City of Pearl

  About a kilometer outside the perimeter there was an efte in mid-collapse. She needed seclusion for a while. She sat down in the lee of its trunk and listened to the clicks and squelches as the core of the plant slowly deliquesced and sank back into the soil. In a day or so only the discarded eggshell of bark would be left.

  Even the grasses and scrub around her seemed more blue. When she looked up into the sky she could see haloes upon haloes round Cavanagh’s Star as it edged up over the horizon. There was a flock of alyats skimming low across the plain.

  They were all blue. The colorless ones she had first seen were a limitation of human eyes.

  Aras couldn’t have done this. Sharing his c’naatat was too much of a risk; he’d slaughtered whole isenj populations to stop it spreading. Whatever had happened to her, whatever had healed her injuries and altered her eyes, had to be a drug or surgical technique.

  There was one way she could settle the question. Her hand went to her pocket and felt the outline of the swiss.

  Now? Did she really want to know right now? “Stupid cow,” she said aloud to herself. “Do it.”

  She eased the swiss from her pocket, its case familiar and use-worn. She had carried it all her adult life. It was one of the few devices she could operate without looking, and she flicked her thumb over the end of the cylinder. The blade eased free.

  She drew it diagonally across her left palm and it hurt like hell. Blood flowed, because she was suddenly clutching stickiness, and the smell of filed metal made her gasp.

  Maybe it was her cycle. Maybe the old human female rhythms of fertility were making her sense of smell more acute. Unaltered women always developed heightened smell at certain times of their cycle, didn’t they? Didn’t they?

  She wiped her palm on the leg of her fatigues and waited a few seconds. The cut had stopped bleeding. She flexed it a few times just to be absolutely sure there was a wound there at all. Then she got to her feet and began walking with no particular sense of purpose.

  She was calming down now. The dispassionate part of her mind, the one she trusted most, was listing prioritized thoughts before her eyes in the reassuring, common sense way it had. First: wait and confirm it. Second: if contaminated, keep away from the research team. Third: ah, third wasn’t an order. Third was a concern. What useful little additions was it going to make to her?

  It was a parasite as far as she was concerned. Knowing that it was colonizing her made her feel nauseated. She decided she would not have been happily pregnant. Eventually she stopped and found herself a little too far from the settlement, although when she turned she could still see it. What she needed to do more than anything was to stop and take a look at her left hand.

  Not yet, though.

  “Yes, now,” she said aloud. She stared down at the back of the hand, balled into a fist, and turned it over and opened it.

  Her palm was unmarked. “Oh, God,” she said. She looked again. The redness was fading. She checked to see there were still rusty smears of blood on the gray of her sleeve and leg, and there were. When she took out the swiss again, there were pungent-smelling bloody fingerprints on its casing.

  If it was an hallucination, it was marvelous in its detail.

  27

  Hello Guv’nor.

  Long time, eh? I hope you’re okay. It’s hard to think of you still on duty out there somewhere. They’re all gone now: Bob, Ali, Dave the Ginger, Dave the Bald. I’m the last of the team left. I made it to Deputy Chief Constable of Wessex Metro. I saw CS2 on the news and none of the nurses here believed I’d served with you. If they have beer where you are, have one for me.

  Look after yourself, Guv’nor.

  Message to Supt. S. Frankland from Robert McEvoy.

  Please route via CommsOp Actaeon soonest.

  “We had a colony here, long before the fur-things came,” said the isenj. His damning tone didn’t appear to faze the ussissi interpreter, translating patiently on another screen while Eddie recorded. “We will not give up. This is ours.”

  The isenj was probably very old, Eddie decided. A patriarch. He had neither the animal charm of the ussissi nor the striking looks of the wess’har. He folded his long paired arms all around him like the skeleton of an umbrella, reminding the journalist of a dead spider in a bath, except spiders weren’t radially built, nor did they move in quite the same bizarre way isenj did. Eddie stared at the image. The creature’s jerky movements made it appear as if it were a film jumping frames.

  “Who are the fur things?” Eddie asked.

  “The wess’har. The ussissi. And you.”

  It was sobering to be on the receiving end of a blanket stereotype. “Tell me about the wars.”

  “Wars?” Patriarch shifted his weight, making rustling sounds. The superimposed frail voice of the ussissi translator made the image even more disorienting. “Isenj come back here from time to time to see if we can take back what is ours. We will not forget, ever, which is why we hold out. We need the planet. We are crowded. Why should we obey wess’har rules?”

  “What is it about the wess’har rules you don’t like?”

  “Easy for them to live generous lives and protect plants, animals, lands. They breed slow, they are few. They force their views on us. Why should we die to save plants?”

  The interpreter was doing an even-handed job, right down to conveying the stark syntax of the isenj language. This was television. This was what Eddie lived for. “What difference will humans make to all this? What do your people think now that we’re here?”

  “We may like you better as neighbors. We hear you breed faster than wess’har.”

  “That’s probably true.”

  “How many humans in your world?”

  “When I left, eight billion.”

  “You have more in common with us.”

  “We were looking for ways to stop our population growing.”

  “Yes. You did not have others choose that for you.”

  “Do you think the wess’har are trying to wipe you out?”

  “They try to stop us traveling and make us like them. Static. We are colonizers and explorers. If we could spread, no conflict.”

  “I didn’t think the wess’har carried out police actions other than on Bezer’ej.” He was careful to avoid the word peacekeeping. “Do they attempt to confine you to your homeworld?”

  “C’naatat. Hard to kill. Live forever, they say. Their killing forces. They will use them again.”

  “A myth,” the ussissi interpreter told Eddie after the interview was officially over. “The wess’har had small numbers but were—are—technically superior to the isenj. They killed millions. There was a story about wess’har who could not be killed, but that is the sort of propaganda you put out about yourself in time of war. And if you lose badly, sometimes you need to tell yourself the odds were unfair.”

  “It did the trick with that old boy,” Eddie observed. “He really hates them, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, isenj pass on memories. Hate is very abiding.”

  “Yet you can live there with them.”

  “We do not take sides. And the wess’har are still capable of coming to our aid if we were to ask for it.”

  Eddie thought of the immense, sky-blackening ships that made him feel as impotent as a caveman with a rock in his hand.

  “Are the wess’har a pain?”

  “Pain?”

  “Interfering. Annoying. Trouble.”

  “No. And if they are, it will not be because they have not warned you. What they say is what they do. There is no excuse for misunderstanding them.”

  “But they do carry out police actions to control isenj movements around Wess’ej and Bezer’ej.”

  “And sometimes beyond that in the past, yes.”

  “That implies a pretty aggressive policy.”

  “They do not interfere with other species unless they are threatened—or they want to stop others from being threatened. They think they have a duty to restore balance.
Balance is their soul. Balance and responsibility.”

  Eddie was searching for a one-liner out of habit. He was enjoying talking to the ussissi and trying to reconcile that appealing, thin little voice with the mouthful of tiny needle teeth. The creatures were furry but they were not at all cute. “Humans have rights, wess’har have responsibilities.” He laughed. “We had a man back home many years ago who wrote speculative books, a man called Wells, and he said journalism curdles all your thoughts to phrases. It’s true.”

  “I still do not fully understand the journalist. You are not just data interpreters.”

  Eddie thought of some of the worst excesses of his brief infotainment days: hell, no. “I like to think of us as real-time historians. No benefit of hindsight and the better for it.”

  After the link with the ussissi was shut, Eddie wished he had meant it. Historians didn’t have any responsibility other than to the truth. Everyone they could damage or destroy by their revelations was usually dead or past caring, and they could pick through a luxurious mass of information at a leisurely pace. Journalists made that ethical call on the fly, without the benefit of the full picture, and they could hurt the living. He’d done it often enough himself. Sometimes he had even regretted it.

  He thought again about the c’naatat. However bizarre life could be on an alien planet, this had to be a myth, and myths did not deserve to be propagated. If it wasn’t a myth—well, he hadn’t thought that one through.

  He continued packing and wondered about two things.

  He wondered if his first real-time report from Constantine had been screened yet. He had scooped himself, because the original was still heading home at light speed. It was a deliciously bizarre concept.

  And he wondered if Graham Wiley, a venerable 114 years old and in a care home, had received his greetings and the news that a greatly enlarged BBChan was rushing to schedule a prime-time Eddie Michallat series.

  Life was good. Weird, but good.

  Aras could hear Shan coming a full twenty seconds before his door burst open and she filled the doorway.

  He braced for a tirade, maybe even a blow. It was as bad as facing Mestin in one of her rages. Shan had a remarkable capacity to trigger all those primeval instincts that told him to submit to a female.

  She slammed the door shut behind her and took out her swiss. “Look,” she said, hoarse and shaking. “Look at this.” And she cut into the palm of her hand without flinching and held it in front of his face.

  Aras looked away. She grabbed his hair and yanked his head round. He froze because that was what the wess’har in him told him to do in times of danger, to keep very still and assess the threat. Before his eyes, the cut in her hand stopped bleeding and began to close.

  “Now tell me this was an accident,” she hissed.

  “You were dying, Shan Chail.”

  She let go of his hair. His scalp still hurt. “Did you even stop to think this through? Did you think what it would do to me, to my world?”

  “I have thought c’naatat through, believe me.”

  “What’s it going to do to me?”

  “I have no idea. But it will keep you alive.” He didn’t mean it to sound patronizing. She was torn between rage and terror, and he didn’t need to smell that to know what she was going through. “I’m sorry. I am truly, truly sorry.”

  “Just tell me why. The truth.”

  “Your injuries were so serious that you had no chance of survival.”

  “Don’t give me that crap. You’ve watched hundreds of humans die over the years and never intervened once.”

  “Perhaps that’s because no other human ever put their life at risk for me.”

  Shan sat back on the efte bench opposite him and stared down at clasped hands.

  “I’m never going home now, am I?”

  She was crying. There was no sound, no change of expression, but her eyes were glazed with tears that threatened to spill down her face. Aras suspected she was not the sort of human who wept easily.

  “No. You can never go back, Shan Chail.”

  “You know what I am now? The most valuable tissue sample in history. Pay dirt. Why didn’t you just let me die?”

  “Because it’s my fault that you were hurt, that you came here, that any of you came here. I won’t have you pay for my mistakes.”

  “Then what’s this?” She held out her hands. “What’s this if it’s not another of your bloody mistakes, eh?”

  “I’ll look after you. You needn’t be afraid.”

  “You bastard,” she said. “You stupid bastard.”

  She got up and walked out. It must have been scant comfort for her. At least his realization of what had happened to him had been gradual, at first just rapid recovery. He had already treated a cohort of wess’har troops with it before he noticed the changes his parasite was making, reshaping him with whatever genetic material took its fancy. He knew then that it needed to be kept isolated.

  But it was only when he realized how many of his contemporaries were dead that the full impact of it struck him, and he knew he had condemned his comrades not only to a sterile exile from their families but also to a lonely infinity.

  They had been angry, too. But at least they had known why it was necessary, and had had time to get used to it. You had to make sacrifices in war. They hadn’t recovered consciousness to find that someone else had made the decision for them in full knowledge of the consequences. No wonder she was angry as well as scared.

  It was getting warm in the chamber. Aras leaned across and opened the baffles of the ventilation grille, grateful for a draught of cooler air. It wasn’t the usual degree of fever that accompanied c’naatat activity, nor was he as hungry as usual, but something was happening in him.

  Whatever it was, however it was reshaping him, he had acquired it from Shan.

  Shan pulled on her gloves and fastened her jacket right up to her chin, careful to expose as little of herself as possible.

  The garment was definitely tight across the shoulders. And it hadn’t shrunk.

  She switched the swiss’ screen to the mirror setting and stared at herself, looking for telltale traces of alien appearance. There was nothing so far, other than that she looked—to herself, at least—more healthy than she had in years. But she knew how c’naatat behaved: it was only a matter of time.

  Tapeworm. She shuddered. No, it was more like being pregnant, except that she would never be free of this. If circumstances had been different, she would have asked Lindsay how she coped with something else living inside her. It was hardly the question to ask now.

  I could do something for David.

  The thought lasted less time than a blink. She recognized it for the sentimental insanity that it was. A pity that Aras hadn’t had that revelation too. And now she was scared, as scared as when she had first walked into a riot with a transparent shield that didn’t look as if it would stop the bricks and petrol bombs. She had a ritual for those times now. Ten deep, slow breaths. See yourself cutting a swath. They’re more scared of you, much more scared. Now walk.

  It worked for kicking down doors, buoyed up on a flood of adrenaline. For lying to people who trusted and relied on you, it was useless.

  She made sure Josh’s spare room was clean and tidy and began the walk back to camp.

  “Hey, you should have told us you were coming,” said Lindsay. She feigned cheerfulness but she didn’t look as if she had slept for a week. By the number of half-finished cups of coffee around the comms console, it seemed she had spent most of her time in the ops room. “You look a lot better.”

  “How’s David?”

  Lindsay’s mask slipped. “Not progressing as I’d hoped.”

  Don’t you start crying, Shan thought. It was a brutally selfish wish. She couldn’t do a damn thing and so she didn’t want to even think about it. It was bad enough being ambushed by the possibility that she could. Not that easy, then: and she suddenly regretted her outburst at Aras. He had made no choic
es that she hadn’t made herself, a very hard choice when both options on offer were bad.

  This was what it felt like to be on the receiving end of someone else’s morality. I’ve got what I deserved. She’d bloody well have to deal with it.

  “What else?”

  “Payload’s quiet, resending data home on Actaeon’s link.” A breath, no more. “Are you going to talk to Okurt? He’s that far from ordering us to detain you.”

  Shan’s stomach rolled over in panic before she realized that this was about Parekh. Relief—and relief was always relative, she thought—washed over her.

  “So what are you going to do?” Shan asked.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do? I know as well as anyone that you had to do it. And who’s going to believe me if I say you didn’t, and you were just covering for your wess’har friend? You were, weren’t you?”

  Shan ignored the question. “I’ve put you in a tight spot. I’m sorry.” There were many times when she didn’t like herself very much and this was one of them. The opportunistic side of her, legacy of her long-absent mother’s greedy sense of her own priority, surfaced and told her what a great break this was, what a fine piece of timing. “Tell him I’ve gone to see the wess’har matriarchs to try to open talks.”

  Lindsay began collecting the cups of cold coffee. “Right.”

  “I’m serious.” Yes, she was. She was going to do it, but not for talks. She was going to ask for asylum. Nobody could take her from the wess’har. Whatever happened to her as an individual, the c’naatat would be safe from human greed.

  Lindsay considered the idea. “He might buy that. I have to keep reminding him to call this planet Bezer’ej if he has any voice contact with the wess’har. He’s stopped calling it CS2 but he’s using the isenj name for it now, Asht. Not very diplomatic.”

  “As long as he doesn’t call Wess’ej CS3.”

  Lindsay put out her hand as if to touch her. Shan stayed out of range. “You take care, okay?”