City of Pearl

  He put his palm against the cabinet door and pressed it shut. “That presupposes your government would not behave as badly as the agricorps.”

  “That’s the problem,” said Shan. “Who’s my government now?”

  Eddie realized just how close the wess’har camp must have been to the colony when he saw the first of the fighters.

  A whiissshh overhead made him look up from his notes. The craft was small and narrow and, apart from the whiiissshh, silent. He knew nothing about wess’har military technology, but he knew a fighter when he saw one. It flew east and disappeared in seconds. Either they were checking out the mission base en route, or they were showing the monkeys they meant business. Still, it was an impressive sight. He made a mental note to have the bee cam permanently active in the future, just in case he missed another chance of good footage. He closed down his note file and went back to his cabin.

  On the way he passed Qureshi. “Did you see that?” he asked, thinking she might have a finer appreciation of flying machinery. “Very neat.”

  “Just caught the tail end,” she said. “You going off camp?”

  “Thought I might.”

  “No straying near the wess’har, and mind the roads,” she said. “You ought to have Frankland or someone with you. Ade’s free.”

  “I can manage. If I fall in, the camera can make its own way back, so don’t rescue me.”

  “Wasn’t planning to,” said Qureshi, and smiled.

  Both scoots were out and the wess’har base was probably way too far on foot anyway. So there were just the shifting, living roads to watch out for. Eddie arranged his pack to rest comfortably on his back and set out at a steady pace.

  He set the bee cam to focus on any movement and enjoyed the day around him. Who would have thought he would end up doing wildlife documentaries? God, that would have pissed Wiley off no end. It was a shame the bastard was probably dead now, but maybe he wasn’t. Eddie was comfortable with the prospect of gloating at an old man. When he got back to Earth, there might even be an award waiting for him.

  He was wondering how he might make use of such an award upon the thawing of his frozen career when another whiisshhh and then another stopped him in his tracks.

  This time the bee cam got the shots. Eddie need not have worried: a further five of the sleek craft passed over him in the next hour. They weren’t the mail run, that was for sure. He ate his rations in slow contemplation while the bee cam settled its gaze on him, but he waved it away. This, at least, was probably real news material, and it would keep him going until he broke down the colonists’ reserve and got some more solid, gutsy human interest meat to chew on. Shan didn’t mind him visiting Constantine once a week even if she tailed him like the copper she was. But the colonists seemed different now: they were even less communicative than usual and seemed uncomfortable. Eddie wondered if they knew something he didn’t, something connected to the sudden appearance of the fighters.

  Eddie waited another hour. There were no more craft after that. When he wandered back into camp in the midafternoon, he found a small knot of marines and scientists gathered around Shan and Lindsay. Whatever she was saying, it was significant enough for the payload to suspend their hatred of her and stand around to listen. Shan caught his eye, and carried on talking to the group, but Qureshi broke away and came jogging up to him.

  “There you are,” said Qureshi. “You didn’t walk into a firefight, then?”

  “I fought off two ten-foot monsters, if that’s of any interest.”

  “Nah. Boring. We have a situation.” She said it as if the word had a capital S, and a military capital S at that. “The boss is briefing us.”

  Eddie thought Qureshi meant Lindsay at first, as Royal Marines would, but when she rejoined the group she was staring intently at Shan. Eddie tried to blend in at the back.

  “…so there’s no immediate need for us to evacuate, but let’s be sensible,” Shan said. “Stick close to base and wait until things calm down a little.”

  Shan struck Eddie as the sort of policewoman who would usher people away from the corpse of a unicorn, telling them there was nothing to see. The knot broke up. Shan stood there and stared back at Eddie.

  “I’ve missed something, haven’t I?” he said.

  “A little local difficulty,” she said.

  “As in hostile difficulty?”

  “As in the isenj are reasserting their territorial claims and the wess’har had a major sense-of-humor failure. It happens every so often apparently. Like Gibraltar. An isenj ship was shot down in disputed space. If down is the right word, of course. I’m being colloquial.”

  “That would explain the air traffic.”

  “We’re not in any danger. There’s just a touch of nervousness in the wess’har camp.”

  “I’m more interested in why the isenj thought it was worth trying again after the kicking they got the last time. Maybe they have short memories.”

  Shan silenced an insistent beep from her swiss with a flick of her thumb. “Perhaps our landing sent out some confusing messages to them. They might think there’d been an unofficial relaxation of restrictions.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. History is full of such misreadings.” Eddie followed Shan across the compound; she seemed to be heading for Constantine. “You would have thought they understood wess’har well enough to know they’re not that subtle. On the other hand, human governments play dumb. Why shouldn’t aliens?”

  “The wess’har cut us an unusual amount of slack in letting us land. Their normal response would be to blow trespassers to kingdom come. Let’s hope they didn’t seriously misread the situation themselves.”

  “Even the gods make mistakes.”

  “We all do.” She paused. She cast a dismissive glance at Rayat, who managed to return it for a full five seconds before withering away and disappearing back into the mess hall. “Filed your piece on me yet?”

  “No,” said Eddie, slowly. He didn’t want her to think he was afraid of her, but he couldn’t bring himself to say he admired her either. “I don’t think it’s network material. Do you?”

  She had that look of bright and fleeting revelation, the same as when he had bombed her with the name of Helen Marchant. “Understood,” she said, her expression closing down again, and walked off.

  21

  You are to offer every assistance short of military support to the isenj. Your priority is to establish a diplomatic understanding with them under the guidance of my office. I fully understand your concern that you are neither trained nor equipped for either a first contact or diplomatic mission, but an opportunity unparalleled in human history has presented itself and future generations will not forgive us if we squander it.

  BIRSEN ERTEGUN, Undersecretary of State,

  FEU Foreign Office, to Commander Malcolm Okurt,

  CO CSV Actaeon

  Life went on in Constantine regardless of global politics because it had to, and Aras was glad of it.

  He snatched a few moments’ respite in the kitchens while he waited. The air was damp and smelled sweetly earthy. An avalanche of soybeans, fine pale beads, roared down the chute from the store and pooled in the pan at the bottom of the hopper, waiting to be transformed into tofu, one of the colony’s few staple proteins. Half a dozen children scooped them up in pails and ferried them to the benches, where Ruth Djenaba and two other women poured them into opaque glass bowls the size of the ATV’s wheels and covered them with water. Farther along the bench, soaked beans were ready to be ground.

  It was as near to a factory process as the deliberately bucolic colony was ever likely to get. They had mechanization available to them, but they often chose to do jobs manually for the pleasure and dedication of it, and Aras understood that need.

  The first time Aras had watched tofu being made, one of the craftsmen had pointed to the curdling stage and said, “This is just like making cheese.” Later, when they explained to him exactly what cheese was, i
t turned him off tofu for a long time. He recalled that every time he watched the curding stage. The human predilection to consume matter ejected from animals’ bodies revolted him only slightly less than their tendency to eat carrion.

  One of the children brought him a bowl of his customary treat—warm soft soy curds topped with grated ginger root and tamari sauce. It might have been his imagination but the boy seemed hesitant, as if he were afraid of him, and there was the same sort of slight tension that he had noticed about Josh in recent weeks. They all knew about Parekh. He understood that killing another human was a sin for them, but it disappointed him that they mourned for a child-killer. You could take this forgiveness thing too far.

  And humans were so easy to kill. He hadn’t expected that. Fragile bodies, quick to break. Parekh hadn’t suffered. It wasn’t the wess’har way.

  The ginger tingled against his tongue and the tamari was sweet and the curds melted against his tongue. It was a perfect silent moment, a spiritual haven that even the arrival of the gethes could not spoil. While he ate, he watched the children patiently rounding up utensils and pans and piling them in a sink to be washed in the yellow whey left over from the curding.

  For Aras this was not just a diversion. It had become an affirmation of faith in his own judgment. This activity, this transformation of the unassuming soybean into the foundation of a community, reinforced his belief that the humans could be good neighbors. It harmed no being and it created no waste. Every part of soy had a use: it was a vegetable worthy of Targassat herself, and in that he saw meaning. Growing, it was a green manure; harvested, it became fuel, fertilizer, oil, soap, vegetable, beverage, flour, condiment, and meat. It seemed more a product of design than of natural circumstance, and utterly wess’har in its utility. The colonists would have said it was all part of the great plan.

  If only all human activity had been like this, Aras thought. We might have been able to live together. He finished his bowl of curds and waited for Shan Frankland to appear.

  He had learned a lot about her in recent months. When they went walking around the island, she answered his questions and volunteered much more. She worried about the fate of her houseplants left behind in her apartment when she was plucked from her own time without warning. She worried about another humanoid, a gorilla, that she felt she had failed to protect. She worried about getting old and not having made a difference to the world. But not once had she expressed any self-pity. She had, she said, got the life she deserved.

  He couldn’t stop liking her more and more.

  But there was one thing he needed to know and that was whether she had worked out the true nature of his disease. If she had—and he was wrong about her integrity—then she was a risk.

  She asked questions. She knew his great age, and she knew about the image in Constantine’s library. She was a professional investigator: she would find out sooner or later. And while he felt she would not betray or misuse that information, he needed to separate fact from hope.

  He checked his tilgir was in its sheath and leaned back in the alcove to be absorbed by the soothing rhythms of efte utensils and sighing water.

  When Shan eventually walked into the kitchens she stood looking around as if she hadn’t seen him. The colonists acknowledged her with nods and then turned back to their tasks, talking and laughing again, and for a moment he saw her do what the shyer colony children did when they couldn’t join in the older ones’ games. She dropped her shoulders a little and looked down at the floor, as if for a few seconds she was trying to disappear from view. It was just a moment, a lapse of control, but he saw it and he felt her isolation. When he finally stood up and came forward out of the alcove she had become the matriarch again.

  He hoped they might still be friends by the end of the day.

  It was a clear sunny morning with high, wispy clouds. Out on the rolling blue-gray plain beyond Constantine, they weren’t likely to be followed or interrupted.

  “Anything new?” she asked.

  “The isenj are in very frequent contact with Actaeon now. I would say they are becoming allies.”

  “How are your matriarchs taking it? I bet they’re dusting off the best china right now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I meant that I don’t think Actaeon will be very welcome. Do your people perceive it as a serious threat?”

  “Of course we do. Hundreds of new gethes, all making friends with the isenj. What else would we feel?”

  “If it’s any comfort, it scares the shit out of me too. It’s the payload I’m most concerned about. Once they know Actaeon’s coming, I think all bets are off.”

  He understood that from the context. “Concealment is hard.”

  “I’m not very good at it, either.”

  But she might be better than he imagined. He had to know. It was more than his growing attachment to her that was at stake: it was the weight he gave to her analyses, the political intelligence he derived from her. He had to know for certain that she had no ulterior motive in her apparent concern for him. If she could feign that, she could also be misleading him on everything else.

  An oset circled them, and they stood staring up at it.

  Shan seemed astonished. He looked at her face, all art and control gone from her, and saw someone he could care for like the child he never had.

  “What is it?” she asked. She held up her hand to shield her eyes from the light and she must have seen its long jointed tail, serrated like a knife. “Is it dangerous?”

  “Oset. Your people call it a stab-tail,” he said. “It hunts small prey, pierces it and lets it bleed to death.”

  “You have such cute wildlife. A better pet than the killer plastic bags, though. Why is it following us?”

  “It might be an old one, too slow to catch its usual dinner. I think it might be indulging in wishful thinking.”

  A stab-tail was a rare sight even on the higher ground. He watched it making slow passes, sizing them up. If they had been udzas, it would have fallen on them and rammed its tail into them like a knife, hanging on with grim claws until they weakened from blood loss and lay still enough for it to eat.

  “If you don’t take specimens, how do you learn anything about other species?” Shan asked, her eyes never leaving the circling stab-tail.

  “By observation and by occasionally finding corpses.”

  “That must be pretty limiting.”

  “Why? We don’t need to know any more than how to avoid interfering with them.”

  “Good point,” she said. “Have you ever seen an isenj? Up close, I mean. Not through a gun-sight.”

  “Yes.” More of them than you can imagine, he thought. “And before you ask, yes, they are to be feared. For the time being we might have the edge in technology, but they have numbers. And in war, numbers count.”

  “You were a soldier. Have you fought them?”

  There was no reason not to tell her. She already knew he was exceptionally old. “I was one of the senior commanders when we erased them from this planet. I not only directed the operation, I took part in it. I have killed thousands—personally.” The white fire came rolling down the street again like a rebuke, trailing screams, but he ignored it. “You would call me a butcher, a war criminal perhaps. Are you appalled?”

  It was as if she had expected it. “I think we’re very similar, Aras. There are more than a few deaths on my record too. I don’t regret any of them.”

  “Then you’re not like the rest of your kind. Even Josh finds this part of me uncomfortable to accept. His ancestor was kinder. He said if I repented I would be forgiven.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. If I had not removed them, would the isenj have repented for killing all the bezeri?”

  She gave him a sad smile. “Are the isenj monsters?”

  “I’m not the person to ask. I was their prisoner of war.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  Shan made those tuneless hummi
ng noises under her breath that humans reserved for moments of awkwardness. They watched the stab-tail for a few more minutes. It was still wheeling above them, riding a thermal. Shan tried again. She was a persistent woman.

  “What’s your government doing right now?”

  “Preparing for conflict.”

  “Can we sort out the gene bank before the shooting starts?”

  “I will help you select plant species but no animal life.”

  “Fine by me. That’s all I came for.” She walked on a little farther, still watching the stab-tail as if the conversation she was having was a casual one. It was clear from her scent that it wasn’t. “And what will happen to you and the colony if there’s fighting?”

  “That depends if the isenj try to fight here.”

  He looked up.

  One moment the stab-tail was swooping over them and diving round behind them, the next he felt it thud hard against his back as if it had punched him. He looked down and a thin cone of wet bronze had appeared from his chest, draining out his blood and his energy. He was aware of Shan shouting, and the flurry of wings, and the weight on his back as he pitched forward.

  It had stabbed him. It had latched onto him with its claws and thrust its armored tail deep into his back. He could see blood speckling the ground as he knelt on all fours. It would stop very soon, but it was not a display he wanted Shan to see.

  “Oh, Jesus.” She was trying to mop at the wound with a piece of cloth, perhaps a folded glove. He batted her hand away to stop her getting blood on her skin. However much pain he was in, the risk of contamination was uppermost in his mind. “Aras, hold still. I’ll call base. Don’t worry.”

  “No. It’s not serious.”

  “It’s serious, believe me. I’ll get help. Don’t move.”

  “I said no.”

  The pain was receding now. He slumped back on his heels and caught his breath. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the stab-tail crumpled on the ground, trying desperately to right itself, flapping weakly. He scrambled over to it to check that it hadn’t broken the skin of its tail. An open wound would have been disastrous.