City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  Funny how that sort of thing worried her. She had a crippled ship and a restless crew and—probably—aliens who could disable an entire fleet out there somewhere, yet that toilet just wouldn’t take its proper place in the queue of priorities.

  No, it was definitely a lavatory. It had to be.

  That matter settled, she plunged instantly into an unusually dreamless oblivion.

  7

  The universe is not here for our convenience alone. If we assume it is simply our larder, we shall starve. If we think that damage we cannot see cannot cause harm, we shall be poisoned. Wess’har have a place in the universe, but we should take no more from it than we absolutely need. Being as strong as we are now, we can take everything from other beings. But we have a duty not to, because we have a choice. Those who have choices must make them. And the wider the choices one has, the more restrained one must be in making them.

  The philosopher TARGASSAT,

  from her Treatise on Consumption

  Shan found it even harder to get up off the low bed in the morning than it had been to lie down on it the night before. She eventually straightened up and washed in ice-cold water to brace herself before venturing out of her room. She expected to find Josh’s family up and about, but found only a place setting at the small table and a note telling her to help herself from the stores.

  Of course. It was Christmas morning. They would be at the church. She helped herself to a few slices of a crumbly honey-colored bread and a bowl of fruit. There was even tea—real tea leaves, Thea sinensis, smelling of sweet tar and leather. She inhaled the fragrance from the jar and suddenly felt a little more optimistic. It wasn’t going to plan, but it might be no disaster either; she could land who she needed to land, give them their restrictions, let them potter around at a discreet distance from the colony and then leave. No longer than eighteen months, maybe even a year. How much damage could that cause?

  She found a jug of soy milk and was savoring her second cup of tea before she finally accepted the scenario that was playing out at the back of her mind. It was not what the researchers did that would matter. It was the fact that they were there at all. The true consequences would not be felt for centuries, but they would be felt one day, and they were already set in motion.

  Constantine was on the most Earthlike planet that humanity had reached so far. Sooner or later, more humans would try to find their way here as the colonists had done.

  It was a shame that such an idealistic little community was finally facing the end of Eden. Even without her implanted orders, Shan would have felt a pressing need to ally with them. Perault had known more about her than she had realized.

  The name Helen surfaced again for a few seconds, and she brushed it aside for the time being.

  Josh was not yet sure how to take Shan Frankland. He pondered the dilemma while sowing broad beans. Not even the arrival of unwanted visitors—or Christmas Day—could be allowed to interfere with the business of survival.

  The woman seemed straightforward. She asked his permission at every stage, as if she accepted Constantine’s sovereignty. But she had that air of having a task to complete, and a way about her that suggested she was wearing a uniform mentally if not in fact. Had Aras been here, he would have known at once whether she was to be trusted.

  The secular world was greedy, destructive, promiscuous. He had the colony’s Earth archives to prove it. Those in uniforms were its instruments, imposing the will of corrupt and avaricious corporations, and those of their puppets, the federal governments. Now the secular world and its twin demons of commerce and government were walking his streets. If it was a test of faith, it was a hard one.

  The contact with corruption might be bad for Constantine. It would be even worse for the beings with whom they shared this world.

  He needed to talk to Aras.

  “We have about three generations’ breathing space to find somewhere else,” Martin said. He walked along behind Josh’s rotavator, dropping martock beans into the emerging drills at practiced intervals. “That’s how long it will take them to decide that this is land worth taking and send more ships.”

  “We’re not leaving,” Josh said. “We have a duty here. And the only way we’ll find another world is if Aras’s people find it for us.”

  “But the seculars will overrun us. It’ll be many years, but they will come.”

  “You have to have faith.” A cluster of stones brought the rotating tines to a halt, and Josh had to back up a little and break them apart with a hoe. “Aras and his people stopped the isenj. They can stop anybody.”

  “We don’t want any more wars fought here.”

  “Martin, you read too many stories. It’s hard to wage a war across light-years. It’s also hard to lift that tonnage in invasion forces. It’ll be a slow process, and slow processes can be stopped without bloodshed.”

  Josh wanted to believe that. He guided the rotavator, and Martin lagged a little, as if sulking. “We risk losing it all,” he said, barely audible.

  “We have to stand firm.” That was Josh’s job, to lead and to be a rock for them all. “Aras will protect us. But we also have to protect Aras. You know how these seculars would exploit him and his condition.”

  Martin finished dropping the beans into place and walked back to kick the soil over them and to scattermarigolds as companion planting. He shuffled his boots back and forth in a well-rehearsed rhythm, pausing to let a few of the curled seeds fall from his hands. Then he fumbled in the soil until he found the irrigation pipe, and turned the valve until faint gurgling could be heard. The two men stood in silence, watching honeybees weighing down the delicate pink-tinged bells of comfrey flowers. The insects—one of the few species the colony had chosen to revive—seemed to be having no trouble navigating by an alien sun.

  “If I explain to the Frankland woman that we’re here under the patronage of an alien government, she will see the implications,” said Josh.

  “And suppose she doesn’t?”

  “Then I’ll be more explicit. She’ll understand military superiority. They’ll leave.”

  Josh began ploughing again, and Martin followed him silently. He didn’t need to say that Josh’s hope was a forlorn one. When he glanced up from the furrow, there was a figure in gray fatigues and a bulky waistcoat moving through the patches of crops. Shan Frankland was picking her way through the fields towards them, zigzagging as she went. She appeared to be keeping to the comfrey and avoiding bare earth, as if she understood what she was doing.

  “Happy Christmas,” she called as she came within earshot of them. “Deborah told me where to find you. Long time since I’ve seen dwarf comfrey.”

  So she had enough sense to recognize where there might be seeds and what was a green manure crop, then. This wasn’t his picture of the urban terrestrial human. Either she had done a great deal of homework and was a practiced deceiver, or she had something in common with them.

  “Can we talk, Josh? I have a problem.”

  “What sort of problem?”

  “We’ve had to revive the research team sooner than I had hoped. There’s been a failure in the cryo system. We can’tleave them in orbit because the Thetis isn’t designed for full life-support for that many people, and we can’t chill them down again yet, not until we can isolate the fault. So we need to land them all, and within the next day or so. Can we do that? Subject to your restrictions, of course.”

  Josh looked into her face, which told him nothing other than that her height and unblinking gaze unsettled him. If only Aras were here. Josh had no idea what he was looking for, but he knew politicians and their minions lied. Perhaps, though, she was telling the truth. Either way, it no longer mattered. They would have to confront the situation sooner or later.

  “Then land them,” he said. “How many are there?”

  “Eight, plus six Royal Marines and their commanding officer. We can land accommodation modules and our own rations. We’re equipped for an unsupported mission.”r />
  “But we must connect your camp to the waste-recovery system before you can use it. All waste here is recycled.”

  “Okay, show the booties how it works and they’ll do the rest. They’re pretty adaptable, even if they’re not sappers.” She looked at him as if he hadn’t understood her. “Booties. Bootnecks. Marines. Look, this isn’t a ploy to get the team down here, Josh. I had hoped to leave them in cryo until I’d decided whether they should land at all.”

  Was his suspicion that plain to see? He shrugged. “What’s done is done. There are things that I haven’t told you that you need to be aware of, though.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We’re not alone on this planet.”

  “I assure you we’ll respect the environment. No live samples of native species, no—”

  “Forgive me. I mean we’re not the only reasoning species with a claim to this world.”

  Her spine straightened sharply: she seemed even taller. “Ah, it is already inhabited, then.”

  Of course it is, he thought. You’ve seen the ecology. But she meant, he knew, that there were aliens here who were people.

  “There is one indigenous species, and another with a diplomatic presence here.”

  “Two other races?”

  “Three, but the third is kept away from landing here by the others.”

  Josh needed none of Aras’s olfactory skills to tell that the Frankland woman was shocked. She looked away, blew a little puff of surprise and stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the soil. After a few seconds she looked up again. “That really does alter the situation, doesn’t it?”

  “Perhaps you should carry out your survey within our colony and then return home.”

  She resumed her fixed gaze at the soil again, and neither Martin nor Josh said anything to interrupt it until she was ready.

  “May I contact these aliens? Can you arrange that?”

  “I’ll see,” said Josh.

  They watched her walk back across the field, still picking out the same zigzag path, and waited until she was out of earshot before resuming their conversation. Josh could hear Martin rattling the dried beans in their cloth pouch, passing the bag from hand to hand in agitation. He nudged him.

  “Stop worrying,” he said. “Trust in the Lord. It’s not the first test we’ve had, and it won’t be the last.” He reached and took the bag from Martin’s fidgeting fingers, irritated. “Finish up here. I must call Aras.”

  The bezeri vessel brought Aras up to the rocky coast of the peninsula and bobbed to the surface to let him out. He waded back to the shore and turned to watch the translucent pod fall back below the waves and disappear, leaving broken amber reflections on the surface. The sun was rising again.

  When he had picked his way up the narrow path to the top of the headland, he looked back down into the sea. There were a dozen or more bezeri pods visible just under the surface of the water. It was unusual to see that many on patrol at once, an indication of the anxiety they felt about the arrival of new creatures in the Dry Above.

  The path up the shallow cliff wasn’t visible unless someone happened to be right on top of it. It wasn’t the wess’har way to leave marks on the landscape if it could be avoided, and certainly not on someone else’s planet. The bezeri would neither have known nor cared. But Aras did.

  He kept up a brisk pace across the short silver moss. The roads hadn’t moved at all since he had been here a few days ago. At this time of year, before their growth spurt, they tended to be stable; he could easily pick them out from the dangerous wetsands and bog beneath the moss by the way they curved proud of the ground like engorged vessels under skin. He managed a brisk pace.

  Everything he owned, or ever would own, was folded into the pack slung across his back, as Targassat had taught. If you couldn’t carry it with you, you didn’t need it. If it didn’t perform several functions, then it was not worth carrying. And if it had no function—well, then it was an unwess’har thing, a waste of resources and something to be avoided.

  Aras had tried to explain Targassat’s philosophy to Josh’s ancestor, Benjamin. The humans relished frugality. It was probably more out of the enjoyment of self-denial than concern for the world, but their intentions were irrelevant. Only their actions mattered. They took readily to the waste and water recovery systems he demonstrated for them. They’d even got used to the idea of concealing their homes in the ground, although he knew their motivation was primarily to remain undetected rather than not to interfere with the natural order.

  Their one sticking point had been the church. They insisted it be a testament to the glory of their God, and that meant grandeur. Aras turned a blind eye to it because it had so many functions. There was no harm in making a functional thing beautiful. He had even made the decorative glass windows for them, with alien and native creatures, and the image of a human who respected all species and had been—if he had known it, worlds and lifetimes away—a fine example of Targassat’s philosophy: Francis.

  Aras still didn’t understand sainthood. He had thought he had understood what God was, but it wasn’t a species after all. Nor were angels a species, either; but the humans insisted angels could see the blues and violets in the opal glass just as well as Aras, even if humans could not. It was all part of God’s will.

  He thought that it was just as well for the colony that they had come across him first, and not an isenj, or their God’s will might have manifested itself a little differently.

  The silver moss of the downland gradually thinned out, and he was in knee-high purple-blue brush again. It blended into a single horizon ahead of him, a smoke sea punctuated by islands of trees in their bright orange growth cycle. This was the wild and untouched land outside the controlled environment he had built for the humans. He liked the blue brush best. At every cycle, he brought a few humans out into the wilderness to see the true world, and their awe always delighted him. It was as if it had a universal truth. All species found it beautiful. But the poor bezeri never saw their Dry Above, uniform brown on their maps, in all its variety and glory.

  The sun was close to overhead now. He could see a shimmer of light in the near distance, sun dancing on the quartz deposits in the rocks. Benjamin had seen the Temporary City; he had even traveled to the planet of Wess’ej, to the city of F’nar itself, and seemed very moved by the iridescent deposits left on every sun-facing hard surface by the swarms of tem flies. He called it the City of Pearl. Josh had wept at the sight of it, too. It was worth taking humans to see it for the joy on their faces.

  Aras had stopped reminding them that it wasn’t the prophecy in their bible. It was just a city. But they wanted it to be so much more.

  The gate to the Temporary City took a little longer than usual to recognize Aras, and dithered over letting him enter. His DNA had probably altered slightly. It happened. The c’naatat parasite must have been busy, tinkering and tailoring its environment—him—to fit its needs. Eventually the mesh across the opening dissolved, and he stepped into the filtered light of the interior. There was a youngster waiting there, and from his startled reaction it was clear he had never seen anything like Aras before. Mestin had probably failed to spell out how different her visitor would appear.

  “I’m here to see Mestin.”

  “She waits for you,” said the boy. “This way.”

  Aras tried to recall who the youngster looked like. “You’re Tlivat’s son. Am I right?” They walked side by side down the passage, a well of channeled light like the subterranean streets of Constantine. “You’ve grown much more than I would have expected.”

  The boy nodded politely. Aras needed no reminder that he looked disturbing to the average wess’har. He really had been away far too long. Even his own language sounded foreign to him now, the words inflexible, the rhythms stilted.

  Mestin greeted him with restraint. Aras had the feeling she was discreetly checking him for more ways in which his physiology had altered since their last meeting. He was slig
htly taller than she was, but if being dwarfed by a male bothered her, she showed no sign of it. He kept his hands clasped behind his back to avoid displaying his claws. He never knew quite which host in the c’naatat’s past had furnished those.

  “Chail,” he said politely, and waited for her to squat down before kneeling back on his heels on the floor.

  “So, have you met any of the new humans? Can they be contained?”

  “There are only sixteen of them. Their technology still appears unable to transport them in very large numbers.”

  “Once we thought that of the isenj, too.”

  “I didn’t suggest abandoning prudence. But our priority is to prevent their contact with c’naatat. Josh fears that the most.”

  “Josh has never tried to acquire c’naatat. Why should the others?”

  “Josh believes he will be permanently transformed after corporeal death. The godless prefer to put their trust in science, but they still strive for the same thing—living forever. It’s a human preoccupation. They all think they’re special in some way and have a right to buy immortality.” He wondered if she would see the irony in that, but Mestin was pure wess’har, literal and linear. He wasn’t even sure she understood the concept of commerce. “Sometimes I wish I could enlighten them.”

  She got up and took an opaque glass bowl of netun jay down from the table. Aras could see the shapes as the light caught it, a nest of eggs, a pod of seeds. She laid the confections in front of him and sat down to face him on an equal level, a very conciliatory gesture that was made even more intimate by offering food. Perhaps she felt sorry for him. The longer he spent among humans, the harder he found it to relate to his own people.

  He took one of the egg-shaped cakes in his fingers, embarrassed at revealing his hands to close gaze, and bit carefully into it, releasing the intensely perfumed gold filling. It ran down his chin and he wiped it away quickly with the back of his hand. “Are the isenj aware there are more humans here?”