Crucible

by Nancy Kress

  “I’ll get River Cloud. Alex, are you sure this alien can—”

  But Alex had already walked away, her back to him.

  River Cloud gestured at the old female Fur, and she limped after him. Karim watched until they both disappeared in the trees. River Cloud’s braves melted after him.

  They had found no cave to shelter in, even in this area rich in caves. But the Cheyenne braves had arranged one of their deadfall shelters for the hapless Greenies. Jon and Alex crawled into it. Night came, moonless but clear.

  Karim remained outside the deadfall. No fire, no powertorch to draw attention. But either they were far enough away from the Fur shuttle-fortress to escape Martin’s detection and attack or they weren’t. Karim fumbled in the darkness to find a thick, strong tree trunk. When he did, he climbed it, scraping himself bloody, until he was above most of the forest canopy and could see the starlit sky.

  How far had River Cloud and the alien gotten by now? Was River Cloud on his way back?

  Karim could see it clearly in his mind. River Cloud and the female Fur making their way through the forest, sworn enemies traveling together. Somewhere behind, the three other braves followed. Or maybe there were more than three by now; Karim didn’t know how Cheyenne summoned their own. Probably not by smoke signals, judging from the braves’ reaction to Jon’s earlier brainstorm.

  River Cloud would follow the track of Julian Martin’s truck, and then, when Martin had stopped the truck somewhere safe and sent a Terran guard on foot with the female Furs up the mountain, River Cloud would not follow. The Cheyenne would stay at least five miles away from wherever Martin stopped, out of detection range. But the old Fur would not.

  There, the Cheyenne would point. They’re that way. Your kin. And the alien, hopeful, would go toward Martin. His thermal-signature detectors would pick her up, and ignore her. Another wild Fur. Nothing to pay attention to. The Terran soldiers were in full battle gear, with major weaponry on the truck. Martin had armed the wild Furs mostly with laser guns, and this one was not even carrying that. No threat.

  Meanwhile, the Terran guard, probably one soldier, had forced the other four females up the mountain, toward the space-Fur shuttle. It, of course, might have more sophisticated equipment. But it would detect no electronic signals; Martin would have thought of that. The space Furs would detect four Furs trailed by a human, and then the human would leave. Prowling primitive humans warring with wild Furs, the invaders would think. They must have detected a lot of such Cheyenne-Fur interactions. They would ellminate the male primitives after they had finished with the more dangerous humans. Then the planet would be theirs.

  Karim shifted on his thick, high branch. A small moon rose above the horizon.

  Had River Cloud left the old Fur yet? Probably. The Cheyenne had started back toward Karim, traveling fast and low. Karim could see the grandmother Fur pushing on, hastening through the brush as fast as she could to where she thought her daughters were. Poor old horror. She limped faster.

  Now the four fertile females were alone. Were they tanglefoamed? It would keep them from wandering off. But tanglefoam would be too strong an indication of human intervention. No, they were free. So they started to flee back down the mountain. But they’ve been detected by the shuttle. Do the space Furs know their primitive cousins are female? Do they know that wild females don’t get left exposed and alone by their males? It would depend on how closely the space Furs had observed the habits of their potential sexual slaves.

  Karim’s own great-great-grandfather had kept an andarun of four wives and six concubines.

  A second moon rose against the stars. The first traveled quickly westward in its low orbit.

  He pictured the four bewildered aliens, starting back down the mountain. They don’t get far—or maybe they do. Maybe the wild Furs refuse the bait, or don’t detect it, in which case Martin would have to recapture the females and try again.

  Miles away, he visualized, the old alien does not see her daughters. They’re captive in that metal house, as she and they had been captive in the other metal house before the magic powder melted it. The magic powder that the human female gave her. These humans had hurt that human female, too. She had wanted their metal house to melt. And the old alien wants her daughters free.

  She unclenches her tentacles and tears open the spore sac, as Alex had shown her. She dumps it over herself.

  Tiny dark spores cling, invisible, without reflected light, to her pelt. More are blown toward Martin’s truck. River Cloud has carefully left the alien upwind of the Terran camp.

  And now the Fur shuttle lifts from its hidden location. Once before Karim had seen it pass over the river, a silent black shape against the stars. A hole in the sky. It follows the fleeing females easily, and sets down beside them. Furs emerge, completely suited, cousins of the terrified females from light-years and millennia of advancement away. The soldiers do … what? Stun the females from a distance? Throw up one of their invisible electronic walls to stop them? Are they making the Fur equivalent of superior laughter?

  Whatever they do, the old Fur has not done her part first. Please Allah, she has not yet opened the spore sac. Because first Julian Martin must give the order to the Crucible, and that ship must swoop down as fast as it can toward the Fur shuttle, now that Martin knows where it is. Martin must have his metal equipment intact long enough to give that order, but no longer. Karim and Alex had to trust River Cloud to estimate the timing of everybody and release the old female

  Fur at the right time. Release her, deceive her, direct her to Martin instead of her lost children.

  Please Allah, let Alex have guessed right about Martin’s plans … Karim found he was praying.

  A light streaked across the sky. One quick flash, like a meteor, and then the entire sky exploded into light. Karim’s tree shook and he hung on for life itself. A noise that deafened him, and then an echo of the noise, and an echo of the echo.

  Cries below him. Someone switched a powertorch on heedless full beam, and Karim glimpsed Jon far below, tiny as an insect. Not Alex. He waited. Nothing.

  Then they had figured wrong! The Furs hadn’t—

  A second flash of light, higher, soundless.

  Karim closed his eyes. It had happened. Alex had guessed right The Crucible, on Martin’s orders, had hit the Fur shuttle with an alpha beam, taking out half the mountain. Then the Fur mother ship, able to accelerate almost instantly to more than a hundred gees, had come roaring down and destroyed the sacrificial decoy in orbit.

  All Julian Martin had left were his troops on the ground.

  All the space Furs had left were the aliens in orbit

  The old Fur hunting for her children, still walking but already dead, was going to take care of both menaces, and never know it.

  Karim began to climb painfully down the tree. Eventually River Cloud would return with his braves. Alex had still not appeared. She was still lying in the deadfall shelter, or had stumbled off somewhere into the forest to be alone. Karim would have to deal with her soon.

  But not yet. That was more pain than he could face just yet.

  45

  T H E A V E R Y M O U N T A I N S

  Alex couldn’t sleep. She had waited in a small clearing in the forest, sitting on the ground, arms clasped around her knees. The huge flash lit up the sky and shook the ground, followed by the lesser flash. When she knew the Fur shuttle and the Crucible were both gone, a strange calm descended over her, an unexpected and eerie caesura.

  It felt almost as if she were separated from her body. Her body made its way back to Jon and Karim, spoke to them, arranged a watch rotation with herself taking the first shift. Her body switched off Jon’s powertorch and instead built a small fire, to keep off night chill and scare away predators. Her body noticed Karim’s relief that she was functioning properly, as well as Jon’s clumsy attempts to restrain his triumph from some misguided motive of sparing her.

  And yet all the while, Alex was someone other
than her body, some detached entity observing herself from the outside. It wasn’t a painful schism, just a peculiar one. And she couldn’t sleep. It felt as if she might never sleep again.

  Jon, rubbing his eyes, relieved her watch after a few hours. Alex lay down by the fire and the snoring Karim, and stared up at the stars. She was awake when one of River Cloud’s braves, the redhead, returned.

  “What happened?” she said calmly. “Where’s River Cloud?”

  The brave sat in the firelight, looking no different from when he’d left. No blood on him, scarcely any dirt. For the first time, however, she saw one of the Cheyenne look tired.

  He said succinctly, “The animal released the spores. Everything metal dissolved. We killed the enemy whites easily. Julian Martin was not there, and River Cloud has gone to find him.” The brave stretched out and fell instantly asleep beside Karim.

  Not there. Julian Martin was not there. Gone to find him.

  Jon said, “It worked! Martin couldn’t have known we were coming or anything about the spores … it’s just bad luck that he himself was gone before the Cheyenne got there. Do you think he went to find Jake Holman?”

  Alex watched herself say evenly, “He wouldn’t know where to look. I couldn’t tell him where Jake and the others went because I didn’t know until you told me. It’s a big continent. I doubt Julian went to search blindly for Jake, and Jake’s too smart to have put out an electronic signal.”

  “Then we don’t know where Martin went.”

  “My best guess is back to his shuttle-bunker. He doesn’t know it was destroyed.” Or that Alex was no longer in it. Had he gone back to do something more to her?

  “Yes,” Jon said. “Well, the Cheyenne will find him. I’m convinced they can find anything.”

  Alex gazed at the sleeping brave. She couldn’t remember his name, if she’d ever known it. She reached out to shake him awake.

  He sat up before her hand even touched him, knife in hand. Alex stayed very still, awed by his reflexes and unwilling to test them further. The brave said, “What?”

  “What’s your name?”

  He stared at her coldly, but he answered. “Gray Bird.”

  Some instinct told her not to issue a direct order. “Gray Bird, I think Julian Martin may have gone back to the shuttle-bunker where he held me captive.”

  “That is where River Cloud seeks him.”

  “And I want to ask you something. What happened to the old female wild Fur with the spores?”

  Something shifted behind his eyes, which, she now noticed, were a pale watery blue in the flickering firelight. “That animal is dead.”

  “Did you kill her? Any of you Cheyenne?”

  “No. One of the Terrans shot her before their weapons dissolved.”

  “So she didn’t even know her daughters weren’t there.”

  He studied her. “She knew.”

  Alex didn’t ask why he thought that. She said, because she couldn’t help herself, “We betrayed her. I betrayed her. She thought I was helping her but I didn’t keep the bargain. I used her. Used all five of them and they’re dead.”

  “Yes,” Gray Bird said, “we know. That is what white men do.”

  Anger flooded Alex. You’re as white as I am! She wanted to yell to this blueeyed redheaded fake. My history is your history, you cannot shed it just because you call yourself Cheyenne and embrace some antiquated tribal life, that will not restore your innocence or spare you history—

  It was Julian who had insisted you cannot evade history. Or remain innocent and still survive.

  She made no answer to the brave. Instead she let Jon carry out his watch duty and lay down on the opposite side of the fire.

  She did not sleep.

  Morning dawned spectacularly red, and the haze continued even after sunrise. “Dust from the alpha-beam attack,” Jon said. “We’ll probably see atmospheric effects for a long time.”

  Gray Bird moved their camp to the edge of the kill-clean zone. Alex didn’t question him. She trudged behind the brave for hours until they were clear of the forest, and then she stood and blinked.

  To her left was a mountain-sized pile of rubble, hazy with dust. The air tasted gritty here, out of the filter of trees. Alex’s eyes watered. The Crucible’s alpha beam had shattered acres and acres, starting avalanches of rock and reducing wooded slopes to slag and flinders.

  By comparison, the Furs’ annihilation beam was clean and orderly. Where the terrible rubble stopped, the sterile plain began, empty and denuded. But not, Alex saw, completely so. The purple groundcover was starting to grow again in stubbly patches. She even saw the first shoots of what would be a deadly red creeper.

  Something moved on the horizon.

  Alex glanced at Gray Bird, but he didn’t seem alarmed. He set about building a fire. As the thing on the horizon came closer, Alex saw that it was a herd of some sort. In the kill-clean zone? What were the animals eating? Squinting, she realized that it wasn’t a herd at all; it was a parade.

  Then she was running to meet them.

  Three of the big herd animals the Cheyenne called “elephants,” although Jake had told her they bore no relation to the Terran mammals of that name. Greenie elephants were placid, stupid herbivores domesticated by the first generation of Cheyenne. They smelled awful; that was their defense against predators. The Cheyenne prided themselves on tolerating the odor.

  Two of the lumbering beasts had their armored backs loaded with gear. The third, led by two Cheyenne women, dragged a travois made of branches lashed together on which lay Jake Holman, cushioned with blankets.

  “Jake!” Alex cried. “Natalie! Ben!”

  They were all there, looking thin, weary, and filthy. Kent, Kueilan, Lucy. Two braves walked silently beside the caravan, which seemed to be made up mostly of women and children. Gray Bird greeted the braves and the three conferred apart from the others.

  Alex fell on her knees beside Jake. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” he quavered. “You?”

  “I—” She couldn’t go on.

  “The Cheyenne told us. Everything. It’s over, Alex.”

  “Not quite.”

  “No,” he agreed, and went into a coughing fit.

  The grit in the air. Alex gave orders to have his travois drawn under the trees, where the leaves would filter some of the dust. It turned out the elephants wouldn’t go under trees, so the travois was unhooked and Kent and Jon pulled it. Ben still had a bloody bandage on his head and seemed edgy and nervous. Natalie hung beside him, loving and tactful. Kueilan asked about fires.

  “Build cooking fires in the kill-clean zone, apart from the trees; we’ll make a smaller one in here at night for Jake. What do you have to cook?”

  “Some things the Cheyenne women gave us, plus a glenning a brave just shot on the way here,” Kueilan said. “They’ve been good about sharing their food. Alex … do you want a … a less skimpy blanket to wear?”

  For the first time in days Alex became aware of how she must look. She still wore the “wrap” she had made from the blanket in her prison cell, plus a pair of boots taken from a dead Terran soldier. She had not bathed in … how long? She couldn’t remember. Kueilan must have washed in the river; the girl looked clean, her long black hair in a neat plait, and her Threadmores were as whole and durable as ever.

  “I’m fine,” Alex said, idiotically.

  “You look like you should sleep.”

  “Don’t fuss over me, Kueilan. Fuss over Karim.”

  “Lucy’s doing that,” Kueilan said neutrally.

  Alex busied herself with food, fires, security, knowing all the while that none of it was necessary. Kueilan was better at creating comfort than she was, and the Cheyenne better at security. Alex went to sit by Jake, but he was asleep. The old man looked frail and papery, as if he could blow away on the freshening wind.

  The wind was freshening.

  The first metal dissolved in midafternoon, just before the rain started. It
was Ben’s laser gun. Ben sat, with Natalie close by, on a fallen log at the edge of the tree line, chewing on a hard piece of something the Cheyenne called pemmican, a revolting mixture of dried meat, fat, and wild berries. His laser gun lay beside him. Alex happened to be watching when the metal started to ooze, then dissolved to nothing.

  “Hey!” Ben cried, even though he had been told what might be coming.

  “It’s starting, Karim,” Lucy said.

  “Yes. Greentrees will be … different.”

  Which was an understatement if Alex ever heard one.

  The spores were self-replicating, Jon had decided, flourishing whenever they had food, going dormant when they did not. “Food” included most metals, including natural metallic ores. The Vines had not known what metals their enemies the Furs could create, and so the Vines had shielded their planet with a spore cloud of voracious, catholic tastes.

  The “cloud” on Greentrees would grow slowly but inexorably. Blown by the wind, feeding where it could, it waited to attack any technology based on metal. Laser guns, cooking pots, starships, spoons, computers, solar arrays, hair clips, batteries, comlinks, rovers, rings, manufactury looms, nails, mining equipment— everything Alex had allocated and hoarded and funded and counted and tracked as tray-o was shortly going to pass out of existence.

  Greentrees could not loft the spores into space. She lacked a space elevator, a shuttle, even missiles. But the Fur ship still in orbit could not send anything down. The minute a shuttle approached the planet, it would begin to dissolve.

  Nor, after the spores had had time for sufficient replication (how much time?), could the Fur ship itself risk assuming a low enough orbit to fire its kill-clean beam.

  It probably wouldn’t take the Furs upstairs long to learn that. Their ship, with whatever uninfected Furs were still aboard, would leave orbit. They would have to find another planet to colonize, if they could. Their home planet and who knew how many colony worlds had been infected by the Vines’ diabolical viral weapon, and now Greentrees was infected in a different way. The war here was over. The Furs had lost.

  But Alex wasn’t sure exactly who had won.