Terran Tomorrow

by Nancy Kress

  “No, sir.”

  “Dismissed.”

  When Major Duncan had gone, Colonel Jenner turned back to Jane. “Ask your questions.”

  “When I waited for a soldier to bring me to you, I talked to some of children. They were very unpolite. One said there is not room enough in the dome for us and we will became told to leave. Is this true?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Two adults stood near. They permitted the children to be unpolite and they did not tell the children we can stay. Why?”

  “Jane, politics—do you know that word? Good—are complicated here. Not everyone agrees on everything. Surely that was true on World as well?”

  “Yes. But no one goes against bu^ka^tel.” Not quite true, but she was angry now.

  “What is bu^ka^tel?”

  He was the first Terran at Monterey Base to ask. She said, “It is what makes us human. To serve and protect Mother World, to obey the Mothers who gave us life, to put the good of others equal with the good of us-selfs, to honor the ancestors, to understand that to give is the only way to receive, in the Great Web by which we all need. That is best I can say it in English. There is more, but it does not translate. Every child learns this down to the bones before they may walk alone outside their lahk.”

  “And everyone keeps to this bu^ka^tel? What about the Worlders you just spoke about who tried to steal vaccine?”

  “No. They did not keep to bu^ka^tel. I am sorry—I did not say true. But bu^ka^tel is the right path, even when a Worlder breaks it. To violate bu^ka^tel is to … to violate others and Mother World. It is to become outside the lahk. Nothing is worth that. Even those people who try to steal vaccine had their lahks with them in the camp. Even the Worlders in Lieutenant Brodie’s new army have permission of the lahk Mothers.”

  Colonel Jenner rose and gazed out the window. Jane didn’t see anything happening out there, but she rose to take in more of the view. The sunglasses deepened the wilderness to an even lovelier green. Branches waved gently and puffy white clouds drifted through a blue sky—so blue! A flock of birds flew overhead.

  He finally spoke. “So you think that Leo Brodie was justified in breaking bu^ka^tel when he shot Lieutenant Lamont.”

  “Yes. But it hurt him, I think.”

  “And you don’t think he stayed on World to avoid court-martial.”

  “No. He wishes to rebuild, and he signed the mating contract with Isabel for five years.”

  “Five years? Marriage expires after five years?”

  “Expires?”

  “Is ended.”

  “Yes, of course. Some contracts are for two years or three.”

  “On Terra, marriage is supposed to be for life.”

  She heard but did not understand the bitterness in his voice. She said gently, “That must be difficult, I think. Sometimes people change, or what they want changes. To force people to stay married … that would not show them respect. It would not be bu^ka^tel.”

  Abruptly Colonel Jenner turned away from the window, back to her. “You are going to be our translator and you should understand our life here. When my grandmother recovers, I’m going to take her outside the base to a coastal settlement. We’ll go by quadcopter, which is not completely without danger but not too bad—we fly lower than New America’s radar can detect. I would like you to come along. There is someone I would like you to meet.”

  “Yes,” she said instantly. A chance to see Terra outside the domes! More than she had hoped for. “Who will we be to meet?”

  Now his voice held even more complicated layers. “My brother Colin.”

  * * *

  Marianne stuck one bare foot out of bed and put it on the floor, then the other foot. The floor, made of alien-dome material she had not touched in thirty-eight years, tingled faintly, just as she remembered. She stood, relieved to feel neither weakness nor vomiting. Expanding her lungs as far as they would go, she took in a huge breath of Terran air.

  No weakness or gastric distress. When her gut microbes had been changed on World, the more primitive process had nearly killed her. Score one for Terran science, marching forward even as everything crumpled around it.

  Her cell in quarantine—you couldn’t really call it a room, too monastic—held only a bed, sink and toilet, and an array of monitors. Sometime in the night, someone must have unhooked her from them. Marianne wore a thin hospital gown open in the back—okay, not everything on Terra had progressed—and didn’t see her clothes. Before she could figure out how to ring for a nurse, Lindy Ross came in.

  “Dr. Jenner! You look much better.”

  “Yes. No. But I can’t … I need to talk to Jason. Colonel Jenner.”

  “He probably isn’t available. Let me examine—”

  “I need to talk to him!” To her own horror, Marianne heard her voice rise to a shriek. “I need to! Now!”

  Dr. Ross gazed at her a long moment. “Okay, I’ll send for him, if you let me examine you now.”

  “Yes! Just … I need to talk to him.”

  Dr. Ross left, speaking in a low voice to someone in the corridor. After a moment she returned. “I’ve sent someone to Enclave Dome to tell him. Dr. Jenner—”

  “‘Marianne.’ I’m sorry. I just need to—”

  “I know. I’m Lindy. Would you like something to calm you a bit?”

  “No.” Marianne tried to steady herself; she must have appeared hysterical. Maybe she was hysterical. “How … how are the others from the ship doing? Where is the ship?”

  “Back in orbit. You’re the last to wake up from the microbe adjustment. Everyone is doing fine except for Kayla Rhinehart. Physically she’s well but she seems deeply depressed, maybe dangerously so. She cries constantly. Was she like that on World?”

  Lindy’s tone, soothing but not condescending, was helping Marianne. “Kayla varies. Claire says she’s bipolar. Do you have lamotrigine?”

  “We use something newer now. There’s no psychiatrist on base, unfortunately, and the meds can have rare but powerful psychotic side effects. I’ve prescribed them here only once. Let me consult with the Army doctor, Captain Holbrook.”

  “You’re not in the Army?”

  “No.” Lindy put a stethoscope to Marianne’s chest. “Cough, please.”

  Marianne coughed. “Will Jason come here?”

  “I’ve sent for him.”

  Not an answer. Marianne had to keep talking or she would disintegrate. “I want to know more about what Jason did at the … the Collapse. Do you know him well?”

  Lindy took a step backward. “I think you must not have been told, Marianne, that Jason is my ex-husband. We’re divorced, or at least as divorced as you can be when there is no government except the military.”

  No, Marianne had not known that. “Do you … did you have any children?”

  “No. If you’d rather have Dr. Holbrook attend you…”

  “No. I … no. I just need to see Jason.”

  “I’m here,” he said.

  Lindy said something to him, too low for Marianne to catch, and then left, closing the door behind her. Marianne clutched Jason’s arm. “It’s all gone, all of it?”

  Pity flooded him. He didn’t have to ask what she meant. He had been there, in the place she occupied now, ten years ago, and then again eight years ago. They had all been there, all the survivors of both the Collapse and then, for those who lived through the first horror, of the war. Her hand, veined and liver-spotted, tightened even more on the sleeve of his uniform.

  “Yes,” he said gently. “Most of it is gone. Not all, but most.”

  “Yesterday I was too stunned to really understand all the … New York? DC.”

  “Yes.”

  “NIH? Fermilab? The CDC? CERN?”

  Leave it to his grandmother to think first of the scientific facilities.

  “All the biotech firms in Boston and Maryland and Seattle—”

  “Yes.” And US Strategic Command, NASA, Andersen Air Force Base in Gu
am, Fort Bragg, Creech, Vandenberg, Fort Benning, the labs at Livermore … The list went on and on.

  She let go of Jason’s arm. Her face looked not only old, but ancient. “I can’t believe it. But … what about fallout? From the nuclear bombs—didn’t we have thousands? And other countries, too?”

  “Most of them weren’t even used. Remember, the Collapse from plague came first, and fast. Nearly everyone died then, including the people with access to weapons, expertise, launch codes. US Strategic Command could only launch on direct order of the president. He died early on, and then his successors, along with the military who were supposed to receive or execute retaliation orders. When the war started two years later, most weapons weren’t usable by either side.”

  “There were enough to take out all the places you just mentioned!”

  “Yes. But it was such a confused time. I’m not even sure who bombed which specific targets: Russia, China, Korea, New America. Even the details of our retaliation are murky.”

  “But when there were so few people left anyway … to senselessly kill more…”

  She stopped. Jason understood that she, more than most people, knew how senseless some people could be. He said, “It isn’t—”

  “Fallout? Even from a few nuclear strikes there would be—”

  “Yes. But most of it blew west to east. And the new bombs aren’t as dirty as the ones you remember. The mechanism is different. Even the Seattle bombs didn’t harm us much here.”

  “I can’t get my mind around it. All gone. And Elizabeth…”

  “We never found out what happened to Aunt Liz,” he said gently. “I’m sorry. Grandma, the only thing you can do is not think about it. Think about now. Try to not remember.”

  Jason exerted a lot of energy to not think about the Collapse. To not remember his frantic efforts to save what and who he could, bringing in biologists from the closest biotech firms and universities. To not remember the dying he left behind, and—much worse—the still healthy he denied a place on the copters because they could be of no use in battling this strange new plague. To not distinguish his own failures from those of the civilization disintegrating all around him. To not remember when the last of his copters was shot down, taking three good soldiers and six evacuees with it.

  Lindy, he knew, remembered everything. She had remembered it over and over, until the memories somehow became bearable to her, like bloody cloths bleached lighter and lighter by sunlight. Jason couldn’t do that. He’d shut the bloody shrouds away in darkness, and only for his grandmother would he have brought them even briefly into light.

  She let go of his arm and pulled at the skin of her face, and he knew that she was herself again. Battered, scarred—they were all scarred, forever—but she was not the quavery, crushed old woman he’d seen when he entered the infirmary.

  “I’m sorry, Jason. I know I can’t just summon you like this—you’re in command of this base. But thank you for coming.”

  He nodded, and offered her the only thing he could. “Tomorrow, I have to see Dad and Colin at the Settlement on the Coast. If you’re feeling strong enough, would you like to come?”

  She raised her face to his, and her eyes glinted with tears. “Yes. I would. Please.”

  CHAPTER 5

  In the armory Jason waited with several soldiers and, to Marianne’s surprise, Jane. Jason, Jane, and one of the soldiers wore armor under esuits. Jane looked like a tall coppery flower encased in a clear vase and incongruously wearing sunglasses. They stood beside a contraption like nothing Marianne had seen before. It had four rotors resting on the vehicle bay floor and, in the center and a few feet above, a dome of clear, heavy plastic housing four low seats. The whole thing looked assembled from Tinkertoys. Somewhere in Marianne’s forehead a headache simmered, kept at bay by the same meds that made her willing to even consider riding in such a flimsy-looking vehicle.

  She said, “What is it?”

  “Quadcopter. Fast and efficient.”

  “What powers it?”

  “Electric batteries.”

  “Where do you get your electricity?” And why hadn’t she thought to ask this before? She’d had a day of resting and asking questions.

  “Generators. This is an Army base, Marianne. We have supplies of very advanced fuel cells, although not an indefinite supply.”

  Marianne. Well, all right, he didn’t want to call her “Grandma” in front of his troops, and “Marianne” was probably better than “Dr. Jenner.” She said, “How high can it go, and how far, on battery power?”

  “Maximum height is half a mile, although we won’t be going that high. With full passenger load, battery lasts six hours before recharging.”

  “Jas … Colonel, it doesn’t look safe. What about a drone attack?”

  He looked at her steadily, from eyes so much like her own. “It has happened. But we fly under New America’s radar, and over open country so that we won’t be ambushed from the ground. Scouts have cleared us for today’s flight. But the choice is yours. However, this is the safest way to see Ryan and Colin.”

  “Can’t they come here?”

  “They won’t,” he said in what she’d come to think of as his Army voice. It allowed no dissent. She’d used the same tone in another lifetime, when she’d taught undergraduates. “Do you still want to go?”

  “Yes. But should you go? If the … the enemy knows that the commander is outside the domes…”

  “They don’t know,” Jason said. “And my second in command is very competent. Put on this body armor and then this esuit. Sergeant, have the quadcopter readied in the airlock.”

  Two soldiers pushed the Tinkertoy contraption toward the oversized armory airlock that the FiVee had driven through yesterday. Jane helped Marianne put on the light armor and esuit. Marianne desperately wanted to see her son and her other grandson. Her daughter was gone; she needed to hold fast to what she still had. If everyone else at Monterey Base could rebuild their lives after unthinkable loss, that was what she would have to do, too.

  * * *

  It was more thrilling than the spaceship, where everything had to be viewed on screens. In the quadcopter—strange word, even for English—Jane could look down and see Terra, separated from it only by her esuit and a piece of glass. No … plastic. She craned her neck forward and to the side.

  The quadcopter skimmed over forest, over field after field filled with weeds and bushes. No crops in the field; this was wild land. Jane shouted over the noise of the quadcopter, “Look! What are those? Look!”

  Colonel Jenner, piloting with Jane beside him and the other soldier with Marianne in the back seats, smiled. “Deer.”

  “They’re beautiful!”

  He said nothing, and Jane remembered that he ate deer. Oh, how could they? These beautiful animals, running so fast and free! They … “Oh, look! What’s that?”

  “Monterey Bay, part of the Pacific Ocean.”

  It was a thin curve on the horizon, growing larger as they flew toward it. Jane had seen the ocean at home, but under a dimmer orange sun, with purple seaweed floating near the shore, World’s ocean had looked nothing like this dazzling, clear blue. “Blue” wasn’t even the right word for it, not if “blue” meant the dye used on World. There must be a better, more wondrous English word.

  Marianne said to the colonel, “Oceanic dead spots?”

  “Dissipating more each year, from what we can tell. Colin will know more.”

  “Jason … can he still superhear?”

  “Yes.”

  What did that mean? From the look on the colonel’s face, nothing good. The closer they flew to Monterey Bay, the more rigid his jaw grew, the stronger the little quiver of flesh at his temple. Did that mean the danger to the quadcopter was increasing?

  Jane clasped her hands in her lap and recited one of the first bu^ka^tel chants taught to children: Death enriches Mother World, who takes us to her breast for peaceful sleep. Be not afraid, dear heart, for you are eternally loved.
>
  Mother Terra? Well, in a phrase she had learned from Claire Patel: why not? This was the original Mother of all Worlders, after all.

  Monterey Bay grew larger and more dazzling. A single dome like those at the base came into view, less blue and shimmering than the ocean. Beside it stretched cultivated fields and orchards like those at home. A river splashed through a small waterfall surrounded by wooden structures. More structures extended from the mouth of the river out into the ocean; those were filled with intensely green slime.

  Small figures ran from fields and bay into the dome. Colonel Jenner set down the quadcopter beside it, and the figures, people-sized now, ran out again. Jane was shocked to see that the airlock to the dome stood wide open. Didn’t RSA spores contaminate everything inside?

  The quadcopter noise stopped. The armed soldier jumped out, followed by Colonel Jenner. In the sudden silence, someone spoke: an older woman, gray-haired and scowling. She wore what Jane still thought of as normal clothes: a simple wrap of undyed cloth that looked homespun, with sandals of cloth and thin wood. No esuit. She said flatly, “Colonel Jenner. Such an honor. Something wrong with the last shipment?”

  “No. Hello, Sarah. Nice to see you, too.”

  She snorted. Then Marianne and Jane climbed out of the quadcopter and Sarah’s sunken eyes went round as buttons. “Oh my God, you’re Kindred.”

  “I greet you,” Jane said in English. Sarah stared and shook her head. What did that mean?

  Marianne said, “I’m Marianne Jenner. Hello, Sarah.”

  Sarah found her voice. “The Friendship returned to Earth?”

  Colonel Jenner said, “Not exactly. Is Colin around?”

  Sarah said, “He’ll be on his way here. Dr. Jenner…”

  “Yes?”

  Sarah seemed to have found not only her voice but also a commanding stance. Was she then the mother of this lahk? She put her hands on her hips and demanded, “Are you staying here? Are you with us or them?”

  Colonel Jenner said, “With us. She’s a scientist, Sarah. And Jane is our translator.”

  Sarah said to Marianne, “You choose death over life?”

  Marianne, bewildered, turned to Colonel Jenner. He said tightly, “Here comes Colin.”