Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (8 page)

“Understandable,” Julian said, “but regrettable. One thing Terran history teaches us is the necessity of being prepared for external attack. Mr. Holman was explaining to me the great importance of increasing fortification against the Furs.”

Had Jake said that to Julian? Alex couldn’t remember. But certainly Jake believed it.

Lau-Wah said, “I’m sure Jake has also explained to you the possibility that Furs may never attack here again, either because Karim’s infected shipload of Furs has neutralized the threat, or because of the great distances and time dilations involved.”

“Which are both much reduced by the McAndrew Drive,” Julian said. “And, of course, the pronounced Fur territoriality and xenophobia argue in favor of attack.”

How did he know so much about Furs, their ships, and the entire situation? The Terrans had only just arrived.

“You appear to know quite a lot about us,” Jake said.

“I have accessed your library deebees, with Dr. Areola’s kind assistance.”

Alex laughed. “I’m surprised the deebees still work.”

Jake said, “When did you have time to do that, Commander?”

“Last night. Perhaps you are not aware, Mr. Holman, that I am genetically engineered to sleep only an hour or so each night?”

Stillness took everyone.

“Only an hour?” Alex finally blurted. “Night after night?”

Julian smiled. “Yes. A genemod developed after you left Terra, I believe.”

“Don’t you miss it?” The instant she said it, she knew how stupid the words sounded. Of course he didn’t miss what he’d never known.

“I’m told a long sleep can be quite pleasant,” Julian said. “But of’ course, life offers many different pleasures.”

“It would seem there’s a lot we don’t know about you,” Lau-Wahj said, with such grave courtesy that Alex knew he, too, disliked Julian. Jake, Lau-Wah … what did they see that she was missing?

“I’m willing to answer any question you wish.”

“May we have the same access to your library deebees that you have to ours?”

“Of course. In fact, your scientists aboard the
Crucible
already have that.”

“Then perhaps,” Lau-Wah said, “you can give us a brief version of life on Earth when you left it fifty years ago.”

Ashraf Shanti had crept noiselessly into their little group. The three Greenies and Jake, who was both Terran and Greenie, waited for Julian’s answer. His eyes, Alex saw, those glittering living emeralds, reflected all light. You couldn’t see into them.

“You are very lucky to have been born on Greentrees,” Julian said quietly, “or to have emigrated here. Very little of Earth is lefts livable. The C02 level is one point five percent at sea level, which is not breathable. Worldwide warming moved tropical diseases into northern areas, which had no defenses against them. Shifting populations led to food shortages, which in turn led to war, some of it by biological agents. When ninety percent of your ethnic group is predicted to perish anyway, you don’t mind releasing pathogens that will kill a third of your people but also a third of the enemy. One way or another, billions died on Earth. The surviving population is about a half billion.”

It sounded an immense number to Alex, but Jake gasped.

“There are tribes roaming in the wild lowlands, but civilization survives mostly in domed cities at higher altitudes. Those have preserved a perhaps high level of civilization, or at least of technology. Geneva is one such place. I was part of a coalition to unite these surviving city-states to do what we could to restore the planet, but we were bitterly opposed and our leader assassinated. It was thought expedient to offer me the command of this expedition, and I accepted. With gladness, I might add. It was the only way I saw to redeem my life from hopelessness.”

Alex found herself moved. Such a position! To watch one’s planet dying … She said warmly, “I think you were very brave to come here.”

Julian did not respond to that. Lau-Wah said, “This can all be confirmed by the news files in the
Crucible’s
deebees, of course.”

“Of course.”

Ashraf spoke for the first time. “Commander, what are your plans now?”

Julian gazed at him. Alex couldn’t help contrasting the two men: Julian so tall and grave in his black uniform, Ashraf slight and fidgety, dropping his gaze as if his question had been somehow impertinent. Not a fair contrast, she knew. Julian was genemod. To sleep only one hour each night… how much more he could accomplish while the rest of them snored time away!

Julian said, “With your permission, Mayor Shanti, my scientists will dispatch a contingent in our rover to meet with Nan Frayne and the Furs that live nomadi-cally on Greentrees. They—”

“You already know about Nan Frayne!” Alex said.

“I’ve comlinked with her. She’s willing to meet with me.”

“She
is?”

He smiled. “I think Dr. Farling, head of my xenobiology team intrigued her with offers of information exchange.”

Jake said pointedly, “Ashraf, did you authorize this?”

“Well, no, I… do you think that’s necessary? I wasn’t… mean…”

“I’m very sorry if I’ve violated protocol,” Julian said, concerned. “Dr. Farling hasn’t left yet; shall I cancel the expedition?”

“No,” Ashraf said, with sudden decisiveness. He stared at Jake. “I give my permission now.”

There was a little silence. Alex shifted her glass of tea to her other hand. Julian continued.

“The rest of my scientists are eager to get started on their various field studies. The four physicists and their two assistants are already working with your people, and will remain in Mira City; And, of course, Chief Engineer Lieutenant Mwakambe meets soon with Alex. I myself, again with your permission, would like to see everything in the city. Alex, will you show me what you’ve accomplished here? It’s so different from Geneva. So … beautiful.”

She heard his voice break, a tiny break but real, and remorse washed over her. This must be so strange for him. They were not treating their guest very well, examining him like some field specimen! “Of course I will,” she said.

“Thank you.”

Hoping to lighten the mood, she said, “And your brother? What made Duncan come here? Merely to bring theater to a new planet?”

“With Duncan,” Julian said, ” ’theater’ and ’merely’ cannot be put in the same sentence. As I’m afraid you’re about to discover.”

“Attention, please, everyone!” shrilled a female voice. Oh, Lord, Alex thought, her third cousin Seena Bramlee. That was all they needed. Seena was one of the few members of the huge Cutler clan who had no profession. She spent her time arranging what social and cultural life Mira City had; Seena had, in fact, helped arrange this party. She lived off her accumulated credits, the result of her mother’s canny loans of original equipment and subsequent granted land to the second and third generation of Mira’s embryonic capitalists. Again Alex thought of Lau-Wall’s uncharacteristic monologue about the subservient position of the Chinese settlers.

Seena clapped noisily for quiet. “We are extremely fortunate in having with us one of Terra’s greatest, most acclaimed actors! And even more fortunate in that he has agreed to act for us a speech from a play by one William Shakespeare! Ladies and gentlemen, speeches chosen just for Greentrees from
The Temper!”

“Tempest,”
Jake muttered. “Jesus H. Christ.”

Alex stared at him in surprise—was he upset because Duncan was going to act or because Seena had mispronounced the name? And why was a “tempest,” a weather disturbance, a subject for an apparently famous play?

There was a long pause, and then Seena dimmed the Mausoleum lights to their energy-saving setting. In the gloom, Alex saw the few Quakers present, Dr. Jamison and Victoria Bly and Ezra Cunningham, sidle quietly toward the door. Did Quakers disapprove of theater? She knew they used no fizzies or caffeine or vids, but theater had never come up before on Greentrees. Alex found herself mildly curious.

A single light was switched on in a side hallway, and Duncan Martin walked a few paces into the room, within the circle of light. He had changed from his outlandish costume into a plain, dark robe of some rough material. And his face was different—how had he done that? His nose looked longer, his eyes darker somehow, or maybe it was just that now they swept levelly, judgingly over the watching crowd. He was taller, too—heeled boots? Or did he just look taller? Was that possible?

Then he began to speak.

“What is this place?” Duncan looked around, fearful and hopeful at once. Alex could not look away. That voice!

“ ’Be not afeared; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not,’”

he said, and in the richness of his voice Alex
heard
them, the sweet noises of Greentrees, the murmuring breeze in bamler trees and the lowing of teelie herds and the deep cries of the sue-birds circling overhead at dusk.

“ ’Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,

The clouds we thought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,

I cried to dream again.

But beseech you, sir, be merry; you have cause,

So have we all, of joy; for our escape Is much beyond our loss.’”

Alex saw the Terra of Julian’s words, the bleak planet destroyed by humanity, from which the
Crucible
had, indeed, escaped.

“’Our hint of woe Is common; every day some sailor’s wife,

The masters of some merchant and the merchant Have just our theme of woe; but for the miracle,

mean our preservation, few in millions Can speak like us—’”

”
One way or another, billions died on Earth.”

“’—then wisely, good sir, weigh Our sorrow with our comfort.

Prithee, peace!’”

—
and the word was a cry, a plea of anguished need that echoed in the vast room: peace, peace, peace … Duncan’s body shifted and his tone changed again. He held out his hands.

“ ’O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in’t!’”

Duncan’s hands dropped. No one else moved. Even Seena Bramlee was silent.

“Thank you,” Duncan said, and the spell vanished, leaving him once more just a man.

Alex whispered, “Is
that
what we’ve lost?”

A moment later she was ashamed. What a stupid remark! But her fingers were quietly circled, squeezed, released. Julian.

“If Duncan Martin forms a theater company,” Lau-Wah said dryly, “no one else had better be in it. They will all look like idiots by comparison.”

“No, he’s too good to let that happen,” Julian said, “which I should not of course say, since Duncan is my brother. But it’s true.”

“I can believe it,” Jake said. “He must have been a sensation in holovids.”

“He refused to make them. A debasement of art, you know. Thespian purity.” Jake laughed. Even Lau-Wah smiled.

Alex said nothing. She could still feel the warmth of Julian’s hand around her own. The feeling was not at all welcome. That, she told herself, was one place she was not going. Never again, not since Kamal. No.

She drew away from Julian and walked forward to congratulate Duncan.

A VINE PLANET

T
he Vine ship went into orbit around their colony planet. Lucy and Karim had to guess this; they glimpsed neither ship nor planet. After a sensationless short time, their air lock opened onto a square, featureless metal box.

“You go in this,” said the mechanical voice of a translator. “Then we go to our planet.”

“It looks like a packing crate,” Lucy said, somewhere between resentment and amusement. “Should we get in?”

“Is there another choice?” Karim said. He took her hand and moved forward. Both were still suited in Greentrees s-suits and Vine helmets. The packing crate slid closed behind them, and they felt it lift and move forward.

“I really don’t like this, Karim.”

“I suspect we’re being put onto a shuttle. Lie down, Lucy, and brace yourself. Shuttles don’t have McAndrew Drives.”

He was right; a few minutes later acceleration flattened him. Five gees, maybe … no, more… how much could Vines stand? And did they know how much humans could? No, of course not; he and Lucy were the first humans these particular Vines had ever seen.

Sound screamed around them. “We’re entering an atmosphere,” he tried to say to Lucy, but couldn’t. Then, abruptly, the pressure stopped at the same time as the sound. “We’re here,” she quavered. “You all right?”

“Yes. God, it’s hot!”

“Adjust your suit,” Karim said.

They waited. For three hours, nothing happened. Lucy and Karim didn’t talk much. He hoped her thoughts were happier than his. They had no ship, no certainty of how they would be received here, and no idea whether the shipboard Vines had understood the urgency of leaving the infected Furs alone in their drifting shuttle. If he could be sure that last had been done, that the plan had a chance of working, then never seeing Greentrees again would be worth it

When one side of the packing box finally slid open, Karim tensed. At least this featureless tiny room was familiar.

Lucy was already on her feet. She managed a smile inside her clear helmet. “Show time.”

“Welcome at our planet,” the translator said, and they blinked in the sudden light

His first reaction was that the scale was wrong. Everything was huge. The Vines aboard ship had been shorter than humans, as had the ones that visited Greentrees. They must have been selected, or grown, for space flight, because the Vines surrounding the shuttle were twice Karim’s height. He stood child-size among trunks of pulpy brown festooned with tentacles and broad, flat, pulpy projections. On a smaller scale those had looked like leaves, but enlarged they more resembled purplish deformed mushrooms. Tentacles and fungi—impossible not to think in Earth analogues! —were evenly dispersed down the trunks, rather than blossoming at the top like trees, and so did not block out the sun. It shone very bright and a bit too orange, larger than Sol.

The Vines were
everywhere.
They crowded beside each other, tentacles intertwined, especially near the ground. It was very quiet; no birds sang or called, no animals roared. Lucy stepped out of the box and Karim watched her sink to the ankles. Quickly she scrambled back.

“It’s swampy!”

He bent to look. Yes, the ground was mud and water, not, as he had first thought, the thick layer of bacteria that had carpeted the Vine ship. Those biofilms had seemed to be part of the interconnected Vine sentience. Did they exist on the planet, too? Or had they been manufactured for space travel?

So many questions. “We need George Fox,” Karim said, “or some other biologist. I just don’t
know
enough.”

“Me neither.”

Karim put one foot onto the swamp. After all, the translator had said they were welcome here. He sank up to his ankle, but no farther. Around him the pulpy fungi/leaves/hands swayed in a sudden breeze.

Lucy joined him and they stood there awkwardly, not certain what to do next. The Vines provided no help. Finally he said, “Vines?”

“I am Vines,” the translator answered.

He gathered himself for the major, necessary effort, searchin for the simplest words possible.

“We say to your people on ship that our shuttle carries your enemy. It carries some of your enemy—’Furs’—that your people make sick. The sick is part of experiment your people make on our planet. Many groups of Furs, many sicknesses.

All sicknesses are different. Your people try to make the enemy not dangerous and also not killed. They did this. Our shuttle carries sick Furs from your people You must let the enemy find the sick enemy and get sick also. Then they carry the sickness to all your enemy. Then the fighting stops.”

No birdsong, no animal roar, no answer. The huge silent sentients turned slightly. Karim realized they were phototropic
”Dreaming in the sun,”
Beta Vine had said so long ago.

Lucy said desperately, “Vines? Do you understand?”

Nothing. What now? Karim looked helplessly at Lucy. Sh shook her head.

When standing became tiring, they lowered themselves to sit on the ground.

Twenty minutes later came the translator voice, “I understand.”

They slept in the box, away from the rain that fell at dusk. Not that they needed to escape the rain, which was light and warm, but the box quickly became the only solid, nonvegetative, non-pulpy object around. In a squishy, silent word, the box was hard and metallic. Their boots rang on its floor. Karim was grateful it was there.

“Where’s the shuttle?” Lucy asked once, but he didn’t know. It had vanished.

The dark was the most complete either of them had ever seen. Clouds covered the sky, and there were no artificial lights, no lightning bugs, no marsh gas. It was as if he’d gone blind. He escaped as soon as possible into sleep, lying close to Lucy.

When he woke, it was morning. He was ravenous. Lucy still slept, in s-suit and helmet, spittle at the corners of her mouth. Karim’s stomach growled, and he welcomed the sound because it
was
sound. But it wouldn’t feed them.

He walked from the box a few feet into the swamp. Vines dwarfed him. Which one had the translator? It apparently didn’t matter. George had said they communicated by exchanging molecules. Whatever one knew, they all knew. For how far? Yesterday the Vine had said “I,” not “we.” Was the whole planet one interconnected sentient animal-plant?

He looked up at the creature—creatures? Hating the way their size reduced him. “We are thirsty and hungry,” he said carefully. “Humans must drink water and eat molecules. We cannot make our own food inside us.” George had theorized that the Vines practiced an analogue of photosynthesis based not on chlorophyll but on a non-DNA equivalent of adapted bacteria.

“Humans must drink water and eat molecules. We cannot make our own food inside us. If we do not have food and water, we die.”

Then he sat down to wait.

After fifteen minutes—he timed it with his s-suit—the translator said, “We must make you water. We must make you food. We must have piece of you.”

Karim had expected this. They were master geneticists even working with life forms starting from radically different biological premises. But they could not work in a vacuum. He said, “I can remove my suit.” He pantomimed this, awkwardly. “If I remove my suit, will I die? Is it safe for me?”

This time the wait was half an hour. Lucy joined him, sleepy and worried. “Food?”

“I ordered room service a while ago.”

She smiled.

“You must remove your suit,” the translator said.

“Is it safe?” Karim asked. “We do not know.”

Before he could stop her, Lucy had unfastened and stripped of one boot. “Lucy!”

“It makes more sense,” she said coolly. “You’re the physicist, and more able to get back to Greentrees alone than I would be. Let them experiment on me.” She stuck out her leg.

Something formed in the swamp beside it.

Not the same sort of biofilm that had oozed out of Beta Vine’s cart on Greentrees. Again, Karim realized that those Vines that went into space must have been genetically adapted for that mission—and why not? Genetic adaptation was what these aliens
did.
He watched as the semisolid slime, looking like nothing as much as vomit with purplish chunks in it, rose in a viscous wave to engulf Lucy’s foot.

She held her foot steady. Minutes passed, and finally the wave receded, leaving her foot faintly coated with slickness. Then she did shudder.

“Karim … something to wipe it off…”

There was nothing. Finally he bent and ran his gloves over the slime, which didn’t remove it all. Lucy put her boot back on.

He said, too roughly, “We’ll have to wait now. They don’t do anything quickly.”

“I know.”

They waited an hour, sitting on the edge of the box like, Karim thought bitterly, scared children outside a stern tutor’s office. Then the closest Vine bent slightly toward them. One of its flat, pulpy, purplish “hands” began to curve into a bowl. The bowl filled with thick grayish liquid.

“No,” Lucy half moaned. “Last time they made a clear hard cup like our helmets. Karim, I don’t think I can drink from that.”

He didn’t answer. She knew as well as he that they had no choice.

He couldn’t pick up the bowl fastened to the Vine’s trunk; he had to bend his head to meet it. When they touched, his clear helmet reshaped itself to form a seal around the living bowl. Awkwardly, Karim lapped the gray fluid. It didn’t taste bad, nor good. Almost instantly his belly felt full.

Lucy closed her eyes and did the same.

Afterwards, Karim felt obscurely ashamed. He tried to figure out why. Finally he realized that the shame was because they were so dependent. Because they were being treated like … what? Like pets, fed and occasionally talked to but otherwise ignored. Because he and Lucy were so clearly insignificant to this vast, intelligent, but seemingly incurious entity, which was more alien than anything Karim could have imagined. Because.

He said, “Vine? Can you hear me? Please tell me more about this planet!”

The translator didn’t answer.

He walked in an ever-widening circle around the box, guided by the coordinator built into the wrist panel of his suit. Lucy declined to come with him. She sat in the box, staring at nothing. “I’m thinking,” she snapped at him whenever he asked.

No matter how far he walked, the landscape didn’t change. Was “landscape” even the right word? Towering Vines, in clumps of three or four or five, their intertwined tentacles sprawling between clumps and sinking halfway into the marsh. Each time Karim lifted a boot, the mud made a noise like someone strangling. His suit registered the temperature as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Every dusk it rained. The sky remained overcast, varied only by the dead blackness of night. He never heard a single sound.

It was the silence that was the worst.

“May we go home?” he asked the Vine with the translator, who didn’t answer.

Only once did it talk to them. At dusk of the second day, as he and Lucy lay down close to each other in the box, the inflexible voice of he translator said, “Our enemy in your shuttle is gone. The enemy took our enemy in your shuttle.”

“They did!” Lucy exclaimed. “When? Do you think they’ll infect the rest of your enemy?”

There was no answer.

Days passed.

Then weeks.

Karim’s beard grew inside his helmet, first itchy and then long enough to tangle against his chin. He must, inside his suit, smell terrible. Lucy’s face grew paler, then ashy, her eyes dull and unblinking. She ate only when necessary, and lost too much weight.

Karim walked twenty miles a day, slogging through the mud. How did Lucy stand it, never leaving the box? He was starting not to care.

The silence was his enemy. The silence, and the horrific fact that nothing ever changed. The same gray sky, the same gray rain, the same gray filling unsatisfying food, the same emptiness. And the same still, alien Vine, a single one planet-wide for all he knew, saying nothing.

This life must not appear to the Vine as it did to him. He knew that, kept reminding himself of that. Beta Vine, who was one of these creatures (or creature) had once told Dr. Shipley that Vines spent their time “dreaming in the sun.” There must be thoughts going on in that vast intelligence. Information was exchanged through molecules, pheromones, whatever. Science, surely. Politics? Poetry? Religion? Jokes? Whatever there was, he and Lucy were shut out from it as completely as if they did not exist.