The World Before

by Karen Traviss

  “Here,” said Giyadas. She tilted her head and clasped her hands, a miniature of the adult matriarchs. “He wanted to see you. He says he’s never met an isenj who wasn’t trying to kill him or who he wasn’t trying to kill.”

  A huge alien that looked more human than anything stepped out in front of him. He had a face that was all harsh angles, and liquid dark eyes like the soldier Barencoin except that there was far less white visible in them. He wasn’t wess’har, and he wasn’t human. Ual couldn’t identify his species.

  The creature flicked a long dark braid of hair over his collar and sniffed the air.

  “I’m the Destroyer of Mjat,” he said in immaculate English. “I’m Aras Sar Iussan.”

  Eddie Michallat said there were monsters in human history, and that humans often speculated on how they would exact their social revenge if they met these long-dead criminals. But this monster was not long dead; and now he was simply an extraordinary creature for whom Ual could suddenly feel nothing but …astonishment.

  This wess’har, or whatever he had become, was more than fifty generations old. And he had survived being an isenj prisoner of war, a very bitter war indeed.

  Ual was glad his political rivals weren’t there to hear him. The first thing that came into his head was hardly what they would have wanted. But he said it anyway.

  “I’m truly sorry for what we did to you in captivity,” said Ual.

  Aras was completely still. Ual wondered if it was a preparation to spring forward and attack like a ussissi, but the Destroyer of Mjat simply stood there and didn’t even blink.

  “And I regret that I had to kill so many of you,” he said. “I remember, you see. I caught my c’naatat parasite from your people when they cut me and tore me. So now I have your genetic memory, and I know what it is to stand outside myself and see me as I am.”

  “A rare gift,” said Ual. “And perhaps one we should all seek. Knowing what you do, then, would you destroy us again?”

  “Under the same circumstances?” Aras tilted his head sharply and Ual could clearly see the wess’har in him now. “Yes, of course I would.”

  Ual took care not to touch him, but he approached close enough to make it clear that he would follow him to talk further.

  “Let us look for different circumstances,” he said.

  Shan hadn’t seen Nevyan since she had last left F’nar for Bezer’ej, a long cold lifetime ago. Esganikan could wait her turn.

  There was a distinct scent of mango in the air as Shan entered the ship’s detached section and it made her indefinably uneasy. It was an indication of the presence of a dominant female under challenge or threat, a pheromone powerful enough to make a ruling matriarch cede her position and become deferential.

  She could emit the pheromone herself, but now that she had it back under conscious control again she wanted to keep it that way. Wess’har couldn’t override their scent reactions; she could. C’naatat had somehow provided her with the capacity for tact that she’d never had as a regular human being and now it was time she used it.

  And there was Nevyan, bobbing her chess-piece head and craning her neck to see who was entering the compartment.

  You saved me, kid. You saved me. Shan stepped forward.

  She’d never been comfortable with displays of emotion. Any sane person would have flung their arms around their rescuer, grateful and tearful. Shan wanted to, but the old control born of years of barricading herself against the world took the impulse and crushed it before she could follow it.

  But this was still her friend, the woman who hadn’t abandoned her to space.

  “I’m not sure where to start.” Shan reverted to English for a moment. “Thank you doesn’t quite cover it.”

  Nevyan’s scent-burst of contentment—sweet powdery musk—almost overwhelmed the mango aromas. “My friend,” she said. “Oh, my friend, it’s good to see you.” She made an awkward move forward and the two of them stood on that precarious brink of actually touching. Neither stepped over it. Mestin would touch her, always with a reassuring layer of fabric between her and Shan’s skin, but most were still cautious. “Look how well you are.”

  Well was relative. “I’m in your debt.”

  “It’s enough for me to see you alive. You owe me nothing.”

  Esganikan, a head taller than Shan even without the magnificent plume of copper hair, watched them intently. “You’re the c’naatat.”

  “Actually, I’m Superintendent Shan Frankland.” Don’t start a ruck. Don’t start effing and blinding at her. “And this is my… colleague, Ade Bennett. He caught the parasite too. Neither of us planned to, believe me.”

  “I want to know all about this organism. Is it true you survived in space?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Rhetorical. She doesn’t get it. “Yes. It’s true.”

  At first Shan was distracted by the growing intensity of the dominance pheromone—discernible, but not provocative—and then she was struck by the fact that the interior of the ship was utterly alien: not just wess’har alien, but alien alien. There were the trademark organic curves and loops, but the bulkheads were a mass of shifting light and lines, all intense detail and movement.

  Shan put her hand on the bulkhead and familiar violet and ruby points of light rippled under the skin of her fingers. Her bioluminescent signaling was back. It tried to match the colors she touched, attempting to respond.

  Esganikan studied Shan carefully with much head-tilting, then stared at Ade for a few moments. He stood with his feet slightly apart, smartly upright, hands clasped behind his back. “You carry more than the life-form itself, then.”

  “I do indeed.” Shan flexed her hands, fist to fingers to fist, and the full spectrum of colors illuminated them. “A few genes from the bezeri. Aras is the expert in c’naatat activity, if anybody is, and you can see how much it’s changed him. It scavenges genetic material.”

  “You and your kind are exceptionally dangerous.”

  “Yes, I realize what gethes can do.”

  “I meant c’naatat.”

  Shan felt something like solidity—and she had no better word for it—settling and spreading in her chest. It wasn’t the cold constriction of adrenaline when she was sizing up for a fight: she knew that only too well, primal aggression poisoned a little by fear. No, this was her. This was the her she had discovered when helpless in the void with only her mind for refuge. A voice inside said try it, go on, see what I’m really made of. She silenced it. This wasn’t the time to create divisions.

  “I know,” Shan said carefully. “That’s why I ditched myself in space. That’s why Aras spent centuries in exile, that’s why Ade gave himself up, and I’m afraid that’s why Rayat and Neville detonated bombs on Ouzhari. We’re not about to hand it over.”

  Esganikan smelled dominant. Shan was fully aware of it but now it was touching her in some way, making her… cautious. Suddenly she realized what was happening to her.

  She’s backing you down. She’s outscenting you. It started the minute you walked through that hatch.

  Shan let go of her control. Her fragile abdominal muscles tightened and she let her skin release the scent that said I’m the Guv’nor, so don’t fuck with me.

  Esganikan’s shoulders relaxed a little. Shan felt the moment pass. It was fleeting, insubstantial: she didn’t like this silent game at all, but she had emitted enough scent to pro duce the reaction. She glanced at Nevyan, who was absolutely still with her muscles locked.

  “Will you let us assess the symbiont?” said Esganikan.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Shan. Yeah, don’t try it on with me again, sunshine. “I want to see the prisoners.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m a police officer, even if the police force I served is long gone. You know what police are, do you?”

  “I do now.”

  “I need to find out things from one of these prisoners.”

&
nbsp; “Will you try to free them?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then speak to them, but don’t execute them.” It was a casual remark, symptomatic of that odd wess’har ambiguity about respect for life. “We do not yet know if they will be of use to us in dealing with your governments.”

  Your governments. So she was still almost a gethes, but at least Esganikan now knew who the Guv’nor was. She was going to have to talk to Nevyan about this.

  Nevyan followed Shan and Ade back outside. At a discreet distance from the fragmented Eqbas vessel, Shan caught Nevyan by her elbow. She flinched.

  “Are you okay dealing with Esganikan?”

  Nevyan’s hands were clasped carefully in front of her, multijointed fingers meshed in a way that a human would have found painfully impossible. “It’s confusing.”

  “Why?”

  “I find myself disagreeing with her, but she’s very dominant.”

  “So? You’re dominant.”

  “I find I want to disagree about our relations with Umeh.”

  “It’s none of my business, but—”

  Ade cut in. “You’re right, it’s not, Boss. Stay out of it for a while. Please. Get some rest.”

  “Yes, I need your counsel,” said Nevyan, ignoring him. Ade’s male opinion didn’t register on the scale. “She’s set on a course of action and I have doubts. Why do I feel like this? Where is our natural consensus?”

  “Maybe she’s just bloody wrong,” said Shan, still rattled by the encounter herself. “What’s bothering you?”

  “Umeh,” she said. “At first, its only relevance was the human enclave. Then Ual asked for our assistance with his world’s environmental pressures.”

  “That’s a brave move.” Shan looked first for the political flanker that Ual might be pulling but couldn’t think of one right then. There had to be one. “Are you going to help them?”

  “Help is a relative term,” said Nevyan. “Esganikan is very keen to assist, so keen that she plans to land a contingent on Umeh, with or without the consent of the various regional governments.”

  Shan thought about it for a while, chewing her lip. Her legs were feeling the strain of a long walk and Ade put a proprietorial hand on her back, steering her. He said absolutely nothing. He was just comfortingly there.

  “We have a word for that,” Shan said. Ade was right; it was none of her business, but she’d played a role in bringing disaster to Cavanagh’s Star and she never left a mess for someone else to clear up. “We call it invasion.”

  The bowl of fried peppers was the first solid food that Lindsay had eaten in nearly forty-eight hours. The sound of Rayat’s chewing irritated her and she couldn’t work out why it seemed so loud given the constant clamor of wess’har voices and clattering glass in the warrenlike home that was now their prison.

  She tried to shut it out.

  “No locks,” said Rayat. “In fact, no doors.”

  “So try walking out of here.”

  “Why do you think they haven’t killed us?”

  There was a sudden peal of trills somewhere in the house, almost a shriek. Lindsay dropped the bowl and last few strips of peppers spilled across the flagstone floor. Then the musical voices resumed their normal pattern. A scent like fruit—peach, mango, apricot?—wafted through the doorway. Wess’har always seemed to be cooking something. Lindsay’s stomach was still growling in response to every aroma.

  “Maybe the Eqbas branch of the family does things differently.” She picked up the bowl and scooped the peppers back into it, unsure when the next meal was coming, if ever. Wess’har seemed to be conscientious about clean floors so she ate what she retrieved. Rayat, perched on one of the rock-hard recesses, looked down his nose at her and carried on chomping.

  “Got a problem?” asked Lindsay. She wiped her finger around the bowl and sucked off the last scrap of oily sauce.

  Rayat shrugged. “We were never much of a team, you and I, were we?”

  “No. Not any sort of team.”

  “What do you want to happen?”

  “What?”

  “Rescue? Return?”

  “Die, and get it over with. I’ve lost my baby, I’ve got nothing to go back to and I’d have to live with being a war criminal.” She checked the bowl. It was hard to see if she’d missed any liquid because the vessel was brown and amber swirled glass—hard glass, the sort that could stand being dropped, the sort that the colonists had used to make the bells of St. Francis Church in Constantine. What was happening to the colonists now? “And that’s before I think about what the wess’har and the isenj will do to Earth. No, dead’s good for me. How about you? I think dead would be good for you, too.”

  “I didn’t plan to kill any bezeri.”

  “You didn’t plan to completely eradicate c’naatat either, did you?” She recalled his anger when he found she’d let Shan step out of the airlock. “Asset denial has a lot of meanings.”

  Rayat remained irritatingly calm. “In the right hands, it could have been immeasurably valuable. But it’s gone now. And we can forget about Aras.”

  Gone. Right. But Ade Bennett was here. What if he really did get homesick and want to leave? No, Ade had an unshakeable sense of duty, just like bloody Shan Frankland. And even if Rayat found out what he’d become, there was nothing he could do about it, not here.

  But she liked the idea of seeing the look on Rayat’s face if he ever found out. It was a little comforting scrap of childish vengeance before she died, nothing more. And someone else could pull the trigger, no grenade and no self-inflicted pain. She could just about handle that. Shut your eyes, think something profound, and try to go with some dignity. Yes, it was almost a relief.

  Rayat swung his legs off the ledge and ambled towards the door.

  “Where are you off to?” she demanded.

  “Perhaps I can have a chat with someone,” he said. “If they haven’t done their usual summary execution, perhaps there’s some room for negotiation after all.”

  Lindsay watched him walk through the opening and heard his steps fade in the corridor. She hoped they shot him. What did their weapons do, anyway? She’d never seen them fire one. They looked more like brass musical instruments than weapons.

  And there was no more sauce. She put the bowl down on the ledge and sat down with her back against the wall and her eyes closed.

  A few minutes later there were footsteps outside again, not the scrabbling dog-steps of ussissi or the thud of a wess’har’s gait, but the steps of more than one human.

  “Is that you, Eddie?” she called. She didn’t need him to mediate for her. She wanted it all to end. “Ade?”

  But it was Rayat who walked back through the door, and for once his face was a perfect picture of shock.

  Lindsay wondered what might be enough to shock a spy. God, maybe he’d run into Ade. He knew. Well—

  But it wasn’t Ade, and it wasn’t Eddie. Rayat, stunned silent, was staring at Lindsay. It was one of those moments when what she saw didn’t make sense, but she saw it anyway.

  There was a gun to Rayat’s head and holding it was a nightmarishly emaciated figure with very short, scrubby dark hair in a loose black uniform. The gun clicked, a good old-fashioned 9mm pistol.

  “Okay, sunshine,” said a dead woman’s voice. “I haven’t said this for years. You’re fucking nicked.”

  It was Shan Frankland. Dead, dead, dead Shan Frankland.

  11

  Creatures without feet have my love,

  And likewise do those with two feet,

  And those with four feet I love,

  And those too with many feet.

  THE BUDDHA,

  566–486 BCE

  Shan began slipping the 9mm pistol in the back of her belt out of habit, and then found her trousers weren’t tight enough even with the belt on its last notch to hold it securely.

  She slid the gun discreetly into her pocket. She didn’t want to ruin a grand entrance by letting it clatter to the f
loor down the leg of her pants.

  Lindsay probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway. She was still sitting against the wall, hands pressed flat on the floor and mouth slackly open in classic theatrical shock. An actor might have made a better job of it.

  Cobalt.

  Lindsay was everything Shan despised, the apparently compassionate woman with short-sighted, pig-eyed self-interest buried not far beneath her normal, reasonable girly veneer. Shan wanted to hurt her, and badly. But she had information to extract.

  She stood staring at Rayat, a man as unkempt and as far from the image of a spy as it was possible to get. She’d never noticed he had so much gray in his dark hair before. What was the rate of violent exchange for genocide? A good kicking? Knee-capping? Holding his head under water a few times—a lot of times? She’d done it all, and worse, and not one of those recalled acts gave her that light-headed, throat-stopping sensation of savage animal release that made her feel some score had been settled in the universe.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  Rayat was looking her up and down without moving his head, eyes darting, and he had never seemed to be a man who shocked easily. She was glad she’d found his threshold. It was a childish thing, but she’d learned a long time ago that a copper needed to know how to make the right entrance. It often saved a lot of work.

  “I said sit the fuck down.”

  Rayat paused for three beats before sitting slowly. Shan meshed her hands, pushing her gloves hard back on her fingers until the webs of skin hurt. His gaze settled on them for a telling second. Oh, he’s afraid I’m going to belt him. No—he’s wondering if he can pick up a dose if I thump him, the sly bastard. He never gives up.

  Shan swallowed her temper. “I’ve not been well lately, you know.”

  “You stepped out the hatch,” said Rayat.

  “Nothing wrong with your memory, then.”

  “You stepped out the hatch.”

  “I think you already said that.”

  Rayat was doing better than Lindsay. She was still sitting on the floor, staring, silent. “Just tell me how.”