If Tomorrow Comes

by Nancy Kress

  “What? But you said—”

  “It doesn’t matter what I said before. We started Haven before we knew we had Rangers to deal with, didn’t we? Haven is both impregnable and defensible, but we only have so much food before we come out again after everybody’s dead, and we need to keep the supplies for essential personnel.”

  Graa^lok blurted out, “But that’s not fair!”

  “Yes, it is,” Tony said. “Harsh, but fair. When you’re older—both of you—you’ll understand that survival sometimes means tough choices. You bring me a doctor, you earn your place here.”

  Indignation choked Austin so much that he couldn’t speak.

  Tony softened. “I’m sorry, kid, but that’s the way it is. Look, I’m sure you’ll bring the doctor. We need her. When you do, you’re in. And you can stay a little while now to get Kayla settled and to rest up. Start by getting her to stop crying, okay? Thank you.”

  * * *

  Leo had perimeter patrol. Everything in the camp was quiet, and it seemed to him there were fewer people. Maybe some had gone back to their lahks, away from any more potential violence. Smart people.

  The ones that remained ducked into their tents as soon as they saw Leo, or stood their ground and glared at him, or looked down at their sandals. In Brazil, an American sniper who had already shot three natives would have been screamed at, or had rocks thrown at him, or worse. He didn’t understand these people.

  A movement behind some bushes. Leo tensed, turned. But it was two tiny girls playing with a little pile of toys, probably farther from camp than their mothers knew. Both looked up from dark eyes huge in their coppery faces and smiled at him.

  “I greet you, halhal^bem,” Leo said in Kindese, hoping he had the word right for their age and status, hoping he hadn’t called them a coffeepot or some damn thing.

  They chorused back, without fear, “I greet you, Ranger-mak.”

  He couldn’t linger. The little girls could even be bait, a trap, although he hadn’t seen anything suspicious and Kandiss, on roof duty, was tracking him. But as he jogged on, the small incident warmed him, the only good thing that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Maybe longer.

  On the farthest edge of the camp, at the farthest distance from the tents, two men approached Leo from a grove of trees.

  He halted, raised his rifle, said in Kindese, “Stop.”

  They did, and raised their hands above their heads. But that didn’t rule out suicide bombs. Leo repeated, “Stop.”

  “Yes,” the older of them said, in English. The word had a click on the end of it like so many of their words did, which Isabelle said changed the meaning but Leo didn’t know how. “I greet you, Leo-mak.”

  “I greet you,” Leo said, because what the fuck else was he supposed to say? This wasn’t a tea party, but it wasn’t an attack, either. Not yet. And how did they know his name?

  The younger man turned his shoulder toward Leo, a sinuous twisting of his tall body, and pointed one finger downward to call attention to the patch sewn there. The same patch that the Kindred who’d turned on the water cannon last night had had sewn onto the front of his dress. The man said in careful, halting English, “I am police.”

  “Yes,” Leo said.

  “We help you. No more vee^al¡ss.”

  It took Leo a moment to get the word: violence.

  Was this a trap? Or were these guys offering to be informants? And how did they learn English? He said nothing, waiting to see what they said next.

  “Come.”

  No way. It smelled like an amateurish ambush. He said, more harshly than he intended, “No.”

  The older man smiled sadly.

  The younger didn’t seem all that surprised. He said, “We tell you.” Slowly he raised one foot a few inches off the ground in the untrimmed weeds.

  Leo tensed, but he let the guy shake his sandal until a piece of paper fell out. The two men nodded and, hands still raised, walked back into the camp. When they’d vanished, Leo picked up the paper, his mind busy. The men had probably been observed from the camp, but it might have looked like Leo stopped them, raised his gun, and spoke to them instead of the other way around—you could spin it that way.

  The paper was a map. A big shaded block for the compound, the proportions exact for its two buildings and walkway; Leo had walked the roof enough times to know. The perimeter zone was shaded more lightly, and the tents drawn in curving rows. One tent fairly close to the south door was circled and inside it were drawn pipe guns.

  Leo put the paper in his pocket, finished the perimeter patrol, and called Owen.

  “An ambush,” Owen said.

  “Maybe, sir. But I could check it out.”

  “If there’s a suicide bomb in there, then we lose you. Go, but take Berman to cover you and each of you take a Kinnie kid as hostage. Carry them in front of you. I’ll give the fuckers that, they don’t use kids as bait. Not so far, anyway.”

  He hated the idea. It was what insurgents had done in Brazil, and children had died. He wanted to say to Owen We don’t do that, it’s not us. But, then, this wasn’t Brazil. The Kindred wouldn’t kill their own kids in order to destroy an enemy holding them; Leo knew that about Kindred, knew it clear down to his bones. Kids shouldn’t even be here in a war zone, but lahks stuck together no matter what. Blood here really was thicker than water. And Leo had just been given an order.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  He radioed Zoe on their private frequency, destroying the last half hour of her allotted sleep, and she cursed him with several inventive combinations of filth he hadn’t heard before. But in three minutes she was beside him in full kit. “This better be worthwhile, Brodie.”

  They strode into camp. Two little girls walked by, carefully balancing a bucket of water between them. Leo shook his head. He picked instead a pair of boys whose parents did not seem nearby, and Zoe scowled at him; he’d hear about this bit of male chauvinism later. Leo and Zoe each held a child tightly against their chests with one arm, sidearm in the other. Leo could feel the child’s fear radiating up his arm, like an electric shock.

  “Stop! Don’t move!” He said it in Kindese. The two men and one woman inside the tent froze, looking grimmer than stone. The tent held more guns—Leo noticed that each batch they confiscated was more sophisticated than the last—plus small devices and collections of chemicals that he didn’t recognize. Leo and Zoe made them carry it all across the perimeter to the door of the clinic and dump it just inside. Then he let the children go. Zoe stood guard over the three adults, whom no other Kindred had tried to join, against the compound wall. Although what the fuck were they going to do with the insurgents? They couldn’t take prisoners.

  Just before Owen arrived, Salah came out of the leelee lab and stared at the pile just inside the south door. “What’s this?”

  “Confiscated weapons.”

  “And the metal cans?”

  “You tell me. Could be bomb-making chemicals. Stay here, Doctor. Lieutenant Lamont might want you to translate.”

  Salah stiffened at the tone in Leo’s voice. “I doubt those Kindred will tell you anything useful, not voluntarily.”

  The two stared at each other. Leo knew what Salah was thinking: Would you torture a Kindred for information? It was the wrong question. Before interrogation, you needed a place to actually hold prisoners, which they did not have. Nor did they have personnel for interrogation. They were four soldiers and they were getting no help from the civilians here. He turned away in contempt from Salah.

  Whom he could not stop picturing holding Isabelle. Kissing Isabelle. Fucking Isabelle.

  Irrelevant, Brodie.

  He said to the doctor, “Put all this stuff somewhere safe. Now,” and went back outside before Salah could answer.

  Kindred informants had led them to this weapons cache. Leo would have to again raise the idea of recruiting and arming trustworthy Kindred to supplement the unit. Christ, weapons could be pouring into every third tent
in the camp, carried in with food supplies or any of the other things that kept this the most organized and cleanest refugee camp in the universe. The squad needed help. Leo found Owen.

  “No,” Owen said. His cheeks had hollowed and his eyes somehow retreated farther into his head. Or maybe just something in his eyes had retreated, gone so far inside that Leo couldn’t see the Owen he’d known. Sure, Owen wasn’t sleeping much, but none of them were, and anyway Owen had always been able to take more physical punishment and deprivation than any other three Rangers put together. This was different.

  “Brodie, don’t be so credulous. Those informants were softening you up. Once they gain access to our weapons and—”

  “We wouldn’t have to arm them with our weapons, only—”

  “Did I ask for your opinion on ordnance?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I didn’t think so. Return to duty.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Leo was off duty. This was his three hours to sleep. He tried, lying on a pallet in the ready room, but sleep eluded him.

  Isabelle. Salah. Isabelle with Salah.…

  Kindred making their clumsy guns to take by force vaccines that didn’t exist. No, the guns existed for more than vaccines. They think, Isabelle had told him, that all Terrans are the same, and it was Terrans who fired from space and destroyed their cities. Well … but … didn’t Owen think all Kindred were the same? Dangerous enemies. Didn’t Kandiss think so, too, and maybe even Zoe?

  Some Kindred were enemies, sure. But if Russia attacked the United States—

  Which Leo was never going to see again. They were stuck on Kindred forever. So didn’t it make more sense to try to understand Kindred, to sort them out into dangerous and nondangerous, to think about after the spore cloud because Isabelle had said that some Kindred might have natural immunity and survive …

  Leo wasn’t used to this sort of thinking, and he didn’t like it. He hadn’t had these thoughts in Brazil. But, then, he’d known he was going home from Brazil. Thinking about the situation here felt almost as bad as thinking about Isabelle and Salah. But the only other thing he had at the moment to fill his sleep-deprived brain was almost as bad: two tiny girls playing with their toys, smiling up at him from huge dark eyes in their coppery faces, regarding him as an immensely interesting object that threatened them not at all.

  CHAPTER 12

  Kindred had plant-based drugs, including powerful opioids. The opioids had surprised Salah. Ree^ka refused all drugs, which did not surprise him.

  She lay in Marianne’s room, now hers (Marianne must have squeezed a pallet in someplace else; Salah had no idea where). Although she had refused medical examination, Salah judged that Ree^ka would not survive another night. He hoped that after this critical meeting, she would take the opioid. He understood that she wanted her mind clear now, but he knew of no aspect of the Kindred worldview that would preclude palliative care after the Mother of Mothers had handed down her last decrees. Surely some version of hospice must be included in bu^ka^tel. The Kindred considered themselves stewards of each other as well as of their precious, limited continent.

  Ree^ka turned her head on her pillow, and did not succeed in suppressing a faint groan.

  Wherever there were narcotics, there was an illegal market for them. That, too, was an aspect of life here that Salah needed to assimilate. If he was going to be here for the rest of his life—and since making love to Isabelle, that didn’t seem such a terrible prospect—he needed more than the language. He needed the culture it served, because no one knew how many Kindred survivors might have natural immunity to R. sporii, as some Stone Age humans on Earth had. There was so much he didn’t know.

  Claire said, “Where’s Branch? He left Big Lab to come here ten minutes ago.”

  Marianne said, “Probably in the leelee lab, working with the recordings from the ship. I’ll get him. Don’t start without us.”

  No one would. Marianne and Claire were in charge of what Salah now thought of as the failed vaccine program, although that wasn’t really fair. In medicine, a partial success was not a failure, not even when the partial was very partial indeed.

  The one leelee that had been sickened but not killed by R. sporii had begun to eat. Slowly, slowly the animal was recovering. There was no way to examine it closely, as there would have been in a biosafety level 4 lab; to break the seal on the improvised negative-pressure cage would have been to release spores into the lab. Kindred and Terran scientists had been reduced to watching it through the glass, to crouching on the floor to squint up at its turds from below, to rapping on the side of the cage to determine response, and other totally inadequate measures. But it was indubitable that the leelee now dragged itself around, ate and drank, sent forth a few faint chitters around its dead and decaying cousins, which also could not be removed from the cage.

  Marianne and Branch returned, Branch looking as if he hadn’t either slept or washed in too long. Everyone was working overtime, but Branch was also working at the hopeless task of decoding alien signals transmitted in alien code from an alien transmitter to a jerry-rigged device he did not fully understand. When she could be spared, Isabelle studied his notes to see if they corresponded to spoken Kindred. They did not.

  Standing beside Ree^ka’s bed, Isabelle slipped her hand into Salah’s. Isabelle looked even more exhausted than Branch. Austin had not yet been found.

  Noah Jenner came into the room, crowding it even more. With Llaa^moh¡ and Ka^graa, eight people jammed themselves around Ree^ka’s bed in a space the size of a large closet.

  Claire said, “I think we have to go with the synth-vac we have. We can run one more leelee trial while simultaneously manufacturing as much vaccine as we can and starting to administer it. There’s just no time to test more. We don’t know how long it will take to become effective, and it offers only thirty-three percent protection…” She trailed off, clearly knowing how ridiculous that was.

  Thirty-three percent on a sample size of three leelees. And the one leelee it had “protected” had sickened anyway. And that was in alien animals, not in humans. Who had, over 140,000 years, evolved immune-system differences from the Terrans the vaccine had originally been designed for. Not to mention that most vaccines needed at least a week, usually two, to protect anybody against anything.

  To the low hum of Noah’s translation, Claire finished with an unexpected note of defiance. “It’s all we have.”

  Branch, with the audacity of the young, said, “So who gets it?”

  Ka^graa said, “We scientists of World will not take the vaccine. It will sicken us and we must help with the manufacture. It is better so.”

  Salah’s gaze dropped. Twenty-first century Americans did not bow; this was the closest he had to a silent gesture of respect. The Kindred scientists were giving their lives in the hope of saving even a few others.

  But then the Mother of Mothers spoke, her voice abruptly stronger. “No. You will preserve some vaccine and take as late as possible before the spore cloud comes. Whoever survives of our people will need you. There is no disagreement possible.”

  Nor would there be any. Salah could see that.

  Ree^ka continued. “The people in the camp are the worst of us. They have left their lahks. They have made weapons. They have tried to kill. Not all of them, that is understood. But they have defied bu^ka^tel to come here, and they must not be rewarded for this. The vaccines will be given to the children in the camps. If they survive, Terrans will care for them.”

  Never had Salah heard such depth of sorrow in a voice, nor seen it as in the dark eyes of the Mother of Mothers. Ree^ka was facing not just the death of most of her people but of her civilization as well.

  Marianne said, “Isabelle, tell her that we don’t know how many Kindred might have natural immunity. Even the worst filoviruses on Earth have only a ninety percent kill rate, and R. sporii isn’t a filovirus.”

  Isabelle said, “She knows.”

  They all knew. Th
is wasn’t Earth, and the Kindred were not nearly as genetically diverse as Terrans. There might indeed be some natural immunity, but on the first Kindred ship, everyone had died.

  Ree^ka said, “Other lahks may come here now, those nearby. Llaa^moh¡ will know who to radio and in what order. Llaa^moh¡, you should bring your daughter and sister here now. They have my permission to leave their lahk.”

  Salah saw Marianne’s face brighten.

  The Mother of Mothers raised a feeble arm and pointed. Clearly, it took all her strength. “Marianne-mak, after the cloud, you must lead the Terran lahk to rebuild World. You must share this work with your soldiers. I so ¡mo¡mo^ you.”

  Another important word. But as Isabelle translated it as “sacred trust,” her clutch on Salah’s hand said that it was more than that.

  Ree^ka faltered, and Claire eased her back onto her pillow. The Mother of Mothers closed her eyes, strength spent, and whispered, “Isabelle. Come … to me … soon.”

  The Kindred seemed to take this as dismissal and filed out. The Terrans followed, Branch half running back to the leelee lab and his machinery. Isabelle said to Salah in English, “There’s nothing more you can do for her?”

  “Only the opioids she won’t take.”

  “Tonight?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “How will you set up the vaccination of the children?”

  It would be difficult. As the Mother of Mothers had said, the people who had come to the camp, who had twice made assaults on the lab, were the roughest of Kindred society. Long ago on Terra, sociologists had made the observation that the worst enemies of any culture were its own young men between fourteen and twenty-four: not yet firmly anchored in life, testosterone raging, they were the ones that created both constructive revolutions and destructive gangs. Yet the camps held older men, women, children—had they followed their young rebels to keep lahks together, or because it was not possible, bu^ka^tel or no, to suppress the human bent to put self-preservation above survival of the group?

  Isabelle answered her own question. “The Rangers will have to maintain order and bring the kids into the compound to be vaccinated inside.”