Ade paused, staring into Lindsay’s face for one minute, then two, then three. He grabbed her arm and examined it, frowning.
“Not a scratch,” he said. His tone was flat and unemotional. He dunked his sleeve in the sea and wiped the blade clean on it, then turned to Rayat. “Now let’s give you someone to keep you company on those dark nights, eh?”
“It’s going to be one long night down there,” said Rayat. “You lose the light at a thousand feet.” He pushed up his sleeve to offer his arm. “Let’s do it, then.”
Aras could feel the warmth and slight itching as c’naatat reconstructed his skull and scalp. The pain was dimming. Ade busied himself cleaning Aras’s blood from the butt of his rifle.
“Two more minutes, I reckon,” he said.
Aras rolled a little further to watch Lindsay’s grim, terrified face as she stared down into the water that was now filling with pulsing red, amber and gold lights. The raft was illuminated from beneath by angry bezeri, floating on liquid fire.
Rayat was gazing down through the deck into the glowing water as well. The scent of anxiety was overwhelming.
But Aras could have sworn he actually smiled.
28
Sometimes people need a few rehearsals to find out what they’re really made of. Shan didn’t, of course: right from the start, she took Horatius’s view that there was no better way to die than facing fearful odds and holding that damn bridge. But I had Lindsay labeled as a regular human being, the sort who thinks the best way to die is in your sleep aged at least four score years and ten. And then she surprised us all. Who would have thought she’d choose an eternity under water to atone for the destruction of the bezeri? You never really know anyone at all. And I don’t think Lindsay really knew what she would be capable of, either, not even then.
Was I ever tempted to try c’naatat?
You must be joking.
Eddie Michallat’s Constantine Diaries
Ade watched the skyline for the approach of a small globule of bronze shiplet. Shapakti was late picking them up.
“You okay now?”
Aras was sitting on his heels, arms folded across his chest. Ade thought it looked weird, but wess’har found that as comfortable as sitting cross-legged.
“I’m no longer in pain,” said Aras.
Ade knelt down beside him and braced himself to put both hands on Aras’s head to examine it. Aras didn’t flinch. Wess’har had few taboos about being touched. Ade parted the hair—barbed and vaned like strings of soft feather—and found nothing to indicate that he’d smashed the butt of his rifle hard enough into Aras’s head to fracture his skull and rip it open.
“I’m sorry, mate,” he said. “Only way I could bring you down for a while.”
“I understand.”
No, he didn’t: Ade ached with misery. He had become his father, resorting to violence in a moment. And, as Aras had pointed out, he’d run and left Shan to it, just like he had left his mother. He’d been so sure he was doing the decent thing. Now he saw what Aras had seen: another act of cowardice.
“C’naatat or not, that must have hurt.”
“It did.” Aras reached out and went to clasp Ade’s arm, but he jerked it back. He was still edgy. “I regret what I said to you.”
“Maybe it needed saying.”
“I only said it to stop you. It’s untrue.”
It wasn’t. Aras was becoming so human that he’d even learned diplomacy. But it was nice of him to try to lie out of kindness. Wess’har weren’t good liars at all. And neither am I.
How could he ever sleep with Shan now? She’d pick up his memories. She’d experience those awful minutes. She’d know. It might not happen right away, but she’d find out before long. She’d realize that he handed over c’naatat to the two people she most despised, and that he and Aras almost competed to be the first to run out on her.
“What about you?”
Aras looked round. “What?”
“Oursan. You’ll sleep with her and you’ll transfer whatever it is that the cells transfer and she’ll have your memories. She’ll find out what went on.”
Aras waited several seconds before replying, as if it had occurred to him for the first time too. But he must have thought it. “Perhaps not. Genetic memory isn’t telepathy. And we will deal with that when it happens.”
“Can you lie to her? Would you?”
Aras waited several seconds again. “I don’t know.”
Ade settled down again and waited, looking down through the niluy-ghur’s transparent deck at swaying weed in the shallows beneath. Shapakti’s fragment of vessel could pick up the raft from the surface and set it down again without even getting the deck wet. The Eqbas would be one hell of an assault force. Ade appreciated that kind of detail.
He wondered what Lindsay and Rayat were doing right then, and all he could imagine was that it was taking place somewhere cold, and dark, and terrifying, and lonely.
Dawn was coming to the roomful of jungle underneath the city of F’nar. Shan sat cross-legged on the floor and watched the artificial sunrise produced by the daylight cycle that Shapakti’s team had created. The macaws stretched their wings one at a time, legs extended beneath them as elegantly as a dancer’s, and fluffed their plumage.
C’naatat had many good points. The best she could think of right now was that it had erased all physical signs that she had spent an hour sobbing her heart out in the privacy of the jungle room.
“Do you want to go home that badly?” said Shapakti’s voice. It made her jump. She hadn’t smelled him coming.
“Forget it,” she said.
“I understand. I long for home too.”
She rubbed the back of her hand across her nose, still sniffing. “Not a word to Aras or Ade, okay?”
“Why?”
“I don’t want them to know.”
“The treatment will always be here for you.”
“If it works. But not for Aras, though. And I won’t abandon him, and I know Ade won’t either.”
“Then you have no reason to weep.”
It didn’t feel that way. But Shapakti was right. Shan patted his back, reassured for the time being by splendid wess’har pragmatism. The Earth she thought of as home didn’t exist now: it probably never had, but it would exist one day and the Eqbas would see to that. She had almost completed the mission that Eugenie Perault had never intended her to fulfill. No, she had no reason to weep.
“Are those two buggers back?”
“Of course they are,” said Shapakti. “They wouldn’t let me accompany them on the niluy-ghur, but I brought them back as you ordered.”
“Just checking,” she said. Ordered. Yes, she had been in sistent. “They can both be bloody daft sometimes.”
“You have a good family. Cherish them.”
Poor bloody Shapakti, years from home, and missing his brothers and his wife and their kids. Shan could offer him no comfort and fumbled in her pocket. She drew out the container that she had carried with her wherever she went, across years and star systems.
“I want to show you something,” she said. She opened the cap and tipped the contents into her palm. Small, pale, round seeds—tomato seeds—settled on the background of bioluminescence that flickered within her skin. “Tomatoes. I always planned to grow them when I stopped being a copper. These are illegal, you know. Unregistered hybrids.”
“Life-forms cannot be illegal.”
“I like the way you people think. I really do.”
She tipped the seeds back into the container and decided that she was going to spend today sowing tomatoes, just as she’d always planned. Shapakti beckoned her to the doorway, slipping behind her and herding her out into the passage. He had to start moving the habitat. Shan was glad it wouldn’t remain here to remind her of Earth.
She walked out into the daylight, the real daylight of Ceret, the yellow sun they once called Cavanagh’s Star before any human knew how many different names it really had. She wand
ered back up the pearl-encrusted terraces, rattling the seeds in the little box and greeting wess’har who she now knew as friends and neighbors. She paused at the top of the steps on the highest level of the terraces and turned to admire F’nar in the winter sun.
It was as every bit as beautiful as rain forest if you knew how to look.
Then she walked on, wondering about the feasibility of that lavender preserve. As she pushed against the door, the lights in her hands reflected in the pearl surface and she took a deep breath, determined not to look back at her own World Before. It was the first breath she had drawn in an hour.
“Hey, you two,” she called. “I’m home.”
Resounding praise for
CITY OF PEARL
and
CROSSING THE LINE
“Stellar.”
Jack McDevitt, author of Deepsix
“Satisfyingly complex… [Traviss] at times, evokes the earlier moral fables of Le Guin… at other times the revisionist critique of expanding human empires… and at times the union of romance with SF that we see in the work of Catherine Asaro or Lois McMaster Bujold… Traviss manages to keep these sometimes conflicting modes in balance, mostly through her strong sense of character.”
Locus
“A fascinating cast of characters involved in a richly complex situation… Her people are convincingly real… Traviss has created a vivid assortment of alien races, each with distinctive characteristics and agendas.”
James Alan Gardner, author of Expendable
“Science fiction with teeth… In Shan Frankland, Karen Traviss has created a tough, interesting, believable character.”
Gregory Frost, author of Fitcher’s Brides
“A writer to watch… Traviss takes what could have been a rote collection of characters (marines, cops, religious extremists) and slowly adds depth, complexity, and color.”
BookPage
Acknowledgments
My grateful thanks go to Charlie Allery, Bryan Boult, Debbie Button, and Dr.Ian Tregillis, for critical reading; to my editor, Diana Gill, and agent, Russ Galen, for keeping me in line; to Andy Tucker, for theological insight; to Benjamin Buchholz, for finding the perfect word; to Malcolm McGreevy and Cliff Allen, who set me on the path that led here; and to Chris “TK” Evans, who made that path a whole lot smoother.
About the Author
KAREN TRAVISS is a former defense correspondent and TV and newspaper journalist. She’s now a political public relations manager and has also been a press officer for the police, an advertising copywriter, and a journalism lecturer. She has served in both the Royal Navy Auxiliary Service and the Territorial Army. A graduate of the Clarion science fiction and fantasy workshop, her work has appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, and On Spec. She lives in Wiltshire, England.
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Books of The Wess’har Wars by
Karen Traviss
THE WORLD BEFORE
CROSSING THE LINE
CITY OF PEARL
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to ac tual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE WORLD BEFORE. COPYRIGHT © 2005 BY KAREN TRAVISS. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition October 2005 ISBN 9780061758737
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Karen Traviss, The World Before
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