Nancy Kress - Crossfire 02 (12 page)

Alex saw a few heads nod around the room.’

“Not everything,” Julian said pleasantly. “If I’ve given that impression, please let me correct—”

“Concentrated on evacuation and defense,” Lau-Wah interrupted, most uncharacteristically. “And also concentrated in
your
hands, not ours.”

A mistake. Alex realized it as soon as Lau-Wah spoke, and sensed that he did, too. Julian had shown nothing but concern for Mira City, for all Greenies… there wasn’t a “your” and “our” here! Why was Lau-Wah trying to make divisions where they didn’t exist?

Just as Hope of Heaven was doing.

Immediately she pushed away the thought. Lau-Wah was in an entirely different category from the dissident troublemakers, Lau-Wah was as concerned about Mira as any of them, it wasn’t jealousy of Julian that drove Lau-Wah, it
wasn’t…

Julian said nothing, standing dignified and silent.

Finally a young Chinese councilwoman, color high on her cheeks, said, “I think Commander Martin is concerned not with… with power but with all our safety.”

Murmurs of assent ran around the room. Then someone in the back called, “Mr. Holman, what do you think?”

Alex swiveled to look at Jake.

The old man said, “I’d like to hear the rest of the defense plans.” People nodded. Jake’s voice had been steady and neutral. But Alex knew. Jake had always been the one to want a strong defense of Mira. He liked what he’d heard so far, and if Julian could present counterattack plans with the same careful plausibility that he’d presented evacuation plans, and with the same humility, Jake would lend the weight of his approval to Julian’s strategies.

“Thank you, Mr. Holman,” Julian said quietly, with obvious deference. He began his defense presentation. Alex had heard most of it before, starting with what he’d told her on their first trip out to the solar array, to Jen McBain’s camp, to Hope of Heaven.

As soon as the discussion of orbital and ground weapons began, the Quaker members of the council slipped from the room. They would, Alex knew, return when a vote was taken. She guessed they would vote for the evacuation, against the counterattack. There were not enough of them to carry the decision.

Julian had prevailed.

Jake was nodding openly now as Julian talked. So did several others. But when Alex searched for Lau-Wah, she couldn’t find him. He must have slipped out quietly along with the Quakers.

Her stomach knotted, although she would have found it difficult to explain exactly why.

A VINE PLANET

K
arim had taken to whistling.

Not from lightheartedness, or joy in music, or even the memory of Beta Vine’s pleasure in Karim’s whistling on Greentrees. That memory, in fact, kept him for several days from forming a single note. But finally he whistled just to have a sound, any sound, in the dead silence of the Vine colony world.

He whistled Grieg.

Around him the huge, pulpy, unmoving Vines stood soundless.

He whistled Strauss.

No echoes came from this world with no hard edges.

He whistled dance tunes from Earth, Moran and Parakinski and Jerzell, all dead centuries and light-years away.

The silence stretched on.

He ran through the Vines, under their protruding lengths that were not leaves nor tentacles nor arms but something alien to him, alien to the music. He ran until he couldn’t whistle, and then until he couldn’t move and had to drop to the squishy mud that was never puddle and never dry. He dropped panting and blind and furious, but he knew fury wouldn’t help. Nothing helped. He was trapped here and he would die here and his and Lucy’s DNA would decay and form the only anomaly on this living world that would not respond to their existence.

Above him the motionless leaves/tentacles/arms did nothing.

When he’d regained his breath, Karim again stood. So far his and Lucy’s determination to escape this pulpy hell had come to nothing. But Karim still walked every day, covering enormous distances, afraid not to walk, afraid to sink into more nothingness than he already felt.

He walked.

He whistled, from despair, the cheerful rondo from Mozart’s
Alla Turca.
Dah dah
dee
dah dah
dee…

Something answered.

Karim gasped and stumbled. Grabbing the pulpy trunk of a Vine—or the Vine, if they were really all interconnected—he righted himself. Listening.

Nothing.

He had imagined it. He must have imagined it.

With lips that almost trembled too much to purse, he whistled the rondo again.

Something answered with a single long, high note.

All the displays on Karim’s suit still worked. Shakily he checked the direction of the received sound and began walking that way. Every hundred yards he whistled again, licking dry lips and holding his breath afterward.

Each time, something answered.

He came to it: an irregular pit, maybe fifty meters across at its widest point, less than a meter down to the surface. Karim stepped closer.

Not water. Not the ubiquitous mud. The pit writhed with a biomass of some sort, a pinkish gray stew of… what? Bacteria, maybe; it looked vaguely like the biofilms that had coated the interior of the first Vine ship. Microorganisms of some alien, unknowable sort, either sentient in their own right or else the servant of the sentient Vines.

Karim knelt by the edge of the pit and peered in. The biomass stew was opaque; his scrutiny told him nothing. He squatted back on his heels and whistled the Mozart rondo.

The biomass answered with a single long note.

He stared at it. A tropism of some kind, automatic and mindless?

He whistled a dance tune, one of Cazzie Jerzell’s upbeat, simple rhythms.

The biomass gave him back the tune.

Karim’s eyes widened. He tried Chopin, a minor-key and difficult fragment. The pit answered with the single long note. Another Jerzell ditty, and it sang it back to him. Grieg, and the single note. Which, he realized, meant
no.
The pit wanted the Jerzell. He was whistling to an alien life form with lousy musical taste.

“What are you?” he whispered to it.

Nothing.

For the next half hour, until his lips would no longer pucker, Karim whistled. He tried to construct his experiment rationally, but too many emotions swamped him: relief, exhilaration, desperate hope. Something on this planet was responding to him.

He learned that if he whistled bright dance tunes, the mass rippled softly. If he sat silent with folded arms, it gave a low soft note until he began again. If he whistled anything complex or subtle, the pit sounded its high long
no.

“You hear me, yes,” Karim said hoarsely at the end of what had to be the strangest impromptu concert in the universe. “You at least hear me.”

He brought Lucy, and the translator. Neither was any help. Lucy’s apathy had grown until it was difficult to get her to move to the pit at all. When she saw it, she stared for a full silent minute, and then said, “It’s just bacteria, like on the ship. So what?”

“I don’t know yet.” Annoyed, he took the translator from her, set it at the edge of the pit, and spoke into it for a good hour.

The pit answered only with its low insistent note demanding whistling.

Karim was frightened by the force of his rage. He saw it as a sign of how unbalanced this place had made him. He forced himself to go on speaking, setting the translator on the ground beside a towering Vine whose fronds dipped into the biomass below.

Neither pit nor Vine answered him.

“Damn them for infidels and whores!” Karim screamed. The rage broke. He grabbed the translator and hurled it into the pit, where it sank silently.

Karim and Lucy looked at each other, petrified.

But nothing happened. And
that,
he thought in despair, was the slogan of this planet. Slogan, motto, operating system, epitaph:
Nothing happened.

“Look,” Lucy whispered. “Oh, Karim … look!”

He turned to follow her pointing finger. A few meters along the perimeter of the pit, very close to its edge, something was growing. At first a blob, it slowly— how slowly, like everything else here! — took on form. It was a small Vine, about six feet high. Then it was a Vine with two long fronds and a bulbous growth on top. The trunk divided. It was, Karim thought dazedly, like watching a speeded-up holo of a plant growing and flowering. An hour later—at least he thought it took an hour, he forgot to time it—the Vine was shaped recognizably, built from living molecules, a representation crude but unmistakable, grown from the sludge in the pit.

Karim was staring at a sculpted plantlike creature that was himself.

As he stared, the creation began to whistle: Cazzie Jerzell’s catchy dance tune “Under the April Moon.”

Karim and Lucy circled the pit, stopping a few feet from the creature/sculpture/music box. Up close, it looked even cruder. Its “lips,” an open circle of pulpy purple, didn’t move as the whistiing sounds emerged. But something, Karim thought dazedly, must be moving inside.

He said inanely, “Whistling sounds are easy to produce. Even wind does it.”

Lucy gasped, “Is it alive?”

“I don’t know. I mean, yes, it’s alive, it’s a plant as much as the Vines are plants, but… but I don’t think it’s sentient. Of itself.”

“No,” Lucy said. She looked from the whistling arboreal Karim to the pit, then to a nearby Vine, then back to the pit. “Karim …”

“What?” This was the most animation he’d seen from her in weeks.

“I think we have it wrong. Here, on the Vine ship, even on Greentrees.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think… no, wait.” She closed her eyes, as if in pain. He waited.

“I think,” she finally said, “that we were wrong when we assumed that Beta’s biofilm arm was under his control on Greentrees. Or that the Vines on the ship controlled all that biofilm covering the floor. Or that these Vines here are master of this planet. I think we were wrong. The Vines are just machinery. Like our translators and computers and ships and skinsuits. Or maybe like the genemod working animals on Earth. Horses, maybe. The biofilm controls the Vines, not the other way around. The biofilm is the sentient master of this race.

“All this time we’ve been talking to the wrong end of the horse.”

MIRA CITY

I
t came ripping through the sky, a huge black disk growing larger and larger and larger still, until it stretched horizon to horizon, shrieking metal and wailing wind. The bottom opened and re spilled out, a trickle at first, growing to a silent torrent. The red liquid flooded the streets of Mira City, higher and higher. People screamed and thrashed, faces contorted with terror as they went under, drowning in blood …

Alex woke and bolted upright on her cot. Sweat soaked her pajamas. Panting, she recoiled as a furry missile landed on the bed. Katous.

“Bad dream, cat.”

Katous stared at her in the darkness, two impassive yellow eyes. “Very bad dream.” She pushed away her blanket; no more sleep tonight. Evacuation drill day, starting in less than half an hour. Well, for her it wouldn’t be a surprise night drill. Probably there were a lot more people awake who were supposed to be taken by “surprise.”

One of them was Jake who, since his last stroke, was now apparently installed permanently in her apartment with a strong male nurse. At least it might be permanently; Alex wasn’t home much Siddalee had grudgingly supplemented the cot in Alex’s office wit a shower. Tonight, however, Jake’s nurse had moved into Jake’s bedroom, and Alex had slept at her “evacuation drill home point.”

As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw that Jake sat at the table in his wheelchair. The snores of the deep-sleeping young came through the bedroom doorway.

“Have some tea, Alex.”

She poured herself a cup, first using her sleeve to wipe the cup clean of yesterday’s dregs. “Why are you awake already?”

“Why are you? Actually, it might give you time to comb your hair for once.”

Even at his age, Jake appreciated female beauty. Alex, who seldom thought about her appearance, grinned at him. She sometimes wondered what women had decorated his younger life, but never asked. “Ready for the drill, Jake?”

“Yes.” His eyes gleamed; Julian had planned well. “I just wish I weren’t in the evac group with that idiot Duncan Martin.”

“Is he an idiot?” Alex said. She hadn’t been able to attend any of Duncan’s theater pieces—too busy with the stepped-up defenses. But most people raved about Duncan as both performer and impressario, a term Alex had never heard of before he arrived.

“He’s a wonderful actor,” Jake said grudgingly. “His Prospero was first-rate. And he’s found acting talent among young people and got them doing amazing things, not to mention working like beavers.”

“What’s a’beaver’?”

“It’s a … never mind, it’s not important. I called him an idiot because he won’t stop doing just what I did, and of course none of us can tolerate our own faults in anybody else. Duncan refers constantly to Earth. Only he berates us all for ’criminal neglect of our artistic past.’ He doesn’t seem to understand that we’ve been busy surviving.”

“So make him understand.” She sipped the hot tea gratefully.

“You cannot argue with dogmatism.”

“Sure you can. Look at Julian, arguing with Lau-Wah.”

Jake blinked at her from his old eyes. “You know, that’s the first time I’ve heard you make a joke about that situation.”

Alex scowled over the rim of her cup. She didn’t know why she’d joked like that; it wasn’t funny. Since the council meeting in which Julian had laid out his defense plans, Lau-Wah and Julian had continued to be quietly, courteously, lethally at each other’s throats. And Alex, as tray-o, was caught in the middle.

“To have the city act together to survive,” Lau-Wah had said to her, “it must, by definition, act together. We are not doing that. It should be our first priority.”

“All men act in self-interest,” Julian had said to her, “and that’s good. Selfinterest, as opposed to fanatic idealism, leaves room for compromise. Governor Mah is trying to advance the prosperity of his Chinese constituency. But he will have to compromise that temporarily for the good of Greentrees as a whole.”

Was Lau-Wah putting the good of his Chinese over the good of Mira? The question troubled Alex. But as the weeks wore on, and Lau-Wah and Julian argued over everything—mining priorities, weapons construction, emergency taxes for defense costs, degree of permissible disruption of Mira’s infrastructure—she found herself siding more and more with Julian. Ashraf Shanti, pliable and nervous, had also been swayed by Julian’s calm logic and ferocious intelligence. But Lau-Wah had grown increasingly remote, politely curt in a way that made Alex uncomfortable. Politics on Greentrees had been more open before now.

They had not prepared for war before now.

No, that wasn’t true. Jake told her that thirty-nine years before, Mira had prepared lavishly for a war that hadn’t happened. Alex didn’t remember much about that; she’d been a small child. But those who did remember tended to side with Lau-Wah, except for Jake himself.

He was still grumbling about Duncan. “The trouble with actors is that they can’t stop acting once they step off the stage. That man is nothing but layers of roles he’s played, tattered into intermingled ribbons. One minute he’s Falstaff, then Faust, then Don Quixote, then Jerome O’Dell…”

The names meant nothing to Alex.

“… and if I have to hear one more time about the ’pleasant primitive naivete of colonies’ I’m going to… oh God, here he comes.”

Alex leaned forward and wiped a thread of drool off Jake’s face. Duncan passed the window and opened the unlocked door without knocking. “Are we ready?” he asked in that thrilling voice whose musical doubleness, harmonizing with itself, was indeed genemod. Julian had told Alex so. ” ’Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.’ ”

“Not war quite yet,” Jake said dryly. Next to Duncan’s robust health, Jake looked even older and more tired. The last tiny stroke had partially paralyzed one side of Jake’s face, increasing the drooling, although the stroke did not seem to have affected his thinking much or slowed down his speech. Tenderness swelled Alex’s heart. The old man was very dear to her.

“Oh, but we must have war or Julian will be so disappointed,” Duncan said blithely. “Now don’t look shocked, Alex, you know it’s true. He is a soldier, and why do men soldier except to war?”

“Julian doesn’t want war,” Jake snapped. “None of us do. Don’t talk obscenities, Martin.”

“As you say. Do I have time for a cup of tea before the festivities begin? What, no clean glasses? My dear, you are a deplorable housekeeper.”

“She’s not a housekeeper, she’s a leader of a city-state!”

Alex stepped into the bickering. “Duncan, did you ever hold a position in Julian’s command on Earth? Besides acting, I mean?”

“Of course not,” Duncan said. “My brother is far too astute to let me control anything. Most artists barely control themselves. I see that there is no hope of hot tea, after all… ah, there’s the siren!”

Alex hadn’t expected it to be so loud. The sound tore through the air, and for a moment the horror of her nightmare rushed over her. She pushed it back, and shouted, “Jake, Duncan, you know what to do … see you later!”

“ ’No one dast blame this man,’” Duncan said, which made no sense but Alex had no time to question him. She ran out the door toward the transport inflatable.

All four rovers were gone.

It actually took her a moment to remember. Julian had devised evacuation plans, contingency plans, backups for the contingencies. He’d worked day and night—literally, sleeping only for his own necessary hour in each twenty-four—to create the plans and broadcast them on MiraNet. Then he’d sent volunteers door-to-door to make sure everyone understood exactly what to do and where to go. He’d taken into account the elderly Arab women who would not leave the medina with men unrelated to them, the scientists and engineers who might be away from the city, the old and the infants and the sick and the recalcitrant. He tried to think of everything. The rovers were missing because in a worst-case scenario they might all be out in the bush.

“I forgot my tram number!” a young girl cried, running up to Alex. The girl shivered in a thin nightdress. Her eyes looked huge with fear, or possibly excitement. “Is it a real attack?”

“Act as if it is! Where are your parents?”

“I was sleeping at my friend Aleya’s and when the siren came I ran home but my family already left and—”

“Children are supposed to stay with the family they’re with when the alarm sounds! And where’s your emergency pac?”

“I forgot it. Oh, Ms. Cutler, is it a real attack?” And this time there was no doubting her expression: the child was thrilled.

“Go back to your friend’s family,” Alex snapped, “and leave with them. Now!”

“What if they already left, too?”

“Oh, for … come with me!” This was not going as planned.

“I’ll… look! There’s Aimee’s father!” She ran off.

Glad to be rid of her, Alex ran toward the tram tracks. Getting fifteen thousand people out of a city and as far away as possible, in groups as small as possible, had required construction and ingenuity. Tracks had been built leading thirty miles out in five different directions. Basic flatbed trams ferried groups of people to the end points, from which each group had a designated destination based on how far and how fast they could travel. Some ended up in the ubiquitous caves to the north of the city, across the river. Some traveled to remote valleys. Some robust groups had no end point at all; after a real attack, they would travel across the continent, if necessary. Barges on the river served the same purposes as the trams.

“They won’t all escape,” Julian had said somberly, “and some who do will be caught later. But this at least gives us a chance to keep humanity alive on Greentrees. And to fight back.”

Alex caught the next tram, climbing up front with the driver. She was a priority red, able to take whatever transportation she needed. A potential fighter rather than a potential hider. At the moment, adrenaline pumping, she was glad.

This tram was full of people who had mostly remembered their evac pacs and who huddled quietly together in the predawn dark. Mostly Anglos, some Chinese. A few people recognized Alex and nodded. No one asked her if the attack was real, and no one looked either outraged or terrified. Maybe this would work, after all.

“You don’t need a full-scale drill,” Lau-Wah had argued. “You can test the plans without forcing the old and sick to stand up to evacuation. And without emptying the city of all essential services. And especially without the EMP. Getting everything running again—”

“The city gets emptied completely,” Julian had answered.

Ashraf said, “What if, for instance, a woman is having a baby?”

“Then she’ll have it in transit,” Julian said. “I’m sure she would prefer that to having a newborn child captured by Furs.”

Ashraf had said no more.

Alex jumped off the tram at the skimmer inflatable. Julian had not, thank heavens, also removed them as a contingency test. She’d comlinked for the skimmer to wait for her. The seats were all filled with scientists and engineers; Alex squatted on the floor for the short trip to the number three command bunker. Beside her squatted her tech, Natalie Bernstein, who was also supposed to have been in the rover.

“Here we go, Alex,” Natalie said. Alex merely nodded back. Natalie was no more than twenty-two, and her head of short, wiry black curls looked as uncombed as Alex’s. But her broad face shone with the same excitement as the voidbrained teenage girl at the tram stop. However, Natalie was anything but voidbrained. Smart and steady, she had been Alex’s first choice for bunker tech, despite Natalie’s youth.

Their bunker lay sixty miles northeast of Mira City. The site had been carefully chosen. Wild and heavily forested, close to a small tributary of the river, the terrain was nonetheless not too mountainous to reach by rover or to land a skimmer. Six such underground bunkers, deep enough and heavily enough shielded to withstand an alpha beam, were scattered within a three-hundred-mile radius. Ashraf, Lau-Wah, Alex, and Julian were all assigned to different bunkers to minimize leadership loss if the Furs attacked from orbit.

The four command bunkers, plus the two housing essential scientists, were linked by computer and by comlink. When Alex ran down the short flight of steps, Natalie’s backup, Ben Stoller, was already there; someone stayed in each command post at all times. Ben, a muscular and quiet young man whose ears reddened when he was embarrassed, silently gave up his seat in front of the displays to Natalie and stood in the back of the tiny bunker.

Julian was already comming from his bunker. “Alex? How does it look in Mira?”

She peered over Natalie’s shoulder. “Moving smoothly, from what I can see.”