City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  “For a group of PhDs, you’re having a worryingly hard time accepting that we’re not the top of the food chain anymore,” said Eddie. “I think we should just sit very still and hope the wess’har don’t notice us.”

  Rayat, who had been tracing patterns on the tabletop with his forefinger, looked up. He didn’t appear angry. He smiled, which Eddie found slightly disturbing.

  “I have no intention of sitting still and wasting this journey,” he said. “I need to get hold of native flora. Novel pharmaceuticals. There’s only so much I can get out of looking at adapted terrestrial species. And I can’t tolerate those restrictions.”

  “Not much you can do about it. The colonists are pretty clear about that.”

  “The natives, as you put it, aren’t always at our side when we work. Without our military escort, how would they know what we took? How would they notice? If you hadn’t gone whining to Frankland, would anyone have known about her sample?”

  There was a silence round the table. It was as if everyone had interpreted Rayat’s comment in exactly the same way. Without our military escort. There was only one way to achieve that.

  “That’s pretty dangerous thinking,” Eddie said at last.

  “I wasn’t suggesting we mutiny,” said Rayat, but his face said otherwise.

  “And did it occur to you that sentient species would notice one of their number was missing?”

  “Are they truly sentient?”

  “Would it matter if they weren’t?” Eddie found himself detaching from his journalist’s grandstand seat and abandoning all the distance of his trade. Jesus, this is real. I’m in this. It’s happening to me. “The locals make the rules. Take it from me. I’ve been arrested while filming overseas and held by local police with far less weaponry than this lot and it is very, very nasty. They can do what they want with you when you’re on their turf and there’s no embassy to bail you out.”

  Rayat shrugged, so genuinely dismissive that Eddie felt a blaze of anger. Maybe he had been immune to challenge and correction for too long to understand that there were bigger kids in the playground. Paretti’s glance darted back and forth between them as if he were expecting escalation. Right then, Eddie was ready to swing for him.

  Then Mesevy walked in and let an armful of freshly picked cucumbers roll onto the table like logs, and the moment was defused.

  “I’d better be getting on with editing,” Eddie said, and left the table.

  Back in his cabin, he couldn’t concentrate on the previous day’s footage. Rain spattered against the small window like a hail of rocks as a gust drove it. Eddie let the editing console slide off his lap and lay back on his bunk, and all he could think about was that he had become involved. It was professional anathema. Every other story he had ever covered in his life had not been like this.

  I am a dispassionate observer.

  I am a real-time historian.

  In the thick of riots, he was almost safe behind police lines; after a chemical fire that killed twenty people, he had caught a cab back to the office and enjoyed a beer after work. He had even spent an evening in a five-star hotel sampling room service while from the window he watched distant shells exploding and wiping out a Greek village.

  It had its risks. He could easily have been killed in all those situations, given bad luck. And he had been banged up in a two-meter-square cell in Yemen not knowing if BBChan even knew where he was. But that sense of detachment, of being special and set apart from the messy drama of ordinary lives, was now gone. He was here and he wasinit.

  He felt himself sliding into something his professional persona had once regarded with disdain. He was starting to take sides.

  There were two things Aras was not planning to tell Mestin.

  One was that he feared Shan Frankland knew that he carried the c’naatat parasite.

  The other was that one of the gethes had taken a bezeri child and killed it.

  He lay back in the cramped pod as the bezeri pilot brought him back to the surface and the Dry Above. Normally the journey would be whiled away chatting in lights, but today there was nothing but a faint blue glow holding steady across the pilot’s mantle, a sad silence in its terms.

  Not even the isenj sought us out to kill us.

  Summoning the bezeri from the depths with the lamp to tell them their child had been taken was the hardest thing Aras had done in many years. Their sorrow was a vivid blue. It had so many shades to it, so much agony, that his interpretation system had been unable to convey the full intensity.

  We want balance. We want forfeit.

  It was arrogance rather than cruelty that had motivated the gethes, but that was the cause of most brutal acts. Hiding behind lack of intent was a human excuse.

  And the bezeri had been correct. Even the isenj, the careless and profligate isenj who didn’t recognize the bezeri had rights, had never taken them and killed them. The poisoning of their environment had been a brutal consequence, not an objective.

  But wess’har cared only about what was, and what was done, not what was intended.

  Aras knew the outrage would be the final justification that Mestin needed to order him to wipe all humans from the face of the planet. He had overseen the destruction of the isenj, but he would not, if he could help it, see his friends in Constantine pay the price for the gethes’ stupidity.

  The very least Mestin would expect was that he wiped out the whole gethes mission, but that too was a step too far at the moment. He would talk to Shan Frankland to see if she respected his position and understood that the price of Surendra Parekh’s life was a generous one.

  The colonists would have understood: an eye for an eye, they said, burning for burning, no more and no less than the sin warranted. They understood balance. The gethes would not.

  He considered what would be the quickest, cleanest method of dispatching a gethes.

  The bezeri pilot who ferried him back to the island offered no opinion.

  Little Rachel Garrod rushed to him when he opened the door of Josh’s home. “Aras!” she squealed. She clung to his legs in unalloyed childish delight. “Come and see my flowers! I’ve drawn flowers!”

  “Later, isanket,” he said. “I promise I’ll look at them, but not today. I’ve come to talk to Shan Chail.”

  Rachel’s enthusiasm dimmed like a light. “Daddy’s talking to her. She scared me. She’s all black.” Shan was evidently in formal uniform today, then. “Can I come?”

  “No, isanket. We’ve got very sad things to talk about. It would make you cry. Go and draw me some more flowers. I’ll see them tomorrow.” He steered the child gently into a side room and closed the door.

  Shan was not a wess’har female, but she was female nonetheless and that made confronting her a difficult procedure. She was sitting in Josh’s kitchen when he walked in, uniform coat fastened right up to the chin, hands clasped on the table in front of her. Josh got up and patted her shoulder before giving Aras a go-easy glance and leaving them on their own.

  “Okay, Aras,” she said. “What happens now?”

  He fought an urge to ask her how she knew what he was and what he carried in him. But that would have to wait.

  “It will be hard for you,” he said.

  She shut her eyes for a second. “I realize that. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  “I have to take Parekh.”

  “Exactly what do you mean by take?”

  “I mean take, and I mean punish.”

  A whiff of agitation drifted from her. “How?”

  “Execution.”

  Don’t disappoint me, he thought. Don’t protest, don’t be a gethes. Accept it. The only movement she made was to grip her hands together more tightly. Her face had turned very pale, and those odd round irises in her pale gray eyes were wide and black.

  “Is there any other way?” she asked.

  “It’s what the bezeri want.”

  “Could we confine her for the duration?”

  “Ther
e is only one other option, and I won’t take that.”

  “We can at least talk about it, surely.”

  “It’s no option at all. It’s Parekh or every human on this planet.”

  “Oh, God.”

  He hated to see her so distressed. He liked her. No, he was fascinated by her, in her capacity to be isanket, matriarch and even house-brother all at once. He put his hand out to touch her arm, but she jerked it back.

  “Explain it to me, Aras. Just explain it.”

  “Your people took the child and let it die and desecrated the body. I think, in your world, you would do the same and demand a life in return.”

  “What do you mean, let it die?”

  “If you had left it where it was, the clan might have located it in time. They were out looking for it. Bezeri can survive a while out of water, and they could have revived it.”

  “Are you absolutely sure about that?”

  “My colleagues have examined it. Your Parekh must have found it not long after it came ashore.”

  “She said it was dead.”

  “You know nothing about bezeri physiology.”

  “Oh, dear God.” She shut her eyes for a second and turned her face away. When she turned back she was under control again, but he could see her breathing was getting more rapid. “Aras, I don’t think she intended that.”

  “The intent is irrelevant. The child is dead and violated. You were told not to take anything. Anything. And your people ignored that warning.”

  Shan braced her elbows on the table and rested her chin on tightly clasped hands. Aras waited. One way or another, he had to finish this today.

  “I will carry out the balancing. I will ensure it’s quick.”

  She appeared to take a deep breath and force her shoulders down into a more relaxed position. There were great red welts just visible on her throat where the collar ended. “I’m sorry. I’m not questioning your laws. We’ve done something unforgivable and I would rather I dealt with it.”

  “No, there will be no further debate.”

  “Why aren’t I held responsible?”

  “If you’re suggesting you trade places with her, that’s very noble but it will satisfy neither wess’har nor bezeri. This is about responsibility. Hers.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that. Well, one thousand innocent people or one misguided one. I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

  “No. Accept that there are some things you can’t put right.”

  She lapsed into silence again and rubbed her palm across her forehead, looking as if the effort of maintaining a calm exterior was about to snap her. He could smell it. The gethes might have been fooled, but he was not.

  “Then at least let me carry it out,” she said suddenly.

  “No. This is about responsibility. I let the colony stay here and so I brought you here. It’s up to me to resolve the situation. I don’t let others answer for my mistakes.”

  “And if your people kill a human, it’ll probably cause a diplomatic rift that will never heal. If I do it, it’s more or less friendly fire. We needn’t involve you.”

  “Do you ever listen? I said it’s my responsibility.”

  “I think you’re making a big mistake.”

  “I’ve already made it.”

  He stood up to go and she caught his wrist gently. He wished she hadn’t; it made it hard to stay suspicious of her. She was as kind to him as Ben Garrod, kinder than Mestin and his kin would ever know how to be. “I don’t know how you plan to do this, but if you are going to do it, at least use this.” She took her pistol out of the back of her belt and held it out flat on her hand. “Please. Point blank, nape of the neck. Should take one shot. Perhaps two. Let me show you how to use it.”

  Aras looked at the small dull metal thing and took it. “I already know,” he said.

  She would have to prepare her people, of course. That, in a way, seemed harder than what he had to do. He had no love of gethes, and this Parekh had destroyed a child. But he imagined the reaction of the others, and he knew even now that they would all turn on Shan Frankland. Their species was paramount. They would not understand her willingness to abide by a different set of ethics.

  “Let me have a few minutes to think how I’m going to deal with this,” she said.

  Aras waited in the hallway, hefting the pistol in his hand and thinking how efficient it seemed. When Shan came out, she was her usual certain self again. She took out her swiss and called her second in command. The woman she called Lin—the one carrying a child, who would surely understand the bezeri—seemed to concern her. Aras listened to a one-sided conversation, Shan telling Lin she needed to hand Parekh over to the wess’har authorities for sentence or every human, colony included, would be punished.

  She did not mention the word execution once.

  “You lie badly,” Aras reminded her.

  “I know, but I don’t want anyone being tempted to let Parekh escape out of some well-meaning sense of pity. I’ll tell them when I’m ready.” She looked at him as if she felt he disapproved of her. “I can do the dirty work. Believe me, I’ve had plenty of experience.”

  He knew humans well enough to almost understand why she was doing it this way. To a wess’har, there was no moral dilemma. Wrong had been done and it had to be balanced out and accounted for personally. But humans were full of rights, and very short on responsibilities.

  “I’ll hand her over,” said Shan. “An hour.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. We should never have come here.”

  “I would like to think we would still be able to talk after this.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “You’re more wess’har than you think.”

  “I think the team will see it that way too,” said Shan, and walked out in front of him without a backward glance.

  The payload started out in shocked silence and then got loudly angry. Lindsay had started to think of them as one entity lately. Herding them together in the mess hall had somehow developed a communal intelligence among them, even in Mesevy, who seemed to be the one most distant from the pack. Bennett and Webster stood in front of the exit leading onto the compound, and Chahal and Barencoin blocked the one to the accommodation and laboratory corridor. Their rifles were still slung on webbing round their shoulders, but their hands rested on the barrel and trigger. There was just one notch of tension to go before the rifles were raised. Lindsay had realized that no exercise, no play war, could have prepared her for taking aim at unarmed civilians.

  But the stakes were high. It was never worth risking the lives of all of them, and Parekh had been a fool. Lindsay wondered how bad a wess’har prison could be.

  Her bioscreen came alive. Shan was summoning her to the rear entrance to the camp. Chahal and Barencoin parted like wheat to let her pass and she walked as fast as she could to meet Shan.

  She had the wess’har with her. He was grim, silent, immense. Lindsay looked up at him and then back at Shan.

  “Just give me the keycard,” said Shan. “There’s no reason for you to be here.”

  “You sure, ma’am?”

  “Quite sure.” She reached round her back, took out her handgun and checked the chamber. “I don’t want any argument with what I’m about to say. Parekh has been sentenced to death. If I don’t carry out the sentence, the wess’har will wipe us all out, even the colony, and they can do it, believe me. Do you understand?”

  “I’m sorry…?”

  “The bezeri was alive when she took it. And it’s her or everyone. Okay?”

  Lindsay tried to make sense of what she had heard. There was no rule or regulation she could recall that told her what to do right then.

  Shan stood and stared at her, unblinking.

  “The keycard, Lin. Now. This is not your responsibility.”

  She handed it over. It was not the time for an impassioned plea for clemency. The wess’har was watching her. She believed Shan completely at that moment
.

  In the mess hall, Rayat and Galvin were engaged in a one-way stream of invective against the detachment, while Eddie watched in his usual manner. Each marine stood silent and unmoving. Lindsay listened for another sound, filtering out the tirade.

  “You’ve let them take her. You bastards.”

  “Christ, can’t we even look after our own?”

  “I can’t believe you’re letting them do this.”

  And they had no inkling what was really about to happen to Parekh. Lindsay could feel events flipping over into chaos. She let the two scientists rage for a few moments and then brought the butt of her sidearm down hard on one of the tables in an explosive whack.

  “Shut the fuck up,” she yelled.

  There was instant silence. She regretted the loss of control at once. But she had so wanted silence, just for a few minutes. It surprised her that they obeyed.

  The silence continued while she walked slowly up and down the space between the two tables, rubbing the small of her back, suddenly aware that it ached. And the silence was profound.

  Maybe two minutes had passed, maybe ten, but then the quiet was shattered by a gunshot, and then another.

  Ade Bennett cocked an experienced ear. “Nine millimeter round,” he said softly. “Officer’s weapon.”

  Shan stood under one of the compound lights with Lindsay and Bennett, and it struck her there was no mist of small flying things clustering round the lamp as there would have been on Earth. The rain had stopped but pooled water glittered in the light. Nobody asked about Parekh’s body. Shan was sure someone would ask who was going to clean up. She would do it herself.

  “What do you want me to do, ma’am? Am I supposed to put this in the official record?” Lindsay was staring disbelieving into her face. That was the worst part of all. “I have no precedent for this.”