City of Pearl (29 page)

“If I had honored that tenet then none of you would be here now. If I had stood back and let your forefathers die, there would be no
Thetis
or
Actaeon
here now. Think on that,
gethes.
”

Aras swept out. He was halfway up the steps but he still heard Josh calling after him. “What will you do if she can't live with it, Aras? What will you do then?”

Humans often said by way of apology that they hadn't meant to say cruel things. Aras had meant every word. Every human was
gethes
to him right then, except Shan.

Back in his chambers, Aras took Black and White from their nest of shredded linen in the alcove and held them in his arms. They were warm and sleepy: White yawned and stretched luxuriously with both paws, then arranged himself across Black and went back to sleep.

While Aras was fond of them, he didn't want the
c'naatat
to scavenge any more interesting DNA. He kept his gloves on. He knew very little about rats.

He wondered now how much he knew about humans, too. There was no way of telling how
c'naatat
would express itself in a human host. It might just repair damage or it might indulge in grandiose, never-ending genetic reconstruction schemes, as it had with him. Whatever it did,
Shan Chail
now shared with him a common genetic ancestry, and he with her. All the creatures that had hosted his
c'naatat
before it encountered him were now part of her: all her lungfish-lemur-monkey ancestors were his.

She was even closer than friends, than family. She was in his blood.

 

Lindsay peered round the door of Josh's spare room.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

Shan looked up from the screen of her swiss and got up to greet her. “Bored shitless. Hey, it's good to see you, I—”

Lindsay stepped back, hands held out as a barrier. “Josh said you might have an infection. No offense. But David. You know.”

Shan felt instant regret. Deborah had kept her informed of the infant's lack of progress. It reminded her how very far they were from Earth and the safety net of hospitals. “Sorry. Yes, I'm still running a temperature. Is there anything I can do? That's pathetic, I know. I'm not very good at this sort of thing.”

“The longer he survives, the closer he gets to forty weeks. No change isn't bad.”

“I don't know how I'd cope if I were you.”

“You'd cope. Believe me. Anyway, you look pretty good for someone who's been shot in the head.”

“Nobody's more surprised than I am. I'd really like to get back to work.”

“And have Kris Hugel crawling all over you? No, stay here as long as you can. She's mad with curiosity about wess'har medical techniques since Ade Bennett said how bad the wound was.”

The faintest grumble of an inner voice—a copper's instinct—made Shan feel uneasy and she wasn't sure why. Maybe it was her Pagan background, her mistrust of unnatural science, that was talking. “If she comes anywhere near me with a probe she'll be wearing it for a suppository,” she said, and smiled. “Tell her that from me.”

“Anything you need?”

“Has
Actaeon
responded on the evac request yet?”

“Consulting. I imagine they're trying to work out how they convince the isenj we're not wess'har mercenaries.”

“I bet Commander Okurt would still like a word with me about Surendra Parekh.”

“I told him to piss off.”

“Thanks, but I can face that one myself.”

“And Eddie sends his best. He did a live real-time broadcast from Constantine, and he's as pleased as a dog with two dicks.”

“Yes, I got the live news feeds, thanks. Earth doesn't look like home anymore, does it?”

“Things change in seventy-five years. I'd better be going.”

It was a strange kind of quarantine. Shan took a walk round the perimeter and decided she was indeed remarkably fit for a woman with a hole blown in her head. If it hadn't been for the constant hunger and the mild fever she would have pronounced herself fit, but Lindsay was right about Hugel. If Aras had employed wess'har technology to treat her injuries, it was a good reason to stay clear of the doctor. There were too many things to be unleashed here. And they were probably days away from being evacuated, just days from withdrawing from this world without her very worst fears being realized.

Days away from leaving Aras for the last time, too.
The thought had upset her before and it disturbed her now. She had become too attached to him. He was all the things that had kept her in the police when she could have left: belonging, loyalty, family, purpose. She wondered where the next meaning in her life would be found, if anywhere.

For a moment she wondered about
c'naatat
. No, that was crazy. She knew Aras too well. He would never go that far.
Kill me if I might lead them to it,
she'd said. And he would, too.

She watched a group of rockvelvets sunning themselves and thought that it wouldn't have been so bad to have spent a little longer here. It struck her how beautiful they were; despite their eating habits, she found their slow black progress hypnotic. A couple of them lounged on a nearby rock, overlapping slightly as if they were holding hands.

She had never noticed the concentric pale rings on them before. Maybe it was their breeding coat, or gender, or age. And then there were the
alyats
. There was one hanging from a tree like a discarded but glamorous plastic bag, a fabulous peacock-blue sheet of gossamer waiting to drop on an unsuspecting meal walking beneath to smother and digest it.

She had never seen one that color before.

Bezer'ej was full of things you could see right through and yet not see at all.

It had been years since Aras had gone hunting isenj with quite this degree of anger.

“You don't have to do this,” he said.

Bennett was keeping up with him remarkably well, barely breaking a sweat. “No problem, sir. I have to assume they're a risk to our personnel now, whatever
Actaeon
's decided.”

“But you leave things to me. Is that understood?”

“As long as you're upright, sir, it's your call. If they drop you, all bets are off.”

“I think that's fair.”

“Shouldn't we be keeping silent, sir?”

“I want them to find me. Even more reason for you to leave me to do this.”

Isenj weren't stupid. The first party had tried to lure him with human bait and got it badly wrong: the others would not be so rash. He had hoped he could rely on the bezeri to tell him if they detected traces of isenj waste in the shallows, but the pollution from three or four of them would have been too scant and too slow-moving even for a bezeri's sensitive biology to detect.

Besides, the bezeri had gone deep. There were hardly any lights visible now.

“What is the name Eddie calls me?” Aras asked, eyes fixed on the skyline. A flight of handhawks had caught his attention. Perhaps they had been disturbed by isenj.

“I don't think he means it, sir. He certainly didn't use it in his broadcast. In fact, he didn't mention you at all.”

“The name.”

“The Beast of Mjat.”

“This is how you refer to war criminals.”

“It's just journalists, sir. You know how they are.”

“You know why the isenj want me.”

“It's none of my business.”

“Do you know how long ago this was?”

“Does it matter?” Bennett was a man who stuck to his own business, which was soldiering. Aras respected him for that too. “We'll never understand it and you don't have to explain yourself to us.”

“You have a commendable grasp of diplomacy.”

“I'm just a bootie, sir. They load me with kit and point me in the right direction and I do whatever needs to be done.”

The handhawks had settled again at a distance. Aras stopped to listen. So did Bennett. The marine checked his palm to read the living light grown into it, as magically illuminated as any bezeri.

“There you go,” he said. He held his palm out. “Three targets heading our way, fifteen hundred meters. On this heading, we should intercept right
there.
”

“Find some cover.”

“If you're planning an ambush—”

“No. I just want you safely out of the way. Don't die here. I would rather see you live to go home and find a female and raise offspring for her.” Bennett stared at him, clearly offended. Of course: this was the
gethes
who needed to defeat his fear afresh every time.

“What if you have to take prisoners, sir? Wouldn't you like a hand?”

Aras transferred his
gevir
to his right hand and pulled out the knife from his belt. For a harvesting tool, a
tilgir
was extremely adaptable.

“I am wess'har,” he said quietly. “We do not take prisoners.”

 

The church of St. Francis seemed as good a place as any to sit and think. Nobody asked what you were doing there, and nobody looked at you. Shan sat in a pew right at the front just letting her mind wander. She checked her swiss. There were still no messages. Sooner or later she would have to get back to camp, Hugel or not.

And
Actaeon
or not.

She wouldn't have blamed the resident god for ignoring her, especially as she hadn't wholly—or even partially—accepted he might exist. So if he wasn't going to do it she would judge herself.

She felt no regret for Parekh. She couldn't allow herself to. The moment she started thinking that humans were special and anything they did was okay, then she was no better than Parekh or any colonial governor who counted a native's death as less serious than a white man's.

Shit, she had only come for the damn gene bank. And now she couldn't recover it and return it to the government of the day, because there were no Peraults left to defend it, just men and women who couldn't even maintain a defense force now without relying on the largesse of corporations. It had waited centuries. It would have to wait a few more.

I could have retired after this. I could have gone home
. But what would be happening to the bezeri, and Aras, and Josh while she lived out her days 150 trillion miles away?
When I look up at the sky and try to find Cavanagh's Star, how will I stand not knowing what's happening there?

There would be consequences to face for the business with Parekh, and although Shan had never walked away from responsibility, that just didn't seem fair right then.

Staying here was crazy, a fantasy.
Go home and face what's coming to you.
And home—home would be no less alien than here. She would be more than a century out of time.

Oh shit.

It was chilly in St Francis's. The plain's notorious wind had come up suddenly, poking angry cold draughts under the doors even at this depth. It was probably going to be a bright, blustery day.

Shan pulled her coat round her and noticed for the first time how uncomfortably tight it was becoming.
That's what you get for stuffing your face all last week.
Early light was beginning to illuminate the stained-glass window, picking out a black-lined coloring-book image of a lean man in a bronze-brown robe. It was a very fine window and it had lost none of its majesty from the first time she had seen it and stood amazed before it.

Around St. Francis creatures that she recognized and creatures that she did not were gathered at his feet and seated at his side. This time she felt it was important to commit them to memory. She would never see them again. There was a European robin, very skillfully rendered, and an
udza,
a rockvelvet, and a handhawk. And there were things she had only seen in Aras's library.

Aras, she thought. Of course: Aras showed them how to make better glass. He would have added images of creatures from home, too.

That made her smile, and it hurt. The light was brighter now. People would be waking, and she would have to go even though right then she would have been content to stay there for eternity. She allowed herself a few more moments to drink in the now vividly transparent beauty of the window.

She'd never studied it like this before. She wished she had, because it was calming, beautiful and timeless. It transcended faiths and divisions. It had meaning. The more she stared, the more detail she found: the shaft and vanes in each feather, the pale rings on the rockvelvet, the slightest gray-blue border to the robin's red bib. The shading and detail was in the glass itself, not in the leading. It was breathtaking. The rainbow of light cast a distorted ghost of the window at her feet and draped itself across the altar.

And St. Francis—there was real compassion in that lined face and more than a little weariness. He looked every inch a man who had turned his back on privilege and comfort because nothing mattered more to him than what he believed in. He would have had no trouble understanding why an alien life counted as much as a human's. It was a damn shame he wasn't commanding
Actaeon
right now.

As she stared at the figure of the saint, she wondered why she had never noticed that his halo was such a fabulous blue. It wasn't just a single color. It was peacock and cyan and violet, every blue she had ever seen, and she felt she could actually taste the colors pressing at the roof of her mouth.

She moved her head, taken by surprise at the intensity of the synesthesia. The colors flooded into gentian. She was sure the halo had been plain milk-white before.

It had.

Her memory for detail had been honed by a hundred crime scenes, a thousand interviews.
The most wonderful blues and mauves, but not to human eyes.
That's what Josh had said. And she had thought of angels, nothing more.

Now she knew whose eyes he had meant.

And anyone who could see those colors was no longer wholly human.

“Oh
shit,
” she said.

 

Shan was built to cope. She liked crises: they were clean and fast and she didn't have to spend time planning and justifying and persuading. She acted. It was what her brain was wired for.

Even so, this new crisis—for she was certain it was one—was moving too slowly for her. She walked as briskly as she could without breaking into a run along the passages of Constantine and up the ramp into the raw day. She was on the main route out of the settlement, staring at the sunlight as it made brilliant blue bubbles out of some of the home domes visible on the surface.

Oh yes, they were blue. And they had never been blue before.

The fields were south of her; she headed north through the bio-barrier and out onto the plain.

She kept looking at her hands. She had no idea why
c'naatat
should have manifested itself there, but if there was anything of her that spoke of humanity, it was her hands. She understood why medical students said they were the most disturbing parts of the body to dissect. They were more familiar than your own face, unique in a way that organs and muscles and bones didn't seem to be.

Her hands still looked pretty average.

Maybe she was jumping to mad conclusions. There might have been a perfectly banal explanation, but as soon as she thought that she knew it wasn't true, she broke into a stumbling run.

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.