City of Pearl Read Online Free Page A

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.”
    â€œEven so—”
    â€œYou’ll join them from here.”
    Shan sat down on the bunk, weighed down by unfathomable time scales. “I can’t go home first?”
    â€œCan’t risk that, I’m afraid. We can take care of your home and finances. And there’s no family to notify, is there?”
    â€œNo.” 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.
    â€œDon’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.
    â€œGood 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.
    G RAHAM W ILEY , speaking on “Science and You,”
BBChan 5682,
April 30, 2299
    Eddie Michallat didn’t care for Graham Wiley. Wiley was a broadcasting Brahmin, a professor who had the prime science correspondent slot across thirty Web channels. He treated Eddie like a tabloid hack, because, Eddie believed, he didn’t regard his Master’s in anthropology as serious scientific credentials. It was rare they came this close physically in real life, but this was an important news conference. Everyone worth a byline in the journalistic community was there.
    Tech came and tech went, and the dissemination of information and opinion could take place a hundred different ways, delivered straight to the brain and optic nerve of the audience in many cases. But a news conference required flesh-and-blood attendance, because only flesh could enjoy the food and wine laid on