City of Pearl (6 page)

“Usual reason. Saves energy, lets in enough light,” Josh said. “And we do get some ferocious gales round here sometimes. What do you think of our church, then?”

“Very impressive.” She recalled the inscription, a boast from the days of the Raj, when Europeans occupied India.
GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD'S WORK
. “A labor of love. Especially building it underground.”

“Local custom,” Josh said, a little awkwardly, and nothing more. He steered up a long ramp to the surface again. She looked back and found she could pick out the tops of submerged buildings catching light but otherwise as buried as missile silos. “Manufacturing plant is down there. The bot gear has lasted pretty well, but we don't use it all the time.”

The houses were more randomly dotted the farther they walked, and it was harder to spot them in the landscape because of that. It struck her that it might be a defensive precaution. If it were, then it was a defense against an airborne enemy who targeted by sight or by heat signature. Or maybe it was, after all, just a sensible way to build against the weather in this place.

“No unwelcome visitors?” she asked.

Josh's voice changed again. He wasn't very practiced at deception, that was for sure: she was on to something.

“Most of our visitors are very welcome,” he said. “Take a look at the doors when you visit one of our houses.”

Shan decided to drop the subject until later. It was the time for tourist questions about flora and fauna and weather. Whatever sore spot she kept touching, this was not the time to pick at it. And it was still not the time to ask about aliens.

She stood and looked out towards the horizon and saw a fertile land with a marbled blue moon hanging over it like a displaced Earth. And she saw a battlefield, too, because now there would surely be those who would want to leave Earth and come here. Not many would be able to make it, perhaps, but there would be enough of them to overwhelm the colony. It wasn't a thought she wanted to put out of her mind. The Suppressed Briefing wouldn't let her anyway. Perault's voice spoke of the need to preserve the colonist's mission.

Perault was almost certainly dead by now. The realization caught Shan unawares.

“The fields are out there,” Josh said, and brought her back to the here and now. The land sloped gently away from them, and she could pick out many little beige-clad figures scattered amid random patches of varied greens that abruptly gave way to the wild blues and ambers a long way in the distance. But fields meant horizon-stretching squares, one color per box, and lots of machinery. Her brain struggled to make sense of it.

“You'll have to forgive me. I can't tell what I'm looking at. I can't see boundaries.”

“There aren't any. We plant in small patches and combinecrops. We were persuaded against monoculture. There's a lot of soy down there, and wheat.”

“I'm impressed that you can grow crops in the open.”

“We can now.” Again, that slight pause before answering: maybe he had some biotech that he didn't want the commercial team stealing. “We can grow a great deal, some above ground, some below in hothouses.”

“Is that a uniform, this beige?”

“No, but we don't bother to dye work clothes. Indulgent trivia.” Josh pulled his coat out with both hands like an apron. “It's the natural color of the hemp fiber.”

“You're big on environmental protection, then.” The Suppressed Briefing filtered into her conscious mind again:
They took the world's most complete archive of plant and animal specimens with them
. “I think we have a great deal in common. Heard of EnHaz?”

“No.”

“Environmental Hazard Enforcement. It's a police function. It's what I do. Or at least it's what I do now.”

“It's commendable that people from your time treat despoiling the natural world for the crime it is.”

From your time.
Ah, that stung. Yes, she was dead as far as everyone she had ever known was concerned, killed by the one-way ticket of distance and time. She had a feeling that realization would start to eat at her.

“And I won't allow your world to be despoiled, either.” Poor Josh: he had his little paradise and now the secular, grasping, exploitative world had come bursting in on him. He had a right to be edgy. She began wondering how she would contain the research team.

By the time she had completed the circuit of the main settlement, her legs were demanding that she stop. She was wheezing; her eyes and nose watered with the effort. It was going to take some time to adjust to higher gravity and lower oxygen. A rotten combination, she thought, but as habitable planets went it was a remarkably close match to home. It wasn't methane and she was still able to lift her legs. Yes, it was close enough.

Josh led her down steps and into a subterranean hall of sand-gold stone. It was solidly quiet except for distant birdsong. The walls curved round her, and there appeared to be rooms off a hall that was large enough to accommodate seating and tables. It seemed to be the hub of a wheelshaped house.

Paper chains in muted colors hung in swags round the top of the walls, and there were those paper flowers everywhere. Some—less wonderful, less realistic—were evidently the painstaking work of a small child. There was no Christmas tree. But a waist-high plant in a large ceramic pot was decked with tiny glass globes in a riot of colors. Glassmaking was evidently the big art activity here.

“I take your point about insulation,” Shan said. “This is very peaceful.” She craned her neck up to the domed skylight, which took up the entire width of the roof. It was slightly opaque, and gave a soft shadowless light. “Is this carved into rock too?”

“Part rock, part soil. The facing is compacted earth. We sealed it with a sort of chalk.” He busied himself at a side table. “We have wine. Would you like some?”

She bit back her automatic refusal. “Yes,” she said at last, concentrating hard on diplomacy. “I'd love a glass. Thank you.”

She sat down on a padded bench at the table and watched him pour from a ceramic bottle. Courtesy told her not to examine the wine's color too closely. The glass that held it was shot with opaque swirls and would have disguised all visible shortcomings. It smelled faintly of raspberries and mint, and although it triggered half-memories that she couldn't pin down she knew they were genuinely distant, not obscured by neurotransmitter markers. She allowed herself a small sip. It was actually very pleasant wine, and the glass was beautiful. She thought glassware would be her lasting memory of Constantine. It was a transparent sort of place.

“What are your plans?” Josh asked.

“If you don't need assistance, we'll just carry out some surveys and perhaps catalog some of the flora and fauna.” The birdsong was beginning to distract her for some reason. “With your consent.”

“I'll discuss that with the council,” Josh said. “I don't think we'll have a problem with your people looking around. But we can't let you take anything that's alive.”

Shan paused. Constantine had its own values and rules, forged over centuries of isolation from human society. As taboos went, the request was at the pale end of harmlessness.

“Josh, do you have an ethical problem with native botanical samples?”

“As I said, nothing alive.”

She should have expected that. She hadn't. “Okay. Can they use any non-invasive techniques? Scans?”

“You're welcome to look around, and to learn. Stay awhile. But you mustn't interfere with this world, and you can't stay here.”

“Don't worry. We're all planning on going home. And we'll respect the fact that this is your world.”

“Not our world. Remember, we're all guests here.”

“I won't lose sight of that.”

“Would you like to stay for dinner? Many people will want to see you. Perhaps you would come to midnight Mass, too. I will understand if you find that inappropriate.”

“Paganism teaches tolerance, Josh. I'm not offended by difference.
Ere it harm none, do as thou wilt.
” She gestured with the glass as if she was really intending to drink it. The first rule of diplomacy was never to refuse food and drink; the second was to genuflect to the local deity. She could see no harm in being polite. “Just explain one thing for me.”

“I'll try.”

“I can hear birdsong. I shouldn't be able to, should I?”

“Blackbirds,” Josh said.

“From the gene bank?”

“No, it's a recording. Our forefathers missed birdsong most of all. Now, would you think me rude if I left you here for a while? I have to go and check on the flowers for the service. Help yourself to the wine. The kitchen's over there.”

Shan shifted uncomfortably on her seat. “And the bathroom?”

“That way.”

Either she had earned his trust or he had nothing worth stealing. That degree of naivety was as alien to her as the autumn-spring trees, but she confined herself automatically to hall and bathroom. It seemed churlish to help herself in someone else's kitchen even when invited.

Thetis
warranted a sitrep call, but that could wait until she had a tighter grip on her thoughts. She held the glass up to the light and admired the changing patterns and colors. Shame about the wine. She felt guilty peering down the stark lavatory bowl—opaque white glass, more a urinal than anything—to check that it was a safe place to dispose of the alcohol. Booze didn't fit into the working day, especially with a headful of SB. She found the flush button and watched the wine disappear.

The nonexistent blackbirds trilled. Constantine was beginning to feel good. It was certainly a town of craftsmen and -women who loved their workmanship, and it showed in the furniture and walls. The doors were perfectly planed.She ran her hand up and down the material—wood or composite?—and smiled at their smoothness.

And she noticed, after a while, that none of them had locks.

There had never been any need for maps. The bezeri had them, of course, but the detail was in the waters, not on the land. Aras still had an original bezeri chart, a lovely thing in colored sand pressed tightly between two glass-clear slices of azin shell. The green areas were peppered with swirls of depth markings and the gathering points of clans, named in light and color. But the mass of information ended at the brown areas, the Dry Above, the land masses unknown and largely irrelevant to the water-dwelling bezeri.

Sunlight filtered through the deckhead hatch of his craft and onto the galley table. He turned the azin-shell chart over and over in his fingers, letting the light dance on it. It was ancient: it had been made before even he had been born. He noticed that some of the painstakingly placed grains of sand and rock and luminescent microfossils had started to shift where the sheets of shell were beginning to warp from the dry air, releasing their tight grip on the sand layer. The map was shifting and breaking up. He blew a little puff of regret and laid it carefully on the table to avoid further damage.

It would never be made again. The bezeri had better technology now, knowledge from other worlds, courtesy of the wess'har. Azin shell was a poor substitute for glass and translucent composites. Its gradual deterioration saddened him.

The map is dying
, Aras thought.
I'll even outlive the map.

He was now the last of his squadron, and the last of his kind, and he didn't know if that was a cause for sorrow or not. Two hundred and seven killed outright in the war; sixty dead by their own hand, the only possible way for them to die, a sudden and explosive death a long way from where their tissue might pose a hazard. There was no return to the soil and cycle of life for them. And here he was, alive and resenting it, because Benjamin Garrod had stopped him choosing oblivion by telling him he had work to do, and that his life was not his own to take.

That was the problem with being burdened with scavenged human DNA. He never knew what was his own decision and what was done at the insistence of alien instincts. Humans had a strange relationship with death.

Aras gave the map a last glance, tucked it into his pack and began the journey back to the Temporary City, the garrison on Bezer'ej. It had been a long time since he had last visited but he owed them an explanation of what was now happening to the human enclave. Mestin's grandmatriarch had warned him the human species would take some managing, and so had her daughter after her, and now Mestin herself was quick to point out how right they had been. But there were so few of the new ones. There seemed little damage they could do in the time he would take to assess them.

But the pressure was growing. A temporary respite for thousands of endangered species had seemed a good reason not to let the colony perish all those years ago. Today, though, he had the feeling he had unleashed a tidal wave.

The sun had dropped closer to the horizon by the time he stepped from the human environmental zone and stood waiting by the shoreline for the bezeri pilot. The shallows were already dark, and sharp scents of decaying vegetation and salts drifted on the wind. He walked slowly up and down the pebbles, circling a route between the Place of Memory of the First and the Place of Memory of the Returned, shrines to the bezeri explorers who had beached their craft to explore the Dry Above.

The First had never returned, like many pilots; unable to propel their pods back into the surf, and fully aware their journey was one way, they were prepared to die to acquire knowledge. Aras felt inexplicably sad every time he passed the shrines. There was no reason to mourn that choice, because one thing bezeri and wess'har shared was an acceptance of endings, but their sacrifice had begun to depress him. Maybe he had spent too much time around humans.

These days the bezeri had better propulsion systems as well as a ready source of data from Aras's own people. If they beached themselves, it was through foolish adventuring. As Aras waited, the shimmering lights from the deep became brighter and danced a message of recognition.

Do you wish to travel?

Aras raised the signaling torch above his head and angled it onto the gently rolling waves: red, blue, ultraviolet, then green and ultraviolet together, in a set pattern that danced around the circular rim of the bowl-shaped torch.
Yes, I want to go to the Temporary City.

Reliable as ever, the bezeri vessel rose to the surface, breaking foaming waves across its back. There was always one around here somewhere at this time of day, patrolling in case any bezeri sightseers wandered out of their depth and became stranded in the shallows away from the sanctuary of deep waters. There were always a few willing to chance suffocation to get a closer glimpse of the Dry Above. The pilot risked air for a few moments to allow Aras to wade out and slide into the soft, translucent hull.

There are new ones here,
the pilot flickered, and wrapped his tentacles around the controls that pressed seawater from the propulsion system in a steady jet.
The sea tastes of burning.

Aras didn't reply until he had suspended his breathing enough to cope with the inrush of water. He turned the torch towards the pilot.
Yes, but not many. Rely on me. I won't allow the balance to be affected.

The pilot sent a rippling motion all the way down his six arms to the controls. Aras thought it interesting that softbodied, fluid beings like the bezeri should share the habit of shrugging with the humans, and with many of the same nuances of meaning. He leaned back as far as he could and concentrated on the sky that was still dimly visible through the translucent hull and the shallow water.

A beautiful pattern of conversational light patterns sparkled above him as a troop of bezeri strolled through the water enjoying the early evening. His was a lonely and frustrating life, made difficult by his parasite, his
c'naatat
,but there were also many advantages to the changes it had wrought in his body.

Concentrating on the ebb and flow of his breathing, he began to lower his rate of respiration, eventually suspending it completely. He could reduce his need for oxygen enough to travel with the bezeri in their own soft-shell ships. No normal wess'har could. It was a unique privilege.

C'naatat
had its compensations.

 

Shan stood leaning against the doorpost of Josh's home. She could hear a growing hum of voices. It was surprising how much you could hear, and how far, when there was absolutely no traffic or heavy machinery around. She had never experienced silence like this, and she thought it almost had a throbbing hum of its own—until she recognized the liquid rhythm as her own heartbeat in her ears. As the sun moved towards the horizon, the settlement began to take on new sounds. People were returning from the fields.

Josh appeared first, with a teenage boy, small girl and a woman his own age in tow. Like him, they were short and wiry, wearing functional work-clothes in varying shades of beige and cream, but the woman was more Oriental, and the children an attractive amalgam of both races.

“Superintendent, my wife Deborah, my son James, and my daughter Rachel,” he said, and swept his arm out to indicate them. They simply nodded at her, looking none too convinced that she was harmless, and Shan managed a pleased-to-meet-you nod. “We'll clean ourselves up, and then we'll make our way to church for the Christmas Eve service.”

“You're a police lady,” said the little girl.

“I am indeed,” Shan said.

“You're ever so tall.”

“Like my dad,” said Shan. She could get tired of this, and fast.

“Do you shoot people?”

Oh, God.
“Only when I have to.”

The child nodded sagely and skipped off into the house. “Don't mind me,” Shan said to Josh, whose expression had set in a carefully composed but shocked smile. “I'll take a walk, if that's okay. I know where the church is.”

“We should be an hour,” he said. “There's plenty to read in the vestry if you run out of things to do.”

Shan assumed the vestry was somewhere in St. Francis. She turned out onto the main path and passed people who acknowledged her but looked nervous. Word got round very fast here; she understood their anxiety. This was Earth as it should have been, at least at first glance. And she was Earth as it actually was. She decided she would not have been pleased to see herself under the same circumstances. The mission and the colonists might as well have been different species.

She wandered into St. Francis and tried two doors—both unlocked—before she recognized a data terminal and placed a cautious hand on the panel to try to activate it. In videos, technology always worked; in real life, interfaces were a lot less universal. She was still fumbling across the smooth surface trying to locate the controls of the archaic machine when the sound of people welled up from the passage.

The colonists were crowding into the main body of the church, and she slipped in behind them. They were pressed into each other, adults and children, yet there was only quiet patience and general good humor. This was not a subway crowd. She turned and saw Josh beside her.

“Is this your whole community?” she asked.

“Yes.” He was smiling a distracted sort of smile that was anchored in the event, not a friendly gesture to her. “Nobody would miss midnight Mass.”

Shan understood Christmas all too well. Solstice was the same. She thought of the early-setting sun, and the rush to get to somewhere truly ancient to mark it. She remembered the price hikes at hotels near Avebury and Stonehenge, and how everyone said they'd never do it again next year, because Solstice was getting too commercialized and all the wonder was going out of it. They started selling live mistletoe long before Samhain these days.

Or they did, she reminded herself. Seventy-odd years ago.

She settled back in the pew and noted that she had a very definite exclusion zone around her. It might have been that Josh's guests were spared the crush, or that the colonists still feared catching something from her. But she wasn't here to gain acceptance or fit in. It didn't matter. She was just passing through, doing a job.

Carols sprang from nowhere. The singing simply seemed to start up in one part of the church, and everyone joined in, worked through to the end and started on another. She felt able to study their faces; they were too caught up in their worship to mind. The racial makeup of the original landing party was evident, some people showing a single heritage and others appearing of mixed race. Christianity, for all its decline, still got around.

A black teenaged boy walked up to the lectern in the gangly and self-conscious way of growing lads and opened a huge bible of real rustling paper. He began to read aloud into a silence that was perfect. Not a cough or a child's fretting disturbed it.
But the lectern should be an eagle,
she thought. She had seen magnificent gilded lecterns in monuments and books, and they had always been eagles. This one wasn't. It was a winged creature, but nothing she had ever seen before.

The service had taken more than an hour, but she was only aware of the passage of time from the shrinking of two nearby candles. A wavering gonglike sound quivered on the air, then another on a higher pitch, then another, like someone playing a tune on a set of wineglasses. The colonists began turning to each other and embracing, shaking hands and kissing cheeks. “Christ is born,” they said. “Praise the Lord.” The greeting ran round the entire floor of the church. Midnight, then, and those strange plaintive gong sounds were bells. It was a definite, simple musical sequence. Josh appeared to spot her dawning recognition.

“Not exactly cathedral standard, but they do the job,” he said. “Glass. We don't have bronze.”

He pointed up, and Shan could see a dark gallery near the top of the vaulted roof where the dim light picked out a faint gleaming surface that shivered every few seconds as an unseen clapper struck it.

“There's something very perverse about glass bells,” she said. “Tempting fate.”

“Local glass is remarkably robust.”

“Well, a happy Christmas, Josh.”

“And you.” He paused, as if he'd made a mistake. “What should I wish you?”

Shan shrugged. “ ‘Blessed be' will do fine,” she said, and they shook hands hesitantly. She wondered if it had been wise to reveal her Pagan background, but Josh seemed to be taking it like a true liberal. Perhaps he actually understood what Paganism was.

The midnight meal was served in the refectory near the church. Smells filled the air, both richly familiar and foreign at the same time; spice and crisping oil merged with something perfumed and woody. The community sat down at long trestle tables and two adults from each collected serving dishes from a central table. Shan noted that they said grace in individual groups. They were a devout people, but pragmatic. The food was cooling fast, and a church full of people took a long time to seat, even in shifts.

The food was also not what she was used to. It wasn't entertainment; it was nourishment. There were soups and good chunky breads, and piles of starchy vegetables. Beans shimmered in an oil sauce. Most of the food was recognizably of earthly origin. And there was no meat.

She wondered at first if meat was simply a scarce commodity, but then it struck her that it might have been a deliberate omission. “You're a vegetarian community,” she said, and felt instantly embarrassed at her naivete. “I should have worked that out.”

Josh topped up her untouched wine and slid a jug of water beside it. “We found we could survive without taking the food animal embryos out of cryo. We came to know God intended us to live without killing.”

Shan nodded. If that was his rationale, fine. Lots of Pagans felt that way too. She seized the tenuous kinship. “You must have had a tough time of it in the early days. How did you get the crops to grow in the open? Everyone thought you'd fail if you moved beyond hydroponics.”