Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (9 page)

Scruffy ghosts on an alien world.

He lost track of time. More days passed. More weeks.

Eventually, standing ankle-deep in mud that was the same mud, the same creature, the same sky no matter where he went, he screamed at the closest clump of aliens. “I want to go home! Do you hear me? I want to go home!”

No response.

Tears poured down Karim’s cheeks; he didn’t know when they had started. He was deeply ashamed of the tears. His father would have hated for his son to cry; his grandfather would have scorned him for it. He threw up an arm to dash away the tears and struck his own helmet.

Anger felt better than tears.

He reached into the nearest clump of Vines and ripped off a tentacle.

“Does that make you want to take me home,
ebn sharmoota? Khaby labwa?
Does
that?”

Another tentacles, a fistful of “leaves” that were like pulpy hands. They would retaliate now, they would kill him, or at least knock him down or out or into some molecularly induced pain. He waited, breathing heavily, ready to welcome the pain, to welcome anything that was different from this swampy, noiseless, gray hell, which wasn’t even his hell but rather the paradise of aliens.
Hit me, Vines! Kill me!

Nothing happened.

Slowly, panting eagerly, Karim realized that no matter what he did to how many Vines, nothing ever would happen.

Nothing.

Forever.

He stumbled back to the box. Lucy sat there, staring. It was a relief to scream at her; at least she wasn’t nothing. “Can’t you do anything but sit?”

She leaped up so suddenly that a part of his brain, still rational, realized that she welcomed fighting him, and probably for the same reason he’d attacked the Vines. “What the hell do you care what I do? You’re never here!”

“I’m mapping this world. At least that’s something.”

“You’re not mapping.” She sneered. “You’re just wandering around aimlessly like a lost little kid.”

“I am not a child. Do not speak to me like one.”

“Don’t tell me how to speak! What are you doing now, reverting to your Arab roots here, powerful patriarchal male and submissive little woman? Well, I’m not wearing a veil, Karim, in case you didn’t notice, and I’m not impressed by your lost Arabian manliness, and I’m not—”

He hit her.

He didn’t know he was going to do it until his fist had connected with her belly, and he had never regretted anything so much in his entire life. She doubled over and then fell sideways, landing on the metal floor of the box with the loudest noise he’d heard in weeks. She gasped for air. He knelt beside her.

“Lucy, oh, Lucy, I’m so sorry, Lucy, please …”

She didn’t, or couldn’t, push him away. He took her in his arms and thought,
No more. This stops here.

They talked about it in whispers, in a back corner of the box. Karim said, “Whatever the Vines were to us on Greentrees, however they united with us against the Furs, here they’re our enemy.”

“But they don’t mean any—”

“Listen to me, Lucy. No, they don’t mean to harm us. Maybe they don’t even know that they are. But we can’t live like them, or with them, or here. They’re our enemy because we need to plan against them to get something we want and they don’t.”

“To take us home.”

“Yes.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know yet. We don’t have anything they want. But there must be some way. Something around here must change, sometime.”

“Wait,” Lucy said. “What about the mobiles? You remember, Karim, the little two-legged semisentients that… that pollinate them at mating time. We saw them on the Vine ship. The Vines loved them, Beta said. If we could capture a few and hold them for … well, for ransom …”

“Capture pollinators? Wouldn’t that be like trying to hold bees for ransom?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. What else can you think of?”

“Beta Vine liked my whistling.” He felt foolish mentioning this. “Really liked

it.”

“Good. What else?”

“I don’t think we have anything else. Unless something different turns up on the planet.”

“Then you keep exploring. Tomorrow I’ll go with you.”

He sat in the impenetrable darkness, his back against the metal wall, and fought off despair. Whistling, aimless walking, pollinators who might appear, for all he knew, every two or three years. With these flimsy things, they were supposed to coerce aliens to launch a ship to the stars.

“We’ll find a way, Karim,” Lucy whispered.

“I know we will,” he said, for her sake, and knew that what he’d thought before was not true. Was in fact heroic nonsense. It wasn’t enough that the infected Furs had been picked up by their brethren. It wasn’t enough that the plan to save Greentrees might succeed. Karim wanted to live, to go home, to walk once more with his own species on a planet with a place for him.

That, and that alone, would be enough.

MIRA CITY

T
he day after the welcoming party for the Terrans, Alex stood by the window in her messy apartment, moodily sipping bennilin tea. Jake lay asleep in the bedroom, its door still closed. Alex’s nightshirt lay on her unmade cot, where Katous sniffed it delicatel and rejected it, leaping gracefully to the floor and then onto the table. Alex stroked him absentiy, reflecting on the day ahead of her.

It was too full. Too much was happening at once. Here it was not even dawn yet, and already she wished the day were over.

Beyond the window the eastern
sky
shone pale at the horizon, dark above. The constellations were still faintly visible, all those sketchy forms she had loved to pick out as a child: the Starship and Allah’s Wheel and the Double Helix with its blue zero-magnitude pole star, Gemma.

“Did you know, Katous,” she asked the cat, “when I was twelve I could tell time to within fifteen minutes by the Double Helix? I had all the position changes memorized.”

Katous ignored her and sniffed the table, looking for crumbs. Dark forms beyond the park took on the ghostly outlines of buildings.

Right after last night’s party, Alex had sat down with the
Crucible’s
chief engineer, Lt. Aliya Mwakambe, to discuss what technology the Terrans could offer Mira City. As tray-o, Alex had hoped for much from this meeting. She’d been disappointed.

The computers aboard the Terran ship, seventy years more advanced than those brought to Greentrees by Jake’s original settlers, had little that was compatible with MiraNet. The
Crucible’s
life-support system had been designed for selfsufficiency in space and offered few usable innovations for planetary technology. Some techniques and hardware could be adapted, but in the main, Mira’s concerns—mining, manufacturing, building—simply had no counterparts on the warship.

That left medicine and defense. The formidable weapons aboard the
Crucible
were certainly welcome additions to Greentrees orbital defenses, but to be effective they needed to stay in orbit. Terran medical advances, even more welcome, were not Alex’s department. She turned Lieutenant Mwakambe over to the genetics lab people and tried to allay her disappointment.

Today’s meetings also looked problematic. Alex had three of them, scheduled in three widely separated places, one reachable only by skimmer, and she hated flying. Oddly enough, the shuttle didn’t bother her, not even when it went screaming through the atmosphere. The view of Greentrees from ten thousand kilometers up was fine; from a hundred meters it made her queasy and anxious. But there wasn’t any choice. Jon McBain was in the Avery Mountains, Lau-Wah was at Hope of Heaven, and Mira City’s chief energy engineer, Savannah Cutler, was sending frantic emergency requisitions from the solar array twenty clicks south of the city.

Better get started.

Alex gulped the rest of her tea and opened the door. Julian Martin stood outside, gazing at the rising dawn. “Good morning, Alex.”

“Julian! What are you doing here?” Too late she remembered that his society was—had been—more formal than hers and didn’t ask people why they were doing whatever they were doing. But he didn’t look offended. Hastily she shut the door behind her before he could see her disorganized living quarters.

He gave his faint, close-lipped smile. “I was hoping I could accompany you on your rounds this morning.”

“Rounds? How did you know I had to go anywhere?”

“You’re the tray-o. I knew you must go somewhere, and I thought that if you were kind enough to let me accompany you, it would be a good way to see more of the city. You control resources, and resource allocation always indicates a culture’s priorities.’

She smiled to cover her irritation. He was absolutely right, of course, but… but what?

What if he thought she was doing a lousy job of resource allocation?

Ashamed of herself—what a time to be concentrating on her own petty reputation!—she nodded a bit too eagerly. “Yes, I see. Of course you can accompany me. It’s a hectic day, I’m afraid. How did you know I’d start so early? Oh, of course, you didn’t, you don’t sleep much so you probably spent the night walking around looking at things anyway…” She was babbling.
Shut up, Alex.

“Yes, I did walk around all night. It’s still novel to me that Mira City is safe enough to do that. Where do we go first?”

“To pick up a rover.”

He fell into step beside her. Today Julian wore a Threadmore coverall; it certainly hadn’t taken him long to dip into Mira stores! There was no chance, however, that anyone would mistake him for a Greenie. His height and the startlingly green genemod eyes ensured that. Surreptitiously Alex ran her fingers through her hair, trying to remember if she’d combed it.

“The cars are powered by hydrogen fuel cells,” Alex said, taking refuge in lecturing. “We have limited manufacturing capacity, of course, and fuel cells are class A, right up there with mining equipment. The only waste product is pure water. You could drink it. We have two goals here on Greentrees, Julian. To make the colony flourish, and not to disturb the ecology of Greentrees.”

“You say ’we.’ Are those your own goals, too, Alex?”

“Of course,” she said, puzzled.

“Which goal is more important?”

“They’re equally important.”

“But if a situation came up in which you had to choose, whic would you pick?”

She said stiffly, “No such situation has ever come up. If something would help Mira City flourish but would harm Greentrees, we find another way to accomplish the same goal.”

“Is that your job as ’tray-o’?”

She didn’t like the faint inflection his voice put on the word. “Yes. It is.”

“I see.” He stopped walking and looked directly at her. His deep voice changed: lightened somehow, and acquired a note of pleading. “I do see. Remember, Alex, this is all new to me.
You
are new to me, you Greenies, and how you think. It’s all very different from Earth. Please be patient with my clumsy questions.”

The humility in those brilliant eyes, gazing so straight into her own, was disconcerting. Alex felt herself redden. “Yes, uh, of course. Julian. Yes.”

“Thank you.” He resumed walking, and she trotted to keep up.

“Was Earth so very different?” she said, to say something.

“You have no idea. We had few resources to expend, and groups fought viciously and unceasingly for whatever there was. The only goal was survival.”

She remembered what he’d said last night about Terra’s wars:
“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.”

“This is so beautiful,” Julian said wistfully. “Look at those flower hods. Native or genemod?”

“Those are native. We call them roses.”

“They aren’t much like Terran roses.”

She laughed. “Jake says that what happened was that the First Landers weren’t linguists. They just sort of named things haphazardly, sometimes using Terran analogues, sometimes making up fanciful names, sometimes trying to be scientific. So by my generation, we’ve got this hodge-podge, and it’s getting worse.”

“You’re first-generation Greentrees?”

“Thirty-second kid born here. Get in the car.”

The four official Mira City vehicles sat under an inflatable so old that even its durable material had started to show wear. Each rover was a stripped-down base with tough all-terrain tractors, open sides, and a top that was itself an inflatable that could expand to the ground. More attention had been given to durability than to comfort. Julian folded himself into the too-small front seat. Even squeezed down, with his knees sticking up, he kept that air of slightly forbidding remoteness that exasperated and baffled Alex.

“It’s a good design,” he said, “light and roomy, if not exactly aesthetic. Duncan would not approve. I assume everything on the rover is recyclable?”

“Everything on Greentrees is recyclable. And we do. After all, nature is a one-hundred-percent efficient recycling machine; we’re trying to do the same.”

“With the tray-o as machine controls,” he said, smiling. “What happens if
you
wear out?”

“I’m replaced.”

“That would be impossible, I think. High-quality precisio tools are always rare.”

She felt herself redden again, this time with pleasure.

Julian chuckled. “Have I violated another cultural taboo? Ar compliments discouraged?”

“Not if they’re sincere,” Alex said, not looking at him.

“I’m a good judge of people,” Julian said austerely, “but I don’t expect you to take that on faith. I’ll prove it to you today. Just wait.”

She said nothing, not sure what response would be appropriate. They drove out of Mira and Alex pointed out the small businesses-none yet open: bakeries, wrap shops, foamcast engineers. When they reached the river she named the manufacturies, from soap to mining equipment, explaining which were privately owned and which operated through Mira Corp.

“And those buildings over there are the gene labs. We just had a major breakthrough in incorporating flu-vaccination genetics into our tubers.”

“Flu? Really?”

“Well, we call it that. I don’t know what you’d call it on Terra. Low-level respiratory infection, kids get it a lot.”

“We call it flu,” Julian said. “Although on Terra there are many—too many— strains that are not low level. Lethal, in fact.”

“I think the First Landing encountered that here. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“You eat most of your vaccines in food?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “Don’t… didn’t you?”

“No,” he said, but explained no further. They drove across the open plain as the sun rose in a cloudless sky over the purple groundcover and tall, thin trees. Birds wheeled overhead, crying raucously. A herd of frabbits scampered in the distance. On Alex’s cheeks the air felt cool and sweet.

She was so seldom out of Mira City that the plain seemed foreign to her, wild, something that should belong to the Cheyenne rather than to civilization. They passed a huge thicket of red creeper, the quick vine that could seize and paralyze a man while it leisurely devoured him. The geneticists had been experimenting with red creeper genes, but so far had found nothing useful to do with them.

“Look at the lions,” Alex said, gesturing to a pair barely visible in the branches of a distant grove. Julian must have heard something in her voice, some trace of that harsh memory in the lab with Yat-Shing Wong, because he turned his head to look sharply at Alex. But all he said was, “Predatory?”

“Yes.”

“Greentrees appears different outside of Mira City.”

“Oh, yes,” Alex said. She was glad when the solar array loomed into view on the horizon and she could resume lecture mode. “This is a stage-three energy project for Greentrees. The original settlers started with nuclear power from their Terran equipment—no, don’t look at me like that, Julian, it was only a temporary plan. As soon as possible, energies based on nondamaging waste were put in place: wind, water, and geothermal. But the problem is, Greentrees has very little volcanic activity or steep temperature gradients. Wind is good—there’s a big wind farm on the other side of the river, but—”

“Does the river have a name?” Julian asked. “I’ve never heard i called anything but ’the river.’”

“Neither have I,” she said, startled. “I never thought about it before.”

Julian smiled. “That says a great deal about Greentrees.”

Alex wasn’t sure what he meant and suddenly didn’t want to know. She resumed lecturing.

“The solar tech is more expensive and harder to manufactur than wind, but we’re doing it, although the results have proved disappointing thus far. We get about thirty-six percent efficiency.”

“Better than we were getting on Earth,” Julian said, surprising her. She hadn’t expected green knowledge from him, given what he’d said about Terra. “Are you using a concentrator photovoltaic system?”

“Yes. It concentrates sunlight about five hundred times.”

They had reached the solar array. Alex climbed out of the car stretching her legs, watching Julian stare at the huge curved reflective dishes, each turning like an upraised flower to follow the sun. He said, “What’s the subject of today’s meeting?”