If Tomorrow Comes

by Nancy Kress

  “Yes, sir!”

  Back home? Did Owen still think that was happening? How?

  “Dismissed,” Owen said.

  Leo bent to once again examine the parts of the pipe gun. There could be a whole factory making these somewhere—except, wouldn’t the Mothers object? And what had the Kinnie been shouting before Leo dropped him? Maybe Leo better start learning the language.

  He’d picked up a fair amount of Portuguese on duty in Brazil. He didn’t have the kind of language ability that Dr. Bourgiba did, and opportunity to study was limited because they were going to stand twenty-hour duty shifts, but you could learn a lot just keeping your eyes and ears open. And—wait!

  Maybe he could ask Isabelle to teach him. Half an hour, fifteen minutes carved from his sleep time … yes.

  * * *

  Two hours later, a dirigible floated toward the camp. Kandiss, on roof watch, used the squad frequency to detail its landing a mile away from the lab. Then he said, “Okay, a … a procession coming toward us.”

  Owen’s voice, sharp on the radio frequency: “What kind of procession?”

  “It looks like … four men carrying a platform on poles. Canopy, open sides … woman lying inside.”

  “A body? Dead?”

  “No, sir. Really old. Not headed here, swerved toward Noah Jenner’s house on the hill.”

  Where the Terran lahk lives, Leo thought, and then corrected himself: lived. Nobody was left in the beautiful karthwood house except Isabelle’s sister and her kid, Austin. Jenner and Isabelle had moved into the compound; the McGuire brothers had returned to their “manufacturies” in the central mountains; nobody seemed to know where the other two males, Schrupp and Beyon, lived now. Or, if they did know, they hadn’t told Leo. Well, that had been typical of most of the foster families Leo had grown up in: people moved away, leaving no forwarding address. No biggie.

  But the big house up the hill from the compound wasn’t Noah Jenner’s house, it was the lahk’s, and Isabelle headed the Terran lahk. Hadn’t Kandiss learned anything about how this place worked?

  Leo also knew, even if Kandiss did not, who the very old lady was.

  The Mother of Mothers had arrived.

  * * *

  “What will you do with him?” Salah asked. He’d removed Leo Brodie’s bullet from the attacker, and cleaned and dressed the wound.

  “He’ll get a trial,” Isabelle said. “Or rather, he would have gotten a trial if there had been time. He might still get one. But with the cloud coming…”

  “I’m surprised all the civic and business machinery has functioned this smoothly this long.”

  Isabelle took a sip of her wine. “Oh, I don’t know, Salah—if, say, an asteroid were going to hit Earth and wipe out everybody in three weeks’ time, do you think most people would riot and loot and go in for orgies, or would they just go on living their normal lives?”

  “Some of each, I think. But you’re right—here there is more of the latter and less of the former than on Terra.”

  They sat on karthwood chairs in the courtyard of the clinic, watching the stars come out. Inside, the rooms swarmed with scientific activity, but there was at the moment nothing for Isabelle to translate or Salah to doctor. The refugee camp, that amazingly orderly group of people not going on with their normal lives, preferred their own doctors. Salah and Isabelle held glasses of fruity wine. It was too sweet for Salah’s taste, but that and a thin sour beer were the only alcoholic beverages permitted on Kindred.

  “Permitted.” Kindred had totalitarian control without totalitarian force, a combination that endlessly intrigued him. So did Isabelle Rhinehart, but he wasn’t ready to admit that yet, not even to himself.

  “You lost your three main cities. Yet government and business and everything else are carrying on.”

  “We lost so many.” Grief in the drawn lines of her face, the droop of her body. “But World is pretty decentralized. Manufacturies are all located away from cities. People are making do, around their mourning.”

  “I’m sure decentralization helps. Still, it’s remarkable that Kindred society exists at all. In fact, it shouldn’t. It’s such a delicate balance between local rule and overarching beliefs.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I think a society’s ideas about what it means to be human shape its institutions, and then those institutions shape individuals, because they must adapt to the system. But you can only stretch biology so far. Hierarchies—pecking orders—are built into human DNA. On Kindred, the possibility for fragmentation must be a constant threat.”

  “Not really,” Isabelle said. “Bu^ka^tel.”

  She had tried to explain the word before, and hadn’t really succeeded. Isabelle, though very intelligent, was not an intellectual. But as far as Salah could grasp, bu^ka^tel—the three syllables had rising inflections that he could never quite duplicate correctly—was the basic ethical and organizational principle on Kindred. It somehow combined law, rank, sharing, and maternal responsibility in a rich mixture impossible for the American mind to sort out. Rank neither trumped law nor was law; Kindred was not an oligarchy. The rule of Mothers carried both heavy expectations and the expectation of obedience from everyone else. Only, however, within the limits of sharing, which limits were somehow bound up with maternalism. Even women who didn’t birth children were “mothers” because children belonged to the society as a whole, except when their allegiance belonged to their lahk, or something like that. Maybe. What was clear was that everyone, mothers and men and lahks, belonged first to World, as stewards of its ecology. All of that checked runaway consumption, even though the economic structure made room for capitalism as well as socialism. There was no government welfare, since a lahk was deeply responsible for everyone born into it.

  But there were still elements of bu^ka^tel that Salah felt eluded him completely.

  He returned to the more concrete subject of the intruder. “A trial of his peers?”

  “No. Of mothers in the local jurisdiction. Only mothers can serve as judges, because mothers have the greatest investment in the future.”

  “On Earth,” Salah said, “there are countries—small ones—that only permit men who have served in the military to vote because they have earned it by risking their lives.”

  “We don’t have a military. Kindred chose to build institutions around life, not death.”

  “Not really fair, Isabelle. Too easy.”

  “I know.” She frowned; her profile in the faint light looked classical. “When I first got here, I was so confused by everything. It just seemed wrong to deliberately choose not to make all the tech they could, to not let everyone have as many children as they wanted, to be so … controlling. Fascist. And then there was a period when I decided World was a utopia. It’s not, you know—don’t make the mistake of thinking that. We have crime, legal disputes, income inequality, all that shit. But no real poverty because working wages are controlled and families are obligated to take care of shiftless Uncle No^kal^te and idiot cousin Ko—and they do. No unhappy marriages because spouses stay with their own lahks as much as they choose, and marriage contracts are time-limited. No starvation because the continent grows food almost faster than it can be harvested. So now…”

  “Now?” he prompted.

  “I love it here.” She said it so simply, and with such pain, that Salah fell silent. More stars appeared, strange stars in strange configurations. Lights shone from the rooms around the courtyard, their yellow electric circles not reaching Salah and Isabelle.

  She said, “The prisons aren’t terrible but they aren’t luxurious, either. No basketball courts or college courses or any of that crap. They’re places of punishment for hurting the social group. But sentences are short and recidivism is fairly low.”

  “Is there capital punishment?”

  “Yes. Take a life, lose yours.”

  He tested her. “What is the recidivism rate?”

  “Three point eight percent.”


  He was sure then. Something in her voice had alerted him, and her precision about the number made him sure. “You’ve been in prison.”

  She turned to look at him. He could just make out her smile. “You’re perceptive. Yes, on Terra. I was a scrappy kid. Juvenile offender, for grand theft auto. Plus a few other things, later. Then I wanted to get a job and go straight, and nobody would hire me. When Noah said anyone with the L-31 mitochondria could leave Earth, I volunteered. Kayla and Austin—he was three then—came with me because.… well, because.”

  Salah could guess at the reasons. Isabelle was the strong one, the “scrappy” one. Kayla, with no skills and mother of a toddler, depended on her sister. Kayla had gone uneasily to World, and now blamed Isabelle for it every minute of every day.

  He said, “But you were bright. You did well in school. Your speech patterns, your breadth of knowledge—”

  “That’s enough about me,” Isabelle said, with more than a touch of belligerence. “What’s your story? Why did you volunteer for this mission?”

  Salah drained his wine. How much of his face could she see in the dim light? But she had been honest, so he was, too. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know why you volunteered to leave your planet and go to God-knows-what? You don’t know?”

  “I’m not sure I know why I’ve done anything in my life.” Except Aisha, but he was not going to tell her that stupid story.

  A figure passed above them on the roof, a Ranger on patrol. From its bulk, Mason Kandiss.

  Isabelle said, “I tried to volunteer for the Army. They wouldn’t take me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Heart murmur.”

  Instantly he was again a physician. “What are the details? Did you get a prognosis?”

  She chuckled, a low sound that, to his surprise, went straight to his groin. “Easy, Doctor. It’s nothing fatal. But the Army didn’t want me.”

  But I do. Salah suddenly felt wary: of her, of himself. He stood. “I think I’ll make one more tour of the labs. Check on Marianne, and make sure nobody has caught some weird Kindred disease.”

  “We call it ‘World,’ you know. Not ‘Kindred.’”

  “I know.”

  He made his way from the courtyard into Big Lab, which hummed with urgent, organized activity. Claire gave him a tired smile. Marianne Jenner was asleep, looking wan. Two more heroic women. This place abounded with them. Of course, there was also Kayla.

  “World,” not “Kindred.” He would have to remember. In the walkway from the clinic to the Big Lab, he passed two World scientists, tall coppery men with big dark eyes, chattering to each other. Each said, “I greet you, Salah-mak.”

  “I greet you, Beela¡. I greet you, Kal^cho.” He wished they would not address him by the honorific for a superior. He was a stranger here.

  I love it here, Isabelle had said.

  He was a stranger who probably would have to stay forever on World. Or what was left of it, after.

  CHAPTER 9

  There had been no time to build a biosafety level 4 lab. No time, no materials, no expertise at the level required. The imitation of Terran facilities, where Kindred had been carrying on its fruitless search for a vaccine, had been destroyed in the Russian attack, along with its researchers. Marianne, Claire, and Branch improvised.

  “Put in the mice,” she said to Branch Carter. The young tech acted as if he hadn’t been seized by a homegrown terrorist and nearly killed. After the first shock of discovering the time jump, Branch had seemed to adopt a stance of energetic we-must-carry-on. Well, they were all carrying on. Branch’s ability with hardware was turning out to be indispensable. As equipment, solicited and bargained for by Noah and Isabelle, arrived from clinics around southern Kindred, Branch modified it to create what they needed. He cannibalized some items to create something else. He jerry-rigged and connected and improvised, a human version of duct tape.

  Branch said, “Dr. Jenner”—she’d given up on getting him to call her Marianne—“they’re not mice.”

  Of course they weren’t. They were leelees, rounder and smellier and purple. But Marianne had spent years working with mice; old tapes die hard.

  Branch brought three of the animals to one of the two glass cages on the bench. Airtight, each cage had been rigged with a negative-pressure system and three redundant air filters, the best available on Kindred, with specs that should stop R. sporii. One advantage: R. sporii was large for a virus. But if the filters didn’t stop the spores, if they got loose from the lab, Marianne might kill a lot of people before the cloud did. But there was no choice; to test the synthesized vaccine, you needed to first determine that something was susceptible to the disease, then vaccinate that something, and then expose it. Leelees were the something they had that was closest to the human genome.

  Spores for the experiment had come from Claire’s suitcase. She’d admitted freely to the vaccines, which used inactivated pathogens. She had not, however, admitted to the sealed packet of live spores also in the suitcase. Only a handful of people knew that the means to bring on a spore cloud early resided in the locked metal cabinet in a corner of the leelee lab: the compound researchers, Terran and Kindred; Isabelle; Noah; the Mother of Mothers. Marianne did not want to start a panic. Branch, who seemed immune to the leelee smell, slept in the lab, guarding the cabinet and the experiments.

  What had Claire been thinking, to bring live spores down in the shuttle? Had she suspected that there was as yet no vaccine on Kindred? Marianne had asked her.

  “Yes,” Claire had said in her musical accent. “It always struck me as suspicious that the Kindred traveled all the way to Earth for help in developing a vaccine. I mean, when they were advanced enough to build a spaceship.” She’d looked Marianne straight in the eye as she said it. Marianne had not replied; Claire was not the person she needed to have that conversation with.

  Soon.

  The leelees, one held in each of Branch’s hands by their short tails, chittered. He dropped them into the negative-pressure cage. Claire Patel and the two senior Kindred scientists, Llaa^moh¡ and Ka^graa, watched, all of them taut as guitar strings. Ka^graa’s mouth twisted in a grimace. Branch turned on the filtration systems and negative-pressure blower, and pressed the lever that released live spores into the cage.

  The leelees scampered and chittered.

  The spores took about twenty minutes to shed their dormancy and begin to propagate—or, at least, they had taken twenty minutes on Earth. Incubation period for the disease was three days in mice. Who knew what it was in leelees? Eventually, the leelees would be either dead or still scampering. If dead, Marianne had her test animals. If not, they would have to move on to another animal. If they ran out of either species or time, the synthetic vaccine would have to be administered to humans with no testing.

  The problem with that protocol, of course, was that the vaccine would’ve been synthesized using available processes, grown on available cultures, guessed at with inadequate facilities. The synthesized vaccine would not be the exact duplicate of the Terran version, and the Kindred bodies were not the exact duplicates of Terran bodies, so who knew how well—or if at all—the synthesized version would protect?

  She watched the purplish animals sniff the glass walls of the cage, climb over the pieces of karthwood that Branch had put in. At least behind glass, they could be neither smelled nor heard.

  Branch said, pointlessly, “Now we wait.” Ka^graa nodded. He and Llaa^moh¡ were picking up English quickly, but it scarcely mattered. Everybody knew they had to wait.

  Marianne, weary, went to her own bed. Unlike everyone else, she had a room to herself, in what had been a closet. In both the clinic and Big Lab, bunks were jammed wherever possible. No one wanted to be away from the work, and Lieutenant Lamont had insisted on as much containment as possible. Only Isabelle, Noah, and Llaa^moh¡ went back and forth to the karthwood lahk house on the hill. Kayla and Lily were there, too, under the care of a sister of Llaa^moh¡
.

  On the wall of Marianne’s closet were photos of her two children and two grandsons on Terra. She had tried to reconcile herself to never seeing them again. This had not worked. As she lay on her pallet, looking up the photos, she dashed away tears. Stupid. If she was here, she lost Elizabeth, Ryan, Jason, and Colin. If she was with them, she lost Noah and Lily. That was just the way it was. She stood up, carefully stripped the photos from the wall, and put them on a shelf under the supply of wraps that Isabelle had given her.

  She was deeply asleep when loud knocking on the wall woke her. “Come in!”

  Branch stood silhouetted in the light from the room beyond. “Dr. Jenner, you said you wanted to know when the leelees died.”

  Marianne looked at her watch. “The incubation period is two hours?”

  “Yes. I witnessed the deaths and made notes. It was respiratory. I sealed the cages.”

  “Good.” The notes were important; they could not remove the mice for autopsy without releasing spores into the air. But now they knew: the leelees were susceptible to R. sporii.

  She said, “Just let me get dressed and I’ll be right there. Claire?”

  “She’s there. The whole team is. And Dr. Jenner—”

  “What?”

  “Your son is here. Noah. He wants to see you right away.”

  Alarm coursed through her. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. But he says the Mother of Mothers is up at the big house and wants to see you right away.”

  * * *

  “Fuck, no,” Owen said. “I can’t spare anyone to escort her. She ought to realize that.”

  Leo said carefully, “She didn’t ask for an escort, sir.”

  He had stopped Dr. Jenner and Noah as they left the compound by the clinic door. Leo, on door duty, had told them to halt. All the while he was asking their intentions, he’d watched the refugee camp a hundred yards away, where cook fires burned and people moved around, green in his night-vision goggles. His orders were to not permit anyone in, anyone out after nightfall. The problem was that Owen didn’t have the authority to give that order. Leo’s choices: violate an order, force civilians against their will (it was clear that the Jenners had wills of their own), or ask the CO for clarification and look like a wuss. He’d called Owen, who was asleep.