Lindsay turned and walked out. She’d done the right thing, but the wrong way. She’d wiped out—no, she had almost wiped out—a dangerous organism that humans simply couldn’t be trusted to handle. And she couldn’t tell anyone right then, or maybe ever. All they saw was her crime and her stupidity.
It was just like Eddie had said about Shan and that business with Green Rage. It was Rochefoucauld’s classic example of perfect courage, a massive private sacrifice that won you no worshipers.
For the first time, Lindsay knew exactly how it felt to be Shan Frankland.
Ceret was rising. The tem flies, swarming before moving south to hotter climates for the winter season, battled for position on the first sun-warmed stones.
“It’s still the prettiest damn thing I’ve ever seen,” said Eddie. “It’s not a bad place to be marooned.”
Eddie had more of a choice than he had realized. F’nar was not the only city of pearl, just one of a chain of settlements and cliffs and other convenient surfaces that stood on the tems’ migration path. Aras said he regretted not showing all of them to Shan.
The tem flies were on the move now, great black clouds of smoke across the face of Ceret. If you looked at them long enough, you could pick out images that resembled animals or plants or landscapes.
Children enjoyed the game of recognition. Nevyan waited with Giyadas for an especially large cloud of flies to sweep across the setting red disk of the sun.
“Great shot,” said Eddie, like a fond uncle. The bee-cam was diligently recording it all. He’d use that the next time he got an uplink.
Giyadas, absorbing English at an alarming rate, watched him intently.
“Great shot,” she said, accentless.
Mestin had promised to send Serrimissani to fetch them when the message came through from the World Before. She was waiting by the screen, an unusual act of patience for her. There was a vague promise of help in the recognition of a common threat, but Eddie had heard that before on Earth. Had it been the matriarchs of F’nar who had said it, he would have believed it.
But not even the ussissi knew how the World Before would really react to a plea for help from a band of outcasts who had cut themselves off thousands of years ago because they didn’t want to get involved.
There was always the chance they would come back and tell them to piss off.
“Have you seen pictures of them?” asked Eddie.
Nevyan jiggled her head like an Indian dancer. “No.”
“You’re pretty short on curiosity for a clever species.”
“Curiosity leads to exploration, and we never planned to go back. But I am curious, Eddie.”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
They all would.
Bennett had persuaded Aras to come out and see the swarming. Aras was sitting with his head bowed, absorbed in the contents of a small red cylinder whose fragile screen was strung between filaments. It was Shan’s swiss. He never put it down now. Bennett simply sat and watched him. They had a lot in common. If Aras was going to survive his grief, it would be Bennett who would be most help to him.
A bloody shame, thought Eddie. Poor sods.
Serrimissani was suddenly among them, agitated, urgent. “They are responding,” she said. “Right now. Come.”
Eddie wasn’t the last inside. Aras was reluctant to watch and shook his head. Bennett waited with him.
“Call me when I can do something useful,” he said, and held the swiss in both hands as if it would break. When it did, there would be nobody left who knew how to repair it or where to find the parts.
The rest of them—Nevyan and Mestin’s families and Eddie—stood and watched the image from a city that was well-proportioned and softened by planting, but very, very urban.
For once Eddie was not alone in his bewilderment and wonder.
The whole of F’nar had ground to a halt. The signal had been made available to everybody: there were no secrets among wess’har. The usual backdrop of domestic noise, of scraping glass utensils and caterwauling matriarchs, had ceased. For the first time Eddie could hear the trickling water from thousands of glass conduits around the caldera. It was as heart-stopping as a total eclipse.
They were all looking at their screens, wherever they were, because that was what he was doing too. They were looking for the first time at kin they hadn’t seen in ten thousand years.
And the face in the image was almost wholly alien.
The wess’har genome was as flexible as thread, always adapting, reshaping. It was what made them such a perfect host for c’naatat. And in ten thousand years, both branches of the family had gone their own distinctive ways.
“That’s a wess’har?” Eddie asked.
“Yes,” said Serrimissani. “A matriarch.”
The scarcely recognizable creature had a ussissi interpreter, and that much they could all identify. It was the ussissi who spoke after a stream of double-voiced but unintelligible sound emerged from the female who looked little like the isan’ve Eddie had now started to see as normal.
“Tell the gethes we are coming,” said the ussissi, repeating the words of his matriarch. “Tell them that we too believe in balancing, and that the bezeri will have justice, even if none are left to witness it. What threatens you threatens us.”
Nevyan had her long arms crossed over her chest in that odd nervous gesture the females seemed to have. “So it’s done,” she said. And she simply turned and walked out on to the terraces again. Eddie went after her.
“Is that it?” he said. “What next?”
“We will arrange liaison now. It will take a little time. And you have much to do.”
“Yeah, I’ve got some stories to broadcast, when the time’s right. You’ve seen the news. Earth’s boiling. So I’m busy. What will you do?”
Nevyan pulled her dhren up around her neck. “I have important work to occupy me.”
“What exactly?”
Nevyan cocked her head, taking in Aras and Bennett, who were just sitting on a low wall and not talking.
“I’m going to find my friend,” said Nevyan. “And I’m going to bring her home.”
Look for the third volume in The Wess’har Wars, coming soon.
Acknowledgments
Thanks go to Charlie Allery, Debbie Button, Bryan Boult and Chris “TK” Evans, for thorough and critical reading; to Dr. Ian Tregillis and Mark Allery for technical advice; to Dr. Farah Mendlesohn for cheerleading; to my editor, Diana Gill, never fazed by wild plot changes; and to my father, George, who taught me the value of thorough preparation.
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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Resounding praise for the miraculous debut novel by
KAREN TRAVISS CITY OF PEARL
“[A] satisfyingly complex tale of human/alien interaction on a colony planet which, at times, evokes the earlier moral fables of Le Guin…at other times the revisionist critique of expanding human empires…and at times the union of romance with SF that we see in the work of Catherine Asaro or Lois McMaster Bujold. The fact that Traviss manages to keep these sometimes conflicting modes in balance, mostly through her strong sense of character, suggests that she’s a writer worth watching.”
Locus
“In Shan Frankland, Karen Traviss has created a tough, interesting, believable character…City of Pearl is science fiction with teeth.”
Gregory Frost, author of Fitcher’s Brides
“A fascinating cast of characters invol
ved in a richly complex situation…Her people are convincingly real…Traviss has created a vivid assortment of alien races, each with distinctive characteristics and agendas…She brings a rare combination of insight and experience that will greatly contribute to our field.”
James Alan Gardner, author of Expendable
Books by Karen Traviss
THE WORLD BEFORE
CROSSING THE LINE
CITY OF PEARL
Copyright
This book 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.
CROSSING THE LINE. COPYRIGHT © 2004 BY KAREN TRAVISS All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books™.
ePub edition June 2005 ISBN 9780061740985
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