The World Before

  He seemed surprised that she had bothered to come and see him.

  “Do you have time now?” Shapakti always kept at a safe distance from her, a good clear meter. Now she had stepped down off the roller coaster of aggression, she realized what a stroppy bitch she must have seemed to him. Poor bugger: he was just doing his job, probably as dismayed as she had been at being diverted elsewhere, and missing his family. “It really is most important, and it is personal.”

  With or without the Eqbas, this was going to be her home for a very, very long time. She wondered why she had ever thought otherwise. And Ade had no more choice than she had, and neither did Aras, so all she had to do was shake off one more redundant attitude and get on with life.

  “Certainly, son,” she said. “Tell me all about it.”

  The request wasn’t unreasonable, but it made Nevyan uneasy. She stood in the forest of lava plugs out on the F’nar plain and wondered how visible a small Eqbas settlement might be.

  “It would look much like Surang,” said Esganikan.

  “No, it would be coated in tem deposits in a very short time.”

  “Very well, it would be covered in pearl. It would be disguised somewhat by the lava formations, and it would be temporary.”

  Nevyan understood why the Eqbas wanted the comfort of a built settlement. Adaptable as their ships were, the environment was still limited. They longed for the surroundings of home. But it alarmed her because it brought them both a step closer together, and Targassat had been adamant that it was a life they should shun.

  It had worked so well for so long.

  “We won’t intrude,” said Esganikan. “We understand.”

  Nevyan imagined the billowing shapes robed in iridescence. But it would be demolished in time, and F’nar had built the Temporary City on Bezer’ej so she had no moral grounds for refusing this. “I asked for your military support. It’s only reasonable that we should make your lives as easy as we can.”

  “So we’ll begin,” said Esganikan.

  Nevyan thought of fetching Eddie to watch the beginnings of the settlement, to record the buildings constructing themselves out of the raw materials around them. Aras had said the original gethes city on Ouzhari—the one he had removed long before the colonists arrived—had been built in a similar way from the land itself, but with visible machines. Humans had their technical limitations. She called home and asked Giyadas to see if the journalist felt up to venturing out. Nevyan suspected it was his conscience that was still injured, because his head wound was healing quite well.

  “We all miss home, and no doubt the gethes do too,” said Esganikan. She scuffed her boot in the gold soil as if checking it for some quality or characteristic. “We brought back some Earth vegetation from Umeh Station for Shapakti’s colleagues to examine. They want to create a small terrestrial environment to gain skills in restoring Earth.”

  “And where might they create this?”

  “You have space in your hangars beneath F’nar.”

  “If you wish to use that…”

  “Again, it would be temporary. When we depart for Earth, it can be dismantled.”

  Nevyan wondered if Shan and Ade might like the environment to remain to ease a longing for home. Shan had never shown signs of missing Earth, although she had made much of being deprived of her favorite boots, but Ade Bennett seemed a more sentimental person. Jurej’ve deserved to be kept happy.

  “Proceed,” said Nevyan.

  She knew what it was like to miss home. She was beginning to feel on foreign territory already.

  “Are you sure about this, Shapakti?” Shan found her arms had crossed themselves tightly on her chest almost without her noticing, just the way they did when an interrogation wasn’t yielding answers as fast as she wanted. “Absolutely sure?”

  “It is possible,” said Shapakti. “I have only modeled the procedure based on the specimen you provided. The bond between the organism and proteins is tenacious, but it appears to be reversible. I believe we can remove c’naatat without harming the organism.” He looked at her as if she had scolded him. “We would of course place the symbionts back in the soil in Ouzhari.”

  He must have misinterpreted her dismay. She heard the words remove c’naatat and her stomach flipped over. No. No, it couldn’t be this way, not now.

  She thought of how she yelled and raged at Aras when she realized he had infected her to save her life. If she’d been offered the choice then, she would have grabbed it without a second thought. She had her plans in those days. She’d wanted to go home. She’d picked out a remote smallholding on the border with the Cymru Republic, somewhere to grow her illegal unpatented tomatoes, and she was getting out of EnHaz because she had done a lifetime’s duty and it was time for her.

  Then Eugenie Perault had intervened.

  They were alone in the dark little bubble of ship that Shapakti had made his home. The bulkheads shimmered with status reports and images; one picture, a live one as far as Shan could tell, was of a billowing Eqbas building that looked like a galleon on a stick. She suspected it might be Shapakti’s hometown. He was like anyone in uniform, decorating his locker with comforting pictures of cherished people and places.

  History. You can’t change a thing now.

  “What about the host?” Shan asked. “Selfish preoccupation, but I need to know.”

  “As far as I can tell without using live specimens, the hosts would revert to their original genome.”

  Now she didn’t want the choice. Is this me? Is this what I want? And why? And then she didn’t know if it was her opinion or if it was c’naatat urging her.

  If it was influencing her, it was sentient.

  The panic that threatened to make itself obvious to Shapakti felt as bad as stepping into space and feeling that total, searing cold that felt white-hot. What was inside her? And if it wasn’t the parasite talking, what did she prize about being a host? She started to face the possibility that she wasn’t simply being good old resilient Shan, always able to brace her shoulders and make the best of a bad job. She had to consider that she might enjoy being as close to a god as a pragmatic, disbelieving woman ever could.

  She didn’t have much time for gods. They were either absent or incompetent. She wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to get too used to being one.

  Then another sickening thought almost cut her legs from under her.

  She hadn’t even thought about Aras.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Shapakti.

  “Have you worked out if you can remove c’naatat from a wess’har?”

  “We don’t yet know. It’s possible.”

  “So… Aras could look forward to some sort of normal life, then.” She swallowed hard. It took all her conscious will not to flood the room with the scent of her own anxiety. She lapsed into detached language. “He could be free to reproduce.”

  “If the organism can be separated from him, yes.”

  You’re looking for an excuse.

  It was almost a disembodied voice in her head. For the first time in her adult life, she didn’t know exactly what she thought, what she believed, and what she wanted. There were no absolutes and no certainties.

  Shapakti looked into her face, pupils snapping open and closed. Even if he couldn’t smell her it was obvious that he knew the news had knocked her for six. “But you would like to go home, wouldn’t you? I would. I have been away a long time. I want to see my isan and my house-brothers and our children again. I thought you would too.”

  Shan thought of Reading Metro and the admin workload and the gridlock riots and coming home to an empty apartment. Then she thought of the Wessex National Park and fried egg sandwiches and how large a plot of land her long-frozen pension would now buy.

  “Who else knows about this?” she asked.

  “My team, of course, and Esganikan—”

  “Do me a favor. It’s speculation as far as I’m concerned. You don’t tell Ade or Aras. Not yet. That’s my job. Understand?
”

  “Very well. But I thought this would please you.”

  She stood up and made for the hatch. “You’ve done a good job. But it’s a choice I didn’t think I’d ever be able to make.”

  “I am sorry for angering you. But they say you are a competent matriarch, able to make very hard decisions.”

  Shan stood on the threshold where coaming would have been on a normal ship, and felt the sleet against her face softening into snow.

  “Well, they were wrong,” she said.

  23

  I miss you. It’s very wonderful here, very strange, and there are so many different types of people and plants that I sometimes forget myself and stop missing you all for a moment. But when I close my eyes to rest, there you are again. It’s been too long. I will bring marvelous things back for you. I will let you know as soon as I have a departure date, so you can all plan a period in suspension. Thank you for waiting for me.

  DA SHAPAKTI, to his isan Jamurian Ve, his house-brothers, and the beloved children of the clan

  The snow was knee-deep. Wess’har didn’t like the cold but a few brave souls had ventured out into the fields, swathed in layer upon layer of sek. Aras, who didn’t suffer in cold weather and had been raised in Baral, took it in his stride. Shan could see him clearly through the scope of Ade’s rifle.

  “I hope he doesn’t get the wrong idea,” said Ade, taking the rifle back from her. “It isn’t even loaded.”

  Shan sat on the top of the plateau next to her memorial, arms around her knees, and savored the exceptionally rare snowscape that ran across the ship camp of the Eqbas Vorhi mission to the city itself. A layer of snow on top of the pearl made F’nar look like a nostalgic window-dresser’s rendering of a fairytale winter.

  “What do you think of that, Ade?”

  The growing Eqbas settlement, tucked discreetly into a stone forest of volcanic plugs, had begun to remind Shan of a wasps’ nest. A slim base emerged from the ground and the structure was beginning to flare out from it, reaching into the air like an oyster mushroom just like the buildings of Surang. It was free of snow: they must have been using some sort of environmental barrier, and it was warm behind it, because tem flies had already begun polishing it with a pretty layer of iridescent shit. They swarmed to hot climates for the winter but some were still here and seemed to have been caught unawares by the weather like everyone else.

  Ade puffed little clouds of condensed breath. Shan reminded herself to breathe again.

  “Ade, have you thought about it?”

  “I still think you should tell Aras right now.”

  “I asked if you had thought about it.”

  “Yeah, I have.”

  “You could be back to normal and going home. Wife, kids, the whole thing.”

  Ade had never been much good at hiding his feelings. Now he wore his expression of suppressed disgust, lips clamped tight and pupils wide. “How can you say that when you know what normal was for me?” His automatic camou-flage jacket was now stark white with faint swirls of pale gray and blue, merging him with his background like an Arctic hare. He seemed perfectly adapted. So this is what he really does. He’s a mountain and arctic warfare expert. “I didn’t have a wife and kids and every woman I ever loved walked out on me. I’m coming up forty and I’ve been kicked out of the Corps. So everything I’ve got is here, even if they take every alien cell out of me.”

  “I was just asking. I didn’t want you to feel that you didn’t have a choice.”

  “You don’t see yourself ever being my isan, do you?”

  It was odd to hear him use the wess’har term. “Ade, I just thought it might all be a combination of a crush and loneliness on your part.”

  “Oh, and there was I thinking you didn’t feel sorry for me.”

  “I thought you might see things differently if you could go home. You don’t have to stay. Take c’naatat out and you could—”

  “This is home.”

  “I’m sorry. I had to ask, just in case.”

  “Okay, do you want to have c’naatat taken out? Do you want to be regular Shan Frankland again?”

  She’d asked herself that over and over again ever since Shapakti had told her it was possible. The answer had been immediate: no. It was a gut reaction. She still didn’t know if it was the parasite colony talking, making a desperate bid to stay inside its host.

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “And perhaps that’s why I should go back to being a basic human. There’s nothing worse than a bastard like me with a bit too much power. Maybe I need stopping right now.”

  Ade shut his eyes for a moment and she thought he was going to erupt. She knew he had been raised on violence and she knew it was within him; but she didn’t want to see it emerge, not because of her and a few stupid comments.

  But he simply opened his eyes again and gave her a smile that was utterly heartbreaking. “That’s why I think the world of you. You’re a fundamentally good person in a way almost nobody ever is. You think I can just pack my bag and leave, do you?”

  “Stop it, for Chrissakes.” She squirmed. “I know exactly what I am. Good doesn’t come into it. You ought to bloody know, too. You’ve got enough of my memory now.”

  “Being good isn’t always about being soft.”

  Stop it. “Come on, you miss Earth.”

  His lips compressed again. She wasn’t getting anything out of him. “We’ve all got responsibilities here, but I’ll go along with whatever decision you make. You’re still the Boss.”

  “Great. Just great. That’s a big fucking help.”

  “You still have to tell Aras. Where does that leave him?”

  “Shapakti doesn’t know if it’ll work on wess’har. I don’t want to get his hopes up.”

  “And if they can, you think he’ll want to breed more than he wants you?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You can’t believe that. I’ve inherited some of his thoughts. So have you.”

  “So let’s see what he thinks when he’s got all the facts.”

  “He’s going to go fucking ballistic when he finds out you kept this from him. If you don’t tell him, he’s going to pick it up from your memory sooner or later. I’d hate to find out that way. Tell him before he takes Rayat and Lindsay back to Bezer’ej.”

  They went back to staring at the snow. Genies didn’t fit back into bottles easily. And she wasn’t sure how she’d feel if Aras was given the same choice and then took it. She’d almost grown used to the status of an isan: she liked being adored, even if she knew that it was as much a biological mechanism as an emotional one.

  C’naatat was showing her all the things she really didn’t like about herself.

  She got up and they walked back down the easy path from the plateau and down onto the plain again. Even 150 trillion miles from home, snow had lost none of its clean, quiet wonder.

  “Want to build a snowman?” Ade asked.

  She smiled. He was his old self again, trying to raise morale like a good sergeant should. “As long as we flatten it afterwards. Nothing intrudes on the landscape, remember.”

  And they built a snowman, laughing and pelting each other with hard-packed, vicious snowballs that almost burned when they caught bare skin. Shan stuck a stylus in the expressionless face to make a nose. There was never a carrot and a couple of pieces of coal around when you needed them.

  “I’ve never seen you laugh like that,” said Ade.

  “I’ve never built a snowman.”

  “No?”

  “I didn’t really have a childhood.”

  “I can tell. Me neither.”

  “Oh.” She glanced over his shoulder and he turned to see what she was looking at. “Shapakti.”

  The Eqbas scientist was walking unsteadily through the snow, the swathe of fabric across his face reminding her of the cowl of his biohaz suit. He made a few placatory bobs of his head and stopped to do a head-tilting stare at the snowman.

  “Is this religious?” he s
aid.

  “No, and don’t even mention it to the colonists if you meet them,” Shan reached out and knocked the head off the figure, embarrassed. Ade retrieved the stylus. “You’ve got some news for me, haven’t you?”

  “I have something to show you—both of you. Somewhere much warmer.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Ade.

  Shapakti turned and began walking back towards F’nar. Shan and Ade trampled the rest of the snowman back into featureless oblivion before catching him up.

  “Why did you traipse all the way out here to find me?” she asked. “I’ve got a virin.”

  “You don’t always answer,” said Shapakti. “And I think you like plenty of warning of my interruptions.”

  It was Ade’s first visit to the underground bunkers that housed F’nar’s fighter craft and assorted weapons. He stopped to admire a vessel, but Shan took his arm and dragged him gently away. “You can play with that later.” Shapakti led them through the maze of passages and they came to an opening that spilled bright light in exactly the same way that the subterranean colony of Constantine had when she had first ventured down into its heart.

  “This was taken from Umeh Station,” said Shapakti, and opened the hatch.

  Hot moist air hit her face and she could taste greenness and life on the oxygen-rich air.

  Home, her body said. Home.

  Maybe it wasn’t Reading Metro, but it was Earth. Rainforest vines and exotic greenery filled the chamber like some Victorian hothouse that had been shipped out to amuse an eccentric guest. Eddie was wandering about inside, stroking his fingers over the shiny emerald leaves.

  “You okay?” said Shan.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “I’m sorry about Ual. I never had chance to meet him, and I regret that.”

  “Yeah.” He was subdued, not Normal Eddie at all. She didn’t plan to divert any time to soothing him right then. She had enough on her plate as it was. “You can have your ballistic vest back now.”