The World Before

by Karen Traviss

  He stopped and leaned on his shovel. “So this is it, eh?”

  Aras beckoned. “Yes. Please don’t try to bargain with me, because I am not open to negotiation.”

  Rayat glanced at Ade and his rifle, and then shrugged and drove his shovel into the soil. “Okay. No point putting on my Sunday best for this anyway.”

  The colonists didn’t stop to see them go. They went about their business: they weren’t the kind of people to turn into a mob watching the tumbrills passing. Lindsay caught the eye of someone she had known well, Sabine Mesevy, the botanist from Thetis who had joined the colony. And when she got to the shore, Deborah Garrod was waiting alone by the glass raft that had somehow attached itself to the pebbles like a perfect jetty reaching out into the shallows.

  Eddie hadn’t made contact since Umeh Station. Lindsay had been so sure that he would. She was hurt: she wanted a goodbye, even a forced one.

  Deborah acknowledged Aras with a nod, then put her arms around Lindsay and hugged her.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said. “It passes.”

  She didn’t hug Rayat, but then that wasn’t surprising.

  Lindsay had never been so scared in her life: from her stomach to the core of her thigh muscles she felt cold and a sensation of pressure squeezed against the roof of her mouth. There was something in the brain that assessed threat far more accurately than the conscious mind, and this time her brain said this is really it, sweetheart. All the other times she had been scared for her life—and there had been a few of those—it hadn’t felt like this, not at all. This was numbing, cold and completely disabling. But if Shan could go with dignity, and Rayat too, then so would she.

  She needed to pick her moment to ask Aras for the favor that she suspected he would never grant.

  She stepped onto the glass deck and wished she had been able to examine this engineering miracle when she didn’t have dying to worry about.

  The part-formed matrix of the Eqbas city stood frozen in time.

  It was neither growing nor deconstructing itself. Nevyan walked ahead of Shan and Esganikan and stopped a few meters short of it. It still stood twice her height, a pearl-covered mass of swirls and billows that reminded her of the tree-sized fungi on Bezer’ej. The air around it was warm and pleasant: tem flies, caught out of season behind the biobarrier, went about their business of laying down more nacre on the smooth surfaces.

  “I thought you were going to remove this,” said Shan.

  Esganikan tilted her head this way and that. “There is no core within this shell. Our materials have been deconstructed and returned to the soil. This is purely the tem deposits, and we will retrieve the remaining flies and release them further south where the climate suits them. And then we can remove the biobarrier.”

  Nevyan turned to watch Shan and the Eqbas commander, feeling excluded from the debate. She could always tell—as could any wess’har—when two matriarchs particularly liked each other, and for all the jask that had been emitted, Shan and Esganikan did appear to be becoming comfortable together. Nevyan imagined it was as much the shared experience of unnatural isolation as it was the kinship of dominance. A return to Earth with a powerful new ally seemed a prospect guaranteed to test Shan’s resolve to stay.

  “Okay, let’s get these little buggers packed,” said Shan.

  One of Shapakti’s team placed a small square container inside the biobarrier and within moments the tem flies began struggling against an invisible force that was sucking them into it. Then the biobarrier dissolved with a breath of warm air that escaped into the winter chill of the plain, and only the thin shell of pearl remained.

  “Now, isn’t that pretty?” Shan stepped forward and put her hand out carefully, brushing her fingertips against the rippled iridescence. Nevyan could see it was the lightest of touches, but the shell cracked, and Shan stepped back with a small sound of surprise and disappointment.

  The pearl bubble began breaking up.

  Shards shimmered to the ground from the uppermost level and large cracks appeared at the bottom. The collapse picked up pace and the three matriarchs stood back and watched as the structure reduced itself to a heap of fragments.

  Esganikan didn’t react at all. Shan seemed upset.

  “I hate physical metaphor,” she said.

  “It’s just tem droppings,” said Nevyan. “There is no such thing as prophecy.”

  Esganikan left without a word. She and her people were free to visit Wess’ej any time, but Nevyan had the impression that they would now keep at arm’s length, to use Eddie’s grossly inaccurate phrase. The Eqbas matriarch was about twenty meters away when she paused and looked back at them.

  “Shan Chail, I have no doubt that we will talk again, next time on Bezer’ej,” she called.

  “I’d like to do that,” Shan called back, and Nevyan wasn’t sure if it was a statement of intent or a display of human diplomacy.

  Nevyan kept her thoughts about the nature of prophecy to herself. It was a silly gethes thing, this superstition business. The pearl shell had been an unstable structure made of tem excrement, a thing doomed to temporary existence from the start.

  No, she would not be swayed by it. She hoped Shan could ignore it too.

  Aras had grown used to bezeri vessels over the centuries but he decided he preferred the niluy-ghur. However many times he submerged in the water-filled bezeri pod ships and felt the sea flood his mouth and lungs, he had never grown used to it.

  It couldn’t kill him. He had first found that he couldn’t drown when he was a prisoner of the isenj.

  “Do you know what they’re going to do to us?” asked Rayat. He was sitting on the transparent deck, hands flat out behind him almost as if he was trying to look relaxed, but it wasn’t working, not if you could smell a gethes’ fear. Ade was kneeling down on one knee next to Rayat, rifle across one thigh, and Lindsay Neville stood with one hand on the column that housed the steering mechanisms. She, at least, was looking down into the water with some interest. She had been a naval officer. Perhaps she didn’t fear the sea as much as a land-based civilian.

  “What would you do to someone who had caused the death of most of your race?” asked Aras.

  It wasn’t a rhetorical question, although he knew how to frame those. He wanted to know. He had little time left to find out what humans might do in certain circumstances.

  “There’s only so much you can do to someone before they die,” said Rayat, and sounded as if he knew that for all the worst possible reasons.

  Aras sat on the edge of the deck and lowered the signal lamp over the sea to summon the bezeri. It was a dull day and he would be able to see their bioluminescence easily when they rose nearer to the surface.

  If only he had been able to tell Shan what he intended to do; but he was adept at dishonesty now. She would have tried to stop him. She had been sent here on the basis of Perault’s lie to begin with, and then he had made her exile permanent with another lie, by not telling her immediately what he had done to save her life. When he looked back, it seemed he had lied to her a great deal, just like everyone else had.

  He distracted himself with Rayat’s question. “It will be relatively rapid. You’ll drown before you suffer. Bezeri have cutting mouth parts but they have no weapons, and they’re not as creatively cruel as your own kind.” He paused. “You’re dead already, though. The human-specific pathogen entered your lungs as soon as you landed.”

  “You could have left us on the shore, then,” said Rayat.

  “This will be much quicker. It’s also what the bezeri want.”

  “So who’s going to help them now?” asked Lindsay.

  “I am,” said Aras.

  “No, I mean who will be based here now that your people have withdrawn.”

  “Me. I’m going below to help them begin the rebuilding. I owe it to them.”

  Shan would be furious, devastated, but she would get over it. Ade would help her.

  “What about Shan? I thought—”
/>
  “You thought wrong.”

  Lindsay seemed shocked into silence. Even Rayat smelled startled. Aras concentrated on not looking at Ade.

  “What if I did it?” said Lindsay at last. “What if I went in your place?”

  Rayat and Ade both reacted at once. “The fuck you are,” said Ade suddenly. “If anyone’s going down there, it’s me. Is this some stunt to get the parasite? Did this bastard put you up to it?” He shoved Rayat in the chest. “Did he?”

  Rayat still appeared genuinely surprised. He certainly smelled stressed, then scared. “I never—”

  “I thought of it myself,” said Lindsay. “I’ll do it. If you infect me, then I’ll serve them—if they’ll let me.”

  Ade stood up and took his rifle off his webbing. “Right. So I just stroll away from all this? Not me, mate.” His face was suddenly pale and he smelled as alarmed as Rayat. “Shan said all she had to do was breathe in the water and stop panicking. I reckon I can manage that.”

  “You have no idea what you’re taking on.”

  “I never do. But I do it, anyway. I front up and earn it. I don’t know any other way.”

  Aras took it as an impulsive gesture by a fundamentally good man confronted with an unpleasant reality. But now he realized why Ade had insisted on coming. He had arrived at the same conclusion as Aras. He had looked at the messy, painful reality of guilt and the choices that were now open again and had made the same decision as he had.

  Aras pushed him gently away. “I want you and Shan to regain the lives you had when you first landed on Bezer’ej.”

  “That’s not going to happen.” Ade stepped closer again, face-to-face with him now: the prisoners were forgotten for the moment. “You’re not just staying here—you’re planning to live under water. You thought about that, have you? So have I. It’s going to be fucking awful and you haven’t done a thing to deserve that. There’s no way I’m leaving you down there, and there’s no way you’re abandoning Shan.”

  Ade started taking off his jacket, the one that changed color according to his environment. As it fell on the glass deck it made an attempt to become gray-blue and mimic the ocean beneath. Lindsay, a tired-looking remnant of a woman in a shabby naval uniform, grabbed his shirt-sleeve. “What the hell are you two thinking of?”

  “They asked for me,” said Aras.

  “Yeah, and they’re going to get me instead,” said Ade. “I’m a complication Shan doesn’t need. And I want to look the bezeri in the eye and apologize.”

  Lindsay wouldn’t let go of Ade’s shirt. “No! Just stop this! You can’t go down there. She’ll come after you, you know that. Go home.”

  Lindsay let go of Ade and went over to Rayat, remarkably steady on her feet for a human walking on a glass floor. “It’s me and this bastard. My command, his idea. So we pay. Okay?”

  Aras thought briefly of seizing both of them and taking them down into the water, leaving Ade behind: he was still bigger and faster than the marine, although he could put up a credible fight. But he knew Ade would pursue him. And one of them would still have to decide to return to Shan.

  “I was just an accident,” said Ade. “Let me put something right.”

  Aras found it was painfully tempting. Life would be impossibly hard without his isan. He had lost her once, twice, and now he was losing her for the third and final time. Human culture was replete with trinity. But if she had Ade Bennett, she would be cared for and respected, and—he hoped—she would find some peace with him.

  Rayat was licking his lips nervously and blinking. “Lin, we’re dead either way. You don’t care what happens to Shan Frankland. You don’t even like her.”

  “This isn’t about her. It’s about me.” She put her hand out to Ade. Aras was getting agitated; if you took a terrible step, you needed to take it fast. Thinking was too painful. “Ask them, Aras. Ask them if they’ll accept me.”

  “No, the bezeri need me. And Shan needs to have a decision taken for her.”

  “You selfish bastard,” said Lindsay.

  Aras couldn’t see what was selfish about it. It was no more selfish than stepping out into space rather than hand over c’naatat. Lindsay spoke with the venom and pain of the human bereaved, who buried their anger at the dead for leaving them alone, and it always lurked hidden in their grief.

  It seemed a desperate trick to avoid death. Aras stared at Lindsay, unable to equate this gesture with the woman who had brought bombs to Bezer’ej and thought it was reasonable. “You think being c’naatat is enjoyable? Desirable? Is this your bid to acquire it?”

  “Nobody’s ever coming for us. The Eqbas are going to see to that.”

  “You’re not capable of this.”

  “Try me. Okay, the bezeri want justice. They can only kill me once. If I live down there, I can serve them, and whatever you think of me, I really, really need to be forgiven in some small part.”

  Lindsay grabbed Aras’s wrist. No gethes—and no wess’har in recent memory—had touched his skin except Shan. He jerked back. “Go on, infect me,” she said. “No tricks. Let me go down there and help them. Please, Aras. Then go back to Shan.”

  Rayat’s scent was pure acid. Aras was about to seize both of them and plunge over the side of the raft, but something hit him hard in the head, once, twice, sending him to the deck and filling his vision with exploding light. He pushed himself up on one hand but the next agonizing blow was so hard he heard bone crack and saw a spray of his own blood spatter the deck in front of him.

  A weight crashed onto his back, pinning him. His right arm was forced up his back. His shattered skull could recover in a matter of minutes, but he didn’t have that time.

  “Sorry, mate,” said Ade, panting with effort. “Come on, you lazy bastards, give me a fucking hand. Rayat, get his legs.”

  Lindsay and Rayat were pinning him down now, sobbing with the effort. Ade forced his left arm higher, and as much as Aras struggled he couldn’t get his strength back before Ade’s plastic restraints—insubstantial, harmless-looking but horribly effective—cut deep into his wrists. He managed to kick out, but three bodies were more than he could cope with. The restraints snapped tight around his ankles.

  Then the weight lifted off him. He was bound and helpless.

  “You’ll be okay soon,” said Ade. He knelt panting, head tilted to look him in the eye as he lay on the deck. “But she’d kill me if I went back without you.”

  Aras knew that. He’d been working on forgetting it. “You can’t do this.”

  “Watch me. Okay, let’s have the signal lamp.” Ade got to his feet and Aras expected Rayat to seize the opportunity to escape, even though the antihuman pathogen would kill him if the sea didn’t claim him first. He picked up the device. “Does this thing interpret English?”

  “It does,” said Aras, recalling how Shan had used the lamp to apologize to the bezeri at least twice. It was getting to be a habit. “If the bezeri won’t take her, then you must—”

  “Here they come.”

  Aras looked down though the clear deck. There were lights, red and cyan and yellow, and they were rising nearer the surface. The last of the bezeri were coming. Ade knelt and projected the colored light through the transparent deck. Patterns flared into the water.

  The human woman wants to help you rebuild.

  The bezeri paused in their ascent. Their reply came in a curious flat approximation of human speech. Is she the one responsible?

  Yes, and the man.

  How will they serve us if we kill them? Or when they drown?

  Ade paused. We can make sure they don’t drown. Like Aras. Like me.

  “Won’t we contaminate them?” said Rayat.

  Aras had moved among the bezeri for 500 years and none of them had acquired c’naatat. “Ade, I forbid you to go with them.”

  The marine looked at him and put a finger to his lips. He turned back to signaling. Will you take them and me instead of Aras?

  Rayat reeked of acid. But he wasn’t f
ighting. He wasn’t trying to escape. Maybe c’naatat was better than death for him, because he had no chance now of ever leaving Bezer’ej.

  How can we kill them if they displease us?

  Ade shrugged, although the lamp couldn’t interpret a motion. Call Aras. He’ll finish the job.

  “Ade, stay.” Aras rolled a little so he could face him. I know your past, Ade Bennett: I know your World Before, and I know what fears haunt you. “Shan will never forgive either of us for this deceit. You abandoned your mother—and now you abandon Shan after putting her through hell. So much for your courage.”

  It was a cruel human ploy, a spiteful lie. Ade embraced danger every day to stop the voices, his own and his dead father’s, that told him he was a coward. Adding Shan to those voices was almost too cruel. But Aras would have said anything then to stop Ade going into the water. He expected him to hurl back the same accusation—Aras was running, taking the coward’s way out—but none came.

  Ade’s face fell for a telling moment.

  “You bastard,” he said. Aras could hear that faint note in his voice, the one that said he was struggling. “I’d never let that woman down again. Never.”

  A vivid display of red and amber lights swirled beneath the raft, pulsing occasionally with green, getting brighter with each beat. The bezeri were shouting, screaming.

  Give them to us. Give them to us.

  Ade knelt back on his heels. This will take a few minutes. Then he laid the lamp aside and took out his fighting knife.

  Lindsay shut her eyes and held out her arm to Ade. He sliced into her arm and then cut a flap from his own, exposing an area large enough to keep the blood flowing sufficiently to drip onto Lindsay’s cut, just as Aras had done when he dripped his own blood into Shan’s open head-wound. It wasn’t easy: c’naatat stemmed blood flow fast.

  “Hold your arm against mine, for goodness’ sake,” said Lindsay.

  “No, I don’t want your memories,” said Ade. “But you’re welcome to mine.”

  He sliced across his arm several times before he seemed satisfied that enough blood had flowed.

  Mohan Rayat smelled panicky but no longer terrified. And his expression was relaxed, almost… content. Whatever Shan thought of him, she would have conceded that he was as capable as she was of facing the unthinkable with dignity.