The World Before

by Karen Traviss

  “You have a message for the minister. Yes or no?”

  “Yes,” said Eddie.

  Ralassi said nothing else. He showed no sign of knowing what Eddie’s business had been about, but ussissi didn’t get involved. They oiled the wheels, that was all. The ussissi pilot who hurried him into his seat on the shuttle seemed equally devoid of curiosity.

  “You have a message,” he said.

  “I need an ITX link out, first,” said Eddie. “Can I use the ship’s system?”

  The pilot fixed him with a disapproving slitted stare. “Now?”

  “Now. Please. I need to transmit to my news desk.”

  The pilot handed Eddie a wess’har virin, a soft translucent hand-sized device that could have passed for a bar of glycerin soap had it not fired up with lights and images when the pilot squeezed it into life. Eddie struggled to find the right sequence of finger positions to activate the interface with his cam.

  “Like this,” said the pilot irritably, and took the cam and the virin from him. The ussissi squeezed the device and the news of Eqbas Vorhi and c’naatat instantly, silently, reached the relay close to Earth, and—one, two, three—it arrived at the BBChan router. Nothing visible had taken place. It was a strange way to make history.

  “Well, that’s going to get the shit flying,” Eddie muttered.

  The pilot peered at the virin and handed it back to him. “And now will you take your message? You have a message here from Nevyan Tan Mestin.”

  “Read it for me.”

  “She says it is urgent and personal.”

  I’ve just filed a bombshell. Shut up. “Read it to me anyway.”

  The pilot settled in his seat and placed the virin back in its housing on the console. He made irritated chattering noises.

  “I said go ahead.”

  The pilot hissed.

  “She thought you needed to know they have located a body.”

  5

  We strongly suggest that you allow all governments access to the ITX system. It will aid you in defusing the tension between the FEU and other states. Your priority is surely both to be assured of the welfare of your citizens on Wess’ej and Umeh, and to keep open a potential diplomatic channel between yourselves and the wess’har; and we wish to be reassured of the welfare of our colleagues en route to Earth in Thetis. We assume you understand the significance of the entry of Eqbas Vorhi into the situation.

  MINISTER PAR PARAL UAL,

  Northern Assembly,

  to Birsen Ertegun

  A halo of shimmering hot air formed around the Eqbas patrol ship as it slowed and eased itself down on the plain north of F’nar. It was the worst possible time it could have chosen to arrive.

  Nevyan was anxious to leave. Time would make no difference to Shan any more, but she had no intention of leaving her body drifting in space for a moment longer. And she had no choice. The first of the Eqbas ships had arrived.

  “Are you worried, ma’am?” asked Ade Bennett. He stood to one side of her. She knew he hoped to accompany her to recover the body, but she had made her position clear. “Historical moment, isn’t it?”

  “I’m anxious,” she said. “Our ancestors left this way of life behind. I’ve changed everything by summoning them here.”

  “Needs must,” said Ade, but she didn’t understand him.

  The ship was a smooth bronze cylinder tapered at both ends. A band of brilliant red and blue illuminated chevrons danced horizontally along each side. Dust rose beneath the hull. It was remarkably quiet but very, very visible.

  Nevyan clutched her dhren to her throat. Serrimissani, ready to interpret, showed displeasure with half-closed eyes and arms straight at her sides.

  Ade frowned. “They don’t believe in stealth, do they? You’re really going to notice that patrolling your airspace.”

  “I doubt anyone has countermeasures to trouble the World Before.”

  The hatches opened with a long hiss and several ussissi came out sniffing the air. They stood perfectly synchronized, heads bobbing in unison, and then went back inside. Serrimissani began trotting towards the ship.

  Nevyan waited with Ade, hoping she would have nothing to regret later. Serrimissani was now with one of the Eqbas ussissi, talking to her, mirroring her movements while they talked. Serrimissani was fluent enough to interpret without the aid of another ussissi, but Nevyan hoped to use her own hastily acquired command of eqbas’u.

  Serrimissani beckoned.

  Nevyan was about twenty meters from the ship when she saw the first Eqbas step out. She was wearing an environment suit. She was shorter and thicker-set than Nevyan had expected, even though she had seen their images on screen, and when she took her helmet off she revealed no tufted mane but close-cropped brown wisps.

  But it wasn’t a matriarch at all. It was a male.

  Nevyan could smell that now. She hadn’t expected a male to lead the vanguard.

  His face was short-muzzled and light brown, and although Nevyan could see the similarities with wess’har features, the visitor reminded her more of a ussissi. This was a wess’har from her origins, a world her forebears had left long ago. The branches of the species had diverged rapidly; wess’har adapted to their environment fast.

  Nevyan shook off her suspicion. Being wess’har was about what you did, not how you looked or what you said.

  Shan had been wess’har: so was Serrimissani. Ade and Eddie were fitting in as well. Wess’har could take many forms.

  More of the crew trailed out, all male, all hesitant. She stared.

  She almost forgot Ade was behind her and stopped dead. The Eqbas tilted his head, gaze darting between Nevyan and Ade, pupils snapping open and shut. We must both look alien to him. But he had familiar wess’har eyes with four lobed pupils, not the single unnerving void of a human eye. He was kin.

  “I am Nevyan Tan Mestin,” she said, and waited for some reaction. “Where is your matriarch?”

  The male warbled, and although he appeared to have a reasonable command of wess’u she had difficulty understanding him. There was the tantalizing hint of syllables and tone chords she thought she understood, but whole sentences were elusive and she failed to grasp them.

  Serrimissani relayed the answer in English. “He says he is Da Shapakti, the commander of this vessel, and he has no matriarchs on board. He asks if Ade is a gethes and why he’s here.”

  “Shall I thin out, ma’am?” asked Ade.

  “What?”

  “Would you like me to leave?”

  “No. Stay and observe.”

  No matriarchs. Why was this Eqbas male without his isan? Jurej’ve needed constant cell renewal from their matriarch, and if this patrol had been in space for some time then they should have been showing signs of ill health.

  Perhaps Shapakti was. Nevyan wasn’t sure what a healthy Eqbas male looked like.

  “Ade is human and has made a great sacrifice for us,” she said carefully, avoiding the word gethes. “Why don’t you have isan’ve on board?”

  The ussissi chittered. “His isan is on Eqbas, as are those of his colleagues. He says that if you are asking about oursan, then they are medicated and do not require it on patrol.”

  “What’s oursan?” asked Ade.

  Nevyan ignored him. This was unnatural. Matriarchs always accompanied their males on long journeys and families were never separated. She stared at Shapakti, appalled. And without a dominant matriarch, where could she begin to discuss the complex politics of driving back the gethes?

  “When will your next ship arrive?” she asked. “One with a matriarch in command?”

  This time Shapakti’s answer was intelligible. “Some days.”

  She stood staring at him. His gaze still seemed torn between her and Ade.

  “Do you want to enter the city? There’s accommodation for you if you need it.”

  “For your sake, we stay here.”

  Nevyan looked to Serrimissani. “I didn’t understand that.”

  Th
e two ussissi exchanged chatter. “He thinks it would be better for both societies if each became familiar with the other more slowly, and they respect your wish for separateness. They have sufficient supplies.”

  It seemed reasonable. The Eqbas were here to make environmental and political assessments, not to fraternize. Understanding might come later, if at all. She acknowledged him with a nod and turned to go back.

  “You mean to walk?” said Shapakti.

  “Of course I do,” said Nevyan.

  “A vehicle for our equipment?”

  “What equipment?”

  “Communications, defense assessment, bio-analysis.”

  He seemed to hesitate and leaned down to the ussissi. Serrimissani listened to the exchange. “He says you have not yet answered his question about the presence of the gethes.”

  Nevyan had to be certain. “Are you sure that’s what he said?”

  Serrimissani lowered her head and exchanged more high-pitched chatter with the Eqbas ussissi. Her eyes were now disapproving slits. “Yes, chail.”

  Nevyan took three steps forward and cuffed Shapakti casually around the head, just hard enough to make her point. Perhaps he hadn’t got the message that he should defer to her. He yelped; she needed no translation. Now he knew his place.

  “Tell him,” said Nevyan, “that I have already explained that Ade is our friend.”

  Nevyan summoned a ground transport on the virin. She reminded herself that Eqbas was industrialized, a world away from the carefully preserved agrarian simplicity of Wess’ej. That was one of the reasons that her people had followed Targassat’s teachings and sought a separate life of what Eddie called minimal ecological and political impact.

  Eqbas were perhaps more like gethes in many ways. They expected transport.

  “Well, that went well,” said Ade, raising his eyebrows in that human gesture that said it definitely hadn’t. “What was all that about?”

  A ground car passed them on its way to the ship. Nevyan found she was clutching the collar of her dhren even though the garment was self-shaping, and she made a conscious effort to lower her hands. “I fear our cousins have a very different social order to our own.”

  “Boys only, eh?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No isan embarked.” He had picked up some words fast. “Come on, what’s oursan?”

  Nevyan recalled a dead friend posing the same naive question. She missed her and she wondered how much more she would miss her as time progressed. “Shan called it shagging.”

  Ade wafted agitation as he walked. “I think this is more than I need to know.”

  “It’s not copulation in the sense of reproductive activity, but as Shan said, it’s as near as makes no odds. We exchange and repair DNA during oursan. Without it, the cells of the male deteriorate.”

  “Ah,” said Ade.

  His face was much pinker now. Nevyan had seen that before. Embarrassment. “I didn’t suggest that it was unpleasant. Far from it. But it seems the Eqbas have medication instead.”

  Ade said nothing more until they reached F’nar. Nevyan realized it was the mention of Shan that had silenced him, because he didn’t seem the kind of human who was easily embarrassed by bodily functions. They sat on crates with Serrimissani in the Exchange of Surplus Things and watched the Eqbas crew—six males—set up equipment at the back of the hall, supervised by Serrimissani.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me orAras to come with you, ma’am?” asked Ade, returning to his main preoccupation.

  He didn’t use the word bodies. Shan and Vijissi were drifting in the void somewhere between Bezer’ej and the isenj homeworld of Umeh, and Nevyan wondered if Ade ever remembered that the ussissi aide had died with Shan rather than abandon her. Mestin had asked him to stay at her side, no matter what.

  “You have preparations to make here, Ade. We won’t be away more than a few days.”

  “Understood, ma’am.” He paused and looked at her as if expecting her to change her mind if he was persistent enough. His clutched his green fabric headdress in both hands and he was twisting it like a cleaning rag. “You said I was your friend.”

  “You are.”

  “Why? I don’t understand why you don’t blame me for Shan’s death. And the bezeri.”

  “You persist in asking this.”

  “It’s because I don’t understand.”

  “Even wess’har have to draw a line somewhere in the chain of circumstances, or we would execute parents and grandparents for a child’s wrongdoings. Your superiors set the bombs. Shan chose to die.” Nevyan, broken-hearted again, inhaled sharply to smell Shan in Ade’s scent. “And I know that if she were alive now, and I went to punish you, she would stand in my way and defend you.”

  Ade smoothed out his headdress and put it in his pocket. “Okay, ma’am.”

  Serrimissani approached as he walked out of earshot. “It’s as well that the crew has no matriarchs on board,” she said. “Or you might be criticized for leaving at such a critical time.”

  “Recovering my friends is important.”

  “For Aras and Ade,” said Serrimissani.

  “For me. Because I said I would.”

  Nevyan wondered if she should have sent Aras instead, however traumatic it would be for him. No. She had promised.

  She would make the retrieval quickly, though. These were testing times for F’nar and all Wess’ej.

  Da Shapakti was fascinated by the concern shown for Shan’s corpse. Aras had begun learning Eqbas’u with Serrimissani’s mediation and there was one word that leapt out at him above all others: suta’ej.

  Shapakti used it a lot. It meant of use. The Eqbas commander trailed after Aras and Ade through the center of F’nar, making urgent sounds and smelling of excitement.

  “His crew don’t say much,” said Ade, glancing behind him. He would always be a soldier, sizing up risk, needing to know terrain and locations. Aras thought it was a good habit to retain. “You sure it’s safe to let them go through your archives?”

  “There is no harm in knowledge.”

  “That’s not how we see it.”

  “Wess’har don’t use knowledge as gethes do.” Aras had agreed to follow Ade without knowing where he was going. Ade had a digging tool in one hand, a soldier’s implement that folded in half. “What do you wish to show me?”

  “Somewhere that matters. Something for Shan.”

  They walked out onto the plain and towards one of the lava-topped bluffs that dotted the landscape. Shapakti followed. Ade stopped and turned back to him.

  “This is private,” he said.

  Shapakti looked at Aras, bewildered. He could tell Ade was annoyed: even if the Eqbas couldn’t read his body language, he could smell him, and Ade now had a distinct wess’har alarm scent when he was stressed.

  “Ade isn’t happy that you’re following us,” said Aras, hoping he had the right eqbas’u word.

  “I want to see,” said Shapakti. “I want to find out as much as I can about gethes.”

  “This isn’t a good time.”

  “Is Ade c’naatat too?”

  “Yes. We both are. The only two left alive.”

  Shapakti thought visibly. Aras could see the process on his face. “When you recover the body, may we examine it? C’naatat is fascinating.”

  It was a very wess’har attitude, utterly pragmatic and moral, examining only dead creatures because interfering with live ones was anathema. It was an approach that humans would have done well to adopt. But Ade wouldn’t see it that way. There was a part of Aras—the part shaped by nearly two hundred years of living with humans—that didn’t see it that way either.

  “What’s he want?” asked Ade.

  “He wants to learn. He also wants to examine the body to find out more about c’naatat.”

  Ade’s face drained of color. “Tell him he’ll be examining the butt of my frigging rifle if he so much as looks at her.” He glared at Shapakti. “No. Understand?”
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  Aras paraphrased. It was from unfamiliarity with eqbas’u, not diplomacy. “Ade is very upset about Shan. He blames himself for the events that led to her death, so I advise you not to raise the subject again. He’s a restrained man but when he angers he’s capable of injuring you badly.”

  “Does that word no indicate refusal?”

  Ade appeared to latch on to the one English word in the sentence immediately.

  “No,” Ade snapped. “Absolutely not. And we’re not leaving her for the scavengers, either. She’s going to have a proper burial.”

  Shapakti stopped where he stood and let them walk on. Ade glanced back over his shoulder now and again as if checking. Eventually he stopped. When Aras looked, Shapakti was gone.

  The top of the lava formation had precious little soil on it, barely enough to plant yellow-leaf. If this was the site for Shan’s grave, they would have a hard time digging one. And it would be shallow.

  “This is a cairn,” said Ade.

  A carefully built pyramid of rocks and pebbles stood a couple of meters from the edge of the plateau, about waist-high to a human.

  Ade rubbed his nose on the back of his hand. “I couldn’t bear her not having a proper grave.”

  “A gravestone?” Aras suddenly felt excluded, but he’d always known that Ade had desired Shan. The marines had teased him about it. Shan had desired him, too. He wondered if Ade had ever seen him as an interloper. “I made a head-stone for Lindsay Neville’s baby. It was colored glass.”

  “You understand, then.”

  Aras did, but he had never understood why some humans were repelled by the idea of their bodies being devoured by creatures like rockvelvets. What did they think decomposition was? Decay and predation were both consumption, returning the components of life to the great cycle. Even the colonists of Constantine, who believed inexplicably in resurrection, adopted the local custom.

  “Shan was raised as a Pagan,” said Aras. “I don’t think she would mind being left for the srebil.”