by Nancy Kress
“Transport?” Owen’s voice said.
“Bicycles.” That was a new one on Leo: enemy on bikes. After a moment he added, “Bicycles now abandoned. Group heading toward me.”
Owen said swiftly, “Brodie, motion them to halt until I arrive, and cover me. Kandiss, with me until the natives are visible and then hold position at the base of the hill. Berman, stay with the civilians.”
Brodie raised one arm and yelled, “Halt!” The people below him halted. Brodie sighted. Whenever Owen appeared, if any of the five Kindred raised anything like a weapon, Leo would take him out.
But—
Where would they carry weapons? The five people all wore dresses, even the men, pieces of pale cloth twisted around their bodies. Sandals on their feet, and carrying nothing. But again, this was an advanced civ and who knew what weird shit they had for weapons. Three men, two women. All tall, with coppery skin and black hair and huge dark eyes—too huge, like those sappy paintings of big-eyed kittens and dogs. Then one of them turned his head and through his scope Leo saw that the man’s eyes were not dark but light gray flecked with gold.
The man called up the hill, “I am Noah Jenner. Please lower whatever weapon you have, we are no threat. I’m here to welcome you to World.”
So this was Dr. Jenner’s son. He looked just like the Kindred, except for the eye color. Owen came around the base of the hill with Kandiss. Kandiss took a position behind a boulder as Owen went forward. Both had drawn their Berettas.
The hill was small and Leo had exceptional hearing; he missed nothing. “I am Lieutenant Owen Lamont, United States Army, in charge of this expedition. Are you here in an official capacity, Mr. Jenner?”
“Yes. Well, as official as possible.” He raised one hand, put it on his cheek, and pulled downward on the skin on his face—some sort of tension tic. Leo had seen his mother do the same thing.
Owen said, “If your delegation carries any weapons, place them on the ground now.”
“We have no weapons,” Jenner said. “Lieutenant, we want to talk to you. Did your … your military destroy our cities this morning?”
Pretty direct. Leo heard the strain and grief in Jenner’s voice. Those were dangerous emotions. He kept his rifle trained on Jenner.
“No,” Owen said. “A Russian ship fired on the planet, destroyed our ship, and then fired on our landing shuttle.”
Jenner turned and spoke to the other four people, presumably translating. Their faces crumpled, looking suddenly much more human. Jenner turned back to Owen. “Why would a Russian ship do that?”
Jenner knew nothing—how could he? The Kindred ship, with him on it, had left Earth ten years ago. Before the spore plague hit, before whole economies collapsed across the globe, before Russians died in greater number than anybody else, before the vaccine was found.
Owen said, “Revenge.”
“For what? All we did—”
We. Jenner considered himself Kindred, not Terran. Leo filed away this piece of intel.
“—was ask your help with finding a vaccine!”
“Some people didn’t see it that way,” Owen said. “Look, Mr. Jenner, I can fill you in on Terran history later. Right now, we have a problem, and so do you. Your planet is under attack, and our transport has been destroyed, both by the Stremlenie. We have the same enemy.”
Jenner gazed at Owen, and Leo couldn’t read the expression in those Terran-gray, alien-large eyes. Finally Jenner said, “Put away your weapons, Lieutenant. We won’t harm you. But I don’t think you realize that—”
“Noah!”
Leo turned his head the slightest fraction. Dr. Jenner was slipping and sliding over rubble on the rough terrain, Berman behind her. Ordinarily Zoe could have restrained Marianne Jenner with one hand, but Zoe had had surgery only two days ago. Behind both of them came Dr. Bourgiba, calling, “Ranger Berman! Don’t—” Kandiss, behind his boulder, looked like he didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do. It was a zoo.
Owen said tightly, “Squad, stand down. Mr. Jenner, let’s talk.”
* * *
Salah sat quietly, listening as Noah Jenner deconstructed the universe.
Jenner sat cross-legged on the ground beneath the overhang. A short distance away, Zoe Berman “guarded” the other four Kindred, who sat in a huddle, not understanding the English being spoken but looking, Salah thought, more saddened than alarmed. One, an old woman, seemed to be the leader, but she hadn’t asked Noah or Salah to translate for her. She merely waited, the coppery skin of her face set in the deep crevasses of age and grief. Her waiting, however, had not an air of resignation as much as of patience, with the trust that in good time she would be informed of everything she needed to make whatever decisions were necessary. Meanwhile, she grieved silently.
Mason Kandiss and Leo Brodie were “securing the area,” whatever that meant under these circumstances. The rest of the Terrans listened to Lamont question Jenner.
“It wasn’t just the city you saw destroyed,” he said, and the grief of his expression echoed the old woman’s. “It was three of our four cities.” He named them, a litany of trills and clicks among syllables heavy with pain. “But we think the Russian ship has gone back to Terra.”
“How do you know?” Lamont demanded. He, alone, remained standing, looming over the others, his weapons glaring to Salah even in the dim and orangey light. The day was heating up, even in the shade of the overhang.
“We don’t, for sure. It could be on the other side of the planet. But—”
“Why can’t you detect it with satellites or probes or your own ships? We could, with the Friendship.” Lamont’s voice was controlled but relentless, each word coming out like a small bullet.
“Ship. Singular. It was also destroyed in the attack. It sat in Kam^tel^ha.”
This time Salah caught the name of the city: Beautiful-by-the-Sea.
“Your fleet consisted of only one ship?”
“There were two. The other, as at least some of you know”—he nodded at his mother, who sat beside him with her hand on his arm—“is contaminated with spores at the colony it was supplying.”
“And you only built two?” Lamont was not even trying to hide his skepticism.
“Yes. Two. We had no need of more than two.”
“A navy of—”
“It was not a navy,” Lamont said. “Or an air force. Or space satellites. We have no military, Lieutenant.”
“Uh-huh. So you’re saying you have no starships left to get us home.”
“That is what I’m saying.”
Branch Carter suddenly shifted his weight on the ground, and Jenner gazed at him briefly before turning to his mother. Jenner’s voice went reedy with strain. “I know you all thought that World must have an advanced technology. I thought so too, once. But I’m here to tell you that we do not. Our two star drives, plus plans to build the ships, were left for us, presumably by whatever race took humans from Earth to World 140,000 years ago. The plans were partly pictorial, partly mathematics, partly in symbols with a pictorial key or something like that—I don’t pretend to understand it. But there were texts, all engraved on some metal that did not decay—the same plans that Mee^hao¡ and his expedition left you on Terra ten years ago. And World understood them even less than you did. But we’d been left parts, too, in sealed containers that required a civilization far enough advanced to open. Including two star drives. It was sort of like.… like fitting together Legos. Or so I’ve been told. I wasn’t here then.”
Lamont said, “So you can’t build another ship.”
“We wouldn’t even if we could,” Jenner said. “We only assembled the last one because the spore cloud was—”
Claire Patel blurted out, “Why wouldn’t you build another one? If you could?”
“Building one was a tremendous drain on our resources, and a tremendous violation to Mother World.”
Claire looked confused, but Salah understood. They were now on religious grounds, or someth
ing close to religion.
“Violation?” Branch said.
“Mining substances, dangerous processing of them, radioactive waste—I’m not sure of the details. I’m not a scientist. But I know that the two ships were built only because of the spore cloud.”
“And when you left us on Earth information about the ships, you just left out that tiny little piece about jumping ahead fourteen years during the trip here.”
“We didn’t know,” Jenner said. “It was a shock to us to arrive here twenty-eight years after the Embassy left World. We thought we had twenty-four years before the spore cloud hit. We didn’t.”
Salah was doing rapid math in his head. But then, if the Embassy jumped fourteen years before it reached Earth and another fourteen returning here, and the cloud had been due in twenty-five years—
Jenner said, “Our calculations were wrong. We don’t have your accuracy with astronomical measurements. But we know now that the cloud will come soon.”
Salah said, “Our astrophysicist says—said—seventy-one days from now.”
Jenner bowed his head.
Marianne Jenner spoke for the first time. “You couldn’t accurately calculate the cloud’s arrival. You don’t have the physics to understand the ships you built. And you didn’t have the biology, the genetics, to research and combat R. sporii yourself. So you came to Earth with hopes that we knew more.”
“Yes,” Jenner said.
Lamont said, “But you’re—”
“No. We’re not. Listen to me, Lieutenant. We have one culture and only one, because the land area of World is small and because the Terrans brought here were small in number and, maybe, because we don’t have much genetic diversity. That’s what I’m told, anyway. There were wars early on, but centuries ago one person gained control of huge swaths of land, presumably with an army, and she went on to establish the start of the civilization we have now. That was Mother Lalo^. She was an extraordinary person, a … I don’t know what you’d call it. Plant worshipper? Anyway, she established the principles for her kingdom, which eventually became all of World, that we still live by. That we must live by, to exist on this one continent without exhausting its resources. Respect for the land, first and always, which you can think of as ecological reality. No violence. Nothing that would lead to revolution, which means nobody starves, nobody is homeless, nobody is exploited. Family is all, not material goods, and a family is responsible for all its members. Government is made up of family heads, and decentralized whenever possible. Also, we practice strict population control. All of this is.… the word is untranslatable. ‘Bu^ka^tel.’”
Marianne Jenner ducked her head, hiding some private expression. Salah tried to process everything he’d just heard. Jenner made Kindred sound like Eden. But these were humans, and Salah didn’t believe in Eden. He said, “And all this works? These principles?”
“Most of the time, with most people,” Jenner said.
“And when it doesn’t?”
“We have laws, courts, punishments. But nothing like you have on Terra.”
Lamont said, “Uh-huh. Mr. Jenner, about our immediate situation—”
Branch interrupted. “You must be mining ore. There are bicycles on your road!”
“Yes, we mine and manufacture and transport,” Jenner said, “but as carefully as possible.”
“Describe your level of tech, please. You have radios, don’t you? That’s why the Friendship couldn’t raise your ship while it was on nightside and we weren’t. Radios but no more advanced communication.”
Jenner smiled sadly. “Yes. And you are…”
“Branch Carter.”
Who now was, Salah realized, the closest thing the humans had left to an engineer or physicist.
Jenner said, “We have no space program except the ship that was destroyed in Kam^tel^ha. Radio and radio towers but not television. No phones—all communication over distances is done by radio. Electricity from wind, sun, water, and geothermal sources. Medicines but not laser surgery. Books, although we control how many are printed so as not to use too much paper. Think the 1940s, Dr. Sherman, and you’ll be about right, with some exceptions. Big exceptions. No, better not think 1940s.”
“Cars?” Salah said, despite himself.
“We could make them but don’t, because we don’t drill for oil. Most goods go by water; there are a lot of rivers. We have dirigibles—I came here by dirigible—but bicycles are the usual—”
“Wait,” Marianne said. “You spoke to the Friendship from the Kindred ship, Noah. I heard you. But now you’re here, and you said the ship was in the destroyed city.”
“The … the best word is ‘rotational mother’—sent me from Kam^tel^ha last night. Otherwise I would have been killed with the rest.”
She said, “And your … your wife and child?”
There was a wife and child? Salah had not known that. Jenner must have told his mother before he left Earth. Was she Terran or Kindred? Interbreeding should be possible, there wouldn’t be that much genetic drift in 140,000 years.
Jenner said, “That’s why I was sent away. Everyone is returning to their lahks before the spore cloud comes.”
“Lahk?”
“Their family groups. Large, as in extended families.”
For a moment, Marianne looked as if she’d been slapped. Her son had just said that his family was not her. Before Salah could look away, the expression was gone. She said, “But by now you’ve developed a vaccine, you’ve had ten years, everyone in such a cohesive society must already be vaccinated … We vaccinated all of Earth against smallpox in less than ten years!”
Salah’s stomach clenched. He knew what Jenner would say before he said it. So did Marianne and Claire, the other biologists.
Jenner said it. “We have no vaccine.”
Branch drew a sharp breath.
Jenner continued, “We tried. But we don’t know enough, not even with everything we learned from you on Terra, and we had to leave before you developed the vaccine.”
Salah’s stomach clenched. No vaccine, and the Friendship with all its supplies and databases destroyed. In another few months the spore cloud would cross paths with Kindred. The entire population, whose ancestors had been brought here before the spore cloud hit Earth the first time seventy thousand years ago, had no species immunity against R. sporii. There would be a few people with natural resistance, which was what had preserved the humanity of Earth even as it reduced the population to a few thousand in the famous “bottleneck event.” But only a few.
Salah had worked in hospitals when the cloud made its second contact with Earth. He’d done twenty-hour shifts in Jordan, trying desperately to save those who, due to millennia of genetic drift, had lost their species immunity or who had weakened immunity. Many died. “Only” 5 percent in Jordan; 7 percent in the United States; 30 percent in Russia, whose genome had lost that particular genetic lottery. They died gasping for breath, their lungs filling with fluid, until they literally drowned.
Civilization on Kindred would disappear.
Marianne closed her hand around her son’s arm. “You left Earth before we’d developed the vaccine. Ten of you. Many on Earth weren’t immune to R. sporii, so some of you may be vulnerable when the spore clouds hit. Noah, you might not be immune.”
Claire Patel said, “I have some vaccine. I brought it in that suitcase there. If you have any labs left standing, we might be able to synthesize more.”
Jenner’s already oversized eyes went wider. “You brought vaccine?”
Lieutenant Lamont said, “That’s not our mission. Our mission is to establish relations and return to Terra.”
Salah stood. He was aware that beside the young Ranger, he was short, a little bit flabby, old. Unarmed. He said, “We can’t go home, Lieutenant. There is no means to go home. Vaccines are our mission now.
“We have to save as much of this planet as we can.”
CHAPTER 5
Austin Rhinehart sat under a makf
ruit tree in the back garden and tried to imagine himself dead.
Everything would disappear, all of World. But then he would disappear, too, so how would he know he was dead? He wouldn’t. Unless Old Mother Kee^la’s tales of another world after death were true and Austin would join his ancestors in endless dancing and feasting. But Austin wasn’t fond of dancing, and he didn’t have any ancestors on World for his lahk, because everyone in it had come from Earth, a place Austin didn’t remember. He’d been only three. Anyway, he didn’t believe Old Mother Kee^la’s tales. She wasn’t even his old mother, only Graa^lok’s; Austin’s lahk was also missing old mothers.
And he wasn’t going to be dead. He was Terran, and thus immune to spore disease. But everyone else was going to be dead: his best friend Graa^lok and Old Mother Kee^la and the teachers at school and Tiklal, whom Austin was supposed to apprentice to when he turned fourteen in two months. Only by that time, Tiklal would be dead, along with nearly everyone else on World.
Steven-kal came down the curving steps from the house, mounted a bicycle, and glimpsed Austin. He said in English, “I greet you, Austin. Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“I greet you, Steven-kal. I was just going.”
Steven-kal looked pointedly at his watch. “You are supposed to be there.”
“I’m just going now.”
“See that you do.” He mounted his bicycle and pedaled off.
Fuck! Austin thought, borrowing a forbidden word from his mother’s vocabulary. Steven-kal and his twin, Joshua-kal, were members of Austin’s lahk. His mother didn’t have any brothers, so Steven-kal and Joshua-kal had primary male responsibility for Austin, under the supervision of the lahk mother, who was Isabelle. Steven and Joshua McGuire—defiantly, he gave them their Earth names without the title of respect—weren’t even here at the lahk very much, so why did they have to visit now? Austin hated all of them—not because they were unkind to him but because they had responsibility for him for another three years and nobody recognized that he, Austin, was already an adult and able to make his own decisions.