City of Pearl, Page 2

  How could I have known? She didn’t sign. But she knew now, and she had gone on knowing every day ever since, and the shame and regret had not faded any more than had the blinding, personal revelation that there was a person behind those ape eyes.

  The gorilla was gone and lime-green shiny marshals were working their way, hand over hand, up the gantry to the next mooring. Mars was as red as Australia. She had forgotten how much color there was to see in space.

  And I’m going home.

  For a moment she wondered who would worry about the people behind ape eyes when she had retired, and hoped that it would be McEvoy.

  She unpacked her grip almost without thinking. She had been living out of it for the last ten years, and her life could fit into it with room for a dress uniform, personal library and her own steel mug with a carabiner for a handle. Just running her hand over the grip’s taut-stretched navy blue fabric would tell her if she had forgotten anything, and she hadn’t. She didn’t forget things. There was one extra item wedged in the shockproof section: a two-centimeter-square case that would have rattled if she hadn’t packed wadding into it to stop the seeds inside it giving the game away.

  Technically, the tomato seeds were illegal biomaterial, but she was EnHaz, and nobody would stop her. Anyway, she no longer cared. It wasn’t a contamination risk. But she was damned if one more agricorporation was going to tell her what she could plant and grow and eat. All seed varieties were the patented property of a company; so her own crossbred tomato plants, reared on a windowsill from carefully hoarded seeds, were unregistered. Technically, it was an act of theft.

  Technically.

  She tucked the seeds deep into the folds of her cold-weather suit at the bottom of the grip. In a few months, maybe, she’d have the first plants growing in her own plot, somewhere out of the way where there were no Gene Inspectorates or patents or licensed crops. She thought of the hairy green leaves and their pungent cat’s-pee scent, and saw her father carefully tending a straggly plant in the windowsill high above her head. He looked down at her. Never lose touch with what you eat, sweetheart. Touch the soil. Embrace it.

  He never did. The best that her apartment-bound family could do was visit friends with a smallholding. And then her father was dead. At least he had finally embraced the soil.

  Oh, Dad.

  McEvoy appeared at the open door. “Bingo, Guv’nor,” he said. “Rummage One’s located a grade-A biohaz containment area. You okay?”

  She snapped alert. “Well, they couldn’t exactly hide something the size of a warehouse up here, could they? Any indication what it’s busy containing?”

  “It’s not a new flavor of soda, that’s for sure.”

  “Ah, joy upon joy unending.” She opened the secure link on her swiss, flicked the keypad and gave him a wink. “I feel an order for suspension of government licensing coming on. There.” She tapped SEND. “That’ll get their attention.”

  McEvoy sagged visibly against the frame of the hatch. “Come on. You know this is pissing in the wind. They’ll be back on agriweapons and god knows what as soon as they’ve paid the fine and sacrificed a few executives. Companies are bigger than governments.”

  “Maybe. But this’ll cost them in lost production. Put a crimp in their bottom line. Let them know the electorate isn’t going to lie down without a struggle.”

  “There’s times when I really understand eco-terrorists.”

  She paused. “Me too, son. Me too.”

  Oh yes, I understand them all right. Was McEvoy trying to say he knew the gray areas in which she worked, that she had her deniable connections, and that it was okay by him? He wouldn’t have been the first. In a way, it helped to have those rumors flying round. Thwart EnHaz, and you’d find yourself dealing with people who worked well outside the law to express their disapproval of environmental tinkering. Governments had always made use of cheap, effective terrorism when it suited them. It certainly suited her.

  “Want a look round?” McEvoy said.

  “Okay.” Shan slipped on her uniform jacket and pulled on the boots that anyone could hear pounding down a corridor. She waited to follow McEvoy down the passage.

  “After you,” he said.

  “No, you go ahead,” said Shan. “Clear a path for me, eh? Be the ice-breaker.” She knew she looked like bad news. It was something you could learn to do. Her old sergeant had taught her twenty years ago to never step aside and never break eye contact, and it worked as well as it ever did. McEvoy swung through the hatch leading off to the containment area, and they were suddenly facing a small group of technicians in pale green lab suits.

  The techs were leaning against the bulkheads or had their backsides perched on sills. A couple of them straightened up as she approached. They all looked her over, and she looked at them. They looked away first.

  “It’s just weed control,” said one. “We’re working on Chenopodium strains.”

  “I haven’t cautioned you, so perhaps you’d like to save it for the interview,” Shan said. “But it’s useful to know it’s Chenopodium, seeing as that’s also a food staple in some areas, and your organization does have some track record in contaminating crop species.”

  “Hey, Warrenders wiped out the opium poppy.”

  “Yeah, and spelt, and non-GM millet. Like I said—I haven’t read you your rights yet. Save it for later.”

  She walked away, leaving a hard silence and then a hum of hushed voices behind her. The word “unaltered” filtered through. She was glad they could see that she was one of the few with plain old unaltered human genes. It would psych them out a little further, that hint of wildness and savagery. It was no more than her mother’s Pagan distrust of any medical treatment involving gene therapy, but it had its propaganda uses. McEvoy brushed against her arm.

  “Well, that confirms the Foreign Office suspicions,” he said. “Maybe they are developing a crop killer for some tinpot government.”

  “Could just as easily be our own.” She found it harder than ever to ignore the closed hatchways flanking her while she walked. To McEvoy, they were probably still just closed doors. To her, there was always something behind them, something disturbing and brutal and sickening. She wondered if she’d ever look at doors and see just openings again. There were always things behind them and once you saw what was there, you could never shut them again, not even with plenty of alcohol. They would always be as laden with sinister meaning for her as kitchen knives and cleaning fluids.

  “Bet you’ll miss all this,” said McEvoy.

  Shan shook her head. I want to be like other people. I want to look at ordinary things and not see all the pain that they can cause. “I don’t think I’ll be able to miss it at all.”

  “You could get a lot more pension contributions out of private security work, you know.”

  “I’m not interested in watching anyone else’s arse any longer. Not even for a better pension.”

  “Not the smallholding thing, Guv?”

  “I kept saying I’d get a life one day, and now I’m going to do it before I’m too old to bloody well enjoy it.” She thought of her tomatoes. It was reassuring trivia—trivia, the details other people didn’t want you to look at, the clues, the building blocks, the very texture of life. But yes, she would miss the family of uniform. And getting by financially was a concern. “Don’t forget that, Rob. You think you’ve got all those years ahead of you but they get eaten up fast. And you with them.”

  She wanted to explain to him about all the corners she had cut and all the gray areas he would have to make black and white when he succeeded her, but her swiss chirped in her pocket and saved her from regret. She flipped it open and checked the message. “Well, the Foreign Office has a team inbound. They could have said so before we embarked, couldn’t they? I hate joint ops with civvies.”

  “How long?”

  “Eight hours.”

  It was typical of another department to do this without telling EnHaz. Shit, they probably set o
ut at the same time as she did. She concentrated on the prospect of signing out of the service and made her way back to her cabin. As she walked—and it was a long walk following the central ring of the orbital—she passed the occasional station worker who hadn’t been confined to quarters. Sometimes they stared and sometimes they just looked away.

  It was definitely time to pack it all in. Staying objective was getting to be a struggle these days. She shut the hatch and loaded her music library into the swiss before flopping onto the bunk the wrong way round so she could stare like an astonished child at the face of Mars.

  There was a chirp from the swiss. She opened her eyes, closed them again, and then there was an insistent knock at the hatch. “Bugger,” she said. The clock read 2017. She’d slept far too long. When she opened the hatch, there were two men at the threshold. They weren’t company security muscle and they weren’t police, but they slotted into their plain suits like men who had no other existence beyond their jobs, no messy home lives, no other role as daddy or darling or son. If they turned round, she expected to see voids where their backs should have been. “You’re early,” she said. “Are you taking over jurisdiction now?”

  One of the suits—very young, thinning blond hair—glanced over his shoulder; the older man blocked the hatchway. “This is nothing to do with your investigation, Superintendent Frankland,” he said. “Foreign Minister Perault is here to see you.”

  Perault. Eugenie Perault was a politician she had never met, another familiar two-dimensional player from a newscast without a family or a back to her head. Maybe this was a job offer. “I don’t work for the Foreign Office,” Shan said carefully.

  “This is a Key Task,” said Blond Suit, somehow adding capitals to his pronunciation.

  “As of next month, I don’t work for anyone anymore. I’m retiring. I’m going home.”

  The two men looked embarrassed. Whatever they were, they weren’t used to debate. “I’m sorry, Superintendent, but when a government minister travels this far to brief you, I really think you should hear her out.”

  Ah, McEvoy and his pranks. A retirement joke. “Oh, okay. Funny. Can I go now?”

  Older Man ignored her politely. “May we show her in?”

  Blond Suit stepped forward; Shan stiffened. He was a few inches shorter, and she was surprised that she had already sized him up for a fight. It had been a long time since she’d had to do that sort of policing. His face was apologetic, bewildered. Something was half hidden in his hand, and it wasn’t a gun. It was a sub-Q drug cartridge.

  “This isn’t a joke, is it?”

  “No, ma’am.” He stepped back and Eugenie Perault appeared beside him as if she regularly dropped in unannounced on space stations.

  “Minister,” Shan said. It was funny how the words came. The thoughts weren’t there at all. But she kept her eyes on the sub-Q. “This isn’t what I was expecting.”

  Perault, all clipped gray hair and unnaturally uncreased fatigues, stared up at her. “I never leave a difficult briefing to others.” She looked over her shoulder at the suits, a silent prompt to leave and close the hatch behind them. The two women stood facing each other.

  “Frankland, you’re not going to like what I have to say, so I’m saying it as briefly as I can. We need you to…shall we say, supervise a sensitive mission.”

  “I’m released from duty next month, ma’am.”

  “We’ve had to override that.”

  “You can’t. I was conscripted, and my conscription has already been renewed for the maximum period. I should have been out ten years ago.”

  “I’m really sorry about that. But we can. Emergency powers.”

  “Oh, terrific. Okay. How long is this going to take?” I want to go home. I need to go home. “A couple of months is—”

  “A hundred and fifty years. That’s how long the return journey to Cavanagh’s Star will take.”

  Shan heard the words. But they served only to split her into two parts, one part retrieving information about Cavanagh’s Star and intrigued by the invitation, the other part screaming no, no, no. It triggered a reaction in her over which she had no control. She heard her other self ask a sensible question while her core being shrieked how unfair it all was. “What’s important about Cavanagh’s Star?”

  “Constantine colony,” said Perault

  “Constantine was lost.” Everyone knew that. It was history now. “At least it wasn’t taxpayers’ money.”

  “It might have been lost, or it might not. A joint government and commercial reconnaissance mission is about to launch and I need a government representative there who isn’t afraid of hard decisions.”

  “So they’ve found it?”

  “We have better data now that suggest the planet is economically and environmentally viable for humans.”

  “But have they found the colony?”

  Perault gave a little twitch of the mouth, a reluctant sad smile, and Blond Suit came into the cabin, this time with the sub-Q openly in his hand. “You’ve experienced a Suppressed Briefing before, Frankland? I know you Pagans tend not to like pharmaceuticals.”

  Shan stared at the sub-Q, and then at Blond Suit’s rapid blinking: well, at least she’d rattled him. “I have.” Suppressed Briefings were expensive. The drug cost more to keep under lock and key as an exclusive government resource than it did to produce. Under its influence, she would understand what she was being told, and her compliance with the instructions would be voluntary, but she would not consciously recall what information she’d been given until circumstances triggered its release. The one time she had worked under it before had been unpleasant, frustrating, like having a name on the tip of your tongue the whole time.

  Shan didn’t like her subconscious holding the reins. But the stuff did the job. She would have to trust it again, and reluctantly.

  “It’s that serious, then?”

  “It’s important enough for you to be given extended pension rights.”

  “How extended?” When retirement meant sixty or more years, that mattered. “Until I return?”

  “Until you return. But you can make up your mind after you’ve heard what I have to say. Suppression doesn’t remove your ability to refuse the mission, remember.”

  Shan did not believe in gift horses. She rolled up her sleeve and offered her arm to Blond Suit anyway. The sub-Q popped slightly against her skin and her ears began buzzing. She sat down.

  Her swiss chirped: it was 2030.

  The buzzing in her ears stopped. She looked up. The display on the wall said 2103, and Blond Suit was carefully wrapping two sub-Qs in foampak. She’d had the stopper, then—the second phase of the drug that brought her into the conscious now, and sealed whatever had been said to her into the retrievable past.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Shan said. “Of course I’ll go.” It felt good and right. Whatever had been said, it had persuaded her, and thoroughly. When she tried to recall it—and not trying to recall was like ignoring an itch—it left her tasting worry, determination and a disturbing guilt.

  “You have a detachment of Royal Marines, Extreme Environment Warfare Cadre, as support.” Perault held out a ten-centimeter wafer of data pack. Shan, numb but still functioning, automatically took it. “The briefings in here are unclassified. The ship is the Thetis, and the civilians and EEWC have been embarked in chill-sleep, so I’m afraid you won’t have the chance to talk to them for another seventy-five years.”

  “I haven’t got a clue how to command marines. I nick people. That’s about it.”

  “I think your skills are a little more sophisticated than that. Anyway, you’ll have an FEU Navy officer as second in command.”

  “And how are they going to feel about finding me in the luggage?”

  “This is the best team of specialists we’ve been able to assemble. Nobody worries about who’s wearing what cap badge these days—they slot in where we need them. The regiments and companies and ships are just there for tribal bonding purposes.”
>
  “Even so—”

  “You’ll join them from here.”

  Shan sat down on the bunk, weighed down by unfathomable time scales. “I can’t go home first?”

  “Can’t risk that, I’m afraid. We can take care of your home and finances. And there’s no family to notify, is there?”

  “No.” Not anymore. “Nobody I can’t live without seeing again, anyway.” Suddenly that thought seemed less pressing. Even getting out of EnHaz, even being temporarily robbed of her retirement garden, didn’t feel so bad. Whatever had been in the Suppressed Briefing must have been extraordinarily stark.

  “Don’t forget,” Perault said. “The priority is Constantine and its planet. Nothing else.”

  Shan looked into Perault’s face and decided she was one of the few people she could not intimidate, and she couldn’t work out why. She now knew Perault was not an ordinary politician, but the detail eluded her. She also knew why she had been given the task. And even though the reasons were still buried in pathways of her brain that were temporarily blocked, she believed them with a crushing emotional certainty located somewhere behind her sternum. It was an unpleasant sensation for a data-rational woman.

  “Good luck, Frankland.” Perault reached out and squeezed her shoulder. Few people dared touch Shan but the gesture didn’t feel intrusive this time, even though this was a stranger and a minister. “Thank you. And thank you for Helen.”

  The hatch closed behind her and Shan sat back on the bunk again. Who was Helen? No, she’d remember when it mattered. This time, she had no lurking suspicions that someone had lied to her or set her up, as she did the last time she had been suppressed. She felt focused and urgent.

  Now she’d have to make sure she had a last drink with Rob McEvoy before he returned to Earth. He would be the last friend she would ever see from her own time.

  She checked her uniform in the mirror and prepared to step outside again, unable to get the name Helen out of her mind.

  2

  Aliens are dull. Jellyfish. Bacteria. Fiction gave us such high expectations of what contact would really be like, and the reality isn’t what we expected. We didn’t expect them to be blobs we could only chat to in prime numbers and wait years for the answer. But now we’ve got the worst of both worlds—we know we’re not alone, but the physics is so unforgiving that we might as well be. As for relationships with aliens—we’ve had things that have evolved and gone extinct on this planet that are even more alien than the extraterrestrials we’ve encountered. And there are still things in the ocean, things we know about, that are truly alien and even intelligent. We put them in pet food.