City of Pearl (16 page)

“Communal, like yours.”

“Are they spacefaring?”

“They think they are.”

“Not quite with you on that one.”

Aras gestured along the beach. “This is the limit of their atmosphere. They try to breach it from time to time.” He beckoned her to follow and walked along the shore, hearing her gasping for breath behind him but still managing to keep up. “Look.”

There was a large perfectly spherical stone on the shore at the high-water line, set with intricate patterns of inlaid color. Shan squatted down beside it and examined its smoothness with her hand. It seemed to impress her. She craned her neck to look up at him, still balancing in a crouch. “What is it?”

“This is the Place of Memory of the First,” said Aras. “It marks the spot where the first bezeri pilot beached himself to gather information about the Dry Above, which is what they call anything that isn't sea.”

“Is this script?” She ran a cautious fingertip over the spots of colored shell and stone, as if she understood it was something to be respected. “What does it say?”

“It says that here the nineteenth of the shoal of Ehek launched himself out of the water and told the waiting ones all he could see of the Dry Above before he died an honorable death.”

“He died?”

“At that time their pods had only enough power to propel themselves out of the water.”

“And he knew that?”

“Yes. It was what you call a suicide mission.”

She was silent for a while and he couldn't work out what she was imagining. “What happened after that?”

“They developed bigger pod ships with secondary water jets that allowed them to push themselves back into the sea.” Aras walked a few meters down the beach and patted another large stone memorial, this time a conical one with lines of color spiraling down its sides. “This is the Place of Memory of the Returned. I expect you can work that out for yourself.”

Shan spent a long time touching the spherical stone, as if a dead bezeri was more intriguing to her than one who made it back. He was getting impatient for a meal, but she was a matriarch, and—
gethes
or not—his instinct of deference to a dominant female was hard to override. She confused him. One moment she was
isanket
, a little female, an amazed child, and the next she was an
isan
clearly comfortable with the authority of her gender. He had neither
isan
nor children. She stirred needs in him that he thought he had buried under the years.

He was still hungry, though. “The Dry Above is like deep space to them, a realm of risk,” he said, and wished she would follow his lead and start walking back to the settlement. “Apart from some scientific interest, the majority of bezeri have no more interest in finding ways of colonizing the Dry Above than humans have of living under water.”

“Or in space,” said Shan. “How did you come across them?”

“Sometimes we could see their light in the sea from Wess'ej. We didn't know it came from people until we landed here. Then we noticed bezeri beaching themselves.

It was very distressing. It took us many, many years to work out what they were signaling, and that they were trying to attract our attention.”

“You assumed they were communicating, though?” A sudden sharp whiff of anxiety rolled off her. What had upset her? “You tried to work out what they were asking?”

“Of course. And once we had established a common set of signals, the bezeri could ask for our help. When the isenj came, they asked us to intervene.”

“So you removed them.” There was no hint of outrage in her tone. “The hard way.”

“We asked them to leave because they were destroying this world. Millions of bezeri died from their pollution. The marine ecosystem is very fragile. I thought that would be something
gethes
understood from experience.”

“I'm suitably chastened.”

“The isenj breed fast. They've spread across their own world and its moon. But not here.”
Not any longer.
“They are excluded.”

“Now we're getting into areas I understand. Territorial ambitions. Fine.”

“I doubt you do understand,
Shan Chail
.” He regretted his honesty instantly. He should have let her think that the wess'har were driven by petty political ambition. But he wanted her to think well of him; it was a moment of stupidity. She missed very little. The
isanket
gave way to an
isan
used to getting answers.

“Then explain to me. Because this is what's going to happen to us if we're not careful, isn't it?”

“There are…unique aspects of this world that make it both vulnerable and dangerous, and we will, I promise you, do whatever it takes to prevent incursions here. By anyone.”

“I'm not criticizing you for that.”

“I don't want to answer any more questions.”

She eased herself upright as if it hurt and rubbed her knees, which made alarming cracking sounds. She just stared into his eyes. He couldn't pick up any scent that would give him a hint of her state of mind, and she didn't say anything. A wave broke close to her boots but she didn't move.

Shan finally shrugged and looked back out to sea for a few moments. “I'm not interrogating you, Aras.” She put her hand out as if to touch his arm and he shied away, forcing a scent of embarrassment from her. She pushed her hands deep in the pockets of her jacket. “I'm sorry. You drew away before. If I've broken some taboo, I really didn't mean any offense.”

Why did she have to say that?
This was the first person who actually wanted to touch him in many, many years. Wess'har were not built to lie. Not even his acquired human characteristics had changed that.

“I'm not rebuffing you. I have a kind of disease.”

“Can I catch it?”

“Unlikely.”

“If I do, will it kill me?”

“No.” Oh, that much was true. It was almost too true.

“You don't like being a pariah, do you?”

Aras had never met a human above the age of six who was as direct, as brutal as that. Shan Frankland was definitely a different
gethes.
Did she know? How could she? “Explain,” he said.

“I've seen how Josh avoided touching you when you crashed, and he seemed ashamed of it. You almost shook my hand and stopped. It's not really you that doesn't want contact, is it? And Josh knows it hurts you.”

“You notice very small details indeed.”

“It's my job. It tells me a lot.” She was still staring into his face, direct as any wess'har. “So?”

“It's unpleasant to have this condition. I live with the fear it produces in others.”

And she took one hand from her pocket and touched him. It was nothing extraordinary. It was just a casual, familiar squeeze on his upper arm, done with as much simple ease as the colonists did to each other. This was the first time anyone had really touched him voluntarily since Benjamin Garrod had tried to comfort him nearly 170 years ago. She held the grip for five seconds; if she had held it forever, it would not have been long enough.

He hoped that his shock and confusion didn't show. He would not have been able to explain.

“Well, I'm not afraid of you or your illness,” she said. “And I'm not your enemy, and I'm not here to pillage your planet, and what you get up to with the isenj is your business. I aim to finish my job and go home with minimum disruption to either of us.”

“And what is your job?”

“I'm not entirely sure yet. Have you heard of Suppressed Briefing?” She turned and linked her arm through his, and began walking him back to Constantine, as if they had a friendship that had mellowed into complete familiarity over a long period of time. He was too surprised to wrench his arm away. “Well, this is how it works…”

He tried to concentrate on what she was saying. It wasn't easy. The thought that kept jostling for his attention while he tried to take in talk of sub-Qs and stoppers was that, for once, somebody was not frightened or repelled by him.

She almost certainly didn't know what his condition was. If she did, her motivation for contact might have been purely commercial. But for those few moments he had connected with someone again, and he didn't care.

Constantine's school occupied a whole wing of the underground complex. Shan looked for a door to knock, but there was none. She stepped into a bright chamber full of tables and screens, like something out of a history book, where small children were gazing raptly at a woman demonstrating the formation of clouds in 3D. Two kids turned round and gaped at her for a few seconds, then turned back to the infinitely more fascinating spectacle in front of them.

“Don't mind me,” said Shan, and wandered round the room, examining the drawings and pictures on the wall. There were Last Suppers and Annunciations and Partings of the Red Sea, lovingly rendered in shaky hands or in confident but eccentric brushstrokes. There were also strange and largely unidentifiable things that Shan thought probably illustrated some of the local wildlife. And there were pictures of a large and alien biped, which were clearly Aras.

“Sweet,” she muttered, and turned to watch the class. It was amazing how little she found she knew about clouds. The lunch bell sounded—wavering, plaintive glass notes again—and she was caught swimming against a steady tide of children ebbing out the door.

“Well-behaved little lot, aren't they?” said Shan, recalling kids the same age with bottles and knives, years and worlds away.

“They learn responsibility early,” said the teacher. “We have to be responsible for each other.” She tied her hair up in a scarf and rolled up her sleeves. “Did you want something?”

“Josh said this was a good place to learn the history of Constantine,” said Shan. “May I have the files?”

She held out her swiss. It was old technology, the sort they understood. Nobody had the time or inclination to develop information tech here, seeing as everyone lived within walking distance of each other and there were no other settlements with which to communicate. The technology that supported the swiss did just fine. The teacher inserted it into the data port on the console, letting it swallow text and pictures for Shan to read at her leisure. Then she handed it back and made it politely clear she was going to show Shan the way out of the complex.

It was a fine clear day with a scattering of thin, high clouds, and Shan collected a pack of dry rations from the base camp to eat while reading the data on her swiss.

The history had been written for children, but that didn't offend her. She knew that someone had recorded somewhere every dot and whistle of the crop yields, council meetings and climate, but what she needed right then was something geared to a child's simplicity.

There were pictures of people digging and planting, and pushing barrows of stone and soil from tunnels. And there was Ben Garrod, thin and smiling, standing in front of one of the first crops of soy, beets and potatoes. It had been a hard few years after the colonists landed, a struggle to keep strains of yeast alive and keep the bots functioning, and only the intervention of a race who already lived in the land—described in the history as a miracle, proof of their righteous purpose—kept them from disaster.

Shan was not much given to appreciating miracles other than the kind that involved ballistics missing major blood vessels. And there were no miracles here. The humans were wildlife in a reserve, preserved as much for the future of the non-human species they brought with them as for their own sake.

Shan considered all the colonies on earth that had survived pretty well without a scrap of righteousness to justify their existence. All colonies seemed to thrive on delusion, whether that was how good the new world was, how much better the old country had been, or how much right they had to do what they were doing. Kids needed to be told harsh truths.

She was scanning through the early history when a word caught her eye.

The word was “Aras.”

For a moment she wondered if the files were not in chronological order, and she checked more out of habit than curiosity. But they were indeed ordered, and the dates they referred to were more than 150 years ago. And still they referred to Aras.

Her first rationalization was that Aras was a generic name for the wess'har. Then she rethought the premise. Could he be that old? There was nothing to say that human life-spans were the norm. In fact, that wasn't even true of Earth species, so why should an alien not be centuries old? Nevertheless the thought gripped her, and for some reason she began to worry that the wess'har might suddenly become very interesting to the life-sciences people. She decided not to say anything until she had checked out the facts.

She flicked through pictures at high speed. They were mostly of people, with an occasional shot of the fields, and every imaginable view of the building of St. Francis Church. She enlarged the shot and admired the inventive approach to scaffolding they had used when they built the vaulted ceiling. And then she spotted a creature she didn't recognize in the background of one of the frames.

It was hard to see, but it looked bipedal. It was the height of a man and had what looked like a long, tapering muzzle, nothing like the solid and broad Aras. Was this an isenj? Was this the species they wouldn't now allow on the planet? And if it was, why had they accepted its company while they were building the church?

Nothing here was going to be simple, she decided. She stood up, dusted down her trousers and began walking back to the settlement.

She had to pass the open hatchway to the marines' quarters on the way back to her cabin. Words wafted out in an indistinct buzz, and she wasn't listening, but then a few words leaped out with sudden clarity. “You're bloody sweet on her,” said Barencoin's voice, teasing.

“Piss off,” said a voice she recognized as Bennett's. “I don't want to hear that again.”

Shame,
Shan thought. But she smiled anyway.

 

Eddie stepped into the tiny alcove in his cabin that was both toilet and shower and tried to freshen up. Expecting extreme conditions, the designers had allowed for two liters of water per shower. On the six-week familiarization program, granite-faced Royal Marine Color Sergeant Durcan had demonstrated how to cleanse the entire body, hair included, with the artful use of a substantial sponge and the minimum of water. They could, said the Color Sergeant, have done it with a plain pint, but as they were bloody soft civilians, they could have nearly four to lavish on themselves. He wasn't a man who dealt in liters. Eddie was glad he hadn't actually trained with the marines as his editor had suggested. The personal hygiene was tough enough.

So the system was set up for two liters of water, even though there was plenty of fresh water on tap, thanks to the colony's borrowed pipeline. Eddie resolved to find one of the engineer-trained marines, maybe that nice Susan Webster, and persuade them to adjust his shower.

By the time he made it to the mess area, everyone was eating. Rayat sidled up to him while he tried to decide if the reconstituted egg would make him want to throw up again.

“You're going off camp this morning?” he asked, very quietly.

“Certainly am, Doc. First foray.”

“You're the only person Frankland is letting out unescorted.”

“That's because I won't stray too far. And I only take pictures.”

Rayat lowered his voice still further. “If you were to come back with a few leaves stuck to your boots, you would let me know, wouldn't you? I wouldn't be ungrateful.”

Eddie looked him in the eye. “Don't even ask. I'm not interested.”

Eddie wondered how long it would be before another member of the payload—and he wasn't payload, of course—asked him to sneak something back into camp. Shan would suspect they would ask, and he didn't want to be grounded with the rest of them. Anyway, it was wrong. The rules had been spelled out to them. And he thought of those obliterated buildings and roads and isenj whose only memorial was a geophys scan of ghosts.

He wanted very badly to know what the isenj looked like and who they were. But there was enough to occupy him while he waited for that opportunity to present itself.

Eddie collected his kit and walked with difficulty out to the perimeter of the colony on the east side, to where he could stand in farmland and yet have a backdrop of orange trees and lavender undergrowth. The hike was agony. He didn't care. He set his camera to follow him, and it hovered behind him like a large tame bee.

“Tight mid-shot and pull out on
but behind me,
” he told it. He checked the shot on his handheld screen and moved a few meters to the right. That was better.

“This may look like a chaotic cottage garden, a piece of land planted with some everyday crops,” he began. “But behind me, there is nothing remotely everyday about the landscape.” He paused for breath. “This is the second planet from Cavanagh's Star, CS2, a planet so like Earth as to enable me to stand upright and breathe its air. Yes, I'm puffing a little, because that air isn't as rich in oxygen, and the gravity is slightly higher than we're accustomed to—but this
is
the nearest place to home that humans have found. And here is where an international group of devout Christians has built a colony, against all the odds. It's also a planet with a violent history, a history of wars that wiped out whole cities…”

He wasn't at his slick best today, he knew that. He could tidy it up later in editing. It was a long time since he'd recorded anything that wasn't live. Out here, not being fast didn't matter. There was nobody else to beat him to air, nobody to scoop him. The luxury was so heady that he almost laughed out loud. He had a new world to himself. Sod Wiley, and sod the networks: whatever was happening Earthside when his transmission finally reached home, he would still be the first man to report from the surface of Cavanagh's Star II.

He rounded up the camera and reattached it to his headset, turning round slowly to work out the best angle. The orange pineapple-shaped trees were stunning. If anything said alien world, they did. Great flapping sheets of clear stuff flew at a majestic pace between them. What the hell were they? He recorded some voice-over expressing just that sentiment, and then thought about laying down a more scientific commentary later.

By the time he got back to his cabin, he was uncertain whether his priority was to die quickly of his headache or to eat until he burst. All his body's balances were still in disarray.
Tired,
it said.
Eat, lie down, sleep.
He ignored it and set up his edit suite.

Suite was a grand term for it. The screen was a sheet of polymer 20 cm by 15 cm, easy to tack to a wall or spread on a table or lap. Eddie pulled down the flap set in the wall to accommodate a workstation and set the screen to a 45-degree angle, then pointed the bee cam at it and transferred the morning's footage. Things somehow looked more real to him on screen than they did in the flesh.

He already had the shape of the piece in his mind before he shot it. Now he tried the shots together, cutting, fading, deciding where the hypercaps would go, and then wondering how he was going to capture all that second-layer data from a system as archaic as Constantine's. He could have made up all the background if it came to it, but he had his pride. This wasn't just news. This was history. There were duties involved.

And there was another thing missing. The native inhabitants must have had a name for the planet. Cavanagh's Star II, CS2, was a geek's designation, not a world, not a place on a map. He wanted something that would capture the essence of the place. Maybe Aras the Alien would oblige.

The piece was running at nearly three minutes. He'd wanted to get that sub-menu in about the vanished city of the isenj. But maybe that could wait along with the geophys scans Champciaux was dithering over letting him transmit for “copyright reasons”—as if anyone was going to care who had breached it when they finally got back.

It was still too speculative, anyway. And it added forty-five seconds to a three-minute piece, a tad weighty by BBChan standards. So what? Nobody else was going to get the whole story before him. He cut it and dumped it in the gash file.