The World Before

by Karen Traviss

  “I understand,” said Eddie. “Thanks.”

  He set off again, this time at a prudent fast walk. He wiped the sweat off his face and pushed cautiously on Aras’s door. There was no sign of Nevyan. He could hear Ade and Aras talking.

  “Is she responding at all? Is anyone thinking of how we feed her?”

  “Nevyan said she’s coughing up water.”

  “Can she swallow?”

  “Not as such.”

  “What do you mean, not as such?”

  “Best she could do was drip it down her throat.”

  It didn’t make sense.

  Eddie walked into the small side chamber that had been Ade’s room. Why’s he taken the body in there? Aras and Ade were leaning over the bed and they both straightened up and turned to look at Eddie at the same time. And Nevyan was standing watching them in silence.

  Body. Oh God, God, God.

  “Eddie,” said Nevyan. “I should have called you. Shan’s back.”

  “I know.”

  “No, she’s alive.”

  There were days when so much water poured down the pipe that one more bucketful didn’t make you drown any faster. He turned the word over in his mind. He looked at it and nothing made sense.

  “She can’t be alive. That can’t be her.”

  Nevyan simply beckoned him forward. “It’s true.”

  Eddie forced himself to look at the body and he heard a little uhhh noise that he thought might be her, or even Ade; and then he realized it was his own voice, his own disbelief and shock escaping from his throat.

  Shan looked dead—no, she looked worse than dead. She looked mummified. She didn’t look like a woman and she didn’t look even remotely like Shan. Ade pulled a dhren across her body, frowning at him. Eddie hadn’t even noticed that she was naked.

  “She wasn’t drifting?” he asked. He couldn’t even form a question.

  He’d seen plenty of dead bodies before. He’d seen—and smelled—bodies in ditches at the side of the main road into Ankara, hacked about, misshapen kit people in pieces who only looked real because there were flies swarming on them that billowed up in a black cloud when he leaned a little too close to look. A small white dog had been eating one of the bodies, worrying at the shattered skull of a young woman. It was a poodle with a blue glittery collar; a civilized thing gone feral, like all the humans around it.

  The roadside dead were strangers. Shan was a friend, more or less.

  “Eddie,” said Ade. “It’s a shock for all of us. Take it easy.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t ask how. All we know is that she’s still alive.”

  Eddie said alive to himself several times. He tried not to put his hand to his mouth, but it was hard.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God.”

  Real shock was a strange thing. Eddie found that another part of his brain took over and said training, training, training. He reached for his camera. It was only Nevyan’s crushing grip on his arm that stopped him.

  Ade showed remarkably little emotion. He’d probably seen a lot worse on the battlefield. There wasn’t the slightest hint that the marine was looking at a woman he cared for, or even that he had misgivings about having emptied a magazine into her. He knelt down beside the bed and looked for all the world as if he was praying. Aras slid his hand under Shan’s head and moved the pillow.

  Ade stood up again. “I can intubate. If you’ve got a tube about so wide, I can get it down her throat.” He indicated the width with close-held fingertips. “I can do basic first aid.”

  “Well, neither of us can, so that makes you the brain surgeon,” said the part of Eddie that was coping. The other part was still staring at an unrecognizable skeleton that had once been a woman who physically terrified him. “I left some brewing kit here. Tubes, squeeze-bulbs, that kind of stuff.”

  “Close enough.”

  Eddie rummaged through the jumble of efte boxes in the storage area he had once used as a bedroom and pulled out the coils of tubing and funnels that he’d filched from the Thetis mission’s lab. It felt like a lifetime ago. His hands were shaking. Alive. Alive. He’d almost forgotten the news he’d run up the terrace to break.

  “It’s not sterile,” he said.

  “I don’t think that’s going to make any difference now,” said Ade. He uncoiled the tubing and measured a length against Shan’s chest. “Why don’t you find something liquid enough to pass through this?”

  “Force-feeding will hurt her,” said Aras.

  Ade’s shoulders stiffened. Eddie had never picked up the slightest hint of aggression from him but he was sensing it now. “Yeah, but I don’t know how to do a percutaneous endogastric tube,” said Ade irritably. “Besides, cutting a hole in her abdominal wall will hurt her a fucking sight more, so just get the nutrient, will you?”

  There was a brief moment of silence. Then Aras simply walked away.

  Ade stretched out the tube and took the end in one hand. “Eddie, can you steady her head so I can get the tube in her nose?”

  “Okay…” Oh God. “How do you know when it’s in the stomach?”

  “Stomach contents siphoning back.”

  “Has she got any?”

  “Look, I’ve measured the bloody thing. Halfway between the end of the sternum and the navel, okay?”

  Eddie had never thought of himself as squeamish but there was something horrific about touching a very frail body. Shan’s scalp was unusually hot against his palm and he could feel the ridges of bone. He thought briefly of his bee cam and accepted, just this once, that it was neither the time nor the place. He let Ade work.

  “Easy, sweetheart. There…yeah, I know…I know… take it easy.” Ade made a couple of abortive attempts to get the tube past Shan’s throat. For a dead woman, she was doing a credible job of struggling and gagging. She crunched down hard on his finger: he yelped and tried to pull free, but she had latched on like a snake and it was a few seconds before her bite tired and he could withdraw. He wiped blood on his pants, seeming unconcerned. “Just as well I’m already infected, eh? Come on… let’s try again, sweetheart.”

  Her struggling grew weaker and eventually he managed to ease the tube past her throat. He glanced over his shoulder. “Where’s Aras with the bloody mix?”

  Aras returned with a glass flask. The contents looked substantial. Ade seemed unconvinced.

  “What’s in it?”

  “Beet jaggery, the last of the barley flour, and some jay juice,” said Aras.

  “You sure you haven’t got it in her trachea?” said Eddie. Oh God. “The tube, I mean.”

  “I’m sure,” said Ade.

  “How do you know how much to feed her?”

  Ade paused for one beat before replying and it was as eloquent as a balled fist. “Maximum stomach capacity’s three liters, normal capacity half that, but she’s wasted away. So we give her half a liter slowly every two hours and keep an eye on her. I might even be able to feel the distension manually, seeing as there’s nothing of her. That’s what you do with animals, anyway.”

  Eddie reconsidered his view of Ade as a simple if excellent soldier. “Animals?”

  “You feel if the stomach’s full. I’ve bottle-fed orphaned foxes.” Ade’s face was suddenly different, distracted, recalling something he didn’t like remembering. “At least I did until my fucking father smashed their heads in.”

  The room was silent except for the liquid sounds of the nutrient working through the tube. Occasionally Eddie had glimpses of what had made Ade Bennett into the man he was and the visions were like a sightseeing trip to hell. Maybe that was what Shan had spotted. She had an unerring eye for damaged men who needed her solid reassurance.

  And here she was, alive. And she shouldn’t have been. There were lucky escapes, and unbelievable escapes, but this was off the scale.

  “Looks like she’s taken it okay.” Ade glanced at Aras, chin lowered. “You want to keep an eye on her while I find something to secure th
e tube? Then we can leave it in place for a couple of days and not have to put her through that each time we feed her.”

  Eddie noted the placatory we. He didn’t feel that included him. Ade busied himself sorting through the contents of his pouch belt and seemed to find something in his emergency medical kit that satisfied him, a small roll of adhesive tape. He handed it to Aras almost submissively. Aras accepted it, and with it Ade’s silent indication of where he should place the tape to best anchor the tube.

  “Rota,” said Ade. “Two hours’ watch each. Okay?”

  “What if she’s brain damaged?” said Eddie.

  “I’ve seen an isenj round blow a hole in her head you could almost put your hand in and she recovered from that just fine,” said Ade, wearing his soft voice again. “And if she doesn’t pull round from this—well, then we’re going to take care of her for as long as she needs it. She’s home.”

  Aras indicated the door with a sharp nod of the head, effectively dismissing Ade. “I will take the first watch.”

  Eddie, well used to observing the gamut of emotional reactions to shocking news, found himself on the terrace staring at his own shaking hands. The adrenaline was beginning to ebb and the enormity of events was kicking in, making him rerun the last hour over and over again in his mind, each time finding the shock of revelation fresh and breathtaking. Nevyan and Ade joined him.

  “I regret not warning you,” said Nevyan. “But this was hardly the information to commit to a public channel.”

  “Jesus, no.”

  “It is…extraordinary.”

  Eddie struggled. “And there was I thinking I had news for you.” He licked dry lips. It was definitely time for a beer. “You need to know this. Ual’s …um… decided to hand over Lindsay and Rayat, no conditions, but his own government doesn’t know. He’s going to get the marines on Umeh to abduct them.”

  Nevyan didn’t turn a hair. “Bold. And sensible.”

  Eddie, one duty done, fretted over abandoning a story. “He doesn’t want a war.”

  “How will he achieve this? How am I to contact him if his government isn’t privy to this?”

  Ade came out onto the terrace with three mugs of beer and handed them out. Eddie took a tight grip on the smooth glass but could hardly feel it. He cupped one hand carefully underneath. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have no idea. I’ll call him—”

  “That can wait now,” said Nevyan.

  They drank in silence. It was a disgustingly yeasty brew but it did the job. Nevyan sipped it gingerly, just once, and then stood nursing the mug.

  “You can’t get drunk, not with c’naatat,” said Eddie, mouth on autopilot now. “Shan told me so.”

  “I know,” said Ade. “But I have a great imagination.” He gulped it. “Here’s to the Boss.”

  “How are we going to keep this quiet?”

  “Shapakti’s going to be all over this. But who would believe us anyway?”

  The best stories were always like that. “Who’s Shapakti?”

  “The Eqbas commander who landed. Yeah, they’re here. I should have said.”

  They’re here.

  Eddie was making a soft landing now, seeing the world in the familiar context of sound bites and angles again. His brain had wrapped up the fact that Shan Frankland had survived where absolutely no complex organism could, and had hidden it while he calmed down. That shock had made the situation on Earth somehow more manageable.

  “I ought to call ’Desk,” said Eddie.

  He sat down at the small console in the main room, not quite seeing the detail of the screen, and reminded himself that he had seen an awful, awful lot of bizarre and terrifying and momentous things in his career. This was just one more.

  Jesus, she’s really alive. It kept washing back over him. No, this wasn’t just one more thing. It changed everything. The BBChan portal opened.

  “Mick,” he said. “Mick, I’m back.”

  There was no recrimination over his abrupt exit. “You look bloody awful. What’s happened?”

  Eddie swallowed a particularly large lump of yeast and hoped the most recent events didn’t manifest themselves in a large cartoon think-bubble above his head. “Yeah,” he said. “I ran here. I can get you some footage of the first Eqbas forces. Maybe today.”

  “Now that’s what I call a story.”

  It was asking for trouble to promise ’Desk anything, but he did it anyway. “Sorry I had to run,” said Eddie.

  “Hey, you were going after the Eqbas. But tell me that next time, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Eddie, and knew there were things he would now never tell a living soul.

  Each day, Lindsay made sure that she knew exactly where Mohan Rayat was.

  She was dead already. She just needed to make sure Rayat got what was coming to him as well. There was nowhere to run on Umeh, but she was determined that he wouldn’t just melt away into the endless heaving mass of isenj.

  Rayat was in the communications center today, an optimistic name for a single room that wasn’t doing much communicating. He was having an argument, and she had to hand it to the slimeball: he could keep his cool.

  “Why can’t I send this?” demanded one of the contractors.

  “Because it contains more than the basic okay message the isenj will allow past the relay.”

  “That’s no bloody use.”

  Rayat had that resigned and immovable look of a man Just Doing His Job. He didn’t seem like a spook at all. His hands were meshed in front of him on the table like a newscaster.

  “You can transmit what you like,” he said. “But if it doesn’t consist of the exact words ‘I am fine’ or ‘systems operating normally’ then the relay is set to bounce it back. So I’m told.”

  “My company needs this information. It’s just operating data from the CO2 scrubs.”

  “The isenj don’t know that it’s not a sophisticated code containing a message that’ll provoke the wess’har.”

  Rayat said it with a commendably straight face. The contractor, hands braced on the table, let his head drop between sagging shoulders in submission to the might of alien bureaucracy. “Okay. It’s bloody stupid, but okay.”

  Lindsay watched the man leave and slid into the space he had left.

  “Reckon we’ll get to the riot stage?” she asked.

  “Not if the food holds out,” said Rayat.

  He looked inexplicably calm for a man who had unleashed careless massacre. Lindsay now had a very different view of the words extinction and genocide. Dead bezeri had helped her see that the two were identical if you just deleted the notion that it was different for humans.

  “Is that the management we or the royal we?” she said.

  “We all have to pull our weight here.”

  “And how do you see your future?”

  “About as bleak as yours. But at least we both know we don’t have to worry about c’naatat any more.”

  “Well, that’s about all,” she lied, thinking of Ade Bennett raising two contemptuous fingers to her as he left the shuttle, showing her how fast his broken nose had healed. Rayat couldn’t possibly have seen that. It had to stay that way.

  And Aras didn’t count. Nobody could take a wess’har, and a wess’har wouldn’t spread c’naatat. But Ade Bennett had it, and he was human, and one day he might be homesick or desperate enough to find a way of getting back to Earth. She’d failed to eradicate the risk—and there was nothing she could do about it now. She’d have to rely on the wess’har to keep Ade confined.

  She wondered if she’d have surrendered if it had been her, or how long Shan would have held out in exile. But Shan didn’t have any of the appealing human weaknesses that made people care and love and pine.

  “So…I seem to recall your screaming your head off at Frankland calling her every name under the sun because she wouldn’t use c’naatat to save your baby,” said Rayat.

  “Thank you for reminding me.”

  “What if she had?”r />
  Lindsay didn’t want to hear any more. She was coping with bereavement, at least in the sense that she hadn’t yet fallen apart. It had been more than a year since David had died, thirty days old, and with occasional medication she’d managed her bewildered grief.

  She knew. What if. Her son would have been as dangerous and endangered as Shan, and very probably as dead. And who might have felt obliged to kill him in case he proved a risk? And what sort of life would he have had, isolated as a biohazard?

  Lindsay walked out.

  There was sanctuary in the maze of plant beneath Umeh Station. She’d put her name down on the rota to dose the feeder tank for the hydroponics system, recycling nutrients from the rapidly growing supply of human waste. It was a sudden hard lesson in ecology. There was adequate water and power, but beyond what could be grown in this biodome there was no food, and the mission hadn’t planned to accommodate a hundred extra people on the ground. It was a damn shame that they hadn’t had time to unload all of Actaeon’s supplies before the ship was hit.

  She went back to the sewage processing plant and climbed down the ladder to the service ducts and machinery spaces. So this was what they were planning to build on Bezer’ej when Actaeon set out from Earth twenty-six years ago. It was just as well the isenj had chosen to make space for it on Umeh; the wess’har would have blown it into orbit for daring to intrude on the landscape.

  Among the pipe runs and filter housings there was no smell apart from new plastic, but the thought of circulating feces was a psychological deterrent for most. A musical rhythm thrummed in the quiet motors and intermittent rush of fluid from pipe to pipe, as soothing as a Zen garden in its way. Lindsay leaned on one of the separation tanks and rested her forehead on the cool surface.

  Poor bloody bezeri. She couldn’t imagine a species so fragile and so localized that fallout would devastate it, but she had to accept that was the price she’d paid without thinking. Why did they pick that chain of islands to spawn in? Why didn’t they spread around the planet?

  Bloody stupid squid.

  She wasn’t a monster. She knew she wasn’t. But now she was wondering what monsters really were. She was so preoccupied with the fear that she might no longer know what was right and decent that the insistent gurgling of her stomach caught her unawares.