Shadow of the Warmaster

13

Cinnal Samineh flattened her hand on the desalinizer. “We bought this about ten years ago. It gives us all the fresh water we need.” She slanted a sly glance at Asian. “A tech slave the Imperator brought in built them for him. One of the few good things that came with the slaves.”

“What did you do before then?”

“Let me show you. It’s just next door.”

It was a long narrow barge with slat blinds over lots of glass. Cinnal Samineh cleared one section so they could look inside. Water was being pumped along deep, glass-lined channels, around and past thick stands of remarkably ugly, twisted plants; the stems were broad and pulpy, the leaves were stiff, dotted with thorns, succulent, coated with a thick waxy substance. They were brilliantly colored, red and purple, orange, gold and blue-green, poison colors. Aslan inspected them and decided she wouldn’t go in that place for a ticket home; she wasn’t about to suck in any air they polluted with their exudates and exhalations.

“Saltplants,” Cinnal Samineh said. “They extract minerals and salts from seawater. It’s slow but sure; by the time they’re finished with it and we pass it through a bit more filtration, it’s almost pure enough to drink. We used it for washing and that kind of thing, what we needed for drinking water we passed through a still. Even now, on Holy Days and Jubilations we drink water from here, not from the machine. Sort of celebrating the past and linking with the future. You see, don’t you?”

“I see.”

Cinnal grinned. “We have other reasons for keeping this going. Those leaves give us some of our best dyes. Poisonous, sheeh! you have to be very careful handling them, but the results are worth it. And the roots, you can’t see them, but they are very, very important. Our best filters are made from the pulp and membranes in those roots. Matter of fact, the Zerzevah Farm, it’s out around the bulge south of here, that’s their main source of income, their merm bed was wiped out a couple storms ago and the new bed won’t be producing for a decade or more.”

“Merm bed?”

Cinnal Samineh wrinkled her nose. “I can’t talk about that.”

“Can anyone?”

“Geri, maybe; I’ll ask her.”

“Thanks. How much water could this… um… plant produce in a day?”

“Enough for all of us. We had to be careful of course, and we used seawater for things we use freshwater for these days.”

“Interesting. You said I might be able to visit a school?”

“I talked to my family’s Ommar, she said fine. Schooling is family business, nothing to do with the Council. It’s quite a walk from here. We could take it easy, or maybe I could whistle up a shell.”

“Why not? It’s a lovely day for a boat ride.”

That night Aslan worked until long after midnight, sketching out the distortions and outright falsities she wanted to incorporate indetectably into her data files; when she was too tired to make sense of the numbers and symbols, she tore the pages into small bits and burned them. When she finally slept, she slipped in and out of nightmare, dreams where she was endlessly running, unable to reach a shapeless goal that seemed to represent safety; it hovered continually just in front of her, kept vanishing on her and reappearing a little farther on. Other times she was under something dark and heavy that came rushing down at her. That was a fast dream. It recurred several times and each time she managed to wake up just before the thing crushed her; she lay bathed in sweat, her heart pounding, her head throbbing, the half-healed bruises and cuts adding their own dull misery to a night that was beginning to seem endless.

“Rosepearls.” Gerilli Persij dipped her hand into a soft pouch and pulled out half a dozen rounds. She tilted her palm and let them trickle onto the square of black suede. The smallest was about the size of a small pea; it was a pale pinkish cream. The others went from cream to deep rose, from cherrypit to plum-sized. They shared a fine luster with a glow that seemed to reach down and down, drawing the eye after it. Gerilli Persij took a mid-sized pearl between thumb and forefinger, held it out to Aslan. “Close your hand around it for a moment, then smell your skin.”

The pearl warmed quickly. Aslan opened her hand, sniffed at her palm. There was a delicate floral fragrance, very pleasant though nothing startling. Another moment, though, and she noticed something odd happening to her. She felt tension dropping from her, her body was vibrating with fine-tuned energy, yet she felt no need to move or speak. That rang an alarm in her mind, a distant flutter that immediately started fading, but not quite fast enough. Chewing on her lip, amazed at how difficult it was, she set the pearl on the suede.

Gerilli Persij smiled and began putting the rosepearls back in the pouch. “One like that probably bought you,” she said. “Depending on how expensive you were.”

“And they come from merms?”

“I can say that, yes.”

“And a Dalliss is the only one who can locate and handle merms?”

“Yes.” Her mouth twisted into a wry self-mocking smile. “I wouldn’t say that if Tra Yarta didn’t already know it.”

“I see. That’s what you meant when you said you were too valuable to the Imperator to be slaughtered at a whim.”

“That’s what I meant.” She shrugged. “If we don’t push it too hard.”

“That malignancy in orbit… if there was just some way we could get rid of it…”

“We?”

“From what you said, I’m stuck here as long as it’s up there.”

Gerilli Persij gazed at her a long moment, then she shut the pearls into a small lockbox and got to her feet. “You said you’re a good swimmer.”

“I spent five years on Vandavrem, my first field assignment after I was accepted in the graduate program on University. It was a waterworld, almost no land. There was a very strange culture of intelligent bubble nesters… Never mind, it would take too long to explain, but yes, I got to be very adept in the water.”

“Would you care to visit the yoss forest?”

“Yes. Of course. Do you freedive or use airtanks?”

“Depends on how deep we’re going and what kind of work’s involved. I think tanks for this expedition.”

“Right. Lead me to them.”