City of Pearl (36 page)

“I will not leave without her.”

“And we do not negotiate.”

Lindsay still had her hand on her rifle, although she was well aware that it was pointless. “I didn't expect you to help,” she said. “But I expected Shan to. She'll answer to Earth authorities.”

“I think not.” He stepped forward again, and this time he was inches from her, huge and suddenly menacing. “Understand this. If you knew what sort of life you coveted for your son, if you realized what my condition truly meant, then you would thank her. If she had tried to use it to cure your son, I would have had to destroy every one of you, and I would have done so. The end would be the same. The intervening detail of your small expectations of each other doesn't concern me. Now go.”

Lindsay realized she had stepped back from him. Eddie, Hugel, and Champciaux were looking bewildered with their grips in their hands. The wess'har troops raised what looked like musical instruments, like sections of horns, beautiful golden curved objects. The open ends each pointed straight at one of the mission team.

“You go or you die,” said the wess'har.

Eddie spoke up. “Commander, we're the ones with the stone axes here. Let's be smart for once and leave.”

Lindsay looked over her shoulder at her marines. They were all combat troops, and she wouldn't have thought of any of them as cowards. She knew they would take on anything if she ordered them to. But their hands were at their sides. If she was going to die, she would probably be doing it alone.

“Let's go home, ma'am,” Qureshi said.

It was one promise Shan hadn't kept. She said she would get them all home in one piece. It was up to Lindsay to take on that promise now.

 

It was hardly the best evening for a baptism. The sky was clear as glass, but there was a biting wind from the sea. Only the fading roses and violets of the sunset gave any impression of warmth.

Shan and Aras stood on the top of the cliff and looked down on to the beach where a large crowd of the colonists had gathered. The assembly seemed a cheerful one. Several of the colonists held what looked like bath towels. Mesevy, draped in a shapeless off-white shift that reached her ankles, picked her way down the beach to the water's edge with Josh and Sam.

“Bloody mad in this weather,” said Shan, and noted that all three of them flinched visibly as they waded into the water to waist height. Josh and Sam stood either side of Mesevy and looked as if they were reciting something while she listened, her eyes closed. Then they each placed an arm across her back and dipped her backwards into the sea, immersing her totally for a few seconds before pulling her back upright again. She stood soaked, hair flattened to her head, gasping. Shan couldn't hear what was being said, but she heard the “amen” from the crowd.

“So that's a baptism,” said Aras.

“Never seen that before,” Shan said.

And neither had the bezeri. As Shan looked farther out to sea, she could see scatterings of light, blue and gold, flickering and shimmering just beneath the surface. The bezeri were watching the humans. It was unusual to see them so near the surface lately; their dread of invaders had driven them deep.

“What do you reckon they're thinking?”

Aras considered the lights for a while and moved his head slightly as if reading aloud to himself. “Some of them are asking whether the humans are trying to breathe under water. They're debating whether to try to bring Mesevy to the surface if she gets into difficulty.”

Shan smiled. “Have you explained baptism to them?”

“There's never been an adult baptism here before.”

“I never thought of that.”

“I explained that the water cleanses the human's soul. The bezeri wanted to know if the soul-dirt that was washed off would pollute their environment.”

The crowd on the shoreline broke up and began moving back up the beach. Shan knew now what the big towels were for. Mesevy was wrapped tight in them, shivering.

“Your technology is pretty good, isn't it?”

Aras nodded. “You say so.”

“Can you do selective memory wipes?”

“No.”

“I was just hoping,” she said. “There are so many things I'd rather forget. I seem to be remembering more than ever lately. I thought it was the SB.”

“That's the wess'har in you. Our recall is complete.”

“And what's the human in you, then? What do you get from us?”

“Restlessness,” Aras said. “A need for solitude occasionally. And maybe that strange ability to know one thing and yet want to believe another. What do you call it? Faith.”

They lapsed back into silence. It wasn't the baptism she had been waiting to watch. Close to the horizon she could see a very bright object, an artificial star she had watched on many nights until its orbit took it out of view.
Thetis
was still on station and waiting for rendezvous with
Actaeon,
itself a brilliant point of light nearby. Eventually the two stars merged.

“There we go,” said Shan. If she needed confirmation that she was never going home, this was it. By the time the ships parted again, they would be below the level of the horizon and she would not see the sudden nova of energy as
Thetis
turned and began its acceleration toward home.

“Your people are unwise to take isenj to Earth. You will regret it.”

“Unfortunately, I think we're going to get along with them just fine.”

“A mistake. I assure you.”

“We all do unwise things.”

“You still think I was a fool to infect you.”

“Well, I don't think we'll have long to wait before the matriarchs find out about it. They won't think it's too clever.”

Now that the baptism party had moved on, they scrambled down the slope to the beach. She could manage it in wess'har time now, or at least in Aras-time. Neither gravity nor variable oxygen hindered her. It was still an unsettling prospect to wake each morning and wonder what might have changed in her body. When the fear took her, she remembered the wonder of seeing polarized light and blues beyond the scope of her human genes. Aras assured her she would get used to it in time. Her only problem would be if she refused to let go of the past.

And there was a lot of that to let go.

The retreating tide had left rock-pools, worlds in their own right. She squatted down and stared into one to see what life stirred in it when her shadow darkened the water. There was a flurry of movement. Sand churned up, and then the miniature universe was still again.

I am a world too,
she thought.
C'naatat
only wanted the best for its environment, for her. It wanted a stable colony, just like the settlers of Constantine.
I'm not carrying a disease. And a world has responsibilities.

On the shoreline, claret-colored weeds washed out in strands like hair. She stepped round the fronds with care, for there might have been a smaller world within them as well. A movement caught her eye, the last bezeri patrol sinking into the depths, trailing blue and green lights.

She looked into another pool.
I was eight years old, exploring the beach.
There were no crabs or limpets or razor shells here: pulses of light shimmered intermittently, the telltale signs of a glass-clear sea creature sheltering in the red weed. She hadn't thought of those childhood seaside holidays in years. It was as if the sudden separation from humanity had opened up a well of memories to cushion her against the unknown.

Shan took the azin-shell map carefully from Aras. It hinged open: the sand and fragments compressed within it shivered a little, as fragile as the ecology of the world itself. Carefully, she took a little vermilion powdered glass between her fingertips and let it fall slowly in an ellipse a little way from the shoreline—the settlement of Constantine.
It was the summer before the Alum Bay cliffs sank into the sea,
she thought.
I filled a glass lighthouse with layers of colored sands so the holiday would live forever
. Then she trailed the glass-powder round the very edge of the map, and shut it tightly again.

She waded into the shallows and left it where the bezeri could see it. She hoped they would understand that she was telling them she was enforcing an environmental protection zone, although they would not understand what EnHaz was.

All they really needed to know was that Superintendent Shan Frankland, Environmental Hazard Enforcement, had changed her mind about early retirement.

“Come on, home,” she said, and took Aras's arm. “Borscht on the menu tonight. Can't wait.”

On the patch of land that had once been the
Thetis
base camp there were marks on the grass like a floor plan, but all traces of the construction had already been picked clean. In the coming weeks, wess'har eco-tech would quietly erase all evidence that humans had ever been there and reclaim the ground for the wild.

The
gethes
had left no more lasting physical impression on Bezer'ej than the isenj had. Some things could be put back together again as if nothing had happened: but she wasn't one of them.

She glanced down at her hands.

Yes, they were definitely claws.