City of Pearl (10 page)

“Coincidence, then.”

“Happens all the time. And I'm along for the ride to ensure you carry on as you were—as far as I know.”

“I doubt that's going to be possible.”

“I'll level with you if you level with me.”

Josh walked on a little ahead of her in silence, head down and hands in the single front pocket of his smock, his thoughts almost visible. The colonists weren't poker players. “Superintendent, you've walked into a delicate political situation. That much I can tell you, and it's quite separate from any other concerns we might have. This planet belongs to the bezeri, that moon belongs to the wess'har, and the isenj make territorial claims here. So the wess'har have what you would call a military presence here to protect the bezeri, who can't defend themselves.”

“So where are they? Why can't I see evidence of them?”

“You're looking in the wrong place. The bezeri are aquatic. That makes fighting a terrestrial enemy pretty difficult—without some assistance, anyway.”

Shan tried to force some recall but there was nothing.

“Ah,” she said, “is this military presence something I should be worried about?”

“See the plain?” Josh said.

She looked around the unspoiled wild landscape. She could see nothing, absolutely nothing, except the alien scrubland. “Are they out there?”

“It's what's
not
there that matters. There was an isenj city out there once, coast to coast. Now there's not a single trace of it. The wess'har wiped it off the face of the planet. They don't bluff and they don't negotiate. Be mindful of that.”

It was hard not to. Shan stared at where the isenj town conspicuously was
not
.

Josh carried on walking. “Welcome to the front line, Superintendent.”

 

In the strip of thornbushes that separated the edge of Constantine from base camp, high voices carried on the breeze. There was laughter, occasional singing and the odd shout. The beings she was watching were about as alien as anything Lindsay thought she might encounter on another planet, and now she had one within her.

Those aliens—those
children
—were weighing and recording the boxes of kale and other greens, or at least the older ones were. The very young, who were evidently supposed to be learning to read an analog scale, appeared to lose interest from time to time and wandered off a few yards to poke in the dirt or examine something utterly fascinating in the bushes. Lindsay could hear an occasional rebuke: “John! Leave the flowers alone!” A serious-looking kid of about fourteen laid his board and stylus down on top of one of the crates and hurried over to the bushes to drag the errant John back by his hand. “If you pick the flowers, we won't have any berries later in the year. Now pack it in, okay?”

He seemed to be more able at parenting than Lindsay ever thought she could be. She flipped the long-distance visor up from her face and let the scene and the sound blur again. What the hell did you teach a kid? Where did you start? And was it fair to raise them here? No, of course it was fair for the colonists, but maybe not for her own. On the other hand, these were good healthy kids, and they weren't vandalizing anything or hanging round in gangs or running risks anything like a kid might face on Earth.

She had an inkling for the first time in her life that there might be something she wanted as much as a navy career, and maybe more. Now that the shock had started to subside she was mentally examining what it might be like to have a child.

After all, she wasn't on Earth. Had this all happened before her promotion board, she'd have taken that damn sub-Q and used it right away, as soon as she could, without a single backward glance. Now she was watching nice kids—not at all like Earth kids—behaving properly and doing something useful. Kids didn't necessarily mean chaos.

She flipped down the visor and watched a little longer. Every so often a couple of adults would walk up with crates of something and stack them where the boy was recording the yields. Other youngsters would put the boxes on a sack truck and wheel them away down the ramps, probably to some huge larder. An adult paused to play-chase one of the younger children, sending her running in circles and shrieking with delight before he scooped her up in his arms and hugged her.

No, I don't want you hanging round with boys. You'll end up ruining your life.
Her long-dead mother's voice rang silent but deafening in her ears: Lindsay, twelve years old, bewildered, trying to understand why skating with Andrew Kiernan would end in disaster.
If I hadn't had you, I would have been chief executive by now. Don't
make the same mistake as me.
The message, repeated often enough, eventually became clear: kids were bad, and, ipso facto, Lindsay was bad, and guilty of destroying her mother's career.

Lindsay never liked the idea of an afterlife, not if her mother was waiting there to remind her how far short she fell of her expectations. She wished she would stay dead instead of popping into her mind uninvited at the worst moments.

And now I'm me,
she thought.
I'll make my own mistakes
. Somehow the time and the distance made it much easier to settle on a course of action. She rolled the visor into a tight scroll and put it in her breast pocket, then ambled back to the base.

She could hear conversation in the mess but she walked quickly by the doorway and down the passage towards Hugel's cabin-cum-surgery. The hatch was open; Hugel wasn't there.

That was a relief, anyway. Lindsay took the unused sub-Q from her pocket and left it on the doctor's desk right where she would see it. It was easier than saying aloud that she had decided to go ahead and give birth to a child trillions of miles from home.

There were beetroot chips in a bowl on the refectory table. The greens on the menu were beetroot tops, and there was chilled sweet borscht to drink. If Shan had been in the mood, she could have added beet salad in vinaigrette and baked beets. Even the plain walls in Constantine's communal eating area had a rosy tinge to them.

“So beetroot does well here, does it?” she asked casually, and took a sip of the borscht. The purple earthiness of it was oddly addictive. She stirred in a dollop of soured soy cream. It was better than eating dry rations while the hydroponics caught up.

“Really well,” said Sam.

“Amazing what you can do with beets.”

“You haven't had the beet wine and the sugar beet yet.”

“The versatility of vegetables never ceases to amaze me,” Shan said, trying to keep a straight face. Once the earthiness had assaulted and overpowered her taste buds, she could taste all the other nuances in the various manifestations of
Beta vulgaris
.

The colonists wasted nothing and seemed genuinely thankful for what they received, just like they said in that prayer before eating. They were all just so damned
reasonable.
Her copper's gut insisted they really couldn't be as wholesome and blameless as they seemed. Christ Almighty, they were
people,
and people were basically bad, if bad was the easiest route through life. It usually was.

She chewed on a beetroot chip and watched the ebb and flow of colonists through the refectory, all colors, all ages. All they seemed to have in common was that wiry, worn-out-by-high-gravity look and the universal line in working clothes. There had to be some dissent, even in an ordered and closed community like this one.

“Do people here ever go off the rails, Sam?”

If she had thought the question would shake him, she was disappointed. He thought visibly, head slightly to one side. “How do you mean?”

“Sins. Crime.”

“Oh yes. From time to time.”

“I'm interested. I'm a police officer. What sort of crimes?”

“We've had thefts. Violence. Anti-social behavior.”

And that was all?
Pull the other one.
“And how do you deal with it?”

“Death,” he said.

“That doesn't sound very…um…Christian.”

“We turn the guilty person out of the community.”

“Oh,
spiritual
death. Excommunication.”

“No,
death
death.”

“How?”

“See how long you can survive off camp without support,” he said. “Brotherhood's a pragmatic thing, Superintendent. Rules hold communities together. Especially in a place like this. A thief can put us all at risk of starvation or disease in a bad year.”

“I'm reassured,” she said.

“And how about your people? What holds them together?”

“I've no idea yet. Maybe nothing at all.”

He topped up her beet juice and got up to go, giving her the first smile she'd seen him manage since her arrival. She smiled back. The world was back to the way she expected it to be, with all too few heroes, even in a village of saints.

She glanced at her swiss. Had this been Earth, it would have been New Year in an hour. But it wasn't Earth, and she had things to tell the marines. She walked around the compound, taking in the balmy spring night with its distant backdrop of wild alien sounds, and wondered if she should have briefed the troops separately.

No, they could all hear it at the same time. That way rumors didn't start and nobody would think they weren't getting the full picture. She made a conscious effort to brace her shoulders and turned to walk briskly into the mess hall.

Hall wasn't quite the word. The accommodation had been designed for exploration in places where air and power were at a premium, so the mess area was just enough to seat twenty people plus a display screen. She'd had bigger offices. She walked in on what should have been a party.

They were trying, she had to give them that. Marines and scientists were chatting politely with shatterproof mugs in their hands, forced by the size of the room into unnatural intimacy. It was as good a way as any to break the ice.

“Drink, ma'am?” asked Lindsay. “Just coffee, I'm afraid, until Eddie gets his home brew going.”

“I'll pass,” she said. “Everyone here?”

“Yes. Glad you could join us.”

“I've got something I need to brief you on.” She hadn't even raised her voice, but the hum of conversation stopped and faces turned towards her. “Maybe you'd all like to take a seat. This could take some time.”

The tables were refectory-style and she stood end on to them so she wouldn't have to talk to hunched backs. She needed to gauge their expressions.
I really ought to make this momentous.
But sometimes there was no ideal way to break that sort of news. She stepped off the precipice.

“My briefing indicated we might come into contact with non-human intelligence here,” she said, and leaned against the bulkhead, arms folded. “I can now tell you there are three alien governments with an interest in this planet, and I'm using government in the most general sense.” She fixed on a few faces: Barencoin was blank, Louise Galvin and Vani Paretti slightly slack-jawed. Eddie Michallat's lips were already pursing in an embryonic question. “At this stage, any first contact—if we have any—will be through the colony. Until we get better intelligence, just stick to the rules and don't go off camp without an escort. I'll tell you more when I know myself.”

The silence was predictable. It went on much longer than she expected, but she took care not to catch Eddie's eye and turn the moment into a news conference. He didn't butt in. Mohan Rayat fluttered his hand for attention. It was as if she had transformed them all into a class of timid and obedient children. She nodded in Rayat's direction, wondering if she had overdone the intimidation.

“Do you know what sort of aliens we're dealing with?” he said.

“One aquatic, for sure. Two probably not.”

“Oh, wow.”

Eddie finally cut in. “What do you mean by having an interest in this planet?”

Don't hesitate.
Was this the time to mention the obliterated isenj settlement? No. “The aquatics are the native species. Another species thinks it has a territorial claim here and the third is here in a peacekeeping role. If you go out and look at the moon when it's up, that's their homeworld.” She thought of the wilderness where the isenj settlement had once stood. “I don't know very much about them but I do know that they can and will remove us without a second thought if we offend them.”

“You know quite a lot, then.” Rayat was already top of her list of annoying bastards. “A lot more than us.”

“I know mainly what Josh Garrod tells me.”

“Can we request contact?” asked Galvin.

“I already have,” said Shan. “If it happens, I'll do it.”

“Do you have any contact training, Shan?” asked Hugel.

“None whatsoever.” The first-name familiarity rankled for a moment. She was
Boss, Guv'nor, Frankland—Shan
was strictly for friends and lovers, and not all of them at that. “Do you, Dr. Hugel?”

“No.”

“I'll just have to muddle through, then, won't I?”

“Can we carry on working as planned?”

“Yes, within the colony perimeter. It's clear enough to see. Beyond that point, a colonist will accompany you when you do eventually go out, and I'll decide when that happens. It's not only about having armed protection. It's also about having someone on board who knows the local conditions and can offer you helpful guidance about what you can and can't touch—advice that you will take, of course. In exchange, we'll do some work for them. They can't afford to lose manpower for long.”

“Jesus,” said Mesevy, wide-eyed.

“And that's one thing to avoid saying in front of them.” Shan turned to Lindsay. “Any problems?”

“I'd like to set up a defense perimeter, ma'am.”

“Okay, alarm only.” It would stop any unaccompanied excursions. She was more worried about that than the prospect of attack. “No countermeasures.”

“I think—”

“No countermeasures. And around the camp only. Take no risk of provoking an incident.”

Shan had expected more; more of what, she wasn't sure, but she had expected more of it. The group simply picked up their mugs and sipped distractedly. She had the feeling they would wait for her to go before reacting. She tended to have that effect on people. She turned to leave.

Eddie intercepted her. “I know this isn't a good time to ask you, but you know I'm a trained anthropologist, don't you? So I might be able to help with contact.”

“Thank you. I'll bear it in mind.”

“Can I file this story now?”

She considered it. “Go ahead. It'll be twenty-five years before anyone sees it.”

“Happy New Year, Superintendent,” he called after her. She wondered if that last reminder of their isolation had been a little brutal.

Too bad, she decided.

 

Lindsay briefed the marines carefully. They were not to let the payload take any live samples or damage anything, not even a leaf. Rock was okay. As long as they were sure it was rock, that was.

“How will we know, Boss?” Barencoin asked. He was dark enough never to look clean-shaven; a few nicks on his cheek were witness to a recent attempt to keep the beard under control with an unfamiliar mechanical razor. “We haven't a clue how they do their work. We didn't train for that.”

“Well, improvise. If they pick anything up, they put it back,” Lindsay said. “Haven't you heard the countryside code? Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but memories.” The rest of the detachment laughed heartily. “Seriously, they mustn't kill or damage anything. That includes picking plants. Frankland says they can do non-invasive scans.”

“Yeah, I heard. The payload said she was mad. I reckon we're going to have our hands full enforcing that.”

“I can understand they're hacked off at not being allowed to run loose and take what they like. But the situation's different now. We're in a potential war zone, and two of the hostiles have space travel and probably know where Earth is. I don't have to draw you a picture and color it in, do I?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Get to it, then.”

If only it had been that simple. Rayat, the pharmacologist, was already engaged in a quiet argument with Sam. He wanted to try to propagate any pharmaceutically interesting plant he came across. Sam was refusing. The two men stood very close to each other, almost head-to-head at the top of the main ramp down into the colony.

“I don't see how propagating a plant harms it,” Rayat said. “I didn't come twenty-five light-years to take pictures.”

“This is still taking live samples,” Sam persisted.

“How am I supposed to work? Painting watercolors of new plants went out with Tradescant. We need to examine them.”

Lindsay made a deliberately noisy approach towards the two men. It didn't seem to distract them from their confrontation. She had to step in.

“Dr. Rayat, perhaps you'd like to gather your colleagues and meet me in the mess hall,” she said. “I'll be happy to brief you all on the procedures we've agreed to follow.”

Rayat gave her a look that said he had not been consulted on any agreement. Civvies thought everything was up for negotiation. She wanted to disabuse him of that notion very quickly.

“Ten minutes,” she said, and withheld the
please
with relish. She didn't care for Rayat.

In the mess hall, all eight payload were sitting quietly at the two long tables with varying degrees of resentment on their faces. Shan was already there, her backside perched on the edge of one of the storage bins, arms folded across her chest. She was still wearing that multipocketed vest over her fatigues, and there was a definite metallic composite object visible from beneath it. She was armed. Given the instruction to be discreet about weaponry, Lindsay thought it was a singularly provocative gesture but said nothing. Shan acknowledged her with a nod.

“We're all here, then,” Lindsay said.

“Yes, miss,” said Champciaux, and some of them laughed. If he'd had a full head of hair he would have been handsome, she decided. “Present.”

“Okay, then, let me outline the agreement to you. It doesn't mean you can't derive some worthwhile data from this mission. The native species and their allies here appear to be very sensitive indeed about taking biological samples, so we have to respect that. You can observe what you need to, and the, er, wess'har representative—that's our alien neighbor—has agreed to supply data on native flora and fauna.”

“What sort of data?”

“I don't know. We'll find out.”

“Can we go out into the natural habitat yet, though?”

“Soon. But you will have an escort with you at all times.”

“For our safety?”

Shan stood upright with a deliberate slowness and walked across to stand near Lindsay, but she said nothing.

“To ensure you don't breach te guidelines and to reassure our hosts,” Lindsay said, picking up from the pause. “I appreciate it's a very restrictive way of working, but our safety could depend on it.”

Rayat and Hugel exchanged glances. “We've come 150 trillion miles to a unique habitat. Don't you think we need to achieve more than to see a few picture postcards?”

Shan cut in. “Okay, Dr. Rayat, what do you want to find out? The pharmaceutical value of native plants? There's a database of chemical compounds you can access.” She took her swiss from her pocket, flicked a pin and a plasma screen spread into life between two cursors extruding from one edge. She read something from it. “I have here a summary of a natural history database that shows you just about everything on the planet that's of note.”