The World Before

  “We will still exercise caution,” said Shapakti.

  “I don’t think it can do much harm now.”

  Shapakti held his arms slightly away from his sides as if he had touched something especially messy. The bore team was suddenly very still and so was he.

  “It is not dead,” he said.

  15

  The Pacific Rim States and the African Assembly today issued an ultimatum to the Federal European Union to end its deep space exploration program “immediately and indefinitely” or face armed intervention.

  The demand, thought to have the tacit support of the Sinostates, follows yesterday’s shock revelation that EqbasVorhi intends to land on Earth in thirty years’time. “I might be dead by the time that happens but my kids won’t be,” said UN delegate Jim Matsoukis. “If we stop this insane colonial adventuring right now we might avert an unprecedented disaster.”

  It’s not yet known if the FEU will give in to pressure to recall its warship Hereward, still heading for the Cavanagh’s Star system. “We still have people stranded out there and we won’t abandon them,” said an FEU spokesman.

  BBChantext 1667. See UN debate live at 1800 EUST.

  “He should have known,” said Shan.

  Esganikan walked with her, a rare study in matriarchal patience. They had trailed up and down the Ouzhari shoreline for a couple of hours, stopping to look out to sea as the afternoon wore on and the rest of the survey team trailed back to the ship to eat. Shan could see it from the beach: a luminous copper cylinder, its shape now more like an igloo with an entrance tunnel, with waves of faint light shimmering across its hull as the automated decontamination system swept it clean of radiation. Shan could walk here with impunity but it was still a dangerous, poisoned place for all other life.

  Except c’naatat.

  “I don’t understand why this makes you angry,” said Esganikan. “An organism has survived. The situation is not completely desperate.”

  Shan jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the lifeless beach behind her. She fell back on English. “It’s a fucking barbecue here. What’s not desperate?” Esganikan stood impassive and silent. Shan concentrated on wess’u again. “Sorry. Not only is this as bad as I could imagine, but the bezeri died for nothing. And Rayat is a scientist. He knows that even some terrestrial bacteria can survive radiation. This was a big, sloppy, stupid gamble. Look.” She held out her arms, flipping her hands over and back again to demonstrate them. “I’m probably here now because some bacteria have a talent for surviving anything.”

  Esganikan brushed something from her soft environment suit. It reminded Shan of a burqa.

  “I learned your language in days, but I will never learn how you think. This is all irrelevant.”

  “Maybe I’m not wess’har enough to feel that way.”

  “You desire balance. That is what police require, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, and we don’t often get it.”

  “And what if the survey team find bezeri still alive? Will that anger you too?”

  “Have you got Aras’s signal lamp?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then if you find any, tell them Shan Frankland is sorry—again. I bet that’s the one English word they don’t need translated by now.”

  Esganikan went back to the ship. Shan sat down cross-legged on the sand to wait for the glass raft to return, suddenly aware she was probably sitting on organisms that had changed her life beyond human recognition. She picked up a handful of soil and sifted it between her fingers.

  Shapakti approached her, giving her a wide berth like a nervous beekeeper in his loose pale suit and veil. Everything that wess’har made, even the sinister stuff like weapons and biohaz suits, had a certain functional elegance.

  “You haven’t eaten.” Shapakti’s agitation made it clear he didn’t want her to get the wrong idea about his offer of food. It wasn’t a sexual invitation. “Aras insisted that I make you eat regularly. Come back to the ship.”

  “I have to decontaminate first or I’ll make you all light up. Can’t be arsed at the moment”

  “Is that a refusal?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I will bring food to you, then.”

  “Don’t worry. You’re perfectly safe, mate. You’re not my type.” She saw his pupils snap from four-petaled flower to cross wires even behind the suit’s draped visor: he might have been working out what mate meant and fearing for his honor again. “Would you do me a favor? Before we leave, can I visit Constantine?”

  “Of course. You can go now if you wish, while we wait for the others to return.”

  “How? I could walk, but it’s a hell of a long way.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t drown. I’ve done it. I walked into the water and visited the bezeri. Can’t say I enjoyed the sensation, though.”

  “It is indeed a long way to walk, especially in your condition. I will find a vessel.”

  He beckoned to her and she followed him back to the craft. Two years alongside utterly alien technology had raised her amazement threshold and she was expecting some part of the small craft to detach itself and form a boat or some other form of transport. But Shapakti simply opened a hatch in the igloo-ship’s tunnel of an entrance lobby and removed a milky smooth cube thirty centimeters square.

  “What’s that?”

  “You called it a raft. A niluy-ghur.”

  “Oh, this is going to be one of those conjuring tricks, isn’t it?” She had once watched a wess’har take a simple jointed stick and snap it into a frame that made a stool. Working surfaces emerged like protoplasm from hard flat walls: metal waste biodegraded in hours. Wess’har were good at manipulating two things—solid materials and cells. “White man’s magic. Go on. Surprise me.”

  Shapakti placed the cube at the water’s edge and it unfurled itself like an emergency life raft, first folding out into a flat transparent blanket of gel and then becoming rigid. The sea lapped at it. It slid obediently into the water to form a solid platform with one edge still on the beach, and Shapakti walked onto it and stood waiting.

  Shan put one foot on the raft. She would have felt safer if she’d had her old boots. It didn’t feel quite the same world in the matte gray ones that an anonymous benefactor in F’nar had fashioned for her, even though they were superior boots, silent and thermally perfect and self-cleaning, and they shaped themselves to whatever height and fit she wanted them to be. But they didn’t go with the remains of her uniform and they didn’t announce her arrival. She missed her old boots.

  The raft was rock-solid and didn’t move when she put her full weight on it like a boat would have done. As soon as she was inboard—if standing on a glass sheet could ever be considered inboard—it moved away into the shallows and out to sea. A column rose out of the surface in front of Shapakti, a plinth of glass-clear material, and images danced in its top layer almost like the virin communicator Nevyan had given her.

  Shapakti touched the column and the raft began making speed. If Shan hadn’t already seen the vessel in action, she would have abandoned ship there and then. There was no undulation or feeling of the wind in her hair, and she could easily have been standing on an immobile solid floor while the ocean and the landscape moved around and past her and under her like a disturbingly good simulation. No water slopped over the bows, such as they were. And she was looking down through the water between her feet. Weed and other unidentifiable debris churned up by the raft’s motion roiled in a space trapped between the ocean and the bottom of the hull.

  “Tell me this thing doesn’t fly,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I meant that humans don’t cope well with seeing the ground a long way beneath them, even if they’re on a solid glass floor. They always think they’re going to fall.”

  “You survived in space. You coped well enough.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to do it again.”

  “And it could fly if we were to modify it.”

&
nbsp; Landing on Bezer’ej for the first time: Ade Bennett closed the hatch behind her and she was looking through the transparent section of the shuttle’s hull as the AI took over and tipped her out into space. It felt like a long and terrible fall. Her stomach rolled. Shan shook herself out of the memory and put out her hand to steady herself even though there was no movement. A glass column flowed up from the deck to meet it.

  It was faintly warm and yielding, like a layer of insulation over steel. “You do like your glass,” she said. “Glass utensils, glass drains, glass bells. Glass people.”

  “You like to be able to see through things, Shan Frankland. So do we.”

  Shapakti brought his heel down hard on the deck and it extruded a glass booth around him. He slipped off his biohaz suit and the raft swallowed it, sealing it into the deck in a bubble. “Now you,” he said. He kicked a booth into place around her. It felt like being shrink-wrapped for market. “Or you will take contamination to Constantine.”

  The seascape streaked past them, spray and wind held at bay by barriers that she couldn’t see. She checked the time on her swiss. Constantine, a hundred miles north of Ouzhari at the top of the chain of islands, was now in sight. The raft must have been making at least ninety knots and yet there was still no sensation of movement.

  She stepped off the raft onto a familiar beach and it was suddenly and unexpectedly heartbreaking.

  A perfectly spherical stone inlaid with intricate patterns of color stood at the high-water line. It was the Place of Memory of the First, the memorial to the first bezeri pilot who beached himself to gather information about the Dry Above.

  “You know what this says?” she said. Shapakti studied the patterns, just as she had studied them when Aras first showed her the stone. “It says that the nineteenth of the shoal of Ehek launched himself out of the water and told the waiting ones all he could see of the Dry Above before he died an honorable death. A suicide mission. After that they developed pod ships with water jets that propelled them back into the water. It was like the early days of space flight to them.”

  Shapakti followed her down the beach to another large stone memorial, this time a conical one with lines of color spiraling down its sides. Shan patted it. “The Place of Memory of the Returned. The first bezeri who came ashore and made it back. And now they’re all gone.”

  “Perhaps not all.” Shapakti stroked his long multijointed fingers over the inlaid stone. “There were several hundred thousand.”

  “And what if you find a few? A hundred? A dozen? It took them centuries for their population to recover last time and they started out with a lot more. And how can they rebuild?”

  “Humans were reduced to hundreds at one time in their evolution.”

  “And that’s a role model?”

  “I merely offer a positive future.”

  “You know what?” Shan began walking up the beach, shaking off memories of when she thought she’d be off Bezer’ej and heading home inside a year, back to a quiet retirement with a garden full of unregistered tomato hybrids. “If you find any bezeri, we should let them have Lindsay Neville. And Rayat. Their call.”

  Constantine, the Mountain to the Dry Above, was returning to its wild origins. The blue and amber grasses had crept back over the site where the Thetis mission had made its camp. Even the recently abandoned fields of the colony were already being overrun by island species. Without the invisible biobarrier that contained the colony and allowed a terrestrial ecology to exist, the crops were dying.

  It was a glimpse of the fate that would have befallen the Constantine mission nearly two centuries before had an exiled alien soldier called Aras Sar Iussan not intervened to help them survive.

  Shan had worked in those fields for a few months. She walked back through them towards the underground colony, looking for the discreet skylight bubbles that blistered the landscape, but she couldn’t pick them out. She was right on top of the colony before she saw it.

  At the top of the ramp that led down into the excavated galleries, she wondered if the tunnels were still accessible. Nanites had been scattered to reclaim the building materials and erase all traces of the gethes. When Ade and Barencoin had dragged her bound and gagged from the place, the walls were already crumbling.

  “I’m going to see how far I can get,” she said. “I’ll call if I need help.”

  “I will accompany you,” said Shapakti. “A cave-in is less alarming than the anger of your males.”

  The subterranean colony, once as striking a feat of excavation as the Nabataeans’ Petra, had been robbed of its light and was now pitch-black. Shan’s adapted vision kicked in and she picked her way through piles of soil and fallen stone. Her boot crunched on something, and when she looked down it was the remains of an ESF670 rifle, the one she had taken from Chahal and tried to fire into Lindsay Neville’s head. The nanites had dismantled most of it; the buffer pin and return springs seemed to be the last items on the menu for them.

  “They used to have sunlight down here,” she said. “Aras never did tell me how they managed that. Are you okay, Shapakti?”

  “I can see well enough to walk.”

  Wess’har had evolved from burrow dwellers: low light didn’t hamper them, but Shan switched on the flashlight in her swiss anyway. Shapakti didn’t have the infrared vision that c’naatat had given her.

  The map of Constantine was etched in her mind. She sniffed, tasting decay on the stale air. No, not decay: putre-faction. She’d smelled that so often in her life that there was no mistaking it for anything else. It was a corpse.

  The colonists left their dead for the native rockvelvets. There were no flies here, nor any of the usual terrestrial insects that lived on the dead. The colony had only been interested in resurrecting pollinators from the gene bank.

  Shan thought that a good old-fashioned bluebottle would have been just the job right then. “Can you smell it?”

  “I smell…sulfur compounds.”

  The wess’har sense of smell was acute. After a couple months in a warm environment bodies had usually peaked in stench, but the microecology here was shot to hell. And rockvelvets only fed in the open. Decay was slow.

  Shan reached in the back of her belt for her gun, purely out of habit in a dark and now unfamiliar place, and Shapakti made a little noise of surprise. Maybe he thought she knew something he didn’t. His sudden whiff of alarm managed to cut through the smell of rotting meat. The tunnels were silent except for their footsteps and the sporadic sifting noise of falling soil.

  “You’re not breathing,” said Shapakti.

  No, she wasn’t. It was funny how you could forget to do some things. She made a conscious effort to start again. She headed for the abandoned church of St. Francis, reasoning that if she were a religious colonist in trouble then she’d go there when things got really bad.

  GOVERNMENT WORK IS GOD’S WORK

  The inscription—archaic, arrogant, delusional—was still legible in the block of hard stone that had come from Ouzhari, the original landing site. Shan just walked in, aware that neither the dead nor the living could harm her but cautious nonetheless. And this wasn’t a crime scene with evidence to protect and secure.

  The efte door was gone and she walked along the aisle as she had first done two years ago, a Pagan disturbing someone else’s hallowed ground. But there was no magnificent stained-glass window of the saint who respected all life. The stone frame was empty, the glass pieces safe on Mar’an’cas. And the carved efte pews with their dancing angels had been devoured and recycled by the nanites.

  She could now both see and smell her target. It was a group of bodies, not one, and when she looked down at them with her hand over her nose and mouth she could see that the group was a man, a woman and two children.

  Even if she had known them there was no way she could recognize them now. The woman had long brown hair and there were two hardened slices of bread nearby. One had neat bite marks taken out of it. The cause of death didn’t matter any
more. But it didn’t look as if they starved.

  “Stupid bastards,” she said. “Some of them wouldn’t leave.”

  Shapakti peered at the bodies, cocking his head in fascination. Of course: if he was going to learn anything about human biology, he would learn it from a dead body, not a live one. Wess’har had no concept of the vivisection of other species.

  “Where is the part that still lives?” he asked. “The invisible component?”

  “The soul? Oh, that’s just crap. A story.”

  “Like c’naatat.”

  “Shapakti, my old mate, they’re dead. Trust me. I’ve seen a few stiffs in my time.” Here I go, copper’s lairy mouth again, shutting myself off from it all by being flippant. “They’re not decomposing normally because there isn’t the range of insects here to do the job the Earth way. If you want some samples, go ahead.”

  “The anti-human pathogen worked.”

  “I’d say. It was based on my original DNA. I always did have an antisocial streak in me.” She watched him squat down and place a thin rod at various points in the tangle of misshapen, discolored limbs. The bodies were huddled together, embracing: a family, probably. “Did I look that bad when they brought me in?”

  “I believe that your shape was more coherent.”

  “Flatterer.” She thought of a hundred other corpses whose last moments she had reconstructed. “There’s a part of me that says put them outside for the rockvelvets, but I’m buggered if I’m going to move them in that state.” Deconsecrated or not, the church is where they wanted to die. Leave them in peace. “When you’ve got what you want, let’s go.”

  A little over two months ago Shan had stood here, her back to the altar, and addressed the thousand or so colonists. The man, woman and children lying here had heard her tell them to leave, to abandon all they’d worked for. She looked at the faces and couldn’t see who had once looked back at her.