gently rolling waves: red, blue, ultraviolet, then green and ultraviolet together, in a set pattern that danced around the circular rim of the bowl-shaped torch. Yes, I want to go to the Temporary City.

  Reliable as ever, the bezeri vessel rose to the surface, breaking foaming waves across its back. There was always one around here somewhere at this time of day, patrolling in case any bezeri sightseers wandered out of their depth and became stranded in the shallows away from the sanctuary of deep waters. There were always a few willing to chance suffocation to get a closer glimpse of the Dry Above. The pilot risked air for a few moments to allow Aras to wade out and slide into the soft, translucent hull.

  There are new ones here, the pilot flickered, and wrapped his tentacles around the controls that pressed seawater from the propulsion system in a steady jet. The sea tastes of burning.

  Aras didn’t reply until he had suspended his breathing enough to cope with the inrush of water. He turned the torch towards the pilot. Yes, but not many. Rely on me. I won’t allow the balance to be affected.

  The pilot sent a rippling motion all the way down his six arms to the controls. Aras thought it interesting that softbodied, fluid beings like the bezeri should share the habit of shrugging with the humans, and with many of the same nuances of meaning. He leaned back as far as he could and concentrated on the sky that was still dimly visible through the translucent hull and the shallow water.

  A beautiful pattern of conversational light patterns sparkled above him as a troop of bezeri strolled through the water enjoying the early evening. His was a lonely and frustrating life, made difficult by his parasite, his c’naatat,but there were also many advantages to the changes it had wrought in his body.

  Concentrating on the ebb and flow of his breathing, he began to lower his rate of respiration, eventually suspending it completely. He could reduce his need for oxygen enough to travel with the bezeri in their own soft-shell ships. No normal wess’har could. It was a unique privilege.

  C’naatat had its compensations.

  Shan stood leaning against the doorpost of Josh’s home. She could hear a growing hum of voices. It was surprising how much you could hear, and how far, when there was absolutely no traffic or heavy machinery around. She had never experienced silence like this, and she thought it almost had a throbbing hum of its own—until she recognized the liquid rhythm as her own heartbeat in her ears. As the sun moved towards the horizon, the settlement began to take on new sounds. People were returning from the fields.

  Josh appeared first, with a teenage boy, small girl and a woman his own age in tow. Like him, they were short and wiry, wearing functional work-clothes in varying shades of beige and cream, but the woman was more Oriental, and the children an attractive amalgam of both races.

  “Superintendent, my wife Deborah, my son James, and my daughter Rachel,” he said, and swept his arm out to indicate them. They simply nodded at her, looking none too convinced that she was harmless, and Shan managed a pleased-to-meet-you nod. “We’ll clean ourselves up, and then we’ll make our way to church for the Christmas Eve service.”

  “You’re a police lady,” said the little girl.

  “I am indeed,” Shan said.

  “You’re ever so tall.”

  “Like my dad,” said Shan. She could get tired of this, and fast.

  “Do you shoot people?”

  Oh, God. “Only when I have to.”

  The child nodded sagely and skipped off into the house. “Don’t mind me,” Shan said to Josh, whose expression had set in a carefully composed but shocked smile. “I’ll take a walk, if that’s okay. I know where the church is.”

  “We should be an hour,” he said. “There’s plenty to read in the vestry if you run out of things to do.”

  Shan assumed the vestry was somewhere in St. Francis. She turned out onto the main path and passed people who acknowledged her but looked nervous. Word got round very fast here; she understood their anxiety. This was Earth as it should have been, at least at first glance. And she was Earth as it actually was. She decided she would not have been pleased to see herself under the same circumstances. The mission and the colonists might as well have been different species.

  She wandered into St. Francis and tried two doors—both unlocked—before she recognized a data terminal and placed a cautious hand on the panel to try to activate it. In videos, technology always worked; in real life, interfaces were a
lot less universal. She was still fumbling across the smooth surface trying to locate the controls of the archaic machine when the sound of people welled up from the passage.

  The colonists were crowding into the main body of the church, and she slipped in behind them. They were pressed into each other, adults and children, yet there was only quiet patience and general good humor. This was not a subway crowd. She turned and saw Josh beside her.

  “Is this your whole community?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He was smiling a distracted sort of smile that was anchored in the event, not a friendly gesture to her. “Nobody would miss midnight Mass.”

  Shan understood Christmas all too well. Solstice was the same. She thought of the early-setting sun, and the rush to get to somewhere truly ancient to mark it. She remembered the price hikes at hotels near Avebury and Stonehenge, and how everyone said they’d never do it again next year, because Solstice was getting too commercialized and all the wonder was going out of it. They started selling live mistletoe long before Samhain these days.

  Or they did, she reminded herself. Seventy-odd years ago.

  She settled back in the pew and noted that she had a very definite exclusion zone around her. It might have been that Josh’s guests were spared the crush, or that the colonists still feared catching something from her. But she wasn’t here to gain acceptance or fit in. It didn’t matter. She was just passing through, doing a job.

  Carols sprang from nowhere. The singing simply seemed to start up in one part of the church, and everyone joined in, worked through to the end and started on another. She felt able to study their faces; they were too caught up in their worship to mind. The racial makeup of the original landing party was evident, some people showing a single heritage and others appearing of mixed race. Christianity, for all its decline, still got around.

  A black teenaged boy walked up to the lectern in the gangly and self-conscious way of growing lads and opened a huge bible of real rustling paper. He began to read aloud into a silence that was perfect. Not a cough or a child’s fretting disturbed it. But the lectern should be an eagle, she thought. She had seen magnificent gilded lecterns in monuments and books, and they had always been eagles. This one wasn’t. It was a winged creature, but nothing she had ever seen before.

  The service had taken more than an hour, but she was only aware of the passage of time from the shrinking of two nearby candles. A wavering gonglike sound quivered on the air, then another on a higher pitch, then another, like someone playing a tune on a set of wineglasses. The colonists began turning to each other and embracing, shaking hands and kissing cheeks. “Christ is born,” they said. “Praise the Lord.” The greeting ran round the entire floor of the church. Midnight, then, and those strange plaintive gong sounds were bells. It was a definite, simple musical sequence. Josh appeared to spot her dawning recognition.

  “Not exactly cathedral standard, but they do the job,” he said. “Glass. We don’t have bronze.”

  He pointed up, and Shan could see a dark gallery near the top of the vaulted roof where the dim light picked out a faint gleaming surface that shivered every few seconds as an unseen clapper struck it.

  “There’s something very perverse about glass bells,” she said. “Tempting fate.”

  “Local glass is remarkably robust.”

  “Well, a happy Christmas, Josh.”

  “And you.” He paused, as if he’d made a mistake. “What should I wish you?”

  Shan shrugged. “ ‘Blessed be’ will do fine,” she said, and they shook hands hesitantly. She wondered if it had been wise to reveal her Pagan background, but Josh seemed to be taking it like a true liberal. Perhaps he actually understood what Paganism was.

  The midnight meal was served in the refectory near the church. Smells filled the air, both richly familiar and foreign at the same time; spice and crisping oil merged with something perfumed and woody. The community sat down at long trestle tables and two adults from each collected serving dishes from a central table. Shan noted that they said grace in individual groups. They were a devout people, but pragmatic. The food was cooling fast, and a church full of people took a long time to seat, even in shifts.

  The food was also not what she was used to. It wasn’t entertainment; it was nourishment. There were soups and good chunky breads, and piles of starchy vegetables. Beans shimmered in an oil sauce. Most of the food was recognizably of earthly origin. And there was no meat.

  She wondered at first if meat was simply a scarce commodity, but then it struck her that it might have been a deliberate omission. “You’re a vegetarian community,” she said, and felt instantly embarrassed at her naivete. “I should have worked that out.”

  Josh topped up her untouched wine and slid a jug of water beside it. “We found we could survive without taking the food animal embryos out of cryo. We came to know God intended us to live without killing.”

  Shan nodded. If that was his rationale, fine. Lots of Pagans felt that way too. She seized the tenuous kinship. “You must have had a tough time of it in the early days. How did you get the crops to grow in the open? Everyone thought you’d fail if you moved beyond hydroponics.”

  “No, God provided for us well from the start, even in these unlikely circumstances.” But Josh didn’t elaborate. She had no doubt the answer—if it ever came—would be on the payload’s minds as well.

  Josh’s son, James, hard and square like his father, pointed proudly to a plate of fried burger-like slices. “Soy,” he said. “I grew the beans.” He seemed like a nice kid, a million miles from the evil little bastards she was used to dealing with.

  “Adaptable stuff, soy,” she said, awkward, and wished again that she had some talent for rapport with youngsters that extended beyond handcuffing them.

  They all ate as if the plain food was the focus of their existence. She reminded herself that there could be no scope for frivolous luxuries here. Anything they needed had to be built or grown or developed by one of their community. There were no shops. In a small group of people, that meant immense hard work and ingenuity. And it meant they cared about each other, because they had to if they wanted to survive.

  Shan suddenly envied them.

  “I have a lot of questions,” she said. “I want to know how you’ve managed without medical support, for example, and how you replace and repair machinery. That sort of thing. But I’ll save it for later.”

  “Tell us when you’re tired and we’ll make up a bed for you,” Josh said, ignoring her in an oddly kind way. It was another definite steer away from technical matters. “Tomorrow we can discuss landing your team.”

  Back at Josh’s house, his wife showed her to a small room with a futon-type bed and a hemispherical wash basin served by a short length of piping. Deborah pointed to a recess like a wardrobe space. “The lavatory is there,” she said, and managed a slight smile as she backed out of the door.

  Shan had a sudden worried thought that what she had used as the toilet bowl earlier that day might not have been one at all. The idea plagued her as she sat down on the futon. Had she used the handbasin, for Chrissakes? The design could have been any sort of receptacle. Oh, hell. She might never live that one down.

  It was time to update Thetis. She flicked open the swiss.

  “I thought you’d run into trouble,” Lindsay said. Her voice was breaking up over the link. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine,” Shan said. “But we have a few issues to deal with at this end.”

  “And a few at this end, too. We had to revive all the payload. Potential cryo failure. I’m sorry I didn’t consult you first, ma’am, but—”

  “That’s fine. You had to make the call.”

  There was a slight, strangled pause. “Very good, ma’am.” Lindsay obviously hadn’t expected that response. But it wasn’t fine at all. Things were running too fast. “It’s getting a bit cozy up here. The ship’s not built for full life-support for this many people. When can we disembark?”

  “
I have some talking to do before we can do that.”

  “It is secure down there, isn’t it?”

  “The colonists aren’t overtly hostile, but we aren’t exactly welcome.” And we won’t be the best thing that’s happened to Constantine, either. “If we disembark the research team, they have to be prepared to accept a lot of restrictions. Will you prep them for that disappointment?”

  “Whatever it is, it won’t be as disappointing as running out of oxygen. We’ve got forty-eight to seventy-two hours. The generator can’t keep up.”

  “Understood. Just find the time to tell them they can’t take biological samples. Period.”

  “Says who?”

  “The colonists.”

  There was a long pause, and Shan thought the link had gone down. She could hear shuffling in the passageway outside the bedroom door and wondered if she had been overheard.

  “Commander Neville?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Let me make one thing clear. I have my orders, somewhere in my memory, and they may not entirely meet the aspirations of our commercial colleagues. But your role is to support the civilian administration, which is me.”

  “Understood.”

  “If you’re telling me that there’s a risk to safety if we keep revived personnel in orbit, then I’ll ask the colonists for permission to land everyone.”

  “I do believe that’s the situation.”

  “Stand by, then.”

  Shan struggled to her feet to prepare for bed. It took her a few seconds to work out that the whole tube above the basin had to be twisted to release the water. It flowed handhot, and she stripped off her fatigues and personals and rinsed them in the basin before wiping herself down with a quick-drying cloth from the do-it-all pack zipped into her jacket.

  She draped the clothing over the spigot, and the fabric was already drying before she had managed to find the controls for the lighting and shut her eyes. Did I really pee in the damn washbasin? No, she couldn’t have. It was definitely a toilet. It had a flush.