City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  “Ought to get that seen to,” Hugel said.

  Shan rolled down her sleeves. Eddie had been talking to Hugel. She knew it. Checking facts, bouncing ideas off her. Or maybe she just looked alien now and didn’t notice.

  If Hugel did know, it wasn’t the end of the world. They had to get samples out of her first before they could make any use of the thing. “No,” Shan said, and began clipping again. “It’s nothing. Anyway, were you looking for me for anything?”

  Hugel shrugged. “You’re not coming back with us.”

  “I like it here.”

  “I’ve never concerned myself with what your objectives might have been on this mission, but there are some pretty wild stories going round.”

  Shan found herself taking an instinctive step back and lifting the double handles of the barrow to put it between her and Hugel as a barrier. Could they recover anything of the parasite from blood on the bush cuttings? She would burn them. She couldn’t take chances. “I never took you for someone who listened to wild stories, Kris.”

  “You know what I’m talking about?”

  “You tell me. Eddie’s tabloid musings about indestructible aliens? I’ve heard.” She felt bad as soon as she said it. It was unfair to discredit Eddie. He’d done his job, and done it too well. “And if it’s true, are you going to be the one to walk up to them and ask for a few subjects for vivisection?”

  “Do I need to? Is there a source nearer to home?”

  Shan started to walk away. She was prepared to drop the barrow and make a run for it, if need be. And she could run in this environment, far faster than any of them now that Aras’s motley collection of genes had started rearranging hers.

  “If it exists, you won’t get anywhere near it,” she said, and began walking back towards the settlement.

  “Is that the deal you did?” Hugel called. She was walking briskly behind Shan. “You got the tech the hard way, didn’t you? Who’s paying you for it? The Americas? The Sinostates?”

  Shan could hear Hugel’s footsteps stumble into a jog every so often. “You don’t know me, Kris. Don’t make judgments.”

  “You’re carrying it. You’re worth a whole economy and you know it.”

  Shan stopped and turned. Her sidearm was out of her belt before she knew it and she was aiming it two-handed at Hugel. Both of them froze and the horror and surprise seemed mutual.

  “You stay away from me,” Shan said. “I’m not going back, I’m not in any deal, and I’m not handing out samples. Now piss off.”

  Hugel stared. “Think about what you’re carrying.”

  “A plague, if anything.”

  “And you’re going to pass up the chance of developing it, eh?”

  “Please, Kris, don’t, don’t make me fire. I am not bluffing. Just go.”

  Hugel hesitated for a moment and then turned and walked briskly away, eventually breaking into a stumbling run. Shan lowered the weapon. For once, she wasn’t shaking afterwards. C’naatat appeared to smooth out the adrenaline cascade: or maybe she was just less stressed about shooting people dead these days. At least it was out in the open now, and all she had to do was to stay clear of contact and get the mission off the planet as soon as she could. She had one last card, the card that told them where the parasite could be found, and that was the card she had to hold on to regardless of the cost.

  She had never considered herself a principled person. All too often lately, her sleep was disturbed by dreams of the rules she had bent and the lives she had bent even further. She blamed it on the slow afterburn of the Suppressed Briefing, but at times she wondered if it really was a dawning realization that she had gone too far too often.

  But it was that ability to go too far—or the inability to stop herself at the edge—that had brought her to where she was now. She could have been like the rest of them. She could have done the right thing because it was personally expedient. No, that was the real corruption of the soul. Real evil wasn’t about bending the law to suit justice: evil was acting out of small, intensely personal expedience and losing sight of the bigger picture so often that you never got it back again.

  Perault, she thought. Perault knew me even better than she thought she did.

  Shan looked down at her hands, which had developed retractable nails, only subtly different in appearance but claws nonetheless. They were red with tayberry stains and some of her own blood.

  She knew it would wash off in time, all of it.

  30

  They prosper, who burn in the morning

  The letters they wrote overnight.

  ADMIRAL RONALD A. HOPWOOD, CB,

  The Laws of the Navy”

  Eddie thought of the aerial shot of Umeh, building on top of building and the total absence of anything that was not an isenj or their construction, except rust-red sea. It made his scalp prickle.

  “Wow,” said Becken. Webster had rigged a makeshift screen in the mess so they could watch live news from Earth, courtesy of Actaeon. The marines and payload were crammed round the table with all differences and dead colleagues forgotten for the meanwhile. “They’re out of the league altogether? Jesus. They were premier league when we left.”

  Sport. Soccer, in fact. The grim news of growing tension between the Pacific Rim and the Sinostates had silenced them at first but then life got back to normal. Even the payload, who Eddie had judged to be less laddish than the marines in their viewing choices, seemed far more interested in the European Premiership than in current affairs. He wasn’t so much disappointed as insulted.

  Soccer, soccer, soccer. Well, it never changed. It was a haven of familiarity in a now-alien Earth.

  “Can we have the interactive banking on, please?” said Champciaux. “Just the icon in the corner. I want to see my money again.”

  There was a huge whoop of laughter. Once the novelty of instant contact with Earth had worn thin, they had all moved swiftly from reminding their employers they were still alive to checking on their bank accounts.

  Seventy-five years’ interest was a great deal of money. So was seventy-five years’ basic pay. They were all very wealthy, and the euphoria evoked by checking their balances had not worn off yet. Eddie noted he had not had any seniority increments since 2299: that, said BBChan Human Resources, was because he wasn’t any more senior in his time frame, and the unions had conceded that time displacement was outside the scope of the negotiated pay structure.

  No, some things never changed.

  Shan Frankland didn’t.

  He took out his screen and unfurled it enough to check the message again. It hadn’t been what he was expecting. FROM: BBChan Research Support to Eddie Michallat CS2. Sorry, no joy. All Frankland’s assets are attached. (Please don’t circulate this: totally unauthorized access, serious crap if we’re caught.) Just her salary in her current account and pension fund. Not even a savings account. Anything else we can do for you?

  He had been so sure. It slotted together as neatly as hindsight; it was enough circumstantial evidence to get a warrant. But he was wrong. He had applied normal probability to a woman who wasn’t the norm and ignored the obvious—that Shan Frankland cared more about what she thought of herself than making money or even the admiration of others.

  I’m going to have to apologize, he thought. I owe her that. And he wished more than anything that he had never discussed her with Kris Hugel. But his revelation couldn’t be erased like Mjat.

  Mesevy sat down next to him. “You look miserable. Not looking forward to going home?”

  Eddie pinned his professional bonhomie face back on. “I’m staying on with Actaeon. Wouldn’t miss the chance of being the only journo in town.”

  “Me too.”

  “Not much for a botanist to do on Actaeon.” Or Umeh.

  “No, I meant Constantine. I found things here, things I don’t think I would have found back home. So I’m staying.”

  Eddie wished for a moment that he could have slipped so easily into that archaic, ideal world
. He’d liked the place. But it was separate, distant, not at all involved with the real ebb and flow of human affairs. In fact, it was waiting for them to end—messily, no doubt—before sweeping over the floor and starting again.

  “Didn’t you have to get permission from the wess’har?”

  Mesevy looked baffled. “No. I just asked Josh Garrod.”

  He knew the botanist had caught a dose of religion, but not that it had gone this far. But why not? There was real work for her to do here, work that didn’t involve making agribusiness richer. And she would be among relatively kind people who would value her and look after her. No, it made perfect sense. “I’m glad,” he said. “I hope you’re happy here.”

  It wasn’t as if he needed any more reminders that whatever Shan had done had been something desperate and reluctant, not part of a selfish plan. Rayat thought she derived a savage satisfaction from enforcement, that she reveled in intrigue and politics. But Eddie now had a glimpse of a much sadder, lonelier woman who was just desperate to do the right thing.

  He might never know why she wanted to put the universe right. In some ways he didn’t care. He just wanted her to be a hero.

  Everyone needed heroes. He certainly did.

  31

  If we had the offer of immortality here below, who would accept this sorrowful gift?

  JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

  The night of November 4 turned out to be a typically mild one, according to Josh. Shan spent it lying on her bed in Josh’s spare room, listening to the agonizing sound of her closest colleague screaming in the distance.

  Lindsay had called at least ten times that day asking to talk to her, but Shan had nothing to say. Bloody Eddie Michallat and his big mouth. It wasn’t the fact that he had exposed her deceit that angered her; it was that he had given Lindsay the idea that, if time could be run back, there would be a chance of saving her son.

  Lindsay’s voice was faint. But Shan could hear it, with or without any enhancements the c’naatat might have made to her hearing. If she could hear it in the upper level of chambers in Constantine, then so could much of the colony.

  “You can’t hide from me, you bitch.” Shan picked up the whole sentence that time, and nothing was lost to the breeze. “Was it too much to…”

  The rest was indistinct. She estimated that Lindsay had to be standing near the first cluster of roof bubbles to the south, almost overhead. Her voice was failing by now: she had kept it up for nearly an hour.

  Over the next half-hour, the longest of her life, the only sound Shan could pick out was sporadic sobbing. It was easy to be harsh with the strong and the evil. It was far harder to stand firm against pain, especially the pain of a friend.

  In the end it was too much to bear. It was stupid, and it wouldn’t help, but she had to go out and face her. Shan slipped on her coat and made her way out of Josh’s home and through the maze of buried galleries to the surface. On the way out up one of the exit ramps she felt the slight fizz of the security shield as it tested her: it was the first time she had noticed it in scores of passes in and out of the subterranean village. It had not reacted to her before. But she had been wholly human in the past. Now she was not, and it was simply making sure she was not isenj.

  Up on the surface the night was pleasantly breezy. She saw Lindsay a few moments before the woman noticed her. She was on her knees in the short grass, sobbing weakly.

  “What can I say to you?” Shan called. “Sorry? Will that really make it right?”

  Lindsay stopped and slowly knelt back on her heels. “Is it true?” Her voice was cracked and hoarse. “I just want to know if it’s true.”

  “I imagine Eddie told you.”

  “Eddie hasn’t told me anything. Kris said you had some sort of wess’har biotech that could have saved David. I just want to know if it’s true. I need to know if you stabbed me in the back for a deal with some drug company or government. Was that what was really in your Suppressed Briefing?”

  It was harder than she thought. This is a job, and I have no feelings about it, she reminded herself. I have no choice.

  “Lin, I never did any deal. I’ve got an infection that enables me to survive biological hazards and injuries. I have no idea if it would have saved David.” Liar, liar, liar. “But it would run riot in the general population.”

  “I know what Kris and Eddie talked about. It keeps you alive.”

  “If there had been a way to make use of it safely, I would have offered.”

  Lindsay got to her feet and walked towards her. “You bitch!” she screamed. “You pious, self-righteous cow! How could you do it to me? Doesn’t personal loyalty mean anything to you?”

  “It’s nothing to do with loyalty. It’s about responsibility.”

  There was no question of Shan being in danger. She could see Lindsay wasn’t armed, but even if she was it would have made little difference in the long run. All she could do was scream abuse at her. But that hurt more than any high-velocity round.

  There was no point listening to any more. Shan turned and walked back to the entrance, telling herself the things she told herself when she was a young copper. Abuse was just words. It wasn’t personal. Words couldn’t do you any damage. Only weapons and fists could.

  The sound of Lindsay’s sobbing and cursing ebbed, leaving Shan to slip back into her room in Josh’s home and shut the door.

  The c’naatat might have been good at dealing with organic damage, but it had no idea how to heal a broken heart.

  Her swiss told her it was the next morning and that there was a call waiting, just the one. Shan washed in the small basin and checked herself carefully against the previous day’s appearance. There was nothing extra that she could see, but she was definitely getting broader in the shoulders and she felt she was looking at a changing face in some indefinable way, like trying to focus on your reflection when a migraine was starting and disrupting your vision. As long as the thing didn’t give her those weird wess’har pupils, she could cope. She returned the waiting call on audio-only.

  “What do you want, Eddie?” she said.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d call back.”

  “If you’ve called to berate me—”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened, Shan. I got it wrong.”

  “I told you so.”

  “But most guilty people do. I’m just not used to people telling the truth.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “If I could undo what I’ve done, I would. You have no idea how much I regret this.”

  “Did you tell Lin, Eddie?”

  “No. I didn’t have the guts. Kris Hugel probably gave her the impression she could have isolated some of the c’naatat characteristics to create immunity. Without messing with life span.”

  “Do you seriously think that, given a whole sample, some biotech firm would take the gene sequences that stop bleeding, or create novel antibodies, and throw the antiagathic uses away?You know nothing about life science corporations. I’m EnHaz. Don’t even ask me what I’ve seen.”

  “I know. You don’t have to spell it out to me.”

  “No, you don’t know. Human cloning and chimera bans didn’t work. Crop terminator genes are still traded despite a worldwide ban. If it’s doable, it gets done. I just bloody know where this will end.”

  “Shan, I’ve seen footage from Umeh. That’s without c’naatat. I think I can do the maths.”

  He sounded like the old Eddie again. Shan wondered why they still called digital images footage. “So what did you want, anyway? An interview?”

  There was a hiss of breath. “I just called to say I think Rochefoucauld was right.” And the line went dead. The swiss chirped and reset itself.

  She had no idea who Rochefoucauld was and put it on her growing list of things to look into. In twenty-four hours, the Thetis team would be heading home, or at least to the relative haven of a human ship. There would be plenty of time for
dissecting Eddie’s motivation later.

  Nevertheless, she set the swiss to monitor outgoing transmissions routed via Actaeon just to see what he was going to tell the world about her, or more precisely about the c’naatat parasite. He only had myths. But myths were very credible in the right hands.

  From time to time, she looked at the swiss and noted that today Eddie had filed features on alyats, ingenious ways to use 100 percent of a soy crop, and local craftsmanship, but nothing about her.

  But then he had never filed any of her revelations about Green Rage, either. Even his recently broadcast interviews with the isenj had not directly picked up on the significance of the c’naatat, as far as she could see; his voice-over had referred to “a long-standing war with as many legends, propaganda and misinformation as any on Earth.” It was as if he were playing it down for the time being. But what material had he edited out?

  She flicked open the swiss and keyed ROCHEFOUCAULD into the database. The plasma screen, strung like a child’s soap-bubble toy between the filaments, disgorged a long biography and selected passages from the man’s works.

  French seventeenth-century classical author known for epigrams expressing a harsh or paradoxical truth in the briefest manner possible. La Rochefoucauld saw selfishness, hypocrisy, and weakness in general in human behavior.

  Well, she didn’t need a dead French intellectual to teach her that. She read on anyway. It was when she was scrolling through the selected quotes that she began to realize just how little she knew Eddie Michallat. She was also reminded of the time that she had told him they were in the same line of business.

  Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of with the world looking on. (From Rochefoucauld’s Maximes)

  She closed the screen and pressed her hand against her mouth, eyes shut tight.

  “I owe you an apology, Mr. Michallat,” she said aloud.

  32