The World Before

by Karen Traviss

“No, mate, that’s where I draw the fucking line,” said Becken. “I’m not hunting civvies for someone to kill them. That’s not what we do.” Becken glanced at Nevyan. He was a young pale man with a badly scarred nose. “No offense, ma’am.”

  Barencoin slipped his rifle off his shoulder. “He knew they were nuclear bombs, and if he hadn’t helped Neville and Rayat, we wouldn’t be in this shit now.”

  “Yeah, Mart, and we helped the bitch too, didn’t we? Or you fucking well did. You landed the devices on the planet.”

  “Okay, I should have shot her and Rayat and had done with it. But I didn’t. So now I do things right. Okay?”

  He stepped forward. The little rank of colonists looked about to part and then closed up again. Esganikan watched, apparently fascinated.

  “Come on, hand him over,” Barencoin said quietly. “They mean it. Wess’har don’t piss about, and you know that better than anyone.” He paused. “Anyway, Shan Frankland’s back, and if you don’t fetch him now she’ll come and drag him out by his balls.”

  The colonists stared at him. “She’s dead.”

  “Well, she’s not dead now,” said Barencoin.

  “She’s alive? Alive?”

  “Yeah, but don’t read anything freaky into it, will you? God wasn’t involved. He’s not taking calls, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  Barencoin motioned with his rifle for them to let him pass but they didn’t move. He sighed and simply walked forward, and then they parted.

  Nevyan and Esganikan followed him. Nevyan found it interesting that humans could be so compliant even when they outnumbered their captors. There were around a thousand here and many emerged from their tents to watch.

  Barencoin cleared a path without even trying. He might have been behaving in that way humans called bluffing, but nobody seemed to want to test him. Nevyan thought she recognized one or two of the colonists but it was hard to tell.

  “Now that Joshua Garrod is dead, who speaks for you?” she asked.

  “Try his wife, Deborah,” said a woman. “Or Martin Tyndale.”

  She didn’t recognize Deborah Garrod at all. The woman seemed neither hostile nor afraid, and she had youngsters with her, a small female and an almost fully grown male. She indicated the interior of the tent. “It’s cold out here,” she said. “Can we talk inside?”

  Esganikan ducked beneath the bar above the opening. The tent was a chaos of fabric and boxes and stank of stale food. Nevyan was aware of the young male’s fixed stare.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “James,” he said.

  “You intend to restore Earth,” said Esganikan.

  “Our forefathers came to Bezer’ej for refuge, to wait it out until the world was ready,” said Deborah. “However long it took.”

  “And what do you want to do now?”

  Deborah shrugged. “If prayers could be answered? To turn back time. If not—I was going to say that we would like to go home, but Bezer’ej is the only home we’ve ever known.”

  “Would you prefer to return to your homeworld?”

  “If the time was right. If the purpose could be fulfilled.”

  “We can make it the right time,” said Esganikan.

  Perhaps she was overconfident of her new language skills. Nevyan watched her, baffled, a little hesitant because the matriarch’s dominance pheromone was so convincingly powerful, as strong as her own and sometimes close to overwhelming her.

  “How?” Deborah asked.

  “You wish to restore your environment. That is what we do, what we have always done. We can do it for you, and with your cooperation.”

  There was something about Esganikan’s effortlessly clear focus that reminded Nevyan of Shan. This was a female used to getting things done. But this was not her friend, not someone she knew well and who had her interests and those of her city at heart: wess’har or not, Esganikan was a stranger.

  “Are you offering to take us back?” said Deborah.

  “Yes, and the rest of the life from your world.”

  “And what about Jonathan Burgh?”

  “He must be balanced.”

  “So ifwe hand him over the rest ofus can go… home.”

  “The two are not connected. If none of you hand him over, then none of you will go home, because I will have to balance all of you for complicity in his action. It is not a condition, nor is it bargaining, because we do not make bargains. It is merely a consequence.”

  “It’s a fascinating distinction.” Deborah thought for a while, her head in her hands.

  James glared at Nevyan and lowered his voice. “Are we just going to let them do what they did to Dad?”

  “The bezeri died, James.”

  “It was an accident. He didn’t mean it to happen like that. He was destroying the Devil’s temptation.”

  “James, we became involved with weapons that we should have shunned, and we’re paying the price of tolerating violence. Don’t you think I miss him? Don’t you think it breaks my heart too?” She turned James around by his shoulders. “Go and find Jonathan. Tell him he can choose whether or not to surrender. It’s up to him. It’s not our place to make him.”

  Nevyan watched, fascinated by the ethical knots the woman had tied and untied. Their logic was wholly alien to her. If Jonathan acted for himself, then Deborah would be innocent of his death. But he would still be dead. In the end, motives counted for nothing but humans never saw it that way. They lived in their heads, not in the world. Perhaps that was why they could never respect life that wasn’t like them.

  She waited with Esganikan in complete silence; Barencoin stuck his head through the tent flap a few times to see what was happening and then withdrew. Nevyan walked outside and found him standing in a tight group with the other marines, talking in a low voice, rifle cradled in his arms.

  “Who’s going to do it, ma’am?” he asked.

  “I think we’ve been here before,” said Qureshi. “With Parekh.”

  “It’s not your responsibility to execute our prisoners. We’ll do it.”

  Esganikan wandered out to wait with them, effectively stifling all conversation. From time to time she reached into her quilted tunic and took out a hand weapon, a smooth dull blue cylinder notched with small finger-shaped indentations to create a grip. Nevyan watched the marines, wondering if they realized what the instrument was. And they watched Esganikan discreetly. They weren’t fools.

  “There,” said Qureshi.

  James Garrod appeared out of the mass of colonists with a man—a man with a gray and stricken face—trailing behind him. So this was Jonathan Burgh. There was nothing about him that would have helped Nevyan single him out as foolishly obedient or violent or even memorable. James kept his gaze on the ground and indicated Jonathan with a gesture over his shoulder.

  He looked as if he felt he had betrayed him. It was a curious kind of morality. It seemed hard for humans to feel that same shame for their treatment of beings who didn’t look like them.

  “I don’t want to die,” said Jonathan Burgh.

  “Very few creatures do,” said Esganikan.

  She took him down to the shore. Nevyan stayed back to make sure the marines didn’t intervene, but they were discussing whether they should stay on Mar’an’cas. Webster wanted to work on the water and power supplies. Nevyan was impressed by their pragmatism.

  There was a loud snap from the direction of the shore, and then another. The camp fell silent. The marines paused in their conversation too, and then went on talking in slightly different tones.

  “I could get this place running a lot better,” Webster said. She stopped a man walking past. “Look, do you want us to stay? Can we get some of the solar plant sorted for you?”

  “Get out,” said the man. “We don’t want you here.”

  “I love civvies,” said Barencoin. “Ungrateful fuckers.”

  “Well, then,” said Qureshi. “Our own government doesn’t want us and neither does this lot. Anyon
e for F’nar?”

  Esganikan appeared again, tidy and unmoved. Except for Barencoin, none of the marines would look at her. She cocked her head and Nevyan followed her back to the boat. The vessel sat lower in the water on the return journey, weighed down by two extra passengers, and Becken took it a little more slowly.

  “I like your friend Shan,” said Esganikan. “I understand her. She has clear purpose. She acts wess’har.”

  “And you seem to like the colonists, and I must say that was not expected.”

  Esganikan flicked her plume of hair and faced into the wind. She seemed to enjoy being in the open air: it might have been a relief after a long enclosed patrol.

  “They want an Earth that lives in balance, and so do we,” she said. “And that is why we will take them with us when we send a mission to Earth. They have asked for our help. So we will give it.”

  12

  We have released the command codes for EFS Thetis so that you can take control of the vessel and retrieve your personnel. The ship is equipped to take up to 400 individuals in chill-sleep and we will order evacuation of all FEU personnel from Umeh Station. We hope cooperation can be resumed when the difficulties over Bezer’ej have been resolved. In the meantime, we ask you to maintain an open communications relay between our systems. We genuinely seek peaceful relations with Umeh.

  BIRSEN ERTEGUN,

  Foreign Secretary, FEU

  Someone hit her. She couldn’t tell who it was but she threw a punch back anyway. And someone was screaming: a woman’s voice, shrill and sobbing, “Don’t! Don’t! Leave him alone, you pig—”

  Shan woke with a start and expected—oh no oh no oh no—to see black, star-speckled space once again.

  Instead she was looking up at gathering clouds in a fading blue sky. She rolled over onto her side and realized she had dozed off on the terrace at the back of the house.

  Shapakti stood at a careful distance. “I knocked,” he said apologetically. He rapped on the parapet wall, not making much of a sound at all. “It was hard to find something to knock on.”

  “Nobody else in?”

  “No Aras, no Ade.”

  Well, at least the two of them weren’t worrying about her any longer. She didn’t like people fussing. It was six days since Nevyan had brought her back and she was mobile and conscious and she could take care of herself. As long as she didn’t look at her body in the shower, she was fine. A week, maybe two, and then she’d look a little more like a survivor than a victim.

  And then Aras might remember she was his wife, and all that went with that. He was treating her like his child.

  Shapakti waited patiently. “I came to ask if you wanted to visit Bezer’ej.”

  “Yes, it’s time I took a look.”

  “I know these things concern you. You were an environment officer.”

  “I was a police officer. I joined EnHaz late and I didn’t do the science bit. I used to nick people for pollution, breaching research guidelines, illegal biomaterials, that sort of thing. Do you understand nick? Arrest. Prosecute. Punish.” Punishment hadn’t been part of her job since she was a uniformed officer on the street, but she did it anyway. Sometimes the informal approach worked best. Sometimes she was so informal that she’d let eco-terrorists do the job for her. “And I’m still a police officer. I don’t know how to be anything else.”

  Shapakti made a cautious circle around her to get to the doorway. “We have started to cleanse Ouzhari. A crew has landed to carry out a survey.”

  Shan picked up the blankets and folded them, finding herself suddenly in the mood for a large plate of something. She didn’t care what. She was ravenous.

  “What do you actually do, Shapakti?” she asked.

  “I am a scientist,” he said. “I study how organisms work.”

  “Ah, a biologist. Is that why you hang around me? Study the old freak?”

  “Do you find my interest offensive?”

  “I’d rather you just asked me questions.”

  “I want to know about c’naatat. We all do.”

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “How does it make its decisions?”

  “I think it treats a host like a planet. An ecosystem.” She had to use the English word: she had no wess’u for it. “Except it takes a lot better care of it than gethes would.”

  “Can you feel it?”

  “No. I can feel what it does, but I’m not conscious of it as an entity. Or a community.” She had a sudden irrelevant thought. There was no God, but if there had been one, maybe that was how he operated too. He let humans fuck up because he was too big and too busy to see the piddling small detail. “I try not to think of being colonized.”

  She looked at her hands and there was more tissue between the skin and the bone than there was yesterday. C’naatat had preserved her brain, even if it had to devour all her muscles and her fat to do so. Then it put back enough tissue to make her mobile, to get her away from any threat. And then it began bringing her back to normal levels of organ tissue and lean muscle mass. If it wasn’t smart and sentient, then it was doing a good impersonation of it.

  She flexed her hand in front of Shapakti, sending a ripple of colored lights up through her fingers. He made a small incoherent sound. It was a great party trick.

  “I picked it up from the bezeri somehow,” she said. “This might be the last living trace of them. Ironic. You know they made maps? Colored sand pressed between sheets of transparent shell. Beautiful.”

  “We look for survivors anyway.”

  Shapakti moved back for every inch Shan moved forward, and that wasn’t like wess’har, who didn’t know what too close meant. “You think I’m dangerous, like Esganikan does?”

  “C’naatat needs to be controlled.”

  “No, those who might misuse it need to be controlled. Understand the difference?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me, are gethes the only species that behaves this badly towards others?”

  Shapakti tipped his head slowly to the right. “No. But you sound as if you would want them to be.”

  It was a sharp observation. Yes, she hated her own kind. She knew that. She was the polar opposite of most humans, who thought that Homo sapiens alone was special: and she thought they were the only ones who were not. She was going to ask Shapakti how he had spotted that so soon, but she decided to leave it.

  “You were going to teach me eqbas’u,” she said.

  “Humans learn language slowly.”

  “Tell you what, give me a shot of Eqbas blood or something and see what happens.”

  Shapakti’s pupils snapped open and shut in utterly transparent curiosity. Shan was reminded what poor poker players wess’har would make.

  “I just meant blood,” she said. “That wasn’t a euphemism.”

  “What’s euphemism?”

  “An indirect and less offensive way of saying something. Don’t think I’m offering you anything extra, okay?”

  Shapakti thought about it. She could see it on his face. There was a definite wess’har expression when they were realizing something, a slow lowering of the head like a small animal gradually nodding off to sleep.

  “I have an isan at home,” he said stiffly.

  “Good for you, son. So you take a few drugs and you don’t need oursan, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “That explains Esganikan’s surly manner.” One wess’har word for surly was ussi’har, ussissi behavior. “She didn’t bring her jurej’ve with her.”

  “She has none. She is a soldier. It would not be fair to have family.” He edged to the door. “I will come for you tomorrow.”

  Shapakti left, wafting sandalwood, and Shan stood looking into the cupboard-sized bedroom she’d shared with Aras. It was high time she moved back into it. Besides, Ade was confined to the sofa as long as she was using his bed.

  She had no idea why she was put there. She wondered if it was Aras’s choice.

  “Sod it,” sh
e said. “That’s my bed too.”

  She dragged the dhren offAde’s bed. Beneath the piles of sek fabric it was just a few broad planks of efte wood laid on blocks. Efte grew on Bezer’ej, fast-maturing tree-sized plants that shot to full height in a few months and then deliquesced and drained back into the soil, leaving behind sheets of fibrous bark that could be cut, felted, laminated, and made into a hundred different materials. For the first time she wondered if the wess’har had introduced it to Wess’ej. There was still a great deal about their approach to ecology that she didn’t know. But it could wait.

  What mattered at the moment was getting fit again and trying to recover that state of relative contentment she’d reached with Aras. For a make-do-and-mend relationship, it had been pretty good; there was a lot to be said for necessity. She made up their bed again, holding the sheets of fabric under the cold torrent of the shower spout to wash them, and shook them dry.

  Ade, ever the ultra-tidy soldier, had folded his bedding neatly and stowed it in the single cupboard. It was just a couple of camouflage sheets of thin DPM fabric, the sort you could fold down in your pack and even use to make a bivouac shelter in the field. Shan recreated his bed as best she could by wrapping the sek blankets around the planks and finally stretching the sheet drum-tight with proper military envelope corners.

  She didn’t have a coin to perform the old army test for bed-making perfection, so she took a cube of brick-solid dried evem from the larder and bounced it down hard on the covers. It sprang back into her hand. She hoped Ade appreciated the attention to detail.

  Aras and Ade returned an hour later, muddy from working the allotment and carrying sacks of vegetables. They seemed easy in each other’s company for the moment.

  I never thought I’d see either of them again.

  Shan wondered why relief was so short-lived. When you were in a terrible situation, you imagined that you would live in a state of permanent gratitude if you ever escaped. You would never ask for anything again, anything, ever, as long as you could extract yourself from the shit you were in. You would cherish all those things snatched from you and never let them out of your sight again. But it wasn’t like that. A sense of gratitude was more fleeting than resentment.