City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  “We record the names in the church. If our loved ones have a presence anywhere physical, they’ll be there.”

  Shan walked a little way after the rockvelvets, and then turned round to look back in the direction of the colony. Now she was staring back at a picture, a tableau into which she could step at will. Even the air looked different on the other side of the divide that was marked by the berry bushes, and she was on the outside. For a moment the sensation made her feel uneasy. Josh patted her shoulder.

  “You’re overdoing it,” he said. “Take it easy on the way back. I forget you people aren’t accustomed to the conditions.”

  “It certainly takes it out of you,” she said, and stepped back into a more familiar landscape. It was familiar right up to the point where the clouds cleared and she found that the sky was filled with a streaked white moon. She kept forgetting it, and it kept shocking its way back into her vision.

  “Wess’ej,” Josh said, matter-of-factly. “The other planet. The moon, if you like, but perhaps our twin is a better description.”

  She knew what his answer would be even before she asked the question. She asked it anyway.

  “Inhabited?” she said.

  “Yes, Wess’ej is inhabited too. I wasn’t sure if you knew that or not before you arrived, but I can see you didn’t.”

  When the Thetis had set out, the best data Shan had was that there were planets around Cavanagh’s Star and that the spectrography from two of them indicated roughly terrestrial conditions. She had just about started to come to terms with the implications of landing in alien territory, and now she was thrown again by the fact that another complete alien civilization was a few hours away.

  She shut her eyes to see if it would summon up something from the SB. There was nothing. She had the feeling that there was very little lost in her memory right then. Whatever detail Perault had given her, it had not been about aliens. So they were a wild card after all, a genuinely new factor to be coped with.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” Josh said.

  “That there were aliens? Yes. At least, that’s what’s emerging from my SB—sorry, Suppressed Briefing. I was given information while I was in a medicated state so that I’d only recall it under certain triggers.”

  “Oh, brainwashing.”

  “No, you’re in full control of your responses when you hear or see the information. You just can’t recall it without a specific trigger to jog the memory. I’m here because whatever I was told made me want to do the job. But yes, I knew you had made contact with aliens—although I’m sure I didn’t know any details.”

  “We didn’t give any. Just that the gene bank was safe, that we had established our model society, and that nobody was to attempt to come here. So it reached the wrong people.”

  “No, it reached Eugenie Perault, a European government minister. One of yours.”

  “The name means nothing to me.”

  “A Christian. You meant it for your own, didn’t you? Well, they got it and they kept it to themselves. The reason the mission’s here has nothing to do with that. The Hubble Two-Nine just sent some new data about the system that made the place look irresistibly interesting.” She tried to avoid tripping as she fixed her gaze on Wess’ej. She hadn’t got the hang of the gravity yet and it was unforgiving of careless footsteps. “When I left I don’t think they had worked out too much detail.”

  “Coincidence, then.”

  “Happens all the time. And I’m along for the ride to ensure you carry on as you were—as far as I know.”

  “I doubt that’s going to be possible.”

  “I’ll level with you if you level with me.”

  Josh walked on a little ahead of her in silence, head down and hands in the single front pocket of his smock, his thoughts almost visible. The colonists weren’t poker players. “Superintendent, you’ve walked into a delicate political situation. That much I can tell you, and it’s quite separate from any other concerns we might have. This planet belongs to the bezeri, that moon belongs to the wess’har, and the isenj make territorial claims here. So the wess’har have what you would call a military presence here to protect the bezeri, who can’t defend themselves.”

  “So where are they? Why can’t I see evidence of them?”

  “You’re looking in the wrong place. The bezeri are aquatic. That makes fighting a terrestrial enemy pretty difficult—without some assistance, anyway.”

  Shan tried to force some recall but there was nothing.

  “Ah,” she said, “is this military presence something I should be worried about?”

  “See the plain?” Josh said.

  She looked around the unspoiled wild landscape. She could see nothing, absolutely nothing, except the alien scrubland. “Are they out there?”

  “It’s what’s not there that matters. There was an isenj city out there once, coast to coast. Now there’s not a single trace of it. The wess’har wiped it off the face of the planet. They don’t bluff and they don’t negotiate. Be mindful of that.”

  It was hard not to. Shan stared at where the isenj town conspicuously was not.

  Josh carried on walking. “Welcome to the front line, Superintendent.”

  In the strip of thornbushes that separated the edge of Constantine from base camp, high voices carried on the breeze. There was laughter, occasional singing and the odd shout. The beings she was watching were about as alien as anything Lindsay thought she might encounter on another planet, and now she had one within her.

  Those aliens—those children—were weighing and recording the boxes of kale and other greens, or at least the older ones were. The very young, who were evidently supposed to be learning to read an analog scale, appeared to lose interest from time to time and wandered off a few yards to poke in the dirt or examine something utterly fascinating in the bushes. Lindsay could hear an occasional rebuke: “John! Leave the flowers alone!” A serious-looking kid of about fourteen laid his board and stylus down on top of one of the crates and hurried over to the bushes to drag the errant John back by his hand. “If you pick the flowers, we won’t have any berries later in the year. Now pack it in, okay?”

  He seemed to be more able at parenting than Lindsay ever thought she could be. She flipped the long-distance visor up from her face and let the scene and the sound blur again. What the hell did you teach a kid? Where did you start? And was it fair to raise them here? No, of course it was fair for the colonists, but maybe not for her own. On the other hand, these were good healthy kids, and they weren’t vandalizing anything or hanging round in gangs or running risks anything like a kid might face on Earth.

  She had an inkling for the first time in her life that there might be something she wanted as much as a navy career, and maybe more. Now that the shock had started to subside she was mentally examining what it might be like to have a child.

  After all, she wasn’t on Earth. Had this all happened before her promotion board, she’d have taken that damn sub-Q and used it right away, as soon as she could, without a single backward glance. Now she was watching nice kids—not at all like Earth kids—behaving properly and doing something useful. Kids didn’t necessarily mean chaos.

  She flipped down the visor and watched a little longer. Every so often a couple of adults would walk up with crates of something and stack them where the boy was recording the yields. Other youngsters would put the boxes on a sack truck and wheel them away down the ramps, probably to some huge larder. An adult paused to play-chase one of the younger children, sending her running in circles and shrieking with delight before he scooped her up in his arms and hugged her.

  No, I don’t want you hanging round with boys. You’ll end up ruining your life. Her long-dead mother’s voice rang silent but deafening in her ears: Lindsay, twelve years old, bewildered, trying to understand why skating with Andrew Kiernan would end in disaster. If I hadn’t had you, I would have been chief executive by now. Don’t make the same mistake as me. The message, repeated often enough, eventu
ally became clear: kids were bad, and, ipso facto, Lindsay was bad, and guilty of destroying her mother’s career.

  Lindsay never liked the idea of an afterlife, not if her mother was waiting there to remind her how far short she fell of her expectations. She wished she would stay dead instead of popping into her mind uninvited at the worst moments.

  And now I’m me, she thought. I’ll make my own mistakes. Somehow the time and the distance made it much easier to settle on a course of action. She rolled the visor into a tight scroll and put it in her breast pocket, then ambled back to the base.

  She could hear conversation in the mess but she walked quickly by the doorway and down the passage towards Hugel’s cabin-cum-surgery. The hatch was open; Hugel wasn’t there.

  That was a relief, anyway. Lindsay took the unused sub-Q from her pocket and left it on the doctor’s desk right where she would see it. It was easier than saying aloud that she had decided to go ahead and give birth to a child trillions of miles from home.

  11

  An’after I met ’im all over the world, a-doin’all kinds of things,

  Like landin’’isself with a Gatlin’gun to talk to them ’eathen kings;

  ’E sleeps in an ’ammick instead of a cot, an’’e drills with the deck on a slew,

  An’’e sweats like a Jolly—’Er Majesty’s Jolly—soldier an’ sailor too!

  For there isn’t a job on the top o’the earth the beggar don’t know, nor do—

  You can leave ’im at night on a bald man’s ’ead, to paddle ’is own canoe—

  ’E’s a sort of a bloomin’ cosmopolouse—soldier an’ sailor too.

  RUDYARD KIPLING,

  “Soldier an’ Sailor Too”

  The Royal Regiment of Marines

  There were beetroot chips in a bowl on the refectory table. The greens on the menu were beetroot tops, and there was chilled sweet borscht to drink. If Shan had been in the mood, she could have added beet salad in vinaigrette and baked beets. Even the plain walls in Constantine’s communal eating area had a rosy tinge to them.

  “So beetroot does well here, does it?” she asked casually, and took a sip of the borscht. The purple earthiness of it was oddly addictive. She stirred in a dollop of soured soy cream. It was better than eating dry rations while the hydroponics caught up.

  “Really well,” said Sam.

  “Amazing what you can do with beets.”

  “You haven’t had the beet wine and the sugar beet yet.”

  “The versatility of vegetables never ceases to amaze me,” Shan said, trying to keep a straight face. Once the earthiness had assaulted and overpowered her taste buds, she could taste all the other nuances in the various manifestations of Beta vulgaris.

  The colonists wasted nothing and seemed genuinely thankful for what they received, just like they said in that prayer before eating. They were all just so damned reasonable. Her copper’s gut insisted they really couldn’t be as wholesome and blameless as they seemed. Christ Almighty, they were people, and people were basically bad, if bad was the easiest route through life. It usually was.

  She chewed on a beetroot chip and watched the ebb and flow of colonists through the refectory, all colors, all ages. All they seemed to have in common was that wiry, worn-out-by-high-gravity look and the universal line in working clothes. There had to be some dissent, even in an ordered and closed community like this one.

  “Do people here ever go off the rails, Sam?”

  If she had thought the question would shake him, she was disappointed. He thought visibly, head slightly to one side. “How do you mean?”

  “Sins. Crime.”

  “Oh yes. From time to time.”

  “I’m interested. I’m a police officer. What sort of crimes?”

  “We’ve had thefts. Violence. Anti-social behavior.”

  And that was all? Pull the other one. “And how do you deal with it?”

  “Death,” he said.

  “That doesn’t sound very…um…Christian.”

  “We turn the guilty person out of the community.”

  “Oh, spiritual death. Excommunication.”

  “No, death death.”

  “How?”

  “See how long you can survive off camp without support,” he said. “Brotherhood’s a pragmatic thing, Superintendent. Rules hold communities together. Especially in a place like this. A thief can put us all at risk of starvation or disease in a bad year.”

  “I’m reassured,” she said.

  “And how about your people? What holds them together?”

  “I’ve no idea yet. Maybe nothing at all.”

  He topped up her beet juice and got up to go, giving her the first smile she’d seen him manage since her arrival. She smiled back. The world was back to the way she expected it to be, with all too few heroes, even in a village of saints.

  She glanced at her swiss. Had this been Earth, it would have been New Year in an hour. But it wasn’t Earth, and she had things to tell the marines. She walked around the compound, taking in the balmy spring night with its distant backdrop of wild alien sounds, and wondered if she should have briefed the troops separately.

  No, they could all hear it at the same time. That way rumors didn’t start and nobody would think they weren’t getting the full picture. She made a conscious effort to brace her shoulders and turned to walk briskly into the mess hall.

  Hall wasn’t quite the word. The accommodation had been designed for exploration in places where air and power were at a premium, so the mess area was just enough to seat twenty people plus a display screen. She’d had bigger offices. She walked in on what should have been a party.

  They were trying, she had to give them that. Marines and scientists were chatting politely with shatterproof mugs in their hands, forced by the size of the room into unnatural intimacy. It was as good a way as any to break the ice.

  “Drink, ma’am?” asked Lindsay. “Just coffee, I’m afraid, until Eddie gets his home brew going.”

  “I’ll pass,” she said. “Everyone here?”

  “Yes. Glad you could join us.”

  “I’ve got something I need to brief you on.” She hadn’t even raised her voice, but the hum of conversation stopped and faces turned towards her. “Maybe you’d all like to take a seat. This could take some time.”

  The tables were refectory-style and she stood end on to them so she wouldn’t have to talk to hunched backs. She needed to gauge their expressions. I really ought to make this momentous. But sometimes there was no ideal way to break that sort of news. She stepped off the precipice.

  “My briefing indicated we might come into contact with non-human intelligence here,” she said, and leaned against the bulkhead, arms folded. “I can now tell you there are three alien governments with an interest in this planet, and I’m using government in the most general sense.” She fixed on a few faces: Barencoin was blank, Louise Galvin and Vani Paretti slightly slack-jawed. Eddie Michallat’s lips were already pursing in an embryonic question. “At this stage, any first contact—if we have any—will be through the colony. Until we get better intelligence, just stick to the rules and don’t go off camp without an escort. I’ll tell you more when I know myself.”

  The silence was predictable. It went on much longer than she expected, but she took care not to catch Eddie’s eye and turn the moment into a news conference. He didn’t butt in. Mohan Rayat fluttered his hand for attention. It was as if she had transformed them all into a class of timid and obedient children. She nodded in Rayat’s direction, wondering if she had overdone the intimidation.

  “Do you know what sort of aliens we’re dealing with?” he said.

  “One aquatic, for sure. Two probably not.”

  “Oh, wow.”

  Eddie finally cut in. “What do you mean by having an interest in this planet?”

  Don’t hesitate. Was this the time to mention the obliterated isenj settlement? No. “The aquatics are the native species. Another species thinks it has a te
rritorial claim here and the third is here in a peacekeeping role. If you go out and look at the moon when it’s up, that’s their homeworld.” She thought of the wilderness where the isenj settlement had once stood. “I don’t know very much about them but I do know that they can and will remove us without a second thought if we offend them.”

  “You know quite a lot, then.” Rayat was already top of her list of annoying bastards. “A lot more than us.”

  “I know mainly what Josh Garrod tells me.”

  “Can we request contact?” asked Galvin.

  “I already have,” said Shan. “If it happens, I’ll do it.”

  “Do you have any contact training, Shan?” asked Hugel.

  “None whatsoever.” The first-name familiarity rankled for a moment. She was Boss, Guv’nor, Frankland—Shan was strictly for friends and lovers, and not all of them at that. “Do you, Dr. Hugel?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll just have to muddle through, then, won’t I?”

  “Can we carry on working as planned?”

  “Yes, within the colony perimeter. It’s clear enough to see. Beyond that point, a colonist will accompany you when you do eventually go out, and I’ll decide when that happens. It’s not only about having armed protection. It’s also about having someone on board who knows the local conditions and can offer you helpful guidance about what you can and can’t touch—advice that you will take, of course. In exchange, we’ll do some work for them. They can’t afford to lose manpower for long.”

  “Jesus,” said Mesevy, wide-eyed.

  “And that’s one thing to avoid saying in front of them.” Shan turned to Lindsay. “Any problems?”

  “I’d like to set up a defense perimeter, ma’am.”

  “Okay, alarm only.” It would stop any unaccompanied excursions. She was more worried about that than the prospect of attack. “No countermeasures.”

  “I think—”

  “No countermeasures. And around the camp only. Take no risk of provoking an incident.”