City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  “So you have no authority.”

  Shan made a conscious effort to remove the automatic tendency to edit what she thought before it escaped her mouth. It had taken many, many years to learn to do that. Now she had to unlearn it.

  “No,” she said.

  “So are you of any use to us?” The matriarch Chayyas was a linguist. She displayed a certain pride in dismissing the services of the ussissi. “Why should we allow you to stay?”

  “I understand the kind of human in Actaeon better than you do, better even than Aras. But I didn’t come here to bargain with you. I came here to ask you to let me stay on Bezer’ej. In the eyes of the government I’m now expected to serve, I’ve collaborated with you.”

  The wess’har sniffed. Maybe she was testing for honesty. “You don’t smell unpleasant at all.”

  “Thank you,” said Shan carefully. “I don’t eat carrion these days.”

  Aras’s assimilated manners had ill prepared her for wess’har directness. If they thought something, then they said it, and they meant it. They liked their truth so plain and unvarnished that it was raw timber, and some of it still had the bark on.

  Chayyas stared. “We’re not inclined to make a treaty with gethes,” she said at last. “But what if we did?”

  Shan shook her head. “What would you ask for?”

  “Peace? An understanding?”

  “Unless there was something in it for them, they wouldn’t bother. You know what that something is. Commercial exploitation, more humans, technology exchange—so unless you can think of anything else you would want from us, I’d forget it.”

  Chayyas inhaled as if someone had made coffee in the next room. “Your absence, perhaps.”

  “Look, you don’t like us and I’m not here to tell you what great neighbors we’d make. There are some good humans, some great ones even—like the colonists on Bezer’ej. But the sort of humans you’re likely to see out here in the foreseeable future won’t be like that. This is business, research and expansion. What else do you want to hear?”

  “You want to hear things from us, not us from you.” Chayyas inhaled again. Could she smell c’naatat? “We could simply destroy the ship, and you too. All of you.”

  “Yes. And if I were you, I’d do it. Now. And maybe send a message back to Earth warning the rest of us off. In fact, I have a man on my team who can do just that. You can broadcast it on BBChan, worldwide.” She had their attention now, and not simply because she was a strongly scented and exotic curiosity. “But if you do, it won’t stop further contact with the isenj, and it probably won’t stop humans coming again in the future. If humans have instant comms technology, they can explore and colonize much more easily. They’re not likely to walk away from this. Learn from me while you can.”

  Chayyas glanced at Fersanye and the others. There was no visible reaction other than that, and Shan suppressed a shudder, because she really had meant that they should open fire. It was exactly what a small nation with a lot to lose should have done. It stunned her that she had actually said so. She folded her arms while the Valkyries trilled and warbled among themselves.

  Chayyas eventually turned those star-centered eyes on her and spoke. “We have decided. Gethes are now barred from wess’har space. Your mission will leave immediately, but you may stay on the understanding that you now serve Wess’ej.”

  “Understood,” Shan said.

  “By serve I mean that you will do what is asked of you without question. You work for us. You have the duties of a citizen of F’nar. Is that clear? Ignore your past, and so will we.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  She almost said guv’nor. Chayyas certainly had some presence. The matriarch leaned forward as if getting one last good sniff of her.

  “I hope you understand what is at stake here.”

  The test. There had to be one. Shan raised her chin just a fraction. “C’naatat,” she said. The matriarchs were suddenly very still and her heart sank. She had nearly pulled it off. Then she’d been just one fraction too clever.

  “The isenj have told you, then,” said Chayyas.

  Isenj? Think, think, think. Don’t lie. They’ll know.

  Shan concentrated. Maybe there was a God after all.

  “It has to be kept isolated. My people might decide they want it, but they will abuse it, even if they start out with honest intentions.”

  Had Chayyas bought it? It was true. She had to. She tilted her seahorse head and looked down at Shan.

  “They are no longer your people,” she said. “We are.”

  29

  David Christopher Neville

  Born July 12, 2375

  Died August 11, 2375

  Cause of death: acute pulmonary failure

  Shan had never been good at bereavement. It had been a professional thing, just a technique for gauging how to break bad news to next of kin in as economical a way as possible.

  Her first time as a probationer copper was awful. She recalled the disbelieving face of a wife who had waved her husband off to work at the monorail without a thought that it might be the last time she’d see him. After that it got easier each time, and in the end she was an accomplished breaker of bad news, as detached as an actor reading lines. It didn’t pay to grieve with them because it ate you up, and anger just made you make mistakes if there was an investigation to be done. Shutting down was the sensible thing to do.

  Even so, this was the second death of a child in her very small world in less than a year. The first had confirmed that humans and wess’har were on a collision course. The second was a personal conflict, even if Lindsay never found out why.

  “I can do this on my own,” Shan said.

  “I can’t take that risk,” said Aras. “You should have stayed on Wess’ej.”

  “I can’t just abandon her without an explanation. Wait here.”

  Shan found Lindsay in the mess hall. She looked like hell, but she was working on inventories with her gaze fixed rigidly on the board in her lap, ticking items with a stylus and waiting for the confirming eep from the database.

  “Lin,” Shan said.

  She looked up. “Hi.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’m fine. Kris fixed me up. I’m not going to fall apart.”

  “I wish I could have done something.”

  “You can’t work miracles. But thanks.”

  “How about getting some rest?”

  “That’s the last thing I need right now. We’ll be back on Thetis inside a week. Funny, isn’t it? Right back where we started, like none of this happened.”

  Shan thought of telling her she was here for her if she wanted to talk. But the idea disgusted her. How could she offer comfort after standing back and letting it happen? Right and wrong weren’t going to carry much weight with Lindsay at the moment, and Shan had to admit to herself that she probably couldn’t cope with the strain of lying to her.

  You can’t grieve with them. You’d be no use to anyone then, her old sergeant used to say. She’d taken an EnHaz decision so she would deal with it as an officer, and put a good safe distance between the event and her emotions. That way she’d be ready to deal with whatever came next.

  “Lin, I’ve decided to stay on.”

  “When are you going back, then?”

  “I mean permanently.”

  Lin looked blank. It might have been whatever moodblocker Hugel had given her. “I can’t say I blame you. Okurt’s very anxious to talk to you.”

  “Then I’ve saved you the problem. I work for the wess’har government now.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t ask, and say you never saw me.”

  Shan debated how she might take her leave of someone she’d almost counted as a close friend in this enforced intimacy, and decided it was probably better to walk away right then.

  Lin looked up. “Shan, I want to have David buried here. You know Josh better than anyone. Will you ask him?”

 
“Of course.” Hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite. “I’m sure there won’t be a problem.”

  “Buried, Shan. Not left for the rockvelvets.”

  “No, I promise.”

  Shan wanted to ask why. But it didn’t matter. She wandered back up the passage to her own cabin and opened her locker. Then she took out her uniform jacket and picked off the fluff that had gathered on it, and opened the dark blue grip. As she moved it, something rattled.

  The seeds. Of course. She had opened the sealed pack of tomato seeds she had smuggled from Earth, but she had never got round to planting them. It seemed too much like establishing a permanent connection with a world she would have to leave. Now she could have at least a piece of her dream, even if she could never retire.

  She made a conscious effort to uninvolve herself. She had real EnHaz work to do now and even if EnHaz no longer existed on Earth, it would live on here, in her.

  She picked over the seeds, wondering where she might plant them. As she examined them, her own hands caught her by surprise for the first time.

  She could have sworn she had the beginnings of claws.

  Aras was proud of his skill with glass. Glass needed making, and there was no reason not to make it well. He put everything he knew into the headstone for David Neville’s grave.

  He sifted through fragments of pink and gold glass and laid the best pieces out on a cloth to plan the image. Josh had said flowers were appropriate.

  The workshop was normally busy with colonists repairing and recycling items, but they left him to his private task with their usual silent diplomacy. He was glad of that. No matter how many deaths occurred around him, he could not inure himself to bereavement: he simply became more adept at it, and recognized its stages, and knew that like pain it would peak and ebb away in a certain time.

  But this time was different. There was another sensation struggling inside him. He turned the cutting tool over and over in his hand, trying to pin down the thought.

  It was guilt again.

  He had the gethes to measure himself against now, the kind of humans who would not have shied away from using c’naatat to keep the infant alive. He had done exactly what they would have done. He had defied the natural order of things in a single, irrevocable moment because he wanted to. Shan hadn’t. He wanted to know why.

  He finished the panel just after first light and carried the memorial to the edge of Constantine’s perimeter where Josh had dug a deep hole and a slot for the headstone. It fitted as he had planned. He stood back, and not so much admired it as noted it. On bright days the sun would slant through it like a disembodied church window and it would throw brilliant colors onto the grave. Real flowers would have been a poor substitute for that display.

  He sat back on his heels and wondered just how many of his unshakeable beliefs would crumble in the years to come. He wasn’t sure that he knew who he was any longer.

  “That’s lovely,” said Shan.

  She had followed him. Or maybe she knew him well enough to know where he would go and what he would do these days. Either way, he was glad she was there, and as she knelt down beside him he patted her shoulder automatically, as if she was a house-brother he was greeting.

  “I wanted it to be right before Commander Neville comes,” he said. “Will it take some of the pain away?”

  “It’s—well, you’re a good man, Aras.” She looked resigned. He couldn’t scent anything. “Decent thing to do.”

  “Shan, is Josh right? Is there life beyond this?”

  “The rational me says no, unless that’s how quantum physics shapes up. The other me?” She looked around the landscape as if there was some answer it would give her. “I don’t want there to be an afterlife. There are some people I couldn’t face a second time.”

  “But almost every human culture has stories of an afterlife.”

  “But you don’t. And the isenj don’t either, do they?”

  “No. I’ve never come across another culture that does.”

  “Every miracle’s got a mundane explanation. Your city of pearl is actually insect shit. Eternal life is a parasite. The bubbles in champagne are the farts of yeast colonies. Even that wonderful smell that comes from the ground after summer rain is a bacteria, actinomycetes. That’s just the way the universe is. And you can choose—you can look at the wondrous surface or you can look at the crud beneath. I want to see the wondrous, believe me. I just know it isn’t going to be there when I’ve finished looking.”

  “Are you depressed about the death of David Neville?”

  Shan shook her head. “I wish I could be. I think I was more saddened by the bezeri, because it was senseless.”

  “Were you at all tempted to save the child as I saved you?”

  “The nearest I got to that was thinking how sad it was that I could but I wouldn’t.”

  “I’m sobered to know you have more resolve than me.”

  “Wrong question,” she said. “I never knew David. The real test would have been if it were you who were dying. If you’re berating yourself for breaking the rules and infecting me, move on. I have.”

  Aras took a last critical look at the grave, determined to reach perfection. Another human was gone; and there had been hundreds over the years, and hundreds of wess’har, too. It had never eaten at him like this before. He wondered if this was some of Shan’s biochemistry at work in him, or if it was simply a product of time and events.

  He wanted to think of them as meaning more than a cycle of component atoms ebbing and flowing through the world.

  For once, he wanted Shan Frankland to be wrong.

  The changes were beginning to pick up pace, and Shan’s mornings were taking on a pattern. On waking, safe in Constantine, she had approximately three oblivious seconds before reality crashed in. Her first conscious thoughts were to dread what changes the c’naatat were making in her body.

  She thought of them as creatures now. She had never felt that way about bacteria or viruses, which existed as a corporate entity called Illness. There were no personalities involved: it was strictly business, cause and effect, supply and demand. But she didn’t feel ill, and she knew there was no cure. The c’naatat would go on with their ceaseless homeimprovement tasks for all eternity.

  They were terraforming her. Her survival was their survival. It struck her from time to time how very unlike humans they were, realizing she was a resource to be preserved rather than exploited.

  She washed her face vigorously in the warm water from the spigot and started brushing her teeth. The swiss on the cabinet eeped.

  “Eddie, you do pick your moments.”

  Eddie’s voice was different, less chatty, less intimate. “Where have you been?”

  “The moon,” she said. “Seriously. I was summoned to F’nar. I want to stay on and the ruling matriarchs like to interview refugees.”

  “Oh.”

  “What can I do for you, anyway?”

  “Is that how you see yourself? A refugee now?”

  “I don’t fancy going back just yet. Is there something bothering you?”

  “I don’t think you’re bottling out of facing an inquiry over Parekh, that’s all.”

  Shan spat foam in the basin and rinsed her mouth again. “Go on.”

  “Do you mind my asking what was in your Suppressed Briefing?”

  “Nothing you don’t already know. Just to make sure the gene bank was safe for posterity.”

  “So who’s paying you?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Who’s paying you for the wess’har biotech? I can’t believe it’s a corporation, although you’d be a bloody good cover for that. So I’m thinking government.”

  Shan was shocked into silence. She was not so much stunned that he had worked out the wess’har connection, but that he thought she was trading biotech for her own ends. There had been no point leveling with him about Op Green Rage at all. He didn’t understand. She should have known better.

  “What the hell makes
you say that?” she said at last.

  “Aras takes a shell up the tailpipe and dusts himself off. You bounce back from death’s door. And I’ve been talking to the isenj foreign minister about Mjat. I can add up, you know.”

  Shit. Shit. But Eddie was out there, and she was here. They couldn’t take her or Aras. Even so…she had hoped it wouldn’t get out.

  Everything gets out in the end. The longer it takes, the more it looks like a cover-up.

  “Then I think you’ve got your sums wrong, Eddie.”

  “I hoped I had, Shan. I really did.”

  “You have no idea. I know what this looks like, but you really don’t understand at all.”

  “A straight answer would help. Who are you playing mule for?”

  “You know the potential of the story you’re sitting on?”

  “I’m right, then.”

  “It’s not for sale. At any price. I know you won’t take any notice of this, but stop digging.”

  The line snapped into static again. Stop digging. It was the worst possible thing to say to a journalist.

  But it was still better than telling him the truth.

  The tayberries were chest high, trained over frames in little domes that were dotted around the fields. Shan took the secateurs and began cutting back the long shoots, holding the ends carefully in her fingertips and dropping the severed shoots into a pile in the barrow beside her. It was a soothingly repetitive task.

  Every so often she would find a berry someone had missed from the harvest and eat it. It burst against her palate, sweet and velvety, and right then she couldn’t imagine a more pleasant way to spend the day. She was completely caught up in the rhythm of it. When Kristina Hugel walked up behind her, she wasn’t even aware of the woman’s footsteps.

  “Earning your keep?” Hugel said.

  “Clears the mind, gardening.”

  “You ought to wear gloves for that. Look at the state of you.”

  Shan glanced down at her hands, and then examined her arms. There was a long scrape down her right forearm, oozing pinpricks of blood; it was the sort of scratch thorny bushes gave you and that you stopped noticing when the weather was cold enough. She tutted and rubbed at it.