City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  She patted his arm. That always prompted a rumbling subsonic. “That’s really sweet of you. Thanks, but later.”

  “What’s that?” he said, changing the subject as fast as a child. He pointed to the pen on the makeshift desk.

  “A pen. Here, try it.”

  Aras examined the glossy black tube. His total absorption in the object was hypnotic, like watching a cat confronted with a new toy, and it distracted her from the pain of the day.

  “It’s just a pen,” she said, and instantly regretted dismissing the importance of it to him.

  “It’s beautiful.” He gave it a final look and replaced it on the desk exactly at its original position and angle. “Is it very old?”

  “Certainly is—liquid ink. You won’t find many humans back home writing manually, let alone using an instrument like that. It’s all vox and neural text these days.”

  She picked up the pen and uncapped it, and held it out to him. He took it and stared; so she made the gesture clearer, relinquished her chair and moved a sheet of the colony’s textured hemp paper to a position where he could write on it.

  “Can you write?”

  “Of course I can,” he said. “The colonists make glass pens. I showed them how. Their ink is made from fungi.”

  “Ah. Silly me.”

  Aras settled into the chair and dwarfed it. He braced his arm on the table, as no doubt he had seen Josh do, and began writing with slow care. Shan watched from a discreet distance, anxious not to look over his shoulder, and waited while he made apparently random movements with his arm. Eventually her patience faded and she found herself standing beside him, looking at the paper. He stopped and turned to her: he wasn’t exactly smiling, because there was no display of teeth, but he beamed. She couldn’t define it. But the fast-learning social monkey in her had picked up those basic nuances from the start, and he was happy.

  Exquisite Arabic script swept along the top of the page. Beneath it, there was a passage of something Asian—Sanskrit?—and Hebrew.

  “Oh wow,” she said.

  From a human, she would have taken it as a show of conceit, a demonstration of expertise at her expense. But this was Aras. For him, it was what it was, and performed for the joy of it.

  She capped the pen again and handed it to him.

  “Here, it’s yours.”

  “No, it’s yours.”

  “I meant I’m giving it to you.”

  Did he understand gifts? He was from a race that set little store by possessions, and living with an ascetic human community. She knew that if he didn’t accept the gift with the same joy he had shown in using it that she would be inexplicably hurt. For a few moments he was absolutely, completely still. She had never seen such a total absence of movement in a human being. He held the pen in both hands as if aware there was some kind of social ritual at work. She waited.

  He suddenly beamed. “You are always unexpectedly kind,” he said. “Thank you. I’ll find ways to use it.”

  No fripperies: worthwhile things had a use. She took it as the approval it was and didn’t care that he was surprised by generosity. She took the paper and admired the handwriting again. “May I keep this?”

  “But it’s yours.”

  “I meant that it has significance for me, and I would like to keep it because you’ve made it into something beautiful. One day I’ll take this out and look at it and remember you when I’m…well, a long way from here.”

  As soon as she said it, she knew that she could never bear to look at it again once she’d taken her final leave of him. She slipped the paper into a folder on the desk. “So where have you been?”

  “The Temporary City. Do you know what Actaeon is?”

  Another leap off into a topic that interested him, no doubt. Fine. “I think he was a hunter in Greek mythology who was turned into a stag by some angry goddess and then his hounds tore him to pieces. Serves him bloody well right.”

  Where was he going with this? She enjoyed the rambling discussions she sometimes had with him. He liked knowledge. She thought a long discourse was just what she needed to shrug off Helen and Perault and the nagging memory of Parekh.

  “No, it’s a ship,” he said. “A gethes ship. And it will be here in a few months.”

  You had to hand it to wess’har. They could floor you with just a few well-chosen words.

  It was dusk and the horizon shaded through from amber at the skyline to a dramatic purple where the first stars were becoming visible. There was not a constellation Shan could recognize. That was a shame, because she had never been able to see more than the brightest stars in the hazy sky of home, and now that she finally had unimaginable clarity, she couldn’t see what she had strained to observe all her life.

  She wandered along the perimeter where the barrier cut a visible boundary between a surrogate Earth and wild Bezer’ej. Aras matched her pace.

  “I need to see the gene bank,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s in my Suppressed Briefing. I have to secure it.” She strained for further definition: nothing came. “I’ll know more when I see it, but right now I know that I have to get to it. And having Actaeon showing up soon makes that urgent.”

  “And was Actaeon in your briefing too?”

  “No. Couldn’t be. Perault couldn’t have known about events that far in the future. She might have set me up for something she had planned a year ahead, maybe a little more, but she’d have to be frigging Nostradamus to slip that one in.”

  “I don’t like this SB.”

  “Well, it’s not a bundle of laughs at this end, either.”

  “And you say it must be a benign purpose she has for you, because you accepted it gladly when she revealed it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I should believe you.”

  “I don’t really care if you do or not,” she lied. “I just know what I have to do.”

  And that was a lie too. However much she had been told and however valid it had seemed at the time, events had been unfolding from the moment the SB was sealed chemically into her memory.

  Things had changed.

  They had changed in ways that even Perault had not imagined, and suddenly having reliable instantaneous communications—something that had always seemed just an impractical and costly trick in a lab—was the most frightening. It was even more alarming than the apparent coziness with the isenj. The real-time Earth, whatever that was, would be on her back in a very short time and she would be as adrift from it as a time traveler. There were no guarantees that what had made sense then would make sense now. Out here, her view still shaped by the world of 2299, she knew too little for her own comfort.

  She paused at a convenient outcrop and sat down on it, legs braced.

  “Aras, just show me the bank. Just the door if it has one, anything that can trigger me. Then I’ll have some chance of knowing where all this was headed.”

  “Very well, I will show you, and that is all. And you will need to explain this to Josh.”

  “Fine.”

  “And what do you think will happen when you tell your people about Actaeon?”

  “Are they likely to find out by any other route until the ship’s in range?”

  “Not unless they have entangled photon communications.”

  “Then I don’t plan to tell them anytime soon.”

  Aras gave her that look of head-tilted, almost canine bewilderment. She imagined it meant he was suspicious rather than baffled. It might have been unwise to show a wess’har that you would deceive your own people when you were trying to convince him that you would not lie to him.

  She pressed on. “I wouldn’t trust any of the payload as far as I could spit in a force ten. I don’t know how Lindsay or the detachment would take it, either. And I don’t know how much home has changed politically in seventy-five years. So I’m taking it carefully. If there’s anything that reaches you that you think I need to know, I’d be grateful for the heads-up.”

&n
bsp; “Heads-up?”

  “Information, advice, warning.” Did he believe her now? “Look, you’re the walking polygraph. I’m telling you all I know. And I’m scared, because I’m more out of my depth with every day that passes. I’m scared of Actaeon’s reason for dropping by, and I’m scared of what your people are going to do when it does. And I’m scared that I might fail. There. I’ve spilled my guts, take it or leave it.”

  Aras stood in front of her, staring. In a human it would have been an aggressive stance. But Aras was just taking things in.

  “Fail in what?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. My self-appointed duty to save the environment, I suppose.” She tried to smile and lighten the moment. “I don’t like humans much more than you do, Aras, but I’m one of them, and that makes life very lonely sometimes.”

  Aras parted his lips as if to say something and then glanced around discreetly and appeared to think better of it.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “We will go to Constantine, talk to Josh, and then you will look at the gene bank. And then you will consider your position again.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “Come on. We haven’t finished our walk yet.”

  Questions kept queuing up in her mind and it took all the restraint she had not to start asking them. What else had the ussissi told the wess’har? Was it third-hand, or were they listening into voice traffic? And how were the matriarchs taking the suddenly blossoming friendship between humans and isenj? She could probably guess that one without too much trouble.

  So she would have to trust Aras. It seemed easier to do that now. For all his personal and military strength and the ease with which he carried that, there seemed to be an awkwardness about him, a sorrow and vulnerability that she found disarming. She had not forgotten how grateful he seemed for a simple touch of the hand.

  Yet, she might have been misreading alien body language for human.

  “May I see Lindsay’s baby when it’s born?” he asked.

  That was the kind of thing that convinced her there was a core of him that was not two meters tall and unmoved by death. Shan stifled a primeval urge to protect him. “I’m sure she’ll be delighted. It’ll be a few months yet. Kris says it’s a boy.”

  “I can’t get used to females carrying babies to term. Not even now.”

  It was another of those non sequiturs he often tossed into conversation. Some of them made sense days later, like the way he used the term people to describe any species. Others were just mysteries. “You’ll have to explain that to me,” Shan said cautiously.

  “It’s a male function.”

  “Not getting used to it?”

  “Nurturing embryos. It’s a male role.”

  “Not where I come from.” She tried to avoid the immediate urge to stare at his body and wonder how and where. “Are you serious? Males conceive?”

  “No, we gestate. Females conceive. Then the embryo is transferred.”

  “Ah. Sort of like seahorses.” No, this wasn’t the time to ask more. The vision was becoming too graphic, and there were no more seahorses left on Earth. “You don’t have children, do you?”

  “No. I regret that.”

  “Is it too late to have them?”

  Aras made an odd little gesture that might have been a shrug. “I think so. And you, will you have babies with the sergeant?”

  “Where the hell did that come from?” She hated the thought of the detachment ribbing Bennett about their nonrelationship. It was almost worse than catching them sniggering about her. But Aras was a wess’har, and very little of an emotional nature escaped his senses. Maybe the others had dismissed the idea.

  “When he talks with you the sexual signaling is very clear,” he said. “Have I spoken out of turn?”

  Shan shook her head. Aras really could be a child, appealingly open, embarrassingly frank, delighting in the moment. And then he could put two shots through Parekh’s head and not turn a hair. She reminded herself he was an alien, a real alien.

  “Let’s just say it’s not possible right now. It’s bad for team discipline. And he has this damn bioscreen network thing built into him that records his body functions and all sorts of stuff I really wouldn’t like broadcast to his comrades. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” said Aras. “That’s very sad.”

  “Maybe when we’re back on Earth.” Like Aras, Bennett struck her as a hard man nursing a great deal of pain and uncertainty that he never allowed to get the better of him. She liked that in a man. “But I’m not good at relationships.”

  “What a lonely pair we are,” said Aras, pointing up at the darkening sky to indicate the streaking sparkle of a meteor.

  Like a child, he had an uncanny ability to say the things adults preferred to leave unsaid.

  20

  TO: All Thetis personnel

  FROM: Supt FRANKLAND

  You should be aware that there may be some wess’har traffic movement in the next few weeks. This is in response to diplomatic contact between the wess’har and the isenj. Please ensure you notify the duty officer of exact plans of movement and estimated return times when you travel off camp.

  Behind the cool room where the colonists kept the last of the autumn onions and pumpkins, there was a dull gray composite cabinet about the size of a restaurant refrigerator. It could have held sides of bacon. But that was out of the question here.

  Shan touched it and looked up at the frame that stood a little higher than her head. The Suppressed Briefing said nothing. “Is that it?”

  Josh was agitated. He hovered in her peripheral vision, glancing at Aras and getting no reaction from him. “It’s part of it,” he said.

  “Open it up, please.”

  “Now?”

  “Josh, I need to know. We have a ship inbound from Earth and a very real chance that we’re all going to have our trip cut short rather violently if the wess’har think we’re allying with the isenj. I was sent here for this. I am not leaving without knowing why.”

  Aras put his hand on the door and pressed the recessed panel. It edged open with a whomp of lost vacuum, and mist tumbled out into the cellar. When Shan stepped forward and pulled the door towards her, she found herself bathed in an incongruous red light that said hot, danger, when all she could feel was a chill.

  “It has switched to internal power,” Aras said. “You have an hour. I don’t think you need take that long.”

  No, she didn’t. As soon as she saw the layer upon layer of very shallow shelves, stacked a few centimeters apart, and the docking points to accept a data-transfer jack on each layer, the SB kicked in. It felt like she had remembered she had left a tap running. There was a jerk of realization and panic.

  Inventory. Download the inventory and check the integrity of the following specimen groups: wheat, rice, maize…

  It was simply a long list of commercial crops. There was no mention of rare birds or endangered orchids or any of the precious cargo that could re-create paradise. But it was a shopping list worth billions.

  Dead Eugenie Perault was standing at her shoulder, telling her what plans the Federal European Union had for those specimens.

  Shan knew. She knew it all now, and she knew why Perault’s argument had been persuasive enough not only to stop her invoking her right to retire from the force but to commit herself to a bizarre and uncertain mission from which she had no guarantee of returning.

  The specimens were a testament to the diligence of a biodiversity team long dead. Every strain of cereal and plant was unpatented, unengineered, and belonged to no agricorporation; each had disappeared from Earth long before, forced out of circulation by transgenics and other modified crops that had a trademark on them.

  The plants were anyone’s to grow and propagate.

  The FEU will take those strains and patent them itself to break the cartel of the corporations, blocking any attempt to restrict availability and giving them back to farmers and allotment holders across Europe. Perault was
right there again in front of her. It will be the first time in over a century that any man or woman can grow what they please without license or restriction.

  Perault knew her very well, it seemed. It was a project she would have given her life to see succeed. She thought of her contraband tomato seed and shivered.

  “Are you all right?” Aras asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said. But she wasn’t. She should have been exulting, punching the air at the realization that she had finally beaten the agricorporations she detested so profoundly. With enough of this seed made available, and cheaply, agribusiness would be stripped of much of its economic power and influence on the actions of governments.

  Perault had given her a treasure map to a past. The problem was that Shan had no idea to what present government she might have to deliver this booty.

  “Is there more of this?” she asked. There had to be. There had to be tens of thousands of species and strains, and that couldn’t fit in one big fridge. Josh looked at Aras again for some cue and it was starting to irritate her. “For Chrissakes, I am not compromising this stuff. I need to protect it. Now, is there any more of it?”

  “There is a great deal more and it is on Wess’ej,” Aras said.

  “Okay, that’s fine for the time being.”

  “You know now what your objective was.”

  “Oh yes, indeed. I certainly do.” There was no harm telling them. In fact, the only way she was going to get that material shipped back to Earth was with their cooperation. She could hardly lug that fridge back up to Thetis. It was going to require some planning and hardware. “Back home, every crop is patented and belongs to some corporation that makes a lot of money out of it. Farmers can’t develop their own strains like they used to or even save seed for the next season. We just let this happen a few strains at a time, year on year, and then it was too damn late to do anything about it. None of the strains stored here are patented. My government was going to patent them itself and make them freely available to bust the agricorp cartel.” She spread her hands as if she had completed a conjuring trick, and wished more than anything that she could have rejoiced. Aras was staring at her as if he had seen something he hadn’t noticed about her before.