City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  “It’ll all get sorted,” Shan lied. “Don’t worry.”

  The shot on one of the monitors was live from Jejeno, in the southern continent of Ebj, one of the four capitals of the isenj homeworld Umeh. For a moment, Eddie thought the camera—if that was how the images were being transmitted—was set facing a building.

  Then his brain suddenly comprehended the scale. There was nothing but building in Jejeno. He was looking at miles of matt gray and cream material speckled with apertures and crossed by filaments. This was a high aerial shot. Actaeon was now in orbit around Umeh, as far away as Mars from Earth.

  Eddie adjusted his external earpiece. He disliked implants as much as Shan, but only because the BBChan ones were notoriously cheap and unreliable. “Could you possibly give me a pullout, please? Is there a more distant view I can take?”

  The tech aboard Actaeon obliged in silence. The plasma screen snapped to a very long shot indeed, the sort of shot an incoming orbital-launched missile might have seen. Ebj was nothing but gray and cream constructs right up to the rust-red coastline. And Ebj was not unique, because the orbital shot showed every visible scrap of land was that same mix of non-color.

  He wondered if he had misunderstood. Isenj could adapt to oxygen and temperate climates, but they weren’t primarily oxygen breathers: their world was colder and bleaker and sulfur-rich, so there was no reason to look for greens and blues and assume them to be the natural planet.

  But his first fear had been right. The world was completely covered in buildings. What kind of ecology that supported he couldn’t begin to imagine.

  “You can see space is at a premium for us,” said the voice of Ual, the isenj minister. Eddie glanced to the other two screens, one with a mongoose-faced ussissi translator who did not appear to be needed, the other filled with—well, a piranha on a spider’s body. Isenj weren’t cute either. Sometimes you had to draw crude brushstrokes just to be able to cope.

  “I’m astonished,” said Eddie.

  “Now you know why we must colonize.” Ual’s voice was distorted by a gulping, breathy delivery, but the words were discernible. “You will understand that need, as a human.”

  “And the wess’har—the c’naatat forces—stopped you.”

  “You think this is a myth, do you?” Ual challenged. “You think we don’t know enough to evaluate military risks? C’naatat are real. They were made for the sole purpose of fighting us and keeping us from our rightful possessions. The high-minded wess’har, who care so much about not crushing flowers and killing animals, swallowed their principles long enough to make monsters of their own people so they could do the fighting for them. And then they turned their backs on them.”

  Eddie felt a pang of triumph that he’d had the right hunch. Some things were very reassuring. “It was a genetic engineering program, am I right?”

  “Possibly. We don’t know how they achieved it, because we have no expertise in that area. But I can assure you the c’naatat were—are—real. We captured one. You could burn him, cut him, infect him, poison him, and still he wouldn’t die. He healed and recovered, often very fast indeed. It’s not a part of our history of which I’m proud, but everyone has their war crimes, do they not? Wess’har made those poor creatures to do their dying for them. So think of that when you judge us.”

  “These c’naatat were wess’har, though, weren’t they?”

  “They were. Just altered.”

  Eddie heard pieces drop into neat holes in his thoughts, perfect and obvious.

  “No myth at all,” he said. “What happened to the c’naatat prisoner? Did he die in the end?”

  “He survived an aerial assault on our camp and now lives on Asht with your fellow humans. The destroyer of Mjat is your neighbor.”

  For some reason, Eddie didn’t experience that usual rush of pure adrenal triumph that marked a landmark story. He felt slightly sick. He had chased a tiger and caught it, and now had no idea what to do with it.

  When he edited the interview with Ual, he decided it needed a lot more editing—a lot more. He was left with a few sound bites. He secure-filed the orbital views of Ebj and the discussion about the wess’har shock troops under GASH FILE, and erased the rushes from Actaeon’s buffer.

  It was a great story. A show-stopper. Back home, under the same circumstances, he would have run that interview without a moment of doubt. Now he had a sense of what his exclusive could mean—could do—out here.

  It was a rotten time to discover a sense of responsibility. He wasn’t even sure he was right.

  He consoled himself with a glass of home brew and the knowledge that in a few hours a very elderly Graham Wiley would be wheeled out in his chair to watch Michallat Reports.

  The colonists were polite as Shan walked down through the galleries of Constantine, but they gave her a much wider berth than usual. News traveled fast. She was suddenly grateful for their insularity and distance from the Thetis team. Josh met her at the door and redirected her with a courteous but brief observation that Aras was still in his chambers.

  She knocked this time.

  “I came to apologize,” she said.

  “I understand how upset you must be.”

  “Maybe I could have thanked you for saving my life.”

  Aras pulled up a chair and pushed a plate of okara cookies in front of her. “They’re stale. Sorry.”

  “I could eat anything right now.” And she could: her appetite hadn’t relented for a moment. “Is this part of it?”

  “Yes. C’naatat uses a great deal of energy when it’s adapting an organism.”

  “That’s me we’re talking about.”

  “Us.”

  “Yes, sorry. Us.”

  “You seem more at ease with the situation.”

  “I find it easier to deal with what’s right in front of me. Right now, that’s removing me from circulation. I need to ask you something. Would your matriarchs let me stay?”

  Aras busied himself with stacking more cookies on the plate. “What reason would you give?”

  “This reason.”

  “I would suggest you ask on the basis that you have been identified as an ally of the wess’har and are hence at risk from the other gethes.”

  “You haven’t told them, have you?”

  “No, because they would almost certainly execute both of us for such an insane breach of quarantine.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “I have learned so many new words from you, Shan Chail. Shit indeed.”

  Any insults she was considering heaping upon him for being selfish, for being rash, for ruining her life, suddenly seemed ungrateful beyond belief. He really had taken a huge risk for her benefit.

  “This just gets worse and worse,” she said.

  “I don’t fear death. But it seems unfair to commit you to this existence and then not be there to help you through it. It can be very lonely indeed.”

  She reached out and took his hand and squeezed it hard. Nobody could imagine what made me break the law to protect terrorists. So how can I judge you? The only thing that mattered right then was that Aras cared about her welfare more than anyone else had, even more than her fellow officers, and plenty more than her family.

  “Ask them for me,” she said. “Please.”

  28

  TO: Research Support BBChan

  FROM: Eddie Michallat, CS2

  REQUEST : All accounts and assets held by Superintendent Shan Frankland within FEU and banking zones 2,3 and 4. Special note: she’s ex Commercial Branch so she knows the ropes—do some digging, call in favors. Seeking unusually large sums, transfers from biotech corps, government agencies. I need this soonest.

  P.S. Good to know you’re still there. God bless isenj comms. Do you still need a budget code for this?

  Eddie’s mouth was dry and his pulse was racing. It always did that when he was beside himself with excitement at the prospect of a seriously big story, and in all his life he had never come across anything this big, let a
lone had it exclusively to himself.

  Nothing was proven. The isenj could have been indulging in self-deception, as the interpreter had said, explaining away military defeat at the hands of a numerically inferior foe.

  But there was the detail. No wonder Aras had walked away from that crash.

  Eddie couldn’t quite remember how he’d arrived in the mess galley and started making coffee. He stopped to stare at the mug and the spoon in his hands and shook himself out of the speculative frenzy that had gripped him.

  There was something else bothering him—Shan Frankland. He thought he had the full and frightening measure of her—hard, calculating, but oddly idealistic—and now he wasn’t so sure.

  Everyone knew she’d had a Suppressed Briefing. It was almost a joke among the marines, a silly political spy-game that they clearly despised. The general view was that it was about aliens, because that was the sort of thing that politicians thought people shouldn’t know about. Nothing more.

  Eddie was starting to have doubts.

  Not even Shan Frankland could get up and walk away from a round in the head. And when had she last gone through the ritual of producing samples for Hugel? It was a camp joke—pee, blood and shit. A sudden cold spasm in his gut made him stop dead.

  Maybe this was all about c’naatat. Maybe that was her order from Perault: secure the biotech for government use before the corporations got their hands on it.

  No, that was insane. Shan was EnHaz. Shan was sympathetic to eco-terrorists to the point of self-destruction. He couldn’t see her acquiring this sort of technology for patriotism or hard cash.

  He didn’t want to see it.

  It was probably just a coincidence, one that was blinding him to the real story of an alien who possibly had the most extraordinary power imaginable. Cock-up over conspiracy theory, he reasoned.

  But where was Shan now?

  “When did Frankland last give samples?” Eddie asked Kris Hugel.

  “She never has,” she said. “I didn’t fancy forcing the issue, given her sunny and tolerant disposition. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “As curious as I am how she’s walking around now with no brain damage?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I don’t think it’s unconnected with the way our wess’har friend survived that crash. Is there anything you want to tell me? Think how much medical techniques like that could achieve back home.”

  “Nothing, not yet,” said Eddie, grateful that Hugel was still locked into her own narrow area of expertise.

  Medical techniques, my arse.

  He wasn’t sure what had wounded him most—the fact that Shan Frankland might turn out not to be the hero he imagined, or that she had actually managed to dupe him.

  Where was she?

  It was a hard climb, and it seemed a strange route to take when there was flat terrain ahead. Wess’ej gravity was even higher than on Bezer’ej: a route like this one was taking its toll. Shan jerked the pack higher on her back to relieve sore spots and put one leg in front of the other, mechanically, painfully.

  “Are you all right?” Aras paused and looked back at her. “Shall I carry your pack?”

  “I can manage,” she said. “I’ll adapt.”

  “I have a reason for bringing you by this route.”

  She didn’t have the wind left for a reply. She drew level with him and kept up her clockwork pace. Discipline, she said to herself. Discipline, discipline, discipline. The mantra had always worked before. They moved up the slope with no further conversation, only her rhythmic gasps punctuating the quiet.

  Aras drew a way ahead. She plodded on. She could see him skylined against the light on the top of the ridge. She hoped it was the top, anyway.

  “There.” He had his back to her, staring down at something beyond that ridge. “Do look at this. Wasn’t this worth the pain?”

  And she looked.

  Beneath them, a town was dotted across the basin and walls of a great caldera, part wreathed in morning mist. Faceted circular roofs shimmered. Everywhere she looked, there was iridescence. She couldn’t tell if she was looking at the tops of high buildings emerging from fog or at a much lower scale of architecture. But she knew she was looking at pearls—thousands upon thousands of pearls, pressed into the roof of each and every fairy-tale building, for as far as she could see.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” she said.

  “I know how humans love sparkly things,” Aras was all pride and delight. “Do you like it?”

  The cold burning in her nose and throat as she struggled to breathe had started to ease: the c’naatat was busy equipping her for this foray. Shan sat back on her heels and simply stared.

  Sheer glory was spread out beneath her. She could suddenly see through the eyes of the colonists, even though she believed none of it. This was a vision from their bible. She opened her swiss and the screen danced with text.

  And the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass. If F’nar was not the new Jerusalem of Revelation, it was doing a very good impersonation. She made a conscious effort to dispel awe. This was a city grounded in pragmatism, and God had played no part in it.

  “They’d go crazy if they saw this place,” she said, mostly to herself.

  “F’nar?” asked Aras. He looked at the swiss display over her shoulder, and the dry sandalwood scent of him jerked her back to the mundane world. “Yes, you all react like this to it. The City of Pearl.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “No, it’s what you call it. Or that’s what Ben Garrod called it. I have brought a few colonists here. Not many, but some.”

  “It’s very pretty. How long did it take your people to coat those roofs?”

  “Coat?”

  “The pearl layer. The coating on all the buildings.”

  Aras assumed his canine-bewilderment expression. “We gave up trying to remove it,” he said. “We found it made the roofs more weatherproof.”

  “It’s natural?”

  “It’s the secretion of tem, small things like your bees. They swarm here and leave little bubbles on the tiles. Billions of them.”

  “Bugger me,” Shan said. “Insect shit?” She regretted her cynicism instantly. This view was beautiful beyond belief. She owed it a little more reverence. The wind had shifted, fresh against her face. Suddenly she was aware of a voice on the breeze, a long, single unbroken note like a singer rehearsing. It held for minutes, and stopped. When it picked up again, another—a different pitch, with a slight tremolo effect—overlapped it. Shan stopped.

  Aras glanced back at her. “Matriarchs.”

  “Singing?” She was looking for a slot, a human slot into which she could put the extraordinary voices. Perhaps it was like muezzins calling the faithful to prayer, or perhaps not, in this place of no prayer. “Is that it? Are they singing?”

  “They’re declaring,” Aras said mildly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and carried on walking. She broke into a trot to catch up with him. After a few paces he stopped again and the expression on his face was unreadable. “They’re declaring their territories,” he said again, as if he was explaining to a child.

  This was getting harder for her. Aras was an alien, but she had grown used to his conveniently human details. Now there were unknown creatures singing over a landscape of pearls, as foreign and strange as the bezeri had been, and her fragile points of reference were crumbling away.

  She had not expected anyone to come to meet her. She was begging favors from them, asking for refuge at a time when gethes were a sudden and potentially serious enemy. But a wess’har was waiting for them at the gateway on the top of the ridge.

  In the flesh, they looked far more intimidating than the picture in Constantine’s library. She had looked at that only once since realizing it was Aras, unable to equate the man she knew with that alien—and now unable to come to terms wit
h the idea that some of that creature’s characteristics were within her.

  She came within a few meters and fought the urge to stare at what now was clearly a female in a shimmering opal coat.

  Shan had no idea why she was so certain about that. She looked for the signs of womanhood, from body shape to facial bones, and saw absolutely nothing that confirmed this was a woman, but she was certain it was a female. She could smell it was so.

  “This is the matriarch Fersanye,” Aras said.

  Fersanye stood more than a head above Shan, an exotic Valkyrie with hair braided down her neck. They weren’t just plaits. The hair—the fur—grew out from her neck in long stiff strips. Her eyes were almost wholly iris, but light amber and translucent. The fast-changing pupils were a cross, a star, one moment horizontal, the next vertical, and then a star of teardrop shapes again. Shan had never noticed that in Aras’s eyes. Would she end up looking like that? Shan stood absolutely still and stared back at her.

  The matriarch emitted a stream of rich notes—no, two streams—as she spoke. There was another sound simultaneously beneath like overtone singing. The effect was breathtakingly weird. Shan was entranced.

  “Fersanye Chail says she wants you to explain yourself to all the matriarchs of this region,” Aras translated.

  “Tell her I’ll do my best,” Shan said.

  Aras relayed the reply. She had never heard him speak his own language before, except for the odd word. Listening to that fabulous and bizarre double layer of sound reminded her what he was: an honest-to-god alien. And now she was alien too, and maybe several aliens for all she understood of c’naatat. The two wess’har conversed and some agreement appeared to have been reached.

  “Fersanye has arranged rooms for us in Chayyas’s household,” Aras said. “Have something to eat, clean yourself, and then we await your audience with the matriarchs.”

  “Can I eat wess’har food?”

  Aras patted her shoulder. “You can eat anything now. But let’s not mention that in front of Fersanye.”

  “Can she understand English?”