by Nancy Kress
The child said, “I greet you, Grandmother,” carefully shaping each of the English syllables, bravely lifting her eyes, as big and dark as her mother’s, to Marianne’s. A shy child, Marianne saw, unlike the two grandsons she had left on Terra. The grandsons she would never see again—no, don’t think of that, this was Lily’s moment.
Marianne held out her hand. Lily glanced at her mother, then came forward. Marianne was shocked at how thin her own hand was after weeks of illness, at how much effort it took to lift. The wrinkled pale fingers enfolded Lily’s smoother ones. The child’s skin was lighter than her mother’s, darker than Noah’s would have been without the artificial coloring. She had a small, heart-shaped face and a firm, generous mouth. “I greet you, Lily,” she said in World. Marianne’s eyes filled with tears.
“Mom,” Noah said, “Llaa^moh¡ needs to get back to work, and you need to rest.”
At the mention of work, tears vanished. Work had always been the great organizer of Marianne’s life, the point of it. If her children had suffered from that, it was too late to make it right now, but not too late to go on contributing.
Llaa^moh¡ led Lily out. Marianne said, “The vaccines?”
“You need to talk to Salah or Claire about that. They’re both recovered. What I know is that they’re using the supply from Terra to … breed more? Make more somehow, but they haven’t got it yet. There’s a lab set up in the school. That kid you brought, Branch, is great with hardware—he got your laptop to function on our current. Now Isabelle is translating data from your laptop for our people, but we weren’t as far along as you, and—”
“Why did you lie about that, Noah? I mean, why did Smith? And where is he, anyway?” “Smith” had been the leader of the first expedition to Terra.
“Mee^hao¡ is dead. Cancer. Would Earth have been as much in awe of Worlders if you’d known that all our tech was secondhand and that we understood it even less than you? Would Terra have been as willing to cooperate, or to voyage here now?”
Marianne didn’t answer. She’d read history. The less advanced civilization was always either ignored or plowed under by the more advanced. Only the promise of advanced trade products had gotten the Friendship built; aggression and revenge had built the Stremlenie.
“Noah, help me up. I have to get to work.”
“Out of the question, Mom. You’re weak as a feather.”
“You don’t understand. I have to help. There’s no way that Jones—your wife—uh—”
Noah smiled. “You never were any good with languages. Call her Lallie. Kayla Rhinehart does.”
Marianne’s flash of resentment at being compared to Kayla, even the brief glimpse she had of Kayla, dissipated in the need to be working. “Lallie and Isabelle won’t know how I’ve organized the laptop files. Salah is a medical doctor, not a researcher, and Lallie doesn’t even speak English, does she?”
“Not much. Claire Patel is in charge, and Isabelle is translating.”
“No English at home, then? You really wanted to belong here, didn’t you, Noah?”
“I never belonged anywhere else,” he said, which was true, and not even his smile could soften the pain that his simple sentence caused Marianne.
Noah put his hand on hers. “I’m happy, Mom. Stop worrying about me. Tell you what, I’ll see if Claire wants to bring your laptop in here so you can explain whatever needs to be explained. But you stay here and do whatever Salah tells you. Okay?”
Marianne nodded. “Noah, are you in charge here?”
“I am not. World is matrilineal, you know. The first expedition had Mee^hao¡ as a leader only because Terra is so patriarchal. Isabelle is the mother of my lahk. Of this … this scientific lab that suddenly got built here, one of the mothers on the Great Council is in charge. She’s Lallie’s great-grandmother, very old and not too well. She arrived yesterday and is at her daughter’s lahk.”
“Is she a scientist? Or was she?”
“No.”
“There’s a very old, non-scientist, great-grandmother in charge of the only effort on Kindred to produce a vaccine? That doesn’t make sense!”
“In the United States you have—or had when I left—a president with no military service in charge of a huge army with nuclear weapons.”
Marianne gazed at her son. When had he developed the ability, so lacking when he’d been on Terra, to riposte so effectively?
When he became happy, her mind said. Happy enough to replace despair with thought.
“All right, Noah. Bring the laptop and Lallie and Isabelle here, with Claire if she can be spared. And…”
“Yes?”
“The vaccine not being used for synthesis—you’ve vaccinated some people already, haven’t you? Are Lily and Lallie among them?”
Noah looked away. All at once she glimpsed, perhaps for the last time, the child he had been: unwilling to tell her where he’d been and what he’d been doing, unwilling to risk her displeasure. Then the child vanished and he said, “Not yet. There isn’t enough for everyone.”
“And on Kindred everybody is treated equally. Bullshit. You’re a capitalist society, aren’t you?”
“More socialist. But with really constrained capitalism, yes. But it’s not my decision. The Council of Mothers—”
“More bullshit. The spore cloud is what? Two months away? Vaccinate your family. Now, while you can.”
Noah said nothing. But she could tell he would not do it.
Marianne said, “One more thing. When can I see Lily again? Soon?
“Please?”
* * *
Austin squeezed through the tunnel, which seemed to have grown smaller since his last visit. He had wanted to come here sooner, but that hadn’t worked out. No one was expecting him, but when Tony heard Austin’s great idea, he—and Beyon-kal, too—would be really glad he’d come. Twenty yards in, when the tunnel turned sharply back on itself and the walls grew smoother, the faint light appeared. At the metal grill, Austin rang the bell. The door farther down the tunnel clanged open and Tony’s face appeared, scowling.
“What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to—”
“Christ, Austin, I told you not to come here unless I asked you to! We don’t want you followed, we don’t want anyone to—Did you see anybody on the way?”
“No,” Austin said, which wasn’t strictly true. He’d seen a rancher rounding up skaleth¡ for milking and, farther on, a group of people hiking toward the mountains, who had called to him. But he didn’t know them or they him, so it didn’t really count. “Tony, I brought you something!”
“What?”
“Something you really, really need! Let me in!”
Tony unlocked the grill and Austin wriggled through and dropped to the lower tunnel. Tony said, “You’re all muddy. Give me whatever you brought.”
“It’s raining out there. I’ll give it to you inside.”
Haven had changed in the two weeks since Austin had been here. More food had been delivered to the shepherd’s cottage Tony had bought as a drop point, and then lugged here. That was usually Austin and Graa^lok’s job, but Tony must have done it this time. Beyon-kal did not lug. Machinery had been rearranged, and the cave was filled with a low hum.
“What’s that noise?”
“Nathan is testing the air filtration system. Negative pressure.”
Austin didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t matter. Tony’s eyes raked Austin, looking for bulges in the pockets of his rain wrap. Tony said, “Well, where is it? The thing must not be very big.”
“It’s not a thing, it’s an idea. You know how you said you had to kidnap Llaa^moh¡ so you’d have a biologist to continue to work on the vaccine? And kidnap Lily so that you could make Llaa^moh¡ work? Well, you don’t have to! The new Terrans have biologists, and they know more than Llaa^moh¡, and one is still a little weak”—he was fudging that a little, Dr. Patel had mostly recovered from having her microbes changed—“and would be easy to take! Plu
s, she’s small and can’t fight. I bet even I could bring her here—tonight! Or tomorrow!”
Tony stared at him. Tony didn’t look happy. The first swirl of anxiety roiled Austin. He waited for Tony to say something.
“You think we should kidnap a Terran biologist who is creating the vaccine at a compound guarded by Army Rangers, two months before the spore cloud hits, taking her away from the work she’s doing there and inviting Rangers, who are experts in personnel extraction, to charge in here and rescue this woman?”
Austin hadn’t thought of it that way. “Well, you could … you could … she would be useful!”
“She would indeed. And if and when the time comes, we might save her life by bringing her here. But do you really think we wouldn’t know about her and her potential usefulness without you coming here to tell us?”
“Well, how would you know? You have a radio, sure, but you don’t speak World!” Yes—how did Tony know all about the Terrans?
A movement to Austin’s left. He whirled around. Beyon-kal and Graa^lok emerged from the biolab cave. Graa^lok said, “I greet you, Austin.”
Graa^lok was bringing news. Graa^lok was here, invited when Austin hadn’t been. All because Graa^lok was better at machinery, better at inventing, already apprenticed to an engineer. It wasn’t fair!
Graa^lok, his face wrinkling, repeated, “I greet you, Austin.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Tony, unexpectedly, put a hand on Austin’s muddy shoulder. “Look, kid, I know you meant well. And you’re part of this team, definitely. But we don’t want to attract any unnecessary attention. The Mothers still think we’re just some crazy business start-up or something—well, I don’t know what they think. But they don’t know what our plans are, and we want to keep it that way. Don’t come again until Graylock brings you.”
Until Graa^lok brings you—when it was Austin who brought Graa^lok here in the first place! Really, really unfair!
But he couldn’t risk making Tony angry. Austin said grudgingly, “Okay.”
“Good man. Look, you can get something to eat before you leave, okay? I know it’s a long walk.”
Austin ate, his back turned pointedly away from Graa^lok. But Graa^lok came and sat humbly beside him. “I have something for to show you.”
“I don’t care! Leave me alone!”
“It’s really wondful.”
“The English is ‘wonderful,’ idiot.”
“It’s really wonderful.”
“I don’t want to see anything you made.”
“I didn’t make it, I found it. And”—Graa^lok leaned close to whisper—“Tony-mak and Beyon-mak don’t know yet. I saved it for you first.”
“I said go away!” But when Austin had finished eating and Graa^lok was still there, Austin said grudgingly, “Okay, what is this wonderful thing? It better be fucking amazing!”
Graa^lok looked carefully around. Neither Tony nor Beyon-mak was visible. Graa^lok led the way to a side tunnel, and Austin followed. Three feet in, the first of Haven’s chimneys rose, letting in air and light, although not as much light as before Nathan Beyon had installed the air filtration machinery at the top. When it and the other three chimney filters were turned on, Haven would be safe from spores. Below the chimney, Graa^lok picked up a bacto-torch and handed another to Austin. Each one held enough microbe-powered fluorescence to let the boys see the tunnels they walked or crawled through.
They went deeper into the mountain. This tunnel, Austin knew from previous explorations, branched and branched again, going on farther than they had ventured. Some tunnels were small, some slick with dripping water, some partially blocked by falling rocks. It seemed to Austin that they went a long way. His clothes were wet and filthy and he shivered with cold.
“Gray, how much farther?”
“Not too far. If I can do it, you can. You’re stronger and quicker than me.”
Austin warmed under the flattery, even though a part of him wondered if that was why Graa^lok said it.
All at once the tunnel widened and grew higher, and Austin could stand upright. A fall of rock blocked the way forward, rising halfway to the ceiling. Graa^lok said, “We go over this and there it is.”
“There what is?” The rock pile looked unstable.
Graa^lok didn’t answer. He clambered up the rockfall, which slipped and shifted under him, sending rocks crashing to the tunnel floor. But he got himself over it, and so Austin had to follow because he was, after all, stronger and quicker.
Beyond the rockfall, the tunnel widened even more into an irregular room. Graa^lok raised his bacto-torch and waited.
“Wow!” Austin said.
“Wow!” Graa^lok echoed, clearly savoring both the new Terran word and the sight he presented to Austin as proudly as if it were an illathil share. Gold crystals sparkled on the ceiling, on the walls, in heaps on the floor. Nuggets glittered at Austin’s feet. Piles of white quartz sand glowed.
“What is it?”
Graa^lok said in World, “We had it at school, didn’t you? It’s the inside of a geode. The gold precipitates out from circulating water that gets hot from magma. Some of these caves have diamonds, too. That’s where manufacturing gets the diamonds and gold to make things. You know!”
Austin didn’t. If he’d had this in school, he didn’t remember it. Certainly nobody had ever shown him anything like this. “Does Tony know it’s here?”
“No.”
“Graa^lok, we could take some of this back and sell it and get rich!”
All at once Graa^lok looked scornful, and much older. “Sell it to who? Manufacturing is going to end in two months, along with everything else! How can you forget that?”
“I don’t! That’s why I want to bring my mother here!”
“Anyway, this all belongs to Beyon-mak, because he’s head of this new lahk.”
“A man can’t be mother to a lahk, idiot.” But Austin didn’t want to fight with Graa^lok. He knelt before a pile of rockfall, gold mixed with sand, and let it run shining through his fingers. “Hey, there’s something buried here.”
“What?”
“Don’t know.”
Austin clawed aside the gold-flecked sand. The corner of something poked above a layer of hardened mud. Graa^lok handed him a hammer—why was Graa^lok always better prepared than him?—and Austin whacked at the mud.
“Be careful! You might break it!”
But when they got the thing out, it was clear that nothing could break it. A meter-high, four-sided pyramid with large bumps scattered randomly across each surface, it was not dented, not rusty, not as heavy as it should be to have survived the rocks that had fallen on it. Austin turned its surfaces over and over in his hands.
“Graa^lok, have you ever seen anything like this?”
“No. But I think it’s been here a long time. We should give it to Beyon-mak—maybe he knows what it is.”
Austin didn’t want to give anything to Beyon-mak. Resentment rose again in his mind, a warty snake resurfacing. “No. It’s ours.”
“Tony-mak owns this mountain. He bought it from the mother of the lahk Ca¡lee^ah. She sold it because the lahk needed money for—”
“I don’t care. It’s ours.”
“It’s not. Bu^ka^tel.”
Austin weighed the Graa^lok’s stubborn expression, the difficulty of smuggling the object past Tony in the exit tunnels, and the effort of carrying it all the way back to his lahk, and decided to bargain.
“Okay, we won’t take it. But you can’t tell Tony or Nathan”—he felt daring calling him that instead of Beyon-mak, which boosted his confidence—“until we agree to tell them together. After all, we found it together, and anyway it probably wouldn’t fit into their plans for saving civilization. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Graa^lok said, even though he didn’t look happy and even though they had not, in fact, found it together. To make up for his agreement, Graa^lok said, “You should sleep more, or drink more water, or something.
You look like turds.”
Probably he did. He’d walked through the rain to get here, and now he’d have to walk through rain to go back. And he was not sleeping well. But he said, scornfully, “I’m fine. Leo Brodie hardly sleeps at all. He told me.”
“When?” Graa^lok challenged.
“Two days ago. I talk to Leo all the time.” This was pushing it, although Austin did try to talk to Leo whenever he could. The Rangers fascinated him. “They’re trained to go without sleep. None of the Rangers sleep much, even the woman.”
“You’re not a Ranger,” Graa^lok said.
Austin stalked back along the tunnel, when he wasn’t crawling or climbing. Beyon-mak let him out the door, the tunnel, the grill. At the end of the entrance tunnel, he clambered through the camouflage bushes.
There, sitting on a wet stone in an even wetter drizzle, was Noah Jenner, waiting for him. Austin’s insides turned sick.
“I greet you, Austin.”
“I greet you, Noah-kal.”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Austin thought fast. He had to protect Haven. “I was just exploring.”
“Uh-huh. Alone, in the rain, without telling anyone where you’re going. Your mother is frantic.”
Austin said sulkily, “My mother is always frantic.” He started to trudge away, but Noah rose and caught him by the shoulder.
“What is Tony Schrupp doing in there?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Noah grimaced. He loomed above Austin—why couldn’t Austin be that tall? He had the wrong genes. His mother’s fault, or maybe the unknown father on Terra that his mother would never talk about.
Noah said, “Tony Schrupp and Nathan Beyon are in that cave system under the mountain. They’ve been bringing in supplies and equipment for months. Do you think the Council of Mothers doesn’t know that? I asked you what they’re doing in there.”
“It’s a start-up company.”
“In a practically inaccessible cave? Without a license from the Council? Hiring no workers? Come on, Austin.”
Austin repeated, because he couldn’t think what else to say, “It’s a start-up company.”