by Nancy Kress
Ranger Berman was on roof duty, with two of Leo’s peacekeepers on the ground. “I greet you, Private Heemur^ka.”
“I greet you, Austin.”
“I greet—What’s that?” He was the first to spot it, a figure trudging over the horizon toward the compound, carrying something big. A second later he heard Ranger Berman on her wrister, although he couldn’t distinguish the words.
The figure plodded closer. Another few minutes, and Austin was sure. “It’s Claire!” He took off running before anyone could stop him.
She was dirty, tired, and angry. “Austin. You. The least you can do is help me—here, carry this!” She thrust at him a big piece of equipment. He recognized it. It was heavy.
“How did you escape? And how did you get this through the crawl tunnel?”
“I didn’t and I didn’t.” Then she softened a little. “Graa^lok let me go, with this.”
“Graa^lok?”
“Tony has a radio, you know. He—”
“I know he has a radio! I’m the one who brought it there!”
“Good for you. They’ve all heard that the virophage has kept deaths from R. sporii to a very few, relatively. Graa^lok understands the science, at least after I explained it to him. He believed me, unlike that moron Tony, and Graa^lok felt bad about my abduction. As you should, too! In the middle of the night, he smuggled me out the third entrance to Haven and let me take this. That entrance is a lot bigger.”
Bigger! That meant that all Austin’s dismantling of supplies, crawling with them through the tunnel, getting scraped and bruised—all had been unnecessary. There was another, bigger entrance that Tony never showed him.
“But Graa^lok contaminated Haven with—”
“There’s an airlock. A real one. Beyon is a good physicist, I’ll give him that, and Graa^lok a good engineer.”
“But Tony will kill Graa^lok for letting you go!”
“Austin,” Claire said, “I’m not going to stand here arguing what Graa^lok did or what Tony will do or anything else. Now carry that thing, and start to make up for all the trouble you caused.”
She walked forward and Austin had to follow. She didn’t seem to understand that he was really a hero.
* * *
More deaths from the spore cloud were being reported on the radio. Isabelle and Noah plotted them on a map that Noah drew of the continent. Marianne and Claire studied the map. The pattern was clear.
No one else had died in the camp. The farther east you went, the more deaths. Most clustered on the east coast, beyond a mountain range that blocked wind, and to the far north, where the land was rockier and less fertile. Mostly herders lived there, with some fishermen and scientific outposts. Those fared the worst. The map was almost a perfect epidemiologic match to the wind direction and strength.
The virophage had saved millions of lives, without causing sickness in humans. It was a miracle. It was scientific triumph. It was evolution in practice, and sometimes, Marianne thought, evolution was on your side. Sometimes.
“About one-twenty-fifth of the population is gone,” Isabelle said, “four out of every hundred. That’s still enough, along with the Russian attacks, to cause major disruption in how everything functions.”
“But maybe not enough to cause collapse,” Noah said. He held Lily in his arms, and Marianne saw all over again how much her son loved this planet and his life here. He added, more somberly, “Apparently there are groups that still blame Terrans for everything, including the spore cloud.”
As there were on Earth. Marianne didn’t want to think too much about the past. She turned away from the discussion and to her work.
Claire Patel had brought a gene-sequencer from Haven. Zoe Berman and Mason Kandiss had taken some convincing that the sequencer wasn’t a bomb in disguise, but Leo Brodie was in charge and he explained to the unit what it was. Marianne would like to have heard that explanation; what Leo knew about science would fit on a thumbnail, in a large font. But he wasn’t stupid, Marianne had to give him that.
The gene sequencer was Terran, brought to Kindred ten years ago. Old, cranky, outdated, but running. Marianne and Branch obtained a virophage sample from dead spores—not an easy task, in itself—and sequenced its genome.
The genome was tiny, only twelve-thousand base pairs making up eighteen genes. Eight of them were completely unknown to the database on Marianne’s laptop. Five of them corresponded to known genes for RNA viruses. The other five were also known: they were exact duplicates of genes in R. sporii.
So this was not the first time the two viruses had encountered each other. Somewhere in the unimaginably distant past, spore cloud and virophage had met. The virophage had raided its host’s genome, as microbes did all the time. The virophage could even be a genetic “mule,” carrying genes between many viruses on planets, on asteroids and comets, in the drifting cold of space. Virophages stole from viruses, modified viruses, destroyed viruses, and viruses did the same to each other. Marianne realized yet again she was looking at the very oldest form of evolution—a jump through time that made the time dilation between Terra and Kindred completely irrelevant. This was the real, fundamental battle, and it would outlast every other form of life.
As well as affecting every other life-form. On the colony ship, the virophage had changed parts of the leelees’ brains. It wasn’t obvious what effect this had on the animals, if any. But it had happened.
Marianne touched her forehead, wondering.
* * *
Leo had recovered from his gunshot wound, and Zoe from her surgery. “I feel fine,” he said irritably to Dr. Patel, who had insisted on a thorough exam. “You don’t need to do that.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “You’re a very bad patient, Lieutenant Brodie. And Ranger Berman is worse.”
Leo had given up on trying to get anybody to address his unit by their right ranks, including the unit. He said, “I have better things to do than to lie here and—”
“Lieutenant,” Lu^kaj^ho said over his wrist radio, in Kindred, “two groups come at the compound, one by north and one by south.”
“I will come now,” Leo said in Kindred.
Dr. Patel said in English, “You’re picking up the language really fast.”
“Have to. Thanks, Doc.” He was already scrambling into his armor.
By the time he’d climbed up to the roof, it was obvious who the group from the north was. Young women, led by Graa^lok. Austin raced out of the compound, past the now deserted refugee camp, to meet them.
Leo said to Lu^kaj^ho, “The prodigal son comes home.”
“What is this?”
No way Leo could explain. Actually, Leo wasn’t sure, either, what the story was about—it was a phrase people used. From the Bible, maybe? Or Shakespeare? Most everything seemed to come from Shakespeare.
Salah Bourgiba would have known. Hell, he would have recited the whole damn poem. If it was a poem.
Leo said to Lu^kaj^ho, “It is not a thing,” and turned his scope south.
A group of men on bicycles, heavily laden with gear. This was more serious. Leo snapped out orders. Before the bicycles got into firing or bomb-throwing range—assuming they had no weapons more advanced than Leo had seen here before—Zoe had the peacekeepers in defensive position. Kandiss had hustled the group on the plain into the compound, along with Dr. Jenner, who’d been picking vegetables in the kitchen garden. Leo had his full kit brought up to the roof. Then they all waited.
The group on bicycles got closer. They were all old men.
Leo set his lips together. One thing that had made defense easier on Kindred than in Brazil, in Afghanistan, in so many other military missions, was that the Kindred did not use suicide bombers. Owen had never believed that, and Kandiss still didn’t, but it had proved true. The Kindred weren’t fanatical enough, or cruel enough, or maybe just plain insane enough to throw away their lives. But things change, and there was nothing like a major plague to change them. These old men could have decide
d to take out the Terrans who, they might believe, had taken out so many of their own, and to do so by ending lives near their end anyway.
Except that for old men, these looked like a pretty healthy group. Only one rode in a sort of cart behind a bicycle. The rest pedaled away. One reached under a tarp over his gear and Leo trained his rifle on him.
“Hold your fire,” he said to his wrist radio.
The group drew closer.
Then Isabelle, who must have just heard that her sister had returned from Haven, was running down the hill from her lahk to the compound—no, to the men. Damn the woman! She was always where she shouldn’t be … Leo would kill every last one of those geezers if they so much as touched her.
She threw her arms around one and hugged him hard.
Christ on a cracker—Who was that? Who were any of them?
Lu^kaj^ho said over Owen’s radio, now his, “Lieutenant, these be no danger. They be jukno^hal.”
Leo didn’t know the word. “What? Who?”
“They build the ship.”
What ship? Was there a ship being built somewhere? A starship, a sailing ship, what? He needed Isabelle to translate, but Isabelle was down there making a fool of herself. Hugging and laughing. Laughing?
“Berman, send Noah Jenner up here,” he said to Zoe.
“Roger that.”
A few minutes later Jenner ran out of the compound toward the old men. Leo cursed. “Berman, I said to get him up here to translate!”
“I told him. He ran off. Unless I shoot him…”
“Forget it.” Civilians.
The group made its way to the compound. Zoe and Kandiss inspected their bundles. Clothing, food, water, a pet cat.
“Well, sort of a cat, sir,” Kandiss said. “In a cage. Purple.”
Leo lowered his rifle. He didn’t know whether to feel relieved, furious, or foolish. Isabelle left him no room for any of the feelings. She said to him as soon as he’d climbed down from the roof, “I greet you, Leo. Let me introduce you. These are the builders.” She began a long series of names, clicks and inflections, none of which he could remember. Each man said, “I greet you, Leo-mak.”
Even less idea of the chain of command than his unit.
Leo said, “I greet you,” to each of them and then to Isabelle in English, “Who are they? Why are they here?”
“They built the colony ship, almost forty years ago. They know as much about it as can be known. Ful^kaa here”—she pointed to the old man in the cart—“he was the chief engineer and brilliant, I’m told—absolutely brilliant. He heard on the radio that the ship had been recalled, that we had the device to do that, and everything that’s happened since. These men have all left their lahks to help you repair the ship.” She paused and looked levelly at Leo.
“Repair it,” she said, a challenge if he ever heard one, “and use Branch’s reprogramming to send it back to Terra. With anyone who wants to go.”
CHAPTER 22
Three months later, the camp was full again.
This time, they were not protesters or attackers or desperate people seeking vaccinations. This time, they were pilgrims. At least, that was the best word Marianne could find for them, since not even Isabelle seemed able to explain exactly why they came.
“They want to touch the ground where it happened,” was the best Isabelle could do. “It’s not a religious thing, exactly—but isn’t not a religious thing, either. This is where the ship brought the virophage and the ship came from their ancestors—you’ve noticed that most of the pilgrims are young—with the bodies of the colonists on it, and also this is where the virophage came from that saved Kindred. Both those that lost lahk members to R. sporii and those that didn’t come to touch the ship. We touch, you know—the ground, the trees, the rivers. Real, feeling interaction with the ecology is so important.”
But the ship wasn’t part of the ecology. Kindred hadn’t designed it or even built the star drive that made it possible, which was the work of the unknown “master aliens.” And it was the Terran scientists who had saved the planet. Marianne did not point all these things out. If this was Lourdes or Mecca or Stonehenge, then let the pilgrims come. They did no harm, although the “security risk” of their constantly changing presence drove Ranger Kandiss crazy.
Kandiss, not Brodie. Over the three months of people coming and going, of creating and applying materials to repair the ship’s hull, of fluctuating food supplies as harvests suffered from the diminished number of farmers and the loss of the three major cities, Leo Brodie had surprised Marianne with his acceptance of everything, with his calm, with his—there was no other word for it—ability to command.
And now the ship was ready. It had been repaired, cleaned of forty years’ of untended and, in some cases, unintended life-forms. It was stocked with supplies. The last groups of pilgrims were arriving. The ship had finally, according to Terran custom rather than Kindred, been named: the Return. And now decisions had to be made about who was going to Earth and who was staying here.
Marianne played with Lily every chance she could. She talked with Noah, got to know Llaa^moh¡. Her long-lost son, wonderful daughter-in-law, precious grandchild. Every time Marianne thought of leaving them, her heart flamed with pain.
But she had two other children and two other grandchildren, and this was not her world. She had never really thought it was. Marianne was going home.
* * *
“Is he ever coming out?” Austin asked Graa^lok. He meant Tony, of course. The boys talked endlessly about Tony, about Haven, about all that had happened. That’s how they referred to it: “the all.” Probably nothing so exciting would ever happen on World again.
Well, that might be okay.
“He’ll come out,” Graa^lok said. “Someday. Probably he’s waiting until the Rangers are gone so they won’t punish him for … the all. Austin—”
“I’m not going to Terra!” Austin said fiercely, as he had said a hundred times before. “They can’t make me! I’ll run away! I’ll go back to Haven! I’ll make Leo throw bombs down the airshaft to get me out, like Lieutenant Lamont did!”
“Leo-mak wouldn’t do it,” Graa^lok said. He had lost weight, eaten by guilt over his part in “the all.”
This was true. Leo wouldn’t do it. But Graa^lok was missing the point. “I’m not going,” Austin repeated.
“Your mother wants to go.”
This, unfortunately, was also true. The chance to return to Terra had made Kayla happier than anything else had in years. Maybe ever. “I know she’s going,” Austin said miserably. “But I can’t go, Graa^lok. I just can’t. I live here. I wouldn’t have any friends there, or a lahk except for Mom, or anything.”
The boys fell silent, unable to picture life without a lahk.
“They can’t make me go,” Austin said.
Graa^lok said nothing, staring down at his sandals to hide his expression.
* * *
The night before launch, the camp was again deserted. Apparently the Kindred felt the need to let the Terrans be alone with the ship. Leo didn’t understand that and didn’t try, but he was glad about it. He wanted to be alone.
He walked out from the compound across the field to the north, passing two groups of skaleth¡. One lay asleep in a clump, as they always did, looking like a football pile-on trying to recover the ball. The other group stood cropping grass, also in unison. On Kindred, “herd animals” applied to more than humans.
“I greet you, skaleth¡,” Leo said, in Kindese. The animals ignored him.
The ship loomed dark against a field of stars. Leo put his hand on the hull, which felt cool and smooth. Inside were supplies, pallets, room enough for a whole colony of people instead of the few that were going.
Five Kindred, two of them scientists, including boss scientist Ka^graa. Only five. Leo knew now what it cost Kindred to leave their lahks, but these had chosen to go. Some people, Terran or Kindred, were always what Dr. Jenner called “outliers”: different enou
gh from their own culture to go off seeking another one. Ka^graa, whose wife was dead, was taking with him his oldest daughter. The mother of her lahk had agreed.
Kandiss was going. He had wanted to leave Kindred since the minute he first set foot on it. The Seventy-Fifth Regiment was his life, and he was going back to it.
Dr. Jenner and Branch Carter were going. So was Dr. Patel, who’d said she’d be needed to oversee the microbe adjustment necessary for the Kindred to live on Terra and the Terrans to get their original microbes back. Leo, remembering what that involved, winced. But it was necessary if you wanted to go home.
Kayla Rhinehart was going. She hated Kindred worse than even Kandiss did. Although it was Leo’s unspoken opinion that Kayla would be a pain in the ass wherever she went. Kayla raised the question, though, of Austin. The kid kept yelling that he wasn’t leaving Kindred, and then the next minute watching his mother like he had to take care of her no matter what. Terrible to make a kid responsible for a parent like that—it should be the other way around. Not that Leo had ever personally known either arrangement.
He didn’t know what would happen with Austin. And that raised the question of Isabelle, who had also always taken care of Kayla. Leo and Isabelle had avoided each other these past weeks. A lot of the time she was gone, working on the Council of Mothers to rebuild Kindred’s government. Leo supposed she was also grieving for Salah Bourgiba, as well as for her planet. He’d gotten his language instruction from Austin, which gave the kid something to do since he refused to return to school and nobody had actually made him do so.
Noah Jenner, his wife, and their little girl would stay on Kindred, of course.
And Zoe? She had looked Leo straight in the eyes and said, “You tell me first, Leo.” He could have pushed her for an answer, but he didn’t. He already knew it. She had had at least five conversations with him, spread over their weeks on Kindred, about how tough it would be to skip twenty-eight years on Earth. Maybe more than five, if you counted sideways hints. But Zoe was a soldier—if her CO told her to return to Terra, she would. If not—