by Nancy Kress
“No. He says he didn’t take it. But of course he did, and now he’s lying so he doesn’t get punished.”
Marianne said nothing. She had raised difficult children—all three of hers, in different ways—and knew that difficult children could turn out all right in the end. Look at Noah, once an aimless addict, now a sort of leader to a sort of alien race. You never knew. Branch, at twenty-eight, was childless.
“But, Dr. Jenner, listen—”
“Keep your voice down, Branch, Lily’s asleep.”
“Oh. Sorry. But listen—I’ve got the transmissions from the colony ship decoded!”
“You have!” She had raised her voice, and Lily stirred on her lap. “You have?” she whispered.
“Well, partly, anyway. I figured out how to translate the signal to sound waves. Now I just have to clear the noise and—”
“You mean speech? But there’s nobody left alive on the ship!”
“No, not speech. I tried that already. It’s some other code, but not from a voice transmitter like the one we have—had—on the Friendship. From the ship itself, I think. It could be really useful astronomical data.”
Useful to whom? The spore cloud was going to commit viral genocide on the planet. Looking at Branch’s excited face, the face of youth so easily able to compartmentalize that one thing at a time could fill his entire mental universe, Marianne did not say this.
“Good work, Branch. But aren’t you supposed to be in the lab, preparing vaccine?”
“Aren’t you?” A flash of anger, born of disappointment in her reaction. Almost immediately Branch said, “I’m sorry!”
“It’s okay. Let’s both go now.” In the doorway behind Branch, Noah loomed. His dark gaze in the artificially coppery skin, those eyes surgically widened to look as much like a Kindred’s as possible, had gone immediately to Lily.
“No fever,” Marianne said, and let her son take Lily from her while Branch held out his hand to help her up so they could both go back to work.
* * *
Austin sat in the dark, in a former blanket closet, and scowled to keep back shameful tears. They would be sorry. In a day or two, they would all be sorry!
The blanket closet was empty of blankets, the entire stock depleted for people to sleep on wherever they could. Austin had yanked out the two bottom shelves so he could sit upright on the closet’s floor. There wasn’t room to lie down, but he was too mad to go to sleep anyway. Isabelle and Noah had yelled at him, threatened him, and accused him of what he hadn’t done. He hadn’t stolen the fucking vaccines! He wouldn’t do that! Did they think he wanted Lily to die, or the scientists who were going to vaccinate all those kids tomorrow? Was that what they thought of him?
It served them right, what he was going to steal when he got the chance! If they thought he was a thief, then he would be one! That would show them!
Although that wasn’t why he was going to kidnap Dr. Patel. It was to protect his mother, the only true member of Austin’s lahk, the only blood member (forget Isabelle—she had betrayed him). “First, always, the lahk”—wasn’t that what he’d been taught his whole life? It was! Bu^ka^tel! But now, when all he was doing was acting on that—
Noah had guessed where Kayla was. “You took her to Tony and Nathan, in the mountains, didn’t you? Let her stay there for now. We have more important things to do here.” And Noah had turned away from Austin, in disgust.
Isabelle hadn’t been any kinder. “Just when we need you to act like a grown-up—you’re thirteen, for God’s sake!”
Austin was grown up! That’s why he was doing this! And there were no gods on World, only lahks. Which he was acting to serve his lahk the best way possible, even if they couldn’t see it. But they would be sorry when civilization collapsed all around them and they died in riots or starved like rats—Tony had been graphic about what those were—while he and his mother and, yes, Claire Patel, were safe in Haven. Dr. Patel would thank him one day for saving her life, just like Kayla would.
But first Austin had to get her there. He had a plan. Scrunched against the back wall of the closet, he went over and over the plan in his mind, until the thought popped into his mind to wonder what Leo would think of it.
No, Leo had nothing to do with this. Still, it would be nice if the Rangers survived the collapse of civilization, or at least if Leo did. They could help Tony rebuild. Then Leo, too, would be grateful that Austin had saved a doctor.
In the dark, he fingered the knife he’d stolen from the kitchen when Isabelle, still furious, had left him there to “at least eat something, for fuck’s sake!”
Austin hoped no one would miss the knife before he needed it. He also hoped he wouldn’t need it—but he was prepared to do whatever he had to. That’s what courage was. Leo had once told him so.
* * *
Salah and Isabelle stood beside the doorway that connected Big Lab to the Rangers’ ready room, that secretive hideaway. Lamont had just emerged, dressed in what looked to Salah like enough gear to take on the Russian army.
Watch your own prejudices, Doctor.
“They want a funeral?” Lamont said. “Here? Now?”
“We are going to have one,” Isabelle said. “At my lahk house. I’m telling you so you know what to expect, Lieutenant.”
“And what is that?”
Salah watched Isabelle choose her words carefully. Lamont looked like hell. He hadn’t slept in days. The Rangers did sleep, of course, but not much, and apparently Lamont least of all. Salah noted the dark, puffy circles around Lamont’s eyes, the jumpy irritability, the inhibition of the acoustic startle response. He couldn’t see the mental signs, which was what Salah was afraid of. Nobody might notice those until Lamont showed impaired judgment, or hallucinated, or went bat-shit psychotic. Claire had tried to reason with Lamont about the need for the Rangers to sleep more, but she’d gotten nowhere.
And the worse Lamont looked, the worse the looks he leveled at Salah. No direct sneers or racist remarks; that was not his style. Just a lowering of inhibitions, gnawing away at the iron Ranger discipline, letting the underlying prejudices show. Salah, who knew everyone’s medical history, knew what Lamont had been through when he’d been captured by people who looked like Salah.
Isabelle said, “The mourning ceremony doesn’t last long. Ree^ka’s body will be carried from the compound on the—”
“No,” Owen said. “No one enters the compound.”
“Noah will carry her body to the camp and it can be placed there onto the litter she came in on. Then all the mothers, including me, will accompany it up the hill to my lahk. What happens there need not concern you. The body will be returned to the soil that nurtured it.”
“Buried? Burned?”
“Neither, and not your business.”
Not buried or burned? What would they do with it, then? And it wasn’t like Isabelle to be curt with the Rangers, whom she inexplicably admired. Involuntarily, Salah glanced up at the ceiling, where Leo Brodie wasn’t even on duty; Kandiss was.
Lamont didn’t react to Isabelle’s rudeness; maybe he’d expected it. His gaze turned inward, maybe mentally measuring the distance between compound and lahk house, which was about half a kilometer. Not, Salah guessed, within firing distance of pipe guns or throwing distance of bombs or anything else the Kindred could devise, or Lamont probably would have burned the house down by now. Lamont regarded the Kindred with scorn for their military inexperience. Salah honored them for it.
Lamont said, “Permission granted, so long as none of my protectees leaves the compound,” and Salah felt his gorge rise. Isabelle hadn’t been asking permission. But she merely nodded, with neither subservience nor defiance.
When Lamont had left, Salah said to her, “Should Noah carry out the body now?”
“No, not yet. Tell all the second-expedition Terrans to go into the clinic. We Kindred need Big Lab for our farewell to her.”
We. Our. There it was again, the line she drew between herself and him
. At least Brodie, too, was on the other side of the line. Salah said, “Afterward, when the ceremony is over, will you come to my room?”
“Not tonight. I need to sleep before we start vaccinating tomorrow morning.”
“I understand. But I meant to sleep.”
“Not tonight. After the ceremony I want to stay and translate if the scientists need me, and then I promised Leo fifteen minutes of Kindred instruction. He’ll be awake and off duty, briefly, and since the Rangers are going to be here with us even after the cloud hits, it’s important they learn what they’re going to have to deal with. Leo is the only one so far who will listen to me. The soldiers don’t sleep much, have you noticed?”
“Yes,” Salah said. “I have.”
* * *
From just inside the east door, which Zoe Berman had permitted to remain open so Salah could see this, Noah carried the Mother of Mothers across the open zone. Her body, wrapped in a light blanket but with her face uncovered, looked like it weighed nothing in Noah’s arms. Salah, who had officially pronounced her dead, knew that ancient face had smoothed into lines of peace, almost of joy.
On the roof, Mason Kandiss covered Noah with an assault rifle.
The camp was quiet. Fires burned, sending spirals of smoke straight up in the still air. No rustle from the purple vegetation, no cries from children. At the edge of camp, four male litter bearers and nineteen Mothers, all that could travel here in time, waited in their pale wraps. Isabelle, almost as tall as the Kindred, was among them, distinguished only by her pale skin and light brown hair.
Noah moved slowly, although Salah doubted that Noah feared dropping Ree^ka. Rather, his pace matched the sense of solemn ceremony that overlay everything this evening. The Kindred in the camp were, by the Mother of Mothers’ own admission, the least acculturated and most dangerous of Kindred’s inhabitants. Yet the men and women, boys and girls, standing beside the Mothers all wore the same expression: respect, sorrow, profound acceptance. Some of them might have tried to kill Rangers; tomorrow some might rush the compound after vaccine; some might hate Terrans as an indivisible entity that had destroyed their cities, as so many groups on Earth had hated other groups as indivisible entities. But tonight they stood in respectful and apparently sincere mourning.
On Terra, Salah had seen people from the opposing political party jeer and taunt at the assassination of President Cranston.
He had seen cemeteries defaced, the gravestones scrawled with hate words.
He had been attacked by a patient to whom he had to give the news of an inoperable brain tumor.
A poem by Rainer Maria Rilke floated into his mind. The German original eluded him, although he did speak some German, but the English was there:
Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunny one
At the end of the path which I’ve only just begun.
So we are grasped, by that which we could not grasp
At such great distance, so fully manifest—
And it changes us, even when we do not reach it,
Into something that, hardly sensing it, we already are—
What had grasped the Kindred, changing their Terran heredity into something else, something that all humans already were, or could be? Just culture, nurture, a kinder set of laws?
Yet tomorrow, there was a good chance some of these same Kindred would murder anyone who stood between them and a vaccine.
Noah reached the litter and laid Ree^ka’s body onto it. The circle of Mothers gently but unmistakably closed around the litter, edging him out. Noah walked back across the open perimeter. A second German writer came to Salah, harsher than Rilke: “All things are subject to interpretation, and whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
* * *
“One down, a hundred thousand to go,” Zoe said over their private frequency. Leo didn’t think it was funny. For one thing, the old lady had maybe helped keep the insurgents in check. Sometimes Zoe didn’t think far enough ahead. She was a terrific Ranger but not much of a strategist.
Leo had duty at the south door of the compound, facing the hill up to Isabelle’s lahk. He had watched the funeral procession climb the hill, after which there hadn’t been anything else to see. In a few minutes Owen would relieve Leo and Leo would get three hours’ sleep, except that he was going to claim the fifteen minutes that Isabelle had promised him. No way he preferred sleep to that.
Zoe said, “Christ, I’m tired. Hey, Leo—all those waving flashlights at the funeral—what do you suppose they use for batteries if they don’t have factories and shit?”
“They have factories. Just not near here. And the flashlights use biofluorescence.”
“What the fuck is that?”
Leo knew the answer because he’d asked Austin, who’d asked Graa^lok and told Leo. “Bacteria in the flashlights that glows if you mix them with other bacteria.”
“Really getting to know this place, aren’t you?”
“Well, we’re stuck here.”
“Leo, you ever wonder if the Russian ship might return to finish the job?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“No good—right? Can’t reach it in orbit. We might rush their forces if it lands and they come out, especially if they think we’re all dead. But their crew would just take off again and start shooting. We don’t have anything that could take her down.”
“We’d have to wait,” Leo said; he’d given this a lot of thought. “Hide, wait until they’re all outside the ship and feeling in control. Get the help of the local cops and train them. Force multiplication.”
Zoe said forcefully, “Rangers don’t do that kind of counterinsurgency shit. Lamont would never agree.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re not Green Berets. But—”
“We don’t do that.”
“We’re doing a lot of things Rangers don’t do. And Zo—if it helps us get home?”
“Well … fuck, it would be nice to go home. See my sister. Have a Big Mac. Get drunk at this great bar near the base.”
Leo, moved by the unaccustomed wistfulness in her voice, didn’t point out that if they got home, her sister would be twenty-eight years older than when Zoe left, her bar might no longer exist, and who knew if McDonald’s would still be in business?
But then Zoe’s voice changed. “Want to tell you something, Leo.”
“Okay.”
“I’m … shit, I’m a little nervous to go home. If we ever do. Twenty-eight years. Nothing’ll be the same. I don’t know about … you know. Adjusting and shit.”
“I’m not sure we’ll be going home, Zo.” No matter what Owen said.
“Yeah. But what I’m thinking is—what if going is worse than staying here?”
“Well, the—”
“Twenty-eight fucking years! That’s more years than I am already!”
Owen emerged from the compound. Leo said, “Gotta go, Zoe.” Owen relieved him, and Leo hurried to the ready room, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and went to wait for Isabelle in the tiny kitchen where their simple meals were either prepared by Kindred cooks or brought in by Noah Jenner. God, he was sick of vegetables. A Big Mac would be wonderful. Damn Zoe for putting it in his mind.
The kitchen had no chairs, so Leo leaned against the wall. He’d had only four hours of sleep in the last twenty-four, but he was too excited to feel drowsy, straightening when she came in.
“I greet you, Isabelle.” She’d been crying; there were salt-tear trails on her cheeks. Leo wanted to lick them away.
“I greet you, Leo.”
“How was the funeral?” Then, because that sounded stupid, he added, “Did everything go all right?”
“Yes. Ree^ka is ¡mundik¡.”
“What does that mean?” He hadn’t heard before a word that both began and ended with that tongue click.
“It means … it’s complicated. Returned to the planet after an honorable life, with sort of overtones of joining the soil, almost like a w
edding.”
Weird—marrying a planet.
Isabelle said, “Say it. ‘¡Mundik¡.’”
He did, three times, until she was satisfied and smiled. “You really do want to learn. But let’s start with something simpler, like basic conversation.”
“In a minute. First I want to ask about tomorrow. I’ll be on the roof with Berman, covering you when you take vaccines into the camp. But I want to know if there’s anything the Kindred might do that would look suspicious to Zoe and me but isn’t really because it’s, you know, just customs we don’t understand.”
Isabelle’s eyes sharpened. Leo felt that, maybe for the first time, she really saw him. She said, “Your lieutenant didn’t ask that.”
Leo was silent; he wasn’t going to diss Owen, not even for her.
“It’s a good question,” Isabelle said. “I don’t think there’s anything weird, not for this.”
“Lieutenant Lamont told you to not go into any tents, right? Make the kids be brought out to you, and stay within ten feet of the perimeter where we can cover you.”
“He told us all that, yes.”
Leo repeated it anyway. “If there’s a rush on the compound, if people run past you toward the compound, hit the dirt and crawl away from the compound and the attackers. Try to reach a tree or other—”
“Lamont told us all that, Leo.”
“Here’s something he didn’t tell you. Do you know a guy called Lu^kaj^ho?”
“No.”
“He’s a Kindred cop. He tipped me off to one weapons cache in the camp, and he and three of his buddies will be working the inside, on my signals. I can’t describe him because they all sort of look alike to me—no, I know I’m not supposed to say that but it’s true and I’ll learn eventually—but if you get in real trouble, he or one of his guys will get you to safety if they can. You’ll know it’s him and not some kidnapper because he’ll say a code word to you that I taught him. It’s ‘GI Joe.’”
Isabelle didn’t smile. “Help just me, or help Salah and Noah, too?”
Leo met her gaze levelly. “Just you.” And then, because he was learning to read her face, he said, “I wouldn’t do that, Isabelle.”