Terran Tomorrow

by Nancy Kress

  “Lindy, I need you. Desperately. And I love you. I always have, despite … everything. Your choice is your own, but…” He couldn’t finish. All he could do was hope.

  “Yes,” she said, her voice thick. “I’ll go with you. You seem to keep needing a doctor.”

  He fumbled for her hand, but she snatched it away. “Not now—neither of us has time. I love you, you idiot. Now I’ll get Hillson. Do not try to get up!”

  * * *

  He stayed flat in bed, although he hated it. Pain mounted steadily in his side; he tried to ignore it. Hillson, who seemed to have aged ten years since yesterday, said, “Sir, Major Duncan asked me to make a report to you, she’s directing the evacuation. Lieutenant Li went back to the signal station, and the Return reports that the convoy from Fort Hood is maybe six days out.”

  “Moving too fast.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go ahead, Sergeant.” It hurt even to lie still, to focus on what Hillson was saying. How much blood had Jason lost? Tubes ran into him in various places, but none of them were red. So maybe he had all the blood he needed. It would be nice to have all of something he needed.

  “The Awakened, military and civilian, were all talked to by Dr. Jenner and Ms. Ka^graa, and given the chance to ask questions about World. We have nine Awakened troops, including Corporal Porter, who attacked Dr. Jenner.”

  “Porter is still drugged?”

  “Yes, sir. As per your orders.”

  “Who shot me?”

  “Private Perry.”

  A perpetual troublemaker, Hillson had said weeks ago. Jason didn’t have to ask what had happened to Perry; he knew. You did not get to shoot your commanding officer in front of J Squad and live.

  Hillson continued, “All eight soldiers have agreed to be transported to World. You wanted agreement, sir.”

  “I did.” Hillson had wanted only orders: This unit is being deployed. But this was hardly a normal deployment.

  “Three of them have family members here, who will also go. Of the remaining troops, those whom you are allowing to choose deployment or separation from the service, the division is about fifty-fifty.”

  That surprised Jason. He’d expected far fewer to choose World. A sudden pain seared his side; briefly he closed his eyes.

  “Sir?”

  “Continue, Sergeant. The officers?”

  “Major Duncan, of course. Captain Goldman. Lieutenant Li.”

  None with a choice; they were all coconspirators.

  Hillson continued, “Lieutenant Allen. Lieutenant Parker and some of her nurses. The rest—captains Frazier, Gardner, Vargas, and Sullivan and Major Holbrook—all are staying here. Majors Sullivan and Vargas are furious that you released the birds and that you’re going to destroy the dome. I have a detail loading up scientific equipment onto a FiVee under their direction.”

  “Go on,” Jason said.

  Hillson spieled off more names, finishing with, “The civilian Awakened are … in a lot of disagreement.”

  Of course they were. “Who else will leave?”

  “All the aliens, of course.”

  Jason would never get Hillson to think of them as anything but aliens. But Jason was relieved that Jane agreed; she might have tried to stay with Colin. But on second thought, perhaps Jane, with her increased insight, understood better than any of them.

  “Dr. Jenner and Dr. Farouk agree to go, of course. Also Dr. McKay—his wife and child are both Awakened. He’s not happy, but he’ll go. Also some of the civilian scientists who are not Awakened, and a lot of the civilian base staff. They don’t want to try to live here without the base. A child, Devon James, is still in a coma, and his parents have finally agreed to go with him, but they’re not happy. In total, a hundred and three people have agreed to leave Earth. But some of the Awakened are saying they won’t go.”

  “Who are … the holdouts.” Damn, he hadn’t expected to be this tired so soon. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been shot before, in Congo. But he’d been younger, and hopped up on combat drugs, and not striving to move an entire Army base off-planet.

  Hillson said, “Holdouts among the Awakened are two Settlers, one parent of a Settler girl still in coma, and Dr. Steffens.”

  That shocked him. “Toni Steffens?”

  “Yes, sir. She wants to stay here and continue her bird experiments. And to keep her wife here. The wife is in a coma.”

  Jason thought rapidly. He hated the only alternative he saw. Toni Steffens was so intelligent, so stubborn, so commanding that Jason would have hated to face her in battle. But she could not stay. “Have her straitjacketed by force, and then drugged. Get Holbrook to do it, on my orders, with whatever troops it takes. She gets put on the ship, along with Nicole.”

  “Yes, sir. Dr. Patel wants to stay here. She wants to go with the new Settlement your brother is planning.”

  A loss. But Jason had allowed the choice, Claire had not been in a v-coma, and Colin’s people would need a doctor.

  Hillson said, “Your father is going with the new Settlement, too.”

  Expected.

  Hillson coughed. “I haven’t talked to Dr. Ross.”

  “Dr. Ross has agreed to go with us.”

  Hillson nodded. “Yes, sir. About the Settler child in v-coma and her parents…”

  “They have to go. Put the kid aboard the ship under armed guard and the parents will board. The other two Settlers get the same treatment as Dr. Steffens.” Colin was going to have a fit. Jason didn’t like it, either; he was kidnapping two families. But he had no choice. “Do it as quietly as you can, Hillson. And as soon as you can.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good job, Hillson. Has the … Return … landed?”

  “Should I get the doctor? You’re—”

  “I’m … fine. The ship?”

  “She’s landed, sir. Supplies are being loaded. The deserters … sorry, sir, the evacuees are being given transport and supplies and weapons. They leave tomorrow.”

  “Good. Hillson … you didn’t name yourself.”

  Hillson straightened, which would have seemed impossible given that he was already straighter than a rifle barrel. His homely face looked even more wooden than usual. “I go with the United States Army, sir.”

  Cold slid down Jason’s spine. “Which army? Staying or going?”

  “You are my CO, sir. You are deploying this unit. I go where you send me.”

  “Thank you,” Jason said, and Hillson scowled at the breach of protocol, the gross violation of chain of command, as he had not outright scowled at any of the other fantastic and unprecedented things Jason had said so far.

  Lindy bustled in, took one look at Jason, and said to Hillson, “Out. Now.”

  Jason said, “I have people to—”

  “No, you don’t. Not yet. I shouldn’t have even allowed Hillson in. Bye, Sergeant.”

  Jason managed, “Dismissed.” Hillson would carry out all his orders. So would Elizabeth Duncan and the rest of his officers. But—

  “You can’t control everything,” Lindy said. “Isn’t it enough that you’re bringing off this insane plan?”

  “I need … a drug to stay awake.”

  “No,” Lindy said. “You need to sleep.”

  Against his will, he did.

  * * *

  When he woke again, it was the next day. Had Lindy given him something in his IV that made him sleep? He would have been furious with her if it would have done any good, but it wouldn’t. And Jason did feel stronger. Hillson reported that the convoys leaving the base were nearly ready to roll. “Convoys?” Jason said. “Plural?”

  “Yes, sir. Major Duncan authorized it. One is heading south, to join the convoy from Fort Hood. Mostly military and their families, with some base civilians. They have transport and weapons. The other convoy has Settlers, some military, and a lot of base civilians. Colin Jenner will found a new village of some kind. They’re heading up into the mountains, to someplace able to be defended, and Ma
jor Duncan equipped them with most of the supplies not put aboard the Return and most of the transport.”

  Colin had accepted military? And considering defense? “Are they equipped with weapons?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Well, well. The mountain finally recognizes the reality of avalanches.

  “Is the Return on schedule for departure?”

  “Ahead of schedule, sir. Major Duncan wants to see you. Also Mr. Jenner.”

  “The major first.”

  Elizabeth Duncan entered. Jason said, “Major?”

  “Operation is proceeding smoothly, sir. Both convoys to depart in a few hours. Prisoners are aboard the Return drugged and under guard: Private Porter, Dr. Steffens—”

  Jason said sharply, “Only Porter is a prisoner.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. All the Awakened except Dr. Jenner are aboard, and so are the v-coma patients, including the parents of the Settler child. They’re under guard, too, but not drugged. The Settlers fought the two families’ removal, sir, but no one was injured. Lieutenant Li has loaded the signal station equipment. Loading everything else proceeds. So does ship modification for time during the flight.”

  Jason didn’t ask what modifications she meant; it didn’t matter. If the trip to World was like the voyage of the Return here, they wouldn’t be in space very long.

  In space. He tasted the words; they felt metallic on his tongue. He’d barely had time to think about the voyage, or the planet that would now be home. Getting there had taken all his thoughts.

  “Anything else, Major?”

  “No, sir. We can proceed whenever you so order.”

  “Thank you, Major.”

  She left, and Colin stormed in. Out of his powerchair, he leaned on a cane. “Jason! You kidnapped four of my people! Including a child!”

  “Colin—”

  “I want them back!”

  “Col … I can’t.”

  “You mean you won’t!”

  “I mean I can’t. No one capable of transmitting the virophage can stay on Earth.”

  Colin took a step toward the bed. All at once Jason realized that if Colin bludgeoned him with his cane, Jason was helpless. Unarmed, alone, all he could do was scream. And who was still out there? Lindy, his grandmother …

  Colin said, more quietly, “I don’t do that, Jason. Stop thinking like a soldier.”

  “I am a soldier, Colin. That’s why I have to do this.”

  “Protecting your country by destroying it? Wasn’t that military tactic thoroughly disproved several wars ago?”

  “I’m not destroying it. I’m ensuring that New America doesn’t do so. They’ll consume themselves in fighting each other. Haters always do.”

  They stared at each other. Between them lay gulfs of perception, crossed only by the fragile bridges of kinship and history. Colin knew he could not stop Jason, who had all the power on his side. Jason knew that Colin might never forgive him.

  Jason said, “I’m told the ship can return to Terra. We’ll only be a short time in space. People can come back.”

  “And twenty-eight years will have passed here.”

  “Yes.” Colin would be the age their grandmother was now. Their father would be dead. Jason would be only a few years older. And probably the spaceship would not return to Earth anyway, unless there was a good reason.

  Colin said, “Good-bye, Jason.”

  “Good-bye, Col. I’m sorry.”

  After Colin stormed out and Lindy came in, Jason said, “Tell my father and grandmother to wait. I’ll see them in fifteen minutes.”

  He turned his face to the wall.

  CHAPTER 26

  Marianne never had gotten in to talk to Jason. He had been too occupied and too weak. “Later, please,” he’d said, and then she’d been taken up with her own good-byes to Claire, to Ryan, to Colin. After the last two, the son and grandson she might never see again, Marianne had gone straight to her berth on the Return and stayed there until liftoff. She had always hated for anyone to see her cry.

  Her shared quarters, thrown up hastily of plywood and metal and used mattresses, looked eerily familiar. As a small child, Marianne had been taken on an overnight train trip to visit relatives in Chicago. That compartment, like this, had had four berths with curtains in front of them and a single chair at the end. Here, however, there were no windows, not even a wall screen. If she wanted to see Earth left behind, she would have to go to the Commons.

  She didn’t want to see it. From the moment the Return had landed in California months ago, Terra had not felt like home. Cities destroyed, populations wiped out, wilderness returning … no. She had never been outside without an esuit. World would be as much home to her as Terra was now, except for the loss of Ryan and Colin.

  But she would have Jason. And on World, Noah and her granddaughter Lily. Although World would be God-knows-what after twenty-eight years of infection by the virophage.

  Marianne put her hand on the windowless alien wall. She pushed her grief away—and how many times in her life had she had to do just that?—and concentrated on what she’d gained. She and Farouk had combined their knowledge, his physics and her biology, into a theoretical structure with details so complex, and so beautiful, that she felt dizzy just bringing it to mind.

  She knew who had created this ship. Who had brought humans from Terra to World 140,000 years ago. Who the “super-aliens” were.

  She had always wondered about that initial transport of humans to World. An experiment, yes. But not a random lifting of a few thousand people who happened to roam the same geographical area. Any band of hunter-gatherers must have included a leader bellicose enough to stand off challengers, some aggressive hunters, other hunters willing to take subordinate positions, and some very yielding people at the bottom of the pecking order. Hierarchy was built into primate genes, and all carnivorous mammals had alpha and omega members of both genders.

  And yet—all, or at least most, of the humans brought to World shared a genomic profile strong on tendencies toward cooperation, mildness, aversion to risk.

  Somebody had chosen humans for those traits. Somebody had understood human genetics very, very well.

  She had told Colin that life on Earth had always been transformed by microbes, from the first prokaryotes on. Serial endosymbiosis had, along with survival of the fittest, been evolution’s earliest tool. The virophage was an unconscious entity in itself, no more sentient than an amoeba. But over the vast oceans of geologic time, different microbes had evolved to control their hosts in ways that aided their own survival. They used more complex animals as reproduction sites, as food, as a means of being carried from a site of exhausted resources to one with fresher resources.

  Earth had, before the Collapse, become a place with rapidly exhausting resources. Years ago, Jonah Stubbins had been building his spaceship for that very reason: to escape an Earth that in a few more generations would be unsustainable for human life. It was a matter of species survival.

  But which species—humans, or the microbes they carried? Or survival of an advanced species able to see ahead, to forecast what Terrans would do to their world and so seed another, as survival insurance for Homo sapiens? And if World had been seeded with humans, how many others as well?

  And by whom?

  Beings with enough intelligence to plan megamillennia ahead. Beings who perhaps began as raw material for a virophage that could—in its own interests—cause a second “Great Leap Forward” that made the first one, seventy thousand years ago, look like a not-very-bright child triumphant at piling just one block on another. Beings who understood human genetics very, very well. Beings who also understood that if microbes could evolve in ways that served their own survival, they could also be turned into tools to aid the survival of other races.

  Marianne had gone to Thomas Farouk because she didn’t have the math. Math was, always, the underlying key to everything that went on in the universe. For two hundred years, math had been blossoming, yield
ing a rich crop of theories usable and unusable: relativity, quantum mechanics, entanglement, multiverses, Gollancz equations. All of them, every one, had involved time. Time was basic to every process in the universe.

  Farouk, with his virophaged intelligence, had done more than find a way into the equations for dark matter and dark energy that would eventually enable humans to build more ships like the Return. He had found a way into the equations of time. A new way that showed yes, under certain circumstances, time could be manipulated to allow travel backward.

  Maybe.

  Unprovable experimentally, at least with the materials and technology known so far.

  But the equations were there.

  And someone had known what would happen to Earth—even though they had not foreseen the human-created RSA—because maybe planetary destruction was what happened to all over-populated and over-civilized planets. But not to World, which had been carefully seeded with carefully chosen humans who valued cooperation over competition.

  Who was that someone, symbiotic with the spore cloud and the virophage it produced?

  Unknowable.

  Unprovable.

  But possible, because Promethean science was possible.

  Marianne whispered, just to be able to say it aloud, “It was us.”

  Or not. The “super-aliens” might have been some other form of advanced sentience that had become one with the virophage, as living bodies always did merge. If not Homo sapiens, then another sentience that, like us, had started out simpler and had been changed to become more. Much more, because of microbes. As humans were on the way to becoming. The other species just got there first. If there was another species.

  She didn’t really believe there was. Not since Farouk, his face shining with disbelief and awe, had figured out the equations for time.

  “It was us,” Marianne said. “We are the super-aliens. Or will be.”

  Us. Them. Microbes.

  All one.

  CHAPTER 27

  Jason lay on the bridge of the Return, in a newly installed “captain’s bed”—Lindy’s term—that he hated and was prepared to leave as soon as possible. Lieutenant Allen was at the controls. Major Duncan was there, and Sergeant Hillson, and Branch Carter, newly awakened and hovering somewhere between fascination and outrage at everything he had missed while in v-coma. Everything that could be tested, had been.