Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (11 page)

“You won’t believe this!” Jon burbled, oblivious to Alex’s mood. “We sunk this shaft down a mile and a half, and there’s apparently some sort of anaerobic microbes down there that don’t use any form of photosynthesis. Well, that’s not so odd, the literature records those even on Earth. They oxidize sulfide, methane, iron, or hydrogen, if there’s any water, for energy. Some of them pump out really weird molecules. But these! Alex … listen!”

Jon pushed a button on a small piece of equipment that Alex couldn’t name. Squinting, she saw that a very fine filament ran from the equipment to the top of the shining pole sunk in the shaft. The machinery began to emit regularly spaced, discordant tones. Jon waved his hand and the unpleasant noise grew louder, then very loud. Alex clapped her hands over her ears.

“Turn it off!”

He did. His eyes shone. “That’s the sound of some sort of crystallization. The Elliner amp turns molecular action into sound. The microbes down there are acting on the pole. It took us three different alloys before we got one it didn’t just eat through.”

“Jon—”

“We have no idea what they’re doing down there,” he said happily. “But all our initial sims indicate some sort of basic catabolism we’ve never seen before!”

“That’s wonderful,” Alex said sarcastically, “but not wonderful enough to ignore a summons to the defense meeting in Mira.”

“Oh, but it is! We might be dealing here with a whole new division of basic life. It isn’t—”

“It isn’t what this research station is supposed to be working on, Jon. What about the—”

“We have a Mira Corp grant for basic science, Alex.”

“I know you do,” she said, as evenly as possible. “But as a sideline. What about the battery?”

“Oh, that’s coming along,” Jon said. He didn’t seem rebuked. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

He led the way to the foamcast building. Inside, two vast clear vats filled with grayish sludge churned quietly.

“This is a microbially powered battery, a prototype,” Jon explained to Julian, the visitor. “A genetically altered form of
E. coli
converts sucrose into CO2 and water. We snatch the freed electrons created by oxidation before they can be seized by intermediate compounds. We’ve altered the bacteria to allow constant contact between cell’s interior and a microscopic mesh screen that—”

Alex stopped listening. Nothing new here; Jon had been this far along on her last visit. It was clear that all the team energies had gone into his new discovery, not the battery that was supposed to eventually provide a natural, safe, recyclable power for Mira City.

“… goal of two million liters of liquid and perhaps twenty thousand tons of microbes, producing power at a rate of—”

As tray-o, Alex’s job was to make Jon concentrate work on the battery, not on the unknown and irrelevant biomass. The problem was that Jon’s concentration, a formidable force when focused, was not easy to direct. It went its own way, independent as a lion. And just as perverse.

“… problem of microbial waste, which tends to turn the soup acidic, so we—” Alex said abruptly, “Jon, I want you to report to Mira tomorrow afternoon for a defense meeting.”

“But I—”

“No arguments, please.” She turned and walked away. Rude … she was being very rude. Well, so what? She hated being rude.

Another silent ride back to Mira. As the city came into view, Julian said, “Alex, stop the car.”

Surprised by his urgent tone, she did.

He sat still so long that she grew alarmed. Finally he twisted in his cramped seat and turned on her the full brilliance of those green genemod eyes.

“I want you to listen to me carefully. Sometimes the observations of an outsider can be valuable in assessing a situation. Mira—”

“I know we’re a bit disorganized,” she snapped. “I’ll take care of it!”

“I’m not talking about disorganization. I’m talking about total stupidity.”

Alex gasped. “How dare you just—”

“Now you’re angry. Do you see how easily I angered you? I want you to see it. I want you to see that you—all of you—are just reacting to each event as it comes along, without any remote idea of how it fits into the overall situation. Savannah Cutler, Jon McBain, Yat-Shing Wong, even you… everyone is interested in a single goal, constructive or destructive, but not working together for the good of Mira as a whole. I called that stupidity, and it
is
stupidity. Willful blindness is always stupid.”

Rage boiled up in her, but then he took her hand and held it in a hard, impersonal grip that compelled her to listen.

“You’re blind to at least three things, Alex. First, you don’t see the necessity for clear authority. You let Savannah Cutler and Jon McBain and even Lau-Wah Mah decide issues that you should decide. Like all democratic meritocracies, you’re afraid to exercise actual power. But you’re at war with the Furs, or will soon be. War does not go well if leaders try to lead by letting every talented person have control over the ends, not just the means, of his own fiefdom.”

“They’re not—”

“They’re running them as if they have fiefdoms. Second, you’re blind to an inherent problem with meritocracies. They always breed aggression.”

Alex blinked, too surprised to answer.

Julian gave her his half smile. His fingers still gripped hers. “You thought the opposite? That in a meritocracy, where everyone has a chance to rise from sheer talent, aggression is minimized? No. A meritocracy means competition, and the less you mitigate that competition with universally accepted norms of inherited privilege, the more aggressive and nasty the competition becomes.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Really? Who are causing more trouble here, the Arabs with their three-centuries-old tradition of stable inheritance of some change but not too much? Or the Chinese with their history of totally remaking politics and culture every forty years or so?”

Alex was silent. She didn’t know much history of either Arabs or the Chinese.

“You have a genuinely dangerous situation-in-the-making with the dissidents in Hope of Heaven. You’re blind to how dangerou because you’re blind to Earth history. What Lau-Wah said to Won was totally inadequate. The third thing you’re blind to is how many weapons you have here on Greentrees that you should be readying for war, but instead don’t even regard as weapons.”

“Like what?” Alex said.

“Everything I saw today. The solar array concentrates sunlight five hundred times, and the dishes are manually directed. Turn them into the sky, or onto the ground, and you have an unexpected heat weapon. Those new microbes of McBain’s destroyed the firs two poles he inserted into the shaft—didn’t you hear him say that? I asked him what the poles were made of. The microbes ate two the of toughest alloys I know, including the one the hull of my ship made of.
Ate metal,
in minutes. That’s a weapon.”

She stared at him.

“In war, Alex, everything is a weapon. Food is a weapon, in how it’s distributed or not distributed. I don’t mean you should starve out Hope of Heaven, which anyway would be difficult to do on a planet as rich as this. I just mean that you should scrutinize all your resources, both for minimizing violence with the dissidents and waging warfare with the Furs. If you don’t, you could lose it all to the enemy. You’re not even
aware
of your resources, not all of them. And you should be.

“After all, you’re the tray-o.”

Alex sat quietiy for a long moment. Ahead of her the white foamcast buildings of Mira City sparkled in the sunshine. The greenery of the farm and the gorgeous genemod colors of the flowers leaped out from the purple countryside. She could see people, small and purposeful, striding along the nearest streets. Wind turbines on a hill across the river flashed in the breeze.

You could lose it all.

“Julian,” she said slowly, “I want you to attend all meetings of the triumvirate from now on. I’ll fix it with Ashraf and Lau-Wah. From now on, you advise us.”

It was only later, in the middle of another sleepless night, that Alex wondered about the meeting at Hope of Heaven. “Inadequate,” Julian had called Lau-Wah’s rebukes to the dissident vandals. But Julian hadn’t been at the meeting; he’d been wandering around Hope of Heaven, returning late to the car.

So how had he known what Lau-Wah had said to Yat-Shing Wong?

A week later Julian laid out his plans for the defense of Mira City at a special meeting of the full city council. Alex scanned the faces of the council members: Quaker, Chinese, and Anglo men and women; Arab men. Most of the councillors, busy with their own jobs and families and lives, were used to meeting hastily a few times a year to agree to whatever the triumvirate put in front of them. This meeting was different, and the faces looked solemn, wary, scared. The Furs were such an old threat; many of the councillors had not even been born when the aliens had last appeared on Greentrees. And Julian, flanked by his chief aides and scientists but wearing Threadmores, probably looked to them almost as alien as the almost mythical Furs.

Alex’s gaze found Jake and Lau-Wah, whose expressions of noncommittal reserve were so identical that, under other circumstances, she might have laughed. She went to sit beside Jake. From there she could view the audience without drawing attention to her scrutiny.

Ashraf began with a little clearing of his throat. “You all know why we’re here. Commander Martin has some… some defense plans to show us. For Mira City.” He considered. “And the rest of Greentrees. Ah, Commander Martin.” Ashraf sat down on Alex’s other side.

“Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” Julian said easily, and Alex noted that although he had dressed like a Greenie, he spoke with the formality of a Terran. What would the council make of that combination?

“As most of you know, my team has spent the last week talking to you all, learning about the tremendous resources and talent here in Mira City. I want to thank you all for everything you’ve told us. If Terra had been this cooperative and this rich, she might not have got herself into the terminal state she has.”

Julian was silent a moment. Pain flickered across his face. Beside Alex, Jake muttered, “Very nice. Flattery tempered by a stoic-but-visible bid for sympathy. He’s good.”

“Shut up,” Alex whispered.

“I’d like to start by listing all of Mira’s resources,” Julian said. “Please bear with me if I recite things you all already know. I hope to be able to show how they will relate to two things: defending Mira when the Furs attack”—
when,
Alex noted, not
if
—“and contributing to all our safety through a city-wide evacuation that gives first priority to protecting your children.”

A ripple ran over the audience. This was the first that most of them had heard about an evacuation. Julian discussed that first, mentioning the children over and over. The children’s safety, feeding the children, keeping the enemy from seizing even one child, preparing for the return of the children after the attack had been repulsed.

As Julian talked, Alex felt herself drawn in. Julian’s plans were detailed and direct. It would require an enormous, temporary diversion of resources from the day-to-day running of Mira, but the evacuation seemed possible.

Julian spoke more, and it seemed advantageous.

He spoke more, and it seemed necessary.

Around her, Alex could feel the council members drawn in. A few nodded, or spoke in low voices to each other. She turned her head to glance at Jake; his expression told her nothing.

Julian said, “That’s the evacuation plan. But of course it does no good to get everyone out of the city if we then let the Furs take it.
But we will not permit that to happen.
While the evacuation occurs— in fact, from the first moment a Fur ship is sited—the defense strategy begins. I’d like to have my ship’s captain start by explaining possible orbital defenses that—”

“One moment, please, Commander Martin,” Lau-Wah said. “Before you go any further, I’d like to ask some questions.”

“Certainly,” Julian said warmly, but a little chill ran over Alex.

“I’ve listened to your plans for this ’evacuation.’ They’re very convincing. But they leave out a crucial point. All these ’rich resources’ you’re diverting from Mira

City will make it very difficult to keep the city running day to day. Manufacturing will be disrupted, mining, transport, food production, even education of our young. Instead, everything will be concentrated on evacuation and, I presume, defense.”