The World Before

by Karen Traviss

  He waited for a few moments before opening the door, listening carefully in case he interrupted a difficult moment. But Shan was sitting on that blue sofa that didn’t fit in with any of the wess’har furniture, one leg tucked beneath her, head propped on her hand while she watched the shifting pattern of the screen on the wall.

  “It’s a brawl at the UN tonight,” she said, not looking at him. “I’m waiting to see the African Assembly bloke slug the FEU delegate. He’s close. I think he’s got the form to take him. About five kilos, I’d say.”

  A humorous Shan was a nervous and unhappy Shan whistling in the dark. Ade slid off his jacket and fired up the range to reheat the stew. The white glass slab radiated heat immediately. “Where’s Aras?”

  “Talking to Shapakti before they deliver the prisoners to Bezer’ej.”

  “Did you have a fight?”

  “No. He just seems very subdued.” She switched off the screen. “I’ve tried convincing him none of this is going to change things. He’ll come round.”

  Ade sat down next to her and offered his shoulder. She yielded slightly and settled into him almost as if they were already lovers rather than simply circling each other, nervous of the final step. There was nothing he could do. He wanted to blurt out everything, but she’d go storming after Aras and then there would be continual arguments. He didn’t want that.

  Besides, Ade had made up his own mind.

  Earth didn’t beckon him half as much as wanting to be with Shan and Aras. He felt a kinship now with the wess’har that was as strong as the sense of family in the Corps, and it wasn’t just his burgeoning wess’har genes that were anchoring him. Aras was a soldier, an abandoned soldier, a man who knew what duty meant and what it was to be expendable.

  And Ade knew he was in the way. And he didn’t deserve any happiness, not after helping Lindsay destroy Ouzhari. It was time he paid for all the people he’d let down in his life— his mum, Dave Pharoah, and the bezeri.

  “You really made this sofa?” he said, struggling to stay off the subject.

  “Yeah.” She looked into his face. “What color is it?”

  “Blue,” he said.

  She managed a grin. “Wess’har vision.”

  “It’s incongruous. But comfortable.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good word. Incongruous.”

  He checked himself. It wasn’t a word he’d used before. He wasn’t stupid, but he didn’t use words for a living like Eddie did, and he wasn’t as intelligent as Shan. He realized c’naatat was changing him in more subtle ways than he imagined.

  “I’m going to go with Aras and hand over Lin and Rayat. I’m the one who took the bloody bombs there so—”

  “I really don’t need this now. Not again, Ade.”

  “I knew they stood a chance of getting used. So I’m guilty.”

  “Motive doesn’t matter here. Just outcomes. How many times do we have to go over this?”

  “So what about inept criminals?” he asked. “You try to be a murderer or a rapist or a thief or something, but you just can’t manage the job. Does that make you innocent?”

  Shan was silent. Then she made a slight uff noise that could have been a laugh or an expression of contempt.

  “I’m buggered if I can answer that.”

  She fell silent again and he could see her jaw muscles working, her eyes slightly defocused. God, he’d stunned her with something clever. He reveled in the moment, not because he’d beaten her at something but because he had surfaced briefly in her intellectual league, and he wondered if she might love him for that. It was rare common ground, more heady than the one-of-the-lads feeling of both being in uniform. But now winning her affection didn’t matter. He couldn’t stay and prompt Aras into leaving. He needed to stop her feeling obligated to him.

  She shook her head at last. “No, you’ve got me there. That’s quite a question. Do you have an answer?”

  “It still makes you guilty, because one day you might try it again and succeed. It’s about… potential.”

  She turned her head slowly. “You do the simple soldier routine perfectly, but you’re fucking smart, aren’t you?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Well, Hawking, wrap your IQ round this. What’s the right thing I need to do for Aras? And you?”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll cope with whatever comes down the road. You know me.”

  Ade had managed brief excursions into Shan’s mind since his infection and what he saw was the headlines, the big events that wouldn’t leave her alone. But every day he saw new facets and they were much more emotional than people imagined.

  He wondered when the memory of being spaced might surface in him. She’d bitten him and drawn blood: he expected it to well up any day now, and the prospect scared him.

  He shared a plate of netun with her and respected the silence. With or without c’naatat, he loved her. Restored to normality, he wouldn’t care about her any less than he had when he’d first seen her swing through that hatch, reassuring and in command, or when she’d treated him like a hero even though he crapped himself, or when she put his medals back in his pocket. He wondered what life might be like back on predictable Earth as a clever woman’s bit of rough. It would be an Earth where they’d both be as alien as the Eqbas.

  And he wondered what Aras might feel like as one of those weirdly likeable sea horses again, with none of the human genes that had made him what he was now. Maybe Aras wouldn’t miss him and Shan at all: and maybe he would be devastated beyond Ade’s capacity to imagine.

  It was all a matter of what was right. Ade had a better idea of that now.

  He’d spare her the explanation. He was never her real jurej, after all.

  25

  Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.

  OVID

  “Oh,” said Shan. “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.”

  Two macaws fluttered among the vines, turquoise and saffron, looking like they weren’t quite getting the hang of being macaws. Their colors were impossibly bright and she had only ever seen them on natural history programs, but they were as real as macaws could ever be.

  “Now that’s a miracle,” she said.

  “I knew they would delight you.” Shapakti had the same air of embarrassed pride that Aras had displayed when he had first shown her F’nar. There was something fundamental in the wess’har male that needed to please a female. “They are perfectly beautiful beings, aren’t they?”

  Shan craned her neck. “It’s one thing to recreate an arrangement of cells,” she said. “But making it into a parrot that knows how to fly and be a parrot is something else entirely.” One of the macaws made a crash landing on a branch and flapped, all screeching panic. “Well, more or less.”

  “We found a great deal of data on macaws. We recreated a virtual environment for them while we accelerated their growth.”

  “Instant parrot. I should hate this, but for some reason I can’t.”

  “A word of caution, chail. Doing the same with each species in the gene bank will take a lifetime and more. This isn’t Earth. There is no ecosystem for them to slot into and learn to be what they are.”

  “But the gene bank you take back to Earth will fit right in,won’t it?” She wanted Ade and Aras to see this. They would love it. It was her first thought and then her second was that she still didn’t know what was the right thing to do for Aras. It took the shine off a moment of pure wonder. “Even extinct species usually have a niche to fit into on Earth and close relatives that can socialize them.”

  “I believe you were right to insist on retaining a separate gene bank as—what is the word?”

  “Insurance.”

  “Yes, insurance.” He clasped his long hands in front of him and wafted a scent of pure contentment. He was good at his job and he knew it. “And they speak.”

  “Parrots? Yes, they really can talk. Took us a while to realize that, and we didn’t treat them any better for it, bu
t yes, they can use language.”

  “An Earth without humans.”

  “What brought that on?”

  “You said it a number of times, as did Aras.”

  “I just don’t like people much.”

  “But we are having talks with people just like you, humans who are not gethes. Does that not give you satisfaction?”

  So the Australasians had the sense to front up some vegan or environmentalist liaison. That was smart. “Only if I can shoot the rest.”

  “Human life is worth less to you than the lives of any other species.”

  “I’m a copper. You get that way after a few years.”

  “You have no more laws to enforce. How much longer will you insist on being a copper?”

  “God, you do sound like Aras sometimes.”

  “Have you made your decision?”

  The macaws shrieked and settled down to groom each other’s plumage. It was hard to look at those exquisite birds and not believe there was something wonderful to look forward to, an extraordinary future for the planet she once saw as the entire universe.

  Fast forward, she thought: I’m back on Earth, all nice and cozy with Ade, and I’m part of the new world order, really putting into action all the things I truly believe in. It’s everything I thought I wanted. And then one night and look up at the sky and I know Aras is out there, 150 trillion miles away. I know what he’ll be thinking. I know how he feels. I know exactly what he’s experienced, right up to the last time I slept with him.

  “How are you getting on with separating c’naatat from wess’har tissue?” asked Shan.

  “I am beginning to think it is impossible,” said Shapakti. “Each time I achieve separation, c’naatat survives but the host cells die. I will persist.”

  “Oh.” Will I remember him? If they take away c’naatat, will I really think about him the way I do now? “Not looking good, is it?”

  Shapakti held out his arms like a scarecrow and the macaws flew to him.

  “They think you’re their mum,” said Shan. “You’ll have a hard job returning them to the wild.” Just like me.

  “We will enable them to have a normal life somehow.” Shapakti ran a cautious finger over one macaw’s head. Both birds were jostling for position on his arm, feathers rustling. One caught his finger in its beak, more playful than aggressive, but Shan braced herself for a scream anyway.

  “Uk’alin’i che,” said the macaw, very clearly, and they both took off for the vines again. Feed me. It was a regular Eqbas parrot, all right.

  Shan sat cross-legged and watched the macaws until she smelled sandalwood overlaid with a little acid and Aras entered. He had something in his hands, wrapped in a piece of fabric.

  “For me?” She attempted a reassuring smile.

  He sat down beside her and placed the object in her hands. “The bezeri asked me to return this.”

  She could tell what it was even without unwrapping it. The weight and shape were familiar. When she peeled back the fabric the azin shell map was exactly as she remembered it, a beautiful piece of sand art. And she knew it wasn’t a present. She turned it over in her hands and remembered how strongly she’d felt she could honor her pledge to protect them.

  “I can guess,” she said, crushed, and wrapped it again.

  Aras seemed to have developed Ade’s habit of compressing his lips briefly before saying something difficult. “They said to tell you that your red line did not hold.”

  She’d promised them. She’d failed. “Is that what’s been upsetting you? Why didn’t you say?”

  Shapakti busied himself talking to the macaws. Aras seemed distracted by them for a moment, his head tilted in curiosity. Then he turned his head very deliberately to her. “I thought it might upset you.”

  “I’ve got a thicker hide than Eddie, and that’s saying something,” she said, and grinned. Maybe he’d be happier now that she’d shown that she wasn’t hurt by the bezeri’s rebuke. By the time he found out it was a front, she would be comfortable with it.

  He reached out and slid his hand into hers, almost edging his way as if she might round on him and hit him. She caught his hand tightly. Now was as bad a time as any to tell him.

  “Shapakti says they still can’t remove c’naatat from you.”

  He let out a breath, nothing more.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” she said. “It doesn’t change a thing.”

  Aras couldn’t suppress his scent like she could. But smelling that acid-citrus fragrance didn’t tell her why he was upset. It could have been that he really wanted to be normal again more than he wanted to be with her. If he did, she would have to accept that. They were both aliens: it was an unlikely relationship born of desperation. If it wasn’t that, then she could only assume that he feared she would take her opportunity to reverse events and go home. She was, as she had been for days, torn between the life she had here and her duty to Earth. EnHaz, as brief a job as it had been, was where her soul lay if she had one at all.

  She got to her feet and he scrambled upright beside her, but his eyes were on the macaws.

  “This is the first time I feel that I’ve seen a real part of Earth,” he said. “Not a farm, like Constantine, for the benefit of gethes alone. This is the Earth that is quite separate from humans, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And there’s so little of it left.”

  “You miss it.”

  “Good God, no. Reading Metro wasn’t unspoiled rain forest. This is as new to me as it is to you.”

  “Eugenie Perault would be most surprised to see all this return to its rightful home,” said Aras.

  “Surprised?” said Shan. “I’ll fucking bet.”

  She thought it would be good to visit Earth some time in the future, after the Eqbas had completed what they set out to do. By then, she might be able to return home safely.

  No, it was Earth now. Just Earth.

  Nevyan took Giyadas to see the growing Eqbas settlement. It was twice the height of an adult wess’har now, still looking ludicrously fragile but getting larger nevertheless. As Nevyan watched, she could see the gradual accumulation of particles building on the fresh edge of the construction as the nanites labored to their template, taking the soil from around them and converting it into a building. There was nobody around. The city worked alone.

  “I don’t like it,” said Giyadas. “Does it have to be here?”

  “I don’t like it either. But if they are to help us, we must help them.”

  “We’ll become like them.”

  “Not if we remain true to our principles.” Nevyan had her own doubts. She wanted to withdraw permission. She felt she couldn’t. “And they’re not alien to us, not at heart.”

  “Are they building a city on Bezer’ej?”

  It was a good question. The isanket had a sharp mind and was already confident and aggressive, an encouraging signfor her future. “If they build there, then they have no need to be here.”

  It was an excellent idea. Nevyan turned and Giyadas followed her back to F’nar.

  This was why her ancestors had parted company with Eqbas Vorhi. It was all too unnatural, too ambitious, too predicated upon continual expansion—and in that sense, it made them no better than the isenj or the gethes. The Eqbas managed environments without harm, but they were still spreading gradually throughout the galaxy, imposing their order—the correct order, but still imposed—on other worlds.

  All I wanted was for the gethes threat to be contained. And now we are the latest outpost of Eqbas Vorhi.

  She would suggest that they might be better occupied in building a temporary city on Bezer’ej, where the cleansing work still had to be done and the handful of bezeri survivors needed watching. If Shan joined her, the suggestion would become a demand that Esganikan couldn’t ignore.

  When Nevyan reached Shan’s home, the woman was lying on her back on the terrace, hands clasped on her chest, with something over her face. It looked like a visor. Giyadas nud
ged her and she took it off.

  “Sorry,” said Shan. “Look what Shapakti’s rigged up for me.” She held the visor out to Giyadas and showed her how to place it over her eyes. “He’s modeled what they might be able to do with the rain forests on Earth. He thinks they can be restored to at least their 2200 levels of coverage in five years. Isn’t that amazing?”

  Giyadas cocked her head back and forth rapidly, trilling with excitement. “It’s green,” she said. “So much green. And people!”

  “Yeah, Shapakti likes his jungle,” she said. “Gorillas. He knows that makes me feel odd.”

  “Why?” Nevyan had never thought of Shan as looking back. Now Earth had become something new and challenging for her. And if Shapakti was right, then she had the option of going home, and that was alarming.

  “Long story. I saw a gorilla once and they’d taught it to use sign language. I didn’t know what it was saying, but later on I found out, and it was asking me to help it get out of its cage.” Shan raked her fingers through her hair: it hung down her back again, like a male’s. Her c’naatat was reconstructing her as fast as Shapakti was fashioning new rain forests. “There’s never a day goes by that I don’t think about how it must have felt to see me walk away, so now I don’t pass gorillas on the other side of the road, or bezeri, or cockroaches, or anything else that deserves the same respect as us.”

  Nevyan understood the sentiment if not the specifics. Shan was back in a world that had given her great torment and that she seemed to feel she could put right if she had the chance. The Eqbas had handed her a world of chances.

  “You get on well with Shapakti.”

  “He’s a decent bloke. We talk a lot about ecology, but that’s all, okay? They’re calling it the Earth Adjustment Mission. I love euphemism. I could watch it all day.”

  “That’s still in the future. You know it will take their fleet five years to reach us.”

  Shan inhaled and her pupils widened into those black voids that showed stress in humans. “Hey, what is it?”