by Nancy Kress
Isabelle said, “What’s a virophage?”
Salah said, “A satellite virus that infects larger viruses and can’t reproduce any other way.”
Marianne babbled at Salah, “R. Sporii is large enough to be a host, it could have coevolved with the spore cloud even though … but no paramyxovirus before now has hosted … no, that’s not right, it’s a new mutation … Isabelle! You said that Ree^ka told you there was a device to call the ship back to Kindred!”
There was? Salah looked at Branch; he hadn’t known it, either.
“Yes,” Isabelle said. She didn’t look excited; maybe she didn’t realize the implications. Salah did. If they could get their hands on a virophage that naturally killed R. sporii and it was airborne—insha’Allah, let it be a virophage and let it airborne!—they could release it on Kindred and it would fight the coming spores. Thousands of people might be saved. Maybe more.
Marianne seized Isabelle’s arm. “Where is it? The device to call back the ship—does it still work? Where is it?”
“Nobody knows,” Isabelle said. “It’s gone. Buried somewhere in the mountains. Mining out the original tablets with starship plans.… they’d been there for 140,000 years! Getting them free took explosives. Caves collapsed, tunnels closed up, the ground shifted. Nothing but the coming spore cloud crisis could have led the Mothers to cause that much environmental disturbance. But Ree^ka told me that the call-back device is described in the tablets but wasn’t with the drive or the plans.
“It’s lost, and nobody knows where.”
CHAPTER 16
At every slight rise in the ground, Austin expected to see someone coming after him: Noah or Isabelle or Leo or maybe one of the McGuires, whom he’d only seen a few times in his life but remembered vividly. Big, silent, scary. Although why would the McGuires come after Austin? They didn’t care about anything but their mines. No, it would be Noah or Isabelle or Leo. Maybe all three. All three would be a problem. Austin had a stolen pipe gun, but he didn’t think he could shoot Noah or Isabelle, and Leo would probably shoot him first. Certainly Lieutenant Lamont would.
He’d dragged Claire into a sort of cover made of bushes, so he could rest. Rain pattered on the dark leaves above them as Austin sat cross-legged and ate a piece of makfruit from his pocket. It was dotted with lint. He ungagged Claire—they were far enough away that no one in the compound could hear her—and held out part of the fruit.
She ignored it. “What are you doing? Untie me!”
She didn’t sound groggy at all. Maybe he didn’t give her enough knockout drug. On the other hand, maybe it was good that she wasn’t groggy—if she could walk, he wouldn’t have to drag her. He launched into the speech he’d rehearsed.
“Dr. Patel—Claire—I’m taking you someplace safe. It’s called Haven. There is food and water and safety from the collapse of civilization when the spore cloud comes. My mother is already there, and Graa^lok—do you remember my friend Graa^lok? Also two other Terrans and, soon, some Kindred. We’re all going to rebuild civilization after the looters and other desperate people are dead, and you’re going to be part of the rebuilding!”
Claire’s mouth fell open. Raindrops dripped inside and she closed it again. Austin had always liked her pretty, lilting voice, but now she sounded almost like Isabelle. “Are you insane? We’re trying to prevent the ‘collapse of civilization’! Untie me immediately and take me back to the compound.”
“I can’t do that, Claire.” There—that sounded definite and mature. Austin improved on it. “I’m sorry I can’t do that, but I have the greater good to think of.”
Claire tugged at the ropes around her wrists. They didn’t give. She screamed. “Help! Help! Help me!”
What if someone was following them; could they hear her? But if anyone was following, they’d find Austin anyway; dragging Claire this far had left a clear muddy trail. Austin held his breath and waited.
No one came. When Claire finally stopped yelling, he stood up. How would Leo do this? Kind but steely. “Claire, we can do this two ways. You can walk with me holding that rope, or I can knock you out again and drag you, the way I did before. But your legs are all muddy and the back part of your wrap is nearly worn through and exposing your … uh … you.”
He felt himself blushing.
Claire stared at him a long time. Then she crawled out from under the bushes, stretching the rope to its limit, and twisted her body with its bound feet in a complete circle. Austin, crawling out after her, knew what she saw: nothing. Empty, rocky fields in the rain, with the mountains rising abruptly ahead.
“We’re going on now,” Austin said. He wished that his voice was as deep as Leo’s.
“Who was killed at the compound?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is the whole camp rioting?”
“I don’t know. Yes. No. Not all of it.”
“You are an idiot.”
Austin didn’t deign to answer that. He strode forward, tugging her to her feet and then pulling on her rope, and Claire was forced to follow. She stubbed her toe on a rock and cried out.
“Oh, sorry, here’s your other shoe!” He fished it out of his pocket and handed it to her.
She couldn’t put it on with her hands tied like that. Austin bent and tugged the sandal onto her foot, untied her ankles, and straightened. He hadn’t known that small, pretty face could look so scornful.
* * *
Claire was a much better walker than Kayla. In another few hours, they reached the tunnel opening. Austin, who’d been a little deflated by her angry silence, felt better. They’d made it without being captured! Now she would see what her rescue was all about!
“I’m going to crawl in there and you’re going to stay here until I tug on the rope. Don’t be afraid, Claire, inside Haven is much different from the first tunnel.”
“I’m not afraid. I’m furious.”
Well, Austin could see that. He dropped to hands and knees, crawled to the grate, and rang the bell. When Tony appeared, he said, “I’ve got her. Dr. Patel. She’s with me now.”
Tony grinned. “Hey! Good man! Come on in, both of you!”
He unlocked the grate and helped Austin down the drop. Austin tugged on the rope until Claire appeared, her tiny body with space all around her in the tunnel, her rain-streaked face distorted by contempt.
Tony said, “Welcome, Doctor.”
Claire said, “When the Rangers come after me, you are finished.”
Austin said, “No, Claire, you don’t understand. This place is impregnable.”
“The boy is right,” Tony said. “We made sure of that. Here, let me lift you down. Just beyond that farther door is Haven. Are you hungry?”
“Finished,” Claire said. “All of you.”
* * *
“If only we had a gene sequencer,” Branch said.
“Stop saying that,” Marianne said. She added, “Please.”
They sat on pallets in the leelee room. It was the only room in the clinic not crowded with people, but it was filled nonetheless. With equipment, with the safe, with live and dead leelees, the dead and infected ones in their negative-pressure cages. That spared Marianne the smell of putrefaction; the live ones smelled bad enough. They chattered; the signals that Branch kept replaying from the colony ship chattered; Marianne felt her mind chattering and stuttering from going over the same limited data in her memory.
Much of the lab equipment had been destroyed by the bomb, but Marianne’s laptop had been in the clinic, not in Big Lab. There wasn’t anything on her laptop about virophages; she hadn’t expected to deal with them on Kindred, and of course she’d expected to have access to the digital library on the Friendship. Virophages reproduced only inside their host viruses, like Russian nesting dolls, each smaller than the one that contained it. That required a host large enough, as viruses go. Also, the virophage had to be very small. The first one discovered was only fifty nanometers in size and had only twenty-one genes, thirteen of no kn
own origin. It also contained a genetic segment of its host, which implied a genetic transfer between virus and virophage. To examine a virophage was to look at the earliest type of evolution, a trip back in time that made the fourteen-year jump from Earth to World insignificant. R. sporii might contain a similar segment of the virophage on the colony ship from some eons-ago encounter, so that when the two encountered each other again, the virophage moved in and set up housekeeping.
Viruses and their phages could have complicated multihost lives. The Argentine ant carried a virus, L. humile, that didn’t much bother the ants but which attacked honeybees unfortunate enough to visit the same flowers or to get attacked by ants foraging for honey. Virophages seemed to be implicated in those encounters, although when Marianne had left Earth, the research was still controversial.
She could determine so much more if they had a sequencer to determine the genome of the virophage! They didn’t have the virophage, either, but Branch, the hardware guy, seemed more obsessed with the lack of sequencer.
“If we had one,” he said, “then after the ship is called back here, we could at least—”
“Branch,” she said, with as much compassion as she could muster through her exhaustion, “the ship won’t be called back here. The device is lost.”
“But if we find it—”
“Branch—”
He said quietly, “I want to go home. The ship is our only chance to go home.”
Marianne said nothing; there was nothing to say. She put her hand over his. A long minute later she said, “I’m going out for some fresh air. Back in a minute.” Best to give him some time to control himself.
As she walked to Big Lab, a bit of eighteenth-century doggerel laughed at in graduate school came back to her:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller fleas to bite ’em,
And so proceed, ad infinitum.
“What are you smiling about?” Isabelle said, not entirely friendly. “I didn’t think there was anything to smile about.”
Isabelle stood in Big Lab, watching four Kindred rebuild the shattered east wall. Earlier in the day the three men and one woman had carted in karthwood, nails, tools, just as the bodies of the bomb victims were being carried out. Representatives of their lahks had come to take the remains of the two Kindred home, even though the spore cloud was so close that Marianne wondered if they would have time to reach their villages. She hadn’t asked. The Kindred carpenters worked in silence. Zoe Berman stood beside them, her rifle trained on the workers; Mason Kandiss stood outside, scanning the camp. Undoubtedly Owen Lamont or Leo Brodie perched on the roof. Maybe both of them.
Marianne didn’t answer Isabelle, who was in no mood to appreciate Jonathan Swift’s doggerel. Instead she said, “The Rangers will go after Kayla and Austin once the compound is secure.”
“Are you sure of that?” Isabelle said.
Marianne wasn’t. She searched for something to ease the terrible twisted tension in Isabelle’s face, to make Isabelle feel better. “Lily still isn’t sick from the vaccine. So apparently it’s not harmful.”
“Which doesn’t mean it will be effective.”
“True enough,” Marianne said. Isabelle didn’t want to feel better.
Big Lab had been cleaned up, debris swept out and benches washed. It no longer looked like a war zone, and the rebuilding would be done by nightfall, although now they scarcely needed the space. It wasn’t only corpses that were departing the compound; once it was secure again, the remaining Kindred would all leave for their lahks. They had nothing more to do here. The means to make more vaccine had been destroyed in the rush to steal it, and the remaining doses would be given to the Kindred scientists going back to their lahks, to do with as they wished. The only people left in the secured compound would be Marianne, Noah and his family, Branch, Isabelle, Salah, and the four Rangers. All of whom Lamont was prepared to defend until, apparently, the end of time.
And then, after the spore cloud, if any Kindred survived, it would be a whole new, and wholly unknown, situation.
Salah emerged from the walkway. He eyed the Rangers with dislike. “I wish it didn’t look so much like slave labor, building their masters’ dacha under armed guard.”
“They volunteered,” Isabelle said. “It’s a form of atonement for what the others did.”
“I know,” Salah said. “But that’s not what I came to say.” He lowered his voice. “Come away from where they might hear.”
Marianne and Isabelle followed him to the far corner. Salah kept his voice down. “There’s two things I think you should both know, as lahk Mothers.”
“I’m not—”
“Just listen, Marianne. I don’t know how significant this is, but it seems it might be. First, I’m pretty sure that Owen Lamont is on popbite.”
“What’s that?” Isabelle said, which saved Marianne’s asking.
“A street drug that acts on multiple brain centers to produce prolonged wakefulness and a sense of power. With prolonged use or in excessive doses, it promotes paranoia and then hallucinations.”
Isabelle said sharply, “How do you know?”
“I’m a doctor, Isabelle.”
Marianne said, “The other Rangers?”
“No. Not yet anyway. But of course, he might decide to share. Here’s the other thing: Three times now I’ve seen Brodie in what looked like secretive conversations with Kindred at the edge of camp, when the other Rangers weren’t around. The Kindred had pipe guns and Brodie didn’t disarm them.”
Marianne said, “I don’t understand. What are you implying?”
Isabelle said, “He’s implying that Leo Brodie is somehow cooperating with or encouraging violence in the camp. Why not say it outright, Salah? You think Leo is betraying us, betraying the Ranger creed, a thoroughly evil guy. Just spit it out!”
“I didn’t say—”
“Yes, you did. The Rangers are dangerous to us, they’re on paranoid drugs, they collude with killers, we shouldn’t trust them at all. I didn’t think you could be so paranoid yourself. Or so petty.” She stalked back to the clinic.
Salah looked stunned. Marianne said, “She’s just worried sick about her sister and nephew.”
“Yes,” Salah said, and then, “No. She … never mind. I’m sorry I spoke. I just thought the two of you ought to know what’s going on with the Rangers.” He left.
Going after Isabelle? Marianne didn’t know, and didn’t really want to. She pulled at the skin on her face. Too much was happening: to her family, to the Terrans, to the compound, to the planet. She stepped forward until she could see out of the rapidly diminishing hole in the wall.
The sun was just setting in a blaze of orange. One moon floated high over the eastern horizon. The brightest of the unfamiliar stars shone faintly; soon fainter stars would frame them, forming unfamiliar constellations that Marianne could not name. And somewhere out there, in orbit around another alien planet, was the Kindred colony ship, full of leelees infested with parasites that might save this planet. Leelees chittering, smelly, all alive-o, and unreachable.
* * *
Claire went all over Haven, inspecting shelves, studying equipment. At first Tony accompanied her, explaining, but she never spoke to him or acknowledged his presence. Nor did she acknowledge that her ass was partly exposed and very bruised from Austin’s having dragged her. Austin tried not to look at that, and looked.
Finally Tony said, “Austin, you take her around. Just don’t let her touch anything at all—nothing, you hear? And stay out of the room where Nathan and Graylock are working!”
They weren’t rooms, they were just caves or parts of caves, sometimes with curtains hung from poles at their entrances. That was clearer than ever to Austin, seeing Haven through Claire’s eyes. Caves with rough floors, or dripping water, or supplies stacked untidily on rough shelves of karthwood, or equipment brought inside in pieces and then reassembl
ed, the tools and packing material scattered around, along with plates of half-eaten food. Behind a curtain, Kayla slept on a not-very-clean pallet.
When Tony had gone, Claire said, “Working on what?” She didn’t look directly at Austin, hadn’t looked directly at him since they’d arrived.
“What?”
“Tony said Nathan and Graa^lok are working. On what?”
“Equipment.”
“What equipment?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does the equipment do?”
“I don’t know.” She was making him feel stupid. He hated her. He didn’t hate her. He couldn’t stop looking at her ass.
Claire said, “What medicines do you have?”
Glad to know the answer to something, Austin led her to the shelf stockpiled with glass jars and bioplast containers. Claire opened some, sniffed, squinted at the Kindred writing, series of squiggles and dots and lines. “Can you read this?”
“Of course.”
“Tell me what they say.”
He did, feeling important again, until Claire said, “I don’t know what these are in English, or even if English analogs exist. I don’t know what they’re for. I don’t know the conventional doses. You wanted a doctor, but as far as meds go, I will be useless to you without my own case of Terran drugs.”
Importance crumbled. Austin clutched at her hand. “Please don’t tell Tony that! Please!”
For the first time, she turned her head to gaze at him. “Why not?”
“He’ll send me back to get your drugs! To steal them! And Noah and Isabelle will keep me there, they’ll make sure I can’t escape again, and the spore cloud is coming—”
“What do you think is going to happen when the spore cloud comes?”
“The collapse of civilization! Don’t you know? Kindred will die, most but not all, and the survivors will be desperate, because some always survive a plague, and they’ll steal and kill—just like they did in the camp, to get the vaccine! Only this time it will be to get food and wine and women … Tony told me! He told me how it was on Terra when Rome fell and the siege of Leningrad and the way the Indians massacred everybody at Cawnpore, even babies … and Leo told me about the Brazilian food riots! That’s the way it always is with humans and no matter what Lieutenant Lamont thinks, Kindred are all human!”