Crucible

by Nancy Kress

  “The Crucible will reach Greentrees’orbit tomorrow and will be met by the Mira City shuttle,” MiraNet announced. Alex wondered what views of the ship the Net was displaying. As tray-o she could have assigned herself a computer but had not; she was not corrupt enough to waste one in a private home when there were so few left. “This is the latest from Julian Cabot Martin:

  “ ’We are very eager to meet you,’ ” came the deep, formal voice now recognizable to everyone on Greentrees. ” ’It has been a long, dull voyage. All of us are now awake and looking forward to stepping onto solid ground.’ ”

  Jake said fretfully, “He never actually says anything, have you noticed that? All PR.”

  Alex didn’t know what “PR” was, and didn’t ask. “He just said they’re all awake. That’s new information, Jake.”

  “Now that cat’s lying on your table, Alex,” Siddalee said. “It’s just not sanitay.”

  Alex shooed away Katous, who gave her a baleful look before stalking into a corner and lying on Alex’s jacket, which she’d flung there the last time it rained.

  “Mira Corp Consolidated Mining,” continued MiraNet, “announced today another mining start north of the Avery Mountains, where naturally occurring tunnels and underground aquifers make it relatively easy to—”

  Siddalee reached out and closed the link.

  “Alex—” Jake began, but Alex immediately cut him off. “Put the link back on, Siddalee.”

  “Alex, you don’t have to listen to any—”

  “I said put it on!”

  Siddalee reopened the comlink. Alex glowered; she hated the way people still, after all this time, assumed that any mention of anything connected with mining distressed her. How did they think she did her job as tray-o?

  She wasn’t distressed. What she chiefly felt now was guilt that she was not distressed. Kamal’s death in that mining accident had been so long ago, and their marriage had been so troubled by—

  “Alex!” Siddalee exclaimed, and she realized that the news item about the mining start had been interrupted.

  “—just posted! Someone has burned a field camp twenty miles downriver, destroying the inflatables used by a Mira City research team as well as the riverside holding pens in which the team was breeding local fish and water animals. The team, which consists of three scientists and two apprentices, was away from camp at the time of the attack. No one was hurt. Juliana Levine, in charge of the effort, reports that in the rubble someone left a metal rod twisted into the shape of the ancient Chinese character for ’hope.’ This artifact has been identified with the dissident village Hope of Heaven, which—”

  “Oh, Lord help us,” Siddalee said. “Them again!”

  “Siddalee, comlink Lau-Wah and Ashraf and tell them I’ll be at the Mausoleum in ten minutes.”

  “Alex, don’t go running off like this! You don’t even know where Lau-Wah and the mayor are!”

  The comlink shrilled on override. “Alex,” said Lau-Wah’s calm voice, “I’m with Guy, on my way to the research camp. Ashraf has agreed to put me in charge of this problem. I’ll be back by the time the shuttle returns to Greentrees tomorrow.”

  “Lau-Wah—”

  “Thank you, Alex.” The link went dead.

  Alex stared at it. She had been effectively cut out of the action. Whatever it was.

  Siddalee said, chewing her lip, “You have enough to do already, you know.”

  “So does Lau-Wah!”

  “They’re his people.”

  “That’s just the wrong thinking, Siddalee! We’re all our people! Everyone on Greentrees is people!” Alex said, aware that she sounded both overwrought and obscure. Damn it to hell! “Jake—”

  But there was no help from Jake. He had fallen asleep, snoring gently in his chair, the gray cat on his lap.

  The Mira City Welcoming Committee assembled at the shuttleport just after dawn. “Shuttleport,” thought Alex, was a misnomer. Used only by scientists and the rotating skeleton crew of the orbiting Beta Vine, the shuttle usually rested under a huge inflatable, which had been moved every few years as the city expanded. When needed, it was rolled out of the inflatable, checked carefully, and flown upstairs. Space travel for its own sake held little glamour for her generation of Greenies; the planet itself was still too full of exciting unknowns.

  This time, however, a small crowd had gathered to watch the launch. Alex counted one robocam plus three people with handheld recorders; MiraNet would have a lot of amateur postings. A few people carried flowers, which they presented shyly to Mayor Shanti.

  “Here, the Earthmen might like these.”

  “Give them an advance taste of how beautiful Greentrees is.”

  “Thank you,” Ashraf said, helplessly accepting the bouquets, one of which was not tied together and trailed stray blossoms as he climbed aboard the shuttle. “Here, Alex … take some of these!”

  “Not me,” Alex said. “They’re your problem. I want to be able to shake hands.” She grinned at him wickedly.

  Guy Davenport stuck his head into the shuttle. “You all ready?”

  “Yes,” Alex said. “Let the recorders hum and the music soar.”

  He slammed the door, frowning. Stuffy prig.

  An irrational exuberance had seized Alex. She was going upstairs to greet aliens. Forget the Furs and the even more mythical Vines—these Terrans were alien enough for her. They came from a different planet, a different culture, a different time, even … the Crucible had left Earth nearly fifty years ago. There would be so much to learn, to marvel at. So many interesting unknowns! Yet, at the same time, the arriving aliens professed friendship, spoke English, and were too greatly outnumbered by her own people to be threatening. It seemed the ideal situation. As Alex strapped herself in, she hummed under her breath.

  They were seven aboard the shuttle: Alex, Ashraf, the pilot, two security people, the president of the Mira City Council, and the head of the Scientists’ League, who was actually a geologist but refused to give up this opportunity to any of the physicists desperate to examine the Terran ship. Alex gathered that this had caused a tempest in a test tube, but she didn’t know the details.

  “Ashraf,” she said in a low voice just before takeoff, “did you hear from Lau-Wah? I didn’t.”

  “No.” Ashraf lay back in his seat with his eyes closed and anticipatory dread on his face. He had a weak stomach.

  “Here we go!” Alex squealed.

  “You sound like a ten-year-old.”

  “That’s the first remotely sour thing I’ve ever heard you say. Welcome to the work crew.”

  Ashraf didn’t answer, and the shuttle took off from Greentrees.

  As they approached the Crucible, Alex craned her neck to get the best view. The council president, Michael Lomax, turned in his seat to smile at her. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

  Kate Areola, the geologist, said, “It’s impossible to get a sense of the ship’s size until we’re closer. No scale out here.”

  Alex nodded. A voice came over the link. “Welcome, Mira City delegation, to the Crucible. Docking instructions follow.”

  The shuttle slid into the ship’s bay. Alex still had no sense of its size. As the bay pressurized, she peered through the shuttle window. No other craft present— surely the Crucible had its own shuttle? Maybe both craft wouldn’t fit. They must have moved it somehow, perhaps taken it outside and attached it to the hull.

  “Fully pressurized,” said the link voice, and the senior security officer opened the shuttle door. By the time Alex disembarked, the Terran delegation had come through a far door and stood waiting.

  She should have dressed better. They all should have dressed better. No one had really thought about it, as nobody in her generation really did; it was only the young who paid attention to dress. Alex, Ashraf, and Kate Areola wore the usual bits of bright cloth tied over skinthins; Alex’s was her customary modest and nonhampering short sarong, this one patterned green and yellow. Ashraf’s knots were knobby,
inexpert bumps. Michael Lomax, who was portly, wore a coverall, as did the security team and the pilot. We look, she thought, like a bunch of weeds invading a manicured garden.

  The Terrans looked dazzling. And how beautiful they were! All five, three men and two women, were well over six feet tall, well muscled, with clear pale brown skins and large, strangely brilliant eyes. Genemod. Had to be, all of them. They wore matching “uniforms”—Alex had learned the word from her history software as a reluctant schoolgirl. The uniforms were tight black pants and long tunics sashed in gold and trimmed at the shoulders with some wide gold decorations that looked both useless and intimidating. All five had hair cropped into short perfect curls of various colors. The curls gleamed like glass.

  One man stepped forward. Black hair, startlingly green eyes, glittering as a cat’s. Unerringly he picked out Ashraf Shanti, who stood gaping with the rest of the Greenies, and made a strange, graceful, embarrassing motion that only after a moment did Alex register as a “bow.”

  “Welcome aboard,” said that already famous deep voice. “We are very glad to become guests on your planet. I am General Julian Cabot Martin of Third Life Alliance, commander of the Crucible.”

  He straightened, his eyes sweeping over them, missing nothing. Ashraf nodded vigorously. “Welcome to Greentrees.” He went on nodding, evidently uncertain what should come next.

  Alex stepped forward and took the bouquet of flowers from Ashraf’s slack grip. She held them out to Julian Cabot Martin.

  “These are from Mira City,” she said shyly. “A small token of what awaits you downstairs. We’re glad you’ve come.”

  “As are we,” Julian Martin said, and, for the first time, he smiled.

  5

  THE VINE SHIP

  The Vines from the colony planet below needed no help in attaching their ship to the Franz Mueller; the designs were identical. Karim and Lucy waited on the far side of the short air lock/corridor that connected the two ships. Karim plucked pointlessly at his s-suit and ran his finger around the seal of his helmet. “Maybe they’ll bring a translator egg,” Lucy said. “They undoubtedly think we’re Furs, so they might. If they don’t just fumigate us first,” Karim said. They were both counting on that not happening, however. The Vines were pacifists.

  No—the Vines they’d already encountered had been pacifists. Thirty-nine years ago.

  “As long as they don’t fumigate the shuttle, too,” Lucy said, and there was that bravery again. Lucy’s best quality. Karim took her hand.

  The air lock opened and three domed carts rolled into the Franz Mueller and stopped dead.

  Karim was surprised at their boldness until he saw the curved baton mounted on the front of the lead cart. Identical to the one he and Lucy used with their captives, it erected a force-field wall (what force? He would love to know!) The Vines were protected from the Furs they had presumably expected to find on a Fur ship. Instead, they found two humans.

  Very slowly, Karim turned his empty hands palm upward and sat down on the deck. Lucy followed. The Vines, of course, displayed no reaction.

  At first glance they looked like plants, although closer scrutiny showed they were not. Each had a “trunk” covered with soft, overlapping, reddish brown scales; “branches” that might have been arms or tentacles, adorned with flat “leaves”; and, in the bottom of the cart, a thick mass of intelligent biofilm. Maybe the biofilm was intelligent; maybe it was merely directed by some organ elsewhere. A Vine, biologist George Fox had said on Greentrees, was neither plant nor animal nor bacteria, but some non-DNA amalgamation of analogues of all three. They had carried species integration far beyond any Terran adaptation. It may have even, George had said, been their major evolutionary mechanism.

  The Vines breathed a different atmosphere, which they renewed under the hard clear domes of their traveling carts. They did everything very slowly. Karim composed himself to wait. He was still holding Lucy’s hand; the slim fingers trembled in his.

  “We are human,” Karim said, each word distinct. He pointed to himself, then Lucy. “We are human.”

  And there, thank Allah, it was: a translator egg attached to the third cart, which rolled toward him. It stopped several feet away, which was presumably the perimeter of the invisible wall. The egg would have stored on it only Fur, of course, not English. Karim’s job now was to supply as much clear, simple English as the device, captured from the Furs, needed to learn the language. But that wasn’t his first job.

  Slowly he held up the drawing he had prepared. The Vines that humans had encountered before seemed not to talk but to communicate by chemical exchange. Yet they had apparently been able to observe and hear other creatures. “A possible evolutionary advantage,” George had argued. “As they evolved, there must have been predators on their planet. They might have developed additional ways of detecting them besides what we would call smell. After all, they and not the predators emerged as the dominant life form.”

  So the Vines could see Karim’s drawing. He held it up. It showed their two ships docked together, along with the shuttle a short distance away. He had filled the shuttle with tiny Furs. Then had come the difficult part: how to convey that the Furs were a diseased Trojan horse to infect their own kind? Karim hadn’t had too much time to think about the problem. Finally he’d setttled for a separate drawing of tiny Vines on the side of the screen, sending a stream of tiny dots into the Furs. Beside one dot he’d drawn a crude double helix. Furs, like humans but unlike Vines, were DNA-based, part of the same panspermic fertilization of this part of the galaxy when it had been young.

  Would these alien beings read all that from a drawing by a creature they had never seen before?

  They didn’t react. Karim held up his screen until his arms ached, and then he laid it down in front of the immobile carts with their immobile inhabitants. Were they discussing it? George had speculated that they could communicate across alien atmospheres by shooting created, nonliving molecules to each other, but this had never been proved before the Furs killed all the Vines on Greentrees.

  “We have to keep talking,” Lucy said, “or they’ll never get English. I am Lucy. He is Karim. We are humans. We come from a planet called Greentrees. Your people did come to Greentrees. We did see your people. This helmet is from your people. Our people are humans. I am Lucy…”

  It went on for hours, until they were both hoarse. Over and over Karim pointed to the drawing of the tiny Furs in the tiny shuttle. “Do not go here. Your enemy is here. Your people did make these enemies dangerous to your enemies. Your people did want these enemies to go to your enemies. Your people”—over and over he pointed to his drawing of tiny Vines—“we did see your people.”

  “They have to realize from the drawing that we’ve seen Vines before!” Lucy said desperately, hoarsely.

  “Your people here. Enemies of your people here. We are humans. I am Karim. She is Lucy. Hello, hello…”

  He didn’t know his throat could feel so sore.

  Lucy sagged against him from weariness. “Karim, it’s not working. And who knows how long before the Furs show up, with all of us still in weapon range!”

  “Your people did want these enemies to go to your enemies… Hello… hello.

  “Hello,” said the uninflected mechanical voice of the stolen Fur translator. “Hello, Lucy and Karim.”

  Action replaced the long hours of desperate monologue. “You come,” the Vines said, and rolled out of the Franz Mueller back into their own ship. Lucy and Karim looked at each other.

  “Why don’t they leave us here? On our own ship, even if it’s disabled?” Lucy said in a raspy whisper. Karim shook his head. If the Vines did that, everything he arid Lucy had risked would count for nothing.

  He was surprised by how much he minded that. He was prepared to die, if necessary, but not to die for nothing.

  Lucy seemed to realize the answer to her own question almost us soon as she asked it. She stumbled to her feet and followed Karim across the joined
air locks into the Vine ship.

  They found themselves in a small, completely bare room. The door closed behind them and another one opened. All three Vines disappeared through it and Lucy and Karim were left alone.

  “A holding pen,” Karim guessed. “They thought they’d find Furs aboard our ship… At least there’s a window. Or something. It might be a screen.”

  “Hell, it might be a VR parlor,” Lucy groused. “Not that we have much choice of—oh my God! Karim, look!”

  The Vine ship began to move away from the Franz Mueller.

  He knew this from the bowing of the floor, but even more from the visuals on the window/screen. The distance between the two ships widened. Then a glittery beam shot toward the Franz Mueller, enveloping it in a thick golden cloud.

  Lucy gasped, “It’s… dissolving?”

  It took only five minutes. The cloud of microorganisms ate through the ship like acid on paper. Another five minutes and the cloud itself had vanished.

  “Terminator genes,” Karim said. “Or rapid sporization. Or .. He trailed off.

  “They’re taking us downstairs,” Lucy said. “We’re going into th cloud. This ship must be treated somehow to avoid being dissolved.”

  Karim hardly heard her. He couldn’t seem to take in what had just happened. The technology, based on a terrifying mastery of biology, was too alien. More: the philosophy behind the actions was too alien. He couldn’t even begin to guess what would happen next to him and Lucy, shipless.

  But just as alien was his own reaction. Karim had been brought up by a father who prided himself on throwing off the bonds of old, superstitious, confining folkways. Ahmed Mahjoub had been an engineer, a citizen of the UAR willing to become a citizen of the stars, a scoffer at anything “primitive,” including religion. He had brought up his sons to think the same way. Yet now, watching the Vine planet in its huge glittering shield of deadly microorganisms, it was not of his father that Karim thought but his grandfather, that fierce pious old man kneeling toward Mecca on the tattered, faded prayer rug he kept to warn himself against pride. Prayer had seemed to bring his grandfather courage and serenity in an in creasingly dangerous world.