The World Before

by Karen Traviss

“She certainly wouldn’t like being used for research, I know that much. Jesus, she was EnHaz. You know how she felt about scientists.”

  It didn’t matter. Aras thought it was an unhealthy preoccupation to care about inert, unfeeling remains when the being that made them beloved had gone. But if it helped Ade cope with his grief, then it had purpose.

  “I will dig,” said Aras. He held out his hand for the folding spade.

  “Okay.”

  “Are you angry that Nevyan wouldn’t take us on the recovery mission?”

  Ade looked down at the cairn, arms folded, chin tucked in. “She was being thoughtful. I know she wanted to make sure Shan was… presentable before we saw her.”

  “Have my memories made this worse for you?”

  “In what way?”

  “Genetic memory. Have you no recollections of her that have originated from me? C’naatat does that. Shan had them, so you might too.”

  Ade appeared to realize what Aras meant. “Not of the kind I think you mean.”

  It was a great pity: they could so easily have been true house-brothers, like wess’har males united by a shared isan. Aras hadn’t missed having brothers for many years but he needed that comfort now. And Ade’s scent said brother.

  The soil was hard going. Ade eventually held out his hand for the spade to take his turn but Aras shook his head.

  “When do we ask for Neville and Rayat to be extra-dited?” Ade asked. “Formally, that is.”

  “When I’ve thought of a penalty which will achieve something beyond revenge,” said Aras.

  “Long way to go, then, mate.” Ade added another pearly stone to the cairn and stood with his head slightly bowed for a few moments. “Long, long way.”

  Nevyan had never traveled further than the distance between the twin planets of Wess’ej and Bezer’ej. She was now far beyond that space with Serrimissani for support, marveling at a starscape for once not wholly dominated by her two home planets.

  She had promised Aras that she would find Shan’s body and bring it home, and it had been very hard to find a corpse in space. The ussissi patrol had patiently followed the extrapolated vector from the coordinates that Ade had provided, seeking not only Shan Frankland’s remains but also those of Vijissi. They were determined to bring their own people home, too.

  “Will you let Aras and Ade see the body?” asked Serrimissani. “They were most insistent.”

  “That depends on how it appears and how presentable we can make it before we return.”

  “They are both soldiers. Neither are squeamish.”

  “I suspect that’s irrelevant when the remains are those of a loved one.”

  The craft rendezvoused with the patrol vessel, matching its speed as it followed the tiny speck of debris at a careful distance. It was Shan’s body, still drifting. Nevyan tilted her head to let her pupils get a better focus as it grew larger in the viewing screen set in the bulkhead. The object was rolling slowly; then she could pick out a human shape, exaggerated by the stark brightness and complete shadow created by Ceret’s light. Then it resolved into more detail, showing a human in a position that suggested a fall, arms outstretched, legs slightly bent.

  There was no sign of Vijissi.

  “Bring her in,” said Nevyan.

  A suited ussissi from the patrol craft steered himself carefully on the end of a long tether, tracking alongside the body until he was close enough to secure it with a line. As the shuttle hauled it in, Shan’s limbs appeared to change position, giving the semblance of life; but when Nevyan concentrated her gaze she could see she was still in the same rigid pose. Shan’s face had no visible features or hair, just an unbroken pale sheen that Nevyan assumed was some frozen matter.

  Transferring the body from the patrol vessel to the shuttle was slow. Two suited ussissi laid the corpse on the long bench running along one bulkhead in the cargo bay and withdrew as the bay hatch closed and the compartment flooded with air again. Shan Frankland was nearly home.

  “This is hard,” said Nevyan.

  “I will stand with you,” said Serrimissani.

  Nevyan looked down at the body on the bench and struggled to cope.

  The clothing was Shan’s. It was her informal uniform, the dark blue jacket and trousers, and it was faded and damaged. Ragged holes peppered the legs and hips, and the boots were cracked and peeling. That detail was all that Nevyan could focus on because she could hardly bear to look at the corpse.

  It didn’t look like Shan at all.

  Nevyan had no idea what was typical for a human exposed to vacuum, let alone one who carried c’naatat. The body was emaciated as if it had been sucked dry of all fluid and flesh. No, this was not a body. It was Shan Frankland. It was her friend.

  Shan was a husk swathed in a milky transparent layer that coated as much of her exposed skin as Nevyan could see. She was simply bone wrapped in tight-stretched paper, hands clenched into fists; her uniform gapped at cuffs and collar as if it had been someone else’s. It didn’t look as if her death had been peaceful.

  She was unrecognizable. Aras would be devastated to see her.

  Nevyan reached out cautiously and touched her cheek. The coating was waxy to the touch and it flaked away at the point of the cheekbone. The skin beneath was lined and dry like efte bark.

  “Fetch me some water,” she said. “I’ll remove it. I can’t let Aras see her like this. He’s suffered enough.” She brushed away a few more flakes. “And these bullet holes in her clothing—I think that might be too much for him if he’s to remain friends with Sergeant Bennett.”

  Nevyan stood and gazed down at Shan and her heart broke again, just as it had when she had first heard of her death. It had seemed a terrible sacrifice then and it seemed even more of one now.

  Tap… tap-tap-tap-tap.

  Something metallic hit the deck, then bounced and rolled. Nevyan froze briefly at the noise and bent down to see that it was a small, deformed metal tube very much like the bullets Shan put in her weapon.

  Nevyan picked up the casing and examined it, wondering how much pain it had caused when it smashed through Shan’s muscles and bones. The number of holes in her uniform indicated she had been hit by at least twenty shots.

  And Ade had said she was still hard to subdue even after taking that many hits. Shan had been right: c’naatat was exactly the kind of adaptation that should never fall into the hands of the gethes’ military forces.

  Serrimissani brought a flask of water and some cloth, taking one piece in her hand. “I’ll help,” she said. “The shuttle is resuming the search. Vijissi must be in this sector too. He went with her.”

  There was another tap and bounce as a second bullet fragment fell to the floor. Nevyan didn’t think she had moved the body that far, but she had dislodged the fragment somehow. She began wiping gently at Shan’s face with a wad of moistened fabric.

  The eyes were closed, sunk in bony sockets. As more of the coating fell away Nevyan could see that the mouth was frozen wide open in one final desperate gasp for air. She almost let herself slip into that motionless state of shock, the primitive wess’har instinct to stop and assess threat, but she had to carry on. Perhaps, with more water and the warmth of the cabin, the body might soften enough for her to close the mouth and restore some semblance of peace and dignity before Aras demanded to see it.

  Nevyan dabbed at the exposed skin. The water appeared to be hydrating it in places, easing the appearance of parchment into something more like human flesh. Shan had never seemed vain, but she had cared about looking well groomed. She didn’t look groomed any longer.

  The coating clung to the cloth and Nevyan had to shake it off into a bowl. Then she placed her hands gently on Shan’s wasted cheeks, overtaken by grief and regret and anger that she had lost her after such a short friendship.

  “You’ll be home soon,” she said. Talking to the dead was a foolish thing that gethes did, but Nevyan couldn’t come this close to her and not speak. “You’ll be part of the worl
d again. And then I’ll balance the gethes.”

  Nevyan had seen gethes mothers kiss their children. She had even seen Aras kiss Shan; it seemed a universal human expression of affection. So she bent and kissed Shan’s forehead, alien as the act seemed. The c’naatat parasite was dead. She could touch Shan now without risk of contamination.

  “I’m sorry, isanket. I wasn’t there to help you.”

  Shan’s eyes jerked open.

  Wess’har didn’t scream. But Nevyan did.

  6

  Frankland sparked controversy in her first appointment as divisional inspector of Reading Metro Nine, where she cut crime figures by 75 percent in her first six months of command. “It’s old-style policing,” she said at the time. “If anyone steps out of line, they’ll get a clip round the ear, and if they do it twice, then they can say goodbye to the ear completely.” Her uncompromising approach—typified by frequent use of decitizenization and complaints of brutality—angered some politicians but earned her allies in the wider community. “I learned diplomacy after that,” she said. Did she take a more softly-softly approach? “No,” she said. “I just stopped shooting my mouth off about it.”

  EDDIE MICHALLAT,

  One Copper’s Story,

  BBChan Publishing

  Shan let out a long rattling breath that trailed off into small gasps.

  Nevyan knew that corpses sometimes appeared to move or exhale for perfectly explicable reasons, but this wasn’t a trick of expanding air or contracting tissue.

  Shan was alive.

  Her eyelids fluttered and then half closed. But she was breathing.

  “This might only be a reaction to temperature changes,” said Serrimissani. She seemed calm, as if corpses came to life before her every day. “It is unthinkable that she could have survived so long in space.”

  Nevyan shook herself out of her freeze reflex and put her hand cautiously on Shan’s chest. Humans had pumping hearts, strong enough to be detected.

  She felt a brief kick. Then there was another, and another, and then the thump-thump-thump became steadier. It was slow, but it was regular; there was a heartbeat, a real human heartbeat.

  “It’s also unthinkable that she survived being shot in the head, or under water, but she did.” Nevyan reached for protective gloves. If c’naatat had preserved Shan in these circumstances, it too was alive and it was a risk. She regretted the kiss. “She may be able to hear us.”

  Nevyan drizzled some water into Shan’s mouth from the cloth and waited. The continuous wheeze spluttered into convulsive coughing. “Shan,” she said. “Shan, can you hear me?”

  There was no response, but she was breathing in great sawing gasps. Nevyan knew almost nothing about human physiology, but perhaps that didn’t matter; Shan wasn’t wholly human. She was an amalgam of whatever c’naatat had collected and carried with it from host to host and then selected for her survival. One organism must have had the capacity to survive hard vacuum and irradiation.

  The water was now triggering rapid changes. Shan’s skin was taking on a pink color, and her limbs and eyelids were twitching. Whatever mechanism had kept her dormant was now kicking her back to normality. Nevyan hoped that it had kept her oblivious, too; the thought of drifting conscious in the void was terrifying.

  “She needs more water,” Serrimissani said. “Perhaps we need to immerse her. You said she could survive in water.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Water is probably her immediate need. Then food.”

  “Shan? Shan, if you can hear us, move your arms.”

  There was no response. The pilot, summoned from the cockpit by Nevyan’s uncharacteristic shriek, pulled a sheet of fabric from a locker. “Support the corners, and we can fill this with water and place her in it,” he said. He unbolted a bench and turned it over to lash the corners of the sheet to its legs. Most of their water supply went to fill it to a depth that would cover Shan’s body. Nevyan cut her uniform from her, lifted away the ballistic vest, and immersed her in the makeshift bath.

  She weighs so little.

  More waxy coating crumbled away and floated on the surface. Shan’s open mouth filled with water and she began coughing and retching, blowing great streams of bubbles. Her paper-husk frame convulsed and her eyes jerked open again but she didn’t seem to be focusing. Her limbs thrashed weakly and then she sank back, lips opening and closing like a suckling child. Her eyes closed.

  She was still breathing, though.

  “Do we leave her there?” asked the pilot.

  Nevyan and Serrimissani leaned over the bath. “The moment she appears to be in difficulties, we take her out.”

  “I will send a message—”

  “No.” Nevyan checked her own immediate urge to notify Aras. It would be agonizingly wonderful news. However welcome it was, it would hit him hard after he had come to terms with her death. And if Shan failed to hang on to life this time, Aras would suffer the pain of losing her again.

  There was also the matter of discovery. The world thought Shan was dead, and with her the c’naatat parasite colony that lived within her. A careless message over the ITX, as Eddie had named it, could be intercepted by anyone. Once they knew she was alive they would hunt her again.

  Nevyan decided the news would have to wait.

  They watched Shan intently, counting each breath. She had curled up, bony arms tucked into her chest, knees drawn up, a skeleton plated with thin pale skin. Nevyan could see the pulse in her throat and temples, and the bones that ran out from the top of her ribs and ended at her shoulders.

  “How are we going to feed her?” asked Serrimissani.

  “If she can swallow water, she can take liquid nutrients.”

  “We have nothing on board.”

  “We need to get her back to Wess’ej as quickly as we can.”

  “No, we look for Vijissi. If Shan survived, so might he.”

  Nevyan reached under the water, soaking her dhren, and lifted Shan’s head clear of the water, noting how much heavier she felt now. She coughed and retched. Water splashed the deck. “If Vijissi is alive, then he has c’naatat too and he’ll survive until we find him. If he doesn’t, then extra time will make no difference to the dead.”

  Serrimissani stared up at Nevyan, an unblinking matte-black gaze. “Dead, alive, we still search for him and bring him home.”

  Nevyan knew better than to argue with an ussissi. But her priority was to keep Shan alive. C’naatat or not—miracle or not—she needed to get her back to Wess’ej. “We leave the patrol vessel to resume the search and we return to F’nar,” she said firmly.

  Serrimissani simply stared back, grim and feral. It was an uncomfortable moment. A human friend mattered more than a ussissi. It must have seemed that way to her.

  “Very well,” she said at last, but reluctantly. “That seems reasonable.”

  Nevyan had never trod that fine line between having a ussissi’s loyalty and losing it to the pack instinct. It felt precarious. It was.

  She propped Shan’s head on the edge of the sheeting and wiped her face while Serrimissani hunted for something to serve as a blanket. The shock and relief of finding Shan alive at all had suspended her horror at the state of her body for a while and now she wondered how Aras would react to her physical state.

  “There’s nothing suitable,” said Serrimissani.

  Together they lifted Shan from the water and laid her back on the bench. Nevyan took off her dhren and wrapped it around her. This was how Asajin had been carried to the plain to be left for the carrion-eating creatures, with her fine matriarch’s dhren as her shroud.

  Serrimissani dripped water into Shan’s mouth. She coughed it back up. “Perhaps her swallowing reflex will return. Her appearance is improving.”

  Improvement was a relative term. She still looked like a long-dead cadaver. Nevyan tried to imagine what it felt like to asphyxiate and for your body fluids to boil. and to drift in absolute, indefinable nothing for months. She would have been
unconscious. She was sure of that.

  “It’s a terrible thing to die in space,” she said.

  “Even more terrible to survive in it,” said Serrimissani.

  Nevyan’s home was deserted when Eddie got back. It was usually a noisy melee of youngsters and jurej’ve at this time of the morning, but he made his way through the interconnecting chambers and found nobody.

  Perhaps they’d gone to the fields early because Nevyan was due back and they wanted to be home to greet her. She’d be in need of support, he knew that much: it couldn’t be easy see a friend’s corpse, even for a matriarch as self-possessed as Nevyan.

  There was a heavy finality to recovering the body. Now he accepted that Shan was truly dead, and the feeling that she might walk through the door at any time was fading fast. At least he hadn’t imagined he still saw her or heard her, slipping elusively into a crowd or evaporating on closer inspection. He wasn’t sure he could handle that.

  He ladled a cup of water from a bowl and sipped it while he tried his hand against the console in the main room. Eventually the screen kicked into life. Without Giyadas to show him, it took him minutes to find the route into the ITX link to Earth.

  Jesus, Ual’s actually going to do it. He’s going to defy his own government. Eddie rehearsed how he might tell Nevyan, with no idea of how she would react. She might launch an attack: wess’har fired up in a heartbeat. Is this what I was really doing on Earth? Did I just spew out information and leave a trail of chaos for others to deal with? There were no anonymous others to clear up now. He was face-to-face with the real consequences of his precious truth.

  Truth my arse.

  With a few prompts from his fingers, the image of the Exchange of Surplus Things rearranged itself in the smooth stone of the wall and he was looking at the holding screen for BBChan’s router. He wondered if ’Desk was pleased with the story and braced himself for the five-second time lag.

  “Jesus Christ, where the hell have you been?” Mick was on duty again, and he didn’t look pleased at all.

  “Umeh,” he said. “I thought you wanted me to get access to Umeh Station.”