There was no such thing as private vehicle ownership here. Cars were there to be used by anyone, moving themselves around to ensure that there were always vehicles where they might be needed. They could carry passengers on autopilot too, with no more than an instruction as to where they wanted to be taken. Quarians, though, often liked to pilot cars themselves for the sheer pleasure of handling that speed and performing elaborate acrobatics. Alex was with them on that one hundred per cent, though his own skills and reflexes would not allow him to carry out anything like the breath-taking manoeuvres quarians accomplished.
Even so, taking the controls in his hands was a rush, as he broke away from the airlock and accelerated into the blue. It had all the freedom of piloting in space with all the variety and challenge of piloting in air and under water. He could go anywhere he liked, as fast as he liked. There wasn’t one single traffic control point on the entire planet.
Alex went more or less directly to Feyor, with just one brief diversion to look at a whale. He was fascinated by whales, particular the kind the quarians called ‘magister’ whales. They were the biggest living creatures he’d ever seen at all, let alone been able to get close to in the wild. The whale he went to look at then was more than eighty metres long – bigger than a gunboat. Its skin was leathery, scarred and pitted with age, its mild eyes ruminative. It was not, Alex recognised, the slightest bit interested in the car which cruised up at a respectful distance alongside it. Sometimes they were, even old whales like this might sometimes show curiosity and swim about companionably, allowing you to go so close that you could lay your hand upon them. Alex had already had that experience and would never forget it. But this particular whale was occupied, his great mouth yawning open as he engulfed tons of the tiny swarming plankton. The plankton had bloomed here too, in response to the massive burst of algae, and were so thick that it seemed almost to be snowing under water. The whale was feeding contentedly and did not want to play, so after a few minutes admiring it, Alex turned away.
He spent some time en-route practising his slalom skills, swinging the car rapidly through an imaginary series of obstacles. This pleased him, even though he knew that quarians would consider even his best efforts to be ludicrously slow and clumsy. Then, as Feyor began to emerge from the murky depths, he turned his attention to his destination.
Several people had told him that Feyor was one of the most beautiful cities on Quarus. This, as the visitors had come to appreciate, did not refer to the architecture of the city itself. Other than in rare instances such as the construction of a copy of the Teralian Opera House, quarian cities all used the same style of architecture. It was the same style, too, which had been in use on their world for centuries. Concepts of fashion or developing new architectural styles as a form of cultural expression were meaningless to quarians. They had long ago found what worked, what suited them, and they could see no benefit at all to changing it.
What defined any given city, therefore, was its environs. Part of that was the natural landscape, and part of it was the way in which that had been cultivated. At Feyor, Alex had been told, the gardens were spectacular.
So, here he was, eager to see what quarians themselves considered to be a spectacular environment.
At first, all he could see was light. It wasn’t the bright agglomeration of points of light normal for a human city with its street lights, thousands of windows and streams of head and tail-lamps flowing through the traffic lanes. This was a dim, diffuse glow in the far darkness, like a patch of phosphorescence on the sea bed.
As he got closer and had a better sense of scale, he realised that the ‘patch’ was actually several kilometres across. Nearly nine kilometres long, in fact, and varying in width from just a kilometre or so to more than five.
This was because the city had been built in a region of undersea mountains. It nestled in a valley between a steep ridge to the east and, just a few kilometres westward, a tremendous drop-off into a chasm even the quarians considered uninhabitable. This was one of the deepest cities on their world. No daylight ever reached this place; it was a city of eternal night.
But not, though, of eternal darkness. Alex had been told that the gardens here were bioluminescent but he had not imagined anything like this. The nearer he got, the more amazing it became. There were three black smoker vents along the ridge above the city, spewing super-heated water in dramatic towers. It was this hydrothermal energy that the quarians had harnessed, not only to provide power for their city but to create their gardens. They had piped that boiling water throughout the valley just as farmers might irrigate dry land, creating a myriad hot springs around which life could thrive. It was engineered life, too, developed by the quarians themselves. The word ‘bioluminescent’, Alex realised, just did not do it justice at all. It was like a weird glowing reef, every creature alight, from the forests of pale tube-like things to the many-coloured sparks which flitted everywhere.
The city itself was dim in comparison. Artificial light was maintained at a level below that of the outside environment, so the domes and structures were revealed by the light of the gardens rather than casting out light upon them.
Alex brought the car to a hover above the city almost without conscious decision to do so. He was aware that his helmet had engaged. He could feel a comfortable sense of pressure across his whole body, too, as his swimming rig had engaged deep water mode, creating a marginal cushion of forcefield between his skin and the fabric. Quarian vehicles adjusted automatically to match pressure and temperature of the water outside, unless overridden. It was a mark of how fully Alex had come to trust both quarian technology and his own swim gear that he’d allowed the car and suit to adjust and keep him safe, giving it no more thought than he would have using a survival suit aboard ship.
Right now, anyway, all his attention was on the city below. It was taking some time for him to really take in what he was looking at. There was just so much here that was strange and distracting that he hardly knew where to start. Slowly, though, he began to make sense of it, seeing more detail. The buildings were unremarkable in style but they looked very different down here. The effect was not unlike that of pale moonlight, but of a moonlight which shone from below, casting strange shadows. It gave even the most ordinary buildings an air of slightly eerie mystique, ethereal domes rising out of the misty glow.
‘Ohhhh….’ Alex breathed out, and in another man that exhalation, and the look of awe which was on his face, might have been a prayer. It was the same kind of feeling he had when first-footing on a planet, gazing at sights no other human eyes had seen and perhaps never would again; a sense of spiritual wonder.
Then, on an impulse, he abandoned the car, leaving it to take itself off to wherever it might be required. There was no airlock – the car was hardly much bigger than an airlock itself – but it was easy enough to manage. Alex simply flooded the car up, sitting calmly while the water surged around him and rose above his head. Once the pressure was equalised, the door opened and he was able to swim out. As soon as he was clear, the car shut its door and shot off under autopilot.
Alex barely glanced back to see it go. He was swimming now, being towed along by wristjets. There was no sense of the icy temperature down here – his suit would keep him warm even in artic conditions – but it took a few seconds to orient himself in the unexpectedly strong currents. It all looked so very peaceful down there that he’d expected it to be still, but water was being drawn in by the rushing heat of the hydrothermal vents and with the warm water rising right across the city it was actually quite turbulent.
Not too turbulent, though, once he’d got his bearings and put his wristjets on a higher setting. Slowly, then, giving himself plenty of time to absorb it all, he cruised across and down towards the city.
There was so much to see, he could have spent hours exploring and still not seen the half of it. Some of the fish caught his attention – there were monstrous creatures with mouths full of stiletto teeth and lurid blue bulbs hanging on antennae
in front of their heads. There were shoals of hand-sized fish with what appeared to be electric stripes along their sides, flashing and flickering with colour so that they sparkled like rapidly dancing stars. There were crabs, too, and lobster-like creatures, some of them bigger than Alex himself and all of them weird, shining as if lit up from within. The tube things, the major source of the phosphorescent glow around the city, turned out to be enormous, many of them at least thirty metres long and some a great deal longer even than that. They didn’t glow evenly, he saw, but rings of brighter light were working their way up each tube, so slowly that you had to watch for some time to see it.
Suddenly, Alex found himself surrounded by a cloud of tiny bright pink things, far too small and too quick for him to see clearly. He thought they might be shrimp, or seahorses, or something of that kind, darting on jets which shot them on a never-ending crazy zig-zag. They glittered, as if their shells were encrusted with jewels.
I am on an alien world… it wasn’t the first time Alex had been hit by that realisation, but it was one of the most powerful of those moments. He was suddenly, acutely aware of how far from human space, human worlds, he actually was. It could have been terrifying. Even for Alex it was overwhelming. But it was followed by a rush of delight which made him laugh out loud. I’m exploring an alien world! Yes!
Instinctively, he looked around as if hoping to have someone to share that moment of jubilation with, and saw that there were a couple of quarians some distance off, watching him.
It was evident to Alex that they had been watching him for some time, and apparent too that they had been enjoying doing so. They had obviously realised from his leaving the car before it reached the city, and from what he’d been doing since, that he just wanted to have a look around by himself. Seeing how absorbed he was in looking at the gardens, they had held back, happy just to wait and watch his amazement.
Alex waved to them, breaking out into a happy grin as they swam over to meet him. They were deep water adapts, with the dense skin and large eyes best suited for these conditions. One of them looked young, a youth barely out of adolescence, though Alex knew that that could be deceptive.
He took very little notice of the young man, though, as his attention focussed entirely on the woman as the three of them came together.
There was a sense… a feeling Alex had come to recognise, and to trust. Just as he had felt a strong sense of friendship with Othol during his first swim here, he’d met several other quarians since with whom he just seemed to click. There was an immediate feeling that they barely even needed to be introduced, as if he’d known them all their lives.
That had never been stronger than it was right then. It was almost, Alex tried to explain afterwards, like love at first sight, but on a platonic level, friends at first sight. That didn’t sound as significant, though, as it was. He knew even before she spoke that this was someone he was already friends with and always would be friends with, a sense quite beyond the ability of human vocabulary to convey.
‘Hello.’ She reached out her hand and they touched fingertips in the customary quarian greeting. As they did so, Alex’s whole awareness was full of her. If he’d been doing this as an exercise the way Silvie had taught Jen, his first impression would have been one of a slow, strong current. Calm strength, a quietly thoughtful intelligence and deep generosity. ‘I’m Salomah,’ she said, and her smile made it clear that she found him every bit as admirable.
‘Alex,’ said Alex, and they gazed at one another with shared pleasure in finding such an immediate, natural bond between them. Alex was only vaguely aware that the young man, seeing this mutual admiration, had just laughed good naturedly and swum off, leaving them to it.
‘We came to welcome you,’ Salomah was gill-breathing, her voice with that rich hint of harmonising duality which was usual for quarians underwater. ‘So…’ she gestured at the city, ‘Welcome to Feyor.’
Alex thanked her. Quarians had learned very quickly that few humans were comfortable with hundreds of them pouring out of their cities to see the alien visitors. By then, it had become established practice for just a few of them to welcome visitors – in the usual quarian way, just the first few responders, with everyone else leaving them to it. That had turned out to be far more manageable. The only exception was Davie, who drew crowds wherever he went and was more than happy to do so.
‘Something to eat?’ Salomah suggested.
Alex had not even recognised himself until she said that that he was starting to get hungry. He hadn’t eaten much of his lunch, mostly because fourteen quarians had boarded the ship all at once. Since Buzz was off the ship at the time and Bonny was already occupied with a group in engineering, Alex had abandoned his lunch to go and welcome them aboard. He’d felt at the time that he’d had enough to eat, but that had been three hours ago and he was, by now, feeling distinctly peckish.
‘That’d be great, thanks,’ he said. They swam together over the city, neither feeling the need for conversation. Alex didn’t even ask where they were going. Salomah knew where they were going, and that was good enough.
She took him, in fact, to her home. It was in a dome on the outskirts of the city, which they entered via a swim tube and then walked up into an air level. As they did so it was occurring to Alex that he was going to find it problematical to eat here. Even though they were in air, his suit retained the air-seal helmet. The atmosphere here was pressurised to match that of the ocean, and at two kilometres down, without a suit and helmet, Alex would be crushed to death. Removing his helmet to snack simply wasn’t an option.
He needn’t have worried. Salomah already had that in mind.
‘We can depressurise a room, here,’ she told him, and Alex smiled, following her but looking around with keen interest as he did so.
This was an accommodation level. Quarians did not occupy apartments in the way humans did. They did not live in family units but in shared facilities. The closest analogy humans had for the way quarians lived was a type of campus dorm common on some of the central worlds, with a communal lounge/dining area, shower block and bunkrooms.
Calling this any kind of dorm, though, seemed inappropriate to the point of insulting. The communal area was an indoor garden which was in itself the size of two tennis courts. It was exquisite with pools, fountains, waterfalls and a landscaping of plants and flowers which filled the air with heady scent. The ‘shower block’ was a spa facility on the lavish quarian scale and the ‘bunkrooms’ were luxurious. There were several other people there as they passed through – eating, reading, chatting, some of them using air-drop screens. Humans could not use those. Quarians had a micro-sized interface unit implanted in the tips of their fingers as soon as they were old enough to use screens for themselves. Quite apart from issues about the technology being too fast and too sensitive for humans to work safely, there were rigid laws in the League forbidding the implantation of any kind of tech beyond that deemed medically necessary. Comms tech was an absolute no-no – an ethical decision made thousands of years before as it was feared that allowing ‘convenience’ implants would lead to ‘enhancement’ implants and thus set humanity on the slippery path to becoming cyborgs. That view had been immovably embedded after their encounter with Marfikians, and the very idea of allowing even the most useful implant was anathema. Even Alex, radical as he was, was firm on that one, and had told his crew not to even think about asking if they could have quarian comms implants while they were here.
‘I know what you’ll like…’ Salomah had paused beside a splashing fountain, drawn a line in the air with her finger and worked rapidly through a series of screens. Had he been able to follow it, Alex would have seen that it had accessed records of everything he’d eaten during previous visits and how he’d reacted to it, then several menu screens narrowing in on choices. ‘Okay?’ She looked at Alex and he nodded. The cuisine here was so strange to him that he would hardly know what to order for himself, and now that it had been established that huma
ns were not to be allowed to eat anything which was liable to make them throw up, he was happy to allow his hosts to choose things for him.
‘Thanks,’ he said again, and with an answering wave and greetings to the other people there who said hello, he followed her into one of the other rooms.
This was a bedroom, on two levels. The upper, air-breathing level was equipped with triangular hammock-style seating and could be used either as a quiet space or somewhere to take a nap. A pool in the centre gave access to the sleep pod below. Quarians generally preferred to sleep while gill-breathing, only gently tethered in place by a light webbing.
From the size of the room, Alex realised that Salomah was living here with friends. A pair-bonded couple – married for life in human terms – would tend to have a smaller room to themselves. This was not because of any issue of physical privacy but because the emotional intensity of that bond was uncomfortably loud for other quarians in moments of particular intimacy, so they segregated themselves out of consideration for the comfort of others. Those in more casual relationships might also live together at least temporarily, so as to enjoy themselves without disturbing those around them. Mostly, though, the majority of quarians lived with groups of friends, moving around quite often and rarely occupying any particular quarters for more than a few months.
‘Oh, wow…’ Alex was drawn to the window, or rather the transparent outer wall. The view was fabulous. In front of him was an expanse of the stunning bioluminescent gardens with the constant spark and flash of living lights moving around them. Beyond the gardens, the tube-forest covered a rising slope, rippling gently in the flow of water. And above, just visible in the light of the city itself, was a mighty plume of dark water boiling up into the blackness above.
Alex stood and looked at it all, feeling deeply content and oddly at home. I could live here, he thought, and in that moment actually could visualise himself settling down in this city. It was the first place on any planet he had ever felt that since leaving his homeworld, and even Novaterre had been a planet he’d been desperate to leave and in no hurry whatsoever to get back to. Even in the Fourth’s base on Therik he never really felt at home. It was, like every other planet, just a temporary stopover till he could get back out to where he really lived, in space.
Quarus (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 6) Page 62