City of Pearl

  He thought he knew why, too. Or at least partly why, and the partly bit was eating at him in the way concealed things always did.

  “It would be great to do an interview with you,” he said.

  “I don’t think I’ll be of interest to your subscribers in twenty-five years’ time, Eddie.”

  “Not even about Green Rage?”

  She didn’t even blink. “Maybe some other time. I think I’ve been humiliated enough over that.”

  “Yeah. Right.” He turned to go. She hadn’t blown him off completely, and he had every intention of returning to the topic at that some other time. “I happen to have a copy of your service record from the BBChan internal database. Do you mind if I share it with the rest of the mission?”

  “Why?” A faint hint of acid there: perhaps she thought he was trying to lean on her.

  “When they ask who the hell you are, I’d like them to know.”

  “You could have done that any time.”

  “I wanted to clear it with you first.”

  She smiled. She could have taken it as a gesture of genuine courtesy. Or she could have thought that he was kissing arse, and that he knew he was, and that it was all a reflective game of we-both-know-what-we’re-up-to.

  He meant it as a courtesy. He hoped she knew that.

  Aras had made a promise, so he kept it. The bezeri said they would prefer to look at the new ones from a safe distance first. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust him, they said. They were just concerned. He came to the edge of the camp and looked at the soldiers for the first time, and noted how they stood stock-still as he passed and stared at him. The encampment was a very visible thing, an insult to the landscape, but these people would not be staying long enough to warrant digging down into the rock to house them. Like the first human landing, when the bots came to the last habitat of c’naatat, it was just a campsite that could be swept away or moved when it was necessary.

  There were males and females in utilitarian dark grays, greens and blues, and all wearing trousers. When he passed them they greeted him nervously. Shan had warned him none of them had seen an intelligent alien before, a reminder—if he needed one—that they were singularly blind to all the other nonhumans they had encountered in their lives. He returned the greetings with a polite nod.

  Shan didn’t talk much. She followed him in silence to the shore, laboring for breath, but she managed to keep up with him despite the length of the walk. She struggled after him up an outcrop of black rock to get a better view of the shallows.

  There was enough cloud cover today for them to see the shapes and lights very clearly. Dozens of bezeri, rippling with the color patterns of the seniors, moved slowly around the shadows, trailing long tentacles.

  Silence. And then it was as if she had suddenly spotted them for the first time.

  “Oh my. The lights.”

  “Can you see the shapes?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “That’s what you might call the bezeri council.”

  “What are they?” Shan asked. She slid down off the rock and walked slowly down the beach. “Squid?”

  She was looking out to sea, hands thrust deep in her pockets while the wind whipped her black hair about. She wore it pulled back in a tail; it would have made more sense to braid it, but perhaps she didn’t know how. An odd human, intense and aggressive, frequently distracted by things he couldn’t see but that she seemed to. And her scents normally matched her words and expressions; when they didn’t, he could tell it was a huge strain for her to lie.

  She pointed out into the shallows at dark clouds of movement and the occasional ripple of light. “You’ve read about squid, have you? You know what I mean?”

  “Not squid, of course,” he said. “But anatomically they’re cephalopods, for want of a better word. That’s what their environment makes them—and like many of your marine species, they communicate by light and color.”

  She raised her hand tentatively and waved. “In the absence of light, I hope they understand this.”

  Aras took the azin map from his pack and held it out for her to see. He thought she would appreciate it. She took it carefully in her hands, almost as if she were aware of its fragility and rarity, and examined it.

  “It’s an ancient bezeri map of their western continental shelf.”

  “They make maps?”

  “Yes. These are just the visual maps, of course, not the olfactory ones. They’re updated all the time.”

  “I just didn’t have any idea that an aquatic species would make things.”

  “They were equally surprised that intelligent technological species could live in an air void.”

  Shan seemed mesmerized by the shell map. She traced the contour lines with her fingertip. For a second Aras thought she was a child he could teach.

  “What does it show?”

  “Home territories, depths.” Aras persisted. “Do humans now consider squid intelligent?”

  “As we still eat them, I’d say not.”

  “Do you eat them?”

  “No, I don’t. Never have.” She looked and smelled agitated, but she was telling the truth. He couldn’t smell the flat, bitter odors of dead flesh on her skin like he could on the rest of the gethes. They repelled him. Rockvelvets ate body tissues too, but they had no other choice. “I don’t think you should eat anything you’re not prepared to kill yourself.”

  “So if gethes don’t eat what’s intelligent, where do you draw the line between prey and non-prey? And how do you tell?”

  “Gethes? What does that mean?”

  “Carrion eater.”

  “Oh.” She shrugged. “Probably anything that hasn’t got a vote.”

  “Do you eat unintelligent humans?”

  “No. And before you ask, yes, we do eat meat because we can, not because we need to.” The black part of her eyes was a lot larger now and he could smell that scent that was part anger, part excitement. She didn’t break her gaze and look away, as the colony women did. This was a real matriarch. “Anyway, what sort of society do these bezeri have?”

  “Communal, like yours.”

  “Are they spacefaring?”

  “They think they are.”

  “Not quite with you on that one.”

  Aras gestured along the beach. “This is the limit of their atmosphere. They try to breach it from time to time.” He beckoned her to follow and walked along the shore, hearing her gasping for breath behind him but still managing to keep up. “Look.”

  There was a large perfectly spherical stone on the shore at the high-water line, set with intricate patterns of inlaid color. Shan squatted down beside it and examined its smoothness with her hand. It seemed to impress her. She craned her neck to look up at him, still balancing in a crouch. “What is it?”

  “This is the Place of Memory of the First,” said Aras. “It marks the spot where the first bezeri pilot beached himself to gather information about the Dry Above, which is what they call anything that isn’t sea.”

  “Is this script?” She ran a cautious fingertip over the spots of colored shell and stone, as if she understood it was something to be respected. “What does it say?”

  “It says that here the nineteenth of the shoal of Ehek launched himself out of the water and told the waiting ones all he could see of the Dry Above before he died an honorable death.”

  “He died?”

  “At that time their pods had only enough power to propel themselves out of the water.”

  “And he knew that?”

  “Yes. It was what you call a suicide mission.”

  She was silent for a while and he couldn’t work out what she was imagining. “What happened after that?”

  “They developed bigger pod ships with secondary water jets that allowed them to push themselves back into the sea.” Aras walked a few meters down the beach and patted another large stone memorial, this time a conical one with lines of color spiraling down its sides. “This is the Place of Memory of the
Returned. I expect you can work that out for yourself.”

  Shan spent a long time touching the spherical stone, as if a dead bezeri was more intriguing to her than one who made it back. He was getting impatient for a meal, but she was a matriarch, and—gethes or not—his instinct of deference to a dominant female was hard to override. She confused him. One moment she was isanket, a little female, an amazed child, and the next she was an isan clearly comfortable with the authority of her gender. He had neither isan nor children. She stirred needs in him that he thought he had buried under the years.

  He was still hungry, though. “The Dry Above is like deep space to them, a realm of risk,” he said, and wished she would follow his lead and start walking back to the settlement. “Apart from some scientific interest, the majority of bezeri have no more interest in finding ways of colonizing the Dry Above than humans have of living under water.”

  “Or in space,” said Shan. “How did you come across them?”

  “Sometimes we could see their light in the sea from Wess’ej. We didn’t know it came from people until we landed here. Then we noticed bezeri beaching themselves.

  It was very distressing. It took us many, many years to work out what they were signaling, and that they were trying to attract our attention.”

  “You assumed they were communicating, though?” A sudden sharp whiff of anxiety rolled off her. What had upset her? “You tried to work out what they were asking?”

  “Of course. And once we had established a common set of signals, the bezeri could ask for our help. When the isenj came, they asked us to intervene.”

  “So you removed them.” There was no hint of outrage in her tone. “The hard way.”

  “We asked them to leave because they were destroying this world. Millions of bezeri died from their pollution. The marine ecosystem is very fragile. I thought that would be something gethes understood from experience.”

  “I’m suitably chastened.”

  “The isenj breed fast. They’ve spread across their own world and its moon. But not here.” Not any longer. “They are excluded.”

  “Now we’re getting into areas I understand. Territorial ambitions. Fine.”

  “I doubt you do understand, Shan Chail.” He regretted his honesty instantly. He should have let her think that the wess’har were driven by petty political ambition. But he wanted her to think well of him; it was a moment of stupidity. She missed very little. The isanket gave way to an isan used to getting answers.

  “Then explain to me. Because this is what’s going to happen to us if we’re not careful, isn’t it?”

  “There are…unique aspects of this world that make it both vulnerable and dangerous, and we will, I promise you, do whatever it takes to prevent incursions here. By anyone.”

  “I’m not criticizing you for that.”

  “I don’t want to answer any more questions.”

  She eased herself upright as if it hurt and rubbed her knees, which made alarming cracking sounds. She just stared into his eyes. He couldn’t pick up any scent that would give him a hint of her state of mind, and she didn’t say anything. A wave broke close to her boots but she didn’t move.

  Shan finally shrugged and looked back out to sea for a few moments. “I’m not interrogating you, Aras.” She put her hand out as if to touch his arm and he shied away, forcing a scent of embarrassment from her. She pushed her hands deep in the pockets of her jacket. “I’m sorry. You drew away before. If I’ve broken some taboo, I really didn’t mean any offense.”

  Why did she have to say that? This was the first person who actually wanted to touch him in many, many years. Wess’har were not built to lie. Not even his acquired human characteristics had changed that.

  “I’m not rebuffing you. I have a kind of disease.”

  “Can I catch it?”

  “Unlikely.”

  “If I do, will it kill me?”

  “No.” Oh, that much was true. It was almost too true.

  “You don’t like being a pariah, do you?”

  Aras had never met a human above the age of six who was as direct, as brutal as that. Shan Frankland was definitely a different gethes. Did she know? How could she? “Explain,” he said.

  “I’ve seen how Josh avoided touching you when you crashed, and he seemed ashamed of it. You almost shook my hand and stopped. It’s not really you that doesn’t want contact, is it? And Josh knows it hurts you.”

  “You notice very small details indeed.”

  “It’s my job. It tells me a lot.” She was still staring into his face, direct as any wess’har. “So?”

  “It’s unpleasant to have this condition. I live with the fear it produces in others.”

  And she took one hand from her pocket and touched him. It was nothing extraordinary. It was just a casual, familiar squeeze on his upper arm, done with as much simple ease as the colonists did to each other. This was the first time anyone had really touched him voluntarily since Benjamin Garrod had tried to comfort him nearly 170 years ago. She held the grip for five seconds; if she had held it forever, it would not have been long enough.

  He hoped that his shock and confusion didn’t show. He would not have been able to explain.

  “Well, I’m not afraid of you or your illness,” she said. “And I’m not your enemy, and I’m not here to pillage your planet, and what you get up to with the isenj is your business. I aim to finish my job and go home with minimum disruption to either of us.”

  “And what is your job?”

  “I’m not entirely sure yet. Have you heard of Suppressed Briefing?” She turned and linked her arm through his, and began walking him back to Constantine, as if they had a friendship that had mellowed into complete familiarity over a long period of time. He was too surprised to wrench his arm away. “Well, this is how it works…”

  He tried to concentrate on what she was saying. It wasn’t easy. The thought that kept jostling for his attention while he tried to take in talk of sub-Qs and stoppers was that, for once, somebody was not frightened or repelled by him.

  She almost certainly didn’t know what his condition was. If she did, her motivation for contact might have been purely commercial. But for those few moments he had connected with someone again, and he didn’t care.

  15

  Frankland has had a number of contacts with one of the alien species—the wess’har—but we’ve had no opportunity to talk to them directly ourselves. She simply passes on the odd detail. You can understand how frustrating this is for a biologist. It’s like trying to catalog the species in a rain forest by talking to a tourist.

  LOUISE GALVIN, xenozoologist,

  note appended to her working-hours log

  Constantine’s school occupied a whole wing of the underground complex. Shan looked for a door to knock, but there was none. She stepped into a bright chamber full of tables and screens, like something out of a history book, where small children were gazing raptly at a woman demonstrating the formation of clouds in 3D. Two kids turned round and gaped at her for a few seconds, then turned back to the infinitely more fascinating spectacle in front of them.

  “Don’t mind me,” said Shan, and wandered round the room, examining the drawings and pictures on the wall. There were Last Suppers and Annunciations and Partings of the Red Sea, lovingly rendered in shaky hands or in confident but eccentric brushstrokes. There were also strange and largely unidentifiable things that Shan thought probably illustrated some of the local wildlife. And there were pictures of a large and alien biped, which were clearly Aras.

  “Sweet,” she muttered, and turned to watch the class. It was amazing how little she found she knew about clouds. The lunch bell sounded—wavering, plaintive glass notes again—and she was caught swimming against a steady tide of children ebbing out the door.

  “Well-behaved little lot, aren’t they?” said Shan, recalling kids the same age with bottles and knives, years and worlds away.

  “They learn responsibility early,” said the t
eacher. “We have to be responsible for each other.” She tied her hair up in a scarf and rolled up her sleeves. “Did you want something?”

  “Josh said this was a good place to learn the history of Constantine,” said Shan. “May I have the files?”

  She held out her swiss. It was old technology, the sort they understood. Nobody had the time or inclination to develop information tech here, seeing as everyone lived within walking distance of each other and there were no other settlements with which to communicate. The technology that supported the swiss did just fine. The teacher inserted it into the data port on the console, letting it swallow text and pictures for Shan to read at her leisure. Then she handed it back and made it politely clear she was going to show Shan the way out of the complex.

  It was a fine clear day with a scattering of thin, high clouds, and Shan collected a pack of dry rations from the base camp to eat while reading the data on her swiss.

  The history had been written for children, but that didn’t offend her. She knew that someone had recorded somewhere every dot and whistle of the crop yields, council meetings and climate, but what she needed right then was something geared to a child’s simplicity.

  There were pictures of people digging and planting, and pushing barrows of stone and soil from tunnels. And there was Ben Garrod, thin and smiling, standing in front of one of the first crops of soy, beets and potatoes. It had been a hard few years after the colonists landed, a struggle to keep strains of yeast alive and keep the bots functioning, and only the intervention of a race who already lived in the land—described in the history as a miracle, proof of their righteous purpose—kept them from disaster.

  Shan was not much given to appreciating miracles other than the kind that involved ballistics missing major blood vessels. And there were no miracles here. The humans were wildlife in a reserve, preserved as much for the future of the non-human species they brought with them as for their own sake.

  Shan considered all the colonies on earth that had survived pretty well without a scrap of righteousness to justify their existence. All colonies seemed to thrive on delusion, whether that was how good the new world was, how much better the old country had been, or how much right they had to do what they were doing. Kids needed to be told harsh truths.