The World Before Read online

  “You’re upset about your dismissal,” said Aras.

  “Too bloody right I am. Twenty-three years in the Corps and I don’t even get the courtesy of a court martial.”

  “It’s what Eddie calls political expedience. He doubts your command was involved in the decision.”

  “Ain’t that always the way.”

  “You needn’t feel ashamed.”

  “I don’t. I’m disgraced. That’s not the same thing.” He opened the throttle with an upward gesture of his hand and the boat picked up speed. “I can live with what I’ve done, but I don’t see why the detachment should be dishonored because of what that stupid cow Neville did.”

  The spray from the bows threw a hail of icy water in Aras’s face and he turned aside. Even if he was infinitely resilient, he still felt the cold. He wondered whether Ade really could live with what he had done because he looked increasingly like a man who couldn’t.

  This gethes shot my isan. He helped Lindsay Neville capture her. His actions led to her taking her own life. I should loathe him. I should punish him.

  Aras had walked away from Ade more than once rather than let his own grief and rage take over. Human and wess’har definitions of responsibility clashed within him.

  Shan chose to step out of the airlock, so Lindsay Neville has to pay for that. No—that’s a human view. Neville has to pay for Ouzhari.

  Shan had liked Ade very much and wouldn’t have wanted him to come to any harm. Aras liked him too. The c’naatat that had entered his body carried with it a comforting scent that said house-brother. Something of Shan was in him and Aras’s primeval wess’har instinct kicked in, making him bond with males who had his isan’s genes. Through the same instinctive mechanism, he identified qualities in Ade that his isan might transfer to him through copulation. Wess’har males influenced their isan’s mating choices.

  But there was no longer an isan, and now there never would be.

  “We could have seized Shan from the Actaeon if they had taken her on board,” said Aras. “She had no need to space herself.”

  “I think she wanted to be absolutely certain the parasite was unusable. You know how she hated leaving anything to chance.”

  It was the first time in two months that they had spoken this openly about her death, edging nervously around their respective raw grief. Shan had left a void. Even Eddie seemed to be feeling it, and Eddie had never looked like a man who cared about anybody. Aras suspected it was a façade that members of his trade adopted. For all his pretence of being untouched, the man was still recording stories about Shan: the real story, he called it, not the pack of lies that others might commit to archive.

  Irrelevant, all of it.

  The forbidding island began filling their horizon. There was no vegetation to be seen but as they drew closer Aras spotted the sloping outlines of shelters. It was a very unwess’har thing to mark the landscape with visible, permanent structures, but the displaced colonists had no time to excavate shelters in the ground. He wondered if the stony terrain would permit that at all.

  Constantine’s underground colony had taken years to carve into the rock. He remembered it all. He remembered helping Ben Garrod, Josh’s ancestor, excavate deep into the ground. He recalled how he took part in building—no, carving—the church of St. Francis and creating the indulgent but beautiful stained-glass window with its saint surrounded by animals.

  Aras hadn’t understood what a saint was. Saints often died for their beliefs. He wondered if Josh Garrod’s god would make him a saint now because Aras had killed him.

  He found he was thinking aloud. “I shouldn’t blame you,” Aras said. “I killed Josh and he was my friend. His great-great-great grandfather was my friend and each generation after him. But when it came to duty I did what was necessary, even if I still cared for him.”

  Aras juggled two opposing impulses again. Ade had played a role in Shan’s death. He was also his brother.

  Ade’s jaw muscles twitched. “You think I did what was necessary to Shan?” He held his gaze. “Sometimes I really think you want to kill me.”

  “I can no longer see situations with a wess’har’s clarity, Adrian. I have become too human. You were ordered to act, and no wess’har really understands the imperative that humans experience.”

  Ade leaned on the control console, making the occasional casual hand gesture to correct course.

  “Only my mum called me Adrian,” he said quietly. “Just call me Ade, will you?”

  “Very well.”

  “And only following orders is a pathetic excuse. I had a choice and I didn’t make it.” He rubbed his nose and suddenly looked out to sea, hands on hips, although there was nothing out there worth his attention. “You know what I did? I emptied a whole clip into her. I aimed low because I knew she’d wear body armor and I knew nothing would kill her and I knew that hitting her legs could drop her for long enough to get restraints on her. Now, if I’d had the balls I could have just put a couple of rounds in Neville and Rayat and nobody would have been any the wiser. Twenty-five fucking light-years away, no enquiry, no post-mortem. But I didn’t. And I fucking hate myself for that.”

  Ade lapsed back into silence, head bowed for a moment, then turned to the helm with a tell-tale glaze of moisture across his eyes. Eventually he slowed the boat to run up onto the beach. He seemed to find some solace in using his skills. Aras jumped out to help him drag the craft a little further up the shore and their eyes met for one uncomfortable second too long.

  “That’s all hindsight, Ade.”

  “Maybe.”

  “All your indoctrination is to obey your commanding officer. Human society relies on unthinking compliance.”

  “Well, I’m not completely human any more so they can shove their compliance up their arse.”

  Aras understood his pain, and it was pain, not simple anger. He had been abandoned too. Communal as they were, wess’har didn’t expend energy on hostage or prisoner retrieval, and Aras could still recall how utterly abandoned and hopeless he felt five hundred years ago when he sat in an isenj prison awaiting the next visit from his captors. He’d done what was asked of him as a soldier. Then he was simply one effort too many. He felt that even more strongly since he had known Ade.

  His isenj captors had never stopped reminding him that they always went back for their own.

  The biobarrier gave Aras a stinging jolt as he stepped through it. On Bezer’ej, the invisible fence that maintained Constantine’s ecology and separated it from the rest of the planet simply prickled on exposed skin. This barrier was several magnitudes stronger. Nobody was taking chances on contamination, however unlikely it seemed that anything would cross the species barrier.

  There were more than a thousand men, women and children now living on Mar’an’cas. It wasn’t the entire colony. Aras knew that a few had refused evacuation from Bezer’ej and were prepared to risk the engineered anti-human pathogen that the wess’har had spread across the planet as a barrier to further landings.

  It had been created from Shan’s own DNA. Aras had been angry that she hadn’t told him she had donated tissue, but now he knew he wouldn’t have wasted a single second on anger had he known she would be taken from him so soon.

  “Let me go on ahead,” said Ade. “If you get any crap from them about Josh—”

  “I don’t require your protection,” said Aras. “But I appreciate the offer.”

  Wess’har had perfect recall. The memoriesAras had struggled to ignore now refused to be brushed aside and pursued him, tormenting him. He remembered exactly how it felt when his tilgir hit Josh in the left side of the neck and the impact traveled up both his arms as his blade severed his friend’s head. He could feel it now. He could hear the absolute silence that lasted seconds and then the rising crescendo of wails and screams from the colonists who had witnessed the execution. He could smell the smoke when the ussissi burned the body.

  But you helped Lindsay Neville deploy the bombs that poiso
ned the bezeri, Josh. You deserved what I gave you.

  It was a very human feeling and it wasn’t his. Wess’har balancing was much more detached. This was a remnant of Shan Frankland, locked into him forever by the capacity for genetic memory that c’naatat had taken a fancy to when it passed through an isenj. Aras wondered how much of his own and Shan’s memories would now be surfacing in Ade Bennett’s mind. And he wondered how he had drawn a line between Josh’s complicity and Ade’s.

  Two figures in dappled camouflage uniforms came into view, a man and a woman, marines called Bulwant Singh Chahal and Ismat Qureshi. They weren’t strangers. Nobody on this island was. Aras knew them all.

  “Hello, Sarge. Hello, sir.” Qureshi looked at Aras and nodded her head, but her attention was directed towards Ade. “You okay, Ade?”

  “I’m fine. You?”

  “We were worried when we lost your signal,” said Chahal. He held out his hand and the luminous green display that was grown into his palm danced with data. It was battlefield tech, a living computer and communications device that monitored and tracked and reported. Human soldiers were full of implants.

  Ade held up his own palm: it was blankly normal human skin, pink and creased and devoid of light.

  “Shit,” said Chahal. “What happened to your bioscreen?”

  “Long story,” said Ade. “It went for a walk with my implants.”

  Qureshi and Chahal glanced at each other. “Okay,” she said. “What do we do now?”

  “Fuck all,” said Ade.

  “What’s up?”

  “The bastards have binned us. We’re all dismissed the service.”

  Aras hadn’t known Ade to use profanities as liberally and unthinkingly as Shan or Eddie; his language was an indication of his distress. Belonging and not belonging to a formal group seemed to matter enormously to him. It seemed to matter to Chahal and Qureshi, too. Their skins, usually quite dark compared to Ade’s, took on a yellow cast as the blood vessels constricted. They weren’t expecting the news. They swallowed hard and fidgeted for a few moments.

  “That’s what you came to tell us?” said Chahal. “That we’ve just been marooned here?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Don’t we even get a hearing?”

  “Seems not. The FEU told the wess’har they can do what they like with us.”

  Qureshi and Chahal looked at Aras as if expecting even worse news. They knew what he had done to a scientist from Thetis for causing the death of a single bezeri infant, and what happened to Josh. He imagined they were scaling up the consequences for being a member of the force that had managed to kill many thousands more, and fearing the worst.

  “Nevyan says you’re welcome to stay,” said Aras carefully. “You won’t be punished. Neville and Rayat will, though, when we find them.”

  Qureshi’s gaze darted between Ade and Aras. “What about Mart and Sue and Jon?”

  “If they wish to join you, they can.”

  Chahal looked dubious. It was a very distinct human expression, chin lowered, eyebrows raised. “This isn’t how wess’har normally operate, is it? What’s the catch?”

  “The catch, as you put it, is that Shan Chail had great regard for you and that regard is respected. More to the point, you are not personally accountable for your commander’s actions.”

  “Neither was anyone in Actaeon.”

  “Actaeon was given time to evacuate the uninvolved. Those who stayed on board chose to do so.”

  Ade stepped in, suddenly the sergeant again. “Chaz, just shut it. We nuked the fucking place. There’s no moral high ground.”

  Chahal glanced at Qureshi as if seeking a cue. She had always looked too slight to be a soldier, but she looked even thinner now. It was a testament to the ordeal of the last few weeks.

  “We’re really sorry about Frankland,” she said. “I just wanted you to know that.”

  Aras wasn’t sure if the comment was for him or Ade. Either way he had nothing to say.

  “Show me the colony,” he said.

  They walked in a line behind Qureshi, totally silent. Two hundred meters away from the shore, Aras got a better view of the tents. Aras thought immediately of one of little Rachel Garrod’s storybooks with their bright illustrations. The tents were made of elegant turquoise and green patterned wess’har fabric but sewn to the colony’s design, looking more like one of the humans’ carnivals than a refugee camp.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Ade. “Hell with soft furnishings.”

  The Pajat clans had done their best to help out in the emergency but there was a limit to what could be done to make more than a hundred farming families comfortable on a rock. Even though the tents were set in neat lines, it still looked like chaos. The first thing Aras noticed was the constant backdrop of children crying and the flapping of fabric in the wind. Then he noticed the smell.

  “We’re working on the water and waste,” said Chahal. “Sue Webster’s really the expert on that. If she wants to come here, we could use her.”

  And these were orderly humans. These were people used to a tough agricultural life and to following rules of survival on a hostile planet. But they were not the generation that had carved Constantine colony out of the rock of Bezer’ej nearly two centuries ago, and they were finding the experience hard.

  “At least we’ve got the hydroponics rigged,” said Qureshi. She turned up her collar against the wind. “We’ve got salad. Just in time for winter. Nice.”

  “The bezeri won’t see another winter,” said Aras.

  He walked into the camp. Faces he knew—some well, others not—stared back at him and he found himself at the center of a silence that was spreading like a pool of water. The expressions that he met were hard and hostile. What else did he expect? He had killed Josh Garrod, their leader, his friend. They were seeing him as he was for the first time—an alien, a complete stranger whose ethical code was ultimately at odds with theirs.

  Aras didn’t understand; his actions were even enshrined in their religious texts. Thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. What did that mean? If it meant a punishment that mirrored the magnitude of the crime, then none of them should have been spared, innocent or not; all the gethes for all the bezeri, just as it said in their Bible. But there were many things in that book that they chose to overlook when it suited them.

  Ade prodded him in the back. “I don’t think this is a good idea, mate. Let’s go.”

  “I have to see Josh’s family.”

  “Just leave it, okay?”

  Aras couldn’t. He wanted to, but he had spent most of his life among these people and their forebears and he found it hard to cut himself off from them. The human genes in him were mainly theirs, gleaned by c’naatat from their bacteria and shed cells. The colonists were almost family. For generations, before Shan came into his life, they had been family.

  Ade walked in front of him. He held his rifle by the hand guard and grip, but his finger rested outside the trigger guard. He was checking to either side as if on patrol.

  “They can’t hurt us,” said Aras reproachfully.

  “I don’t want any more accidental contamination.”

  “They know what I am. They’ve never shown any interest in c’naatat. But they don’t know what you are.”

  Ade held his rifle a little higher. “I wasn’t planning on hugging any of them.”

  “Bastard,” said one of the men as they passed.

  Aras hadn’t experienced abuse for five centuries, not since his isenj captors had told him what a filthy murderer he was and that he deserved the tortures he was enduring. He was surprised how much simple words stung. The two centuries that he had spent ensuring that the Constantine colony survived were obviously forgotten.

  Aras stopped and turned round.

  “Leave it, Aras,” said Ade. He had been trained to ignore that kind of provocation. But A
ras hadn’t, and he genuinely wanted them to understand why Josh had to die.

  The man who had called him a bastard was named David, he recalled, just like Lindsay Neville’s dead infant son. David had two daughters and his wife taught at the colony school. He took a step back as Aras faced him.

  “Do you know what genocide is, David?”

  David smelled of acid fear. “Josh never set out to harm the bezeri.”

  “And still they’re dead. Your god might care about your intentions, but I don’t and neither would the bezeri. If Josh had helped destroy beings who looked like you, would you understand better?”

  “The parasite had to be destroyed.”

  “It was a life-form like you or me. Do you know what else lived on Ouzhari?”

  “No.”

  “And now you never will. Did you think what else the bombs might destroy, or did you think a neutron device and the cobalt poison would be selective in their action?”

  David stared back into his face. The scent of frying garlic jostled for attention with the smell of the latrines. “But you know us. The Garrods were your family.”

  “My family was Shan Frankland,” Aras said quietly. “And she’s dead too.”

  Ade took his elbow and pressed gently. “Come on. Let’s find Deborah Garrod and get this over with.”

  Word traveled ahead. Deborah was waiting for him, standing outside an incongruously patterned tent and holding six-year-old Rachel by the hand. Her teenaged son James, as square and lean as his father, watched Aras suspiciously. He stood a little in front of his mother.

  Deborah said nothing. She had a fine-boned oriental face and fatigue had painted dark circles under her eyes. James disappeared inside the tent and came out cradling something in his arms.

  “We can’t feed them,” he said. “You take them.”

  Aras held out his hands to receive two live rats. Black and White, as he’d named them, were laboratory animals he had confiscated from Mohan Rayat soon after the Thetis party landed on Bezer’ej. They had been young animals then, lively and with fine silky coats, and now they were not. They were tubby and their fur was coarser. They were aging fast, as rats did, and they scrabbled to get inside his coat for shelter.