“No.”
“I was just hoping,” she said. “There are so many things I’d rather forget. I seem to be remembering more than ever lately. I thought it was the SB.”
“That’s the wess’har in you. Our recall is complete.”
“And what’s the human in you, then? What do you get from us?”
“Restlessness,” Aras said. “A need for solitude occasionally. And maybe that strange ability to know one thing and yet want to believe another. What do you call it? Faith.”
They lapsed back into silence. It wasn’t the baptism she had been waiting to watch. Close to the horizon she could see a very bright object, an artificial star she had watched on many nights until its orbit took it out of view. Thetis was still on station and waiting for rendezvous with Actaeon, itself a brilliant point of light nearby. Eventually the two stars merged.
“There we go,” said Shan. If she needed confirmation that she was never going home, this was it. By the time the ships parted again, they would be below the level of the horizon and she would not see the sudden nova of energy as Thetis turned and began its acceleration toward home.
“Your people are unwise to take isenj to Earth. You will regret it.”
“Unfortunately, I think we’re going to get along with them just fine.”
“A mistake. I assure you.”
“We all do unwise things.”
“You still think I was a fool to infect you.”
“Well, I don’t think we’ll have long to wait before the matriarchs find out about it. They won’t think it’s too clever.”
Now that the baptism party had moved on, they scrambled down the slope to the beach. She could manage it in wess’har time now, or at least in Aras-time. Neither gravity nor variable oxygen hindered her. It was still an unsettling prospect to wake each morning and wonder what might have changed in her body. When the fear took her, she remembered the wonder of seeing polarized light and blues beyond the scope of her human genes. Aras assured her she would get used to it in time. Her only problem would be if she refused to let go of the past.
And there was a lot of that to let go.
The retreating tide had left rock-pools, worlds in their own right. She squatted down and stared into one to see what life stirred in it when her shadow darkened the water. There was a flurry of movement. Sand churned up, and then the miniature universe was still again.
I am a world too, she thought. C’naatat only wanted the best for its environment, for her. It wanted a stable colony, just like the settlers of Constantine. I’m not carrying a disease. And a world has responsibilities.
On the shoreline, claret-colored weeds washed out in strands like hair. She stepped round the fronds with care, for there might have been a smaller world within them as well. A movement caught her eye, the last bezeri patrol sinking into the depths, trailing blue and green lights.
She looked into another pool. I was eight years old, exploring the beach. There were no crabs or limpets or razor shells here: pulses of light shimmered intermittently, the telltale signs of a glass-clear sea creature sheltering in the red weed. She hadn’t thought of those childhood seaside holidays in years. It was as if the sudden separation from humanity had opened up a well of memories to cushion her against the unknown.
Shan took the azin-shell map carefully from Aras. It hinged open: the sand and fragments compressed within it shivered a little, as fragile as the ecology of the world itself. Carefully, she took a little vermilion powdered glass between her fingertips and let it fall slowly in an ellipse a little way from the shoreline—the settlement of Constantine. It was the summer before the Alum Bay cliffs sank into the sea, she thought. I filled a glass lighthouse with layers of colored sands so the holiday would live forever. Then she trailed the glass-powder round the very edge of the map, and shut it tightly again.
She waded into the shallows and left it where the bezeri could see it. She hoped they would understand that she was telling them she was enforcing an environmental protection zone, although they would not understand what EnHaz was.
All they really needed to know was that Superintendent Shan Frankland, Environmental Hazard Enforcement, had changed her mind about early retirement.
“Come on, home,” she said, and took Aras’s arm. “Borscht on the menu tonight. Can’t wait.”
On the patch of land that had once been the Thetis base camp there were marks on the grass like a floor plan, but all traces of the construction had already been picked clean. In the coming weeks, wess’har eco-tech would quietly erase all evidence that humans had ever been there and reclaim the ground for the wild.
The gethes had left no more lasting physical impression on Bezer’ej than the isenj had. Some things could be put back together again as if nothing had happened: but she wasn’t one of them.
She glanced down at her hands.
Yes, they were definitely claws.
Acknowledgments
My thanks go to Dr. Kelly Searsmith, whose unerring judgement kept this book on track: to Liz Williams, Charlie Allery, Joe Murphy, Chris “TK” Evans, and Mike Lewis, meticulous readers; to Lyn Graham and Martin Welsford for technical advice and moral support in every sense of the word: to my editor Diana Gill for getting a far better book out of me: to my agent, Martha Millard, for doing the biz: to Greg Frost for his unstinting support and wisdom: and to my mother, Barbara, for instilling in me a lasting sense of wonder at the age of five when she told me just how far it was to Andromeda.
About the Author
KAREN TRAVISS is a former defense correspondent and TV and newspaper journalist. She’s now a political public relations manager and has also been a press officer for the police, an advertising copywriter, and a journalism lecturer. She has served in both the Royal Navy Auxiliary Service and the Territorial Army. A graduate of the Clarion science fiction and fantasy workshop, her work has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, and On Spec. She lives in Wiltshire, England.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CITY OF PEARL. Copyright © 2004 by Karen Traviss.
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